Authors: Stephan Talty
Abbie’s bright blue eyes grew still. Then she shook her head no.
“And you came back here to take care o’ your father?”
“Yes, I came back here to take care of my father.”
Only half a lie.
Patty regarded her, her eyes weighing what she’d just heard, growing softer.
“That’s good. Maybe … maybe you’d understand.”
“Understand what exactly?”
Patty made a slow twirling motion with her right index finger.
“Around here.”
Patty’s gaze fell to the carpet, a tan shag with lines of intersecting brown and black. Her eyes searched the patterns there. Then she got up.
“I never offered you anything.”
“That’s okay. Really.”
The woman stood still, then turned.
“Just tell me what’s bothering you,” Abbie said. “I want to find your husband.”
Instead of coming back to the couch, Patty shuffled to the fireplace. On the mantel the family photos, turned at different angles to the room.
Patty walked down the four feet of the wooden mantel, tapping on the white painted top absentmindedly. She paused by the first
photo: her in a big white dress, thirty pounds lighter, beaming and holding the hand of a brown-haired man. Her finger touched the man’s face and then glided down the glass. She took another two steps and got to the last photo. Abbie stood quickly, but Patty pulled the frame to her belly, blocking Abbie’s view.
Patty stared at the wall above the mantel, hesitated, then glanced down at the photo before pressing it again to her body.
“Was your husband good to you, Detective Kearney?” she said, still turned away.
“Not really. He was good to himself, and then I got what was left over. How about Jimmy?”
“Jim wasn’t no good either, tell you the truth. When we’d fight, he’d threaten to leave me, and I’d say to him, ‘You’ve been leaving ever since we were married.’ ”
Patty turned, the picture held tight to her stomach, facing away from Abbie.
“You’ve been leaving me
ever since you got here
. Y’know?”
That almost-Canadian inflection in the phrase.
Y’know
.
“Yes, I know.”
“But now that he’s gone, I want you to bring him back to me. Then …”
The hand holding the picture dropped to her side. Patty began to walk out of the room.
“Then I’ll know what to do.”
Abbie watched her go.
McDonough turned and made the crazy sign by the side of his head.
A
BBIE WALKED OUTSIDE AND THE COLD AIR FELT LIKE IT WAS CUTTING ICE
rings into her lungs. McDonough came up behind her.
“What a freak show. She’s lost it.”
Abbie turned to look at him, her eyes burning. “No, Officer, she hasn’t lost it. And if you pull that hand-gesture stuff again, I’ll see you do midnights on the East Side all winter. You up for that?”
“No.”
“Good.”
McDonough coughed.
“You really think he’s dead?”
Abbie looked up and down the street of tiny cottages, rusting American cars, and small Toyota compacts.
She sighed. “Yes.”
McDonough shook his head. “I don’t see it.”
Abbie’s eyebrow arched. McDonough fidgeted and pulled his broad blue police hat tight over his flushed forehead.
“I’m one test away from getting my detective shield. And when I get it, I’ve put in my request to work with you, Detective Mar—um, Kearney. Tell you the truth, about half of my graduating class did.”
“Really? Why’s that?”
McDonough shrugged. “They say you’re the best since your father retired, that maybe you’re even better than him. And in the County, that’s saying something. Your dad was the fucking gold—”
“McDonough?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Which photo did she choose?”
“Huh?”
“You say you want to be a detective, so I’m asking you, which photo did Patty Ryan take off the mantel when we were talking about her husband? You did notice she took one down, didn’t you?”
“Um, sure.” He kicked the snow on the porch.
“Mm-hmm?”
“Was it the wedding photo?”
Abbie turned away. “No, it wasn’t. And that’s what makes it interesting. Women
always
go for the wedding picture, because if you know anything about marriages, the wedding is almost always the high point for them. Men will almost always pick a photo from when they first met. Don’t ask me why.”
“So you’re saying she took a different one?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”
McDonough looked vacantly at the street and shook his head. Abbie sighed.
