Empty Ever After (5 page)

“Why’d you do that, scrub the paint off, I mean?”

“I don’t know. I was angry, I guess. I want Jack to rest in peace, not to be part of …” She collected herself. “I just want peace is all, for Jack and myself.”

That was easy enough to understand. I had been pretty vague with her that morning about what had been done to Patrick’s grave, but I thought the time had come to tell her all the details.

“My lord!” Mary slammed on the brakes. And to her credit, it wasn’t lip service. She seemed utterly horrified by what I described. “I’m so sorry, so very sorry.” She repeated it several times as we made our way slowly to the gravesite.

“It’s okay, Mary, it wasn’t your doing.”

“This is it.”

We’d stopped along the way to buy some flowers—not roses—to lay on Jack’s headstone. When Mary turned off the car, we both reached into the backseat to collect our bouquets. I asked Mary for a minute by the grave alone. She hesitated, her earlier discomfort once again showing through.

“Go on,” she said, if not happily.

I wasn’t a grave talker. I took no solace in speaking to bones, grass, and granite. Besides, it’s not like Jack and I were old buddies. I liked what little I knew of him and he had seemed really in love with Patrick. No small accomplishment. Although I didn’t know Patrick, I’d learned a lot about him during the course of my search for him. Much of what I learned, I didn’t like. I didn’t care that he was gay: not then, not now. I even felt sorry that he suffered from paralyzing OCD, but he could be a bully like his father. He’d even gotten physical with a girl he dated while working through his sexual identity. No, I hadn’t requested the time alone to chew the fat with Jack about his old boyfriend.

Like Mary said, the roses were gone, but I could see where she’d scrubbed the paint off the back of the small headstone. It wasn’t a grand thing, Jack’s tombstone. It was a low chunk of beveled granite: tasteful, modest, Midwestern. I liked that. I liked that a lot. I laid my flowers down and extended my hand to Mary.

While not exactly Father Blaney, Mary wasn’t much for touchy-feely either. She sort of winced when I held out my hand. I remembered her being warmer when we had her to New York, but this was her home turf and this was her brother’s grave. Patrick had been an abstraction to her, someone who only existed in her brother’s phone calls and letters. So his burial, twenty years after the fact, was almost surreal. Jack, on the other hand, had been very real to her.

“Hi, Jack,” she said, laying down her flowers, “Mr. Prager, Patrick’s brother-in-law, has come all the way out from New York to see you …”

I sort of tuned out to the rest of her chat. Mary was right, there wasn’t much to see. But sometimes you have to see for yourself that there’s nothing to see. It was like when I looked at the envelope in the office. I didn’t figure there’d be anything on it, but I had to look for myself. Suddenly, I was feeling pretty beat. There’d be time to rest that night. I was going to stay over in Cincinnati and fly out early in the morning.

When Mary was done, I picked up a pebble and placed it on Jack’s headstone. I did it without thinking. I noticed Mary staring at me and not with a glad expression.

“Why did you do that?”

“Habit. It’s a Jewish tradition.”

“But what is it for?”

“You know, Mary, I think it serves a lot of purposes. It shows other mourners that the person buried by that headstone isn’t forgotten. I guess it also lets the spirit of the person buried there know too, though I don’t think that’s in the Talmud. But a wise man I loved very much once told
me it was symbolic of adding to the mound, to show that a memorial was an ongoing thing and would never truly be finished.”

“Oh.”

“I meant no disrespect. Would you like me to remove it?”

Her mouth said no, but her body language said yes. I chose to take her at her word. That’s what Israel Roth would have done. For the second time in two days I remembered our visit to the cemetery all those years ago. I was smiling as we pulled away, remembering Mr. Roth. I also saw that Mary could not take her eyes off that pebble.

I asked Mary if she’d like to go to dinner, on me, of course. She said no. I tried to contain my disappointment. It meant I’d have time to get a lot of rest and maybe call one or two of Jack’s old students. Not that I thought talking to them would get me anywhere, but again, I just wanted to hear it for myself. At first, Mary was reluctant to share any of the names or numbers with me, though she eventually relented. Again, I understood. Mary just wanted this over with so she could get back to the way things were. She liked her routines. The older you get, the less you like change. And the disturbance of her brother’s grave was a little more serious a change of routine than her dry cleaners moving to a new location.

