The Pocket Wife (13 page)

J
ack Moss stares at the manila envelope on his desk. He picks it up and runs his thumb and index finger along its edges, tracing the perimeter, stalling. The crime-scene investigators lifted some prints from the front seat of Celia Steinhauser's SUV that don't belong to her or her husband. Forensics got a match, and Jack has the name in his hands. The prints were in the front seat—the door handle, the dash, the radio—but more important they were on the glove compartment—inside it, even. Whoever sat in the dead woman's car was all over it. Recently.

He's happy for the phone call that comes in just as he's begun loosening the glue at the top of the envelope. Something nags at the back of his brain. He sets the envelope down on his desk and picks up the phone. “Moss,” he says, but his voice sounds scratchy. He clears his throat. “Jack Moss.”

At first there is only silence, and then there's Ann. “Can you talk?” she says. “Is this a good time?”

“Not really.” He swivels around in his chair so he can see down the hall. “But it could be worse.”

“I went back to the house for a few things, but I'll have to get the rest the next time I—”

“Whatever you want,” he says. “Whenever you want.” Now that she's made up her mind, now that she's actually gone, he doesn't want to talk about it. Sometimes he doesn't want to talk to her at all.

“Jack?”

He swivels back, drops his head into his hands.

“Say something.”

“There's nothing left to say,” he tells her, and it sounds silly and cliché and not what he wanted to say or meant to say or what he imagined himself saying if Ann ever left him. And he had imagined it. He always half expected her to be gone when he came home at an impossible hour or missed a celebration or countless other marital transgressions he'd committed over the years.

“I guess that's why I'm here and you're there,” Ann says. “Because there never was anything left to say.”

“That isn't true. We had something.”

She sighs. Her voice shakes. He wonders if she's crying. “I tried to make things work for years.”

“Not long enough,” Jack says, but even as he says it, he isn't sure it's true.

“How long, Jack? How long is long enough?”

He drums his fingers on the top of his desk. “I don't know, Ann. Maybe this is long enough.”

“I miss you,” she says, and it is unexpected, this raw truth, this ragged voice, his wife baring her soul somewhere on the Upper West Side, where she's hemorrhaging money into a hotel. He stares out the window across the room. Dark clouds gather off to the east. “Jack? Are you still there?”

He sighs. “I'm still here.”

“Right,” she says, and she hangs up.

Ann was the one pursuing him in the beginning, opening him
up to the possibility of starting over only months after he walked away from his first marriage. She found him in a bar one night after his criminal-justice class at Hunter, sloppy drunk and self-pitying. She was sitting next to him, and they'd started talking—
she'd
started talking. Chitchat. Bar talk, but when she got up to leave, he'd found he didn't want her to. He followed her outside and convinced her to go with him to a diner up the street.

They talked a lot in the beginning, about things that seemed so important, so urgent at the time and that now he couldn't remember if his life depended on it. For weeks they did nothing but talk. They didn't kiss, they didn't even touch until the snowy, stormy night they slept together, the two of them swaying, arm in arm up three flights of stairs to Jack's hole-in-the-wall room above a bakery off Bleecker Street. They made love as the odor of cinnamon drifted up through the floor, the worn and knotholed boards, as the Russian baker made babka for the morning rush. They fell asleep to snow drifting down, soft and thick and pure, to the tinkling of the small bell on the bakery door, to the sun peeking up between the buildings.

Their marriage was a good one, but it was always fragile. It was a safe harbor for Jack when he finished school and became a cop and, later, a detective, but he knows it was never quite enough for Ann—that she wanted it to go on forever, that intensity, the leaning over scarred wooden tabletops in late-night diners. The sharing. “You threw me over for your job,” she used to tell him, and she'd laugh, but the last few times she said it, she was serious. “Intimacy issues,” she'd said through the window of her little red Honda the night she left him, backing out of the driveway with the clip-on reading light from the bedroom peeping out at him like E.T. “You should really get some help.”

