“Maturing? I’m eighty friggin’ years old.”
Jennifer shook her head. “Not quite. Let’s not rush things, time is flying by fast enough. But I am proud of you. And impressed with your bravery.”
“Bravery?”
“Yes, Joe, bravery. The girls and I will welcome your guests with open arms. But we will also disavow any and all responsibility for their presence. As far as my mother and your mother are concerned, this will have been your idea and yours alone.” Jennifer paused, smiling again. “It takes a very brave man to face that. Just remember: there’s a difference between bravery and stupidity.”
Rizzo wrinkled his brow. “What?”
Jennifer raised a pointer finger as she replied. “Inviting them was bravery,” she said flatly. “Not checking with me first-that was stupidity.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wednesday morning at seven-forty, Jackson sat at her desk in the Six-Two squad room. She fingered some precinct crime reports, scanning them perfunctorily, initialing them with an absent mind.
Her mother. Priscilla shook her head slightly, frowning at Karen’s continued insistence on a reconnection.
“Can’t reconnect somethin’ never was connected to begin with,” she said softly.
In the chaos that had been her childhood, the one facet of Priscilla’s character and personality that had proven instrumental to her ultimate survival had been her deeply ingrained pragmatism. At an age when most young girls were hanging posters of pop stars and gossiping on the telephone, she had been dealing with her mother’s alcoholism and all its inherent baggage. Priscilla had soon come to a self-preserving conclusion: the act of birthing a child was merely the physical manifestation of the biological rules of nature. In and of itself, it conferred no special powers or privileges, talents or virtues. It was the simple culmination of an earlier physical act, unrelated and even alien to any professed blessings of maternal love.
An actual mother, Priscilla realized, was a woman who loved you unconditionally, stood by you, taught you, nurtured you. A woman who would never abandon or hurt you by virtue of careless acts of indifference and selfish neglect.
By Priscilla’s definition, the reality of her own life was that she never had a mother. Not as a child, not as an adolescent. And certainly not as an adult.
Priscilla sighed heavily. Her partner, she realized, could never come to such a conclusion about her own life. Karen had bestowed the magical, mystical qualities of a child’s love upon the woman who had given her birth. She could never understand the consequences-the torment, the anguish, the agony-Wanda Jackson’s maternal failures had imposed.
An empty coldness spread slowly within Priscilla’s chest, memories straining beneath veils of darkness, struggling to reach her consciousness. She willed them away, forcing them into the abyss of the deepest corner of her soul.
“Fuck it,” she said aloud, bitterly.
“Fuck what?” she heard.
Raising her eyes, she found herself looking into the curious face of Joe Rizzo. He stood at her desk, his approach having gone unnoticed.
“You okay, Cil?” Rizzo asked, concern tugging at his tone. “You look like you just swallowed a rotten clam.”
She shook her head, clearing it. “These freakin’ precinct reports,” she said, indicating the papers before her. “Pain in my ass readin’ all this, signing off on ’em like it makes a rat’s ass bit of difference if I see them or not.”
Rizzo’s face remained impassive, and Priscilla realized he didn’t believe her answer. “Okay,” he said. “What ever you say.”
Later, Priscilla watched as Vince D’Antonio crossed the squad room to Rizzo’s desk and sat down, conferring briefly with her partner.
Rizzo raised his eyes in her direction, meeting her gaze. He gestured across the room, summoning her. Priscilla rose and walked to his desk.
“Pull up a chair,” Rizzo said. “We need to work out some details.”
She slid a chair from the unoccupied desk near Rizzo’s and sat down. “Mornin’, boss,” she said to D’Antonio.
“Good morning,” the lieutenant said. “I just need a few minutes to get this straight. Rizzo tells me you’re going to interview Lauria’s cousin tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Priscilla said. “The M.E. released the body and she’s tied up making funeral arrangements.”
D’Antonio turned to Rizzo. “Refresh my memory: What’s your schedule look like?”
“Later today I’ve gotta be at court for a grand jury thing. Tomorrow we got the cousin, then me and Cil are RDO till we start midnights Sunday into Monday, then midnights all next week. Tough to work a homicide from midnight to eight, Vince. Some people like to sleep those hours.”
D’Antonio considered it. “Look, let’s do this. I’ll reschedule you both for steady days to work the Lauria case. Take RDOs Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. After your interview of the cousin, prepare a laundry list of grunt work you figure needs doing-license plates, phone reviews, and junkie roundup. Somebody needs to check out the relatives of the landlord, see if there’s a potential perp among them. I’ll have the squad handle it all while you’re RDO, then DD-five the results for you by Monday morning. You come in fresh and go to work.”
Rizzo shrugged. “Monday I’ve got to be at the range, Vince. I already postponed it twice and if I don’t requalify, they rubber gun me and stick me on a desk. I can’t work a homicide from a desk.”
“So, Tuesday then,” D’Antonio said. “On Monday Cil can review the reports of what the squad got done and work the phones to follow up. Then Tuesday you both hit the streets on it.”
“I never seen this happen on television, guys,” Priscilla said with a tight smile. “Not even once.”
“Yeah, well,” said Rizzo. “The world don’t stop turning ’cause two cops caught a homicide. Only people who think that are the ones putting those shows on. And you’ll have to use Monday for more than just Lauria. That counterfeit prescription case, for instance. Those phony Rx’s are turning up all over the borough. Try and get a lead on that girl who worked in the doctor’s office for two weeks, then disappeared. We find her, we find our stolen script pads and our writer.”
Priscilla stood up. “Okay, Joe, what now?”
D’Antonio also stood. “I’ll leave you guys alone. Talk to the cousin. Get me that list of things you need done. The squad’ll pitch in.”
He turned and crossed the room to his office.
The following morning, a cold gray November day, with heavy, dark clouds and the faint scent of a threatening early snowfall, the two detectives were speeding eastbound on the Belt Parkway, Priscilla at the wheel.
Closing the note pad he had been scanning, Rizzo said to Priscilla, “Vince means well, but the squad won’t accomplish nothin’ over the next three days.”
Priscilla glanced at Rizzo. “Oh? Why’s that?”
“Well, for one thing, checking out plate numbers is a waste of time. Only reason for it is to see if some out-of-neighborhood car was parked near the scene, maybe the killer’s car. But those plate numbers were taken November tenth, after the body was layin’ in the apartment ten, twelve days. It don’t mean a goddamned thing whose car was parked where on the tenth. We need to know who was there the date of the murder.”
“A date we don’t even know,” Priscilla said.
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Well, what about Lauria’s phone record?” Priscilla asked. “Vince said the squad would get it for us.”
“Yeah. That might help, but I doubt it. We’ll see.”
“Maybe,” Priscilla said tentatively, “we should cancel our RDOs, come in the next few days.”
Rizzo shook his head. “No, let the squad do some of the work, it won’t kill them. It has to be done, even if it won’t help us. I especially don’t want to do the junkie roundup. Let them handle it. After I qualify at the range Monday, we can focus on Lauria. One day at a time.”
“What ever you think, Joe.”