Red on Red (7 page)

“Meehan?”

“Yes.”

“Can you talk?”

“Yes.”

“The Milton Cole homicide, the woman’s death.”

“Yes.”

“Well? What happened?”

“The report’s in the system. You don’t have access?”

“I’ve seen it. And?”

“What happened is what’s in the report.”

“Are you sure?”

There was guile in the question, and Nick waited for the next.

“The other brother wasn’t assaulted? We have a witness that will testify that Esposito assaulted the other one. That the bastard actually told a young man who had just lost his mother, and I’m quoting here, ‘Go fuck your mother, you asshole.’ ”

Nick had to think about that, about who had been there in the hallway—Michael, the EMTs … and the woman Michael summoned to take care of the children. No, she was later. Anyone else, looking out their peephole? Still, he had to agree that no decent man could ever utter such words in such a circumstance.

“That was me.”

“What?”

“And the kid tried to hit me, not the other way around. The quote’s not exact, either, but it’s not that far off, I guess.”

Now there was a pause on the other side of the line, disappointed, then accusatory.

“Then, why didn’t you arrest him?”

“Half his family had just died. I wasn’t hurt. I didn’t think it was worth it.”

“This is not about you, Detective. We’ll be in touch.”

M
ornings, Nick woke to the thought that waking was a mistake. Not that he wasn’t glad to—he just didn’t believe it, didn’t believe that what he woke to wasn’t some devious subconscious subterfuge, some dream within a dream. It was not just the ashy light in the alley outside the window, the aged creak of the springs in the bed, or that his feet dangled off the lower end. Nor was it the fact that he slept in a bunk bed, even though he was an adult man and had been an only child. A large neighbor family had outgrown it decades ago, and his father had accepted the hand-me-down with the remark, “You never know,” which of course is what you always think before you know.

At the head of the bed, there were water pipes, and sound traveled down them sometimes, with passages of uncanny clarity broken by schlock-horror sound effects, reverbs and echoes, muddy slow fades. The voice was male, usually calm, never happy. It didn’t happen every day. It didn’t happen most days, but Nick didn’t remember it at all from when he was young. The pipes, the pipes are calling … He wondered if it would have bothered him more or less if it had been a female voice—it had been a house without women for a long time—and he decided that the malcontent manner made the gender immaterial. There was no good company to be had. After a few minutes, he threw back the thin sheets and rough wool blanket, and began to shake off sleep to figure out what day it was, whether he was late for work or could just lie there for a while. He’d stretch and scratch, like he was sloughing off skin, as the exhalation of warmth left the bed. When he was married, he would walk to the kitchen without a cleanup stop in the bathroom, at home in his home. He was still married, he remembered, but often he’d have to remember.
Here, which was also his home, and had been at all states and stages of his life, he was newly self-conscious. He’d wash his face, brush his teeth, run a comb through his hair, and examine the mirror for a moment, half-expecting to be met with the reflection of a pensive child, or an aged man, blinking through milky eyes. He’d then go out to see his father, who was almost always there, whatever the time. It was nearly ten in the morning; Nick had slept for three hours.

Since he’d come home some six months before, his mother had been more in his thoughts. She had been a shy woman, never at home in the world. There had been an awkwardness to her that he’d noted even as a young child—at the grocery checkout, the rapidly downcast eyes, the slight fumble with the change purse—that had had little to do with being an immigrant, or a country girl come to the city. Early on, she would give Nick the money to pay at stores, thinking it educational for him and a relief for herself. “You’re a powerful help,” she’d say, and Nick loved how she said it. She and his father were from “the other side,” a phrase meant to convey a family sameness of Irish wherever they scattered, but for Nick it was suggestive of otherworldliness. The fact that she’d died when he was twelve carried the phrase deeper into that sense. The other side was a kind of intersection between Galway and heaven, foreign and familiar. “Don’t go,” were her last words to him, as if he were the one who was leaving.

Nick was with his mother when she was struck by a car, crossing the street at a distracted moment, when she remembered she had forgotten to buy stamps. Though she suffered no more than a bad bruise to the hip, he was horrified by her lurching, unnatural movement, by her being taken unwillingly from one place to another—five feet, maybe, but a mile, it seemed—and by the sight of the bulky plaid purse that shot away, dumping its contents as if in a rush to escape, dollars and coupons and rosary beads spilling onto the street. It was seconds before the look of raw mammalian fear left her eyes for an expression of twice-tearful pity, because of the pain and because her son had seen the accident. Nick could never decide whether it had been the fear or the pity that had told him, but he’d known then that she would die. He was likewise unresolved to the nature of her death, when the subsequent hospital visit—pro forma, it was thought, protested against but insisted on by the apologetic driver—led to the discovery of the cancer that killed her in a month. A brute accident, but also a cabal in her blood. Nick learned that
there could be knowledge without profit, and that other, larger forces were always at work, no matter whether you slept or kept watch. Still, vigilance seemed the better stance.

After she died, his father drank a bit more for a while, then less, and now hardly at all. It was the better way, Nick knew, but there was something pointlessly thrifty about the way he took care of himself, the small portions and boiled vegetables and brisk walks. To what end? That was the way the old man would phrase it, were the question turned around, something from catechism, the first principles. But Nick never asked him that, in part because he couldn’t answer the question himself, and in part because he was fond of his father. He’d asked the question in interrogations, and had drawn baffled looks from both crooks and cops. “Why are you here? Not in this room, in handcuffs. Why are you here in the world?” The cops thought it was a trick, and wondered where he’d go with it. Nick honestly hoped to learn something.

