The Last Good Day (42 page)
“That’s why they used to pay me the big money.” Barry smiled modestly.
“Is this Dan in Security?” Ross nodded as he spoke into the phone. “Please lock down Mr. Schulman’s desk and escort him from the building. Make sure he doesn’t take any papers or discs from his computer. And call my office if he tries to get back in.”
ONE WORST-CASE SCENARIO
after another fomenting in her mind, Lynn caught the 3:28 off a dead run through Grand Central and still didn’t feel she’d completely caught her breath even when the train pulled into Riverside Station thirty-four minutes later.
She bolted for the car and drove maniacally to the Holly Farms Family Martial Arts Center between the Radio Shack and the Dress Barn on Evergreen, not even allowing herself a moment’s satisfaction over François’s praise for her more recent photos.
The dojo was full of anxious mothers by the time she arrived and doffed her shoes at the door. The women sat cross-legged around the canvas mat, trying to ignore gray hairs and extra pounds in the pitiless floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The children, in their starchy white outfits, warmed up on the far side of the room, kicking and punching at the air, pretending their mothers weren’t present.
“Hey, babycakes, you’re right on time.” Jeanine jumped up to give her a hug.
Her white Liz Claiborne sweater reeked of pot and pencil shavings.
That’s one way of dealing with all the stress,
Lynn thought. She’d noticed a kind of continental drift among her friends these last few days. After the initial burst of emergency meetings and neighborhood patrols, some of their gang had begun to withdraw, hunkering down in their homes and peering out from the drapes as if they were avoiding a contagion. No one had even called to set up the next Tuesday-night book group.
“How’s everything going here?” Lynn settled onto the spot that Jeanine had made for her on the floor, glad and relieved to be among other mothers again.
“You’re not going to believe the kid Clay’s decided to fight.”
“Why not?”
Jeanine pointed to a boy across the room. A close-shorn young wolf with long legs and pointy elbows. His brow was a bony ridge over pale-blue eyes. Was it just her imagination that he looked a little like Mike? A white foot lashed out and shattered a half-inch-thick plywood board held by another boy.
“Oh, shit.” Her mouth dried as she watched the boy who’d been holding the split board brush splinters from his lapel.
She waved to the sensei, Rick Webber, doughy, ponytailed, and slack-faced yet utterly convinced that every single Karate Mom in town was madly in love with him.
“Rick,” she said as he came trotting over in red-white-and-blue Gore-Tex, “is Clay going to be all right with that kid?”
“Whaddaya mean?” He glanced over dully. “They’re both orange belts. Clay’s up for it.”
“But he’s not in shape. He’s lost all this weight lately from not eating. He can’t even kick his sister’s butt.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that.” Jeanine tapped Lynn’s leg. “You’ll undermine his confidence.”
What confidence? She watched Clay staring down at the canvas as he adjusted his headgear, her fragile little boy trying to play Stone Cold Steve Austin in front of all his friends.
“So how are
you
doing?” Jeanine asked meaningfully as Rick went back to center-mat to help the boys get ready.
“Okay … a little shaky … pretty nervous if you want to know the truth.”
“Oh, I know.” Jeanine sighed. “It’s such a shame.”
There it was again. That sound Lynn noticed when she’d first talked to Jeanine about filing disciplinary charges against Mike a few days ago. A certain polite cautious reserve.
“You haven’t heard from Mike lately, have you?” Lynn asked.
“No. Just to wave at him picking the kids up the other day.” Jeanine pulled her hair back. “I think he’s having a tough time too.”
“Do you?”
The wolf boy had put on his pads and his red Everlast headgear, making him look pinched and engorged. By contrast, Clay appeared exposed and lopsided in his protective wear, and Lynn had to fight the urge to go over and embarrass him by fixing it.
“It’s too bad you guys weren’t able to work things out before it got this far.” Jeanine suddenly leaned over, not able to keep her own counsel.
“Jeanine, believe me, we did everything we could to avoid it. The last thing we wanted was a public hearing.”
“All right, ladies”—Rick had gone out to the center of the mat to address the mothers in the round—“we’ve been over the rules before, but one more time …”
“Look how cute Zak and Brawley look,” Jeanine whispered as her twins stood in the corner and tried to punch each other in the nuts.
