The Last Good Day (20 page)

Lynn took a deep breath, trying to focus on Jeff. She pictured him in his tux at the Waldorf, surrounded by his office buddies, drinking too much Cristal and talking too loudly about the strippers at Shenanigans. But when she watched him take Sandi for the first dance across the ballroom floor, she remembered thinking that this was a guy who’d come a long way to find love. When Sandi’s father and Jeff’s friends hoisted him up on the chair to carry him around for the traditional part of the celebration, his smile became a klieg light shining from face to face, and she could see exactly what had drawn Sandi to him.

“So do you think Jeff could’ve found out and killed her?” Lynn heard herself blurt out.

The book slid off Molly Pratt’s lap as she was eating and hit the floor. The thud seemed to jar everyone else.

“Jesus, Lynn, you don’t mince words, do you?” Anne tried bending down to pick up the book. “The man’s supposed to be in mourning.”

“Well, who else could’ve done it?” Lynn asked, remembering what Barry said last night.

“It couldn’t have been him,” Jeanine announced in the prescriptive tone she used when friends failed to listen to her instructions properly. “He’s been away for a few days in Boston and Providence, meeting with venture capitalists to try to prop up his business. I saw Sandi with the kids on Saturday down by the skateboard park, and she said he was coming back at the beginning of this week.”

“Did you tell the police that?” Lynn said.

“Of course. Some Hispanic detective with a shaved head and an earring came by yesterday. I tell you, this town has really changed. When I saw him coming up the driveway, I thought he was one of Eduardo’s gardeners.”

“All right, but if it’s not Jeff, who is it?” Lynn turned back to the rest of the group, trying to enlist them. “Why wouldn’t she tell any of us who she was having the affair with?”

“I think she was trying to break it off,” Jeanine murmured.

“What makes you say that?” asked Lynn, hearing the others start to whisper.

“She just turned to me on Saturday and said, ‘Why is it everyone always acts like it’s women who are the ones who won’t let go after a thing’s over?’” Jeanine said, imitating Sandi’s slightly adenoidal deadpan.

“Really?” Dianne de Groot’s girlish features pulled back. “She said
that?
”

“Yeah.” Jeanine sniffed. “It was one of those kid conversations when you never get to complete a sentence. Zak fell coming down one of the ramps and skinned his knee, and it was like an Oliver Stone movie at the skate park …”

“A …” A surprised laugh caught in Lynn’s throat.

“You know: ‘
Shut up and take the pain, soldier!
’” Jeanine snorted, starting to crack up. Molly coughed. Dianne gave a little gasp. And then the floodgates opened, and they all began crying at once. The living room became a republic of tears in a country that hadn’t stopped crying for two weeks. They cried for their friend, and they cried for themselves. They cried for the children who lost their mother, and then they cried because they were scared. They cried because they didn’t know what was going to happen next, and they cried because they knew all the crying wasn’t going to change a thing.

“God, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to stand it.” Lynn shuddered and dried her eyes.

“What’s the alternative?” Anne Schaffer said, giving up on the fallen book and accepting a tissue from Jeanine to blow her nose.

“I don’t know.” Lynn hugged herself. “It just feels so useless to sit here
talking
about it.”

“Honey, just let the police do their job.” Jeanine tried to reassure her. “They know what they’re doing.”

“You think so?”

Lynn found herself staring once again at the empty velvet seat. She’d sat right there, hadn’t she? Just a few feet away, with one leg curled up under her and both shoes parked beneath the chair. Her mind went back to a winter afternoon senior year of high school. A long train ride into the city, her breath fogging up the window, and a slender brown serpent of coffee spilling down the aisle. Her first time going to Manhattan without her mother. She and Sandi had made a promise to each other, that if they somehow got separated on the subway, one of them would come back for the other. Sure enough, at Times Square, the doors had closed and she’d seen Sandi’s face receding on the downtown local, leaving her stranded among the platform prophets, the stumblebum bystanders, and the muttering angry creeps in dirty raincoats. The lurid carnival she thought she’d been looking for. She remembered how that one scary silver-suited freak with a video camera kept asking her to come back to his apartment and take off her clothes. But then she’d heard a shout and turned to see Sandi running up the stairs to rescue her, having just caught the local coming back uptown, keeping up her end of the deal. If one of us gets lost, the other always has to come back for her. Cross your heart, hope to die, no excuses.

