The Body Human (9 page)

“Not anymore.”

“But you
know
people. And cases get buried there all the time, you used to tell me that yourself, with enough money you can buy yourself an investigation unless somebody high up in the city is really out to get you. Kelvin Pha
r
maceuticals doesn’t have those kinds of enemies. They’re not the Mob. They’re just…”

“Committing murder to cover up an illegal drug trial? I don’t buy it, Bucky.”

“Then find out what
really
happened.”

I shot back, “What do
you
think happened?”

“I don’t know! But I do know this drug is a good thing! Don’t you understand, it holds out the possibility of a pe
r
fect, totally open connection with the person you love most in the world.…Find out what happened, Gene. It wasn’t suicide. J-24 doesn’t cause depression. I
know
it. And for this drug to be denied people would be…it would be a sin.”

He said it so simply, so naturally, that I was thrown all over again. This wasn’t Bucky, as I had known him. Or maybe it was. He was still driven by sin and love.

I stood and put money on the table. “I don’t want to get involved in this, Bucky. I really don’t. But—one thing
more—”

“Yeah?”

“
Camineur
.
Can it…does it account for…” Jesus, I sounded like him. “I get these flashes of intuition about things I’ve been thinking about. Sometimes it’s stuff I didn’t know.”

He nodded. “You knew the stuff before. You just didn’t know you knew.
Camineur
strengthens intuitive right-brain pathways.
As an effect of releasing the stranglehold of violent thoughts.
You’re more distanced from compulsive thoughts of destruction, but also more likely to make co
n
nections among various non-violent perceptions. You’re just more intuitive, Gene, now that you’re less driven.”

And I’m less Gene
, my unwelcome intuition said. I gazed down at Bucky, sitting there with his skinny fingers splayed on the table, an
unBucky
-like serenity weirdly mixed with his manic manner and his belief that he worked for a corporation that had murdered eight people. Who the hell was
he
?

“I don’t want to get involved in this,” I repeated.

“But you will,” Bucky said, and in his words I heard utter, unshakable faith.

Jenny Kelly said, “I set up a conference with Jeff Connors and he never showed.” It was Friday afternoon. She had deep circles around her eyes. Raccoon eyes, we called them. They were the badge of teachers who were new, dedicated, or crazy. Who sat up until 1:00
a.m.
in a frenzy of lesson planning and paper correcting, and then arrived at school at 6:30
a.m.
to supervise track or meet
with students or correct more papers.

“Set up another conference,” I suggested. “Sometimes by the third or fourth missed appointment, guilt drives them to show up.”

She nodded. “Okay. Meanwhile, Jeff has my class all worked up over something called the Neighborhood Safety Information Network, where they’re supposed to inform on their friends’ brothers’ drug activity, or something. It’s somehow connected to getting their Social Services checks. It’s got the kids all in an uproar…I sent seventeen kids to the principal in three days.”

“You might want to ease up on that, Jenny. It gives everybody—kids and administration—the idea that you can’t control your own classroom.”

“I can’t,” she said, so promptly and honestly that I had to smile. “But I
will
.”

“Well, good luck.”

“Listen, Gene, I’m picking the brains of everybody I can get to talk to me about this. Want to go have a cup of coffee someplace?”

“Sorry.”

“Okay.” She didn’t look rebuffed, which was a relief. Today her earrings matched the color of her sweater.
A soft blue, with lace at the neck.
“Maybe another time.”

“Maybe.”
It was easier than an outright no.

Crossing the parking lot to my car, I saw Jeff Connors. He slapped me a high-five. “Ms. Kelly’s looking for you, Jeff.”

“She is? Oh, yeah. Well, I can’t today. Busy.”

“So I hear. There isn’t any such thing as the Neig
h
borhood Safety Information Network, is there?”

He eyed me carefully. “Sure there is, Mr. S.”

“Really?
Well, I’m going to be at Midtown South st
a
tion house this afternoon. I’ll ask about it.”

“It’s, like,
kinda
new. They maybe don’t know
nothing
about it yet.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll ask anyway. See you around, Jeff.”

“Hang loose.”

He watched my car all the way down the block, until I turned the corner.

The arrest room at Midtown South was full of cops filling out forms: fingerprint cards, On-line Booking Sy
s
tem Arrest Worksheets, complaint reports, property i
n
voices, requests for laboratory examinations of evidence, Arrest Documentation Checklists. The cops, most of whom had changed out of uniform, scribbled and muttered and sharpened pencils. In the holding pen alleged criminals cursed and slept and muttered and sang. It looked like fourth-period study hall in the junior-high cafeteria.

I said, “Lieutenant
Fermato
?”

A scribbling cop in a Looney Tunes sweatshirt waved me toward an office without even looking up.

“Oh my God.
Gene
Shaunessy
.
Risen from the fuckin’ dead.”

“Hello, Johnny.”

“Come
in
. God, you look like a politician. Teaching must be the soft life.”

“Better to put on a few pounds than look like a starved rat.”

