The Girl in Times Square (22 page)

Chief Colin Whittaker called Spencer into his office and asked him to close the door. “O’Malley, are you nucking futs?”

Spencer could see Harkman through the glass windows, sitting, sweating, a satisfied smirk on his fat face. “What’s going on, Chief?”

Whittaker was tall, rumpled, gray-haired, carrying two weapons strapped to him, not wearing a jacket, already perspiring even though it was early morning and cold. “Our honorable congressman is fit to be tied.”

“Yes, tied up in jail.”

“He said you came into his home and completely overstepped your bounds. Says you harassed him. He is ready to sue the NYPD.”

“I didn’t harass him,” rejoined Spencer. “I asked him some routine questions, which he was slow in answering, by the way. Cagey, stalling for time, stammering, evasive, quick to anger, repeating my questions back to me.
Slow.
Hiding something. Lying, Chief.”

“Did you get him to cough up information based on evidence you didn’t have?”

“I got him to tell me the truth about one fucking thing, yes.” Harkman was such a bastard.

Whittaker pressed his hands together and when he spoke he used a placating, deliberate, through-the-teeth tone one uses with wayward children. “Spencer, I have been so good to you. I never second guess you, I let you do what you want, I watch your back, I stick up for you, sometimes I cover for you. You’ve been worth it. But I’m afraid I have to put my foot down on this one. Do you know who Bill Bryant is?”

“No.”

“He is a retired New York City councilman, turned businessman, philanthropist, charitable contributor to historical landmarks in New York City, and a very generous contributor to the NYPD. Most of the new Kevlar vests we have, including yours, we have because of his generosity.”

“Bully for him. What does he have to do with anything?”

“He has an office in the Carnegie Hall Tower. On
57th
Street.”

“All right…” Spencer drew out.

“Bryant called his good friend the police commissioner late last night—the police commissioner!—and said that Andrew Quinn came to see him on the afternoon of May 14, around one or two p.m. They spent two or three hours together, went out for a drink at the 57/57 bar, and then Quinn went to Penn Station to catch a train home. Our councilman, who’s been in public life for fifty years and is a revered member of the community, is willing to swear an oath to this. This morning he sent us the original copy of his private planner, where Andrew Quinn’s name in Bryant’s own handwriting is penciled in from the hours of one to four in the afternoon.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Why didn’t Quinn remember this yesterday when I spoke to him?”

“I don’t know why. I’m not privy to everything that goes on in his sleazoid, adulterous brain. However, if he needed an alibi for that Friday afternoon because of some cockamamie theory you dreamed up, he’s got one.”

“Conveniently he got one the day after I came to speak to him when he didn’t have one.”

“He didn’t remember. He said he was flustered, there was a social gathering at his house, he was feeling extremely stressed and harassed by you.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“Spencer, you know what, how about if you and I make a little deal? Until you find the body, parts of the body, bloodied clothing, or photographs of the deceased in the congressman’s wallet, you don’t bother the congressman, the councilman, the senators, the governor, or the frigging president. You simply leave all politicians out of it until you have a scintilla of evidence of wrongdoing. How would that be for you?”

“Chief, come on. Quinn has a lot at stake. How do you know he didn’t kill her because she was going to go public with the affair? Perhaps she was pregnant. He’s going to run for the Senate again, you’ll see. He’s completely shameless. And you know he is, look, he used his wife’s name to register in a hotel so he could pop his mistress! I mean, this is the kind of man we’re dealing with.”

“I hope you’re using pop in the one sense and not in the other, O’Malley. Yes, he is a son of a bitch to his wife. That’s what divorce is for. The rest of what you’re telling me is nothing but conjecture, supposition, assumption, guesswork. It’s not police-work. Speculative motive, yes, but no evidence, not even circumstantial evidence! And he’s got an alibi now.”

“Well, then perhaps she wasn’t killed that Friday. Perhaps she was killed on Saturday, or the following Monday when the congressman was heading back to DC.”

Whittaker banged his head several times on his desk before he spoke again.

“Spencer, I’m serious. This isn’t homicide. It’s missing persons. You’re making half of New York law enforcement furious and you don’t even know if a crime has been committed. Leave the congressman the fuck alone. Do you hear?”

“Let’s arrest him and have the courts sort it out.”