“So,” said Molly Pratt, finally bending down to get her own damn book, “anybody want to talk about the novel?”

18

MIKE GOT TO WORK
a couple of minutes late that morning and found most of the officers in the squad room watching that ridiculous annoying
Riverdance
video again while Larry Quinn, acting as desk sergeant for once, accepted a package covered in duct tape from the distinguished citizen known around the station as Peculiar Clark.

“What’s going on?” asked Mike, raising his voice to be heard above the clatter of tap shoes and the sawing of violins.

“There’s nowhere to hide anymore,” said Peculiar Clark. “It’s everywhere.”

He was an elegantly addled old man in a milk-stained double-breasted suit, who’d supposedly made his fortune back in the forties writing saccharine holiday homilies for one of the major greeting card companies. But these days he lived by himself in a huge old Victorian wreck up in the West Hills, and at least two nights a week he got himself liquored-up and slicked-back like a boulevardier to try to importune young soccer moms in the aisles of Stop & Shop.

“Mr. De Cavalcante says he may have been a terrorist target,” said Quinn, the station’s records officer and a character in his own right, twisting the waxed end of his mustache slyly. “He received a suspicious package.”

“A pair of woman’s lace panties and an obscene note in my mailbox this morning.” Clark leaned on his battered wolf’s-head cane, his face as corrugated as an empty scrotum. “I never asked for that.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Mike. “What do you think that’s about?”

“Biological warfare.” Clark gave a sage nod as Larry slipped the package into a silver hazmat bag. “Anthrax-soaked panties. The terrorists test it out on the old people first because they think we won’t be missed.”

“Probably right.” Mike took the bag from the sarge. “I think I better show this to the chief.”

“Thank you, son.” Clark shook his hand. “I’m glad somebody recognizes we’ve got an emergency on our hands.”

Mike gave him a two-fingered salute and sprinted up the stairs to the chief’s office, trying to remember the last time he’d gotten so much as a true laugh out of Harold. The panties were probably a pair of those old rayon drawers that you could fit a little elephant into. Chances were they belonged to some hooker Clark slept with in 1953. But maybe they could be an opening, a way to get into a more casual kind of conversation with Harold about Sandi. Having taken a look at a large portion of the diary last night, he realized he had to play it cool with the chief, find a way to artfully arrange some details ahead of time so Harold didn’t go crazy and lop
his
head off.

He moved through the outer office, ignoring the finger Deb Ryan, the secretary, was holding up to delay him, and threw Harold’s door open.

Harold and Paco Ortiz looked up in surprise, like Catholic schoolgirls caught smoking cigarettes in the bathroom.

“Hey, am I interrupting something?”

He clenched the bag to his side, deciding to shelve the gag for the moment.

“Case is starting to move.” Harold set down his Mont Blanc pen. “Old man and his grandson fished a head out of the river this morning.”

“Sandi?”

“Looks that way. The ME already picked it up. They did the autopsy on the rest of the body last night and said they didn’t find any oxygenated water in the lungs.”

“And when were you going to tell me about this? I don’t rate a phone call?”

Mike noticed the stubble contract like iron filings on Paco’s head, and he wondered what the two of them had been talking about just before he came in. There was a definite afterburn lingering in the air. Harold studiously avoided looking him in the eye. Did they know something already?

No. It was too early for them to be seriously onto him.

“I was going to tell you this morning, when you came in,” said Harold carefully. “Nobody’s keeping anybody out of the loop.”

“Glad to hear that.” Mike shot Paco a cold look, reminding him who was in charge here.

“So, what else is doing?” he said, as if the two of them were still holding smoke in their lungs.

“Working on putting together an affidavit for a warrant to search Lanier’s house,” Harold said. “Brian Bonfiglio from the DA’s office is supposed to be here any minute to help us write it up.”