We stood there clasping hands, looking at each other,
not saying the things that didn’t need saying anyway, even if we’d had the words, which we didn’t. Johnny and I had been partners for seven years. We’d gone together through foot pursuits and high-speed chases and lost files and vi
o
lent domestics and bungled traps by Internal Affairs and robberies-in-progress and the grueling boredom of the street.
Johnny’s divorce.
My retirement.
Johnny had gone into Narcotics a year before I took the hit that shattered my knee. If he’d been my partner, it might not have happened. He’d made lieutenant only a few months ago. I hadn’t seen him in a year and a half.

Suddenly I knew—or the
Camineur
knew—why I’d come to Midtown South to help Bucky after all. I’d already lost too many pieces of my life. Not the life I had now—the life I’d had once.
My real one.

“Gene—about Marge…”

I held up my hand. “Don’t. I’m here about something else.
Professional.”

His voice changed.
“You in trouble?”

“No. A friend is.” Johnny didn’t know Bucky; they’d been separate pieces of my old life. I couldn’t picture them in the same room together for more than five minutes. “It’s about the suicides at the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home. Giacomo
della
Francesca and Lydia Smith.”

Johnny nodded. “What about it?”

“I’d like to see a copy of the initial crime-scene report.”

Johnny looked at me steadily. But all he said was, “Not my jurisdiction, Gene.”

I looked back. If Johnny didn’t want to get me the r
e
port, he wouldn’t. But either way, he
could
.
Johnny’d
been
the best undercover cop in Manhattan, mostly because he was so good at putting together his net of criminal i
n
formers, inside favors, noncriminal spies, and unseen procedures. I didn’t believe he’d dismantled any of it just because he’d come in off the street. Not Johnny.

“Is it important?”

I said, “It’s important.”

“All right,” he said, and that was all that had to be said. I asked him instead about the Neighborhood Safety Info
r
mation Network.

“We heard about that one,” Johnny said. “Pure lies, but somebody’s using it to stir up a lot of anti-cop crap as a set-up for something or other. We’re watching it.”

“Watches run down,” I said, because it was an old joke between us, and Johnny laughed. Then we talked about old times, and Libby, and his two boys, and when I left, the same cops were filling out the same forms and the same
perps
were still sleeping or cursing or singing, nobody looking at each other in the whole damn place.

By the next week, the elderly suicides had disappeared from the papers, which had moved on to another batch of mayhem and alleged brutality in the three-oh. Jenny Kelly had two more fights in her classroom. One I heard through the wall and broke up myself. The other
Lateesha
told me about in the parking lot. “That boy, Mr.
Shaunessy
, that Richie Tang, he
call
Ms. Kelly an ugly bitch! He say she be sorry for messing with
him
!”

“And then what?” I said, reluctantly.

Lateesha
smiled. “Ms. Kelly, she yell back that Richie
might act like a lost cause but he
ain’t
lost to
her
, and she be damned if anybody
gonna
talk to her that way. But Richie just
smile
and walk out. Ms. Kelly, she be gone by Thanksgiving.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Sometimes people surprise you.”

“Not me, they don’t.”

“Maybe even you,
Lateesha
.”

Jenny Kelly’s eyes wore permanent rings: sleeplessness, anger, smudged mascara. In the faculty room she sat hunched over her coffee, scribbling furiously with red pen on student compositions. I found myself choosing a di
f
ferent table.

“Hi, Gene,” Bucky’s voice said on my answering m
a
chine. “Please call if you…I wondered whether you found out any…give me a call. Please. I have a different phone
number,
I’ll give it to you.” Pause. “I’ve moved.”

I didn’t call him back. Something in the “I’ve moved” hinted at more pain, more complications,
another
chapter in Bucky’s messy internal drama. I decided to call him only if I heard something from Johnny
Fermato
.

Who phoned me the following Tuesday, eight days after my visit to Midtown South. “Gene. John
Fermato
.”

“Hey, Johnny.”

“I’m calling to follow through on our conversation last week. I’m afraid the information you requested is un
a
vailable.”

I stood in my minuscule kitchen, listening to the traffic three stories below, listening to Johnny’s cold formality. “Unavailable?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“You mean the file has disappeared? Been replaced by a later version? Somebody’s sitting on it?”

“I’m sorry, the information you requested isn’t avail
a
ble.”

“Right,” I said, without expression.

“Catch you soon.”

“Bye, Lieutenant.”

After he hung up I stood there holding the receiver, surprised at how much it hurt. It was a full five minutes before the anger came. And then it was distant, muffled.
Filtered through the
Camineur
, so that it wouldn’t get out of hand.

Safe.

Jeff Connors showed up at school after a three-day a
b
sence, wearing a beeper, and a necklace of thick gold links.

“Jeff, he big now,”
Lateesha
told me, and turned away, lips pursed like the disapproving mother she would som
e
day be.

I was patrolling the hall before the first bell when Jenny Kelly strode past me and stopped at the door to the boys’ room, which wasn’t really a door but a turning that hid the urinals and stalls from obvious view. The door itself had been removed after the fifth wastebasket fire in two days. Jeff came around the corner, saw Ms. Kelly, and stopped. I could see he was thinking about retreating again, but her voice didn’t let him. “I want to see you, Jeff.
In my free period.”
Her voice said he would be there.

“Okay,” Jeff said, with no hustle, and slouched off,
beeper riding on his hip.