Disturbed Earth (18 page)

"I'm not sure. I think it was me. But you want to call Mark's mother? Talk to the girls?"

She shook her head. "It's four in the morning. They'd be more scared by the phone ringing than anything else," she said, but already she was dialing the number.

A conversation with Maxie's mother-in-law followed, though I could only hear Max's end. The kids were OK. The mother-in-law was nervous.

Maxie said, "They're fine up there. They're OK. What can happen to them in Accord, New York? Right? What's your guess about this?"

"Right, sure. The kids will be fine. But I don't know if the kidnapping is just some goofball, you know, someone who only goes for family members, or a wing-nut or a serial, I don't know. I don't think anyone knows." I took her hand. "Let's make some coffee and you tell me if there's been anyone hanging around the girls, though, lately. OK? If anyone said anything to you or to them or anyone you know."

I got dressed and we went into the kitchen and sat at the table and Maxie opened the cabinet and took out a jar of coffee. "I'll make coffee," she said. "Or you want Scotch? I might have a drink. But the girls are OK, right? I mean there's no creeps up there?"

Maxine was insistent and I heard a kind of denial. No more bad stuff, she was thinking. She had had her share. I knew that it didn't work like that.

"Yes," I said.

She poured the drinks and we stood in the kitchen and downed the Scotch.

"I have to get back to the city."

"Why?" she said.

I didn't answer.

"You want him to follow you, don't you? You want to see if whoever this creep is, if he goes after you. Listen, get some help, OK? Please. Let me call someone."

" I don't know who the thug was who busted in here or if it had anything to do with the stuff out by the beach, but I have to go. You get to bed. I'll wait until you fall asleep," I said.

"Honey, I'm a big girl. I have a gun locked up in the nightstand. The girls are upstate. I'm fine. I'll probably do laundry."

"Why?"

"Keeps me calm," Maxine smiled. "Passes the time."

"I think you're terrific." I put on the rest of my clothes and picked up my jacket.

"Because of the laundry?"

I kissed her.

"Because you're lovely, you're a really fabulous woman."

"It's mutual," she said and I could see she wanted to say something else but she only smiled, kissed me on the cheek, put an ancient Martha Reeves album on the CD player, went into the bathroom and began sorting out laundry from the hamper.

22

Out of my window, a kid slid down the street on an orange plastic tray and, while I watched, he tumbled off the tray into high soft white drifts. After a while, he gave up; he trudged home, the tray on his head, lifting his feet high, trying to follow in the footsteps of a dog-walker who had made tracks ahead of him.

The blizzard, the holiday, everything was shut. When I got home from Maxie's around five that morning, hoping the creep who broke into her place would follow me, the snow was already knee deep. I had stayed in my car outside my front door, watching the street. No one came. I stumbled upstairs and into bed, put my gun on the floor along with my cell phone and slept.

When I woke up a few hours later, the snow was coming down two, three inches an hour. My head hurt. My body ached.

I rolled over and sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. The floor was freezing and I ran for the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of water and some Advil, put coffee on and ran back to the bed. I felt lousy. My head was on fire. My feet were frozen. I stopped myself from falling back to sleep. I could have slept standing up. I could have slept around the clock, but somewhere in the oceans of white coming out of the sky was Billy Farone.

I had promised Genia I'd work the case myself for a day, but I didn't want Billy dying because his mother was terrified of cops, so I had left Lippert messages every hour. I didn't know if he had picked them up and I called Rhonda, his assistant, at home.

He'd flown up to Boston, Rhonda said, chasing some information about a kiddie porn ring that involved dirty cops and was connected to a case Lippert was involved with in the Bronx. He got the last shuttle up before the airports shut down. Rhonda promised to find him, give him my message.

I reached out for the radio and switched it on and listened to the news reports of the biggest blizzard in a decade. I loved the snow in the city. Lily had loved it. She would lie in bed and look out and yawn and yearn for more snow, for the kind of storm that paralyzed the city and where people skied to work on Fifth Avenue and stayed late in neighborhood bars and sometimes fell in love. I should have paid more attention to Lily.

Where women were concerned, I was usually a jerk. I knew I should settle down with Maxine. She was fun and smart and pretty. We had nice times in bed and out. I loved her girls; we could have a life. What difference did it make if I wasn't exactly besotted with her? So what if Lily had made me feel better than I was, smarter, more connected to the world; Lily was gone for good.

From the kitchen the smell of coffee reached me and I forced myself out of bed and went and poured some in a mug. I sat at the counter and drank it and tried to eat the eggs I fried and couldn't. My jaw hurt. I stared at a cereal box. Everything, the words on the box, the pieces of Billy's case, seemed distant and disconnected. The fragments of the puzzle drifted free in my head like mental garbage and I tried to put them together and knew something was missing.

