The Last Good Day (30 page)
“Sorry. I got tied up,” said Mike, flushing.
“And how come you didn’t tell me you’d been back at that house on Love Lane a week before we went to search it?” Paco crossed his arms like one of those macho rappers you see on billboards.
“I told you. I knew her.” Mike shrugged. “We all knew her. Harold knows I did some work on their fence.”
Mike sensed a shadow moving in the depths, underneath all the little minnows swimming back and forth.
“We’re having some problems with the chain of evidence in this case,” said Paco.
“What are you talking about?” Mike looked over at Harold.
“You see a diary when we were over at the victim’s house the other day?” asked Paco.
Mike heard the day laborers’ pit bull starting to bark across the street, a throaty yelp above the merengue din. “No. Did you?”
“We have information from people close to the victim that she kept a detailed diary. Friends saw it around the house recently.”
“Well, maybe the husband got rid of it. Maybe there was something in it that he didn’t want us to see.”
Jesus. He was flailing here.
“Maybe,” said Paco, giving him the hundred-watt stare right back. “Except the husband noticed it was missing too and mentioned it to us. He said he’d seen it on a bookshelf right before the two of us came over the other day.”
That crazy bitch. She must’ve put it there deliberately, as if she wanted the whole world to know.
“Obviously, he’s lying.” Mike gave a half-strangled laugh. “Did he happen to say what was in it?”
“No,” Harold interrupted. “But, Mike, I’m starting to think you haven’t been a hundred percent straight about some of the things I’ve asked you …”
“Like what?”
Some part of his mind was retreating to his childhood bedroom, hearing his parents’ voices in the kitchen.
“Part of the reason I’m here is to tell you that we’re opening an Internal Affairs investigation into the way this all went down,” Harold said.
“Get the fuck outa here.
I
do the Internal Affairs investigations.”
“Not this time, partner.”
The rush was like diesel fuel filling up his mouth. Too fast. It was all coming apart on him too fast to make a rational decision. The body washing ashore, the diary turning up, the fact that she really was pregnant like she’d said. He was a pilot losing altitude, his dials spinning wildly. When do you bail out?
The screen door opened behind him, and he whirled around.
“Yeah, what the fuck do you want?”
Timmy stood in the doorway, eyes glistening and lower lip sore from being chewed. “I just wanted to say good night to you and Harold,” he said in a shaky voice.
“
Get back in the house.
”
He saw the boy back away and let the screen slowly close, a dense gray rectangle of tiny wires between them.
Regret drenched him like a freezing rain. “Hey, come back here …”
But the boy had already bolted back into the living room and up the stairs, his bare feet thumping unsteadily on the wooden treads.
“Thanks a lot, you guys.” Mike turned back to his guests, still feeling the scorch marks on his tongue. “See what you made me do?”
Harold was wearing his deeply etched solemn face, as if he was about to present the bereaved with their bill. “Mike, I want to ask you one more time: Is there something about your relationship to the victim that you haven’t told us yet?”
Mike began to shrug, heaving weight off his shoulders.
Okay, so I was doing her.
He tried the line out in his head.
Okay, so I lied about it. Okay, so I took the diary. Okay, so there’s a couple of things in it I didn’t want you to see. Okay, so I might have roughed her up a little sometimes. Okay, I might’ve put my hands around her throat. Okay, so that might’ve been my kid she was carrying.
Okay, so where do you stop saying
okay?
“I can’t believe you guys are wasting time on this bullshit,” he said, trying to deflect them. “We should be sweating the husband, going over his financial records, sending a guy up to Boston to try and shake his alibi. He’s the one that did her.”
“What makes you say that?” Paco tugged on his earring.
“She was scared of him.”
“And how do you know that?” asked Harold pointedly.
A slant of light fell over Mike’s face. Marie turning on a lamp upstairs.
“I don’t think I want to answer any more questions without a lawyer around,” he said abruptly.
“Then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to take a leave of absence.” Harold bowed his head as if he was about to lead them all in common prayer. “I checked before I came over, and you’ve got a week of paid vacation that you have to take before the end of the year …”
“What the fuck are you doing?” said Mike. “You’re suspending me? I haven’t done anything wrong. My only problem is I have an old girlfriend with a big mouth and a jealous husband.”
