Backward-Facing Man (9 page)

The detective leaned back in his chair and tried to summarize what he'd learned. There were workplace violations here, no doubt. And they'd be relatively easy to verify. There was negligence on the part of at least one, probably both, of the brothers. But it was unclear why Arthur Puckman was talking. Maybe he wanted to be in charge of the business. Maybe he just liked dissing his brother. Maybe he didn't realize that if he kept this up, both of them would be in big trouble; but if he shut up and called his lawyer, he'd walk away with a fine. The real loser was Gutierrez. The Puckmans would be making money again, and the world would stay the same. It didn't matter who you rooted for. A peculiar cooked-meal smell filled the tiny room. Fernandez had the feeling he was back working night shift in a mental hospital. A sharp knock on the door interrupted him. The detective slid his chair back and opened it a crack. “The captain wants to see you,” the desk clerk said, poking her head in.

Artie was grateful for the detective's disappearance. He shifted his weight and released gas. He believed in his performance thus far, its rightness given the turn of events in the factory and in his family. He rolled his eyes up in his head and relaxed.

 

Fernandez took a seat in his boss's office beside a row of beat-up filing cabinets. Captain Murphy, a gap-toothed Irishman in his early sixties, veteran of more than his share of homicides, was talking on the phone and watching Arthur Puckman through the mirror. He leaned back in his chair, the phone up in the air over his mouth. “We got a kid in a coma,” Murphy said, “and we got a business owner telling us he fucked up—no safety instructions, no equipment, no ventilation.” From the sound of things, the person on the other end of the line was not responding the way the captain wanted him to. He was talking into the phone but looking right at Fernandez. “Can't you people get out here before Monday?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Cocksuckers.”

Fernandez smiled.

“Right,” Murphy said, nodding. “Right…. Okay, okay.” He hung up the phone. “OSHA can't respond till Monday,” he said to Fernandez, throwing up his hands. The two of them watched Artie looking around the room, nibbling on Fernandez's pen. “What have you got, Detective?” “Same thing as Patrick's snitch. That and the history of the security guard business.”

Fernandez said he believed the fat man was spinning things to serve himself, but that he was telling the truth. “Why don't we do an autopsy?” Fernandez said.

“Because the kid's not dead yet.”

Fernandez bit his lip. “There's something fishy about this. Italian guys don't rat out their brothers this easy.”

Murphy thought about it. “It's late. Get the guy's statement and take him home. Be nice to him. We might need him again.” Fernandez stood up.

“And try to find out where they disposed of that shit, will you? If OSHA isn't interested, maybe the EPA will be.”

“Yeah, boss,” the detective said, turning to leave.

 

While Fernandez was out, the desk clerk returned to the interrogation room with a day-old box of doughnuts. Artie thought of Sister Theresa, the kindest of the nuns at St. Agnes. How grateful he was as a little boy to be tended to during those long afternoons while his tormentors—boys from the projects—waited outside. When he came back in, Fernandez told the fat man that he wanted to review what they'd discussed so far, so he could prepare Artie's statement and they could go home. But there was one more thing he wanted to know in order to understand the whole complicated process of cleaning metal. “I think you've given me an excellent education in how to clean metal, Mr. Puckman. But I wonder if you could tell me what you do with the chemicals when they don't work anymore.”

“I told you that already. We drain them.”

“Right. Yes,” Fernandez said, pretending to make notes. “But where exactly?”

“We p-p-pull the p-p-plug,” Artie said, his voice rising in pitch.

Fernandez nodded. “Of course. But where does it go?”

Arthur Puckman was silent.

“I mean the contents of the tank, the residue of those chemicals—1, 1, 1 TCE, whatever it's called.” In his office, Murphy leaned toward the glass, listening intently.

“We s-s-spray it first t-t-to loosen it up,” Artie said quietly.

“Uh-huh,” Fernandez said. The detective flipped his paper cup into the trash can. “When the chemical loses its strength—when it doesn't clean metal anymore—you spray water in, to kind of loosen it up.”

“Exactly,” Artie said, nodding.

