The Last Good Day (8 page)

Maybe it was good to get away from the station for a few minutes, clear his head. Sometimes, you could see things more plainly on a field than you could sitting behind a desk. All the little holes in the chaos, all the little patterns and openings in three dimensions that might never occur to you otherwise.
She was from around here.
Even the New Guy could tell.

Come on. Get
your
head in the game. Harold asked him to show up and try to maintain appearances. So here I am. See? Everything’s under control. He looked around, wondering how long it would be until the other moms on the sidelines realized that Carl wasn’t the only one of their friends missing now.

Meanwhile, Danny Fitzsimmons glanced back at him, making sure he was doing the right thing, and then disappeared into the scrum of boys surrounding the ball.

“Stay on it, Danny!” he shouted, wondering how the hell he was going to make a graceful exit. “Go for the ball!”

Once you put a foot in these things with kids who’d lost a parent, you had to chew your own leg off to get out of them. A week after his dad disappeared, Danny got a bloody nose at practice and said he didn’t want to play anymore. So Mike had to start calling the kid’s house every day, telling him that the other guys really needed him. Because what the fuck else were you supposed to do when the roof was falling in? Stand there, waiting to get crushed?

He started to trot toward the scrum with the whistle in his mouth, ready to break things up before the tears began. All right, you’re stuck for the moment—play the part until the ball goes out of bounds. Keep up the game face. Act like everything’s perfectly normal. But then he saw a skinny white leg kick out stiffly and the ball squirt out of the jam. Javier, the little ringer from Ecuador, tripped and fell going after it, and then all of a sudden Danny was breaking from the pack, running past him, chasing it toward the goal at the other end of the field. The kid ran like a crippled sandpiper, matchstick legs staggering and arms flapping uselessly at his sides, but he was getting there. He hesitated for just a second, still not sure if he should really cut loose, and then reared back and kicked the ball with the side of his foot. It hit a rock, bounced, and then rolled into the far corner of the net.

“Yeah, baby. That’s what I’m talking about.”

And hearing a grown man’s voice celebrating his little victory, Danny threw his arms up, let out a war whoop, and came flying over to give his coach a hug.

The odd thing was, up until two weeks ago, Barry had hardly noticed the other people on the train ride home. Usually he was so deep into reading or looking out the window that everything else just seemed like background noise. But tonight the Metro-North car seemed emptier than usual. He realized that most times he caught the 8:07, the same guy would be sitting across the aisle. Always wearing the same kind of navy Men’s Wearhouse suit, white shirt, and red tie. Always breathing hard and sweating like a horse when he first got on, as if he’d been running for the train. It usually wasn’t until they were well out of the groaning bowels of Grand Central and clearing the clotheslines of Harlem that he’d seem to relax a little. And then he’d slump against the window, an automaton turned off, oblivious to the expanding glory of the Hudson, the blue bridge at Spuyten Duyvil, the little sailboats rocking gently on the current. Once or twice, Barry had found himself imagining the guy’s life. Probably just another poor shlub trying to hold on to a cubicle at Citicorp and a saltbox in Hawthorne, working the phones all day and then being too tense and tired to deal with the wife and kids when he got home. He remembered smugly thinking that he’d never allow himself to live like that again, always running late for the train. But something about seeing that body this morning had made him just a little more attentive to his daily routines. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen the guy since the Eleventh. And as the train rolled by the old Jack Frost sugar refinery in Yonkers, he saw the sun melt into a red puddle on the river and turned to the
Times
“Portraits in Grief” section to see if he recognized any of the pictures.

“Sandi, this is the third message I’ve left.” Lynn sat in the Saab, making a call while she waited for Barry’s train. “I just want to say it really sucks that you stood me up like that last night. Friends don’t treat each other that way.”

She saw a line of cars slowing down before they left the lot and a big man with a clipboard and a flashlight leaning in to talk to each driver. Something about the way the brake lights glowed in the gathering dusk sharpened the sense she’d had all day that a connection in the town’s underlying mechanisms was not functioning properly.

“Look, just call me and let me know everything’s all right,” she said. “You’re so fucking irresponsible sometimes it drives me nuts. Call me, you old whore. I miss you.”

