Where It Hurts (16 page)

(WEDNESDAY MORNING)

C
asey was gone by the time I opened my eyes. I realized that she hadn’t asked me about the bandage on my left calf. I was thankful for that. Nor had we gotten around to the subject of her real name. I hoped we’d have plenty of opportunities to get to that. The truth was I was glad she was already gone, because I woke thinking of Annie, though not out of some sense of misplaced loyalty or guilt. It was about moving on. My old man wasn’t generally full of wisdom. Mostly he was full of misery and Jameson, but this one thing he said to me about not looking back has always stayed with me.

He’d driven me to his old Brooklyn neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon. I don’t know why. I don’t know why he did half the shit he did. Maybe he thought it would be a bonding experience. More likely he was just lonely and I was the best he could do for an audience on short notice. My old man always liked an audience. Anyway, as he drove around he would tell me stories of things he and his friends had done on this street here and that one there. He drove by his old schoolyard and told me about the stickball games he’d played and the fights he’d had there. After the schoolyard, we drove a few blocks and parked. My old man didn’t say a word, just stared across the street at a beat-up
row house for what felt like an hour. When I finally got up the nerve to ask him whose house that was, he turned to me with a look on his face I’d never seen before or since. He was on the verge of tears, I think.

“Once you leave a place, don’t look back. Move on. Once something is gone, John Augustus, it’s gone forever.” He cupped my cheeks in his hands as he said the words. It was the only tender moment we ever shared. “Once you step ahead, keep going, ’cause there’s no going back. Even the people you thought you knew . . . they change, too.”

He never told me who lived in that row house. The next time I asked him, a few weeks later, he smacked me. I didn’t ask again. I’d like to think it was his first love’s house, or better still, the house of the girl that had gotten away. I even gave her a name: Colleen. I liked to think of her as a redheaded beauty because it helped me explain away some of the bitterness and cruelty he showed to my mom. I don’t imagine it really mattered who lived in that house because I’ve never forgotten that moment, nor what he said. It’s not like that sentiment hadn’t been expressed a million times before or since. There was nothing very original about my old man. It was just that look in his eyes that I’ll never get out of my head.

So yeah, I woke up thinking about what last night with Casey meant for Annie and me, for whatever was left of Annie and me. I laughed to myself because I realized that my dad had said those things to me about not looking back when that’s exactly what he was doing. That had never occurred to me before. I wondered if it ever dawned on him. By the time I’d showered and borrowed Casey’s toothbrush and got dressed, I wasn’t thinking of my dad or Annie. I was thinking of Casey. I left her a note, asking if we might try for a real dinner out sooner rather than later and promising to call. I was thinking about something else as well as I closed her front door behind me. I was thinking of my proximity to where TJ Delcamino’s body had been found.

Just like I did the first time I visited the scene, I parked by the wooded lot on Browns Road. As I drove up, I noticed that the plug had been pulled on the naughty Santa display on the roof of the house to
my left. Oh, Santa and the reindeer were still up there, but unlit and unmoving. Long Islanders can be a fairly tolerant bunch as long as you don’t screw up their food orders or take too long making their lattes. Oh yeah, there’s one other thing that makes us mental: property values. A mother lioness protecting her cubs has nothing on a Long Islander whose property value is threatened. Apparently, the neighbors had had enough of Santa mooning the passersby. At least Alvin and the Chipmunks were still at it, crooning away.
You can keep the singing rodents, but Santa’s gotta go!
When I looked to my right, the baby Jesus was staring at me from his mat of plaster straw, his blue doll eyes unblinking. I turned away, deciding I’d have a talk with the owner of the rude Santa house.

As I made my way over to the front door, it occurred to me that Christmas was fast approaching and that I hadn’t done any shopping. That first year after John died was the worst. Beginning the week of Thanksgiving—and what the fuck was I supposed to be thankful for, exactly—stretching through New Year’s was pure hell. There were reminders of John everywhere and in everything. And with the reminders came the reminders of our loss. From moment to moment, we relived his death over and over and over. Even the ads for Black Friday did us in.
Remember that year Johnny had his heart set on that one Transformer and you got up at four and . . .
There wasn’t a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, anything, that wasn’t an assault on my heart. Nothing that didn’t bring him back to me and rip my guts out anew. Annie and I were well into our descent into oblivion by then, but the three of us were still living together in the house in Commack that year. And I think it was our Christmas there that finally drove us out. I made a mental note to call Krissy again when I was done, maybe take her for dinner.