“Arrest him for what? Shopping? He’s got a provable alibi! Oh, and by the way, something else, which you keep forgetting—we got no fucking body!”

“Yes, we also don’t have
her
! And we know she was supposed to go to her mother’s and never showed up.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right.” Whittaker coughed and sat up straight, assuming a proper mock-legal air. “Mrs. McFadden, tell us, how often did you talk to your daughter? Oh, twice a month you say. Sometimes even less. Was Amy reliable? No you say? What? There were many times in the past when she said she’d be coming up for the weekend and then never showed up and never called to explain? Why, that simply can’t be, Mrs. McFadden! We have built our entire case on Amy’s reliability. She simply could not have not shown up and then not called! Why, it is our only incontrovertible proof of murder!”

Spencer stared blinklessly at his commander. “Whenever you’re done, Chief.”

“We got nothing, Spence.
You
got nothing. We don’t have a body, we don’t have physical distress in the apartment, we don’t have a letter from her, a journal entry implicating Quinn, a suspicious phone call. We don’t have a ransom note from her kidnapper, we don’t have blood on the congressman’s suit. We have no witnesses, no fluids, no evidence, no
body
! We got nuffin’! Time to move on, my friend. Time to move on. You’ve got eighteen MP cases open on your desk and Harkman is getting testy.”

“Fuck Harkman.” Spencer didn’t even lower his voice.

“You don’t want me to promote him over you just to shut him up, do you?”

Spencer wanted to spit as he left Whittaker’s office.

From that day on, Colin Whittaker began the daily meeting of all the station detectives and patrolmen like this: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to start our meeting reiterating the following point regarding Detective O’Malley’s
McFadden case. As of this morning, have we found a body?”

In unison the officers would say, “No.”

“Detective O’Malley, did you hear that? There is no body. Therefore, is it a homicide or a missing persons investigation? Detective O’Malley, I didn’t hear your answer.”

“Missing persons.” Through his teeth.

“Good. Now that that’s settled, let’s move on to the next item on our agenda for today.”

By the beginning of only her
third
week of chemo, Lily said to DiAngelo, I can’t do this anymore. She thought the words must have come out whispered, because he said, “What?”

“This. I can’t do it.”

“Stop it. You’re doing great, this is nothing.”

“I’m serious. I just…” She wanted to say, I’m too sad, I can’t get over how low I’m feeling, and I can’t shake it. The sadness never leaves. And it was pervasive; the sorrows that afflicted her were assailing her from all sides.

For example:

Lily and Spencer were sitting on the stoop outside her building. It was an Indian summer day, and by promising to carry her up five flights of stairs if he had to, he somehow got her to come downstairs and sit for a few minutes in the October afternoon warmth. Both were wearing jeans, jean jackets, both were pale and drawn. He had a buzz cut. She had no hair on her head at all. They were sitting lazily, chatting about nothing when his beeper sounded. He showed Lily the caller ID. J. McFadden, it read. Lily waited quietly while Spencer had a stilted five-minute conversation with Jan. She seemed upset. When he hung up, Lily said, “She calls you even on Sundays?”

“Lily, she calls me every God-given day.”

Suddenly she didn’t want to be sitting on the stoop anymore. She knew that something ticked over in him when Jan McFadden called, and he was no longer thinking about his nephews or her nieces, which is what they had been chatting about before the phone rang. As if to confirm that, Spencer said, “Jan McFadden was drawing my attention to page eleven of
The New York Post.
Did you see it?”

“No.”

“I saw it. A girl, sixteen years old, was found floating in the Atlantic ocean, weighted down by chains that were tied around her feet.”

Lily closed her eyes. “Do I
have
to hear this?” Why does Jan McFadden continue to read the papers?

It was as if she hadn’t spoken. “The girl was bound, gagged, and strangled in a Delaware motel room,” Spencer continued, “and then dropped with chains and cinder blocks from an airplane that one of her killers chartered. She’d been missing for two months.”

Lily was quiet, trying to stave off nausea, trying to decipher meaning.

“Two young punks killed her. Do you know why?”

“I don’t want to know why.”

“One of the killers was dating the girl’s foster stepsister, who didn’t like her. She didn’t like her, and wanted her out of the way. So they killed her.”

Lily gave a theatrical sigh, replete with vocalization. “And this is pertinent why? Because most killings are done by people we know? By people who are close to us? Or is it that you think you should check out some Delaware motel rooms?”

