The Last Good Day (48 page)

He watched her light the candles one by one. As each small flame sparked and slowly flickered up to its full height, he felt hope sputter and then revive again. He’d gotten no response to the twelve messages in four different locations for Iris Lopez, the other woman who’d filed a complaint against Fallon and then suddenly withdrawn it. If he didn’t get this Muriel, he wasn’t getting anybody.

“You know, my wife really surprised me today.”

From the next room, he heard the other nannies groaning and gagging in unison, with one of them yelling, “
Ay dios mío!
I can’t believe he ate that fuckin’ rat!”

“I mean, at the time, I was furious with her because I thought she’d been lying to me all these years.” Barry raised the coffee cup again. “But then, when I was outside waiting for you to show up, it occurred to me: she really went all the way out on a limb. Because she had to know she was going to take the hit. But she did it anyway. She got up and let them take their shots. Because she knew it was the right thing to do. It was an act of faith.”

She took a step away from the counter and turned around, somehow still holding the candlelight in her eyes.

Keep going,
he told himself.
This is your last shot.

“You know what I mean? It was like she was sending up a flare. Saying,
Here I am. This is what happened to me. Is there anybody else out there?
It was like lighting a candle to draw people out of the dark.”

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, studying the blue tips of the flames.

“So, what is it that you want me to do?” she said.

“I want you to go to the chief and the prosecuting attorney and give them a statement about what really happened between you and the lieutenant. And I want you to explain why you withdrew your original complaint. Because you know there’s probably other women out there in the dark.”

She looked back at the candles beside the sink, watching the flames waver and sway in the evening breeze through the half-open window. He almost missed it when she gave a tiny little nod.

“You want a fresh cup of coffee?” she asked.

52

AS HE GOT BACK
from dropping all three kids off at school the next morning, Mike saw Harold’s dark-blue LeSabre parked in his driveway. There was an instant pungency in the air, a bad smell about to reveal its source. He’d been in a foul mood to begin with. All this sitting around was starting to get to him. His body turning to mush: his face looking like a shucked oyster, his upper-body muscle dribbling down to his love handles. His thumb throbbing and changing colors with the season, the nail peeled back just enough to cause him constant discomfort without falling off.

He parked curbside, got out, and slammed the door behind him, taking an angry hunk out of the morning.

A pile of black pit-bull nuggets sat on the path to the front door. So this was how the neighbors welcomed him? Fine. He’d reckon with them too when the time came.

He stopped to pick up the mail on the porch and noticed he had a letter from his first wife, Doris, along with all the bills, probably complaining that he’d fallen behind on alimony again. Somehow she could sniff his wounds from three thousand miles away.
Women.

He came up the steps and noticed that the door was already open. He went in and felt a pigeon fluttering inside his rib cage. The laundry had been put away. The refrigerator rattled, threatening to become the next appliance to turn on him. From the living room, he heard the hamster running on its treadmill, claws tumbling the steel bars over and over.

He came toward the kitchen and heard water dripping in the sink, reminding him about his latest failure with the plumber’s wrench. When he turned it off, he saw Marie’s teacup on the counter, with a bright scarlet lipstick stain still on the rim, as if she’d put it down in haste. The caulk gun was lying beside it. More evidence of her taking on the little projects he couldn’t complete because of his bad thumb.

“Honey, what’s going on?” he called out.

The door to the basement was wide open, deepening his sense of profound apprehension. The tensile roll of the hamster’s treadmill faded, and his heart began to thump. He heard men talking calmly just above the grunt and rumble of his boiler. “You couldn’t have got rid of it that easy,” one was saying.

He came to the top of the stairs, and the smell of gas filled his nostrils.

“Hey, Harold!” he called out. “Is that you?”

“Anything?” Paco watched the chief broom Luminal powder across the surface of the table saw, checking it for bloodstains with the infrared light.

“Not that I can see.” Harold, wearing special tinted glasses, scanned each shark-fin blade carefully. “No blood at all. You think he would’ve cut himself using it. People lose fingers all the time.”

