Strong 03 - Twice (9 page)

“I’m so glad,” she said, and she was. Relief washed over her like a wave.

“There’s paperwork you’ll need to fill out. Would you like us to messenger it to you, or would you prefer to come by?”

“You saw my daughter today,” she said, not answering the question. “Do you think she’s guilty?”

There was a pause on the other end of the phone before the girl answered. “No. I don’t.”

Eleanor was glad to hear it, though she wasn’t sure she believed Lydia Strong. “I’ll come by the office tomorrow around noon, if that’s all right.”

“That’s fine. We can talk some more then. I have some more questions for you.”

“Very well,” answered Eleanor. “Good-bye.” She hung up the phone and sighed. They could ask all the questions they wanted. But there were only so many answers she could give.

L
ydia folded Jeffrey’s cell phone and handed it back to him. He took it from her and held her hand in the warm pink waiting room. Everything was pink and roses, smelling of potpourri. Even the bulbs behind the sconce lighting were pink, the reception desk a rose-colored Corian. A very pregnant woman sat across from Lydia reading a copy of
Parenting
magazine. She looked so young and serene, her cheeks glowing with health and color. She had her arm looped with the arm of a young man, who was reading a copy of
Money
. She stared at them in wonder.
Aren’t they terrified?
She was ready to get up and run screaming from the doctor’s office, and these two just radiated peace and joy. The young woman looked up at her,
must have felt Lydia’s eyes on her. She gave Lydia a happy, shy smile, and patted her belly. “I’m huge, aren’t I?” she said, her blue eyes shining, “Just a couple more weeks.”

Lydia smiled back at her. “You’re beautiful,” she said, and meant it. The man smiled at them and returned to his magazine. After a few more moments, a nurse came out and escorted the young couple in to see the doctor. Lydia noticed a soapstone sculpture that sat beneath a lamp on the end table next to the couch where the woman had been sitting. It was the impression of a woman, her head a stone atop her belly, which was a circular nest with another tiny stone nestled in the curve.
Motherhood
.

“Oh, God,” said Lydia, squeezing Jeffrey’s hand.

“I’m right here,” he said with an indulgent smile.

“You damn well better be,” she said. “You’re stuck now … shotgun wedding and all.”

He laughed and released her hand, put his arm around her and pulled her close. “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried,” he whispered in her ear.

F
ord McKirdy pulled his green Taurus into the narrow driveway beneath his Bay Ridge row house. He didn’t bother pulling the car into the garage, but he attached the Club to his steering wheel, took the bag of Chinese takeout from the passenger seat, and locked the doors. Nobody wanted his piece-of-shit car, anyway, which was part of the reason why he drove it.

He felt heavy and tired as he pulled himself up the red brick steps to his front door. His neighbors in most of the other houses had hung their Christmas lights and decorations, making the block a tacky visual cacophony of multicolored bulbs, plastic Santas, reindeer, snowmen, and nativity scenes. Ford’s house looked grim and neglected by comparison. He held the screen door open with his back, looping the bag around his wrist as he fit the key into the knob. The air was cold outside, a biting winter chill moving in for the first time in a season that had been unusually mild. The house was dark inside, empty.

A lifetime ago, his children, Katie and Jim—or James, as he liked to be called now—and their golden retriever, Max, would have raced each other to the door in a messy, happy tumble to greet him. He could hear the echo of Max’s deep barking, the kids’ yelling. His wife would be standing in the archway between the living room and the dining room, the look on her face telling him if he was in trouble or not for however he’d fucked up that day. The smell of whatever she was cooking reaching him as he embraced her. But tonight the
house was quiet. Max was long gone, put down nearly five years ago now. Katie, a kindergarten teacher, lived with her husband and two kids in Houston. Jimmy was a Wall Street broker living in Battery Park City “working like a slave and partying like it’s 1999,” as he liked to say; Ford saw even less of him than he did Katie, though he was only a few subway stops away.

His wife, Rose, hard to believe she was gone more than a year now. All the difficult times they’d faced together, all the hell he’d put her through, all the fights and late nights she spent worrying about him, all the canceled dates and missed anniversaries because he’d “made a big collar.” After thirty years together, she’d finally had enough.