“No, your only problem is you’re about to become a material witness in a murder case, and you could be sued by a member of this community for harassment. Other than that, you’re doing a hell of a job.”
“I’m sorry I
embarrassed
you, Harold. Is that what you want me to say?”
“I’m not the one you need to apologize to.”
“Oh, screw this.” Mike slapped a mosquito on the side of his neck. “You guys are going to let this case slip right through your fingers.”
“You’re not giving me any choice.” Harold lowered his voice. “There’s going to be a disciplinary hearing if Lynn and her husband press charges. But if you start cooperating with us right now, you can count on it all going down a little smoother.”
“I made you, Harold. You would’ve never got to be chief without me.”
“I know that. But I am not going to jail for you.”
“Let me tell you something.” Mike stood back, his voice scrounging down in the gutter. “You try and drown me, I’ll pull everyone else down with me.”
“Then I take it you already have the name of a good lawyer.” Harold gave him a circumspect look.
“Don’t worry. I can take care of myself.”
He saw Harold shake his head at Paco, as if they were a couple of gravediggers rubbing their hands. Thirty-two years. So this is how you bury a friendship. You bring a stranger with you.
“Look,” said Harold, reaching into his back pocket for a white business card, “I brought along Dr. Friedman’s phone number at County Psych Services, in case you lost it. I remember how she helped you out after Johnny died.”
“Just what I need. A
professional
friend.”
Mike took the card from the chief, tore it in half, and handed it back to him.
“There. Now you can say you tried.”
Harold stared at the torn pieces in his palm. “Can’t make a man take a lifeline if he doesn’t want it.” He said it not so much to Mike, or even to Paco, but to himself.
“No, you certainly can’t,” said Mike, hitching up his chinos and drawing up to his full height.
“Fine, we’ll do it your way.” Harold sighed in resignation. “Go get me your gun and badge. We’ll wait out here. No one wants to humiliate you in front of your family.”
WITH EACH THUMP
and scatter of dirt hitting the coffin lid, Lynn felt the hollowness inside her chest.
A breeze swept across Green Hill Cemetery as she watched the ritual of mourners taking turns shoveling dirt into Sandi’s grave, having heard Saul and Rabbi Heyman from B’nai Israel recite the burial Kaddish.
“
Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw
…”
The words still seemed to circle in the wind. But a different recitation was going on in her head.
That’s my friend down there in that rosewood box. That’s real dirt they’re throwing on top of her. These are three dozen people we both knew dressed in black, gathered in a circle around this hole in the ground. Those are her children back in the rented Lincoln Town Car by the entrance with their step-grandmother. Those are her feckless brothers at the back of the crowd. That’s the man she married, looking ashen and anemic. That’s my husband standing beside me in a black yarmulke, holding my hand and bowing his head.
Amen.
Grief kept reinventing itself and finding new ways into her. She remembered a woman she’d met at Sloan-Kettering with Sandi last spring, an old lady with Alzheimer’s and a double mastectomy. Every night she forgot what had happened to her, and every morning she woke up and started crying again.
She saw Saul, his hair brilliantined and his eyebrows trimmed, take the shovel and stare bitterly at his son-in-law. With a grunt, he stooped and stuck the blade into the mound and then ladled the dirt lovingly into his daughter’s grave. A decommissioned old warship adrift on a dark river. She understood that he needed to do something with all this pent-up rage, but this seemed wrong. Not a half-hour before, Jeffrey had delivered the eulogy at B’nai Israel and spoke so movingly of how Sandi had been his soul mate and conscience that tears burned the corners of Lynn’s eyes like kerosene. So weren’t they all part of this growing province of grieving people?
She looked up the hill toward the grove where she’d buried her own mother last year. Harold and Paco Ortiz stood in the shade of an elm near the grave, with their heads lowered but their eyes conspicuously alert. Something about seeing them here broke the mood. Were they paying their respects or on the job?
