"I feel great," he said, more a sigh. He yanked on his tie, loosening it, revealing an unnatural ridge of purple skin on his neck. He leaned to the floor to pick up a schoolbook about the solar system. He laid it on the stand at the end of the couch. "Pete Coates, the lead NYPD detective on the case, is coming over in a few minutes. Will you kids pick up this place?"
"Are you going to talk about how you blew the case?" Julie asked.
"You are too kind." Gray sipped the tea. "We didn't exactly blow it."
"The New York Times said you did," Carolyn teased. "You and your boss blew it, the editorial said."
"John, stop swinging your father's briefcase," Mrs. Orlando ordered as she returned to the kitchen. "You'll break something."
The apartment was in Bay Ridge, a Brooklyn neighborhood of Italians and Greeks, pizza joints and Optimos, fifty minutes by subway from Gray's office in lower Manhattan. The living room was about the width of John's swing. The television, a twenty-five-inch monster purchased as the result of an earlier lobbying effort by the twins, was the only item in the living room not careworn, dented, or frayed with age. The couch was sprung. The coffee table wore the marks of John's experiments with a hammer several years ago. The living-room rug was an old and fine Sarouk that belonged to Gray's ex-wife Cathryn. In a puerile fit, he had changed the lock before she remembered she had left the rug behind. She had also forgotten their framed wedding photo, and it remained on the end table. His family had never met Cathryn.
He said, "John, the briefcase goes—"
The door buzzer interrupted him. Gray rose from the chair and crossed to the intercom. When Pete Coates identified himself, Gray pressed the lobby door button.
Gray had no idea why Coates would visit his apartment, unprecedented in all the years of preparation and trial in the De Sallo case.
"Better warn Mrs. Orlando," Carolyn exclaimed, glancing into the kitchen. "It's a cop."
Julie laughed. "Maybe she can make it down the fire escape."
Gray waved them to silence. He tightened his tie and opened the door. Pete Coates climbed the last few stairs to the third floor. He was a large man, but his bulk was in his chest, not his belly. He moved with a lively gait despite years on the beat before earning his gold badge. He was breathing easily, a man in shape.
Coates said, "I'd have been here earlier, but I stopped at Junior's for a couple slices of cheesecake. Too bad you weren't along to pick up the tab."
Gray laughed as Coates entered the room. The detective had not once paid a check in the years he and Gray had worked on the De Sallo investigation. It seemed a point of honor with him. He had once told Gray, "I've never taken a nickel under the table on this job, so I've got to make up for it by stiffing people for food."
The twins were wide-eyed. A real police detective in their apartment. John stepped quickly to his special corner beside Gray's chair.
"Nice-looking bunch of kids," Coates said as he helped himself to the couch. A fleck of cheesecake clung to the corner of his mouth. "Looks like you got your own Third World country here."
Early in the De Sallo probe, Gray had learned that the trade-off for Coates's legendary tenacity was his relentless unrefinement. At first Gray thought the crassness was an act, part of the detective's tough-cop routine. But Coates was so persistent in his boorishness that Gray concluded he had brought it into the world with him like a birthmark.
Coates had proved himself again and again on the De Sallo investigation. The detective had once dug in a Staten Island garbage landfill searching for Pots Asperanti's numbers receipts for forty-eight hours without stopping, bringing in klieg lights so he could work at night. On another occasion, when his car stalled, Coates commandeered a Number 16 bus on Second Avenue and ordered it to follow De Sallo's Cadillac across the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, the passengers on the verge of a riot. On one January night Coates had posted himself down the block from De Sallo's Jamaica Bay Club while the thermometer dipped below five degrees and stayed there for the entire ten hours Coates was on duty. The next day a surgeon removed the tip of Coates's frostbitten small toe.
Coates had another quality Gray valued. He detested gangsters. The detective's loathing of organized crime brought an unbending moral principle to his police work. He hated the mob so much that he could not bring himself to call them hoodlums or gangsters or any other label imparting even a modicum of dignity. Instead Coates usually used the term pukes, and had done so while testifying against Carmine De Sallo, causing defense attorneys to move for a mistrial, which was denied. So Gray gladly put up with Coates and had even become fond of him.
The detective kicked off a loafer and rubbed the ball of his left foot. "It's good to get off my goddamn feet."
John gasped at the profanity. The twins tittered and looked knowingly at each other. They were convinced they knew words their father had missed all his life. The kitchen door opened slightly. Mrs. Orlando peered out.
Coates began, "Owen, you're a cool customer, I got to admit. After the Chinaman went down, you left the scene like you had ice in your veins."
Gray opened his hands in a vague gesture. Looking back on the scene later that evening, Gray had been vexed and angered at his own dispassion, at his own callousness at the gruesome event at Foley Square. His long journey back to normalcy — for years a day-to-day harrowing struggle that had exhausted and confused him and had cost him dearly — might not have succeeded. A healthy person would have reacted differently, more like Anna Renthal, sick at the abrupt and gory passage from life to death.
"Owen, you've got a lot of scars, those ones on your arms and legs," Coates said. "But remember that first day when you went to the gym with me and I saw your neck and asked about the scar there? You said you choked on a piece of ham in your dormitory at college and had to have a tracheotomy. Well, I recently was talking to a surgeon friend of mine and he said tracheotomies shouldn't leave much of a scar, not these days. So I got a little curious and did a little digging."
The children were quiet, peering at the detective.
"If I showed initiative like this all the time I'd be mayor by now, I'll guarantee you that," Coates said. "Owen, everybody at NYPD thinks you are just a run-of-the-mill prosecutor, a damn good one, but just your average PA making life miserable for us police."
The twins inched closer.
Julie needled, "You aren't a run-of-the-mill prosecutor, Dad?"
Carolyn joined in, "We thought you were."
Gray cautioned, "I'm good enough to put you two girls in juvie for ragging your father."
The detective asked, "You got a beer?"
Gray shook his head.
John called from his spot, "We got Yoo Hoos in the 'frigerator."
"Who'd have figured it?" Coates asked. "I read about that scar in your service file an FBI friend sent me. Made me queasy. No beer?"
"Pete, why were you interested in my service file?"
Carolyn asked, "Why'd the scar make you queasy? It's not too bad."
"Just some blue and red and purple skin," Julie chimed in.
The detective asked, "Your old man ever tell you how he got that scar?"
"A leech," Julie replied. "Big deal. We Koreans eat them for breakfast."
"You want that Yoo Hoo, mister?" John asked from his spot.
Gray said, "My kids know I had an accident."
"I'll say." Coates put his shoe back on. "One day out in the jungle you picked up your canteen and took a big gulp of water. And you swallowed a leech that had gotten inside your canteen when you were filling it."
Carolyn made a production of shrugging. "Wouldn't have bothered me."