Close up, under the façade of bad taste, the Chipmunk ranch house was actually not a bad place at all. The cedar shingles that covered it weren’t chipped or split and had turned that lovely shade on the color spectrum between silver and faded brown. The driveway had been
recently repaved and the lot was almost completely free of fallen leaves. No mean feat for a house next to a wooded lot and in an area full of big old oaks and maples. The storm door was new and the front entrance featured a shining red door and tasteful stained-glass side panels. It was hard to tell much about the rest of the place given the vast array of lights and decorations that covered the house and yard.

A balding man with a wisp or two of gray hair on his head opened the front door but not the glass storm door. He was in his seventies if a day and seemed about as happy to see me as a sad-faced oncologist. I knew the look. No need for words.
I don’t want any. Go away!
That’s when I shouted to him, “I used to be a Suffolk County cop.” I threw my thumb at the lot that his property bordered. “I need to talk to you about the body they found there in August.”

Did I think that approach would work? I wasn’t sure. I thought it might, but what else was I going to say? I didn’t want to lie to the guy. I mean, if he gave me the chance, I could prove I’d been on the job. If I got caught in a lie, he’d shut me down.

He smiled and opened the storm door. “A cop? Sure, come on in.”

I guess he hadn’t heard me completely through the storm door, but as he was welcoming me, I wasn’t going to correct his mistake until I was in his house.

When he closed the doors behind me, he said, “So, you’re on the job?”

“Used to be. Twenty years, mostly in the Second Precinct. Now I’m working private.”

“Twenty years, huh? Maybe you know my grandson. My son’s boy. He’s on the job in Suffolk, too.”

“Maybe. What’s his—”

“Pauly Martino. He works in the Marine Bureau.”

“Sorry, Mr. Martino. I’ve been off the SCPD for a few years now and never had much to do with the Marine Bureau.”

He shrugged his old shoulders. “I figured I’d ask.”

“Sure. My name is Gus Murphy.” I offered him my hand.

Shaking it, and holding his other hand up to his ear, he said, “My hearing ain’t so great anymore. Gus, is it?”

I nodded.

“You wanted to talk to me about the lot next door?”

“About the body they found in the lot last August.”

Now he was nodding. “Yeah, sure, sure. C’mon into the kitchen. Sit.”

I was thinking of my old man again, about how he would never have shown a stranger the courtesy that Mr. Martino was showing me. I followed Mr. Martino into the kitchen. We passed through a nice living room with a beautifully decorated tree. The whole house was well kept and clean as could be. But the kitchen really looked lived in, comfortable, a bit dated. Very 1970s. A lot of Harvest Gold appliances. I sat at the breakfast nook by the bay window. Had it been a sunny morning instead of a blustery gray one, it would have been a great spot to greet the day. Mr. Martino stood over by the coffee maker.

“Want some?” He wiggled the pot at me.

“That would be great. Milk and if you got a Sweet’N Low—”

He pointed at the crystal sugar caddy on the table and the little cow-shaped milk dispenser. Over the first cup, we got the small talk out of the way. He showed me photos of his grandson in uniform, of his great-grandkids. Told me that he did all the Christmas decorations because it reminded him of his days growing up in the Bronx and of his own kids.

“They thought that silly Santa thing on the roof was just the best thing ever, and the grandkids, they loved it even better. That’s what all this stuff is for, to make the kids happy. For all the years we lived here, nobody ever said nothing about that Santa, but now people are all so sensitive. You know what I mean, all politically correct?”

I told him that I did.

“I got a registered letter in my mailbox the other day from the town telling me that the neighbors were complaining and that the seasonal display on my roof was in violation of some town ordinance or something like that. They told me to shut it off or take it down or I was gonna
get fined or something. I was gonna fight it, but what for? No one got a sense a humor no more. And since the wife died last year . . .”

No need for him to finish that sentence, certainly not for me.

“I bet it was that jerk next door that started the trouble,” he said, unwilling to let it go. “That
strunz
on the other side of the lot. Family’s lived there since October and the prick won’t even wave to me.”

That gave me the opening I was looking for. “So they didn’t live there when the kid’s body was found in August?”

“Nah, the Cohens, great neighbors, they moved to Florida soon as they sold the place. Nice Jewish family, never bitched once about the decorations the whole time they lived there. The wife, Leah, she used to bring us over latkes at Hanukkah. Nice people, but everyone’s moving away. Who can afford to live on the island anymore? The property taxes could choke a horse.”

