The Last Good Day (34 page)

37

“AM I MISSING
something here?” asked Harold, looking over the open containers of Chinese food arrayed on his desk and the reports Paco had written up for him.

“That’s everything I’ve put in the system.”

Paco sat on the other side of the Great Wall of Takeout, toying with the orange Nerf football with huge foam gouges taken out of it that Harold kept in his desk drawer for times of extreme stress.

“Sandi Lanier’s husband is away all weekend, having business meetings in New England.” Harold lowered his bifocals. “That makes sense to you?”

“It all checks out.” Paco tossed the ball from hand to hand. “Lanier lands at Logan Thursday morning, registers at the Four Seasons hotel by eleven. Spends the next three days tooling around in a rented Tempo, meeting with venture capital people. Goes sailing with two college friends on Sunday in New London. Goes to two more meetings Monday in Providence. Returns the car to Avis at Logan by three-thirty. Lands at LaGuardia at five. Walks in the front door a little after seven, almost twelve hours after his wife comes floating down the river without her head.”

“You pull his cell phone and hotel bill records?”

“Called home twice over the weekend and made about half a dozen work calls from the hotel. I think he might’ve been blowing smoke up our asses about how well his business is doing, but that don’t make him any different from most folks around here.”

The chief folded up his bifocals and put them in his vest pocket as the two of them took a moment to contemplate the moral lubricity of white people and their money.

“Still think there’s anyway he could’ve done it?” he asked his detective.

“If there is, I’m not seeing it.” Paco let the ball rest on his lap. “I’ve talked to people who saw him every one of those days. The only gaps are when he’s sleeping and a few hours Sunday night when he says he went to see
Moulin Rouge.
And he would’ve had to drive something like a hundred-fifty miles to be back in time for his meeting Monday morning. It’s possible, but …”

He opened his palms, indicating to the chief the precise amount of hard evidence he would have to present to a jury at this point. A second-year law student could tear apart this circumstantial a case.

“What about paying somebody else to do it for him?” the chief asked.

“When we think he’s low on cash?” Paco shrugged. “I’ll look into it, but I gotta tell you, Chief, hit men don’t give preholiday discounts, even in this economy.”

“Shit.” Harold pushed aside the round tin of beef lo mein he’d been picking at indifferently, wishing he could go home early and eat with the family one of these days. “So I guess we’ve gotta start looking at the other guy. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Hey, bro, I don’t like to talk bad about another cop, and I know you guys
go
way back together. But do the math.”

“Let’s hear it.”

Harold wiped his hands with a paper towel and sat forward in his chair, revealing a small tear in the leather behind him.

“He knows the victim from the old days and does work around the house when the kids and the husband are out,” Paco said.

“Mmm.” Harold grumbled, brooding again on what Lynn had said about those two “seeing” each other.
Damn.
They’d have to nail that down, get a real source. Not that he hadn’t figured it out already, but what else did the women in this town know? And how could you subscribe to be part of their closed-circuit twenty-four-hour news network?

“He’s at the crime scene the first morning at the train station,” Paco went on, laying it out piece by piece, as if he was putting together a bike, “so his footprints were all over the riverbank by the time I started to take shoe impressions. Then he’s all hinky about what kind of relationship he had with Mrs. Lanier when I ask him about it. And he keeps bothering Mrs. Schulman, wanting to know if Sandi ever said she was having an affair. Then a can of the same wood protector he uses turns up in the bag with the victim’s head …”

“You don’t think that could’ve been someone setting him up?” Harold raised his eyebrows.

“I ain’t done yet.” Paco shook his head. “He has access to all the physical evidence in the locker, so I don’t even know the rest of what we’re missing besides the diary. There could be fingerprints, carpet fibers, and hair samples I never got a chance to look at because he got to them first.”

“Damn …” Harold eyed the open container of white rice, deciding the last thing he needed was more starch in his life.

“And then there’s the laptop.”

“The laptop?”

“The one we collected from Mrs. Lanier’s house. It’s got a bunch of e-mails from an AOL account called Topcat105.”

