The Graving Dock (9 page)

At first Ben had closed ranks with his mother, given Michelle short shrift, which was understandable, but she had stuck around, and eventually, after the first dicey days in Intensive Care, the ex had seen that someone new was in Jack’s life and backed off. Soon all the press and Departmental frenzy died down and it was just Michelle and Ben, every day, making sure Jack got something decent to eat, that the nurses were taking good care of him. The son’s initial confusion and hostility had slowly given way to a shy kindness, and they had become friends, bonding over crappy snacks from the hospital vending machines and gossip from celebrity magazines.

Jack emerged from the kitchen looking puzzled. “Should I bring forks or spoons for the dessert?”

Michelle smiled. The man was one of the NYPD’s more senior and capable detectives, but in many ways he still seemed like a boy. All men were boys at heart, at least all the ones she’d spent time with. There was that familiar befuddlement over the workings of the simplest things, that need for praise and reinforcement, those quick resorts to anger or petulance.

All you could do was look on and shake your head.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT, JACK
made love with Michelle. Or tried to, at any rate. He propped himself above her, watching her closed eyelids move and twitch. She had disappeared into a deep interior landscape, as if she was searching for her orgasm on some far horizon only she could see. He tried to help her move toward it, but tonight he couldn’t tell how much he was contributing.

Men struck him as pretty simple sexual machines. If you were with someone you found attractive, especially someone you loved, the only difficult part was trying to hold back from feeling too good. Women, on the other hand, could be like foreign cars, requiring subtle diagnostics and maneuvers.

Finally, Michelle moaned a bit, and he took that as his own permission to finish, but he wasn’t sure that she was satisfied.

He rolled away, lay silent as his breathing slowed. She was an indistinct form in the darkness next to him. He shrugged to himself. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the best sex they’d ever had, but they’d have plenty of opportunities to improve on it.

He glanced at the clock on the bedside table. Six hours until he’d have to go back to work, but he didn’t feel sleepy yet.

His mind drifted back over the day’s tour.

After checking out the bodies in the park, the detectives had split up. Halpern had stayed behind to organize a canvass for witnesses, while Jack and Vargas had gone off to notify the doctor’s wife. That was certainly one of the worst parts of the job, but Jack had done it many times and he knew not to worry about it until he got there. As he drove back out onto the loop drive, it didn’t take long for the somber atmosphere of the crime scene to dissipate. The joggers continued on their merry rounds, cocooned in their headphones, oblivious to the tragedy that had unfolded earlier, just yards away; the little swarm of bicyclists zipped by again, continuing in its orbits around the park. The moral, as always, was simple and blunt: For the victims of homicide, life was blotted out in seconds, but for everybody else, it flowed right on.

When Jack reached the west side of the park, his ruminations about the bodies in the woods suddenly gave way. A concrete band-shell went past, empty and forlorn in the winter cold, but in his mind’s eye he saw a big zydeco band on stage, a happy crowd spread out in front. A warm summer evening, people clapping along, little kids running through the throng…and there he was, dancing with Michelle, on their first date, the first time he had cut a rug in years…He decided that he would definitely propose to her in the park. The fact that the Boathouse was just several hundred yards from the morning’s crime scene didn’t faze him. This was New York City: How could you possibly avoid places where someone had died?

Michelle was silent in the bed next to him; he wondered if she was asleep.

He went back to retracing the day. Just beyond the park he and Vargas had pulled up in front of a fancy brownstone. He could remember a time when Park Slope had been a run-down, shabby neighborhood where few people wanted to live, but now the streets were packed with yuppies and their baby strollers, and brownstones were selling for millions. The doctor had found himself a prime one, just a few blocks from the hospital where he worked.

A pretty but harried-looking young blonde answered the bell, one little kid scampering in the hallway behind her, another on the way, by the looks of her belly, which was only half-covered by a pink T-shirt. The child—a boy with a pixie face under a head of wild blond hair—hid behind one of his mother’s legs and peered around wide-eyed at the strange people who had just shown up at his door. Jack and Vargas exchanged a quick somber glance. (He remembered when his colleague had joined the task force, the only woman in his team. Some of the guys had tried to foist off death notifications on her, remarking how women were so much more “sensitive” about such things, but she made it clear that she was having none of it. “If you’re not good at it,” she had said, “you need to
get
good.”)