“It was a five-by-eight of three men, the man to the right with his back turned, the man to the left probably Jimmy Ryan, the middle one balding. Judging by the difference between Ryan’s current photo and this one, it might have been ten or fifteen years ago. The three were standing on the lakeshore, probably facing the Canadian side, judging from the angle of the sun on the Peace Bridge to the right.”
Abbie slapped her notebook against her thigh.
“And, damn it, she walked away with it.”
“So why didn’t you ask to see it?”
“Because she wouldn’t have shown me. And she would have known that I know. And I don’t want that yet.”
McDonough was staring at her with a dazed expression.
“Know
what
?! What is it that you know?”
Abbie sighed. Back in the County. The shadows, the undertones, the whatever you want to call it, were thicker here than in a Louisiana swamp. She felt it press down on her chest, the old familiar claustrophobia.
Why
had
she come back? On good days, it was to take care of her father, and to finally discover who she was, as corny as that sounded. Because she hadn’t found it anywhere else, not at Harvard, not in Miami.
And this was the last place left to look.
On bad days, it was because she felt at home in the city’s windswept emptiness; its air of desolation suited her own.
She heard McDonough cough.
“If Jimmy Ryan is dead,” Abbie said, shaking off her reverie, “then Patty has a good feeling why he’s dead.”
“No shit! Is that what she meant when she said, ‘Then I’ll know what to do’? Is she going to war or something?”
“Listen to what the woman said, McDonough. And how she said it. Did she seem angry?”
“No.”
“How would you characterize her demeanor?”
“More like, um, depressed.”
Abbie nodded. “Very good. I think she’s talking about burying Jimmy. Taking care of him one last time. It’s as if she’s already mourning him.”
McDonough smiled. “Or killing the fuck who did it, more like it.”
Abbie felt the overwhelming urge to punch McDonough in the stomach. If there was one cop like him on the force, there were fifty. “If you think she’s a lunatic, a crazy woman you can laugh at and ignore, you’re going to miss something. And if that happens, I’ll make you sorry you ever put on the uniform. Is that understood?”
McDonough nodded.
“Good. I want you to start on your sweep. Get his picture out.
The TV stations, the
Buffalo News
, the
South Buffalo Post
, websites, everything.”
McDonough scribbled in his notebook as Abbie headed to her car.
The County was divided into a long grid. There were four parallel main avenues that radiated out from downtown Buffalo, each with its own particular history. South Park was closest to Lake Erie, and it had been rough as long as people could remember. The legend was that there were more bars per square foot than anywhere else in the country except Reno, Nevada, but so many opened and closed every month that the number was in constant flux. South Park had biker bars, Irish bars, country and western bars, cop bars, old man bars, fireman bars, heavy metal bars, strip bars, steel plant bars (now welfare bars), bartender bars, hooker bars, and freak bars. A freak bar was a druggie bar.
Next came McKinley Avenue, broad and green. In its heyday it had been the best street in the County. Firemen with two jobs on the side dreamt of owning a house there, with its rich lawns, mowed by their owners—the County had never gotten rich enough to import immigrants to care for its hedges—sloping down to an elm-lined avenue. The major corners were anchored by huge, broad-shouldered homes built in the forties and fifties, and the two schools that parents worked two and three jobs to send their kids to. Bishop Timon for boys, Mount Mercy for girls (including Abbie, class of ’98). The schools were still there, but the paint was peeling from the signs and drugs were slipping into the polished corridors.
Abbott Road was her old haunt, the working-class avenue where high school kids colonized every corner on weekend nights and raised hell. It had been Abbie’s second home for her high school years.
Then came Seneca Street, which was descending into some kind of open-air prison. Cops didn’t want to work Seneca anymore; too violent, too disturbing. Abbie tried not to think about it, honestly. It had once been a nice busy street, with hardworking families hoping
to graduate to Abbott Road or move out to the suburbs. But now it was like a concrete patch of Appalachia. For all Abbie knew, they were having human cockfights behind the convenience stores.
