Red on Red (50 page)

“Nick, I think we got it wrapped up here, as long as you can handle the father,” Napolitano said. “He could still press charges against the older kid. He’s not even too slow, like the mother keeps saying he is. He’s just a little soft. His mother babies him. He got picked on at school, so she got him put in special ed. But he’ll get locked up, if we don’t square it away. How’s the little hoochie?”

“She’s fine. We’re dropping her off in a minute. I’ll talk to the guy, see what we can do. Keep ’em there. I’ll let you know.”

“Ten-four.”

Nick asked the cop to stop around the corner from the address Grace had given. Dyckman Street, south of the park. Just a few blocks from where he lived; he was appreciative again of the privacies of city life,
how you never knew anyone, if you played it right. Nick didn’t want to draw attention to Grace, having her step out of a cop car in front of her house. When they arrived, he got out and opened the door for her. She fixed her glasses and hair, laboring under her backpack, and smiled as she walked away. Nick got back into the car and didn’t say anything until they returned to the precinct. The young cop called over to him as Nick walked up the stairs, and Nick felt bad about his rude indifference to him over the past hour.

“Hey, Detective! All this work, all this running around—for nothing?”

“At best. I hope so. I’ll let you know.”

When Nick got back to the interview room, Ivan Lopez leapt up and tried to hug him. Nick pushed him away. Nick sat down on one side of the table and pointed to the far chair. Lopez began to protest, but he sat down. Nick told him he had to stop lying. Lopez became angry, yelling about the defense of honor, the defense of children, and Nick told him to shut up. Nick asked whether he had a dog. Lopez said that he never had one, had never said he did. Nick slapped him across the face. Lopez stood up and said he would sue, sue Nick’s family, take everything away from Nick’s children. They would have nothing when he was done. Nick slapped him again. Lopez started to cry, and Nick moved in close to him, saying Lopez had to tell him everything.
Everything?
Everything. How it had happened, with the mother. More tears, and Nick raised his hand again, then waited. He wasn’t good with women, Lopez said. He had a brother, an older brother. He was dead now. The brother was with two friends. They knew a girl. They were drinking together, they could call the girl for Lopez. They went to the park, to Inwood Park. It was summer, and they drank together with the girl. Lopez drank a lot. He didn’t know if they paid the girl or they dared her. Maybe both, a little of both, but it started good. They kissed, they started. He’d never done it before, and it felt great, and his brother and the other two cheered him on. And then she said she felt sick and wanted to stop, and he got mad, and the boys laughed at how he got mad. They held her down, and he finished. Then he got sick, too, rolling off her to throw up. His brother and his friends helped him home. He didn’t see the girl again for a couple of months. Then he heard she was pregnant. He looked for her, and when he found her, she slapped him.

Lopez looked up at Nick, crying, to see if he was going to hit him again, too. Nick didn’t.

“How do you know she’s your kid?”

“I just know.”

Maybe he did. It didn’t matter. Nick had demanded to know more, and now he wanted to know less. He didn’t want to know why Lopez walked in the park, what he wanted to remember, whether it was penance or pornography. Old times, old times. There was no reason, only rhyme. Nick told Lopez that they should all forget what happened today, that if he didn’t press charges, none would be pressed against him. Lopez agreed. Nick left the room and called Napolitano, telling him that everyone could go home.

E
sposito was due back on Valentine’s Day. All the predictable jokes were made about who would buy chocolates, where he and Nick would go for a romantic dinner. It was part of the ordinary back-and-forth of the Job, the guy-world of men paired, nearly literally, at the hip. Perez started on about buying roses, until Garelick glared at him, and Perez realized he might have trespassed into genuinely sensitive territory. Nick didn’t hold it against him. As for Esposito, Nick had missed him for his own sake, but also because as one bad turn had followed another in those cold, dry months, Nick had come to believe in Esposito as a talisman, who would bring back warmth to the days, awaken the earth with rain. As for himself, Nick wasn’t sure whether the other detectives saw him as someone under a dark cloud or as the cloud itself. He was eager for Esposito’s return, and supposed Valentine’s was more auspicious than April Fools’.

Luck was something not discussed around Nick. Napolitano had two stabbings in a row in which the perp dropped his wallet at the scene, leaving his photo ID in each case. He crowed that this was the kind of thing that happened to Esposito, but when Nick agreed, laughing, Napolitano turned away too quickly, as if the contrast were too painful to witness. Nick went out with Garelick to a DOA in a single room, an old man whose only company was a listless goldfish. When Nick picked up a gluey tube of medication to identify his ailments, he saw the instruction, “Apply twice daily to lesions,” and flung it away. He scrubbed his hands until they nearly bled. When he tried to shake a few flakes of food into the fishbowl, the top popped off the container, burying the goldfish beneath a crust of crap. The fish didn’t seem hungry. Garelick picked up the bowl and walked to the back, and Nick heard a toilet flush.

When the brick from the rooftop missed Nick’s head by three feet, and Lieutenant Ortiz’s by ten—the lieutenant had come out with Nick on a case, in a clumsily touching effort to probe for suicidal tendencies—Nick doubted the brick-chucker had intended him as the target. Whatever the circumstance, the lieutenant was satisfied by the scramble back to the car—dignity diminished but skull intact—that Nick’s will to live remained avid. On the ride there, the lieutenant had asked him how he was feeling, had assured him he could call whenever, if he needed to talk. It was not the kind of conversation for which he had much aptitude, and Nick respected the effort, despite the odd tone of precondolence. Was that a word? On the ride back, the lieutenant shifted in his seat and looked out at the sky, as if the weather threatened lightning.