Mr. Martino didn’t know it, but his rant had just saved me a visit. No need to talk to the neighbors with the doll-eyed baby Jesus if they hadn’t lived there when TJ’s body was discovered. I brought the subject of the body back up again. Unfortunately, Mr. Martino was more eloquent on the subject of property taxes.

“There wasn’t anything to see,” he said, pouring me more coffee. “By the time I got out there, the police had everything all blocked off. If there was something to see, I didn’t see it. I musta been back in the house and asleep by the time they removed the body.”

To be polite, I stayed a few more minutes, sipping at the unwanted second cup of coffee. I thanked him for his time and hospitality and asked him again if he was sure there weren’t any details he might’ve forgotten about that August night. He shook his head no, but as I was leaving, he told me to hold on a second.

“You know, Gus, there was one thing that didn’t make no sense to me. The next day I read in the paper that the guy they found dead in the woods was a nobody. I don’t mean to speak bad of the dead or nothing, but—”

I put my hands up as a gesture of understanding. “I get it, Mr. Martino. Go ahead.”

“He was a small-time car thief, right? So it made me scratch my head.”

“What did?”

“That night, the night they found the kid, I figured whoever he was had to be pretty big or connected, because why else would the chief show up?”

That got my attention. “The chief? The chief of detectives?”

“Nah.” Martino made a face. “The chief! The big chief. The big Irishman. What the hell is his name? My grandson is always talking about him.”

“Jimmy Regan?”

Martino smiled. “That’s the one. The big Irishman,” he repeated.

“The chief of the department showed up?” I said as much to myself as to Martino. “How did you know it was him?”

“Are you kidding me? All the guys in uniform looked like they were gonna kneel and kiss his ring. And that red hair . . . you can’t miss it. My grandson tells me the guy’s a legend.”

“He is.”

“Besides, I overheard the blond girl who’s now our local COPE officer whispering to her buddy. They were as surprised as I was to see the guy.”

I tried not to react. I’m not sure I hid it very well. I thanked Martino again and got out of there. I knew Jimmy Regan well enough, though not so well to call him a friend. Mr. Martino had spoken the truth, though. Jimmy Regan was a cop’s cop: fearless, loyal, dogged, street smart, and just plain smart. I never had much use for the brass. They were usually the ambitious men and women who tended to pick their spots and polish their own apples. Not Regan. His rep was well-earned. I knew guys who had come up with him. To a man they said Regan was the best cop they ever saw. Always the first guy through the
door. Never asked anyone to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. I had a sergeant who used to tell Regan stories like he was talking about Babe Ruth. Yet, odd as it was for the chief of the department to show up at some petty thief’s murder scene, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. He might have just dropped in unexpectedly to observe his troops handle the situation. But what Jimmy Regan was or was not doing at the murder scene was beside the point. What mattered was who killed TJ Delcamino, and that’s what I was thinking when I turned the corner to talk to the folks whose back fence bordered the wooded lot.

(WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON)

I
found the local COPE—Community Oriented Police Enforcement—officer parked in the lot of the Lake Grove Village Hall on Hawkins Avenue. Wedged between Nesconset and Centereach, Lake Grove had no lake and no grove, but it did have the Smith Haven Mall, the largest indoor mall in the county. That counted for a lot around here. Kind of like having the biggest cathedral, only better.

The COPE officer was yakking on her phone as I approached her unit and she adopted her best cop face—hard and falsely neutral. Beneath all your expressions as a cop, there’s a requisite air of implied threat. I’d seen a lot of
Don’t Fuck with Me
expressions in my time, most of them on the faces of other cops. It made sense. Your expression, the way you carried yourself, they were your first lines of defense. Having a Glock on your hip and a vest under your shirt doesn’t make you invulnerable. Most of the time you’re either outnumbered or outgunned. Sometimes both. Someone gets it in his head to fuck with you, he’s going to fuck with you no matter what.

She sat low in the driver’s seat, her head not reaching much above the wheel. She had wiry blond hair pulled back tight in a ragged ponytail and her skin was that weird shade of orange/brown that screamed
tanning salon. As I came closer to her car, she stepped out and gave me more attitude. She was taller than Casey, about five seven, and not petite. Her neck was thicker than I expected and her upper torso was severely V-shaped. That was obvious in spite of her vest.
A gym rat
, I thought. I don’t know. You’re a cop long enough and you get a sense of these things, of who people are beneath the things they show you.

Everything about her body language told me not to come any closer, so I put my hands up and I smiled.

“I come in peace,” I said.

She laughed at that and then took a careful look at me, squinted her eyes. “You look familiar. You on the job?”