“I have good years left, Ford,” she told him one night, when he’d come home to find her sitting at the kitchen table, her coat on and an overnight bag by her feet. “I don’t want to live them like this. Our children are grown and happy. I did my job, taking care of my family.”

She’d put some money away, wanted to travel.

Turns out no one ever told him that all the things that make you a great cop make you a shitty father and husband. He missed her every night when he came home to the quiet, cold Brooklyn house where he’d lived for twenty-five years, twenty-four of them with her. But when he thought of her, he realized he didn’t know certain things about her that a man should know about his wife, like her favorite color, the perfume she wore, what made her laugh. He’d paid attention to every detail of every case he’d ever investigated, had a catalog of professional memories, remembered things about cases twenty years ago like it was yesterday. But when it came to Rose, he was ashamed to admit, he didn’t even know her dress size.

Ford flipped on the light in the hallway and hung his coat in the closet. He looked at himself in the mirror that hung behind the door, the mirror where Rose had always combed her curly black hair and applied lipstick to her full, soft mouth before leaving the house.
He looked old, with blue smudges of fatigue under his eyes, a five o’clock shadow on his jaw. His salt-and-pepper hair was in serious need of a trim. He was fat and pale. Shit, he didn’t even get on the scale anymore. He didn’t
want
to know.

He turned out the light and walked over the red shag carpet of the living room and onto the speckled Formica of the dining room and into the kitchen.

When Rose left, he realized he didn’t know how to run the dishwasher. That he couldn’t remember the last time he’d washed a stitch of clothing or been inside a grocery store. He was virtually helpless. Thank god for Chinese takeout and Laundromats. If it weren’t for the Asians, he’d be dirty and hungry all the time.

The aroma of sesame chicken wafted from the bag as he dropped it on the counter by the sink. He washed his hands and pulled a plate from the cupboard. It was funny, not in a ha-ha way but in a pathetic and miserable way, that he’d spent his whole life trying to be different from his father and his life was turning out just exactly the same way—alone, a heart attack looming in the not-too-distant future. He turned on the television that sat on the stand by the table to the eleven o’clock news, brought the bag and the plate over to the table, and sat down.

Ford’s father, a first-generation Irish American, had been a mean bastard of a drunk who’d never held down a job for more than a month. Living off welfare and the meager salary Ford’s mother earned as a clerk at Macy’s, his father had systematically terrorized and tried to ruin the lives of his wife and each of his children. He’d beaten Ford and his older brother Tommy, nearly killed his mother before she got the strength to leave him and move them all away. His father died alone in a room at the YMCA, a heart attack at the age of fifty-six, with no one to mourn him.

In his life, Ford had worked to be exactly the opposite of the man his father was. He’d learned the value of discipline and hard work from his mother and promised himself that no children of his
would want for things the way he and his brother had. He’d worked long hours of overtime to make sure his family had everything they needed and more. He’d never had more than a beer or two in a sitting. Even with all of that effort, always sure he was doing the right thing just because it was the opposite of the way his father had done it, now he was alone.

Ford had never touched his children in anger; in that way at least he had not lived his father’s legacy. Nonetheless, Katie and James were distant, polite strangers who made the obligatory calls on Sunday night and visited every few months. He couldn’t blame them … he hadn’t been the best father. He hadn’t really been a father at all. But they were good kids because of Rose.

He reached over to turn up the volume on the set when he saw himself on the screen. He looked even worse than he thought. He stood beneath the maroon awning of the Park Avenue building where Richard Stratton had been killed, with the reporter he’d agreed to answer some questions for when he’d been ready to make his statement to the press.

“At this time,” he was saying to the pretty blond reporter, “no charges have been brought against Julian Ross.”

He cringed to hear himself talk. Just a month ago, his partner Frank Benvenuto would have talked to the press. A good-looking guy, charismatic, funny, Frank had always handled the press with ease, knew how to
use
his relationships with reporters to the department’s advantage. But Ford had no such expertise. Now, with Frank retired and no new partner assigned to him, Ford had to deal with the vultures himself. He tried not to think about the fact that his chief had hinted at a reluctance to assign Ford a new partner, the assumption being that Ford, too, must be considering retirement.

