The Last Good Day (43 page)

“Might be him on the far right.” Larry shrugged. “He was supposed to be the hardest of the hard.”

A big-shouldered guy with deep shadows under his eyes and a neck like a redwood.

“They say one of the local farmers got pissed because sparks from the trains passing through set his cow pasture on fire. Story is, he started pulling spikes out of the tracks so the next train going by went sailing off the rails, killed about twelve people. So supposedly Old Man Fallon went by with a repair crew. And I guess they had a bit of a row. Because the next day the local constable found that farmer facedown on his own pitchfork. Must have had a farm accident.”

“Country life can kill you, man.” Paco grimaced.

“Well, he was apparently a good man to have on your side, Robbie Fallon. They say he dug most of the first quarter-mile of tunnel three by himself because the rest of the crew was too shagged from working six days a week. And what’d he have to show for it in the end? Pile of mud.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he died in a cave-in. They couldn’t even get the body out. He’s part of the foundation. We’re probably standing on him.”

Without thinking, Paco found himself looking down at the linoleum floor. “Damn.”

“Exactly. You know, sometimes I think there’s a curse on families that gets passed down.”

“You getting anywhere with those time sheets?”

Larry seemed to walk his fingers through the files more slowly. “I’m getting there,” he said. “Yep. And you know about his brother, right?”

“He died?”

“Makes you sick just thinking about it.” He nodded. “His wife and kid don’t even get a full pension because he was out of his jurisdiction. He was a city cop, come up on a Saturday night to have dinner with his parents. On the way home, he sees this mope having a fight in the car with his girlfriend on River Road. Rolls down his window, says, ‘Hey, easy there, chico. That’s a lady’ Guy pulls out a .357.
Mind your own fucking business.
Bang! Good-bye, Johnny. And they wonder why Mike was so aggressive about making us all do traffic stops after that.”

Paco watched the sergeant kneel down and lean farther into the file, as if he was about to go headfirst into it.

“I just need those summer months,” he said.

“I know what you’re looking for.” Larry pulled a bulging folder out. “Here’s August and the first two weeks of September. Mike was out part of that second week because he took sick days to help out at Ground Zero.”

He dropped the file on the floor with an angry splat and shoved the drawer shut.

“You wonder what the point of it all is sometimes.” He yanked open a higher drawer. “You give your life to a place, and then your children give their lives and then their children give theirs. And what do you end up with? Shitty little two-story down in the Hollow while the toffs keep climbing over you and on up the hill. Sometimes I wonder why I bother studying history when all it does is keep repeating itself.”

Paco scooped up the folder. “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to …”

“Yeah, yeah, right. Look, don’t necessarily think you’re getting any higher yourself. Back in the twenties, the Reverend Philips’s great-grandfather and some of Chief Baltimore’s relatives raised a half-million to buy a couple of hundred acres near Indian Ridge to set up their own little suburban community. Last minute, bunch of white bankers from up the hill swooped in and bought it for three hundred thou and kept the lots empty for thirty years. I can show you the headline from the
News
in my archives. It says, ‘NEGROES FOILED!’”

Paco tucked in his chin, feeling mildly insulted. He’d never thought of himself as dark-skinned in the first place. His family were aristocrats from Cuba. It was just a quirk of history that they’d lost the plantation in Havana after
La Revolución
and had to go to San Juan for a few years. He’d never bought into this
tocarle a uno la suerte,
crushed-under-the-wagon-wheel-of-destiny sorry-ass bullshit.
Sucede lo que sucede.
A man took the future in his own hands and shaped it every day because otherwise, what made him a man?

“I got June and July.” Larry plucked out another file and slammed the drawer shut. “So you’re really looking to nail him, huh?”

“I’m not looking to nail anybody. I got a dead body and two taxpayers filing harassment complaints. The chief’s got the Town Board and the state police breathing down his neck. You do the math.”

Larry hobbled over to hand him the second file. “You know, some of the guys are saying that in the old days, it didn’t matter if you were black, white, or brown. You gave a man the benefit. The only color that counted was blue.”