I thanked her for her putting up with my visit. And when she said she was sorry for what had been done at the Maloney family plot, Mary got that sick face again. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that bothered her more than having Jack’s resting place messed with. She was tired and we kept our goodbyes brief. Tired as she might have been, I was willing to bet that the second I turned the corner, Mary would be heading back to the cemetery. That pebble I left on Jack’s headstone would have to go.

 

I RETURNED THE rental and caught a shuttle bus to my hotel. I got back early enough to have ventured into Kentucky or Cincinnati, if I was so inclined. I was not. I felt the allure of a quick meal and a long stretch in bed more than the need to feel blue grass between my toes or … What was Cincinnati famous for, anyway? Chili, right? I could get some of that from room service. But first I ordered a double Dewar’s on the rocks at the hotel bar and found a quiet table away from the TV. I took out the list of names and numbers Mary White had given me and punched the first number into my cell.

I left three messages before I got a live human being on the phone. Too bad, in a way. I was just perfecting my message.

But like I said, someone picked up on my fourth call.

“Yo.”

“Hello, is this Marlon Rhodes?”

“Who da fuck wanna know?”

“My name’s Moe Prager.”

“Dat name s’posed ta mean sumptin ta me?”

“How about the name Jack White?”

That got Mr. Rhodes’ attention. “Say whatchu gotta say.”

“I knew Jack White a long time ago in New York. He was close with my brother-in-law Patrick. I was thinking about Jack this week and I asked his sister Mary if she could put me onto any of Jack’s old students because I knew he meant a lot to you guys.”

“Don’t be lyin’ to me, man. Dis about dat graveyard shit, right?”

“Right.”

“You Five-O?”

“A cop? I used to be.”

“Fuck y’all.”

So ended our conversation. I waited a few minutes and called back. He didn’t answer, so I left my finely honed message on his machine. I got two more of Jack’s former students on the phone and though the conversations were longer and more polite than the one I had with Marlon Rhodes, they were equally unproductive. Both liked and admired Jack and both had, on occasion visited his grave, but neither had made a habit of it and neither had been there for months.

I drank another scotch, ate a bowl of awful chili, and went to bed. I had a long dreamless sleep without insight, vision or revelation. It was just exactly the kind of sleep I needed.

DURING THE PLANE
ride home I realized I was doing it again. I was keeping secrets under the guise of protecting someone else. That’s crap. Secrets protect their keepers. I hadn’t told Katy about what had happened to Jack’s grave or that I was going to Dayton. When I spoke to Sarah, I severely minimized the extent to which the Maloney gravesite had been desecrated. If it hadn’t suited my purposes, I probably wouldn’t have shared all the details with Mary White. Had I shared them all? It gets hard to know. But if there is any justice, it’s that the protection of the secret keepers doesn’t last forever. For when any two people share knowledge, their secret is a shared illusion.

Looking back twenty-two years, it seems like madness to have not confessed to Katy what I knew about her father and brother. I was afraid to tell her I had found her brother and that I had let him go. Afraid to tell her that her father had been thrown off the NYPD in the early ’60s for a brutal assault and that it had been covered up. Afraid to tell her that her father and brother had been locked in a perverse game of chicken. Afraid to tell her that her father had ordered two of his underlings to beat the piss out of me on a SoHo street. The truth would have hurt her, sure, but it might’ve hurt me much worse. There’s a reason people say, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” I wasn’t willing to risk losing the only woman I had ever loved by being the bearer of bad news. And my original mistake was compounded by the day, by the week, by the year, by the decade. Even now there were things I hadn’t told her, things she had a right to know.

