The Last Good Day (2 page)
Barry looked down the platform and saw everyone else hesitating as well, not wanting to be the first to get on.
Whaddaya supposed to do here? What’s the protocol?
No one wanted to pull a Kitty Genovese, but the train was huffing.
The man with the cinder-block face decided to break the embargo and end the standoff, turning off his Motorola and swinging his briefcase as he stepped smartly through the doors.
TCB, babe.
The ruddy guy in the Burberry followed, not looking anyone in the eye, obviously
damn
uncomfortable about this. But with the barrier breached, people flooded on after them.
Marty tugged at Barry’s sleeve. “Hey, Bar, come on,” he said. “We gotta get to work. It’s not our problem.”
His conscience would be bothering him the rest of the day, like a sliver of glass under the skin. But Marty was right; work was where they needed him this morning. Somebody else would stay. He took one more look over the railing and then reluctantly joined the boarding crowd.
“P.O. MUNCHAUSER NEVER
heard of letting a ball roll foul, did he? He couldn’t just let her keep floating by.”
The Riverside police chief, Harold Baltimore, stood at the platform railing twenty minutes later, watching his first deputy and former best friend, Detective Lieutenant Michael Fallon, try to secure the crime scene on the muddy bank.
“I had Munchie playing third base a few years ago in Little League, and he was exactly the same,” said Mike, driving little wooden stakes into the ground to demarcate a clear path to the body. “Aggression was never the issue with that kid. You hit a grounder at him, he ran right at it every time. Only problem was, half the time he’d overrun it. One game, he made three errors and said he was gonna throw himself in front of a bus. I told him, ‘Don’t bother. It’ll probably roll between your legs.’”
The chief allowed himself a small down-and-dirty chuckle. He was a heavyset walnut-brown man with basset-hound eyes, a trim debonair mustache, and large tenderized-looking hands. He wore a gray tweed jacket with a white Macy’s shirt, an oxblood tie, dark pressed slacks, and cordovan loafers. And he carried himself with somber gravity, befitting his other job as a part-time funeral director.
A bicycle officer in a blue helmet and spandex shorts had herded commuters down to the far end of the platform, away from the crime scene. Yellow tape blocked the steps down to the muddy shore. The department’s newest detective, Paco Ortiz, stood over the sheet-covered body at the water’s edge, two shiny dabs of Vicks VapoRub under his nose, taking pictures of the surrounding area with a Polaroid while two patrolmen collected evidence in Ziploc bags.
“So, what are you hearing from the state police?” asked Mike.
He was a broad-beamed white guy in a yellow Polo shirt and Levi’s with a thirty-six waist. He had a weight lifter’s coconut-shell shoulders and a strong neck, but at certain angles, the child within the man was very much visible and people who hadn’t seen him in many years recognized him easily on the street. What still disconcerted them was his habit of holding a clear steady gaze just a second or two longer than necessary, as if there were something not altogether trustworthy about even the most innocuous human interactions.
“They’re saying it’s all ours.” Harold Baltimore ducked under the crime scene tape and started down the steps, avoiding the vomit splatter. “The body washed up on our property, and our man was the first on the scene at the train station. It’s a no-brainer. They don’t want any part of it.”
“Were they pricks about it?” Mike asked.
“No, not at all.” Harold moved toward him, stepping over places where shoe impressions were yet to be taken. “The inspector was very nice. Said if we needed a hand with the crime lab or dental records, such as it is, they’d be happy to help out. The county medical examiner’s van ought to be here any minute. But it’s our case.”
“You had to figure as much.”
Mike came halfway up the slope to talk to Harold, while Paco and the two other guys continued their work around the body.
“You being careful where you’re stepping?” The chief watched Mike stumble a little in his thick-soled Timberlands.
“What do you think, Harold? Am I a fucking idiot?”
“Okay, okay.” The chief massaged his eyelids with thick wrinkled fingertips. “So, what do we have?”
“Well, I just got here, so I haven’t had a chance to look at the goods myself.” Mike dropped his voice. “But Paco says we’ve got your basic traumatic disarticulation, with the head severed just below the cervical spine.”
