“My dad wanted it. I respected the man, so I gave it a shot...” He shrugged. “It just wasn’t for me. After a few weeks, I quit.”
“And your cousin Michael couldn’t understand?”
Again, Mike shrugged. “He thought we were in it together...”
“So he turned on you?”
“Like I said, that’s how it started. Trust me when I say that my cousin has no love for me, and I’d like you to stay away from him. Can you do that for me, Clare?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thank you.”
As we sat gazing at the hearth, I felt Mike’s hand brush aside my hair, begin to caress my shoulder. His heavy body leaned into me, and I felt his lips at my nape, applying little kisses.
I knew what the man wanted. (I wanted it, too.) But I couldn’t let go. An idea kept banging around my brain, a pithy piece of police wisdom Mike once shared: If a smart perp wants to dodge an interview, he doesn’t clam up or even argue. He keeps feeding the interviewer information — just not any key information...
And that’s what Mike had done with me. I was sure of it. Considering the Quinn clan’s history with the FDNY, I figured there had to be more to his story. Not that I was some expert on familial expectation.
After my mother left us, my father expressed zero thoughts about my future apart from I just want you to be happy, cupcake... The equivalent of a “Good girl, Lassie” pat on the head. My old-world grandmother, who’d primarily raised me, never pushed me to be anything — beyond a well-behaved young lady.
It wasn’t until college that I realized not everyone was like me. A number of my classmates were pressured children, saddled with the baggage of parental aspirations. When the stars aligned, they had few issues: I always wanted to study contract law... Electrical engineering works for me... Sure, I’m going for the PhD...
But when one future had two different maps, kids got lost.
The strong ones waged external rebellion, raising shields against arrows as they followed the sound of Henry David’s drummer. The pragmatic ones chose deafness — screw the different drummer, he’s suspect — and locked down their spirits to the road often taken.
The ones I worried about lived in the gray purgatory of indecision, giving their families the appearance of going along while quietly burning for another life. These kids saw the lights of an inspiring new highway yet continued to plod along the deadening old one, nurturing quiet resentment with every step. (And I knew from my own lousy marriage that a pretense like that was about as healthy as feeding a piranha in your stomach. Inevitably the thing grew bigger and bigger, gnawing at your insides until it completely hollowed you out.)
Given the Quinn legacy, Mike’s father must have been devastated when his eldest quit the fire academy. It couldn’t have been the casual decision Mike was now making it out to be.
I cleared my throat: “I noticed you like sharing that story about the schoolyard fight, but there’s something more, isn’t there? Something you don’t want people to know about why you became a cop.”
The kisses stopped. The magic fingers quit moving. Mike leaned back, taking his hand and lips with him.
“Mike?”
“It’s not a pretty story, Clare.”
“I don’t care. I’d like to hear it...”
For a full minute, he stayed silent, shifting a few times on the sofa. Then just when I thought he would clam up for good, he rubbed his jaw, took a breath, and said —
“When I hit high school, I started dating a classmate. Leta was her name, Leta Diaz. Bright girl, beautiful smile. She was my lab partner in chemistry, a class we both enjoyed, so we hit it off...”
He paused to glance over at me. I nodded. “Go on.”
“Leta’s family came here from the Dominican Republic. They ran their own little convenience store just off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. One afternoon, Leta’s dad was robbed at the store. He resisted and was shot to death.”
“Oh God, that’s awful. Your poor girlfriend.”
“Yeah, she took it extremely hard. I tried to be there for her. But I wanted to do more than just hold her hand and watch her cry her heart out, you know? I wanted to do something. So I did.”
“What do you mean? You were just a high school kid.”
“I had a gut feeling. The week before, at one of the school’s basketball games, I noticed the father of a classmate talking to Leta’s father. There was something about the way he was chatting up the man — it seemed odd, like a hustle.”
“So?”
“So this robbery that happened — it was during a very narrow window of time when Leta’s father had a great deal of cash on hand at the store to pay their packaged-food distributor. Once a week they got that delivery, once a week on a certain day, between certain hours.”
“And you thought this man, this father of your classmate at school, was the stick-up guy?”
“I knew he’d already done time for mail fraud. My classmate — Pete Hogarth was his name — he’d been complaining that his old man couldn’t get any work, also hinted that he had a worsening cocaine habit. So I took matters into my own hands.”
“What did you do?”
“I buddied up to Pete, went back to his apartment to hang out. The place was small, no privacy, but when I heard his dad kept pigeons on the roof, I knew that’s where I’d find evidence — and I did. The gun and the cash were buried in one of the coops. I called the detectives assigned to the case. They arrested Pete’s father. The ballistics matched up. He was the shooter.”
“Leta must have been grateful.”
“Honestly, she was too numb to fully understand what I did. Less than a month later, her family was back living in the Dominican Republic.”
“So much for young love.”
“Don’t sweat it, Cosi. My heart survived.”
“Those detectives handling the case must have been impressed.”
“They were. They checked in on me after that, encouraged me to go to the police academy.”
“But your father wanted you to join the FDNY?”
“I was the oldest. Like I said, I respected my dad, wanted to make him proud. But...”
“But... ?”
Mike turned on the sofa to fully face me. “As it came down, two of the guys in my class at the fire academy — they were relatives of Pete Hogarth’s. These guys didn’t care that Pete’s father was a scumbag killer. They just figured me for a narc, a rat, a guy you could never trust, and they made it a point of spreading the story of what I’d done.”
“Is that how your cousin felt about you?”
“No. Michael defended me. But it wasn’t enough, and after a few weeks, my reality check kicked in. I knew what I wanted to be doing for the next four decades of my life, and it wasn’t fighting fires. I wanted to be hunting down predators, Clare, getting them the hell off the street. Hogarth shot Leta’s father in cold blood, and I made sure he couldn’t kill again. I liked how it felt when I took him down.”
My mind flashed on Enzo, pale as a cadaver in the ICU; Madame weak and teary on that stretcher; Dante unconscious on the glass-strewn concrete...
I closed my eyes. “Does it always feel good to take them down?”
“For me it does. But you don’t always get them, Clare.”
I realized something then, something Mike had known all along...
“That’s why you’ve never discouraged me, isn’t it?” I met his gaze. “You solved your first homicide as a kid, without a badge or a gun. You know what someone like me can do.”
“Information and evidence, sweetheart. That’s what clears cases. I can flash my shield all day long, but without information and evidence, I can’t do my job. That’s why we work to develop informants on the street, interview witnesses, run background checks. If you can get those things for an investigator, then you can help him — or her.”
I exhaled. Given the fire marshal’s brush off earlier in the evening, not to mention Captain Michael’s oh-so-subtle warning not to get involved, I hadn’t realized how much I needed to hear some encouraging words. Well, I was happy to return the favor.