CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHOOSE YOUR GROUND: THAT was what Epstein had told me. Choose the place where you will confront them. I could have run. I could have hidden myself away, and hoped that they would not find me, but they had always found me before. I could have chosen to return to Maine and face them there, but how could I have slept, fearing at any time that they might come for me? How could I have worked at the Bear, knowing that my presence there might put others at risk?
So I spoke to Epstein, and I talked with Angel and Louis, and I chose the ground upon which I would fight.
I would draw them to me, and we would end it at last.
They gave Jimmy the inspector’s funeral: the full NYPD works, even better than that which they had given my father. Six white-gloved patrolmen carried his flag-draped coffin on their shoulders from S [oul′?t. Dominic’s Roman Catholic Church, their shields masked by black ribbons. As the coffin passed by, cops old and new, some in street uniform, some in dress blues, others in the old-man coats and hats of retirement, saluted as one. Nobody smiled, nobody spoke. All were quiet. A couple of years before, a Westchester DA had been seen laughing and chatting with a state senator while the body of a slain cop was being carried from a church in the Bronx, until a cop told her to shut up. She had done so, instantly, but the slight had not been forgotten. There was a way these things were done, and you screwed with it at your peril.
Jimmy was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery on Tilden, in a plot alongside his mother and father. His older sister, who now lived in Colorado, was his closest surviving relative. She was divorced, so she stood by the graveside with her three children, one of them Jimmy’s nephew Francis who had come to our home on the night of the Pearl River killings, and she wept for the brother she had not seen in five years. The Emerald Society Pipes and Drums played “Steal Away,” and nobody spoke ill of him, even though the news of what had been carved into his body had by then leaked out. Some might whisper later (and let them whisper: such men were worth little) but not now, not on that day. Today he would be remembered as a cop, and a well-liked one.
And I was there too, in plain sight, because I knew they would be watching in the hope that I might appear. I mingled. I spoke with those whom I recognized. After the burial, I went to a bar named Donaghy’s with men who had served alongside Jimmy and my father, and we exchanged stories about both men, and they told me things about Will Parker that made me love him even more, because they had loved him in turn. All the time, I stayed close to groups. I didn’t even go to the restroom alone, and I watched what I was drinking, even though I gave the impression that I was matching the others beer for beer, shot for shot. It was easy enough to disguise, for they were more concerned with one another than with me, even though I was welcome in their company. One of them, a former sergeant named Griesdorf, did ask me about the rumored connection between Mickey Wallace’s death and what had happened to Jimmy, and for a time there was an awkward silence until a red-faced cop with dyed-black hair said: “Jesus, Stevie, this isn’t the time or the place! Let’s drink to remember, then drink to forget.”
And the moment passed.
I spotted the girl shortly after 5 P.M. She was slim and pretty, with long black hair. In the dim light of Donaghy’s, she looked younger than she was, and the bartender might have been forced to card her had she asked for a beer. I had seen her at the cemetery, laying flowers on a grave not far from where Jimmy was being buried. I had seen her again walking down Tilden after the funeral, but so were many other people, and I had noticed her more because of her looks than because of any suspicion I might have had of her. Now here she was in Donaghy’s, nibbling at a salad, a book on the bar before her, a mirror facing her so that she could see all that was happening behind her. A couple of times, I thought I saw her glancing at me. It might have been nothing, but then she smiled at me when I caught her looking. It was a come-on, or the appearance of one. Her eyes were very dark.
Griesdorf had spotted her too.
“Girl likes you, Charlie,” he said. “Go on. We’re old men. We need to live vicariously through the young. We’ll look after your coat. Hell, you must be dying under there. Take it off, son.”
I stood, and swayed. “No, I’m done,” I said. “I wouldn’t be good for much anyway.” I shook hands with them all and dropped fifty bucks on the table. “A round of the best,” I said, “for my old man, and for Jimmy.”
There was a cheer, and as I left them I staggered. Griesdorf reached out a hand to help me.
“You okay there?”
“I didn’t eat much today,” I said. “Dumb of me. Think you could get the bartender to call me a cab?”
“Sure. Where do you want to go?”
“Bay Ridge,” I said. “Hobart Street.”
Griesdorf looked at me oddly. “You sure about that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” I handed him the fifty dollars. “Call those whiskeys while you’re there.”
“You want one for the road?”
“No, thanks. If I have one more, I’ll be lying on the road.”
He took the money. I leaned back against a pillar and watched him go. I saw him call over the bartender, and could hear a little of what passed between them from where I stood. There was no music playing in Donaghy’s, and the after-work crowd had not yet begun to arrive. If I could hear what was being said at the bar, so could anyone else.
The cab arrived ten minutes later. By then, the girl was gone.
The cab dropped me outside my former home. The cabdriver looked at the fluttering crime scene tape and asked if I wanted him to wait. He looked relieved when I said no.
