Donovan leaned across his desk. “Then you will get out of my division and wait for the order to come down to terminate your ass.”
The assistant chief coughed into his hand.
Donovan stabbed a finger toward the door. “Now get the fuck out of my office!”
Murphy turned around and walked out.
The most humiliating part of Murphy’s summary dismissal from the Homicide Division was the final walk through the squad room. It was like a cliche from a bad cop movie that Murphy was watching instead of living, a sort of out-of-body experience.
He emptied his few personal possessions from the desk he shared with a detective on the opposite shift, a man Murphy saw for five minutes two or three times a week. The only thing he knew about his counterpart was that he was married to a pretty brunette, a nurse, judging by the scrubs she wore in a photo on the desk. The picture was of the two of them together at a bar. They were both smiling. They had two children, a boy and a girl, information Murphy gleaned from the second photograph in the two-picture drugstore frame.
Murphy had often looked with a certain degree of envy at the photographs and wondered what his counterpart’s life was like behind the picture-perfect images. Were the detective and his wife as happy as they looked, or were their smiles just the same masks that everyone else wore? Did they fight a lot? Was she fucking a doctor while her husband worked nights? Did he have a shack job?
In the second photo, the boy looked about twelve, his sister a couple of years younger. Were they as happy and well-adjusted as they seemed, or had the two years that had elapsed since the picture appeared on the desk changed them? Had the boy turned into a dope-smoking hippy and the girl a prepubescent slut?
Sometimes in his darker moments, Murphy hoped so. Then he felt bad about thinking that, so he said the Lord’s Prayer in his head to clear his conscience. Just like his mother used to tell him to do when he was a teenager and she caught him staring at a girl.
Murphy dumped everything he owned into a discarded copypaper box he found next to the trash can. But the box was too big. His belongings could have fit into a shoe box.
The stapler was his, as was a box of government Skilcraft pens he’d bummed from his buddy at ATF. He had a paperback copy of Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo, a day planner to keep track of court dates, a stack of new notebooks held together with a pair of rubber bands, a tape dispenser, a set of crime-scene sketch templates, and a copy of Practical Homicide Investigation.
That was it.
No pictures, no Valentine’s Day cards, no kids’ drawings of Daddy in his police uniform.
Murphy tossed his car keys on the desk, picked up his cardboard box, and started for the door. On his way out he pinched a blank leave slip from the secretary’s desk.
During that final, cliched walk, the squad room turned eerily silent. Just to break the tension, one detective said, “See you around, Murph.”
Another asked if he needed a ride.
Murphy nodded. “Yeah, actually I do.”
As he shuffled through the parking lot, Murphy saw his department-issued Taurus and remembered he had some personal items locked inside it, but the keys were back on his desk. He decided to collect his belongings later.
The ride home was painful. The other detective did the obligatory motherfucking of the rank, but Murphy got the feeling the guy was doing it just to fill the silence that would otherwise have engulfed the car. Mercifully, traffic was light going uptown. Murphy told the detective to drop him off at a corner grocery store a block from his apartment. Murphy knew the owner, an old Sicilian named Vincent Dispenza. In the back office, Vincent had a fax machine he had let Murphy use before.
At the corner, Murphy climbed out of the detective’s car and stood on the street clutching his pathetic cardboard box. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Sure, Murph,” the detective said as he drummed the steering wheel. “You’ll get back up there one day.” Then he drove off, practically spinning the tires in his desire to get away. Murphy understood. He was a pariah, a disease carrier next to whom no one wanted to stand for fear of catching his contagion.
Murphy turned toward Vincent’s. The grocery store was old New Orleans, a corner store actually built on the corner, with the double doors facing the apex of the sidewalk.
There were a hundred stores like Vincent’s, maybe more, spread across the city. In the old days Sicilians owned them all. These days you were more likely to find a Palestinian or a Jordanian minding the store, sometimes a Korean or Vietnamese. National chain grocery stores were still the exception in New Orleans. Most people bought-or as die-hard New Orleanians said, “made”-their groceries on the corner. Some things were better off left alone.
Vincent was manning the register. His wife, Mary, was churning out sandwiches behind the deli counter.
“Good-a morning, Sean,” Vincent said, his Sicilian accent still thick even after forty years in the United States. “What-a is that you are-a carrying?”
“Nothing. Just my life’s worth.”
“What-a you say?”
Murphy shook his head as he set the box on the counter. “Can I use your fax machine? I need to send something to the police department.”
Vincent nodded toward the back of the store. “You know-a where it is,” he said as a thirty-something-year-old black woman with two kids in tow set a box of cereal, a pack of cinnamon rolls, and a half gallon of ice cream down on the checkout counter next to Murphy’s cardboard box.
In Vincent’s office, Murphy used one of the U.S.-government Skilcraft pens from his box to fill out the leave slip requesting forty hours of annual leave beginning that night. He had more than three hundred hours of accrued leave. When you didn’t have a personal life, it was easy to build up vacation time. He didn’t know the fax number to Central Evidence and Property, so he picked up the handset and dialed the command desk.
After getting the number, he faxed the leave request to his new boss at CE amp;P. Then he bought a frozen calzone, a six-pack of Moretti beer, and a bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey.
As Murphy was unlocking his apartment door, his cell phone rang. The call was a department number. He let it go to voice mail. He popped the calzone in the oven and pried the top off one of the dark bottles of Moretti before dialing in to get his voice mail. The call was from a sergeant in the property room. The captain in charge of CE amp;P had turned down Murphy’s leave request. He was expected to report for duty, in uniform, at 10:25 PM.
Murphy glanced at the digital clock on the stove. It was 9:30 AM. He drained his beer in two gulps, then reached for another.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tuesday, July 31, 4:30 AM
Sergeant Tommy Shelby, the one-armed night supervisor at CE amp;P, pulled a stainless-steel flask from his briefcase and handed it to Murphy. “You probably need this more than I do.”
Murphy unscrewed the top and knocked back a long sip. The cheap liquor burned his throat. He handed the flask back.
“Vodka doesn’t have a smell,” Shelby said.
“You trying to tell me something?”
Shelby nodded. “I hear the rank is trying to fire you.” He raised the flask to his lips and took a deep swallow. “You don’t have to give them a reason.”
“After three nights in here, I’m starting not to care.”
“That’s why I bring this.” Shelby gave the flask a shake. “It takes the edge off.”
“How can you stand this place?”
Shelby waved the stump of his left arm, cut off just above the elbow. “What choice do I have? I’m a forty-five-year-old cop with one arm. I don’t know how to do anything else, and I can’t draw my pension until I’m fifty.”