It’s strange how they say you can’t teach instinct. Learned behavior is learned behavior. Instinct is inborn. Yet it’s become nearly impossible for me to distinguish between the two. Once you replace reason with self-preservation,
secret keeping becomes reflexive. For me there was little difference between a secret and the blink of my eye. Only in retrospect can I distinguish between the two. So there on the plane home, in seat 24C, I decided for the second time since 1978 to come clean.

My resolve lasted the time it took to get to New York and have the wheels of the 737 hit the LaGuardia tarmac. When we touched down, I turned on my cell phone and found a long queue of messages. The first was a hang-up from Katy. The other four were from my brother Aaron, Sarah, Carmella Melendez, and Sheriff Vandervoort. All of them were looking for me on behalf of Katy and their tone ranged from desperate to angry. Something was wrong, but no one would say what exactly. When I tried Katy’s house and cell numbers, I got recordings. Now I was getting panicky. As a keeper of secrets, I was uncomfortable on the opposite side of the fence.

Although the Boeing was half empty, it took an eternity to deplane. When I finally managed to free myself, I did something I hadn’t done for quite some time: I flashed tin.

“Listen,” I said to a woman at the desk of the adjoining gate. “I need a quiet place to make some important calls.”

“Follow me.”

I was glad she took a closer look at my badge than at me. I was getting a little long in the tooth to be flashing a regular cop’s badge at anyone. Like an aging comedian taking stock of his act, I realized the time had come to retire that joke. The gag was on its last legs.

“You can use this lounge, officer,” she said, fiddling with a keypad lock. “No one will bother you in here and if you want to use the phone, just hit nine for an outside line.”

I thanked her and waited for her to close the door behind her before getting back to my cell phone.

My first thought was to call Aaron, but it wasn’t my second. Just the judgmental tone of his voice was enough to set my teeth on edge and I’d heard hints of it in his message. I was an enigma and a bit of a disappointment to my big brother. He didn’t understand my being a cop in the first place and when I was forced to retire, he couldn’t comprehend my missing the job so much. There was a lot he didn’t understand about me. We were wired differently, Aaron and me. But the flash point between us for the last two decades was my stubborn refusal to leave my PI license in the sock drawer with the dust bunnies and the rest of my unrealized ambitions and accept my life as a wine merchant. That was always enough for him. It never was and would never be enough for me.

I tried Katy’s numbers again to the same frustrating end. Again, I left messages. I hesitated to call Sarah before I knew anything. Trouble sucks,
but it sucks worse when you’re seven hundred miles away from it and you feel helpless. I didn’t want to add to her frustration. Carmella was out of the office and not answering her cell, so that left Sheriff Vandervoort. At least he’d left me his cell number.

“Vandervoort.”

“Sheriff, it’s Moe Prager. What’s going on?”

“Where’ve you been, Mr. Prager?”

“What the fuck does that matter? What’s going on with Katy?”

“You better get up here.”

“One more time, Sheriff, what’s going—”

“Your ex-wife’s had a little trouble. She’s over at Mary Immaculate.”

“Trouble! Is she hurt? What happened?”

“No, she’s not hurt, not physically, anyway. We just had a little excitement and the doctors wanted to take a look at her.”

“Sheriff, I’m an ex-cop and I respect other cops, but if you don’t start speaking English to me, I’m gonna—”

“Mrs. Prager called us to her house and when we got there she was … unhinged and talking a little crazy. Maybe it was all the heartache from yesterday or—”

“Crazy how?”

“She said she got a call.”

“A call. A call from who?”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

“Sheriff!”

“She said she got a call from her brother Patrick.”

 

I’D BEEN TO the Mary Immaculate Medical Center only once, back in 1981. I was up in the Catskills looking into an old fire in which some of my high school classmates had perished. One of the dead was my fiercest teenage crush, Andrea Cotter. That’s when I first met Mr. Roth. During the investigation, Francis Maloney suffered a stroke and I rushed to be with Katy. Now as I drove, I remembered that last time, how I prayed for the cold-hearted prick to die. He knew it too. Even with a partially paralyzed face and mild aphasia, he warned me to be careful what I wished for. He was right. Eventually all death wishes come to pass, and the fallout with them.