“Cutting’s a little asymmetrical, like it was done with a hacksaw or something,” the new guy volunteered, somehow hearing him from ten feet down the slope. “Not that professional, but not bad either.”
“Any other bruising?” The chief looked past Fallon, getting it right from the source.
“Nothing obvious”—Paco took a Polaroid—“except maybe he tried to chain something around her waist to sink her, but it slipped off. We probably won’t be able to tell about lividity because she’s been in the water awhile. We’re estimating six to eight hours, but that’s the ME’s call.”
“Rigor?” asked Harold, ignoring the way Fallon was licking his lips and looking down at his feet.
“Still pretty strong in the limbs, so she was killed in the last forty-eight hours.” Paco took the photo out of his camera and flapped it.
“So, what’s your take on it?” Harold turned back to Mike as if he just remembered he was standing there.
“My take is maybe we cross suicide off the list.”
The chief sighed and watched a tugboat churn its way down the sun-dappled river, a vision of tranquillity receding.
He’d never felt the need for all this nervous joking about death. His father had brought him into the family business early on. By the time he was fifteen, he knew how to suture a mouth shut, how to fashion a nose out of wax, how to avoid blowing the features with too many chemicals. Over the years, he’d come to feel not just a reverence but a kind of affection toward the little ventilated basement room where “Midnight Train to Georgia” was always playing on the tape deck. Because in those quiet moments—working side by side, draining fluids and prelubing veins—he’d been able to hold on to that closeness with the old man that other boys lost when their voices dropped. The only time he ever remembered Dad cracking wise on the job was when they laid Godfrey Chamberlain on the slab, dead in a car wreck six months after he’d broken a bottle of Brass Monkey over Uncle James Booker’s head. And even then he’d had to strain to hear his father mumble as he injected the embalming fluid into the carotid artery:
So who’s the big man now?
The 8:09 to the city whipped by behind Harold, and he was aware of people on the train craning their necks, trying to look down onto the crime scene as they passed.
“Shit.” He felt the vibration of the platform’s pilings in the river-bank. “All my life, I lived in this town and there’ve been—what?—eight, nine homicides? I make chief, I get two in less than a year.”
“You want to say eight or nine?” Mike looked at him sideways.
“Why, what do you say?”
“I wanna say like ten or eleven. You don’t always think of the ones that don’t bother the people up the hill. Not right away. But I remember cradling Tony Foster’s head when he was bleeding to death outside the Front Street Tavern my first year on patrol. He kept saying, ‘Tell Don I’ll give him the money Tuesday,’ like he didn’t know he was going out of the picture.”
“Loco Tony”—Harold knit his brow—“the Reefer Prince of Riverside. He was the first drug dealer I ever knew that had his own power lawn mower. Four-hundred-dollar Craftsman with six-and-a-half-horsepower engine. Man, he was an asshole, but he had a beautiful lawn.”
“You saw I locked up his son the other week with three ounces. Loco Junior.”
“The gift that keeps on giving.”
“So how do you wanna play this?” Mike ran his hand over the sandy buzz cut that emphasized the shape of his skull. “Should we call Metro-North about holding the rest of the trains this morning?”
“
Hell no.
You know what kind of crap I’m getting? Do you know how many times the mayor’s called already? Do you know how many of the town trustees have called?”
Harold wagged his chin, thinking about the other little cliques in town he hadn’t even heard from yet, all the people who liked to pretend there was never any crime in Riverside: the cocktail-shaker-and-plaid-pants contingent from the Stone Ridge Country Club, the Saint Stephen’s crew from halfway up the hill, the B’nai Israel crowd, the Rotary Club Mullahs, the Welcome Wagon Fanatics, the School Board Ayatollahs. The whole social strata of the town getting ready to tumble down on him if he didn’t wrap this baby up fast.
“Word does get around,” said Mike.
“Forget about it.” Harold snorted. “The people on the hill don’t wanna see this shit. Next we’ll hear from the TV and newspapers. ‘Paradise Spoiled,’ ‘Murder in Quiet Suburbia.’ Emmie got me on the cell phone while I was running over here, half about to lose her mind because she’s showing two houses today and she’s worried the customers are gonna back out because they’ll think they’re looking at the ‘Little House in the Ghetto.’”
