The Last Good Day (25 page)

He crossed the street after the chief, maneuvered his way through the milling pack of day laborers out front, and then went in through the tinted glass doors, seeing that Harold had already arrived at the front of the line.

“Gimme a
venti
cappuccino,” Harold Baltimore was saying in a hoarse exhausted grumble.

“It’s on the house,” said the boy behind the counter, who had a shaved head and a small gold ring through his eyebrow. “Compliments of the manager.”

“I don’t need any compliments.” The chief proffered a ten-dollar bill. “Just gimme the correct change.”

“Isn’t that something?” Barry took his place in line behind him. “Our fathers fought the wars in Germany and Korea, and our generation invented the five-dollar cup of coffee. Makes you wonder about civilization, doesn’t it?”

The chief turned and grunted, so tired it looked like he had old damp grain sacks under his eyes.

“How’s it going?” asked Barry.

“It’s going.”

He’d gotten to know Harold slightly from Lynn’s mother’s funeral last year, which the Baltimore family had handled with understated decorum and taste at their funeral home on Bank Street.

“You remember me, right? Barry Schulman.”

“Sure. The son-in-law. Rosewood casket, eleven o’clock service, three limos to the cemetery.”

The chief himself had sat in their living room beforehand, patiently going through the casket catalog with Lynn and sparing her the arduous task of going to the funeral parlor to pick one out.

“That’s amazing,” said Barry. “You remember every service?”

“Mrs. Stockdale was my fifth-grade art teacher.” Harold accepted his cappuccino and dropped a few coins in the tip jar. “Great lady. Taught me how to draw sunsets.”

“Ah.”

“And, of course, your wife was in my high school class.” The chief moved down the counter for sugar. “We’ve always had friends in common.”

“Just give me a regular cup, black, please,” Barry told the boy at the register before he stepped to the side after the chief. “So it sounds like you had a tough case drop in your lap. I saw there was a little story today in the Gannett paper.”

Harold raised the sugar dispenser high, pouring a steady granulated stream into his cup.

“We’ll put it down,” he said.

“You catching any breaks?”

The chief kept pouring, lowering and raising the white powdered stream so it arced and stretched in midair.

“Good luck is the residue of careful design,” he said. “Just like a proper burial plot.”

Barry paid the counterboy and took his coffee, staring down at the smoky black surface and remembering that Lynn had asked him not to make trouble.

“How’s your better half?” the chief asked.

“She’s pretty upset, as you might imagine. Sandi Lanier was a good friend of hers.”

“Huh,” said the chief, managing to pack commiseration, grim acceptance, and cool professional distance into a single syllable.

One of the other boys behind the counter began tapping the grinder with a little hammer to get every last grain out.

“You know, one of your guys came by my house yesterday,” Barry said.

“Oh? Who was this?”

“Your detective lieutenant there, the big guy. Fallon.”

Harold carefully put a white plastic lid on his cappuccino, making it clear that he was taking it to go.

“I was kind of surprised to hear about that,” said Barry, “since he’d already been out to ask my wife some questions the day before.”

“He may have had a few things he wanted to follow up on since your wife was so close with the victim.” The chief shrugged, not letting on if he was bothered.

“I understand that, but it also made it a little awkward since your detective knows my wife as well. I think they may have had a sort of … an uncomfortable exchange.”

A part of him knew that he should just drop it as Lynn had asked him to, but walking away at this point would have felt neglectful, like leaving the dome light on in the car or letting a very small child alone in the bath with the hot water running.

“I’m not sure what you mean by that.” Harold worked his fingertips around the rims of his eye sockets.

“I don’t want to get into specifics, but my impression was that some things were said that didn’t directly pertain to the investigation.”

He could see that he’d made Harold deeply unhappy. The chief drew in his lips and lowered his brow, making his face look slightly squashed, as if someone were sitting on his head.

