Mitchell Smith (37 page)

“Now, now … 11 she said. “Now, now . . .” And, after a while, Sonia wept less, and then not at all, but sniffled.

“Come on,” Ellie said, “-that’s enough crying. Time to blow our noses.

After tears—snot.” And Sonia almost laughed. Ellie patted the girl’s back and let her go. When Sonia let go, too, Ellie went back to the car, got her Kleenex, and both of them blew their noses. Then Sonia picked up two envelopes she’d dropped on the grass.

“Here’s the letters my mother sent me. She just sent two of them, a couple of weeks ago. We used to talk on the phone, mostly.” She used a wadded Kleenex and blew her nose again. “-She called them Truth Letters.

She said that was the most important thing of all. . . .”

Sonia handed the envelopes to Ellie. “-They’re kind of dirty, I guess.

People would think they’re dirty.”

“I won’t,” Ellie said.

“You promise nobody else will read them? -I haven’t even let Joanna read them.”

“I won’t let anybody read them,” Ellie said, —except maybe my partner.

He’s a very nice man, and he has a little girl of his own. I promise we won’t let anybody else read them, not unless we have to, to catch whoever killed your mom. -I promise you, Sonia.”

“Well,” Sonia said, “-I guess that’s all right.”

“Here . . .” Ellie gave her another Kleenex.

“I ruined your blouse. . . .”

“Oh, this thing’s polyester; it’ll dry.”

“Well,” Sonia said, “-I’m sorry I was such a kid.”

“I think your mom was worth a lot of tears,” Ellie said, “-and I didn’t even know her.”

They hugged, and Ellie went back to the Honda, got in, and started the engine, while Sonia stood by the car, watching her.

“I’ll come up and see you again, if that’s all right,” Ellie said.

“O.K.” -and Sonia, my friend and I are going to find out who did that to your mother. We’re going to destroy the son-of-a-bitch.”

“Good,” Sonia said, and blew her nose. “-Good.”

“Mother of God, would you look at that line-up.

Lieutenant Eastman-still and likely forever a lieutenant, still and likely forever the assistant to the Assistant DepUtY Commissioner for Community Affairs-was observing the civilian mourners at Woodlawn, gathered beneath a mild early autumn sun, but dressed in drab for deep winter. His new boss—a pleasant, but not particularly simpatico ex-reporter for The Washington Post-agreed.

“The Dawn of the Dead,” he said.

Old Mrs. Classman’s friends, veterans of the Ladies’ Garment Worker’s Union, were few and drearily aged in aspect, and they made a poor showing for the TV cameras-facing, across the two caskets (best bright bronze), ranks 5f uniformed young patrolmen-and, in a loose semicircle to the right of these ranks, standing beside Rabbi Solwitz, the brass.

The Rabbi, a tall, handsome man with grizzled, curly hair-he’d grown up being told he looked like the late Jeff Chandler-was completing a soporific address on the indissoluble bonds linking mother and son,

—4hat even death. - - .” This speech, or sermon, had reduced the press corps and other hangers-on to standing sleep, though the police officers present appeared genuinely affected, and some grimly veteran eyes were wet.

“They are shooting nothing but those hags. . Lieutenant Eastman slid out of place in a sinuous effacing maneuver, drifted back … turned, trotted to the right, and arrived at the small aluminum platform from which ABC Local News was covering the affair.

“For Christ’s sake,”-to an assistant cameraman standing near. “Get some shots of the Commissioner! Get the Mayor, for Christ’s sake!”

“He’s getting’ everybody.”

“Bullshit,” Lieutenant Eastman said, and reached up to tug 11 at the cameraman’s trouser leg. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey!

The cameraman glanced down.

“Is your mother over there or something?” Lieutenant Eastman said.

“You’ve been shooting over there for ten minutes! -The Commissioner’s here-if you haven’t noticed. The Mayor’s here!”

“You got any complaints,” the cameraman said, and returned to his eyepiece, ‘-talk to the L.D.,” and gestured with his thumb at the location van parked fifty yards behind them.

“I’m talking to you, motherfucker!” said Lieutenant Eastman, gay, but a policeman after all. “You turn that camera-you turn that fucking camera right now.”

The cameraman held his position, and his view-but only for a few more seconds, for self-respect. Then he swung to the right, found and focused, and videod the Mayor, the Commissioner, the handsome Deputy Commissioner for Public Affairs (his lower lip still slightly swollen), and almost two dozen other persons of importance.