“This class is about learning to have control and discipline,” Rick explained in a booming voice, as if he was talking to a roomful of marine recruits. “But this is sparring, so there will be some
moderate contact.
Three-point match. Whoever fails to block three times loses. Everybody okay about that?”
“Yesss,” a dozen reluctant women replied.
“Well, then I don’t know why the whole thing couldn’t have been put off awhile,” said Jeanine.
The two boys bowed stiffly at each other in the middle of the mat, a formal little ritual that somehow seemed to mock the grownup world of good manners and superficial niceties around them.
“You think I’m looking forward to this?” Lynn whispered.
“
Hajime!
” Rick stepped between the boys as they shifted down into stylized fighting stances.
In an instant, all the mothers in the room disappeared, their presence negated by a kind of fiercely concentrated energy in the middle of the mat.
“Every morning I wake up with this weight on my chest,” Lynn murmured, still feeling the need to explain.
“Honey, you don’t need to tell me.”
The other kid struck first, a pistonlike punch straight from the shoulder. Lynn heard herself give a gasp as Clay turned sideways and danced away with an agility she’d never noticed before.
“See that?” Jeanine clapped her hands and touched Lynn’s arm.
Lynn hunched forward, seeing something of Barry in how the boy moved. A way of tucking his chin in and keeping his shoulders squared. The low center of gravity, the side-to-side movement of the eyes searching for opportunity. She’d had mixed feelings since she’d signed him up for karate last year. On the one hand, it got him out of the house and moving. A body at rest with a Sega Dreamcast tended to stay at rest. On the other, it was a step farther into that realm where mothers and sisters had no coin.
“I was just saying it’s too bad it all had to come out
now.
” Jeanine turned to her, keeping her voice low.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we’re all looking for the police to
protect
us. You hate to see one of them on the spot.”
Clay suddenly lunged, a quick rabbit punch that the other boy caught in the crook of his elbow.
“It sounds like you’re blaming me,” Lynn muttered.
She realized several of the other mothers were staring at her as well, perhaps starting to make some judgments of their own.
“
Yame!
” Rick the sensei stepped between the boys, separating them briefly.
“I’m not blaming
anyone,
” Jeanine said.
But in that last word, Lynn heard sympathy being put on an even higher shelf, just out of reach.
What did Jeanine think had happened? That she’d tried to seduce Mike? That Barry was just a jealous husband? Did she seriously believe that this was some plan the two of them had cooked up to deprive the town of one of its guardians?
“Look, Lynn, the main thing is you know I’m on your side,” she said. But somehow these words just made Lynn hunch down farther.
“
Hajime!
”
She was distracted by the boys going at it again. The wolf boy striking out and drawing back as if there were coiled springs inside him. Lynn tried to catch Clay’s eye, to let him know there would be no shame in quitting. But Clay adjusted his hand chops and shook his head furiously, wanting to continue.
“I wish I could just get in there and make them stop,” Lynn said, protective instinct scratching at the walls of her chest.
“If you did, he’d never forgive you.” Jeanine put a hand over Lynn’s wrist. “Don’t embarrass him in front of his friends.”
A white foot landed just below Clay’s rib cage, and all the other mothers gave a sympathetic
oooooffffff.
But instead of doubling over, Clay danced away and raised his hands, showing everyone he was okay.
My brave man.
Lynn felt her heart start to rise. In some way, seeing her youngest child refuse to back down gave her courage. Yes, I can do this too. I’m going to hold my head up.
“We’ll all be there for you,” said Jeanine.
“I know.”
In slow motion, Lynn saw a closed fist come straight from the wolf boy’s shoulder and find its way through the opening in Clay’s headgear. She felt the impact of fist and face as if she’d taken the blow herself.
A slaughterhouse squeal went up from the boys in the class, whose voices hadn’t changed yet. Clay’s hands flew up to his face, and his body wilted. A thick red clot of blood hit the beige mat.
Lynn ran over to her son and saw that the nose wasn’t quite broken, but two streams of blood were guttering down onto his lip. She threw her arms around him and glared over his shoulder at the sensei.