A fine haze was coming off the river as the 8:07 pulled into the station with a gust of relief. Doors popped open, and commuters stumbled out onto the stark fluorescent-lit platform like big-headed aliens disgorged from a flying saucer in a Spielberg movie.

Mike stood by the parking lot exit with his clipboard and flashlight, watching the elongated silhouettes descend the stairs, remembering how he used to love to come to this station as a kid for its hypnotic rhythms, the tide of commuters coming and going, the unholy racket of the old diesel engines pulling in. The hours he wasted on the bedroom floor with cruddy old toy trains he’d inherited from his brother, Johnny. There was a shiny Tonka model he wanted his mother to get him from Angelo’s Candy Store and Deli around the corner. A midnight-blue die-cast model of an Old 58 Union Pacific steam engine. It killed him not to have it. Every day he’d beg for it, his need churning like wheels in his head. But she squeezed every nickel so tight she made Jefferson look like a forceps baby. And so one day he just
took it.
Put it right in his pocket when no one was looking, where it became another part of the secret world he always kept hidden from her.

He watched the commuters getting into their shiny Outlanders, Caravans, Escapes, Expeditions, Land Cruisers, Sequoias, and Tahoes. Rich people’s toys. Two by two, headlights came alive in different sectors and gradually formed a line moving toward him, their beams piercing the dark and revealing little misty swarms of circling gnats.

“Excuse me, sir?” He stopped a fiftyish guy in a white ’99 Lexus and came around to the driver’s window. “We’re doing a routine canvass because of the incident at the train station this morning.”

“Oh, look, I really need to get home.”

The guy’s breath smelled like Cutty Sark, and his eyes were light-bulbs with the filaments burned out.
What the hell’s he doing getting behind the wheel of a fifty-thousand-dollar car stewed to the gills?
On almost any other night, Mike would’ve pulled him out and made him walk a straight line.

“We’re just trying to see if anybody might have any relevant information about how this body turned up here …”

“No, no, and no … I took the later train.”

“How about last night? Were you at the station?”

“No, I drove yesterday. Can I go now?”

A lone Volvo horn beeped behind him, remote and cautious. “Thanks for your help, sir.”

“Yeah, you too, buddy.”

Four more cars passed with nothing to say. No one saw anything. No one knows anything. City people. He remembered the way his father would shake his head and hiss through his teeth when they cut him off at the River Road intersection in their snazzy European gas-guzzlers. Middle-aged men with cue-ball scalps and long sideburns. Mike looked at his watch, seeing he’d been at this for almost two hours. His calves ached, and his knees were still killing him from soccer practice. More than two weeks since his last real full day off. He noticed that his lungs were still bothering him, and again he wondered about the toxins he’d breathed in at Ground Zero.

Some things kill you quickly, and some kill you so slowly that you hardly know you’re sick.

A polished black Saab with a light scuff on the hood pulled up, and Mike pointed the flashlight beam at the driver’s eyes, taking some satisfaction in the dazzled grimace.

“Yo, roll your window down.” He spooled a finger in midair.

The driver looked like a wiseass, with beady eyes and a slightly crooked nose. Banker or a lawyer, Mike guessed. The profile of a pretty wife was half-shadowed in the passenger seat.

“Excuse me, sir, we’re following up on the incident at the train station this morning …”

“Hey, Fallon …” The lady in the passenger seat leaned across her husband’s legs.

It took him a split second to bring Lynn Stockdale’s face into focus.

“Hey, you,” he said. “Twice in one day. We’ve gotta stop meeting like this.”

The husband half-closed one eye as he glanced over suspiciously.

“So why’d you tell me you had a drowner before?” she asked.

“We were going on what we had at that point.”

Mike took her gaze and held it for as long as he could, remembering just what it was like to stare at that Union Pacific engine.

“Can’t have all the soccer moms making another run on the Prozac without a good reason.” He gave her a small wink.

“She didn’t look like any drowner to me,” mumbled the husband.

Mike slowly turned his glare on him, making it clear that nothing this man could say would ever impress him.

“Michael, this is my husband, Barry Schulman.” Lynn tugged lightly on the driver’s tie.