The two of them had been searching the basement for almost twenty minutes, armed with a warrant signed by Judge Harper and a statement from Muriel Navarro saying that Mike had blackmailed her into withdrawing her original complaint a couple of years ago. When the call came from Jack Davis just before midnight, saying that Barry Schulman had tracked the girl down, Harold was furious, smelling a setup. But after actually
hearing
the evidence for himself, he’d done a complete one-eighty. So here he was, searching his former best friend’s basement. He tried to let his funeral director instincts take over. He was a servant of this community, he told himself. There were dire matters that needed to be attended to. No one ever said this was work for the faint of heart.

“Maybe he knew we were coming eventually and washed it down,” said Paco.

“Nah, man. Look at this place. It’s been years.”

The basement was a mess. The rest of the house showed Marie’s fastidiousness and attention to detail, but here, she’d given up trying. This was Mike’s domain. An unfinished workshop with a dirt floor, an ancient octopus boiler covered in friable asbestos, and rusty ceiling pipes left half-insulated. It smelled of oil, sawdust, and airplane glue. On the work table, there was a cheap ProGen computer surrounded by bolts, hinges, and pieces of old radios taken apart but never put back together. Time got lost here. It rolled into corners and seeped into tiny spaces in the brick wall. It got covered in grime and soot and stacks of bundled old newspapers and sports equipment. It got buried under greasy bicycle wheels, bags of blacktop patch, paint-can lids, dismantled gearshifts, tangled fishing reels, and shoe boxes filled with Monopoly pieces, seashell soaps, spent shell casings, football trophies, Boy Scout merit badges, and, mysteriously, dozens of blue Corgi police cars and Tonka train engines.

“Here’s what I’m thinking.” Paco unplugged the computer and started to wrap up its power cord. “She’s already dead when he brings her down here.”

“Sandi?” Harold pushed the glasses up on top of his head.

“Yeah. Let’s just say manual strangulation, for the hell of it. She wants to break it off. He doesn’t. Whatever. We
know
they were fucking. They argue. They fight. Maybe they’re just having too much fun.
Oops.
He chokes her. She turns blue.” Paco let his head loll and his tongue hang out. “He’s like, ‘Oh shit, now what am I gonna do?’”

“Leave her in the motel parking lot where her car was.” Harold carefully removed the circular saw from its groove, holding it daintily by its edge in his rubber-gloved fingertips. “Make it somebody else’s problem in another jurisdiction.”

“Maybe he thought someone saw him in the motel parking lot and figured they could ID him later. Maybe he just wigged.”

“Come on, Paco. He’s a cop.”

“I know he’s a cop, but he’s human. We’re all human. Right?”

Tiny specks from the ceiling drizzled down on Harold’s head as he looked for a bag to put the saw blade in.

He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have begged off doing this search. Just before he’d left the house this morning, he’d finally broken down and called the state police to ask for help. They’d said they might be able to spare a senior investigator in about an hour and a half to help out. Perhaps he should’ve just waited outside for the guy to get here. But with Mike due back at any minute, he figured that they had to start to secure the evidence as soon as they could.

“I’m thinking he does her in the car and then maybe throws her in the trunk and drives her back here ’cause he doesn’t know what the fuck else to do.” Paco put the computer in a cardboard evidence box.

“Okay. I’m with you so far.”

“He remembers that dump job from last spring, where they found the dealer’s girlfriend floating in the river with her hands cut off so they couldn’t ID her. So, what does he do? He decides to make it look like one of those by mutilating the body and throwing it in the water.”

Harold looked up, not sure if he’d just heard a footstep.

“You don’t like it,” said Paco.

“He’s got four people sleeping upstairs and a set of squeaky wood steps leading down to the basement.” Harold lowered his voice. “The body’s over a hundred pounds. He’s going
thump, thump, thump,
carrying it down the stairs. And nobody wakes up?”

“We don’t know if nobody wakes up. We haven’t interrogated the rest of the family.”

“It’s got holes in it. That’s all I want to say.”

“Everything has holes.”

