“Two girls. Kate and Annie. They’re at school today. They’re still adjusting to having my dad here, though.”
“How is he?”
She grimaced. “Not good. It’s just a matter of time. The drugs make him sleepy, but he’s usually good for an hour or two in the afternoon. Soon, he’ll have to go to a hospice, but he’s not ready for that, not yet. For now, he’ll stay here with us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He’s not. He had a great life, and he’s ending it with his family. He’s looking forward to seeing you, though. He liked your father a lot. Liked you too. I think he’d have been happy if we’d ended up together, once.”
Her face clouded. I think she had made a series of unspoken connections, creating an alternative existence in which she might have been my wife.
But my wife was dead.
“We read about all that happened,” she said. “It was awful, all of it.”
She was silent for a time. She had felt obliged to raise the subject, and now she did not know what to do to dispel the effect it had had.
“I have a daughter too,” I told her.
“Really? That’s great,” she said, with a little too much enthusiasm. “How old is she?”
“Two. Her mother and I, we’re not together anymore.” I paused. “I still see my daughter, though.”
“What’s her name?”
“Samantha. Sam.”
“She’s in Maine?”
“No, Vermont. When she’s old enough, she can vote socialist and start signing petitions to secede from the union.”
She raised a glass of water. “Well, to Sam, then.”
“To Sam.”
We ate and talked about old school friends, and her life in Pearl River. It turned out that she had made it to Europe after all, with Mike. The trip had been a gift for their tenth wedding anniversary. They went to France, and Italy, and England.
“And was it what you’d expected?” I asked.
“Some of it. I’d like to go back and see more, but it was enough, for now.”
I heard movement above us.
“Dad’s awake,” she said. “I just need to go upstairs and help him get organized.”
She left the kitchen and went upstairs. After a moment or two, I could hear voices, and a man coughing. The coughs sounded harsh and dry and painful.
Ten minutes later, Amanda led an old, stooped man into the room, keeping a reassuring arm around his waist. He was so thin that her arm almost encircled him, but even bent over B aridthe was nearly as tall as I was.
Eddie Grace’s hair was gone. Even his facial hair had disappeared. His skin looked clammy and transparent, tinged with yellow at the cheeks and a reddish-purple below the eyes. There was very little blood in his lips, and when he smiled, I could see that he had lost many of his teeth.
“Mr. Grace,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”
“Eddie,” he said. “Call me Eddie.” His voice was a rasp, like a plane moving over rough metal.
He shook my hand. His grip was still strong.
His daughter stayed with him until he had seated himself.
“You want some tea, Dad?”
“Nah, I’m good, thank you.”
“There’s water in the jug. You want me to pour some for you?”
He raised his eyes to heaven.
“She thinks that, because I walk slow and sleep a lot, I can’t pour my own water,” he said.
“I know you can pour your own water. I was just trying to be nice. Jeez, but you’re an ungrateful old man.” She said it with affection, and when she hugged him he patted her hand and grinned.
“And you’re a good girl,” he said. “Better than I deserve.”
“Well, as long as you understand that.” She kissed his bald pate. “I’ll leave you two alone to talk. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”
She looked at me from behind him, and asked me silently not to tire him out. I nodded slightly, and she left us once he was comfortably seated, but not before touching him gently on the shoulder as she pulled the door half closed behind her.
“How are you doing, Eddie?” I asked.
“So-so,” he said. “Still here, though. I feel the cold. I miss Florida. Stayed as long as I could, but I wasn’t able to look after myself, once I started getting sick. Andrea, my wife, she died a few years back. I couldn’t afford a private nurse. ’Manda brought me up here, said she’d look after me if the hospital agreed. And I still got friends, you know, from the old days. It’s not so bad. It’s just the damn cold that gets me.”
He poured himself some water, the jug shaking only slightly in his hand, then took a sip.
“Why’d you come back here, Charlie? What are you doing, talking to a dying man?”
“It’s about my father.”
“Huh,” he said. Some of the water dribbled from his mouth and ran down his chin. He wiped at it with the sleeve of his gown.
“I’m sorry,” he said, clearly embarrassed. “It’s only when someone new comes along that I forget how little dignity I have left. You know what I’ve learned from life? Don’t get old. Avoid it for as long as you can. Getting sick don’t help none either.”
He seemed to drift for a moment, and his eyes grew heavy.
“Eddie,” I said gently. “I wanted to talk to you about Will.”
He grunted and turned his attention back to me. “Yeah, Will. One of the good ones.”
“You were his friend. I hoped that you might be able to tell me something about what happened, about why it happened.”
“After all this time?”
“After all this time.”
He tapped his fingers on the table.
“He did things the quiet way, your old man. He could talk people down, you know? That was his thing. Never got real angry. Never had a temper. Even the move for a time from the Ninth to Uptown, that was his decision. Probably didn’t do much for his record, requesting a transfer that early in his career, but he did it for a quiet life. Of all the men who might have done what he did he wasn’t the one I’d have picked, not in a million years.”
“Do you remember why he requested the transfer?”
“Ah, he wasn’t getting on with some of the brass in the Ninth, he and Jimmy both. They were some team, those two. Where one led, the other followed. Between them, I think they managed to spit in the eye of everyone who mattered. That was the flip side of your father. He had a devil in him, but he kept it chained up most of the time. Anyway, there was a sergeant in the Ninth name of Bennett. You ever hear of him?”
“No, never.”
“Didn’t last long. He and your father, they locked horns, and Jimmy backed Will, same as always.”
“You remember why they didn’t get on?”
“Nah. Clash of personalities, I think. Happens. And Bennett was dirty, and your father didn’t care much for dirty cops, didn’t matter how many stripes they carried. Anyway, Bennett found a way to unlock the devil in your father. Punches were thrown one night, and you didn’t do that while in uniform. It looked bad for Will, but they couldn’t afford to lose a good cop. I guess some calls were made on his behalf.”
“By whom?”
Eddie shrugged. “If you do right by others, you build up favors you can call in. Your old man had friends. A deal was cut.”
“And the deal was that my father would request a transfer.”
“That was it. He spent a year in the wilderness, until Bennett took a beating from the Knapp Commission for being a meat eater.”
The Knapp Commission, which investigated police corruption in the early seventies, came up with two definitions of corrupt cops: the “grass eaters,” who were guilty of petty corruption for tens and twenties, and the “meat eaters,” who shook down dealers and pimps for larger amounts.
“And when Bennett was gone, my father returned?”
“Something like that.” Eddie made a movement with his fingers, as of someone dialing a rotary phone.
“I didn’t know my father had those kinds of friends.”
“Maybe he didn’t either, until he needed them.”
I let it go.
“Do you remember the shooting?” I asked.
“I remember hearing about it. I was four-twelve that week. Me and my partner, we met up with two other guys, Kloske and Burke, for coffee. They’d been over at the precinct house when the call came in. Next time I saw your father, he was lying in a box. They did a good job on him. He looked like he’d always done, I suppose, like himself. Sometimes, these embalmers, they make you look like a wax dummy.” He tried to smile. “I got these things on my mind, as you can imagine.”