Where It Hurts (3 page)

(WEDNESDAY, EARLY MORNING)

I
sat in the driver’s seat, a howling wind buffeting the van as I waited on the 4:37 to pull into the station. We didn’t get many calls for pickups at Ronkonkoma this early in the morning, but weather delays in the Midwest had caused someone to switch to a Southwest flight out of MacArthur later that day. The station was a cold and lonely place at that hour, and when a winter wind kicked up, blowing litter around in whirling eddies, hurling pebbles and grains of road sand into your windows, it felt like the end of the world. Maybe it was. I felt so fucking guilty about how I’d treated Tommy D. that I found myself hoping so.

I never used to be a guy who felt guilty much, mostly because I didn’t think I had that much to feel guilty about. People live their lives somewhere on a scale of Have-to-dos and Want-to-dos and I was always the kind of guy who turned have-tos into want-tos. When it snowed and I shoveled my driveway, I’d shovel my neighbors’ driveways, too. Not because I felt obliged to or because I thought I’d get some kind of payback, but because I wanted to. I’d had a happy nature once in spite of my miserable drunk of a dad and my shy, almost invisible mother.

Maybe it was because I never wanted for much. It was my experience that the real name of the devil was “wanting.” I’d gotten those few
things in life I did want: a loving family, a good job, a nice house. Simple things made me happy: watching a ball game, reading a book, sitting in the sun in my backyard. When you aren’t ambitious, when you don’t covet. When you keep your dreams simple and your grasp short, there’s not much to lie about, no need for scheming or deception. Absent that stuff, what is there to feel guilty about? I don’t know, until John Jr. died, I felt like I had my little piece of the world by the balls. I thought I understood the order in the universe. Turned out I understood nothing, let alone everything.

As I sat, waiting for Mr. Lembeck’s train to show, I reread the newspaper clipping Tommy Delcamino had left behind. I didn’t know why I was reading it again except to punish myself some more for acting like such an asshole. Whether he knew about my son or not was beside the point. If anyone on the planet should have understood Tommy D.’s frustration or had empathy for him, it should have been me. I had been exactly where he was now: lost, guilty, and grieving. I wondered if Tommy D. had other family—a wife, maybe, brothers and sisters. I wondered if they had done what we had done when we found out the hurt doesn’t stop. That there is only you and your wife and your daughter. And somehow, blameless or not, you all wind up blaming each other and burning down everything you have because you have to do something with all the pain.

One thing was true, Tommy hadn’t exaggerated about what they’d done to his kid. I could only imagine the mess those autopsy photos must have been. I wondered what it must have been like for Tommy D. to go identify his son. I’d been around the morgue enough to know the horror involved when a parent comes to identify a child. If there’s anything that’s wrong in the world by its very nature, it’s that—a kid in the ground before his parents. For that reason alone, I should’ve at least heard Tommy D. out.

I knew the spot where they’d left his kid’s body. It was only about five minutes north of the Ronkonkoma station. That area around Nesconset and Lake Grove was full of these little wooded lots choked with
poison ivy, prickly vines, and shrubs in the summer. Mean with bare, twisted limbs and fallen branches come the cold. Places where the little neighborhood kids went to build forts or explore, and their older brothers and sisters went to drink or get high or study anatomy. As was often the case, a man walking his dog found the kid’s body.

There was a banging on the van door window that had nothing to do with the wind. I looked up to see a man’s angry face staring in at me. I looked beyond the face to see the train sitting in the station and noticed a few passengers fighting the wind and their exhaustion to get to their cars. I hopped out, opened the door for the rightfully angry Mr. Lembeck, and tossed his bags in the back of the van. There would be no tip for me at the end of this ride. That was okay. Mr. Lembeck couldn’t punish me any more than I was already punishing myself.

(WEDNESDAY, EARLY MORNING)

P
ulling up to the hotel, I noticed a car parked to the left of the main entrance. It was a car I didn’t want to see. Its presence could only mean trouble in one form or another.

After unloading Mr. Lembeck’s bags and apologizing once again, I thought about driving off. But Lembeck needed help with his bags. Slava Podalak, our crazy night bellman from Warsaw, was nowhere in sight, so I carried the bags to registration. When I got there, Rita, who sometimes worked the night desk, welcomed Mr. Lembeck. As he looked down, reaching for his credit card and ID, Rita tilted her head toward the Full Flaps Lounge, mouthing,
She’s in there.