“Look, I appreciate that you’ve got a murder to solve and that you’re just trying to do your job. And we’ll do anything you need us to do to cooperate. Sandi was a good lady. Just, if it’s
possible …
”—Barry tread carefully here, knowing he might have already overstepped his bounds by a half-mile—“it’d work better for us if you could give us a little more advance notice. My wife would be happy to come down to the station to talk to you.”

The compression increased around the chief’s mouth. He put his coffee cup down firmly.

“You’re a lawyer, right?”

“You don’t miss much, do you?”

“My wife sold you your house,” the chief deadpanned.

“No kidding? Emmie?”

Barry found himself having to readjust his settings a little. All right, so the chief is married to a white lady. A very white lady. Cool. Emmie with the oversize round glasses, turquoise bracelet, and straight blond hair, who’d piled them all into her Navigator and driven them up to the farmhouse on Grace Hill Road less than twenty months ago.
You’ll be happy here.
She’d announced it, as if it was a prophecy out of one of the sun-faded New Age books on her dashboard. Not just your typical suburban couple. He’d forgotten her saying she was married to a cop.

“We’ve been married almost twenty-one years,” the chief said matter-of-factly. “My point is, is that this is a
small
town. All right? A lot of people know each other. I even knew the victim. So we may have some big-city problems, but we all have to
coexist.
You understand what I’m saying?”

“Sure, but …”

“Three weeks ago, one of my officers had to arrest my second cousin for selling marijuana less than a hundred and fifty yards from the high school. Was I happy about it? What do you think?”

“I think things might be sort of tense next time the family gets together for the holidays.”

“You’re damn right. But I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it. Now we got all kinds of folks living in our little town. We’ve got stockbrokers and bank presidents, heads of foundations and plenty of distinguished lawyers such as yourself. But do you think it would be right if I gave them special treatment over my second cousin trying to put a little cash aside to buy himself a new car?”

“Of course not,” said Barry.

“Now I know my officers make mistakes sometimes—believe me,
I know
—but I also know that I owe it to the people of this town to do a thorough and complete investigation without fear or favor and that Michael Fallon is one of the best men I have.”

“He tried to put a move on my wife.”

“Well then, I will certainly speak to him on that,” the chief said stiffly, clearly roiling under the surface. “But I also would appreciate it if you cooperated fully with any other questions my investigators have. You and your wife knew the victim, and you may have other key information we’re going to need in this case.”

“Of course.” Barry covered his coffee with a lid and picked up his briefcase. “You can count on it.”

He saw the chief take a deep fortifying breath and instantly understood the crux of his daily dilemma: how do you keep both your officers and your constituents in line when most of them probably don’t trust you in the first place? Probably only by conscientiously pissing everyone off to precisely the same degree.

“Well, all right then.” The chief dismissed him with a curt nod toward the front door. “Don’t miss your train.”

24

WHEN MIKE OPENED
up the detectives’ squad room that morning, the phone was ringing on Paco Ortiz’s desk. Mike picked it up before the answering machine got it and found himself speaking to a state trooper named Cotter.

Sandi Lanier’s red ’99 Audi had been found in a Motel 6 parking lot some five miles outside of town. The doors were unlocked, there were no signs of struggle, and there were no obvious traces of blood anywhere in the vehicle. They’d already run the plates and come up with a photo ID of Sandi, but none of the motel staff could recall seeing her and there was no room registered in her name.

Mike took down the information in his notebook and thanked the trooper, saying arrangements would be made to pick up the car within the next few days. Then he hung up the phone and stared at his own handwriting, as cryptic as a doctor’s prescription, wondering what to do.

Two days at sea and he still had zero visibility ahead. Shouldn’t the fog have parted? Shouldn’t the next move have presented itself? But the only thing that was clear was that he should’ve said more to Harold the other night. Just enough to spin the wheel a little and save himself from a head-on collision.

Of course, now that he’d read the diary from end to end, he knew there was no easy way to double back and make excuses for not owning up in the first place. All he could do was keep sailing straight off the end of the map. But in the dreary haze of his early morning hangover, he felt confounded, seasick, and hard done by all the women in his life.