“No, no, and no. But I’m glad you asked. The two suspects were apprehended long before the girl’s body was found.
Eventually
they confessed and were charged with first degree murder. So it is pertinent because it shows you that you can have a homicide investigation without the body. All you need is a potential confession.”

“Tell that to your boss, not me.” Lily struggled to her feet. “I’m not feeling good,” she said, using her cancer to turn away from Amy. “My throat hurts. And I know what you think. And you know what I think. I can’t hear about this anymore, Detective O’Malley.”

Other times Lily tried to turn away from the cancer to sift through her brother’s outrageous inflicted miseries, but turning to Andrew meant instantly having to turn away from Spencer; leaning toward her brother meant by necessity turning away from Amy and all good feelings for her, turning away from caring about Amy’s vanishing, from Amy’s happy life in their apartment, from two years of their intimate friendship; turning to Andrew meant invariably turning to a hostility for Spencer, such a naked hostility that after the stoop talk Lily asked Joy to ask him not to come anymore until she got her head together. Lily was so pathetic, she couldn’t even tell him herself.

There was just one little problem. Vague thoughts of feebly defending a secretive and invisible Andrew weren’t going to replace for Lily Spencer’s very real and solemn taking of responsibility for things that weren’t even his. And what remained, even without Spencer and his crazy Delaware parallels was this: Andrew, her brother, lied and deceived and betrayed Lily and his whole family by being with Amy. Nothing Spencer did or said could change that.

But there was no avoiding the detective in Spencer. He brought the detective with him even when he brought the chicken soup and the blue eyes.

She didn’t know of a way to see him and not think of Andrew and Amy. Spencer made it so impossible for Lily to be in denial about so many things in her life, and all at once, that she frequently found herself thrashing from side to side, unable to find comfort in any cranny of her mind. She was sick, but the person who helped Lily feel a little better thought her brother had something to do with the disappearance of her best friend. There was no way to get around that elephant in her head. So
this was why Lily did the only thing she could to remain half-sane. She asked Joy to withdraw her from Spencer. Joy refused. Lily said it was an order not a request, to which Joy replied, “You’re getting rid of him, now you’re threatening to get rid of me, too? Who are you going to be left with, Lily? You want him not to come? Tell him yourself.”

Lily left him a pained message on his beeper. Without even calling her back, Spencer stopped coming around, stopped calling—and now Lily couldn’t face her life.

Without saying any of this to the doctor, this is what she was saying to the doctor: I can’t do this anymore.

And what did the good doctor suggest by way of solution out of the quagmire?

“You should watch Jay Leno at night. Watch Comedy Central. Old re-runs of
Saturday Night.
”

“Completely devoid of humor, by the way.”

“Just using them as an example. Rent comedies. Buy yourself a DVD player, a new TV, a new couch. Rent movies, only funny ones, I’m going to tell Joy, nothing outside the comedy section.”

“I don’t think Joy would understand. She doesn’t have a humerus bone in her body.”

“Funny. Comedies only, Lily.”

She tried DiAngelo’s approach. With Joy’s help Lily bought Best Buy’s most absurdly expensive television—a fifty-inch plasma TV. The TV was good. She hung it on her wall like a painting. This pleased her. The DVD player was good. The $300 chenille blanket heavy like a sheepskin rug was good. The Pottery Barn couch was goooood. Soft, mushy, with big pillows. The whole thing barely fit into her living room.

“If I didn’t need all of my money for cancer, I would buy myself that Park Avenue apartment you were talking about, Joy,” Lily said. The bill for September had recently come. With the hospital fees, the anesthesiologist, DiAngelo, the X-rays, the blood, the medicines, the drugs (she couldn’t believe she had to
pay
to
put those into her body!) and Anne’s mortgage and bills, September cost Lily four hundred thousand dollars. At this rate, she better die or get better by spring, because there was going to be nothing left of either her or her money.

“Money well spent,” said Joy. “You’ll be broke, but you’ll have your life.”

“Mmm, what joy to be alive and broke,” said Lily.

“You’d rather be dead and rich?”