“That’s better,” said Lieutenant Eastman. “This is a Departmental funeral. -You forget that, I’ll come back and remind you.”

“Pretty fierce, Sammy.”

The Lieutenant turned, and seized Ellie in a hug. “You sweetheart,” he said, ‘-have you been being good?”

“I’ve been trying.”

“You-are late.”

“I know. I was out of town. I just got back.”

“Sweetheart, have you ever heard of gray? -It is absolutely not necessary to wear banker blue to every formal event.”

“It’s what I’ve got, Sammy. I’m not going out and buy a second funeral suit. -How are things going?”

“Oh, it’s running along. Shomrin people set it up.-We can do these damn things in our sleep”-a glance up at the undoubtedly overhearing cameraman-“as long as we’get cooperation.”

“How’s Fred?”

“Ancient history. -Handsome wasn’t as handsome did.”

“Maybe you need to try the ladies, Sammy.”

Lieutenant Eastman almost said, “-That working for you . . . ?” but didn’t, for fear of hurting and frightening her. A friend of a friend was a friend of Clara Kersh’s in the Federal Task Force, and Eastman had been careful to see that that information went no further.

He said, instead, “Oh, I have-but that’s just sex.”

Ellie laughed, and tiptoed to kiss him on the cheek.

Eastman had been very good to her the days after she’d been hurt in the fire. He’d stayed in her hospital room all one night, reading E. F.

Benson to her, after-during an evening makeup session before an interview-she had begun to weep, and call for her ex-husband.

“Where are ‘de boys’?” Ellie said, and flattened the end of her nose with her forefinger.

“You’ll find them down there,” Eastman said, pointing to the far end of the uniformed police ranks. “—gehavini themselves, I hope.”

Ellie, her medium heels sinking slightly into the grass and soft earth, walked along behind a line of blue-coated backs, hearing the Rabbi’s oice slow … deepen, under a thrumming mutter of traffic passing on the Parkway.

“Together now-as they were in their very beginning.

Together now, once and for all. Together now, in the arms of their God.

- - . Amen.” A murmur of appreciation, almost applause. Rabbi Solwitz and the Department’s Catholic chaplain, Father Gruenwald, had a long-standing disagreement in the matter of religious rhetoric, the Priest preferring a manly, laconic style-suited, he felt, to a paramilitary organization, while the Rabbi favored, for that very circumstance, a romantic, even thrilling approach, to match the sacrifice and aspirations of soldiers in the Army of the Just.

Sophisticates in the Department, and those in a hurry, preferred Father Gruenwald’s sermons-a considerable minority of romantics, this rabbinical music.

The detectives and plainclothesmen, male and female her off duty-were gathered in bunches among the trees and tombstones, huddled in groups of a few to a hundred, representing squads, precincts, divisions, this or that side of town, but all-except for a few undercover oddities grown stuck to their tie-dyed Tshirts and leather goods, their Indian pajamas, their short shorts, sneakers, and snakeskin vests—wore Sunday suits, and, though they had been fairly silent during the Rabbi’s.number, now erupted in humming conversation concerning scandals, promotions, demotions, and Departmental politics.

They did not, by and large, talk cases, since talking shop at funerals was considered no class.

Ellie was greeted by some of these as she wandered through, glanced at by more, and identified as a cop at once, even by men and women who had not met her identifications that would have pleased her very much.

She had gradually acquired-after years, and all unknowing-purposefulness in posture and directness in eye contact foreign to sidling civilians.

She saw Keneally in a blue suit, talking to some Homicide people standing beside a thicket of tombstones. He saw her, and waved. -A few yards farther on, Samuelson’s massive head rose above a peninsula of people (past a white stone angel, mourning). Ellie cut through to there, and found the Squad up front in pride of place—the killed cop being one of theirs. Nardone, Serrano, and a sergeant named Seguin were still on their knees in the grass, completing prayers, slender strands of beads gripped in heavy hands. The other officers were quietly gossiping.

Ellie could . just see one of the caskets past the end file in of uniformed people. She didn’t know if it was Classma or his mother in there. That gentle, quiet man … Dead meat. Pumped full of chemicals to keep it from rotting. -it was disgusting.

“You’re late, Klein,” Leahy said.