“So?” asked Harold, remembering the old cartoon character Top Cat, who was always giving people a dime on a string and then yanking it out of their hands.

Top Cat was probably working for the federal government now.

“The last e-mail from this Topcat was asking Mrs. Lanier to meet him at the same Motel 6 where the state trooper found her Audi a few days later. It says, ‘I have a few things of yours that you might want back. You miss that earring?’”

Harold glanced over at his office door, making sure it was firmly closed. “And who’s this Topcat?”

“His member profile gives the name J. C. Martin and says he’s a law enforcement professional with an athletic build and a movie-star smile.”

J. C. Martin.
Harold took a second to close his eyes, trying to drop the name into his memory bank. It rolled around and then hit the jackpot, sending him back to the Samuel R. Walker Middle School lunchroom. He was in the pack with white kids gathered around a little Panasonic transistor, listening to Lindsey Nelson call the fourth game of the ’69 Series.
And the ball hit Martin in the wrist as he was running up the first-base line!
A journeyman back-up catcher for the Mets, having his one moment of glory because an errant Baltimore throw struck him and allowed a run to score. He remembered the whole lunchroom exploding with joy, everyone jumping up and cheering, slapping him on the back as if he’d finally become one of them just by being a Mets fan. The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that Mike had been one of the white boys who’d put an arm around his shoulders.

“It’s a fake name,” he said.

“I figured as much too, even though I’m a Yankees fan.” Paco squeezed the ball on his lap. “It don’t look good.”

“Can you prove it’s Mike’s account?”

“I’m working on it with the company’s legal department. They got all kinds of privacy laws to protect people’s identities.”

Harold threw his bulk back into his chair, a jagged lightning bolt of rage shooting across his brain. Long ago, he’d acclimated himself to the fact that this was an imperfect world and that there was little to be done about it but to accept the bitter immutable facts. When he was seventeen, he’d learned that his father, whom he dearly loved, was having an affair with a local widow and had never told his mother. But at this moment, he felt his tie slowly constricting his throat.

“You got a theory why he would kill her?” he asked, reaching up to loosen it.

“Not yet, but it’s pretty goddamn obvious something’s up with him, after all that crazy shit with Mrs. Schulman and her husband. And then that John Henry number at the cemetery. I thought he was gonna hit water the way he was digging …”

“I kept telling him to leave it be,” Harold muttered, pulling on the fat end of his tie in rhythmic frustration. “I said it once, I said it a hundred and fifty fucking times.”

“You cut him a lot of slack.”

“He saved my life, Paco. Not just with that crazy old woman, but a hundred thousand other nights out on the street. You know what it’s like trying to get some little punk-ass motherfucker in the back of a squad car with fifty of his relatives and best friends surrounding you and yelling, ‘Get their guns’?”

“So what? I’m trying to save your job.”

Harold grimaced and touched his right side again, feeling the old knife wound starting to burn a little.

“I’m not seeing it,” he said.

“You’re not seeing what?”

“I’m not seeing him kill Sandi. I see a husband killing his wife because she’s stepping out on him. But the boyfriend as the doer?”

“I’ve seen it.” Paco shrugged. “He’s a control freak. Maybe she was trying to break it off with him.”

“It still don’t make sense to me.”

Harold pulled open his top desk drawer and looked for the Motrin. At least he didn’t have to take those nasty antibiotics that had him running to the bathroom every five minutes while the wound was still healing.

“How’s he get along with the ladies generally?” asked Paco, trying another angle.

“Fine … okay … not bad.” Harold heard the confidence in his voice ebbing as he cast his mind back. “Better than some, worse than others. What are you getting at?”

“I’m just saying, I worked Sex Crimes a couple of years in the Bronx. I know how the play goes. Has he got a history with this?”

“Listen, the man’s no saint.” Harold picked up the Motrin bottle and started wrestling with the lid. “I’m not defending the way he acted with Lynn Schulman. Or the fact that he was having an affair with Sandi. But I don’t see him cutting off anybody’s head and throwing the body in the river. You’re gonna have to connect those dots for me.”

