The Last Good Day (44 page)

“Okay.” She dropped the card into her sweater pocket as if it was of no great importance and then went back to referee the children.

He watched her go, a gentle knowing sway in her hips, sunlight spreading like quicksilver in her hair. From behind, she looked a little bit like Lynn. And in that instant, he saw why Michael Fallon had pulled her over in the first place.

48

“GOOD AFTERNOON, MRS. SCHULMAN.”
Gwen Florio faced the witness stand, a stiletto-thin figure in a dress-blue skirt and jacket with official-looking white piping along the lapels that seemed to strongly suggest some kind of police affiliation for the benefit of the judges hearing this case.

“Good afternoon.”

The disciplinary hearing had gotten off to a relatively uneventful start this morning. Lynn had been sworn in by Tony Shlanger, the six-foot-nine court officer who spent every Saturday morning outside abortion clinics in the city, screaming himself blue in the face and waving tiny plastic fetuses at frightened young pregnant women rushing by. Her right hand wavered slightly as she swore to tell nothing but the truth. The members of the Town Board stared down at her from the dais. But even the so-called friendly questioning by the prosecuting attorney, Jack Davis, a stumpy old codger with hair the color of a striped bass and a worsted plaid suit, had left her feeling exposed and shaky on the stand.

For almost an hour, Mike had sat at the defense table, less than fifteen feet away, glaring up at her and jotting down the occasional note to help arm his lawyer for this cross-examination. His anger emanated toward her in waves, defining her like the shadow on a sonogram. Even more disturbingly, his thumb appeared to have swelled up to twice its normal size and had turned a livid purplish shade that reminded her of an erection.

And just to ratchet up the general anxiety level, right after lunch the courtroom doors swung open and Jeanine, Molly Pratt, Anne Schaffer, and Dianne de Groot from her book group filed in, giving her A-OK signs and warm supportive smiles.

“You know my client, don’t you, Mrs. Schulman?”

“Just as I told Mr. Davis right before lunch.”

Lynn had dressed demurely for her appearance, in a blue blazer, a gray skirt, and a white shirt with a subdued Chanel scarf and simple pearls. Her hair was pulled back, starkly revealing the grip and release of sinews in her throat.

“How long have you known my client?” asked Gwen Florio, stepping from behind the lectern.

“I think I’ve testified that I’ve known him since high school.”

Barry sat two rows back on the right side of the spectator section, arms spread wide across the back of the pew, trying to look open and relaxed.

She felt as though she was seeing him across a busy avenue, cars and trucks speeding back and forth in between. In the middle of watching
Charlie Rose
in the living room the other night he’d suddenly announced,
I quit today.

She didn’t even wait to turn the sound down.
You what?

You heard me,
he’d said.
They wanted to do something like a Mafia bust-out. Pull the furniture out, burn the place down, and scam the insurance company. They wanted me to hold the matches. I couldn’t do it.

So you just quit?
she’d asked, trying to get over the shock.

He’d studied the separation of his scotch and water.
Why am I not hearing the kind of support I expected? All these people I work with are going to get screwed out of their savings.

But what about
us? she’d said.

Gwen Florio stood before her, smiling. “Can you tell us a little more about the nature of that early relationship? You seemed to gloss over that very quickly this morning.”

“We were close.” Lynn gave up trying to make eye contact with Barry and concentrated on speaking in a strong loud voice. “At the time.”

“
Close?
” Florio’s eyebrows lifted. “Is that how you characterize it?”

“Yes.”

Lynn noticed a woman in the first row staring at her with the kind of pinpoint attention that made her aware of every pore on her face, every little catch in her throat. A lady with a kind of severe composure, wearing earth tones and a short sensible haircut. This had to be Mike’s wife, she realized. She’d positioned herself to be dead center in Lynn’s field of vision when she stared straight ahead into the spectators’ gallery.

“When you say
close,
you are of course referring to a romantic relationship, aren’t you?”

“Of course. I mean, I was.” Lynn heard herself stumble, trying to sort through her tenses, and saw a slight droop in Barry’s lip. “I mean, I was referring to back then.”