She turned back, watching Saul daven, rocking back and forth over the grave. Lost in bereavement, he closed his eyes and began to recite the Kaddish all over again, having forgotten he’d already done it. Marty Pollack came to the head of the grave and took the shovel from him. He bent over to stick the blade into the pyramid of dirt and then stopped and delicately touched the small of his own back as if he’d injured himself. Jeanine came up quickly and took the shovel from him, tossing a coffee cup’s-worth of soil down on the lid and fulfilling the family’s obligation. Again, the thump felt like a depth charge going off inside Lynn. The finality of it. The grain-by-grain reality of covering someone she’d known all her life. The surrendering of flesh to the earth. She decided that when her turn came she’d have to pass.
Barry let go of her hand and went to take the shovel from Jeanine. Something about watching him unbutton his suit jacket and get down to business made Lynn feel slightly distant from him. He could say he understood what she was going through, but really he couldn’t. Just as she couldn’t quite get to him after his father died. Grief put a velvet rope around you. People could come and look, but they couldn’t touch. Barry turned the shovel over, and a hard lump of dirt fell and broke on the coffin lid. The sound caused Saul to look up from his davening.
“
V’yis’halawl sh’mei d’kudshaw b’rich hu …
”
Slowly, all eyes went back to the grave, except for Harold’s. Lynn saw him staring into the mid-distance, that look of alertness beginning to pull his heavy features together.
“
L’aylaw min kol …
”
Barry handed the shovel to Jeffrey with a solemn man-to-man nod and then went back to Lynn’s side. “He’ll be all right,” he muttered. But she was distracted, seeing Harold give Paco a small nudge.
“
B’all’maw, v’imru: Amein.
”
“
Amein,
” the men in the crowd answered.
Jeffrey sniffed, dug into the pile, and started to bring out an unsteady scoop. But then the shovel stopped and hovered over Sandi’s coffin, a few shaky grains spilling over the side and pouring down on the lid. Something was not right here. His mouth opened slightly, and the lenses of his glasses turned into opaque white circles. Following his gaze, Barry looked over his own shoulder. Then Jeanine started to whisper to Marty and point urgently.
“
Y’hei shlawmaw rabbaw …
” Saul’s voice trailed off.
Lynn turned and saw Mike Fallon lumbering up the hill toward them, over the low-lying tombstones and the paling neatly trimmed grass. He seemed to bring a highly charged ion field with him. The sight of his thick wrists dangling from the sleeves of an ill-fitting dark suit only heightened the sense of a man out of place.
“
Min sh’mayaw, v’chayim … ,
” Saul began to recite the prayer again, oblivious to the disturbance.
Lynn saw Paco Ortiz’s chest swell as he started down the hill to intercept him. But then Harold took his arm and pulled him back, waiting to see what would develop. Saul’s bewildered eyes found Lynn’s, requesting explanation. But all she could do was dip her shoulders helplessly.
“
Awleinu v’al kol yisroel …
”
Jeffrey turned over his shovel full of dirt and then lowered the blade as the circle of mourners parted. Mike stepped between them and boldly walked right up to Jeffrey, the interloper confronting the bereft. They stared at each other blankly, like species encountering each other for the first time.
It was, Lynn decided, the most uncomfortable thing she’d ever seen.
Mike, a good two inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than Jeff, firmly seized the shovel from his hands and looked around the circle, daring anyone to try to take it back from him. His eyes lingered on Barry, doubling the challenge. Lynn squeezed her husband’s hand, silently begging him not to rise to the bait again.
“
Oseh shawlom bim’ro’mawv …
” The rabbi joined Saul in running through the prayer a second time, trying to complete the ancient words of a tribe used to burying its dead while under siege.
Satisfied that no one was going to try to take the shovel from his hands, Michael loosened his tie, bent his knees, and dug into the mound as if he was about to heap coal into a steam engine. Dirt cascaded over rosewood. Most of the other mourners had only tossed a small ceremonial amount in. But Mike pivoted and threw another load down and then another, a small rivulet of perspiration appearing by his temple, glimpses of scalp reddening vividly through his bristle cut. Several of the women in the circle stepped back, not wanting any part of this confrontation. Saul looked at his useless sons and then at each of the other men in the circle, imploring one of them to intercede. But then Mike suddenly stopped, having completed his tribute. He turned and handed the shovel back to Jeffrey, as if to say,
See, that’s how it’s done.