The only person who’d dropped out of sight was Joe Spivack. Soon after the last of the memorial services and dedications, which we were all sort of required to attend, Spivack closed down his office in Brooklyn Heights and moved out of the city. No one knew where he’d gotten to, and, as none of us were exactly buddy buddy with him, no one seemed particularly concerned. To his way of thinking, he’d fucked up. Nothing anyone could say was going to change that. With time, maybe he’d come to see it differently. Oh, and that dinner Geary had promised that would include our families and friends, it never came off. That was fine. We had moved on.
I was certain we had, but Wit’s phone call put a dent in that notion.
“Hey, Wit,” I picked up, actually happy to hear his voice, “what’s up?”
“I … I thought you might want to know,” he said in a sort of odd monotone.
“Know what?”
“It just came across the wire. Spivack’s dead.”
“Shit! How?”
“He ate his.357 Magnum for breakfast yesterday.”
Neither one of us was shocked by what he’d done or how he’d done it. There was a few seconds of silence between us.
“Where was he?” I asked.
“Up in the Adirondacks someplace. Apparently, he owned a cabin up there.”
“Anything about a note?”
“Nothing in the wire story, no,” Wit said, sounding a bit distracted. “I’ll find out about the funeral arrangements and get back to you.”
So, Spivack had taken his own forgiveness out of the equation. Some people are just more comfortable with punishment than forgiveness. Forgiveness is always a messy proposition; complicated, ambiguous, hard to accept. Sometimes a bullet is easier to take. I’d never put a barrel in my mouth, not in jest or in the depths of despair, but I’d been a cop. Cops understand punishment. They believe in it. On the job, they live by it. Some die by it too.
The coroner’s report was straightforward enough. Joseph Spivack had consumed nearly a liter of 100-proof vodka before pressing the tip of his big handgun to the underside of his jaw above his Adam’s apple and dispensing a single round. He had left no note, but even the most devout conspiracy theorist couldn’t have spun much of a tale out of Spivack’s death. Since closing down his firm, he’d spent most of his time drinking alone in his cabin. Still, his suicide made me uneasy.
He was afforded the honor of a pretty nice military funeral out at the Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island. There was no twenty-one-gun salute or anything like that, but there was a small honor guard and a flag-draped coffin. No family showed that I could tell. Some of his old marshal buddies and a few ex-employees came. Wit, Pete, and I were there. Rob Gloria and Larry Mac couldn’t get out of work. Neither Geary nor Brightman was anywhere in sight.
When the honor guard finished folding the flag that had draped Spivack’s casket into a taut triangle, an officer asked if there was a Mr. Moses Prager in attendance.
“That’s me.”
The officer approached. “Sir,” he said, placing the flag in my hands, “I’ve been instructed to deliver this to you. On behalf of the United States Army, my condolences.”
I was utterly and completely stunned. Though this must have been either a mistake or a very bad joke, the grave site was not the place to delve into it. As they began lowering his coffin, a Navy F-14 passed directly overhead on its way to the nearby Grumman plant. It was purely coincidental, of course, but we chose to ignore that fact and saluted the roaring jet.
We retired to a local bar. Kilroy’s Place uniquely reflected the bulk of its clientele. The decor was an interesting mixture of Grumman and military paraphernalia ranging from fighter group patches to helmets to bayonets to a piece of a lunar module mockup. In a place of honor above the bar sat a wood-and-glass framed flag just like the one I cradled in my arms.
“What do you think the flag thing is all about?” Pete Parson was curious to know.
“Fuck if I know. His life must’ve been sadder than we thought for him to have left this to me.”
Wit was noncommittal, staring into his Wild Turkey as if it were a crystal ball. “He obviously respected you and the work you did for Brightman, Mr. Prager. You should be honored.”
“Wit, I think the time has come for you to call me Moe. You think, Pete?”
“I suppose you two have dated long enough.”
Wit liked that. “Okay, Moe it is.”
Maybe because I had been ceded the flag, all the other attendees stopped by to reminisce. Two consistent themes emerged: Joe Spivack was one tough motherfucker and loyal as any man who’d ever lived.
“Even last year when the company started taking on water, he wouldn’t let any of us go,” Ralph Barto, a fellow ex-marshal and former Spivack employee, wanted me to know. “Anybody else would have started throwing anything that wasn’t nailed down overboard, but not Joe Spivack. Somehow, he pulled us through. Even when he shut us down, we all got two weeks’ severance. I bet you it came out of his own pocket. I don’t know what you did to deserve that flag, mister, but it must’ve been something special.”
“Hey, do you know why he rated such a nice funeral?” I wondered.
“No. I know he was early in ‘Nam, even before Kennedy was shot, but that’s about it. Listen, I’m out on my own now,” Barto said. “Here’s my card. If you ever need backup, I’m there.”
On the way back into the city I asked Wit if he thought there might be a story in Spivack’s suicide.
“No story for me,” he said, “but there might be one for you.”
He didn’t volunteer a further explanation and I didn’t ask him for one. I had a comfortable life that needed getting back to.
Chapter Twelve
Sarah’s third birthday had come and gone when the package from Florida arrived at the Brooklyn store. At first, I was as surprised by it as I had been by Joe Spivack’s flag. Then I remembered that I had asked Moira’s mother to send it up to me. Inside was a hodgepodge of the personal effects her mother had held on to during the nineteen months of her daughter’s disappearance: pictures, a college ID, a ring of keys, her checkbook, some mail. Her mother had attached a handwritten note which included her good wishes that I find whatever it was I was looking for.
Although I considered it a blessing to have finally been involved in a case that I could hold at arm’s length, I was daunted by my inability to make any emotional connection with Moira Heaton. I suppose I was saddened, too, by her inability to connect with people in life as she had in death. She would be remembered now, if only through the scholarship that bore her name. It had seemed painfully important at the time, just after the case had come to a head, to somehow discover the essence of Moira Heaton. Six or so weeks had surely numbed the ache, but I flipped through her things anyway.
I don’t know what I had expected to find when I asked to see these things. Whatever it was, it continued to elude me. Flipping through her checkbook ledger, I did find one entry from a few weeks prior to her murder that got my attention:
CK NO. DATE CODE TRANSACTION PAYMENT/DEBIT 42611/7/81HNJ 1956Headlines Search, Inc.115.00
It stuck out for several reasons, not the least of which was the size of the check. After her rent, this was the biggest check she’d written in months. What could be so important to a woman making barely ten grand a year, I wondered, that she’d be willing to spend almost half a month’s rent on it? Second, Moira was nothing if not consistent. She wrote the same checks for roughly the same amounts in the same order for months at a time. There was her rent, her phone bill, her electric, her student loan, and an occasional check written to the local supermarket. Page after page had the same entries, then, a few weeks before she disappears, bang! Naturally, I was curious about exactly what goods and/or services Headlines Search, Inc., had provided to Moira for her money. I didn’t waste the time guessing and let my fingers do the walking.