There were no cops watching the house. Under ordinary circumstances, there would have been at least one officer on duty to secure the scene, but these were not ordinary circumstances.
I walked around to the side of the house. The gate to the backyard had been secured loosely with a chain and some tape, but the chain lacked a lock: it was there purely for show. The kitchen door, though, had been secured with a new lock and hasp, but it was the work of a moment to open it with the little electric rake that Angel had given me. It sounded very loud in the stillness of the late evening, and as I entered the house I saw a light go on somewhere nearby. I closed the door and waited until the light was extinguished and the darkness grew deeper.
I flicked on my little Maglite, its beam hooded with masking tape so that it would not attract attention if someone happened to look at the back of the house. Anmael’s mark had been removed from the wall, probably in case reporters or the terminally curious took it upon themselves to take surreptitious photographs of the kitchen. The position in which Mickey Wallace had been found was still marked, and the cheap linoleum was stained with his dried blood. My beam picked up the kitchen cabinets, more modern than those that had been in the house when I lived there, yet also cheaper and flimsier, and the gas stove, now disconnected. There was no other furniture, apart from a single wooden chair, painted a sickly green, that stood against the far wall. Three people had died in this room. Nobody would ever live here again. The best thing for everyone would be to tear the house down an Z Aouse downd start afresh, but in the current climate that was unlikely to happen. And so it would fall further and further into decay, and children would dare one another to run into the yard and taunt its ghosts at Halloween.
But sometimes it is not places that are haunted, but people. I knew then why they had returned, those remnants of my wife and daughter. I think I had understood from the moment that Wallace’s body was discovered here, and I sensed that he might not have been alone and uncomforted in his final moments, that whatever he had seen, or thought he had seen, while prowling around my property at Scarborough had come to him here in a different form. There was a sense of expectation about the house as I passed through the kitchen, and when I touched the handle on the door my fingertips tingled, as though a small electrical charge had just run through them.
The front door had been taped from the outside, but only the door lock and the security dead bolt held it closed from the inside. I opened them both and left the door slightly ajar. There was no wind, so it stayed as it was. I climbed the stairs and wandered through the empty rooms, a ghost among ghosts, and wherever I stopped I re-created our home in my mind, adding beds and closets, mirrors and pictures, transforming it from what it now was to what it once had been.
There was the shadow of a dressing table against the wall of the bedroom that Susan and I had once shared, and I brought it back, filling its surface with bottles and cosmetics, and a hairbrush with blond strands still caught in its bristles. Our bed returned, two pillows hard against the wall, an imprint of a woman’s back upon them, as though Susan had only just absented herself. A book lay with its cover exposed on the bedsheet: lectures by the poet e. e. cummings. It was Susan’s comfort book, Cummings’s descriptions of his life and work interspersed with a selection of poems, only some of them written by the poet himself. I could almost smell her perfume on the air.
Across the hallway was another, smaller bedroom, and as I watched, the vibrancy of its colors was restored, the dull, scarred walls becoming a clean vista of yellow and cream, like a summer meadow ringed with white flowers. The walls were covered mostly with hand-drawn pictures, although there was one large painting of a circus above the small single bed, and another smaller painting of a girl with a dog that was bigger than she was. The girl’s arms were curled around the dog’s neck, her face buried in its fur, and the dog stared out from the frame as if daring anyone to interfere with its charge. The bright blue sheets on the bed were pulled back, and I could see the outline of a small body against the mattress, and the dent in the pillow where, until seemingly only moments before, a child’s head had rested. The carpet beneath my feet was a deep blue.
This was my home on the night that Susan and Jennifer died, restored to me now as I felt them return, as they all drew closer, the dead and the living.
I heard a sound from downstairs and stepped into the hallway. The light in our bedroom flickered and then went out. Something shifted inside. I did not stop to see what it was, but I thought I saw, in the shadows, a figure moving, and a hint of scent came to me. I stopped at the top of the stairs, and I heard a sound from behind me, as of small, bare feet running across carpeted floors, a child moving from her room to be with her mother, but it might simply have been the boards settling beneath my feet, or a rat disturbed from its lair beneath the floor.
I descended.
At the bottom of Z Ahe bottom the stairs, a poinsettia stood upon a small mahogany table, sheltered from drafts by the coatrack. It was the only houseplant that Susan had been able to keep alive, and she was immensely proud of it, checking it daily and being careful to keep it watered just enough so as not to drown it. On the night that they had died, it had been knocked from its stand, and the first thing that I saw when I entered the house was its roots lying amid scattered earth. Now it was as it had always been, cared for and loved. I reached out for it and my fingers passed through its leaves.
There was a man standing in the kitchen, close to the back door. As I watched, he moved forward a step and the moonlight filtering through the window caught his face.
Hansen. His hands were hidden in the pockets of his overcoat.
“You’re a long way from home, Detective,” I said.
“And you couldn’t stay away from yours,” he replied. “Must have changed a lot since then.”
“No,” I said. “It hasn’t changed at all.”