“And then you pull the plug and drain it.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Fernandez leaned forward. “So where does it go?” He was enjoying himself.

“Into the p-p-pipe…”

“Uh-huh.” Fernandez tapped his pen against the table. “And the pipe leads where?”

“I d-d-don't know.”

“Really? You seem to know so much.”

Artie smiled nervously. “Not really.”

“Into the sewer?”

More silence.

Fernandez leaned in again. “C'mon, Mr. Puckman, it has to go somewhere.”

“I d-d-dunno.”

In his office, Captain Murphy picked up the phone.

Artie folded his arms over his chest. His mouth hung open, his tongue pressed against his bottom teeth, and his eyes rolled up in his head. His brow was a deep shade of red, and there were beads of sweat on his upper lip and scalp. He was angry. These questions had caused him to lose his composure, which was a dangerous and familiar feeling. The detective had tricked him.

Fernandez would have kept going, but the captain interrupted. “It's a wrap,” he said over the loudspeaker. He'd left a message with an Agent Keaton at the Environmental Protection Agency, Region Three.

Fernandez pushed his chair back from the table and studied the malodorous human being who sat before him. Artie's body posture had changed completely. While he'd never been at ease, the fat man had seemed comfortable enough before. Now, he was mumbling to himself and moving his hands around as if he were conducting several simultaneous conversations with invisible beings that encircled him.

Since he was a kid, Fernandez had heard about guys who rat out their friends out of loyalty to someone or something, either as a favor or to carry out a threat. Some trade what they have, and others tattle to extricate themselves from bad situations. There are those who plea-bargain, or buy what they think is their own safety, and there are crooners who say what they say and then regret it. There are religious nuts and those who just don't give a shit. The one thing they have in common is that you can't trust them. Every one of them is playing an angle. As a detective, you had to filter what you heard, examine the physical evidence, and then come back and ask questions. The faster you draw conclusions, the sooner you make mistakes. Even though the fat guy's story wasn't playing for him, Fernandez would write up the report, leave it with Murphy, and then head home for a few hours of rest.

“We're gonna break here,” he said to Artie. “I'll have the girl type up what we've got,” Fernandez said, looking at his watch. “You look it over, sign it, and I'll take you home. How's that sound?”

Artie nodded his head.

 

The statement Arthur Puckman finally signed contained three disclosures that Captain Murphy said would give the police, the EPA, and OSHA maximum leeway to investigate the Gutierrez accident. First was that the Puckman brothers knew about numerous safety violations that existed in the plant, including those involving the use of hazardous chemicals. Second, that Chuck Puckman specifically ordered Gutierrez to clean out the tank, knowing he'd have to climb inside, where he was likely to be overcome by fumes. And third, that either Arthur Puckman didn't know or, more likely, Puckman Security hadn't arranged for toxic liquid from the tank to be discharged legally.

In exchange for his cooperation, Arthur Puckman earned himself a ride in the back of a 1997 undercover police cruiser, driven by Detective Fernandez. This, in and of itself, was not unusual. It was rainy and cold, and Fernandez was exhausted. Sitting behind him, Artie closed his eyes. His mind was going a mile a minute. They were only a few blocks from the precinct when the fat man asked Fernandez if he could visit his father before being dropped off. “He'll go into shock if he hears about this from somebody else,” Artie whined. Indeed he will, Fernandez thought, when he learns that his son has for some mysterious reason implicated all three of them.

Reluctantly, Fernandez took Frankford north a few miles into the Great Northeast, and then pulled the patrol car into the circular drive. Elysian Fields was a squat nursing home consisting of three brick rectangles, joined at odd angles to fit a footprint of land carved around the interstate. There was an odd slope to the parking lot. Had it been a putting green, Fernandez thought, getting to the glass front doors in a straight shot would have been a challenge. “Five minutes,” Fernandez said, tapping his watch. Artie walked slowly, his head tilted at an absurd angle.

At the front desk, Artie announced his father's name. The receptionist typed something into the computer. Artie stared at the watercolors on the walls, amateurishly simple paintings of ducks, geese, and other waterfowl. They seemed perfectly useless, devoid of any cheer that might have been intended. “Orange. Second floor. Room 210.” She motioned down a hallway to a bank of elevators. An acrid smell, a mixture of urine and disinfectant, wafted toward him.