“Why didn’t you stop it?” she said. “Couldn’t you see someone was going to get hurt?”
“I thought he was doing all right.” Rick shrugged.
“HEY, LARRY, YOU GOT
those time sheets I was looking for?”
Just before six that night, Paco stuck his head in to see Sergeant Larry Quinn, the records officer.
“You’re not gonna leave me alone about that, are you?” Larry sat behind his desk with his pant leg rolled up to his knee, examining a nasty red scrape on his shin.
“What happened?”
“Fell off my goddamn bike. Can you believe they’ve got a fifty-seven-year-old man riding around town like a twelve-year-old?”
“I thought you’d like getting out of the patrol car and riding a beat. Seems like something they would’ve done back in the day.”
“If we’re going to turn the clock back, give me a horse. Give me a fine Arabian steed. I’ll ride it through the hallways of the housing projects. That’ll get rid of your loitering problem.”
Larry was Old School, so Old School that he had a handlebar mustache and combed smelly pomade into his steel-gray hair like a cop from the turn of
the previous
century. So Old School that he still hadn’t quite succeeded in getting the department’s time-card system computerized like he was supposed to by last summer, making it necessary for every officer to sign in and out by hand.
He was the department’s history buff, and he’d turned his corner office into a kind of minimuseum of Riverside. His walls had pictures of the town’s first police department from the 1890s, with its six bewhiskered officers in matching long coats and soft felt bobby hats. An authentic 1902 mahogany nightstick lay across his desk, and a plastic replica of the department’s first mascot, Horatio, a Jack Russell terrier with a black ring around his eye, sat atop the row of black file cabinets.
“What were you looking for anyway?” Larry said, wincing as he tried to stand up. “‘I Forgot to Remember to Forget.’ You know that old song?”
“All of June. All of July. All of August. All of September.”
“‘Try to remember the kind of September …’” Larry limped over to the file cabinets, switching songs and singing in a broad operatic baritone.
Paco watched him, holding a tolerant smile for as long as he could.
“You trying to find out when the loo punched in those days?” Larry cast a wry knowing look over his shoulder.
“Just putting in the roadwork. Crossing my t’s and dotting my i’s.”
“You know, some of the other guys, they wonder why the chief put you in charge of this investigation.” Larry slid the top drawer all the way open until it banged loudly.
“Do they?”
The muscles in Paco’s cheeks began to tire from the effort of grinning at all these
blanquitos.
“A lot of us go back a ways with Mike. Some of the young patrol guys he taught everything they know, so they still feel pretty loyal to him.”
“Maybe that’s why the chief doesn’t want them working the case.”
Fingering his way through the files, Larry nodded sagely, as if he saw the wisdom here. “Not that I have much of a dog in this fight myself, but they just want to make sure the loo gets a fair shake here.”
“A fair shake is what he’s getting.”
Paco looked at one of the other old prints on the wall, trying to contain his restlessness. Bunch of gaunt white nineteenth-century motherfuckers in shirtsleeves, ’staches, and suspenders, their faces smeared with grime and muck, boots the size of marlins up to their knees, canvas tents, and the river gray and molten behind them.
“So who’re the
chico viejos
here?” he asked.
“Them?” Larry glanced over, pleased that he’d noticed. “That’s my great-great-grandfather in the middle of his crew. He was a sandhog.”
“Say what?”
“You know, a tunnel digger. A river rat. Some of the loo’s relatives did the same. Shanty Irish just off the boat.”
Paco studied the picture for another minute, picking out Larry’s ancestor with no trouble. The same receding chin and beady mole eyes, the hard-man stance with legs and arms folded, even the same little country-dude spit curl falling on the brow.
“They look like Pancho Villa’s gang.”
“I know.” Larry chuckled. “Bunch of hungry bastards, aren’t they? They built this town. They really did. They built the aqueducts so all the toffs on Park Avenue could have drinking water and then they laid the railroad tracks so the toffs’ grandchildren could move out to the ’burbs and get away from the grubby masses and still commute to their jobs at Morgan Stanley.”
“Is the lieutenant’s great-great-grandfather one of these guys?” Paco adjusted the frame.