Before he became a cop, there was some time in the service, some time in college. He worked on Wall Street for a while, married. Allison was a kind of athlete, driven but unhurried, and she rose steadily as an analyst at her brokerage. They had known each other in grammar school, but her family had moved. It was a dozen years later when they ran into each other again, downtown, at a restaurant. The transformation was storybook, from the spectacled twig of a kid, studious and awkward, to full-blossomed beauty with a sly, kind smile. She knew the probabilities but called it destiny, just to be sweet. Nick said he didn’t know what the chances were, but he’d take them. They trusted each other, seemed to fit; Nick moved in within months, and they married a year later. They could talk or not talk, take hold of each other or leave each other alone, and each felt natural and apt. When he joined the police department, Allison thought it would be better for him, for them, and she was half-right, which was a low percentage for her. They were in no hurry to have children, but when they decided it was time, it didn’t happen. A year of kamikaze lovemaking followed—in the park, in the back of a car, once in a stuck elevator—when they joined forces as much as bodies, it felt, delighting in the cause, determined for the effect. After several false starts, you might call them, sex became part of a regimen that included vitamins and calendar markings and thermometers, undertaken with the eye-rolling good sportsmanship of office mates during a fire drill. Pleasure gradually became duty, and both of them became increasingly
derelict. Management terms popped up in Nick’s mind as he tried to see it as Allison might—results and goals, returns on investment, viability. As their confidence in each other, in what they had together, slowly dwindled, both of them fell back into their jobs. With her long hours and his odd ones, their easy drift became an empty one.

Together they kept each other company for the off hours, which meant a little food in front of the television, a few nights a week. Sundays were a slight confusion for them. She liked tennis, or games with a purpose; he preferred pastimes without one. He liked to go for walks, looking up at the windows of the tenements and towers, catching a face here and there, and picturing the rest of the story—in one, the old man yelling at the television; in another, the young woman weeping by a phone that doesn’t ring; in a third, the couple shocked with love, leaning over the crib of their newborn. He thought she liked these walks too until one week she twisted her ankle and didn’t come out again. That was her excuse, at first, until she realized she didn’t need one, telling him with a note of touching embarrassment that she’d rather lie in bed and read the papers. The walks got longer, and in time, more and more often, Nick found himself heading from where they lived on the Upper West Side to Inwood, back home.

Earlier in the year, his father had felt dizzy and had fallen, breaking his collarbone. It had been some kind of spell, he’d said. Nick had stayed with him in the hospital for three days of tests, and then had gone back home with him for a while. The doctors had agreed, it had been some kind of spell. Bit by bit, and then more and more, Nick had left Allison, but they still spoke, still met, when they found the time. What had begun as a rescue had become a retreat; both of them knew it, but neither brought it up. It would have felt like fighting to talk about it, and they hated to fight. Tonight, in fact. He would see her tonight—some sort of company dinner—and the venue would keep their conversation from straying beyond public-room limits. Still, there would be a pull toward the subject of themselves, whether from gravity or curiosity. Unwatched words had a way of going where they are warned not to stray. Words were like children, just like them. Nick decided to stick to conversation about the weather and work.

When he’d first moved back, his father had asked him if he would be staying. Nick had nodded, and his father had said it was a shame. Nick’s father spoke his mind without restraint or thought of consequence. Not
loudly, not often—but when you asked his opinion, it was like picking his pocket. What was there came out, and if you didn’t like it, you shouldn’t have reached. Days later, he’d felt obliged to clarify, to say that it didn’t mean he wasn’t glad to see Nick, didn’t mean Nick wasn’t welcome. No offense had been taken, Nick had assured him. He had understood the first time around. There really wasn’t a question of hurt feelings, Nick had realized later, only that the old man said so little that he had time to dwell on the ramifications of each word. There was a luxury to that way of living, and a poverty, depending on whether the man in the cell was an inmate or a monk. His father didn’t seem like either, very much. His range seemed limited to slight bemusements and mild regrets. Five years ago—longer?—Nick had bought him a recliner, which had inspired the sole evidence of his father’s capacity for fascination and delight: “What an astonishing thing, to invent such a great machine, just for sitting on!” This morning, when Nick went into the kitchen, he was met with a question in the more accustomed range. His father had clearly put some thought into it.

“There was a dollar on the table. Did you leave one?”

“Maybe, Da … it’s not yours?”

“I don’t think so. I empty my pockets in here, but I just leave the keys. Still …”

“Tell you what, why don’t we split it.”

“That’s the lad.” The old man pocketed the dollar and counted out five dimes, sliding them across the table. “Coffee?”

“Yes, but not instant.”

A look of mild distress crossed his face. Nick had introduced a note of disorder into the little room.

“I had mine already…. It seems a waste to make the whole pot.”

“Make half, then.”

“Aha!”

He smiled and turned to the percolator on the counter, measuring out careful spoons of coffee. From the sink, the water flowed brown a moment, then clear.

“You had a long day at work?”

“All through the night.”

“That is a long day. Someone died?”

“A couple of people. Three.”

“All murdered? God bless us.”

“One murder, one suicide, and one … accident, I guess.”

The old man paused from his task a moment, and his tone was cautious. “Black people?”

“Two out of three. Not the suicide.”

“Ah. They have their troubles, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Drugs, is it? They’re mad for them, aren’t they?”

“Some of them, I guess. But look at Jamie Barry. The other day, I saw him nodding off in the lobby. He’s on the needle.”