Where It Hurts (21 page)

(FRIDAY NIGHT/SATURDAY MORNING)

I
wasn’t sure of the time, but I was sure of the place: a holding cell in the Third Precinct. Beyond that, there wasn’t much I could be sure of, but I could make some pretty educated guesses. I was probably fucked, big-time. You didn’t have to be a genius or a jurist to imagine the narrative an ADA would spin at trial.
The sudden and tragic loss of his beloved son knocked Mr. Murphy off his bearings. His entire life and family were blown apart. Who among us can’t empathize with his plight? And for two years he tried in vain to hold it together, taking a menial job at a low-rent hotel, but just recently he had begun acting oddly, even irrationally, associating with known criminals, making wild accusations against one of the most respected police officials in our county and against the department itself. And so on and so on . . .

Well, that was if things ever got as far as a trial. I didn’t doubt there’d be a bargain on the table and a deal to make, one keeping my time inside to a minimum, but one that would ruin me nonetheless. No time inside was minimal enough for a cop, retired or not. Oh, everyone would be sympathetic as hell.
Poor,
poor
Gus
,
he just went off the deep end. Do you think he meant to use the heroin to do himself in?
Sympathy, as the last two years had schooled me, has serious limitations.

Something else I was sure of was that I had the mother of all headaches. That cop who pulled me over, whoever he was, had a heavy hand. At least the cut wasn’t too bad, and when the EMT who arrived to take care of Slava’s fake heart attack patched me up, I let him know that I’d recently had a tetanus shot. But just at the moment, tetanus and lockjaw were about the last things on my mind. There was a part of me, though, that took perverse satisfaction in all of this. I must have mightily pissed somebody off, that or I was getting close. Close to what, I wasn’t sure. Because as far as the Delcamino murders were concerned, I had smoke but no mirrors, nothing to hold on to.

One thing was clear to me. Even if Milt Paxson had been responsible for sending Pauly Martino at me, he wasn’t responsible for this. He didn’t have that kind of juice. It was one thing to instigate a fistfight in a mall parking lot. Assault, false arrest, planting evidence, that was in a whole other league altogether. No one was going to risk his career and meaningful jail time by doing Milt Paxson that kind of favor. Nope, all this had me looking straight up at Jimmy Regan all over again. Or, if I was wrong about Regan and somebody was playing me, maybe that was exactly where they wanted me to look and who they wanted me to look at.

There was a thin string of hope I was clinging to. Although I’d been put through the pantomime of an arrest, had my rights recited to me, I hadn’t been booked. Hadn’t been printed. Hadn’t had my photo taken. So I wasn’t in the system. Not officially. Not yet. I hadn’t even been interviewed. And it was because of those anomalies in procedure that I hadn’t made a single phone call. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted to call Tammy Wang, a reporter I knew who worked the local crime beat for
Newsday
. I was so furious I wanted to scream it from the mountaintop, but this was Suffolk County. No mountains. No mountaintops. Just a few steep hills in Farmingville. Even if we had mountains, who would’ve listened?

There were other people I thought about calling. Annie? I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction and I didn’t want to upset Krissy.
Father Bill? He was too close to Jimmy Regan. Casey? Not exactly the follow-up phone call you want to make after a first date. Dr. Rosen? He was away. Pete McCann? Al Roussis? If I was radioactive before this, no cop would want to get within five miles of me now.

That’s when it struck me again like it had the night before this whole mess began. The night before Tommy Delcamino showed up at the Paragon. It struck me that my world had grown so small. I once had so many friends I couldn’t count them all, once measured my wealth not in terms of money but in terms of friends and goodwill. But now my world would fit inside the bottom half of a bathroom Dixie cup and I had been foolish with my wealth. Grief and pain cut me off, had let me shed my friends as a careless bird loses his feathers, one here, two there, failing to grow them back, losing so many he can no longer fly. Now when I thought about who my friends were, the list was tiny, made up more of acquaintances than friends, really. And not far down the list, just after Slava, Felix, and Fredo, was Aziza, the Pakistani girl from Dunkin’ Donuts. These were people I barely knew who barely knew me. People who knew me only in terms of how much cream I liked in my coffee. Some of them didn’t know that much.

At some point, I simply surrendered to the pain in my head and the weariness. So I had no idea what time it was when the cell door swung open. This was it. I was off to get fingerprinted and to pose for my close-up. To get interviewed, finally. Or maybe they’d just skip past all that and haul me over to the courthouse in Central Islip to room D11 for arraignment. I was pulled up into a sitting position. The air smelled strongly of coffee. Funny that the aroma of coffee should be so present because of how I’d been thinking of Aziza and of coffee before drifting off to sleep.