They had been right to worry about him. Nick had begun to try on the idea of not being there, and it fit him like a bespoke suit—the feel of it, the look, were unexpectedly becoming. He stared into the mirror and imagined no reflection; he liked what he saw. Not quite, not yet. Nick didn’t want to kill himself, as such; he just didn’t want to live. He was held in check to some degree by the taboo of it, but more because of a fussiness and laziness in dealing with the practicalities, and he put it off, like taxes.

The walk to City Island had ruled out cold water, and hanging had a copycat aspect after Maria Fonseca. He decided against the apartment, on the admittedly ironic terms that it was too depressing even for suicide. Days after, he would be reported as a foul odor and found in a bunk bed. The gun was obvious. That was the cop’s way. It was always right there. That was that, then; the other details he could determine at leisure, or not. The sense of outright self-dominion was a novelty for Nick, and it pleased him, as did the irony of the inspiration, the little lamp of black light burning in the window. As he’d discovered with the recent interrogation of Ivan Lopez, he could accomplish more when he cared less.

This newly ruthless spirit of investigation prompted Nick to visit Michael Cole. Michael had also undergone a transformation, had become someone else. It would be good if they could talk. Could Michael explain his own causes and origins, his influences and metamorphic leaps? People could change, and maybe Nick hoped they could change more than once. He didn’t see the harm in asking, or rather he was not troubled by the possibility of harm. And Nick was not motivated by curiosity alone. It would have made more sense had his concern been
clinical, a desire only to capture a glimpse of something that he did not understand. But there was also a muddy impulse to make amends, in a vaguely twelve-step, check-the-box fashion. The impulse was not religious, in that his religion was not vague on the matter. There were no loopholes for contingencies, no points for saying you were sorry in advance. Killing yourself was the worst thing you could do, and you shouldn’t do it. Nick was in a strange state, persisting in the idea that the answer could change the question. He was a missionary without a mission.

Nick wanted to say hello to Michael, say he was sorry, see what there was to be seen. He never thought that deep amends were owed Michael, on his own account; Nick had assisted in the delivery of tragic misinformation, but it had been wholly a homegrown, homemade catastrophe. Nick would apologize, but he wanted Michael to understand, for both to benefit from the larger perspective. He knew it was a stupid idea as soon as he knocked on the door. Michael would not explain himself like an exhibit in a museum. What were the missing museums again—Indians, coins, explorers, what else?

“Who?”

“Hello?”

A woman answered, older-seeming than Nick but probably not, hard-worn and maybe half-drunk. Her sour breath extended past the threshold, and she wore a new bathrobe of thick blue fluff, the price tag sticking out the neck, that made her seem bonier, the worse for wear. Because Nick disliked her instantly, he strained to be polite, appear interested, and she caught him in his effort. She looked at him as if he were a door-to-door salesman, shifty and shoddy. Which was only half-true, at best. And who was she to talk?

“What you want?”

“Is Michael here?”

“No. You police?”

“Yeah.”

“What you want with Michael?”

“Just to talk with him.”

“Yeah, right. When you people just wanna talk, people end up dead, in jail. You got a card? I’ll let him know….”

The request for paperwork made Nick realize his other mistake in visiting. There was litigation pending between him and the family, which
would drag on for years. It would not be wise to document his interference. And then he smiled. Even as he was entertaining thoughts of annihilation, he was still afraid of a lawsuit, as if they’d dig up his bones to put them under oath.

The woman mistrusted Nick’s smile as he shook his head, turned away. “He knows who I am.”

A few nights later, as he was heading home, going up the stairs to his apartment lobby, a gunshot chipped the sidewalk. When the shot hit, Nick stopped for a moment. Yes, he does know who I am. A few pigeons lifted off from nearby roosts, wing tips softly flapping like polite applause; they were disturbed, but not much. Nick was nearly calm. He almost wanted to wave or give Michael the finger, but he resisted the instinct. He unhurriedly put his key in the lobby door and went in. Inside the apartment, he went to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and sat down at the table. He took out his phone but hesitated before calling 911, savoring the company of his new problem. It was a good one: Could he be sure it was Michael? An assumption about a Cole brother was what had begun this whole crazy game. It had been far more obvious that Malcolm had been shot in the projects that night. There had even been evidence of it, with the ID. By comparison, this was sheer intuition, and Nick didn’t place much faith in his instincts of late. It was not as if he couldn’t have set extraordinary efforts in motion, by informing superiors that a fanatic had dedicated himself to the assassination of a New York City police officer. Maybe Michael was the one who’d graffitied “G-Had” in the lobby. A guaranteed attention-getter, that one was.

But only attention was guaranteed. A reaction did not mean a result, at least as desired. Nick could not control events, could not predict the consequences. There would be a big fuss, yes, but the only certain outcome would be that he would have to leave the apartment. The proof problems with this shooting were the same as with Michael’s attack at Miguelito’s funeral. Even if everyone knew, no one had seen, no one could say. Moving out was inevitable. The risk would be reduced, and the rule about living where you worked would be enforced. Nick wanted change in his life, but moving promised only headache, the same depression at five times the expense. He did not need new furniture, a view of another alley. Something would break soon, and it might not be him. Esposito would be back at work tomorrow; he would know what to do.

The strangest part was that Nick was grateful for the blundering
ambush. He was flattered by it, in that Michael was one of the few people Nick could think of who thought he mattered very much. His first thought was that Michael knew what Nick wanted, wanted to help—
Penny for your thoughts?
—and his second was how funny it was to think so. His third thought was that he was glad Michael had missed. He had been tempted, tested; for now, with help, he had passed. An enemy had given him purpose, when friends and family had failed. Michael had made life interesting again. After that night, Nick took to coming and going through the alleyways behind the building, never through the front door. He would tell Esposito. Esposito would know what to do.