Abbie worked out a grid in McDonough’s squad car and four people began walking it—McDonough, Juskiewicz, Abbie, and her partner, Z, short for Zangara. Frank Zangara was a homegrown product, like 95 percent of the cops in Buffalo, but he was from the West Side, a black-haired Sicilian in the Department’s sea of brown-haired Celts and redheads. They’d called him Animal until he reached sophomore year in high school and shot up to 250 pounds of muscle by working out in his basement gym while everyone else was running wild in the local parks, strapping cases of Stroh’s beer to their backs with belts and walking around like astronauts with their life packs. After he’d gotten big, they’d still called him Animal, but with respect.
“This guy’s probably in Vegas spending his 401k money,” Z said as they tramped through knee-high snow on South Park. There’d been a rash of those going around, husbands leaving wives or wives leaving husbands, without explanation or forwarding addresses.
“Not this time,” Abbie said. “He’s around.”
“Which intuition is it this time, women’s or Ivy League’s?”
“Cop’s,” she said, cutting her eyes at him. “Ever heard of it?”
Z laughed.
South Park was rutted with deep grooves in the ice, navigated by rusting cars. It seemed like the only new cars were the ones owned by city agencies, Health and Human Services or Sanitation. A new car on South Park looked like some kind of visitor from the future.
They split up and took opposite sides of the street. It had snowed that morning and many of the houses were draped by a blanket of white, like the felt sheet that wrapped the foot of a Christmas tree.
The houses looked drearily alike. Frozen in silence, their owners out working at Wal-Mart (where they’d be floor workers, not managers), at one of the few remaining auto parts plants out at the lake, in the firehouses, or in the bars. There were no bold colors splashed on the fronts. God forbid you should buy a whimsical mailbox, Abbie thought. The County tended to think alike.
She covered one block, then two. A slow mist of intense cold seemed to filter into her black riding boots, freezing the toes first. She’d chosen fashion over warmth, always a mistake in Buffalo. Abbie stamped them on the hard sidewalk and kept moving on.
Abbie glanced into a backyard, then another. She got to the end of the block and crossed over, kept walking, then stopped. Her eyes swiveled back slowly to the second driveway on the block and she turned and retraced her steps. There on the fresh snow were what looked like a series of squirrel droppings.
“Hold on,” she called across to Z.
Abbie headed down the driveway. Suddenly, she shot the right flap of her down jacket back and unholstered her Glock.
Abbie saw Z start toward her from across the street, dodge a UPS truck, and then hurry to the sloping driveway.
“Blood trail,” she said as he hustled up.
The trail was ruby-red and fresh. It hadn’t soaked down into the snow yet. The drops started two feet into the driveway off the street, just where two tire tracks ended at a narrowing of the fence.
He couldn’t get the truck all the way back to the garage, Abbie thought. It was too wide across. Had to carry the body in from here.
The home had a sunken look, light blue with black trim and a swaybacked porch. She put her back to the opposite house and held the gun out in front of her, two-handed stance, as she sidestepped down the driveway. Z had his gun aimed at the house, alternating between the side door and the front entrance, which was reached past a chain link fence. The trail was leading toward the garage, a dilapidated shed of no discernible paint color with two broken windows looking mournfully out at the street.
Something snapped to her left. Abbie swiveled her gun to the sound, but it was shingles on the garage flapping up in the wind. She stepped carefully through the snow until she reached the single garage door. She pressed her back against it, turned and stood on her tiptoes to see through the filmy windows into the interior. But they were covered with old newspaper taped to the inside, and all she could glimpse through the holes was milky gloom.
Abbie looked down. The blood trail led straight under the garage door.
She pointed to Z, then to the handle of the door. Abbie pulled out her flashlight and held it up near her right shoulder, the gun leveled beneath it. She nodded to Z. He took a breath and reached for the handle. Z gripped it with his enormous right hand, turned to look at her, and pulled. The door came shooting up with an ungodly shriek.
Eyes—red, green, and brown—glinted at Abbie from the darkness. She whipped the gunpoint from one to the next in quick succession. But the eyes didn’t move. Lifeless, a constellation of dead things.
Abbie’s shoes made a crinkling sound as she stepped onto a blue tarp, smeared and speckled with blood, that covered the floor. Another one hung from the wooden beams of the ceiling and shrouded the right corner of the garage. Carcasses were spread out on work-tables, bones shining dimly in the murk. She caught her breath.