“Gus, come on,” a voice from three rooms away called to me. Then my face got slapped, not so gently. “Come on, get up.”

I opened my eyes and a blurry face appeared in front of me. It had the outlines of a familiar face and I waited for its mouth to move again, to speak again.

“Come on, Gus, you’re getting kicked, free and clear. Drink some of this.”

The blurry face with the now more familiar voice put a paper coffee cup in my hand and squeezed my stiff, cold fingers around it to make sure I had hold of it. The coffee was hot and how I liked it. It tasted like salvation. After a few swallows, my vision cleared and I recognized the voice and the face to which it belonged.

“Pete?”

“Come on.” He yanked me to my feet. “You’re getting released. Don’t give anybody a chance to rethink this. You can’t afford it.”

We walked, him propping me up on our journey through the precinct out onto Fifth Avenue. Morning was about an hour away from breaking and it wouldn’t break with a smile. December on Long Island could be a fickle month and this one had been fairly miserable on several accounts. They hadn’t predicted snow, but it was here, about three inches of it blanketing the ground in the parking lot, the wind whipping it into our faces like pieces of crudely cut glass. If I wasn’t fully awake before we got outside, I was now.

“My wallet and things,” I said, gasping for breath against the wind, turning to head back into the precinct.

“I’ve got them,” Pete said. “They’re on the front seat. Everything but your gun. You’re not getting that back so fast.”

I thought about arguing with him about that, but I needed to get out of the weather.

“But where’s my car?”

He pointed over my shoulder. “It’s right there, for chrissakes. After we talk, I’ll drive you back here to get it.”

I was too tired and cold to fight about it and got in.

(SATURDAY MORNING)

I
thought we’d end up in a diner, but Pete McCann wasn’t about diners. Pete was all about wanting and getting, so at something like five thirty on a snowy Saturday morning the week before Christmas, we ended up at Malo, an after-hours club in an industrial park in Hauppauge. The doorman, a Polynesian guy as big as a backyard shed and whose eyes were about as feeling as a headstone, didn’t even look twice at Pete and didn’t ask for the cover. He sneered at me, shaking his head. I would have sneered at me, too. I hadn’t had a chance to clean up or to look at myself in the mirror before Pete hauled me out of the holding cell. I didn’t doubt that I looked a mess, the bloody bandage on my head adding to my visual charm. And I’m sure I didn’t exactly smell great. Jail cells have a certain stink, a kind of sickening mash-up of pine-scented disinfectant and human decay that sinks deep into your pores and coats your skin. Sometime soon, I’d be spending a long time in a hot shower with several little bars of hotel soap.

Pete guided me over to a red vinyl banquette, but it wasn’t like there was much competition for any of the seats in the place. Besides us, there were eight people in the club, and that was counting the guy at the door, the bored-looking barely dressed blond woman behind the bar, and the
equally unenthusiastic and completely undressed black chick dancing on a makeshift stage in the center of the room. Though the music to which she was performing was some disposable piece of electro-thump trash, she was as evocative as an assembly-line robot, going through the motions as if doing it in her sleep. I’d been there. I knew all about that, about robotics. The other people in Malo were three too-loud, too-drunk guys, and two well-dressed white men in their midthirties. Real ruler-of-the-universe types who probably got hard-ons dreaming of subprime mortgages and Warren Buffett. One of Three Stooges was apparently on the verge of marriage.

I’d been to places like this with Pete before. Before, when we were pals. Before he became a detective. Before he fucked my wife and then kicked her to the curb. Before John died. That’s just how my life, however I moved forward, was going to be divided from now on. This was the perfect venue for Pete, the ultimate hunting ground, because these places attracted people with money, people who liked bending the rules, people who had things like bored trophy wives looking to warm their feet in someone else’s bed.

The blonde came out from behind the bar to take our order. She was wearing tight gold lamé hot pants, a really sheer black halter, and black stilettos. I wondered why she bothered. In a way, she was more naked than the dancer. Her expression was certainly less veiled. This wasn’t the life she wanted, but it was the one she had and it was eating her alive. She was pretty and had probably been a knockout once.

“Pete,” she said, nodding at him as if he were another piece of the furniture. “Glenlivet neat, right?”

“Can’t sneak one past you, can I, Mags?”

She turned to me. Her face brightened. “And you, sir?”