“Can’t turn the clock back, Sarge.”

“Hey, Paco, this isn’t me talking. I’m just telling you what I’m hearing from the rank and file.”

“Yeah?” Paco flipped the folder open. “Well, here’s what I’d like you to tell them: You don’t love me?
Fine.
I don’t love you either. But I am still the primary that your commanding officer put in charge of this investigation. And if you got a problem dealing with that, go get a security guard job at a museum. Because this is how it’s going to be. And by the way, Larry, the Spanish made it to America a long time before the Irish did. But being a guy who studies history, you probably knew that already, didn’t you?”

Larry’s mustache drooped. “You don’t have to chew my head off, Detective.”

“I’m sure I don’t.”

Paco quickly paged through the file and saw the pattern almost immediately. Fallon had signed out early and often on his day tours the last two months, up to and including the night Sandi Lanier disappeared.

“So how’s the case looking anyway?” asked Larry, trying to read his expression.

“Great.” Paco snapped the file shut and put it under his arm. “Thanks for asking.”

47

THREE PAIRS OF
grubby hands grabbed for the same bright-yellow dump truck, and a cry went up like an air-raid warning siren.

Barry saw the baby-sitter spring into action, rising from the park bench, stepping into the sandbox, and getting between the children to play mediator without missing a beat of conversation among her friends still sitting over by the strollers.

She was lovely, he thought, watching her from the playground entrance. One of those ageless Latin women with smooth copper skin, a tiny waist, and a heart-stopping smile. Somehow she managed to crouch among the toddlers without dirtying the knees of her white Levi’s, stroking unruly heads, distributing her smile evenly, while deftly extracting the contested toy from the area of play without any of the children noticing.

By the time she stood up, they’d all turned their attention to a labor-intensive joint project, attacking a giant hole with pails and shovels. A lawyer who could resolve conflicts on Wall Street that quickly and painlessly would be making five hundred an hour easy.

He fixed his collar and came moseying over, intercepting her three steps short of her friends, the group of older nannies who gathered for early lunch just about every day at this time at the Eisenhower Park playground in Indian Ridge, a half-mile down the hill from his house.

“Muriel?” he said, raising his eyebrows, as if they were old friends just running into each other. “Muriel Navarro?”

“What is it?” Hearing her own name from a stranger’s lips dimmed the wattage in her smile instantly.

“My name’s Barry Schulman. I’m an attorney. I was wondering if I could take a few minutes of your time.”

Her eyes danced from the children in the sandbox to her friends on the benches, who were cautiously watching this scene unfold while still opening Tupperware containers of fresh fruit and talking loudly to one another in machine-gun Spanish.

“You from Immigration?” asked Muriel.

She had the deep husky voice of a much older, heavier woman. A smoker’s voice.
Tremont Avenue in the Bronx,
he mentally placed her. He’d taken dozens of statements from women who sounded just like her when he was a DA. Except that so many of them looked worn out beyond their years, with baggy eyes, junk-food figures, and phlegmy asthma coughs from crappy housing-project ventilation systems. Somehow this girl had made it out into the sun.

“No, I’m not from Immigration,” he said. “I’m a private citizen.”

“Then what do you want? How’d you find me?”

“You used to work for Kim Roseborough, whose daughter Allison went to the same school as our son, Clay. I got Kim’s number out of the school directory, and she gave me the number for the lady you’re working for now. She told me I might find you here.”

If he’d hoped to allay her suspicions by throwing around familiar names and casually outlining the route he’d taken, he saw now he was sadly mistaken. She was looking at him as if
he,
not Fallon, was her stalker.

“You don’t have to worry. I didn’t get you in trouble with the boss,” he said. “I told Mrs. Lockhart we were thinking of hiring somebody to help out with some baby-sitting on the weekends. She told me you were busy with your classes at Hostos Community College, but that we could talk to you …”

She shook her head, not buying it. “What do you want?”

He turned, subtly using his size to encourage her to walk alongside him. “I know you filed a complaint against Sergeant Michael Fallon a few years back.”

“Oh, no.”