The lounge was dark, almost lightless, but I was as familiar with her shape as my own. She was half-asleep, curled up on a row of old airline seats that were part of the bar’s décor.

“What’s up, Annie?” I asked my ex.

She unfurled herself and stretched her long, graceful body. I tried not to look at her dark figure, but couldn’t help myself. For two plus decades, this woman had been the object of my love and desire. Since the day we got the call about John Jr., Annie and I had systematically taken each other apart. We’d ruined ourselves and our marriage, and
we’d probably ruined ourselves for anybody else. I read once about this rare breed of wildcat, the Asian fishing cat, that were so ornery, so territorial, and such loners that they could only tolerate the presence of one of their own kind to mate. Even then, they often tried to kill each other after mating. That was us now, Annie and me. Every few months we’d find an excuse to get together to fight and then fuck our brains out. Then, afterward, we’d go back to our corners and wait for the bell to ring for the next round of war.

Why did we do it? I used to think it was our way of remembering our son and how he came to be in the first place. Or it was our way to numb the pain, sex as novocaine. That wasn’t it. It was just another way to empty ourselves, a way to beat the remnants of love out of each other. Each time we walked away from those episodes, it felt like there was less of who we once had been. As I looked at her, I hoped that wasn’t why she was here. I wasn’t in the mood for any more punishment, self-inflicted or otherwise. Even in the dark, she could read my face.

“Don’t worry, Gus,” she said, reaching into her bag for a box of Newports. “I’m not here for that.”

I didn’t bother telling her she couldn’t smoke in the hotel. She wouldn’t’ve listened and to defy me would have only increased her pleasure in the act. She flicked the lighter and its flash framed Annie’s lovely face. She looked older now. Near defeat, not defeated. Her hair was still that beautiful shade of rich dark brown. Her eyes still hazel. Her nose, perfect as if the work of a sculptor, but her skin was etched with deep ragged lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. The flame, I thought, made them seem worse. The tip of her cigarette glowed there between us in the dark like an accusation. Then she stood and blew the smoke into my face. I didn’t react.

She strolled out of the lounge into the light of the lobby. Annie’s lean body cut through the air like an arrow. I followed at her heels, waiting for the hammer to drop. Slava had reappeared, but made himself scarce at the sight of my ex. He may not have known my story, yet he knew to avoid Annie and me. Rita and Mr. Lembeck were gone as
well. Annie stopped, turned, and looked at me. Brushed her hand dismissively across the chest of my uniform jacket.

“Aren’t you embarrassed by this job?”

“It’s a job.”

“God, I used to think you were so hot in your cop blues.”

“I still get to wear a uniform,” I said, poker-faced, pointing at my Paragon Hotel jacket.

“It’s beneath you. Why do you do it?”

“You gave away the right to ask me those kinds of questions.”

She shook her head. “You used to have pride.”

“I used to have a lot of things I don’t have anymore.”

“What happened to you, Gus?”

“The same thing that happened to you. What are you doing here, Annie?”

She didn’t answer immediately. We stood there, looking at each other, wondering what had become of us.

“It’s Kristen.”

She said our daughter’s name as if it was answer enough. I guess it was. There had been a third casualty in the shitstorm that followed in the wake of my son’s death. Kristen, always the most fragile of the Murphys, had lost more than any of us. She’d not only lost her brother, she’d lost her entire family. Worse, she’d been both complicit in and witness to the disintegration.

“What now?”

“She got pulled over again,” Annie said with a shrug.

“Where?”

“If it wasn’t so stupid it would be funny, Gus.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“In front of the state office building on 347.”

“You mean right in front of the Fourth Precinct!”

“See, I told you. It’s almost funny.”

“Not nearly, Annie. What was she doing this time?”

“Smoking weed. They also found an open bottle of vodka in the car.”

“Fuck!”

“Don’t worry, Gus. They’re not charging her, but they’re holding her until you get down there.”

“Why didn’t you just go get her?”

“Because I’m not a retired Suffolk County cop. I’m not the one with the connections. Anyway, he specifically asked for you to get her.”

“He who?” I asked.

“Pete.”

The name landed like a punch to the kidneys.

“Okay, I just have to let them know I’m leaving. Go ahead of me. I’ll meet you over there.”