He picks up the envelope again and turns it over several times. His hands are large; they cover the writing, the
“Attention: Detective Jack Moss.”
He never meant to leave her on her own the way
he did. He loved her. He loves her still, but it's like an addiction, his connection to his job, to his work. It consumes him.

“Work is the one thing you can control,” she used to say, and he thinks now maybe she was right. Not that he can control his cases, not that he can stop the murders and carjackings and suicides or in any way affect the decline of humanity, but even Jack has to admit that work is the one constant in his life. No matter how bad things get, there'll still be a deskful of files and papers and unsolved cases waiting for him when he gets to the precinct. No matter what shape he's in, no matter what the hour, like a faithful mistress they will always be here.

There was a match on the prints, someone already in the system. A prior. He pulls out the sheet. Kyle Murphy. Jack stares down at his son's name, and he's almost as disappointed that he's not surprised as he is to see it printed there on the page. He never thought he'd be glad his ex-wife changed the boys' last names back to Murphy along with hers after their divorce, but, staring at the paper in his hands, he is. Kyle's shaky past is back to haunt him. It was this possibility that made Jack put himself on the teacher's homicide from the get-go.

When Kyle was seventeen, he was picked up on a burglary charge. Jack got a call at the house in the middle of the night. “It's Margie,” Ann said, handing him the phone, turning over and inching her body away from his. Margie was another problem between them—another stabbing needle in the balloon of their marriage.

Kyle had been arrested for a robbery several miles from home, even though he never actually went inside. He tripped the lock with a card of some kind and stood watch while his buddies went in and ransacked the house. The next-door neighbor saw the whole thing through her bedroom window and called 911 with her light off and her nose pressed up against the glass. When the cops
arrived, they pulled up to the neighbor's yard without headlights or sirens and walked next door; caught the kids red-handed. Kyle didn't have a prayer, standing on the porch with the card still in his hand. They nabbed him before he could even holler out a heads-up to his buddies. Jack left the boy in lockup for the night, and in the morning he called in a favor and got Kyle into a program, a youth camp in the country, away from his low-life friends, and it seemed to work. Until now anyway.

Jack glances at his partner. He watches Rob lean back in his chair, his desk phone against his ear. Jack turns the papers over, shoves them inside the envelope, resealing it as best he can, and then he slides it to the very back of his desk drawer. He retrieves his cell from his pocket and scrolls through the call log for his son's number as he walks down the hall away from Rob.

Again his call goes straight to voice mail. It's morning, still early enough to catch Kyle before he leaves to look for work or to go to GED class if he's still in it, if he hasn't already taken the test that he could pass even if he's only glanced at the pages of algebraic equations, the geometric theorems. His son has a photographic mind; he sees whole chunks of books inside his head. “Kyle,” Jack says into the blankness of his cell phone, pressing it tight against his ear. “It's me again. It's . . . um, Dad. I need you to call me right away. This will all be out of my hands soon, so get back to me. Now!” He ends the call and walks to his office, drops into his swivel chair, letting it roll away from the desk. He waits. He walks across the room and stares outside, where pigeons spill along the street toward the courthouse like a trail of moldy bread crumbs, where cars are jammed up at a red light. His cell phone rings. “Hello?” he says. “Kyle?”

“Yeah,” Kyle says. “What do you want?”

“You need to get down to the station. We're on Broadway. Brick building around the— On second thought. Not here. I'll meet you. You got a car?”

“Nope. I ride the bus like all the other underemployed, under-parented—”

“Fine.” Jack cuts him off. “How about the diner down on Getty? Twenty minutes. I'll see you there.” Again he ends the call quickly, without saying good-bye. He feels a sense of urgency; he feels trapped. He walks back to the chair across the room and stares at the black lines along the wall beside the window; they look like marks made by a bird, made by the pigeons fluttering outside the courthouse, by the claws and wings of captured things flapping against the dull, ugly green of the wall.

