Last Call (2 page)

Frank hears the sharp intake of breath. She dreads what’s coming next but bears the standard response stoically. Nor does she protest when Gail says, “I’m coming over.”

Gail lets herself in and crosses the room to where Frank is leaning against the patio door. She enfolds Frank and Frank dutifully accepts the embrace. Gail’s smell is sweet and familiar, as wonderful as a child’s must be to its mother. Frank has loved the scent of this woman, the feel of her flesh against hers, but for all the comfort it brings tonight, she may as well be hugging marble. She feels nothing and that’s all right. The click is kicking in. While she wouldn’t exactly say it was peaceful, at least it isn’t painful. And that is worth a lot. Yes, indeedy, that is plenty good right now and she won’t risk losing that precious cessation of feeling.

The doc asks, “How’d you find out?”

“When he hadn’t called in by eight I tracked Tracey down at County General.”

“What happened to him?”

“I told you. He was in a car accident.”

“No, I mean, was it his head, internal trauma?”

Irritation bleeds into Frank’s drunken equanimity but she decides the question is only natural coming from the county coroner. “He bled out. The doctor working on him said he’d sustained a lot of trauma and that they couldn’t stop the bleeding. His heart quit.”

Frank’s almost stops as she says that.
Noah’s heart quit.
She can’t believe that big, stupid, goofy heart could be stilled. How could an organ with so much life in it just quit? Her heart, sure. It was a rock. People like her died every day. That was to be expected. But Noah was
good.
He was a good dad, a good husband, a good cop. A good friend.

“Did you get to see him? Or talk to him?”

“No. He was in surgery when I got there. He never came out of it. Tracey didn’t get to see him either. Not until it was over.”

They have broken apart a little and Gail nods at the glass affixed to Frank’s hand. “I assume you’re getting drunk.”

“Not as drunk as I’d like to. Fubar’s on call, Darcy and Bobby volunteered to catch tonight, but I want to see Tracey first thing in the morning. I won’t be any good to her hungover.”

“How is she?”

“Pretty fucked up. Her sister’s with her.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

Frank shakes her head. “Nothing anybody can do.”

“Have you eaten at all?”

“No.”

“How about some soup?” Gail asks, moving toward the kitchen.

Frank doesn’t stop her.

“How’d everybody at work take it?”

Again Frank is irritated. It’s taken her hours to dim the day’s hot lights and Gail’s flipping them back on.

“Like you’d expect. I gave ‘em the choice to go home if they wanted. Johnnie and Jill left.”

“What about Lewis?”

“She seemed kind of at odds.” Then more to herself, Frank says, “I don’t know what I’ll do with her.”

Cheryl Lewis had come into the 93rd Squad barely a year ago. Frank had watched her advance from boot to sergeant and when Frank needed replacements for her depleted squad, she’d requested Lewis. She’d partnered her with Noah. Lewis was big, black and temperamental. Noah was an impish, skinny, white boy whom Lewis insisted on calling O’Malley even though he always countered he was Jewish. Noah would take his partner to the edge of her temper and back away, gradually building elasticity into it. Lewis learned quickly and Noah blossomed as a mentor. He was a helluva good cop. Frank had always thought if the day came when she was ready to leave the nine-three that she’d like to leave Noah holding the reins.

Now that won’t happen.

Gail puts a bowl of tomato soup on the table and Frank sits in front of it. She tastes a few spoonfuls, then lets the soup cool and drinks her Scotch. Gail gazes at her over the slab of glass tabletop.

“How are you?” she asks, chin in hand.

Frank pushes the bowl aside and adopts the same pose. Gail is lovely. Green eyes, crow’s feet, the silky, dark-chocolate pageboy that Frank only recently found out is dyed. All lovely. Frank would testify to it in a court of law, but Gail’s beauty can’t move her. She sees Gail from a great remove, like a master’s painting in a book of great art.

“How am I?” Frank repeats, having no idea how to answer the question. “I guess I’m all right.”

“How do you feel?”

Referring to the BSU shrink she used to see, Frank counters, “You sound like Clay.”

“You liked Clay.”

“Not in my living room.”