“No, you won’t. I’ve had it with her, Gus. I don’t know what to say to her anymore. I’ve screamed at her until I’m blue in the face.”

“How about not screaming?”

“How about fuck you?” She flipped me the bird and stormed out.

I didn’t follow. Deep down I knew the reason she walked away had less to do with Kristen than with Pete.

(WEDNESDAY MORNING)

T
he new Fourth Precinct building was only a few years old. With its reflective blue glass, concrete-and-steel construction, it more resembled a bank or a suburban office building than a cop house. The inside was something else. Inside was inside and no matter how you dressed it up—and they had dressed it up—the same sort of business got done here as in the old house. The same scum, the same addicts and assholes, the same drunk drivers, the same murderers, thieves, and fools came through its doors. And the most recent fool was me.

For the majority of my career I’d been at the Second Precinct on Park Avenue in Huntington, so I didn’t expect anybody except for Pete to know me here. Some of them might’ve heard my name or heard about me, but it was unlikely they could place me. Nothing like retiring from the police to validate the saying: Out of sight, out of mind. In that way, the department was like a sports team. Retired players weren’t part of the team. They were gone. It didn’t much matter why. Gone was gone was gone.

I was glad to be forgotten. One of the worst parts of the mourning process was dealing with people who were aware of your situation. Grieving was hard enough without having to manage other people’s
reactions. Half the time I wound up consoling
them
. Even when things didn’t get to that point, it was always awkward. People don’t know what to say or how to say it or whether to say anything at all. I hated it when they either pretended to not know or ignored it. It was like having a piece of spinach caught between your teeth. People would look at you funny, but just wouldn’t tell you. I’d catch them staring at me out of the corners of their eyes. God, how I hated it. It was one of the reasons I liked my job at the Paragon. No one at the hotel knew my story. They knew I was divorced and that was that. Everyone who worked the night shift there seemed to me to be hiding out or running away. We all had stories not to tell.

Detective Peter Francis Xavier McCann came to collect what was left of me so that I could collect what was left of my daughter. Pete, a lean and handsome son of a bitch, was seven years my junior. I’d been one of his training officers when he came on the job. He’d been transferred to the detective squad at the Fourth around the time I retired. He was a black-haired Irishman with oddly fair skin and the damnedest blue eyes. The bastard even had a cleft in his square chin, but it was his charm, not his chin, that was his deadliest weapon. He had the knack of making you feel you were the most important person in the world to him and the best friend he ever had. Problem was, believing you were Pete’s best friend was like believing you were Napoleon in a psych ward full of people who swore
they
were the real Napoleon. And even so, even after what had gone on between us, I got a jolt at the sight of him.

There was awkwardness between us obliquely related to John Jr.’s death. Pete had been one of the pallbearers at the funeral. I think the only fully honest relationship Pete had ever had was with my kids, John Jr. in particular. Maybe because John had the gift of seeing right through people’s bullshit. Pete’s blarney and charm bounced off him like bullets off Superman. So Pete was forced to expose who he was underneath if he wanted to be that sage “uncle” to my kids. It would be no lie to say that John’s death had been almost as hard on Pete as the
rest of us. Almost. It was the way Pete chose to salve his wounds that was the issue.

“Come on back,” Pete said, smiling, waving at me to follow him to his desk.

I followed him back and sat facing him. He offered me coffee. I nodded.

“Half-and-half, two Sweet’N Lows?” he asked, knowing the answer, and said he’d be right back.

I sipped my coffee. He sipped his. The only sounds around us came from the occasional ringing phones and the buzz of early-morning traffic on Route 347.

He said, “Good thing I happened to be here this morning early to clear up some shit.”

“How’s that, Pete?”

“PBA cards and courtesy shields don’t work like they used to for DUI and DWI. If I wasn’t around, the uniforms would have processed her for sure.”

“Thanks.” There wasn’t much enthusiasm in my voice. He understood why.

“You still living out of that shitbox hotel by the airport?”

“Yep.”

He made a sour face, shook his head without being conscious of it. That was okay. I was use to much harsher judgments, specifically my own.

“Where are Annie and Kristen living?”

“They’re with Annie’s brother and sister-in-law in East Setauket.”

“East Setauket. Very nice. Somebody’s done well for themselves,” he said, his smile barely concealing his envy.