I spilled some of the coffee and hopped around for a while like a scalded cat, and then went and took a hot shower and wrapped myself in a robe and went back for more coffee.

Suddenly I noticed the red light blinking on the answering machine and I played the messages. One was from the nursing home in Haifa. I called back, and got the nurse who said my mother had been calling for me by name; for years she hadn't known who I was or my name, but now she had said it out loud: Artyom, she had called. Artemy!

Once, years earlier, I had picked up the phone and heard her voice, my mother, speaking Russian, calling to me: get me out of here, Artyom, get me out, your father has locked me up, I'm locked up, help me! The message on my answering machine had lasted twenty minutes, her repeating herself over and over.

Now I got through to her floor at the nursing home. She was asleep, the attendant said, and muttered something in Hebrew I didn't understand. Call back, she said after that. Call tomorrow.

On the shelf above the desk I kept a row of dictionaries: Russian, French, Hebrew, Arabic, most of them shabby now, left over from school or jobs I'd done a decade earlier. Two decades. I reached up for the Hebrew dictionary and then I saw it. The dictionaries had been moved. The Arabic dictionary was on its side. Someone had taken it down from the shelf, then put it back hastily. I put it on the desk and flipped through the pages, but there was nothing. I stared out of the window, unnerved.

Someone had been here, in my place, the only place I had ever owned. When I moved into the loft it had pipes hanging from the ceiling, stained linoleum on the concrete floor, a century of crud on the radiators and window sills crusted black from the filth that settles everywhere in New York. One of the windows was broken and a dead pigeon lay on the floor underneath it, surrounded by broken glass. The bird had shattered the glass when it flew through it and killed itself. The loft had taken me years to fix, but it was mine—at least the part that didn't belong to the bank.

Someone had been here and for a minute I hesitated, desperate to look for more evidence. But I had to go. Maxine had called earlier. She was coming into the city, to catch up on her paperwork at the office. She wanted to meet for coffee. I promised her, so I got dressed. I grabbed my gun and went out to meet Max, and put a wedge of paper in the front door so anyone who broke in would disturb it.

The snow was deep and soft and I tumbled into a pile of the stuff, got up, walked stiff legged to a coffee shop near Police Plaza. Max was waiting.

I said, "How'd you get into the city?"

"I caught a ride with a guy I know. A cop. It took hours," she said. "I did what you wanted, honey." She ignored the no smoking rule and pulled out a pack of Kools. The place was empty. It was a holiday, and with the snow piling up, the city was silent and lovely.

"You want one?"

"It's like smoking candy." I smiled and got one of my own. "I thought you quit."

"That was yesterday. Artie, I raised an issue on the clothes that will take them another twenty-four hours at least. You've got a day, OK, is that what you wanted? By then I'll know who else has been to see the kid's clothes. I'll get you the list, if you want. I know you saw them at the beach, but in case you want another look."

"Thank you. I didn't ask, but thank you."

"Yeah, you did. You just didn't say the words. Listen, I can't do this often, Artie, you can't pull me into your private stuff too often, OK? I did it this time because I know how you feel about that kid, Billy."

"I didn't mean to pull you in."

"But you do. You just do. You know how I am. As soon as # you tell me you need something on a job, you know I'll try and *help."

"I promise I'll try not to," I said. "You want me to see if I can do anything about who broke into your house?" I asked.

"No. I talked to a guy I know at my station house in Bay Ridge. He's a cousin of Mark's. He came and looked at everything and he helped me get the locks changed because you can imagine trying to get someone in this weather at the crack of dawn. I'm sure it was just some local creep. They weren't exactly prime time crooks looking for my diamonds."

"What about the kids?"

"I'll go get them tonight if this storm breaks, if I can even get a bus that's going upstate. Thank God today's a holiday. It's only assholes like you and me at work. But the kids have school tomorrow. I can't leave them up at Mark's mom forever; also I don't want to owe her, you know?"

"How come?"

"Like I said, I can't play the grieving widow anymore, and that's what she needs." She crushed her smoke out in a saucer on the table and got up.

"Say hi to the girls."

"Sure." Maxie was uneasy, she fumbled for her jacket, looked away from me.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," she said and waved and started towards the door, then stopped suddenly, came back and sat opposite me. She took a deep breath.

"You OK?"

"Not really," she said.

Maxine took out her cigarettes. She took one out of the pack but didn't light it. She looked out of the window and then pulled a paper napkin from the metal dispenser and folded it into a triangle. She kept her eyes on her hands.

