“But you lost your temper?”
“I didn’t lose my temper, Lieutenant Salmone. I did not lose my temper. I asked Miss Stack to go back to her dorm because I have a child in the house who I thought might be frightened.”
“You could have called us.”
“There was no need.”
“Maybe there was. Maybe she oughta have called us.”
“Nobody needed the police then. It was personal. It was not violent. We didn’t require cops.”
“Maybe it was a lovers’ quarrel, huh? Because everybody in this place knows you were in bed with this girl. Sounds like she was in your way big-time. Maybe she should have called us.”
“Are you accusing me of pushing her in front of a car?”
“What if I tell you I have people saw you do that?”
“You can’t, goddamn it! What people saw was me trying to get her out from in front of the traffic! Both our lives were in danger.” He rose from his chair. Salmone backed his own chair away. “What bullshit are you people trying to sell? Is this the college you’re working for or what?”
“It’s against the law to sleep with your student.”
“It is not against the fucking law, Salmone! Adult-on-adult sexuality is not illegal. As yet.”
“It’s against the college rules.”
“That’s not your problem, sir!”
They glared at each other across the desk.
“Hard-ass,” Salmone said. “Aren’t you, Professor?”
“Too hard for you, Mr. Cop. If you try to make some kind of killer fiend out of me, I swear I’ll sue you, your city and anybody who I catch collaborating with you in such a scheme.”
Brookman settled in his seat and put his elbows on the desk. There were a few other city cops working in the station and they stopped to listen. A few of them moved closer to Salmone’s office.
“Maybe I should have driven her home,” Brookman said. “Obviously I should have driven her home.”
Salmone said nothing.
“Are we finished?” Brookman asked.
Salmone stood up.
“Who do you think that driver was?”
Brookman stared at him in surprise.
“I hope you find him.”
“We always do,” Salmone said. “You have anything more to tell us, Professor, you have my card. Don’t hesitate. You gonna be around?”
Brookman thought about it for a moment. His not being around was an idea that had not occurred to him.
“Well,” Salmone said. “We’ll be here.”
Brookman decided to engage a lawyer the next morning.
30
ONE COLD DAY STACK TOOK the Long Island Rail Road to the McCallum and Jenkins funeral home, the people who had contained his wife’s ashes.
“I’d like my daughter’s remains beside my late wife’s,” he told the slightly overweight, fair-haired undertaker, a McCallum. McCallum expressed his sympathy, especially for a person so young. Stack saw that his sympathy was as genuine as it could be in such circumstances. The younger McCallums went to seminars and did meditation to the tinkling of bells.
“Have you arranged this with the church, sir? I presume interment will follow a Mass of resurrection.”
“I don’t think she would want a Mass.”
“Mr. Stack, isn’t your late wife at the cathedral?”
“Holy Redeemer, right.”
“It would follow the same procedure, Mr. Stack. May I ask why you believe Ms. Stack wouldn’t want a Mass?”
“She wasn’t religious. She loved her mother very much. She missed her mother a whole lot. She would want to be beside her.”
“Sir,” the young man said gently, “it all goes together. Can you be sure she wouldn’t want to follow mom’s way?”
“I have no beef with you,” Stack explained. “I’m hoping to take care of this.”
“We’ll follow your instructions, Mr. Stack. I think we’ve served the Stack family for generations.”
“Since your place was on First Avenue.”
It was true, although Stack had never much thought about it. McCallum and Jenkins funeral parlors had managed to remain local, moving in the same pattern of families like the Stacks, from certain Manhattan neighborhoods. They had buried a lot of soldiers since after the Civil War. Different kinds of people favored different firms, and M&J was well regarded by the unlucky. The McCallums had extended credit to prisoners’ widows without benefits or influence, and for reasons of their own they had served AIDS victims from the beginning. There were those who disliked that.
“One thing we can’t do,” McCallum said, “is guarantee a place with Ms. Stack’s mother in Holy Redeemer. They have their rules and costs, et cetera. So you’ll have to deal with them, Mr. Stack.”
“The urns are standard, right?”
“Sir?”
“The urns, the whaddaya calls? What you put ashes in. They all look alike, right? Do you make them? Do you sell them?”
“Usually…,” McCallum said.
“Pick up my Maud. Put her in the thing. I’ll talk to the church then. I need to do this, see.”
He gave McCallum a copy of the death certificate.
“It’s a very simple ceremony,” McCallum said. “These physical things, the earthbound things, they’re partly for friends and family. In the tradition.”
“Still,” Stack said. It was what Maud would have said.
“I don’t know what to say, Mr. Stack. I’m sorry.”
“I’m determined to try to get Maud what she wanted. She never had a life.”
McCallum looked him in the eye.
“I can understand your feeling that, Mr. Stack. The thing is, we’ve always worked with the church. Within its traditions.”
“I’ll talk to them. I want my daughter with her mother.”
“We can do a lot of things to serve you, Mr. Stack. I can’t simply get your daughter’s remains into Holy Redeemer Church.”
The next day he took the train to the cathedral to look at the niches along the wall. Ashes were held in little marble-like repositories that had lids on the tops like cigarette boxes, and in glass cases like imitation medieval reliquaries Stack remembered growing up with. In his own parish church in Richmond Hill there was a bone in a similar case. The faithful would kneel devoutly in front of the bone and smooch the glass on the front of it so that there was always a surface of spittle-laced, fogged-up glass on the case containing the alleged bone of Saint Wallbanger or something reposed in it. Next to it was a gray rag of dingy sheeting to wipe the glass with, in order not to catch polio or mouth fungus or something like it from the glass. Sane people who felt compelled to take part in this kissy game staged a lip-smacking air kiss and pumped the rag on the front of it, wondering what diseases you could catch off the cloth. It was a disgusting little sacramental moment a guy could joke about with the right people.
31
BROOKMAN CALLED ON Dean Spofford at the dean’s home, not at his office in College Hall. John Spofford’s house could surprise, with its grace, people who had spent a lot of time entering tastefully appointed residences on eastern liberal arts college campuses. The grandest of the contents in the Spofford house belonged to the college, but a great deal of what was luminous and beautiful belonged to Spofford and his wife. The best effects were Mrs. Spofford’s.
The Brookmans and the Spoffords had been acquainted for some years. Steve Brookman and John Spofford were, at times anyway, close to friends. They had both served in the Marine Corps during the same period. When he entered the house, Brookman caught a glimpse of Mary Pick, so known though she was Dean Spofford’s wife. Brookman told her good morning. It cheered him that she gave him a friendly look and spoke a good morning.