The young wife let them in, and they sat with her in a fancy front parlor, with its elegant old moldings and its dusty chandelier, and Jack did his best to be gentle.

“No,” the wife said at first, shaking her head, a weird kind of smile contorting her mouth. “He’ll be back in a few minutes. He just went for a jog.”

And then he had pulled out the driver’s license from the wallet, and she held it up in front of her face, staring at it, and he watched her world implode.

A flurry of emotions rippled across her face. Who knew what was going on inside? Maybe she felt guilty because she had argued with her husband just before he left the house. Maybe their marriage was not going well, and there was some quick dart of relief. Or maybe she loved him with everything she had. You never knew for sure. All you knew was that you were watching someone’s whole planned future suddenly disappear in front of them, as if they had been driving and ignored a warning sign:
BRIDGE OUT.

Homicide detectives frequently said that their job was to stand up for victims who could never speak for themselves. Jack felt that sometimes—as he did for the boy who had floated ashore in Red Hook just days earlier—but he also knew that the dead were beyond help. No justice would ever bring them back. He could never restore this woman’s husband to her, could never even restore her shattered sense of safety. As he watched her crumple into herself in the armchair in front of him, though, he knew that he would do anything in his power to catch the man’s killer. He could at least get the perp off the street so this wouldn’t happen to somebody else. And maybe he could help this woman feel in some small way that the world had not surrendered to chaos.

Suddenly he felt very tired.

“Jack?”

He roused himself from his sad reverie. Evidently he wasn’t the only one lying here awake.

“Yeah?”

Michelle’s quiet voice rose up into the dark next to him. “Remember, the other day, when we were in the bath and you asked me about kids?”

He sighed. The shift was jarring, and this new subject was too big to bring up now, so late. After dinner he had made a plan for a walk in the park with Michelle, just three days away. He wanted to get through the marriage proposal, to get that settled. Then they could worry about if and when to have a kid…

He reached out and stroked Michelle’s shoulder. “I remember. No offense, but would it be okay if we talked about it some other time?”

I
N THE HAPPY HORSESHIT
land of TV cop shows, murders were committed by villains who cleverly plotted every step of their crimes, from luring victims to disposing of bodies.

In real life, homicides usually happened in jagged, unpredictable outbursts. A domestic squabble flared into sudden violence. A street diss provoked a macho response. Once the bodies hit the ground, the perps had a rude awakening: It was a lot easier to pull a trigger than to deal with the aftermath. How to dispose of a large, heavy body in the middle of one of the biggest, most crowded cities in the world? You could rarely bury the thing, in this world of concrete. If you did the killing solo, just moving the corpse presented a major physical difficulty.

In this case, even though the crime had happened in the relative isolation of the woods, the shooter would have been suddenly confronted with
two
bodies. Getting them out of the park past all of the joggers and bikers would have been nearly impossible, and the perp couldn’t risk the time to bury them in the frozen ground. So he had staged a false scenario. The ruse had failed, but the detectives still had one unidentified body on their hands. Not for long. Since there had been no anthrax mailings or subway bomb threats that day, the next morning’s tabloids actually had room for news of the killings. Just hours after they hit the stands, Jack received a call from a colleague in Flatbush. Detective George Billing’s cigarette-rough voice: “I heard you were working that thing in Prospect Park and I got a tip for ya. Last night I pulled in this kid named Pudgie Dibell for trying to move some coke outside a bodega over here. He already has a sheet, so he’s looking to make a deal. He claims he overheard two kids from the Trumbull Houses talking two nights ago. They said they were planning to go over to Prospect Park and
get paid
. ‘Park Slope makes, Trumbull takes,’ that kinda noise.”

Jack leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “Did he give good descriptions? The body I’ve got is a short, stout kid with one gold tooth and a silver cuff, right ear.”