“Some guys they start small and then they escalate.” Paco shrugged. “It’s like a drug, bro. You gotta go a little further, hit that shit a little harder every time so’s you can still feel it.” He smacked his fist into his palm for emphasis. “Maybe a couple of times he hit it a little too hard.”

“I still don’t see it.”

“Then maybe you’re too close to it. Lemme ask you something else, Chief: If he was screwing Sandi, but he didn’t kill her, why wouldn’t he just tell us that?”

“I don’t know.” Harold pulled the cap off the Motrin bottle and saw it held only cotton. “Chain of command. He was afraid I’d take him off the case and bust him down to patrol. Problems at home. He thought Marie would give him the heave-ho and take the kids away. Say what you will about the man, but he loves those children.”

“Then the best-case scenario is that he was impeding an investigation and tainting the evidence against whoever killed his girlfriend.”

“Maybe he thought he could keep control of the wheel and steer us around the problems.” Harold tossed the Motrin bottle across the desk in disgust. “Who knows what he was thinking? The man’s seen more fucked-upness in his life than veterans of two world wars. Maybe it started to get to him.”

Should a friend have tried to help out more? Harold was reluctant to absolve himself too easily. In his new job as chief, he’d told himself he couldn’t afford to get too close to any of the officers anymore, but at the same time he knew you couldn’t be so distant as to have no idea of what they were up to.

“So have you entered all of this evidence into the system?” he asked.

“What, are you kidding?” Paco let the ball roll off his lap. “So a defense lawyer can subpoena all of it as Rosario material if we end up arresting somebody else? We’d be fucked if they got their hands on all these notes. That’s why I wanted to talk it over with you first.”

Harold saw the orange Nerf ball appear under his desk and roll up to his feet.

“What do you want to do then?” He bent down to pick it up and felt a small tearing in his side.

“I want to take a run at him.”

“For real?”

“We’ve almost got enough for a warrant,” Paco said. “And he’s already gotta be sweating about the disciplinary hearing. I say we lay it all on him. Go at him hard. Straight on. Lying about the relationship. Stepping on the evidence. Not answering our questions. The e-mail account. Ask him to give us a DNA swab so we can compare the fluids on the body and then see if it was his baby she was carrying. Make him think he’d be lucky to catch a break from us.”

“Won’t work.” Harold shook his head.

“Why not?”

“It’s not enough. I know this man. Some of his wiring may not be up to code, but the lights still go on. He’ll see right through us. If we’re only going to get one shot at him, we have to make sure he doesn’t get up and walk away.”

“So how do
you
want to play it?” asked Paco.

“Keep digging. Get us a little more leverage. See if you can prove it’s Mike’s Internet account on the laptop. Recanvass for witnesses who might have seen the body dump. Give it a few more days.”

“All right.” Paco nodded.

“One thing I do worry about, though.” Harold cocked the ball back by his ear, feeling the burning like a lit cigar stuck in his side.

“What’s that?”

“If we can trust Mike to keep his hands to himself in the meantime.”

“I don’t know.” Paco got up. “You know him better than I do.”

38

“I SAW HIM
again today,” said Lynn.

At half past midnight, she was sitting up in bed, listening to branches scrape the window and watching the play of moonlight on her husband’s profile.

Barry’s eyelids fluttered. “Who?”

“Michael. He was in the aisle at Home Depot.”

Barry rolled onto his side, suddenly wide awake.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he said.

“I didn’t want to mention it in front of the kids.”

“Did he try to talk to you?”

“He was pretty upset, as you might imagine.”

“What exactly did he say?” She heard a hint of impatience in his voice, a former prosecutor’s demand for precision.

“He kept asking me, ‘Are you proud of yourself?’”

“Are
you
proud of
yourself?
” He flipped each word over as if carefully inspecting its underside. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Here it is, Lynn. Here’s your opening.

“I guess what he meant was, we’ve known each other a long time,” she began cautiously.

“Yes. And?”

Listen to me,
she thought.
Don’t just hear the words. Hear what I’m not saying.

“I was close to some of the other people in his family too.” She pushed it a little further. “Did I ever tell you about his brother?”