Gwen Florio approached the stand, her heels clicking on the floor like a Geiger counter.

She was a woman who’d carried off middle-age with a certain seasoned smoky elegance. Her hair was a little wiry and her eyelids were weary, but she had legs like a Bob Fosse dancer and there was a hint of husky amusement in her voice, a throaty forthright quality that Lynn found both admirable and intimidating. She seemed like the kind of dame who would tell her lover straight-out when she didn’t consider a job done right.

“Now, during the course of this romantic relationship, Detective Lieutenant Fallon would do things not just for you but for your family from time to time.” Florio held her in the green-eyed tractor beam of her glare, slowly pulling her in. “Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Your mother was sick then. Wasn’t she?”

“She had MS.”

“Mrs. Schulman, can you speak up please?” Mayor Flynn cupped a hand behind his ear. “Some members of this board—and I’d rather not say who—are at the age that they need hearing devices.”

A gentlemanly chuckle rippled down the dais. The mayor was a chalky thin man in his midsixties, with a bow tie knotted neatly over a large Adam’s apple. Lynn’s mother used to call him the “most thwarted man I’ve ever met,” back in the seventies when he was a local accountant just starting to run for office. And Lynn had captured a rather harshly lit Robert Frank-style picture of him standing alone in the canned goods aisle of the A&P with his campaign literature, looking for someone to shake hands with.
The Candidate,
she’d titled it. She’d been planning to use the shot in her gallery retrospective, but now she hoped that he wouldn’t remember it from her high school exhibit and hold it against her.

“She had multiple sclerosis.” Lynn raised her voice, trying not to sound strained or strident.

“I see. And isn’t it true that Lieutenant Fallon helped take your mother to many of her doctors appointments?”

“I don’t know if you’d say it was
many,
but he certainly helped us out. I would never deny that.”

Lynn cast a quick look over toward Barry, hoping for guidance. But he was studying her with a sort of clinical detachment.

“So this was more than some puppy love,” the defense lawyer pressed on. “Your lives really became enmeshed at some point. Isn’t that right?”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far.”

“But isn’t it true that during the time you were involved with the lieutenant, you got to know all the members of his family intimately?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so?” Florio cast a foxy squint up at the dais, shaking her head in wry disappointment. “Isn’t it true that his mother cooked meals for you and your sister when your own mother couldn’t make it to the kitchen?”

“Yes, that happened on a few occasions.”

“And the lieutenant’s father helped your career as a photographer, as well,” said Gwen. “That’s true also, isn’t it?”

“He helped me get access to things I wanted to take pictures of. Yes, that’s right.”

The board members began muttering to one another, obviously remembering a few more of the unflattering pictures she’d taken of the town in the seventies. In the back of the courtroom, a familiar old man with a hawkish face and an unevenly mowed gray crew cut leaned forward on his cane.

“Isn’t it also true that you had a very close relationship with the lieutenant’s older brother, Johnny, who went on to become a police officer in New York City?” Gwen Florio asked.

Lynn froze for a second and stared down at Mike, not quite willing to believe that things were going to move in this direction. She’d been warned that the normal rules of evidence didn’t apply in this kind of hearing, that the defense lawyer could ask her literally anything. But surely there were
some
limits. She looked to Jack Davis at the prosecutor’s table, waiting for him to object. But he seemed lost in the fields of thought, reading documents with his legs crossed and his pale shins and old-fashioned black elastic sock garters exposed.

“I’ve already said they were all very good to me,” she said. “Though I’m not quite sure what that has to do with what we’re talking about
today.
”

She saw Barry give a slight encouraging nod, as if to say,
You go, girl.

“I’m coming to that. Shortly.” Gwen Florio smiled, the warning shot as a courtesy call. “Did there come a time when the lieutenant asked you to marry him?”

Lynn raised her eyes to a water-stained ceiling panel, ignoring the frantic whispering among her reading-group friends in the third row. “We were both about seventeen.”