“Does this murder make you doubt the jury’s decision to acquit Julian Ross ten years ago?” the television reporter asked, her smile and perky voice seeming inappropriate to him.

“There’s nothing at this time to connect the two events,” he said,
curt and non-committal.
Why did I keep running my fingers through my hair like that
, Ford thought, hating the way his voice sounded.

But Ford wasn’t thinking about retirement. He had no idea what he would even do with himself. It was fine for Frankie, now sailing around the Caribbean in a fifty-foot sloop with his wife, Helen … his dream for as long as Ford had known him. Ford kept getting postcards from exotic locales: “The emerald water is calling you, my friend! Come meet us in St. Bart!”
Yeah, right. And do what? Sit on my ass and sip cocktails?

“Where is Julian Ross now?” asked the reporter.

“She’s under psychiatric care at an undisclosed location,” he answered.

“Are there any other suspects?” the reporter pressed.

“There are no suspects at this time,” he said, moving away from the reporter and toward the unmarked Caprice that he drove while he was on duty. “That’s it. I have no further comments right now.”

As he watched himself get into his car, the camera still following him, Ford noticed that he had a huge bald spot on the back of his head. He sighed and served himself some of the sesame chicken, started eating with a plastic fork. The fact of it was that, without a partner, he’d been lucky to catch this case at all. If he hadn’t worked the first Julian Ross case, he’d be doing peripheral work for people like Piselli and Malone, a couple of junior guys assigned to work the case with him.

“As you can see,” the reporter concluded, “the police have no leads in the murder of Richard Stratton, husband of world-renowned artist Julian Ross. But inside sources say that the arrest of Ross is imminent. We’ll keep you apprised of all breaking news on the case. This is Betsy Storm, ABC News.”

The newscast was enough to switch his focus from the misery of his life back to the Julian Ross case. His visit to Orlando DiMarco had led him nowhere. The guy wasn’t about to admit that he and Julian were lovers. But Ford did get a good look at the painting
Lydia Strong had described. It reminded him of the description Jetty Murphy had given him ten years ago, the mysterious man who’d left through the basement back door and disappeared into the night. He could track Jetty down easily enough, but getting him to remember might not be so simple. After Jetty raped and murdered an elderly woman in Tompkins Square Park a few years ago, he’d been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and sent to the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane. It was an awful place … made Payne Whitney look like Club Med. People who went there didn’t usually get better. So he didn’t expect Jetty’s mental health to have improved much. But it might be worth a trip up there with Lydia and Jeff, to see if there was anything they’d missed the first time.

He looked down at his plate and was surprised to see that he’d polished off all of the sesame chicken and the white rice that had come with it. He’d barely even tasted it. He pulled himself up from the table, threw the containers in the garbage, rinsed the plate off, and placed it in the dishwasher next to the plate from last night. He walked over to the refrigerator and popped a Michelob Light and headed down the stairs to his basement office. He walked past the groaning old furnace and through the laundry room.

His office was a converted walk-in pantry; it was in this small space where he had pored over the Julian Ross case, among others, over the years. It was this small space that he had chosen over the love and company of his wife and children. It was here where he had spent every ounce of his energy and his free time going over the cold cases where the answers had eluded him. It was here that he had given everything of himself over the course of his career. So it was fitting, he supposed as he reached up to pull the string and turn on the light, that it was all he should have left.

T
he bent old man carrying a Balducci’s bag, wearing a long black woolen coat and a plaid golfer’s hat, shuffled off the bus at Astor Place. He moved slowly with his head down, moving against the
crowds of people still pulsing along the streets though it was nearly midnight.

He made his way down the stairs to the subway and walked to the end of the nearly deserted platform. He could hear the street noise from the grating above his head. When the downtown 4/5 arrived, a screeching, hissing metal bullet, the few passengers waiting on the platform got on. But the old man waited, seated on the wooden bench against the tiled wall. “Stand clear of the closing doors,” the conductor yelled, and in a rumble and flash the train was gone.