A slight curve lifts Gail’s lips. Frank realizes they didn’t kiss hello. She wonders if it’s too late. She could lean over and kiss the soft folds right now. She knows what they will feel like. Firm and giving at the same time. Frank considers this but doesn’t have the inclination to act on it.

“How much of that have you had?” Gail asks, indicating the glass at Frank’s elbow.

“I’m not counting.”

Frank’s “lapses into inebriation,” as Gail calls them, are an issue around which they have created a wary detente. Gail’s dad was a destructive drunk, always promising to go on the wagon and stay there, and always falling off. Frank doesn’t get drunk in front of Gail and Gail doesn’t bring it up. Today Frank has broken the rules and couldn’t care less. Her best friend’s dead and she’s entitled. She lets the chips of their delicate truce fall where they may.

“Would you like me to stay?” Gail surprises Frank by adding, “I promise I won’t nag.”

Frank reaches across the table for her hand. “Yes.” She says this because she thinks it will please Gail to feel needed. Also because it’s the right thing to say. One shouldn’t be alone at times like this and all that jazz. What she won’t admit is that, lying restlessly under fathoms of alcohol is the frail hope that Gail can touch her, that the doc can offer some small measure of comfort. That maybe, just maybe, Gail can become part of the click.

The next morning, Frank is comforted by the distraction of a mild hangover. She stays at Tracey’s long enough for a cup of coffee. Amid tears and dark laughter, Tracey, her sister and one of Noah’s sisters are managing the funeral arrangements. Tracey’s mom and dad are flying in this afternoon and Noah’s folks will drive up tomorrow from San Diego. Tracey and the kids will be surrounded by people who love them, and Frank will stay out of the way.

Before leaving, Frank hugs Noah’s kids. Leslie is just hitting puberty. She is silent and withdrawn. At ten, Jamie is wide-eyed and brave, vainly trying to comfort her baby brother. Markie is old enough to understand his father is dead, but young enough to burst into tears for him. She returns them to the diversion of aunts and cousins, making Tracey promise to call her if there is anything at all she needs.

The rest of Frank’s morning is spent repeating the phone calls she made yesterday. Without emotion, she relays the details of Saturday’s funeral and memorial. The squad drifts in and out, until they have all gone home, but Frank remains, burying herself in the minutiae of administration.

Now it is a few ticks shy of midnight. Frank paces the squad room. Her cadre of ghosts follows in close formation. Light filters in from her office and the hall. The squad room dozes, undisturbed by the station sounds drifting up the stairs.

Smoking is not permitted in the building yet a blue haze nuzzles the ceiling. Frank stops long enough to light a new cigarette off her old one. She drops the stub into the Pepsi can Darcy uses to spit his chew, the sizzling extinction pleasing her. From the boom box in her office, Sinatra spills his guts. The CD player was a birthday gift from the squad. She’d been touched, sure it had been Noah’s idea to replace her ancient cassette player.

Frank keeps stopping at his desk. Like a kitchen is always the gathering place in a house, Noah’s desk has always been the focal point of the office. The metal sides are upholstered with his kids’ artwork held in place by a variety of magnets. Colorful paintings and poems paper the wall behind the desk. Noah updated the school photographs each year but never changed the picture of Tracey he put on his desk his first day in homicide. She picks up Tracey’s smiling face. Frank used to joke that he wanted a younger wife, but Noah always maintained the picture was good luck.

“Not good enough,” she tells the picture. She puts it down, continuing past the silent hulk. After a few more tours around the cramped office, Frank is inevitably drawn back to the desk. She stares at the cluttered top, then pulls Noah’s chair out. She sits in it, pushing and prodding at papers. She will have to divvy his cases among the squad. Prominent on the desk is the murder book for a stabbing he caught two days ago. Lewis can have that. Noah is—
uh-uh,
Frank corrects herself.
Was.
Noah
was
the primary on it, and as his partner, Lewis has already helped him work it. Besides, Frank’s sure that sooner or later someone will drop a dime on their perp.

Frank lifts the cover on another binder. The dead crack baby. Lewis can handle this one, too. There’s a rock hound out there that carried for nine months and is suddenly childless. Lewis’ll either find the woman who suffocated her infant or she’ll get someone to talk. Life’s cheap in South Central, but smothering a baby and burying it under a pile of garbage is scandalous even by ‘hood standards.