Unlike me, Pete was a man with ambition. He was a man who wanted everything and then some. It had taken me years of knowing him to figure out that he was most fond of things that belonged to other people, women in particular. When we’d all go out drinking after a shift, Pete would regale us with story after story about the women he
was sleeping with, all of them well married: the Jets’ running back’s wife, the heart surgeon’s wife, the CEO’s wife. So I shouldn’t’ve been surprised when I found out he had added Annie to the list.

I believed Annie when she said she had started sleeping with Pete out of grief over John Jr. When she said that she knew it would blow us apart. That she
meant
to blow us apart. That all she felt for me anymore was rage and sadness and that she had no will or desire to bear it. But when Pete tried to find cover for his betrayal in my son’s death, I called bullshit on that. I knew him too well by then. In some ways, Annie was his ultimate prize, the cherry on top of the icing on the top of the cake. Once it was out in the open, though, their passion turned to dust. Annie, regardless of her intentions, was embarrassed by what she had done. For his part, Pete lost interest. Trophies, even the biggest, shiniest ones, lose their luster pretty quickly, especially when they come at the cost of friendship.

Still, it wasn’t in me to hate Pete. Was I still furious with him? You bet. I was a lot of things, but hypocrite was not among them. I had listened as eagerly as the rest of the guys to Pete’s tales of conquest. Listened to him detail how he had so many other men’s wives in so many ways and I’d never once registered an ounce of protest or warning. I’d gotten what I deserved, but so too did Annie and Pete.

I let Pete’s envious comment about East Setauket go.

He took note of my silence and said, “Why not sell your house in Commack? You guys aren’t underwater, are you? Not with that house?”

“We can’t bring ourselves to live there and we can’t stand the thought of selling it. Besides, even if we wanted to sell it, its value isn’t all the way back.”

He seemed to understand.

I finally asked about my daughter. “How’s Krissy?”

“You gotta get her some help, Gus. She’s gonna do something soon that none of us can save her from.”

“No shit! Don’t you think we know that? We’ve tried everything with her. She just won’t listen.”

“Look, I know I’m not married and I don’t have kids—”

“That you know of.”

“That I know of,” he repeated, smiling in spite of himself. “And you and Annie have your reasons for hating—”

“Just say your piece, Pete.”

“Stop bailing her out. Stop letting your cop friends get her out of the shit she gets into. Let her fall down and scrape her knees. Parents aren’t there to catch their kids when they’re falling. Parents are there to help pick them up after they fall. If you don’t let her suffer a little . . .”

He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to. The implication was clear enough. If we didn’t do something soon, Krissy would self-destruct. Annie and I would have no living children. I hung my head because I knew he was right—I hated that he was—and because I knew I couldn’t let Kristen suffer the consequences, not yet, anyway.

After Pete sent word down to bring Kristen from where they were holding her to his desk, it occurred to me to ask him about Tommy Delcamino’s kid.

“Pete, you working the Delcamino homicide?”

He didn’t seem to hear me. “What case?”

“You remember Tommy Delcamino,” I said.

“That low-life piece of shit, sure. What about him?”

“They found his son tortured to death over in Nesconset last summer.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. Nope, not my case.”

“Whose case is it?”

“Why you want to know?”

“Just curious,” I said, and left it at that.

“That asshole Paxson and Lou Carey.”

At first, he left it at that, but when he walked Kristen and me to the door, he grabbed me by the biceps and pulled me aside.

“Krissy,” he said, “give your dad and me a second, okay?”

I gave her the keys to my car and told her to sit there and wait for me. She hesitated.

Pete prompted her. “Go ahead, honey. Your car’s okay here. I’ll make sure of it. You or your mom can come get it later.”

Kristen, red-eyed and dejected, turned and walked away.

“What’s up, Pete?” I asked when Kristen was out of earshot.

“Listen, Gus, I’m gonna give you some more advice you probably don’t want to hear, but you need to listen to it. Stay away from the Delcamino case. Stay far, far away from it.”

I could feel myself pull away from him, my face getting hard with anger. “You ever know me to run away from anything?”

He took a deep breath, then said, “Seems to me that since John died, all you’ve been doing is running away.”

I wanted to grab him by the throat for saying that. If I had, I’m not sure I would have let go. He was right, in his way. But he was the last person I wanted to hear it from. I don’t suppose it mattered now. I’m not sure what did anymore.