“Mrs. Schulman, I’m standing right here, in front of you.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to object.” Jack Davis finally roused himself and got to his feet, pant cuffs dropping over his garters. “What does any of this have to do with the price of beans? I can’t see any relevance.”

“It’s relevant because it has to do with the credibility of this witness and the particular history she has with my client.”

Gwen Florio looked back at Mike, who was brooding at his swollen thumb, a blood red tie knotted thickly at his collar. Lynn shuddered a little, thinking about the conversation he must have had with his lawyer to prepare her for this line of questioning.

“I’m going to allow it,” said Mayor Flynn, with a cursory rap of the gavel. “We’re not in an actual trial here. Ms. Florio has a lot more latitude in what she can ask.”

Jack Davis gave a small shrug before he sat down, as if to say,
So I tried.
Lynn girded herself, adjusting her scarf, wishing she’d found the nerve to tell Barry exactly what was coming.

“Yes, he did ask me to marry him.”

“And did you consider the possibility?”

She focused on a burl in the wooden balustrade before her. “Only very briefly.”

“And can you tell us why you considered the possibility?”

“I thought I was in love with him.”

She looked down, the tightrope walker realizing she didn’t have a net. How does she do it, ladies and gentlemen?
Why
does she do it? What had possessed her to think this would be anything other than the most heinous and humiliating public disaster of her life?

Of course, it was all her fault. She’d let shame nudge her out onto a high wire one hundred feet above safety. Shame had kept her from telling Barry the whole truth about who she used to be. But shame had kept her from backing out and not testifying today. So now she was stuck between the two points, wobbling and swaying above the gaping crowd.

“Was there some other urgent reason that made you consider his proposal?” Gwen Florio pressed her.

“Yes. I was pregnant.”

The courtroom fell dead quiet. Barry’s drawn face seemed to come rushing up at her from the second row and then quickly recede.

“And did there come a time when you decided to terminate that pregnancy?”

“Yes.”

“And so you had an abortion.”

“Yes. I did.”

She looked over as the court officer, Tony Shlanger, cleared his throat. His ears had turned bright pink, revealing an embryonic-looking network of veins within the thick cartilage.

“And did you consult Lieutenant Fallon about that decision?”

“I did.” She was transfixed, watching the color of the court officer’s ears darken as she spoke. “He wanted me to keep it. He thought we could have it and live with his parents. But then I decided it was all a little too much for me.”

“So, what did you do?”

Lynn looked forlornly at Barry. She’d tried to tell him, hadn’t she? She’d said,
We talked
very seriously
about having kids.
But she couldn’t even justify that excuse to herself for more than a half-second. She was a coward and a prevaricator, and this was precisely the punishment she deserved.

“I asked my mother for the money,” she said. “And then I went into the city with my friend Sandi to get one at the Eastern Women’s Clinic downtown.”

Her stomach dropped, and for a split second she was seventeen and back on the subway platform at Times Square with Sandi. The crowd separating them before she saw the doors close and Sandi speeding off on the downtown train without her, fingers pressed against the scratchiettied glass, mouth open in a silent wail.

Then she was back in the courtroom, being gawked at, the tight-rope walker starting to lose her balance. Jeanine pointing and whispering behind her hands to the other book-club ladies, as if she alone could explain what was happening. Mike’s wife turning beet-red in her dark-green business suit. The mayor waving his hands, trying to get the other board members to stop whispering at him.

A kind of humidity filled the courtroom. The water stain seemed to spread across the ceiling. And gradually it dawned on Lynn that she’d altered the temperature just by mentioning Sandi’s name, reminding everyone of the case lurking just beneath this one.

Gwen Florio approached the stand again, holding the legal pad out in front of her as if it were a young swimmer’s Styrofoam kickboard.

“So you disposed of my client’s child without asking his prior consent?”

“Last I checked it was my body as well,” said Lynn defiantly.

“All right, all right.” The mayor gaveled them both into silence, broken blood vessels lighting up like small red wires in his nose. “We’re not going to reopen the Supreme Court
Roe v. Wade
case here. Ms. Florio, move on please.”