Mentally parceling out Noah’s cases, she leaves the murder books where they are. The mess on his desk is comforting. It lets her believe Noah’s coming back, that he’s just at home, on vacation, taking sick time. He’ll be back. The work waiting for him tells her so.

Like faithful hounds by their master’s chair, two cardboard file boxes press against the desk. A pile of obsolete memos and crinkled forms sit on top of them. And a shoebox.

“Oh, yeah,” she mutters. The Pryce case. Was he working on it? Not likely, considering the boxes are covered with papers. Still, Frank checks a couple of the old memos. Their dates suggest the boxes haven’t been touched in at least six weeks. She thinks back. It could have been slow enough then that he’d gone through the case one more time.

Almost seven years old, Pryce is still unsolved. Noah’d caught the case right after Joe had told Frank she was being promoted to lieutenant. Months before, Joe and Noah had kicked her ass to take the lieutenant’s exam. She’d done it to get them off her back, and maybe because she didn’t care, she’d scored in the top ten percent on both the written and oral tests. Joe had been pulling strings for almost a year but still only received the green light three weeks before his retirement. Frank had balked at advancement. She didn’t want to command a squad. She just wanted to stay a Detective III, keep to herself, and drink away every last vestige of her past. But Joe and Noah wouldn’t let her.

Swamped with all Joe had been trying to teach her before he left, Frank couldn’t help her old partner. Noah had to work Pryce alone. The case was two months old and spilling into its second box by the time she took a look at it. Still overwhelmed by her new responsibilities, she hadn’t offered much input. Noah actively worked the case for the better part of a year, chasing the tiniest of leads like a whippet after a mechanical rabbit. The rabbit always eluded him, but the boxes stayed by his desk.

Two years into her command, Frank noticed them by the cold files. After that, when his workload permitted, Noah would tackle the case again, always hoping he’d spot a lead he’d missed the first thirty dozen times. Frank had meant to help him with it—had started to a couple of times—but some crisis
dujour
always derailed her.

Frank’s cigarette has burned down to her fingers. She takes a quick last suck on it then grinds it under her heel. She carries the musty boxes into her office. Pryce has just been reassigned.

Frank takes a garment bag out of the closet. She lays it on the bed, unzips it and carefully removes her dress blues. She undresses in the adjoining bathroom and takes a long shower. She finds her blow-dryer under the sink and dries her hair. The smell of hot dust fills the room. She doesn’t have the patience to finish her hair and leaves it damp against her neck.

Walking naked into the bedroom, she contemplates the clothes laid out on her bed. She never thought she’d have to wear them for this. Not for him.

She pins the gold bars on the collar. Satisfied they’re straight, she slips into the heavy cloth. The shirt buttons snugly and Frank has to suck her breath in to zip her trousers. She tells herself she’d better spend more time on the treadmill. She pulls her dress belt through the pant loops and puts her tie on in front of the mirror. She doesn’t look at her face.

Carrying her hat into the living room, she snaps her old .38 to the belt. She loves her 9mm, but today she feels a need to carry history. Creased and pressed, she drives alone to her best friend’s funeral.

There, she stands with her squad, looking across the rectangle of plastic grass at Noah’s family. Kennedy is there. Her old flame is subdued but solicitous. She asks why Gail didn’t come.

“She wanted to. I asked her not to. Selfish of me, but this will be easier without her.”

Frank has developed two personalities—a softer, more accessible personality reserved for rare intimates, and a professional, implacable police persona she uses to her advantage now. She braces herself, relieved when Kennedy doesn’t press for detail. She’s also relieved when Kennedy doesn’t follow to the reception.

Cops and civilians make two separate knots, the former growing louder and raunchier as the liquor disappears. Joe Girardi is here. He’s lost hair and gained weight. Frank doesn’t know if she’s glad to see him or not. She loves Joe, but his presence brings memories. Just like the old days, he pulls Frank away from the squad. She is both relieved and apprehensive.

“You look like you’ve been fucked, fried and flogged halfway to Friday.”

It’s such a classic Girardi line Frank has to smile.

Joe squeezes her shoulder, bending his head to hers. “How you doing, girlie-girl?”

“I’m okay.”

“I know, I know. You’re always okay. How you handling this?”

“Handling what?”

“Noah.”