Covered by a heavy blanket, Lily sat through the rest of week three watching
Tootsie, Airplane, Animal House, Bachelor Party, Porky’s Revenge
, and
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,
the stupider the better. Joy sat with Lily on the couch once or twice, but watched as if the movies were
I, Claudius
, not
Bachelor Party
—not a facial muscle moved on Joy in response to the antics on the screen. By the beginning of week four, when the VePesid was being piped in, Lily said to DiAngelo, the movies aren’t helping.

“Have you tried Conan O’Brien? He’s very good.”

“Doc, you’re not listening.” She didn’t think that was it.

“You’re not eating. Lily, you have to eat.”

She didn’t think that was it.

“What would you like, a week off? We’ll have to start from scratch. We’ll have to do continuous cytarabine again. Is that what you want?”

“No. But I don’t want this either.”

“Only nine more weeks to go.”

By week four
all
the hair had gone from her body. Only the eyelashes remained. What were they made of, if not protein? “Don’t worry,” said Joy, who was helping her out of the bath. “It’ll all grow back.”

“Like I care. I’ll never have to shave or wax again.”

Week four,
Some Like it Hot, Annie Hall, The Great Dictator, My Fair Lady
, not technically a comedy, but one of her favorites.
The Graduate, Blazing Saddles, Ghostbusters.
She rediscovered Bill Murray, and watched
Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters
again,
Ghostbusters II
and
Groundhog Day.
Lily got stuck on
Groundhog
Day.
Something in it stuck in her. She watched it three times on Friday, three on Saturday. And then on Sunday, when Joy had her day off, Lily called Spencer and stammering into the phone asked if he wanted to come and take a look at her new plasma TV.

He came—bringing Coke and ginger ale and popcorn. His hair had gotten a little longer. He was so sullen, he was like Sinead O’Connor’s “Gloomy Sunday” song right on her new couch.

But then they watched
Groundhog Day
and he laughed. After it was finished, Lily asked if they could see it again. “If you want,” Spencer said.

There was a line in the movie spoken by Bill Murray to one of the regulars in a bowling alley bar: “
What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing you did mattered
?” Bill Murray stared at the guy with his deadpan face, and the regular responded, “
That about sums it up for me
.” Spencer stared at Lily with his deadpan face, and then reached over and took the remote off her lap, and pressed STOP, saying, “Okey-dokey, I think that’s enough
Groundhog Day
for this evening.”

They sat on the couch, she at one end, he at the other. Spencer said he had to be going, and Lily agreed that was best.

On Fridays when she felt like she could move, Lily put on Amy’s skicap and with Joy’s help walked to HMV on Broadway or Best Buy on 6th and bought movies. No renting and returning business with Blockbuster. She would buy dozens at a time. One day at Best Buy, she offered to buy a refrigerator for Joy, who declined. “I’d wait for your October hospital bill before I started buying refrigerators.”

The October bill was only a hundred thousand dollars. Lily was so excited, she bought Joy a refrigerator
and
an oven. She gave ten thousand dollars to Anne for her November mortgage and extras, and another five thousand to Amanda for the girls’ birthdays. She bought another $300 chenille blanket for the couch—in case Spencer needed one.

Lily bought every comedy in the comedy section, even
A Life Less Ordinary
, which didn’t look remotely funny. Sometimes she slept through them. Sometimes she watched them with one eye. She put the same movies on again and again until she saw them whole. Sometimes she even laughed.

During week five Steve Martin said, speaking from the TV as if straight to Lily, “You don’t watch enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” So Lily watched
The Out of Towners, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, All of Me, Man with Two Brains, My Blue Heaven
, and
Lonely Guy
to get Steve Martin to answer her life’s riddle.

“He answered it in
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
,” Spencer told her. “Remember? He said, ‘All dames are alike: they reach down your throat and they grab your heart, pull it out, and they throw it on the floor, step on it with their high heels, spit on it, shove it in the oven and cook the shit out of it. Then they slice it into little pieces, slam it on a hunk of toast and serve it to you, and then expect you to say, thanks, honey, it was delicious.’”

Spencer could be funnier than any comedy, especially
A Life Less Ordinary.
Laughing inside, Lily said, “I can’t imagine you really believe that.”

And Spencer said no, he didn’t, he just thought it was funny. “I think the answer to the riddle of life is more from
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
than from Steve Martin. Bill says, ‘The only true wisdom consists of knowing you know nothing.’”

And Lily, as Ted, said, “That’s us, dude. That’s us.”