“I agree,” I said. “The world’s a better place.”
“You know, you’ve got all the makings of a great cop.”
“Pardon my manners, Casey, but get the fuck outta here.”
“No, I’m serious. Whether you’re gonna admit to anything or not, you got to the bottom of two huge cases. You busted up a major heroin ring, and you saved your friends’ lives. You did all that without an ounce of knowledge about how to do it. You’re tough. You’re smart and you give a shit. You’re already a better goddamned detective than I am. You do a few years in uniform, and you’re a lock for a gold shield. And there’s something else; you’re comfortable in there,” he said, pointing back at the bar. “It’s all cops in there, and you fit in.”
“Maybe because there aren’t any asshole cops in there like Nance.”
“You want things to change, make ’em change. Be a cop, set an example instead of whining about it. And it’ll get you outta the war.”
We laughed about that last part there. It got quiet between us for a minute after that. Casey didn’t realize at the time, but he’d given me the chance I’d been looking for since that night at the warehouse. I’d struggled with how to let someone inside the NYPD know that Sam and Marty had been murdered as a direct result of a dirty cop.
“Three cases,” I said, “not two.”
“What are you talking about?”
I didn’t answer directly. “You know a detective named Patrick Fitzhugh?”
“He’s a real prick. A face on him not even his mother loved. Why?”
Again, I didn’t answer directly. Instead I took Sam’s badge out of my pocket and handed it to him. “You found out about my dad owning part of the warehouse without too much trouble. Look into who that badge belonged to and see what you come up with.”
Feeling a little better, I got up and went back into the bar. I turned around to see Casey palming the badge and starting to put two and two together.
EPILOGUE — DECEMBER 2012
Through the front windows of my condo on Emmons Avenue, the sun was hinting at its rebirth. The oily sheen had returned to the surface of Sheepshead Bay, and the cold rain that had ravaged those same waters only a few hours before were now barely a memory. That is one of the glories of water: it has no memory. As I stared out at it, I imagined myself as water, as having no memory. Then, in the next instant, the images of that long-ago night in the warehouse came back into my head as fresh as the new day would come. I could feel Jimmy Ding Dong’s warm blood on my face and smell the acrid smoke from the blasting caps and from the shotgun blasts. I could almost taste the iron on my tongue from the spray of blood in the air. No, I was nothing like water.
Sarah, yawning, came and stood beside me. “What happened after Tony died?”
“Bobby got Lids out to his car while I tried to clean up any hints of our having been there, but I didn’t know how successful I was at it. We rode over to Lake Ronkonkoma and threw in Jimmy’s.45 and the shotgun. Strange thing is that years later, when I was working a case as a PI, I wound up by that lake again. I’d blocked it out of my mind that I’d been there before.”
“What case, Dad?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Oh,” Sarah said, “that case.”
“That’s right, kiddo. The one I fucked up that eventually got your mother killed.”
Sarah put her arms around me and squeezed. “Forget it, Dad. I forgave you for that. We can’t hold onto those things, not now. Did the police ever find the guns?”
“You know, there’s a legend about Lake Ronkonkoma that the restless soul of an Indian princess lives in the lake. They say she drowned in the lake centuries ago and is forever searching for her lover. Whenever a man drowns in the lake, the locals blame it on the princess. They say she pulled the victim in to see if he is her lover. I guess the princess took the guns and buried them as gifts for her lover’s return.”
“What happened to Lids?”
“We dropped him off by the ER entrance to a hospital in Smithtown. Jimmy had broken him up really bad. He was barely more alive than Tony or Jimmy. He spent almost a year in the hospital and in rehab centers.”
“But what happened to him after he got out?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was already on the job by then and living out on my own. I heard he came back to his parents’ apartment for a little while, but he was still so broken. They fixed Lids’s bones, but his mind was never right after MIT, and what Jimmy did to him only made it worse. He just left one day and never came back. My friend Eddie Lane said he thought he once saw a guy who looked like Lids panhandling on Telegraph Avenue in Berkley. That was the last I heard of him.”
Sarah went and sat back down on the couch. I made some French press coffee for us. Me, as an old cop and PI, I could drink swill and deal with it, but Sarah loved French press coffee.
“You want some eggs, kiddo?”
“No, Dad, I’m not hungry.”
I didn’t like the look of her. The mention of eggs kind of made her turn green around the gills and she hadn’t slept all night. “You okay? You wanna lay down?”
“Just tired, Dad, really. So what happened between you and Bobby?”
“Nothing. Bobby moved out of New York in the middle of March and I didn’t hear anything about him for five years. I got a call from Uncle Aaron one day. He told me to go buy a copy of the latest Forbes magazine. There was Bobby on the cover. Apparently he’d turned his drug profits and other investments into such a fortune that he was rich enough to lend money to God at low interest. The article called him ‘The Boy Wonder of Wall Street.’ But he kept his promise to atone for his sins. While he was away, he found his way back to Judaism, something his parents always fiercely rejected. He made it a habit to give away almost forty percent of his yearly income to all sorts of causes. Everything from a fund for the families of cops killed in the line of duty, to groups against gun violence, to drug treatment centers. My guess is that he left most of his money to charity.”
“Is that when you guys hooked up again, after the article?” Sarah asked, sipping her coffee and making a face.
“Isn’t the coffee okay?”
“No, it’s fine, Dad. So, you and Bobby …”
“One day in 1987 I’m in my office in Bordeaux in Brooklyn and I get a call on the intercom to come upstairs immediately. And when I get upstairs, there’s Bobby in all his glory, a gigantic smile on his face. Twenty years had passed, but there was the same smile he’d had on the night I bailed him out of the Brooklyn Tombs. He was dressed in a suit that cost more than two months of most people’s mortgage payments. He came down to the office and we talked. We worked it out. Our friendship from then on was more of a truce or understanding than anything else.”
“But you invited him to my bat mitzvah, and he was at my wedding.”
“Of course he was, and he no doubt gave you the biggest gifts for both,” I said, shaking my head, looking again into the past. “We were locked together forever, kiddo. I’d saved his life and he’d saved mine. But Tony P had a point about Bobby. I could never quite trust him again. I had some sleepless nights in the years following what happened to us. Bobby wasn’t supposed to show up at the warehouse that night. He was just so furious at Tony and Jimmy and at himself for what happened to Samantha that he couldn’t control his rage. To this day I wonder that if he hadn’t been so overcome with rage, whether Bobby would have been on the other end of the phone when I called. Part of me thinks Tony P was right, that Bobby would never have given up his money, and that he would have left me and Lids to die there.”