She took two steps and then stopped, gold hoop earrings swinging and winking in the daylight.

“Look, you’re probably not eager to get into all this again. But my wife and I were also harassed by him. And we’ve filed charges too.”

“That was a long time ago,” she said.

“I understand. But we’ve got a little disciplinary hearing coming up the day after tomorrow, and so I’m just trying to rally a few more support witnesses in the meantime.”

“How’d you get my name in the first place?” Her eyes narrowed again, seeing through that breezy
so
and
just,
right down to the shifting unstable core of their case.

“You filed your complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board. I looked it up in the old records.”

“
Qué batingue!
” She looked back in frustration at the sandbox, where a towheaded girl was mashing a Korean boy’s face into the dirt. “Chiara, leave your brother alone!”

He suddenly became aware of just how unwelcome his presence was here. A white man at a playground in the middle of a working day. Even his size marked him. He had to squat to sit on a low jungle-gym bar so he wouldn’t keep towering over her.

“So, what happened?” he said, trying to sound solicitous. “He pulled you over when you were driving your boss’s car?”

“I can’t talk about this.”

“I understand. You’re nervous. You don’t know me. The man’s a police officer …”

Slow down,
he told himself. You’re violating your own rules of the road. The moment a witness knows how badly you need him is the moment he pulls away.

“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “I’m this close to getting full citizenship. I don’t even know the family back in San Salvador anymore. I haven’t lived there since I was nine.”

“I seriously doubt Immigration is going to come after you just because you testify in a local cop’s disciplinary hearing.”

“Yeah, thanks a lot. I’ll wave to you from the back of the boat.”

He watched the children rocket down a long wiggly aluminum slide and wondered what else he could do to gain her trust. As always, time was the enemy.

“So why’d you withdraw the complaint after three days?” he asked. “Did somebody say something to you?”

“You know, my life is good now.” She brushed a fringe of dark hair, almost the same shade as Lynn’s, out of her eyes. “The kids are nice. The lady I work for lets me borrow the Honda twice a week to drive down for my classes in the city so I can get my RN license. Why you wanna mess me up?”

“I’ll take that as a yes then. So did he threaten you?”

The texture of her skin seemed to go from butter cream to distressed leather right before his eyes.

He realized he’d come on far too strong. “Look, I didn’t mean to pressure you. All we’d need is a brief statement.”

She looked back toward the sandbox, where two of the little girls were beginning to bury the Korean boy up to his neck, sunbursts of fine lines appearing around both of her eyes.

“I’m sorry.” She turned. “I have to get back to work.”

“What about all the other women?” he called after her. “You know if he did it to you and he did it to us, he’s probably done it to other people.”

Her shoulders seized up under her bright-yellow sweater. It was like watching his own shot at the buzzer arc high and hopeful in the air, begin its descent on target, and then somehow bounce uselessly off the back rim. He’d let it go too soon. His timing was gone. He’d lost the soft touch.

“You trying to make me feel
guilty?
” she said.

“Well …”

She glanced back, taking in his Italian loafers, his Brooks Brothers khakis, and the cut of his blue Custom Shop shirt. All this studied hey-I’m-just-another-dad-at-the-playground casualness that suddenly felt like an ill-fitting costume.

“You know what the police used to do in San Salvador?” she said. “I have an uncle who doesn’t have ears anymore because he left them in the interrogation room. There’s just a hole on either side of his head.”

“That usually doesn’t happen in your average East Coast suburban town.”

She needed only the mild lowering of her eyelids to remind him that a woman’s decapitated body had washed ashore less than a mile down the hill from here.

“Well, it doesn’t happen very often …”

“I think you should go,” she said firmly, her eyes roaming past his shoulder and finding the black Saab, newly washed, parked alone across the street. “The police patrol here all the time now.”

Nothing in her expression gave him any indication whether she was warning him to be more discreet or telling him that she was about to call the cops herself.

“Forgive me for bothering you.” He dug a business card out of his wallet, scribbled his home number on the back, and slipped it to her in a handshake. “But call me if you change your mind.”