“Well, Chief, we can’t mess around with people’s property values, can we?”
Harold narrowed his eyes, trying to read his old friend’s expression. This was the first white kid who’d ever invited him into his home. They’d stood together on the defensive line on Riverside High School’s football team, worked as a pitcher-and-catcher battery for two seasons, shared a squad car in their first years on the job, been best men at each other’s weddings, saved each other’s lives once or twice, and had dozens of sleepovers looking after each other’s kids. But there were still times that those blue eyes were as inaccessible and mysterious to him as the chrysalis within an ice cube.
“We need to start doing a complete canvass and see if anybody saw the body being dumped,” said Harold. “I want to keep officers up on the platform, questioning people for the rest of the morning rush, and then I want somebody at the station tonight to talk to people as they’re getting off to come home. And I want somebody to go around the corner and talk to the Mexican day laborers hanging out in front of Starbucks. A lot of those guys are out on the streets late in the evening, and one of them might’ve seen something. I think until we find out otherwise, we have to assume this poor young woman is from our area.” He glanced down the slope. “How old do we figure her for anyway?”
“Dunno.” Paco looked up from mixing the Plaster of Paris that would be used to take the shoe impressions. “She was in pretty good shape. Late thirties, early forties. Those might have been stretch marks I saw before.”
“You can usually tell the age by looking at the neck,” said Mike.
“That ain’t an option this time.” Paco ladled out a generous dollop of plaster.
“Goddamn.” Harold watched the river breeze riffling the white sheet, making it look as if the woman underneath were about to sit up. “I hate it when they have kids.”
He found himself picturing a quick cremation and a short dignified memorial service to comfort the surviving kin. This was not the season of open caskets. He thought of the Fitzsimmons family, not even having a body to bury.
“So how you want to handle the security presence?” asked Mike. “We’ve already got a lot of edgy people in this town.”
“I’m thinking we’re going to have to go with a twelve-man rotation for the day shift and ten officers for tonight, or at least until we can positively ID this young lady as coming from somewhere else.” Harold exhaled unhappily. “I’ll talk to the mayor about overtime.”
“One- or two-man cars?”
“Six one-man cars during the day and four at night. And let’s put another half-dozen officers out on bicycles. I don’t want panic, but we want the taxpayers to see they’re getting their money’s worth. I want all our missing person reports compiled, and I want all our available personnel calling around to the other departments up and down the river to see who they have missing.”
Harold took a quick mental inventory of the twenty-nine officers in the department, unhappily sorting out the highly competent, the functional, and the brain-dead. He wasn’t cut out for this. In his heart, he’d always known he was not a born leader or a follower, but a loner. He’d always preferred solitary activities: sweeping up for his father, washing out tubes, filling out arrest reports, and having the quiet satisfaction of being a man alone in his own kitchen at midnight, paying every last one of his bills while the rest of his family slumbered upstairs.
He saw Mike staring at him.
“What?” Harold glowered back. “Why’re you giving me the Look?”
“Just makes me feel glad I didn’t get the job.”
“Oh, we gonna start with that again?”
“I’m just saying it’s a lot of pressure. I don’t envy you.”
“I didn’t go begging for this job, Mikey, and you know it.”
“I never said you did.” Fallon blinked, his face suddenly as clear and untroubled as a child’s open hand. “I said, ‘Let me be the first to congratulate you.’”
“I know what you said. Let’s not try to rewrite history.”
They were both still smarting from that last awkward Christmas dinner with the wives at the Olive Garden on Route 12—Emmie letting fly with that remark about the nerve of some people suggesting Harold got the job because he was black, Mike shrugging, rheumy-eyed over his whiskey sour, and asking,
Well, why
do
you think they gave it to him?
It wasn’t like Harold had been looking to step up. Come this January, he would have had his twenty years and been ready to turn in his papers. He’d been thinking of selling his share in the funeral home to one of the national chains. Pace University, just down the road, was offering a couple of computer classes he wanted to take. He’d earned the right to coast awhile: with the money from his share and his savings with Emmie, they could afford to put the kids through college with a modest financial aid package and still have a little left over to buy one of those beachside condos in South Carolina his brother was telling him about.