Artie's father had been assigned to a floor for stroke victims who were frozen in a perpetual fluorescence that illuminated the physical world they were denied. There, men and women sat in wheelchairs along the corridor, their hands folded in their laps, their heads lolling from side to side, mouths suspended over wet bibs, looking sideways at each other. Behind the buzz of the lights, Artie heard canned laughter erupting from the TVs.

It had been a year since his father had been moved from Northeastern Hospital to Elysian Fields, and, in that time, the old man had lost most of his body mass. Each day, a therapist visited him, but the extent of his daily workout was using the fingers of his right hand to shoo her away. Charlie Puckman took his meals through a bag attached to his arm and breathed through a tube in his nose. He watched television all day and all night. He slept in jags. When he felt himself drifting off, he woke with a start. Mute, except for a little chalkboard that rested on his sunken chest, he had no choice on this night but to accept a visit from the son he despised.

Artie was not there out of compassion or curiosity. He had not come to reminisce about the childhood he wished he'd had, or to talk to his father about declining sales or problems with the bank, or to complain about Puckman Security since his brother, Chuck, had taken over. Every family business has its mysteries. Offspring wonder what they could have accomplished on their own, whether what they had was earned or given, whether after being mollycoddled and spoon-fed at the table of plenty, they could survive the trials and tribulations of the real world. Where there's a family business, there are brutal comparisons between siblings; rivalries between cousins; animosity between spouses; that reflect slights, real and perceived, grudges, past and present, hatred and hurt, gnarly, emotional wounds exaggerated by secrecy.

For his part, over the years, Charlie Puckman had offered opinions and judgments to anyone who'd listen. He complained about his unreliable workers, his thieving bankers, his miserable customers, and his good-for-nothing sons. He sulked and loafed and paraded around, assigning shit jobs to those around him, sucking whatever cash and satisfaction he could as though he alone was entitled to it. And like many of his generation, he never planned for the fate of the business after he was gone. By avoiding this single task and refusing to delineate responsibilities beyond doing what needed to be done, and by hoarding shares of stock, he'd made it clear that there'd be nothing to inherit when he died. In his mind, this prevented his sons from wishing for his demise. So as Artie approached his father's room that night, he had a gleeful feeling seeing his father propped up in bed, thin as a rail.

“Can I help you?” a night-shift nurse holding a tray of medication asked.

“I'm Arthur. Ch-Ch-Charlie Puckman's son…”

“Your father is very agitated tonight,” she said, pressing her lips together and arching her eyebrows.

The room was dark except for the flicker of the television. Artie stood in the doorway and looked at the shriveled form in the bed, which was jackknifed so the old man could see the television without moving his neck. There were two lumps under the blankets where knees would be. “Hello, Pop,” Artie said, twisting his mouth.

Charlie Puckman Sr. stared straight ahead. If he was aware of his son in the room, he gave no indication. Artie moved a chair from against the wall and the two of them sat there in silence, watching commercials. A few minutes later, Artie heard the
Action News
theme, its staccato beat signaling something lurid and unimportant. A male newscaster appeared in a trench coat, live from Kensington. “Unsafe conditions and an industrial accident in Fishtown has left one worker in a coma and…”

Artie moved forward and turned the volume up. “That's us, Pop!” he said excitedly. They were showing Coleman Porter's footage now on all three networks. You could see the Puckman factory in muted daylight, the fence up, the garage like a gaping mouth. In the parking lot, off to one side, was Chuck's black Suburban. Charlie Puckman began to moan, soft and low. His head slumped forward, his eyes turned as far to the side as they could, and the fingers of his right hand pointed toward the television.

“The police are blaming Chuck…”

“…in critical condition,” the reporter said.

The old man blinked repeatedly and stared ahead. His cheeks were flush, in contrast with his neck and forehead, which had gone flabby since the stroke. His lips were grayish blue and they quivered, and he struggled to moisten them every few seconds.