Am beginning to suspect no one will ever really love me. Every man I’ve ever known has turned out to be a fraud.
Shiiiit, baby! Look at your own damn self. None of the men you knew had their fat sucked or their hair colored.

He decided to put off making a decision about the trooper’s message until he could at least sweat the toxins out. After checking to make sure he had no calls on his own machine, he changed into his shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers and went downstairs to the gym in the basement. A sign on the wall said,
FATIGUE MAKES COWARDS OF MEN
. Greaseman, the D.A.R.E. cop who spent his on-duty hours lecturing school kids about drugs and his off-duty hours popping steroids, was on the StairMaster, listening to his Walkman and watching stock prices fluctuate wildly on CNBC. Sweat stains darkened patches of the mustard-brown carpet and a Fedders air conditioner rumbled asthmatically.

Mike took a seat on the bench and adjusted the weight to 220 pounds. Then he lay back and shut his eyes, focusing all his concerns into the effort of raising and lowering those stacks of black steel plates.

His muscles felt sluggish and achy; he’d stayed up too late reading the diary in the basement, tooling around on the Internet, and drinking bourbon from a SpongeBob SquarePants glass. He tried to gather his strength in the middle of his chest and push it out, imagining himself as Atlas, holding up the world. He felt the strain in his lats, the heavy laboring of his heart, the poison starting to ooze out of his pores. His elbows locked, and slowly he tried to straighten his arms, tightening his grip even as every nerve in his body screamed for him to stop. It was just a matter of dead-center control. Life was about maintaining control.

I told M. that I didn’t want to keep doing this,
she’d written in the diary.
But he’s so relentless. He won’t let things just be. I’m really starting to get nervous about him …

Screw her. He concentrated on the flickering light over his head, pulling down deeper into himself, trying to find the hard impenetrable core of his being, the part that could never be broken.

The other night I showed him the new tattoo on my ankle …

Two hundred and twenty pounds and he was about to pop a double hernia. His brother could hoist 250 and dive with 75 pounds of scuba gear on his back, no problem. But how could that be? Johnny didn’t have any of his body mass. He was just a wiry little guy. So how could he have been so much stronger?

I made some stupid remark about how I hoped I didn’t get hepatitis C from the needle they used, and he just went nuts on me …

His sinews burned, and an angry hiss escaped from the corners of his mouth.

He started screaming and yelling about how could I do this to him and his family. What if I got them all infected?

Slowly, his elbows unlocked, and the weights began to rise higher as if succumbing to some buildup of hydraulic pressure. I’m a man. I’m the son of a man who was the son of a man.

He shoved me down on the bed and put his hands around my throat. I really thought he was going to strangle me …

His arms trembled slightly as he thought of shutting the book as soon as he read that. It didn’t happen that way. Yes, it did. No,
it didn’t
. She was crazy. She was exaggerating. No one would have ever believed her if she was still alive. And not for nothing, she was kidding about that needle, wasn’t she? Hadda be. Hadda be.
I’m a man. I’m the son of a man who was the son of a man …
He ground his jaw, pushing harder and harder, slowly extending his arms until they couldn’t lift anymore. But just then, Harold’s face loomed above him, eclipsing the flickering light.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“What does it look like?” Mike gradually lowered the weights, incrementally becoming aware of the sound of his heartbeat fading in.

“Are we having some problem understanding each other?”

“What’s up?”

He sat up quickly, thinking somehow Paco had found out about the missing diary. Blood began pounding in his ears.

“You think this is some kind of joke that they made a black man the police chief?”

“Look, will you chill the fuck out and tell me what’s bothering you?”

Mike mopped his face with a towel, feeling a throb in the base of his throat. He’d never been afraid of Harold before, and he didn’t like it. The Greaseman had departed the gym, leaving the CNBC lady babbling about earnings disappointments and declining indexes.

“I told you I needed you to take a step back, didn’t I?”

“Just tell me what I did wrong.” A droplet of sweat eased down the bridge of Mike’s nose.