“Couldn’t be helped,” Ellie said, and went to Nardone. -He looked up, smiled, murmured “. . . and the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” and stood up with the other two officers as the mayor began to speak. the mayor’s theme was Sacrifice.

Ellie and Nardone found a quiet place among the monument&—one, very massive, was carved only GREENHuT-a place behind a silent group of Stakeout people. These dangerous, active men, awkward in their Sunday suits, stood in the shade of a single large tree, listening to the mayor’s amplified voice-bored wolves hearing a bull frog’s comments on the hunt. Samuelson had been one of these, once, and according to Nardone, gravely missed that precarious life-those long hours squatting in feral silence behind a liquor store’s back counter, or in its storeroom among the crates and cartons, cradling like a baby a Remington twelve-gauge loaded alternately with double-ought buckshot and slugs thick as a man’s thumb.

Those long, long hours, climaxed only rarely by an entrance of desired prey-two men, sometimes three, come with pistols to rob the place.

Commencing as usual, to avoid later difficulty, by beating the man who clerked in or owned the store, by beating customers, these hoodlums might enjoy that part, or do it only out of dutyand were occasionally allowed to do so, the stake-out commander waiting, wanting them positioned more fruitfully. Those positions, fairly soon, they would assume-one man at the register, one man a lookout at the door-the third controlling sight lines across the center of the store. The clerk, and any customers, prone on linoleum under faintly buzzing fluorescents.

Pleased as a little boy with a present, the commander would then step out with a heavy handgun, make his announcement-and, at any motion but surrender, even the slightest, would produce his myrmidons in a sudden smashing storm.

Early in the funeral, while the crowd was gathering, the uniformed ranks forming up near the shining caskets, Samuelson had looked over at these men, nodded to them and been nodded to in return, but hadn’t walked over the graves to visit.

“How’s the kid?” Nardone said. “-She takin’it O.K.?” There were grass stains on the knees of his blue suit trousers.

“I think she’ll be all right. The principal up there is a priest-he said the school is going to look after her. Keep her in school, and send her to college, too.”

“O.K. Then she’s a lucky girl-right?”

“Maybe. I hope so.”

“She have anything?”

“Two really long letters from her mom. I pulled over and glanced at them on the Way down, and it looks personal, you know …

mother-daughter stuff-what she learned being a prostitute, that kind of thing. But there could be something there. I’ll start reading them tonight, see what’s what. -And Sally had a boyfriend, a guy called Soseby—George Soseby.”

“Hey-that’s something’! Where is this boyfriend? -Don’t tell me . . .

you got that look the guy’s up at Ossining, been there a year.”

“Belgium.” Ellie had a cramp. She felt it tighten into her.

“Belgium?”

“And been there a few weeks, it looks like. Sent Sonia postcards. . .

.”

“That doesn’t mean shit. The guy could have come flyin’ in and out. .

. .”

“Brussels, Belgium. He’s a factor, a financial guy.”

“Well, we’ll check . . . see if he stayed put, see if he got cute on the airlines. -An’ that’s it?”

One of the Stakeout men had turned to look at them, a tall, stoop-shouldered man in a gray suit.

“That’s it,” Ellie said. ‘-What have you got?”

“Somethin’, anyway,” Nardone said. “The load came in this mornin’. The M. E.“s preliminary report-nothin’ new there. Lady was cooked.

-Period. Nothin’ under her nails. No semen. Nothin’. Fingerprints came in, too, long last.-You ready for this? Some funny stuff, but it doesn’t amount to much.”

“Who . . . ?” The cramp was easing.

“To start with, four cops-including’ you, Prints was really pissed off,

‘unprofessional behavior’ and all that shit. . . . Then, your buddy Margolies-“

“No surprise. -Where?”

“Under the toilet handle.”

“Under the toilet handle . . . Got to be pretty recent.”

“Could be. Ready for this? -Birnbaurn.”

“The mayor’s man . . . ?” As if he’d overheard, the mayor commenced a loudspeakered statement concerning readiness to sacrifice what might be personally deareven life, itself-for the greater good.

“Used to be the mayor’s man. -An’ guess who else?”

“I give up.”

“A guy named Audrey.”

“You’re kidding me. -The black guy?” Ellie felt an other cramp, and then a sharp twinge that made her slightly sick. Felt her now coming down. It seemed so heavy she imagined herself walking in front of all these men with blood running down her legs, so they could think anything about her they wanted.