"What? Tell me." I reached for her hand, but she pulled back, sat up straight and looked at me.

"Artie, honey, I can't waste any more of my life. OK, so, it's like this: I'm in love with you. I was in love with you before Mark, but I knew it was no use, and I wanted kids and stuff and I loved him in a way, so I married him. But I'm still in love with you. You went with Lily, so I knew that was it and anyhow I was married." She fumbled with her cigarette, tearing the paper, pulling out the shreds of tobacco. "Look, I know this is a lousy time, everything coming down on you, your godson missing or whatever out by Brighton Beach, Billy is like your own, I understand. I think you kind of replaced Lily's little girl with him. Is that enough? More?"

"Go on."

"I want to give you the space to do this case, you know, but there's always stuff coming down in our jobs, so I can't go on waiting to talk to you between jobs and other women, and I don't want to talk about pizza all the time, I know it's code, it's shtick between us, it's a way we do things, but it's not enough for me. So, well, listen, I'm in love with you." She stopped and her eyes filled up and then she said, "So that's it."

Maxine tossed the broken cigarette on the table. "I want a life. I don't care about getting married again but I want a life with a guy in it who's home most of the time and who doesn't fuck around with other women. My girls are also crazy about you.

"Likewise," I said, feeling incredibly warm about Maxie. It surprised me. I didn't feel trapped. I didn't feel put upon. I felt warm.

"I love them," I said. "I love you."

"You do?"

"You know I do."

"I don't mean it like that," she said. "I don't mean it like friends who have pizza and sometimes a fuck, OK, I don't want a fuck buddy, but someone who would be there when I look shitty and have a cold or to go on vacation with and for Christmas."

"Yes," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean do you want to get married?"

"In general?"

"In general, to me, whatever."

"Is this a proposal?"

"Sort of. Yeah. I don't know."

"Well, you let me know, OK, because this is just the kind of shit I was talking about. I need to know, Artie, honey, I have to get on." She got up. "I have to run now," she said. "I really have to go."

"So you want to do pizza next weekend?"

"You're not listening."

"I meant it as a joke."

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "I don't think so, Artie. The pizza, I mean. But thanks."

"Can I come to the girls' birthday party anyway?"

"Sure you can, honey. Of course," she said and having sat down again, unfolded her long legs and got up and went back out of the door. I saw her through the glass as she walked, back to me. She gave a jaunty wave but without looking back.

I watched her go, loping along the street, and thought what a jerk I was not to run after her. It was as if I was glued to the chair in the coffee shop, my face pressed against the window, watching her go, unable to follow, wanting to follow. No, what I wanted was to want it. To want the thing that would make me like everyone else, a wife, kids, and I couldn't go, couldn't follow her, I just sat and smoked and looked through the window.

For a while longer I sat in the coffee shop and then I called Rhonda again, who said Lippert was making his way back from Boston by train.

"Sit tight," Rhonda said. "He'll call you in a few minutes."

When Lippert called, I tried to tell him about Billy Farone, I tried to say, it's my cousin's kid, it's Billy, but he shut me up and said never the fuck mind about Brooklyn. We're done with it, he yelled, May Luca is dead, the killer is dead, the locals can wrap it up. The line crackled.

I tried to break into his stream of talk but the signal went dead. I called him back. He said I was too involved, too emotionally screwed up about the Russian thing in Brighton Beach and he didn't want me working out there. If I had a problem out there, I should call the locals. I knew he didn't hear me. I knew he didn't understand.

Forget it, he said, and anyhow, a little girl had disappeared from a fancy loft building over in Tribeca. He said, get the hell over there, he said. Use your nice manners, man, OK, just make nice with them because with this one media shit is going to rain down on us for real. The girl that disappeared from Tribeca belonged to a couple of lezzies, he said, you know, man, I mean one of them had the kid with somebody's sperm, turkey baster stuff, you know the deal and they're both rich and pretty famous and connected. Fashion. Architecture. Astronomy. Who knows? Who cares? Some kind of downtown shit and they're already calling in lawyers, squads of fat-ass lawyers, Jonnie Cochran style, Bruce Cutler, he said contemptuously. A phalanx of lawyers, he added, enjoying the word.

Listen, man, Lippert said, it's one thing some girl in Brooklyn gets murdered, it makes the police page in the
Post.
This one is rich and white, you know what I'm saying, also it's Tribeca so these people were downtown when the towers fell, so, like heroic. Right? I got the networks, the papers, every fucking media asshole is on me, and I want you there. It's probably a circus. He told me the street and the building.