"Would you like some tea?" she inquired with perfect diction as she brought us into her dusty, threadbare parlor. Books covered every surface and were piled chest-high like trash in a landfill.
"That's okay, Mrs. Phelps," Mike said, taking out his bifocals and putting them on.
"Ms. Phelps," she corrected him.
"Sorry," Mike said. "Ms. Phelps, as you know, a police officer was found dead in the park. We're the detectives conducting the investigation. Can you help us?"
"The car I saw was a Toyota," Ms. Phelps said. "A Camry, I believe, and a recent model. The man who exited it was white, five eleven maybe. He wore glasses and dark clothing.
"At first, I thought he was here for the same unfortunate reason most Caucasians visit our community; namely, the purchase of illegal drugs from our neighborhood boys. But then, oddly, I saw him open the back door of his car and emerge with a large something rolled up in a blue sheet. It could very well have been a body. He returned approximately five minutes later, empty-handed, and drove away."
When I glanced at Mike, he looked as happily astonished as I felt dismayed.
Because this Bronx witness, this former schoolteacher, was a rare species indeed. We'd done midday gas station shootings where not one of twenty people had seen anything. Drive-bys of weddings where both sides of the family hadn't seen or heard a thing. Now, here we had a middle-of-the-night dump job in a drug spot, ostensibly the most difficult of all homicides to solve, and we run into photographic-memory Grandma.
"Did you get the plate number?" Mike said expectantly.
No, I thought, wincing. Please, God, make her say no.
"No," Ms. Phelps said.
I had to force myself to release my breath silently.
"It was too dark?" Mike said, disappointed.
"No," Ms. Phelps said, looking at him like he was a student who'd forgotten to raise his hand. "There were no plates."
"Did you call the police and tell them what you saw?" I said.
Ms. Phelps patted me on the knee.
"In this neighborhood, Detective, staying out of other people's affairs is an acquired necessity."
"Then, why did you tell the police officer who knocked on your door that you saw something?" Mike said, curious.
"They asked," Ms. Phelps said with a prim nod. "I am not a liar."
That makes one of us, I thought.
"Would you be able to pick out the man you saw from a lineup?" I asked with a tight smile.
"Undoubtedly," Ms. Phelps said.
"Terrific," I said as I handed Ms. Phelps my card. "We'll be in touch."
"You can count on it," added Mike.
Chapter 27
MIKE HAD HIS BIFOCALS on top of his head as we left Amelia Phelps's house and walked back into the park. He mumbled to himself excitedly as he went over his interview notes. He was pumped. He had to feel we were getting closer to the killer. It was a great feeling, I knew. Being a detective, being the good guy.
I missed it terribly.
I felt horrible about lying to Mike and the rest of the cops who were traipsing around in the rain out there. When one cop goes down, all cops feel it. There's the instant outrage, of course, but underneath is unsettling fear. Have I made a mistake in choosing this dangerous job? Is it worth dying for?
I knew my friends and co-workers were reeling, hurting. By telling the truth, I could erase their anxious tension. The thought that somebody else could possibly get hurt out there made me almost physically sick.
I closed my eyes, listening to the crackle of police radio chatter and the rain in the trees.
I didn't say anything to anyone about what I knew, what had actually happened to Scott.
I kept my head down and my mouth shut.
I looked up only when I saw some commotion alongside the fountain.
A couple of dozen uniforms were arraying themselves in parallel lines from the fountain to the medical examiner's black station wagon, waiting underneath the rusted el on Jerome.
"They're taking him out," I heard one of the uniforms say as he rushed past me to grab a place in the line.
An honor guard of six cops carefully stepped into the water of the fountain and received from the medical examiner's team the green-black body bag Scott had already been placed in. They handled him as if he were a sick person who was still alive. Oh, God, I wished that were true. I wished I could take this entire night back, every second of it.
Along that stock-still, midnight-blue rank, someone started singing "Danny Boy" in a high, clear, haunting tenor that would have made Ronan Tynan jealous.
You want a definition of forlorn? How about half a dozen cops slowly bearing one of their dead through a dark Bronx tenement valley while the rain falls and the pipes, the pipes are calling. Was Scott even Irish? I didn't know. All dead cops are Irish, I guess.
I watched the rain splatter like flung holy water against the body bag as the procession passed me. Everywhere men were weeping openly. I watched as even the commissioner, standing beside the ME office's hearse, cupped a hand over his eyes.
An overhead passing number 4 train sounded out a martial drum snare as Scott was slid into the back of the wagon like a file returned to a drawer.
Tears drained out of my eyes as if my tear ducts had been slit.
Chapter 28
I CAUGHT A WHITE BLUR out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly I was enveloped in a wall of warm Tyvek.
"Oh, Lauren," an academy classmate of mine, Bonnie Clesnik, whispered in my ear as she hugged me to her side. "This is so horrible. That poor guy."
Bonnie had been premed at NYU before she dropped out to become a cop, and she was now a sergeant in the Crime Scene Unit. As the only female former professionals in a class filled mostly with twenty-two-year-old, smooth-faced boys from Long Island, we had formed a quick bond. I'd stayed over at "the Bonster" and her partner Tatum's loft on St. Mark's Place so many times, they named the futon after me.
Bonnie fished a Kleenex out of her suit and wiped the corners of her eyes, then handed me a tissue, too.
"Look at us," she said with a laugh. "Badass cops, huh? It's been – what? A year? You did something to your hair. I like it."
"Thanks," Mike said, stepping between us. "I just washed it. And you are?"
"Bonnie, this fool is my partner, Mike," I said, introducing them. "I thought you worked days."
"When I heard the news, I came running, just like everybody else," Bonnie said. "I haven't seen this many cops in one place since St. Paddy's. Or Ground Zero."
She took off the freezer bag that was strapped across her chest beside several cameras.
"I'm glad I did, though, Lauren. I'm really glad. I think I found something."
I accepted the freezer bag from her, held it up.
Every light in the park and beyond seemed to surge suddenly with a white-hot brightness. The rain felt like it was falling right through me.
I turned Paul's silver, wired-rimmed glasses slowly in my hand.
"They were in the sheet Scott was wrapped in," Bonnie said. "I already called one of the guys in his narcotics unit. Scott didn't wear glasses. If they're prescription, we can go through the files of every ophthalmologist in the tristate area and nail the four-eyed son of a bitch who did this."
I felt a tingling behind my left eye as Mike whooped and gave Bonnie a high five.
A stream of electrified chatter leaked from Mike's radio a moment later.