One of the thoughts Harry tried to keep on the run, with the help of a lot of scotch, was that he’d played an important part in bringing himself to this point. It wasn’t as if things had just been done to him. Bad thinking led to bad decisions, and bad decisions led to stupid actions. It made him feel dizzy, this whole interconnectedness of things. Every event in life was knotted around the thing that happened before it, and led straight into the thing that came after it.
If he hadn’t been involved with Julia, what were the odds of him meeting Leo? A billion to one? And if he’d ever bothered to make something of himself, he wouldn’t have been delivering cocaine to parties that had guests like Julia. He wouldn’t have worked for Frankie Yin, and he never would’ve met Manfred. Poor old Manfred. His poor Dutch Uncle. Was it Manfred who set off this chain reaction of bad juju? Or was it Harry? Or just destiny?
Another thought was chasing him, and he let it catch him in the foyer of a Chinese take-out joint. Harry bought a Coke with a ten-dollar bill. He asked for his change in coins. This drew a fractured complaint from the counterman, but he gave it up anyway.
A Bud Light clock on the wall said it was five after three. Harry pictured Aggie staring at her computer screen, typing in a line, maybe reading it out loud, a halfeaten cup of yogurt sitting on her desk.
She picked up on the first ring. She said hello twice.
Harry said, “Hi.”
She didn’t recognize his voice.
“It’s Harry,” he said.
Now that she knew who it was, she wasn’t talking.
“I called to see how you were doing.”
“I’m fine,” she said. There was a sinking pause, like she wasn’t going to say anything more, but when Harry let the line stay silent she said, “How’re you?”
“I’m coming back.”
“Detective Arnie Martinson will be thrilled.”
“My brother hired me a lawyer. I’m giving myself up.”
“So I should look for you on the six o’clock news. What’d you do, call to warn me?”
“No, I called to say I’ve been thinking about you. And that I missed you. Depending on the way things shake out, I was thinking maybe we could get together.”
The street door banged open and a deliveryman pushed past. He was wearing a yellow rain slicker and a pair of yellow boots that buckled up the front, like a kid’s.
“I think we’ve got a chance,” Harry said. “I really do.”
It sounded like Aggie was smoking. She said, “A chance at what?” Then she said something else Harry didn’t hear because a recorded voice was talking over her, telling him to put in more money or his call was going to get cut off. He dropped in four more quarters.
When the beeps stopped, Harry said, “A chance at being together.”
“How could you even be thinking about that? For all you know, you could be going to jail for the rest of your life.”
“All I’m saying is, I really care about you, Aggie.”
“Harry,” she said, “I’ve gotta go. I wish you all the luck in the world.”
“Can I call you?”
“I didn’t hang up, did I? Although I probably should have. Goodbye, Harry.”
Davey Boy was talking on the phone with his feet on the desk. Harry nodded on his way to the elevator, but Davey had been blowing hot and cold since Harry rented the room, friendly or not according to his mood. Today, not.
He wished he’d thrown the extra twenty-five a week for a TV. At least it’d take his mind off of things, and he could have drowned out the game show blaring next door, cartoony bleeps and buzzes knifing through the plaster.
Glancing through the sports section of the Post, he saw the Mets had dropped their home opener, the Yankees got snowed out in Cleveland, and the Knicks were scuffling toward the playoffs. A column by the guy who covered the team predicted they wouldn’t make it past the first round.
A vampire cult in Florida made page one. Some sixteen-year-old had lured a classmate into the woods, dragged a machete across the kid’s windpipe, and drank his blood. The cops said it was the initiation into a secret society, and a bunch of teenage bloodsuckers who flipped had lined up to testify against the lead vampire. This was outside Orlando. An entire state of freaks, Florida. And Harry was going back.
Voices filtered through the door. Whispering voices, vibing wrong, a threat in the tenor of their hissing. Harry was about to get up and check it out when the door blew open and somebody screamed police. Two guys pinned him to the bed and turned him on his stomach, the flash of a third guy pointing a gun. They tore back his arms. Harry heard a pop, his shoulder dislocating again, and a spiking pain engulfed the joint. If he ended up in the Florida State Pen after all, he was going to get the surgery done on that shoulder, for sure.
The cops pulled him to his feet.
“You guys,” Harry winced through his gritted teeth, “have got this all wrong.”
Chapter Seventeen
The lawyers for the union assured Lili the Review Board inquiry would amount to nothing, and Kramer called her reassignment a public relations move, but Acevedo wouldn’t be back in the field until the heat from the Fernandez thing burned out, and that was going to take some time.
Which was a shame. By all rights, it should’ve been Lili who went to the airport and met the U.S. Marshalls who had Healy in custody. Instead, Kramer sent Robotaille and Martinson. He wanted to make sure there was a Beach detective on each of Healy’s handcuffed arms, and he instructed them to bring the suspect through the front door.
Martinson wanted to book him as quietly as possible. They didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with Manfred Pfiser’s murder, they were just busting him on a parole violation. But Kramer alerted his friends in the media and every TV station dispatched a crew to Rocky Pomerance Plaza. It was a slow trudge from the street to the entrance, a classic perp walk.
Healy kept his mouth shut and his chin up. No flashbulb flinching, no shackled peek-a-boo, no burying his face under a hooded sweatshirt. He stared straight ahead, and let Robotaille and Martinson lead him through the front door, where three uniformed cops intercepted the jostling bodies.
Due to some screw-up between New York and the Marshalls’ office, Healy arrived without his lawyer, but rather than turning to stone, he wanted to talk. He had a lot to say. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to tell them anything.
“Just so you know I know,” he told Martinson at one point, “I don’t have to answer a single one of these questions until my attorney gets here. But to tell you the truth, I’d rather be talking to you than sweating my ass off in some jail cell.”
Lili was standing with Kramer outside the interview room, watching and listening through the two-way glass. Martinson made Healy run through his story another time. Healy wasn’t disrespectful, but his breezy tone was bugging her. He seemed relaxed, almost relieved, like a man with a weight off his shoulders.
Martinson told him they lifted a fingerprint that belonged to him off the stereo in Pfiser’s room. Healy didn’t deny being there.
“I shut it off,” he said. “It was blaring some Patsy Cline thing. I wiped down the scotch bottles and the glasses, but I forgot about the stop button on the stereo.”
He had drained his second can of Coke, and now he was wondering about coffee. Martinson shifted his gaze toward the mirror, nodding his head yes, and Lili had to go fetch him a cup.
“Light and sweet,” Healy said.
Martinson was waiting outside when she got back. Kramer was chewing the inside of his lip, and everybody stayed mute as Arnie took the coffee and went back in. He set the cup on the table.
Healy led Martinson, for the third time, to the point where he ditched Pfiser’s rented Mustang in Hollywood.