“Retired. I was in the Second for most of the career.”

“Then you must know Pete.”

“McCann. Yeah, I know Pete.”

She got that look on her face. She wouldn’t have been the first woman in the bag to fall for Pete. I thought about warning her that she’d only have a shot with him if she was with someone else. The charms of being willing and available were lost on Pete. You also needed to be taken. I decided not to go there.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Gus Murphy.”

She got another look on her face, but this one wasn’t about Pete McCann. “I heard about your son. Sorry. That was a few years ago, right?”

“Two. Thanks.”

Her face changed again. She seemed almost in physical pain. “Does it get any easier, losing your kid, I mean?”

“Easier, yeah, but never better. You got kids?”

“A little boy, Drew.”

I smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, but you can’t really protect him the way you think you can. Just let him live his life as happy as he can.”

I didn’t even know where those words came from. They just seemed to force their way out of my mouth.

She was smiling again, shaking my hand. “Corinne Durney. What can I do for you, Murphy?” Apparently, word hadn’t drifted down as far as COPE about me being off limits.

Closer to her now, after her iron handshake, I felt pretty sure I was right about her. Durney definitely worked out. You could see by the way she held herself when she was relaxed that she was proud of her body, but not in a coy way.

“You lift?”

She lit up like the Christmas tree in Mr. Martino’s living room. “Not as much as I used to. Used to compete when I was younger. So how can I help you?”

“I’m doing a little fishing around on my own these days and I was talking to Mr. Martino on Browns Road.”

She laughed. “Guy with the Santa on the roof, right?”

“That’s him.”

“Nice man, too bad his grandson’s a prick,” Durney volunteered without prompting. “A real hothead, Pauly is. They threw him on the Marine Bureau to keep him away from people. So why were you talking to the old man?”

“We were talking about the body found in the woods next to his house last August. I heard you were there.”

Her face hardened. “Why you interested?”

“Officially? I can’t say.”

“Unofficially?”

“Unofficially, I’m working for a party who’s interested in purchasing the lot and is looking for any way to drive down the price.”

That lie came out of my mouth a little too easily to suit me, but come out it did and it seemed to work well enough.

“Okay,” she said, “I was there that night. It was only about a month before I got assigned to COPE.”

“How you like it?”

She shrugged. “It’s all right. Boring sometimes, but boring ain’t so bad, right?”

“Right.”

“Neighborhood guy walking his mutt called it in. By the time I got to the scene, the place was already crawling with other cops.”

“You see the vic?”

Durney made a sick face, shaking her head as if to rid herself of the memory. “Wish I hadn’t. Kid was in bad shape. Bloody. Burnt-up. Bones sticking through the skin. He didn’t go easy.”

“Anything unusual about the scene?”

“Other than it was in Nesconset? Not the kind of thing we generally run into in the Fourth.”

“I heard Chief Regan made an appearance,” I said as innocently as I could manage.

“I guess that was pretty unusual. He got there about a minute after me and I was on scene pretty quick. But like I said, the scene was already turning into a zoo.”

“Anybody figure out why he was there?”

I could tell there was something she wanted to say, but she didn’t know me well enough to trust me, so I gave her a push.

“C’mon, Durney. It’s all off the record here.”

“The first detectives on the scene, they were pretty shocked that Chief Regan showed up. I overheard them talking.”

“About what?”

She shrugged again, but I couldn’t tell if she meant it. I don’t think she liked the excited tone in my voice or where these questions were going. I could see her retreating. She even took a step back.

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling her unit’s door open. “Look, I gotta get back out on patrol. Again, sorry about your son. Merry Christmas.” She got sat behind the wheel and slammed the door shut. “It’s okay to wish you Merry Christmas, right?”

“Sure, Durney. Merry Christmas to you and yours. And don’t worry about talking to me. Your name will never come up.” I handed her a Paragon hotel card with my cell number on the back. “You wanna
talk again, let me know who those first detectives on the scene were, give me a call.”

She took the card. “Or not.”

“Or not.”

She put the window back up and the car in reverse. The car rolled back a foot, stopped. She rolled her window down. “And not for nothing, Murphy, that bullshit about a buyer wanting to drive the price down . . . you gotta do better than that. That lot is designated green space. It can’t be built on. You want me to be straight with you, you should be straight with me.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Here’s some straight advice for you. Stay away from Pete McCann. Far away. He’ll fuck up your life and throw you away. Don’t let him do that to you.”

She didn’t say anything to that, but you could see she was thinking about it. I was glad for that much at least.