“Not that many.” Harold went to look at the slop sink in the corner. “Drainage would be a real issue down here. You ever see how much blood there is when a head gets severed? I’ll show you the system we have at the funeral parlor one of these days.”

Paco shrugged. “So he took his time and did it right.”

“And then there’s the river.” Harold knelt down to study the underside of the sink with a flashlight.

“What about it?”

“Why would he dump the body in the river so close to town if he didn’t want any of us to find it right away?”

“Whaddaya mean?” Paco rubbed the back of his ear. “He thought the tide would take it down toward the city.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Harold took off his glove and touched the pipe to see if it was dry. “Have you ever looked at the way the current moves?”

“Chief, I’m from the South Bronx. All right?”

“It’s an estuary,” Harold explained. “It’s constantly changing direction. If you dropped a stick off a bridge, it would go back and forth at least seven times before it made up its mind where to go.”

“How am I supposed to know that? I’m not from around here.”

“
Exactly.
Because if you were from around here, you wouldn’t just roll a body into the water at low tide and expect to never see it again. You would know it would come back at you eventually.”

The sides of Paco’s head seemed to bulge and contract as he processed the idea. “You’re telling me it has to be somebody from outside here who did it?”

“I’m not saying it has to be.” Harold stood up. “I’m just saying that if you’re from here, you’d know you couldn’t get rid of it that easy.”

They both heard the squeal and groaning press of a floorboard above them at the same moment. And then Mike calling down the stairs, “Hey, Harold! Is that you?”

Heart pinned up between his lungs like a piñata, Mike started down the steps and saw Paco standing by an open cardboard box with his computer inside.

“The fuck you think you’re doing?” he said.

Men were in
his house.
Going into
his basement.
Touching
his things.

“We got a warrant, Mike.” Harold stepped into the light of a bare bulb, wearing one white latex glove, a liberal sprinkling of gray dust in his hair. “Marie saw it before she let us in.”

“Marie let you in?”

“She said she had to get to work. And you’d be home soon.”

“Let me see that warrant.”

He trudged down the stairs, the treads creaking and threatening to snap under his weight. She’d let them in.
She had to get to work.
That’s what he meant to her. On the last step, Harold handed him a warrant, still warm from his back pocket.

The words were a jumble before his eyes. He saw the name
Muriel Navarro
and the date
1998.
Slowly his eyes scanned the rest of the page, trying to make sense of it, stopping on the phrase
harassment and intimidation.

“What IS this?”

“That baby-sitter you pulled over,” said Harold. “She’s decided to press charges again.”

The warrant started to slip between his fingers. “Why?”

“Schulman FOIA’d her complaint and turned her up. She’s saying you threatened her and made her drop the original charges. Said you were going to report her to the INS and send her back to El Salvador if she gave you trouble.”

“Oh, fuck this and fuck you too. Fuck you twice.” But his original rush of fury was already slowing to a cold trickle. “She’s a greedy little bitch looking to get in on a civil suit with that shyster. And you know what? I don’t blame her. I blame you. Thirty-two years and you don’t have the balls to give me a heads up.”

“She says you left messages on her answering machine.”

“So what?”

“She kept one of the tapes.”

Mike felt carbon soot fill up his lungs, slowly blackening his in-sides. “You’ve heard it?”

“She gave the tape to Schulman last night, and he gave it to Jack Davis, who played it for me. It ain’t Dolby stereo, but a jury would get the idea. It’s clearly your voice saying, ‘You make trouble in my life, I’ll make trouble in yours.’”

“I think I gotta call my lawyer.” Mike sat down on the bottom step.

A distant rumble began in the back of his mind, like water rushing through a long dark tunnel.

“That’s okay,” said Harold. “But in the meantime, you need to understand that I’m going to have to turn over a copy to the DA’s office so they can file charges …”

“Jesus Christ.”

The cave-in. This was what a cave-in must feel like.

“Mike.” Harold put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You know, it’s not going to end there.”

Mike looked up and saw that Paco had opened one of his old shoe boxes and found his collection of squad cars and train engines.