“Detective Lieutenant Michael Fallon, Barry. Glad to finally meet you.”

He waited until the husband turned and mouthed, “
Finally?
” to Lynn before he reached through the window and gave him the old inmate’s Iron Man handshake, crushing the joints and giving the hand a slight turn to the left and a pull forward. His father used to tell him that if you could get a man a little off-balance, you could probably get him to do anything else you wanted. But instead, Schulman gripped him back hard and kept his wrist rock-steady.

“Hey, easy there, partner.” Mike took his hand back. “These is delicate instruments.”

“You got a pretty good grip there yourself.”

“So, Barry”—Mike stretched his fingers—“you look like you might be part of the commuter class. You see anything this morning?”

“Yeah, I was on that train,” the husband said a bit too quickly. “But I don’t think I saw anything that everybody else didn’t see. Sickening goddamn thing. Didn’t look like she’d been in the water long.”

“Yeah, and what makes you say that?” A small muscle tightened above Mike’s eyes.

“The skin hadn’t started to separate.”

“Is that right?” Mike put his hands on the door frame, not giving the car too much respect. “You just happened to notice that?”

“Barry was an assistant district attorney in the Bronx for four years before he went into corporate work.” Lynn touched the side of her husband’s face. “We met outside a courtroom. I still tease him sometimes that he never really lost the bug.”

“Ah, you know how it is.” Schulman raised his palms. “It’s more interesting debriefing a witness in a mob case than filing papers with the FDA. Work is work, though.”

“So, you used to be a prosecutor, huh?” Mike’s eyes cut sideways, as if he was trying to see around a corner.

“Yeah, I work in the city. But up here I’m just a citizen like anybody else.”

Got that right, asshole.
Mike stared at him without speaking for a few seconds. A talent he’d had since he was a kid. The Ice Man stare. Glare at someone long enough, and eventually they either back down or start babbling.

“Interesting you’d notice that,” he said, deciding to spare him the full treatment. “Most people wouldn’t.”

He saw Lynn fidgeting, trying to find the right attitude to take in front of her husband. Mike wondered how much she’d told the old man, whether it was enough to put a wild hair up his ass. Over the course of the day, he’d changed his mind a couple of times about their conversation this morning. At first, he’d thought she was just putting him off with that crapology about the phone number. But here it was obvious she was simply afraid that old embers would start smoldering again.

“So how’s it going?” said the husband. “You have any idea who she is yet?”

“No, but we will soon. They’ve got all kinds of DNA crap for identifying victims at the State Crime Lab. You can’t spit on the sidewalk anymore without us finding out who did it.”

“Yeah.” Schulman nodded. “Once you find a match.”

“Of course,” Mike said slowly, acknowledging the obvious. “But that takes time, which I’m sure you can appreciate as a
former
law enforcement professional.”

Mike looked from the husband to Lynn, rolling his tongue under his lip.

“Oh, yeah, of course,” said the husband, taking the hint. “Look, I didn’t mean to step on anybody’s toes here.”

“No problem, amigo.” Mike took his hands off the door and hitched up his gun belt. “Anybody who ended up with Lynn is okay in my book.”

“Oh, I see.” Schulman looked over at his wife. “You guys are old friends?”

Mike saw Lynn scrunch down in her seat a little, as if she meant for both of them to forget she was here.

“Oh, yeah.” Mike grinned. “You trying to tell me she’s never mentioned me?”

“Michael and I went to high school together,” she said quietly. “I think I’ve told you.”

“You did?”

Mike felt his smile strain as if it were held up at the corners by thumbtacks.

“You know I’m terrible with names,” the husband said, almost apologetically. “They go in one ear and out the other. That’s what happens when you move back to your wife’s hometown. You’re always playing catch-up.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that.” Mike pointed the light into Lynn’s eyes, feeling something shrivel and harden inside him.

“Mike’s family’s been in this town for generations,” she said, almost shyly.

“Oh, yeah?” The husband’s fingers began to tap the steering wheel.

“And now Mike’s a big man in the department here. Somebody was telling me this morning that he was the one who drove all the crack dealers out of the Hollow.”