“That sounds right. James Ausbury. I know the kid—I’ve collared him a number of times myself: purse snatching, GTA…”

“And the other one?”

“Street name: T-Mo. Real name’s Tryell Vincent. That one’s a tough nut: violent assault, weapons charges, attempted homicide. I’ve been trying to put him away for years, but he’s slicker than weasel shit. You wanna pull him in?”

Jack stood quickly. “I’m on my way.”

“WAS IT HIM?” MICHELLE
asked two days later as they settled into Jack’s car. “Was he the shooter?”

Jack put on his seat belt, then turned to Michelle and raised his eyebrows theatrically. “Do you want me to jump to the ending, or would you rather hear the story?”

She raised her hands. “Sorry, Mr. Columbo. Tell it your way.” Jack was surprised to be telling the story any way at all. With his ex-wife, he had kept all talk about work to a minimum. Most cops did. He saw the ugly side of human behavior every day, and he didn’t want to bring that home. You had to build a containment wall. Or at least he had thought he needed to. It had hardly protected his marriage. Had done the opposite, really—this was one of Louise’s big gripes, that he didn’t talk enough. Maybe he had a chance now to do things differently, after fifteen years alone…

He waited as a Hasidic family—a mother in her prim blond wig, three little girls in identical plaid skirts—crossed in front of the car. His hand drifted to his jacket pocket where he had stashed the ring. The sun was bright, and he tilted the visor down. An inch of snow had fallen the previous night, but now a freakishly warm day had already melted it, sending sparkling beads of light dripping off the eaves of Midwood’s suburban houses. He turned onto Coney Island Avenue: a long, incredibly drab boulevard of car supply stores, Pakistani phone card shops, and taxi drivers’ quick-eats joints. The avenue bisected nearly the whole of Brooklyn, from Brighton Beach all the way to his current destination: Prospect Park.

He stopped at a light next to a huge brick yeshiva, a religious school. Michelle glanced at it and frowned. “I hope this doesn’t sound offensive, but why does Jewish religious architecture have to be so ugly?”

Jack chuckled. It was true. The Christians had their soaring cathedrals, the Muslims their airy mosques, but his people seemed to favor a dull and heavy sort of building, inspired, seemingly, by mausoleums…or matzoh balls.

He paused to remember where he had been interrupted. In truth, he was glad to be able to tell the story, not just because doing so opened up a promise of a new way of being with a woman, but because it helped him take his mind off his fast-approaching new proposal.

“So,”
he said. “Tryell Vincent. Definitely a bad guy.” The suspect, twenty-two, had the lean, mean look of a predator, one of the small pool of aggressive offenders who committed a hugely disproportionate number of the city’s violent crimes. Vincent was just under six feet tall, well muscled, with a strange dent on the right side of his head, evidence perhaps of some childhood accident or abuse. He had worn a fancy down jacket, another angry marshmallow. He slouched back in the hard chair of the interview room as if it were a lounger, legs spread out before him, hands clasped comfortably in his lap.

“He knew all about gaming the system,” Jack continued. “He showed up with a sharp lawyer. The guy could have refused to talk at all—it’s a constitutional right—but they were going out of their way to pretend to cooperate.”

“Why?”

“He wanted to present his alibi. He claimed he’d spent the night before the shooting and the next day taking care of his invalid aunt. Who just happens to be a prominent member of the local church.”

“Did she back him up?”

“
Oh yeah.
Said they had watched TV together, that he made her breakfast the next morning. The detective I was working with wanted to throw up—he had watched this guy skate away from major charges too many times.”

“So what did you do?”

Jack shrugged. “We had to let him go.” He pictured Vincent standing up and saying, “It’s been real nice talkin’ with y’all.” The look on his face said
Fuck you, Five-Ohs. I beat you before, and I beat you again.
Then he strolled out of the interview room, right hand tucked down between his legs, practically cupping his balls. Jack’s blood pressure rose again just thinking about it. The kid had likely just killed two human beings—including his own friend—yet he didn’t seem to have a care in the world.