He gets to the restaurant before his son and finds a small table near the kitchen. In the noon light, even with the little bit of sunshine coming through the shuttered window, the table seems too bright, the restaurant too public, and Jack regrets suggesting this place. Even Rosie's Rooms would be a better choice. He stares at the menu. His shoes gleam in the sunlight from outside.

Kyle slips in like a thief, like a thug; he slouches in. He glances around the room, and there's something in his eyes. Guilt, Jack thinks. The kid looks guilty as hell. He nods toward Kyle, makes a small gesture, a slight rising movement without actually standing.

“What?” Kyle slumps into the chair across the table. Sunlight brightens the brown of his eyes, picks up the blond highlights in his hair, too long, Jack thinks. No wonder he can't find a job.

“Order what you want,” he says. “It's on me.”

“Coffee,” Kyle says. “Black.”

“Get something else,” Jack says, jovial, almost. Phony. “We'll have two burgers,” he says to the waitress when Kyle shakes his head. “Two orders of fries.” She scribbles on her pad and hurries back behind the counter.

Before his brother died, Kyle used to say he wanted to be a cop. He wanted to help kids, he said, wanted to stop them from getting
shot down in the streets or in some other country, climbing over rocks or driving jeeps across land mines. He'd make parents accountable to something or to someone, so they'd have to be parents, not drunks and certainly not deserters. This is what he once told Margie and what she then told Jack. He wonders what his son aspires to now, what twists and turns his life has taken since his brother's death, his mother's relapse, the discovery of Margie's clammy body on the floor beside the couch. “How've you been?” he says, but Kyle doesn't answer. He follows the waitress with his eyes. “You take the GED test yet?”

Kyle nods.

“How was it?”

He shrugs. “I think I did all right. They'll let me know when they—”

Jack can see Kyle's hands shaking on the water glass. As if he's read his father's thoughts, he folds them under the table. He looks caught. Jack thinks again of the black marks around the window in his office, of Dana squirming when he questioned her, the funny nervous way she played with her hair.

“So why'd you call me?”

“I know you were in your teacher's car.”

“So?” Kyle's legs are shaking. Even though he tries to keep them hidden under the table, Jack can see. He taps his foot.

“So.” Jack leans in closer, looks him in the eye. “So she's
dead.
And your prints are all over her car.”

“She gave me a ride,” he says. “She did that a lot. Gave students rides when the class let out late. She dropped me off in town.”

“So how'd your prints get on her glove compartment? Inside it, for chrissake?”

Kyle shrugs. He sits up straighter, leaning against the back of his chair, staring into space, as if the answer to Jack's question is in the air somewhere over his head. “I was looking for a Kleenex,” he says, “so I could blow my nose, Detective.”

The waitress arrives, putting their plates down among the tangle of silverware and coffee cups, their discarded saucers. She is awkward, setting a thick, white plate on top of a fork, throwing it off center, wobbly. “Anything else?” she says, but she's looking at Kyle.

“We're good,” Jack says, and the waitress keeps her gaze on Kyle for a few seconds before she trots off toward the kitchen.

“So you're saying you went through this woman's glove compartment looking for a
Kleenex
?”

“She told me to. I asked her did she have a Kleenex, and she said to look in her effing glove box.”

“And now she's dead.”

Kyle shrugs again, a careless gesture, but his shoulders stay hunched, his foot tap-taps under the table. Jittery. “I know. It's all over the news—shots of her house, her dog. . . .”

“Unfortunate timing.” Jack takes a bite of his burger and chews, gazing past his son toward the door.

“Yeah. I should plan my colds better.”

“Listen,” Jack says. “This was a murder, Kyle. You've got a record, and your prints are all over the victim's car.”

Kyle picks up his burger and wolfs it down like a starving man. Jack notes his eyes—just like his mother's. “Next time I'll make sure my teacher's not planning to get murdered when I ask for a Kleenex. How's that sound, Jack?”

“Could you not call me that?”

“That's who you are.” Kyle reaches for the mustard.

“Why don't you try ‘Dad,' without the sarcasm?”