“Ghosts?” I repeated. “Depends. There’s shit that can haunt a man worse than the walking dead. But do I believe in spirits and shit? Nah, I don’t believe in things that go boo or bump in the night.”
“You sound pretty confident.”
“I am.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Larry said, his eyes looking through me and into the past. He smiled. Pulled a cassette tape out of his pocket. Put it in my palm and gently folded my fingers around it. “Don’t be so sure.”
“What’s this?”
“It goes bump in the night.”
“Very funny, McDonald.”
“You see me laughing?”
I didn’t.
He held his right hand out to me. I put the tape in my pocket.
“Again, congratulations on the new store, Moe. Pass it on to your brother and kiss Katy for me. Listen to the tape and call me.”
“Cryptic isn’t usually your style.”
“This isn’t ‘usually.’ ”
I thought about saying something to that. Thankfully, he’d gone before I could formulate a question. When I turned back around, Francis Maloney was smiling at me through the plate glass window of the store.
CHAPTER TWO
I counted sleepless nights instead of sheep, staring up at the ceiling I knew was there but couldn’t see. Katy was next to me, but a million miles away. We had hit the inevitable impasse, that stage in marriage when each day is like a long drive through Nebraska. In the absence of passion, I wondered, what distinguished love from habit? The answer escaped me there in the dark.
Once, many years back, when I was working the case that ultimately led to Larry Mac’s first big promotion, I thought Katy meant to leave me. Only time in my life I felt faint. Had to prop myself up against the furniture. God, I can feel the power of that moment surging through me even now. A few months before, Katy had miscarried. The convulsion of grief and guilt that followed in its wake had overwhelmed us. After the initial tears and blame, Katy fell into a kind of stupor. I thought she was coming out of it, but she was so unpredictable in those long weeks.
The miscarriage and the months that followed caused the first subtle cracks in our marriage. They were hairline fractures, small, barely detectable. I suppose they’ve added up with time. But that day, the day I thought I would faint, my panic wasn’t about the miscarriage. No, the panic belonged to me. I owned it. I thought Katy had stumbled upon the secret, the one her father and I kept wedged between us like a bottle of liquid nitroglycerin.
Back in December of 1977, Patrick Maloney, Katy’s younger brother, had gone into Manhattan and vanished. I had just been retired from the job due to a freak knee injury. Hobbling around on a cane and looking for a way to raise some money for our first wine shop, I was hired by the Maloneys to help find their missing boy. According
I had, in fact, found Patrick, a college sophomore who had collected a trunkful of his own dark secrets. By that time I’d already begun to fall in love with Katy. But when I found her brother, he begged me for a few more days. He wanted to come back to his family on his own terms. I agreed. Biggest mistake in my life. I should have dragged him out of his hiding spot by the ears and plopped him on his parents’ sofa.
Of course, Patrick was full of shit. He hit the road running and never looked back. Can’t say that I blamed him. My problem was that my father-in-law knew I’d found his son. We both had our reasons for not telling Katy. Now our reasons were moot. The time for confession had come and gone. Compounded with each passing day, this was a sin Katy would never forgive.
For years I had been able to keep the panic and guilt at bay. My sleepless nights were few. Only time it used to get to me was when I’d work the odd case, or see Francis and he’d ask me that fucking question about ghosts. Then I’d relive it all over again, the past churning inside me. These days, sleeplessness was the norm and I’m not sure if guilt or panic has a thing to do with it. I suppose I still loved Katy and that she loved me, but the love just wasn’t the glue it had once been. Sarah, our little girl, she was the glue now. These nights, when I stare up at a ceiling I cannot see, I wonder if I would still feel faint if Katy threatened to leave or if I would simply feel relief.
Tired of the frustration, I got up and fished Larry McDonald’s cassette out of my jacket pocket. Still smelled his smoke on my suit. Went downstairs. Poured myself a few fingers of Dewars. Sitting on the floor, hunched against the wing of the sofa closest to the stereo, I sipped scotch and rolled the cassette in my hand. It was a prayer of sorts, a prayer without words-a prayer that the cassette meant trouble, that the trouble meant Larry Mac needed my help. It was a cruel prayer. It’s cruel to pray for troubles, but I was lost. Worse, I was bored.
Some cops are action junkies. They crave stimulation. If it doesn’t come to them, they go looking for it. If they can’t find it, they create it. That wasn’t me, not who I used to be-not while I was on the job, anyway. Now I wasn’t so sure. The wine business had never been my dream. That was Aaron’s gig, not mine. I’d just hitched my ass to it
I slipped my big old Koss headphones over my ears, clicked off the SPEAKER A button, and pressed PLAY on the tape deck. There were three voices, two men and a woman. All sounded far away, but I could make out what was being said clearly enough. The recording had the sound of a tape that was made surreptitiously, because no one was speaking into the mic. It became immediately apparent I was listening to an interrogation or, as cops euphemistically like to call it, an interview. The suspect’s name was Melvin. Melvin didn’t like being called Melvin. Even my moms don’t call me Melvin no more. It’s Malik!
A strategic mistake, telling the detectives that. The woman detective-young, with the lilt of someone raised speaking English in school and Spanish at home-jumped all over him. She started and ended each question with Melvin, picking fiercely at his scabs. She was the bad cop and was either a great actress or born to the part. The male detective-older, white, Bronx Irish-was the sympathetic voice. Listen, Malik, I’m with you, man, but it’s her case.
You could tell he was the more experienced detective, not because of his age, but because he spoke less. A good interviewer knows that silence can be your best weapon. The Latina’s youth was showing. She was a little too eager, too much of a shark, that one. She smelled blood in the water, Melvin’s blood. She’d learn.
Funny thing is, I was a cop for ten years, but I wasn’t allowed in the box except for maybe once or twice, and then only to try and intimidate the suspect. Detectives guarded their turf jealously: uniforms need not apply. For detectives, the interview room was like the ark that held the Torah scrolls; only the rabbis got a free pass. The rest of us had to be invited to stand before the ark or stare from the pews in awe and wonder. It took me a minute to divine that Melvin, a.k.a. Malik, had been snagged with half a key of coke taped to the underside of the dash of his 1979 Buick Electra 225. Things quickly settled into a boring point-counterpoint:
I’m keepin’ my mouf shut till y’all get me my lawyer.
You do that, Melvin. You keep quiet while I extol the virtues of the Rockefeller Drug Laws to you. Okay, Melvin?
The partner bitched about her using words like extol.
What’s the problem? You afraid Melvin won’t understand?
Fuck Melvin. I’m worried I won’t understand!
I didn’t get what this chatty interrogation about a drug bust had to do with Larry, nor why it would worry him so, but it was great for insomnia. I found myself drifting off into that netherworld between consciousness and numb sleep. I was almost fully out when the female detective began a rant about just how much of his worthless life Melvin would be spending in Attica thanks to the former governor of the Empire State.