“Irish coffee. Just the Irish and the coffee, okay?”

“Sure, anything for a friend of Pete’s.” She spoke it as if a death sentence.

“Then don’t bother,” I said, sounding cruel and especially nasty. “He’s no friend of mine.”

But if I thought my tone would put her off, I was wrong. She smiled. It was a really gorgeous smile. One I bet she had forgotten all about.

“In that case, it’s on the house. He’s no friend of mine, either.” She turned and walked away, the lower cheeks of her heart-shaped ass flexing as she retreated to the bar.

“You make fans everywhere you go, huh, Pete?”

“Mags was my favorite mistake,” he said, looking genuinely regretful. “Used to be on TV on soaps. Some minor roles, but never made it past there. Married a personal injury lawyer from Kings Point.”

“This is a long way from Kings Point.”

“Yeah, about as far as you can get. When she took the plunge, I guess she didn’t realize her husband went through wives like wet naps at a rib restaurant. First hint shoulda been the prenup he made her sign.”

“I’m sure you fucked her before the divorce.”

“Years before,” he said without an ounce of guile or guilt. “Christ, she was wicked in bed. Wicked good.”

And just as he said those words, Mags brought our drinks. I reached for my wallet, but she shook her head at me. “No, I meant it. Drinks are on the house. Nice to see that Pete knows some people who have some manners and don’t assume I’m community property.”

“Community property.” Pete laughed. “See what happens when you marry a lawyer. Stick to serving drinks and showing off your tits, Mags.”

She turned and left.

“You really are an asshole, aren’t you, Pete?”

His face went blank. I guess the time had come for us to talk about what we had really come here to talk about.

“Gus, I need you to listen to me and know that I’m not fucking around.”

“Just say what you gotta say, Pete.”

He smiled that disarming smile of his. “You know what a warning shot across the bow means, don’t ya?”

I took a swallow of my drink, the smell of Jameson whiskey cutting
through the coffee like a straight razor. It was a scent I knew too well. It smelled like my father, like my childhood.

“Let me finish my drink if we’re gonna do this in riddles.”

“Okay, Gus, you want it like that? Fine. Cut the crap and go back to doing what you were doing two weeks ago. Go back to mourning John, driving that stinking courtesy van, and making something out of what’s left of your life. But leave the Delcaminos in your past. Forget about them. Pretend they were two anonymous people who got killed in a fucking avalanche in Switzerland or in a tsunami in Indonesia or some other fucking place. Do what you gotta do to get them out of your head, but do it and do it today. Do it now.”

“Or else what, Pete?”

“Or else there won’t be some poor Russian schmuck having a heart attack to save your ass. You know how close you came to going away last night?”

I nodded, drinking my drink.

“That can happen to you anytime. Worse can happen.”

“You know, Pete, last night in the holding cell I had lots of time to think.”

“That’s trouble waiting to happen. What were you thinking about?”

“All sorts of things. Like about how small my life’s gotten and how I don’t have many friends anymore. But I was also thinking about how desperation makes people do some stupid shit.”

“Oh, yeah, how’s that?”

“I want you to tell the man pulling on your little marionette strings something for me.”

“Gus!”

“No, Pete, hear me out and then I will consider myself duly warned and threatened.”

He shook his head at me, but didn’t speak.

“I don’t know exactly why TJ Delcamino or his father were killed, but I pretty much know when the thing happened that led to their
murders. I wasn’t sure before yesterday, but I am now. Something happened four or five days before the kid was killed that led to the bloodshed. He found something out or stole something or stumbled into something that made him a lot of money fast and got him killed for the bother. And when I narrow that window down, when I find out what that thing was, it won’t be me who’ll be going away.”

Something flickered across Pete’s face. It was a barely perceptible change in his expression, something a person who didn’t know him the way I knew him would have missed. Then he stood up, took what was left of his drink, and threw it in my face.

“You’re a fucking fool with a death wish, Gus Murphy.”

“Maybe so.”

“I’m trying to help you out here.”

“The only person you ever tried to help was yourself, and it usually involved helping yourself to things that didn’t belong to you. Well, Pete, this is my fucking life and you can’t have any more of it. And if there’s not much time left to me, that’s my choice, not your boss’s. So go fuck yourself and fuck him, too.”

He stormed out.

When I turned around to look, everyone else in the place except the dancer was staring at me in silence. The dancer continued to go through the motions, her taut, flexible body shining with sweat and glitter. Now she was the lone robot in Malo. I was done going through the motions.