“Hey, hey, what’s this about?” Mike looked back and forth between the two of them. “I thought we weren’t going to make a move until we all agreed we had probable cause.”

He was sure he’d had everything under control when he left the Laniers’ with the diary yesterday. But here he was being upended and forced to scramble for his footing.

“It was my call,” said Harold.

“Your call.” Mike stared at him over the sallow dotted orb of Paco’s head.

“The phone rang five minutes ago. Somebody saw a bloodstain on the wall in Lanier’s house.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Hey, bro, don’t feel bad about not seeing it.” Paco swiveled in his chair to face him. “We were just there to get the prints in the bathroom. It’s better this way. Now we have a witness.”

“Who is it?”

“Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” Harold steepled his fingers. “Judge always likes to see a real name, but we don’t want to put anybody at risk unnecessarily.”

“Fuck it,” said Paco. “Put it in. He’s gonna figure it out eventually anyway. How many other people were in his living room yesterday?”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Harold said. “He won’t see the actual affidavit with the name on it until we’re closer to trial. And by then he’ll have bigger fish to fry.”

“Wait a second.” Mike made sure he’d closed the door behind him. “This was Lynn Stockdale who saw this?”

Harold nodded.

“And she called
you
and not me?”

“It was a police matter, Mikey. She wasn’t looking for a date or anything.”

Mike stared in silence, a hard dark coal glowing in his head.

“This the lady we saw yesterday?” Paco palmed the top of his bald head.

“I just don’t know why she would’ve called you instead of me,” said Mike, trying to button up the hurt quickly. “It’s just funny, that’s all.”

“Well, either way it’s a break, and we have to move on it fast before he gets a chance to clean up.” Harold picked up his pen again. “We want to get a look in his garage and basement too while we’re there, and see what kind of saws he’s got.”

“I know how to do a search, Harold,” Mike cut him off. “Who’s going to take the warrant over for the judge to sign?”

On a Wednesday morning this early, old Highball Harper, the real estate lawyer who sat on the bench and heard local cases three days a week, would probably be out on the links at the Stone Ridge Country Club with all the other desiccated old WASPs, reminiscing about the Ford administration and trying to maintain their tenuous grip on the town’s levers of power.

“I’m going to ask Paco to do it,” said Harold, officiously clearing his throat and rolling his pen between his fingers. “He’s the primary on this case. He’s going to have to swear to the warrant and answer any serious questions that come up later in court …”

“But …” A hot protest started to spill out of Mike.

“I
said
Paco is the primary, and you’re the supervisor,” Harold said in that brusque stentorian tone he’d started using since he became chief. “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided maybe you’re a little too close with too many of these people.”

“So that’s how you want it?”

“That’s how I want it.”

Mike took a beat, watching Paco scratch at the side of his goatee with his finger. That pumped-up little prick must’ve said something to Harold about the argument they’d had at the Lanier house yesterday. And these were the guys who held his fate in their hands?

Screw this.

He was thinking maybe some of the old-timers might’ve been right about Harold: that he’d suddenly decided he was a black man after all, once he got the chief’s badge. Sliding Paco in ahead of men with more seniority. Going to that NAACP dinner after all those vicious protests over the Woyzeck shooting. Joking around in the locker room with the three other black guys on the job, making all these coded little references white people weren’t supposed to get.

When did the Blue Wall get color coordinated? What about loyalty and fraternity? What about remembering the men who put their lives on the line for you? What about the fact that they’d known each other since they were ten? Moment by moment, though, the idea was hardening in his mind that this was no longer completely his tribe.

He sighed and put up his hands, knowing he had to keep stonewalling. He couldn’t count on Harold for anything. No mercy for the white man once he’s down on his knees.

“Okay, Chief, whatever. It’s your bat and ball.”

Harold sat back in his chair, hearing the bitter undertone.

“Look,” he said, “nobody’s trying to do an end run around anybody else here, Mike. We’re all team players.”

“I don’t have a problem working with Paco if Paco doesn’t have a problem working with me. You got a problem with me, Paco?”

“No, man.” Paco draped an arm over the side of his chair, eyes moving warily. “We got an understanding.”