Good Day to Die (37 page)

“I’m afraid I forgot to pack my handcuffs. I’m sure the captain’ll be on my case about it.”

“Look, I’m not …”

“If you don’t turn around, I’m going to kill you very, very slowly.”

He hesitated a moment, then read the signs correctly. Submit or die—it was a better choice than the one he’d given his thirty-three victims. What he’d told them was submit
and
die.

When he was fully turned, when his back was to me, I put the rifle up against my shoulder, took a deep breath, let it out and shot him right between the shoulder blades. I heard two distinct cracks, the first an exploding cartridge, the second an exploding spine. His legs collapsed under him and he fell forward onto the dirt, landing hard. I crawled over to him, wanting to be absolutely sure. The right side of his face lay flat and unmoving against the ground, but his left eye rolled in its socket, searching for me.

“I can’t feel anything,” he whispered. “I can’t feel anything at all.”

And neither could I.

I
T WAS EARLY AUGUST
when Mount Sinai Hospital in New York cut me loose. I came to Mount Sinai by way of Guardian Angel in Lake George, and to Guardian Angel by way of a police helicopter. (Which helicopter, by the way, I shared with a paralyzed Robert Kennedy and a possessive Lorraine Cho who hounded the working paramedics like an avenging angel looking for work.) Kennedy had caught me with two .00 shotgun pellets. The first had cracked a rib and stopped, but the second had found its way into my abdomen, where it nicked my colon, spewing bacteria-laden fecal matter into my abdominal cavity. My body had fought the massive infection that followed, an up-and-down battle that would have been lost (or so the doctors told me) if Lorraine hadn’t made it down the mountain.

Or if Vanessa Bouton, Sheriff Pousson, and two dozen assorted deputies and state troopers hadn’t been waiting at Kennedy’s house.
With
a helicopter.

“A matter of hours,” my surgeon later explained. “We saved your life.”

What Dr. Manuel Ramirez meant was, “I saved your life.” He was the most arrogant man I’d ever met, dispensing his talents with the diffidence of a British lord tossing loaves of bread to kneeling peasants. The fact that he was right—that he
had
saved my life—didn’t make his attitude easier to swallow. Especially because, for a very long time, it didn’t seem like much of a favor. I was delirious when they rushed me into surgery at Guardian Angel, and nobody stopped to explain the mechanics of colon repair. What Dr. Ramirez did was remove six inches of my colon, sew off the end where it turned into the rectum, then shove the other part like a hose through the outside of my abdomen, and cover it with a plastic bag.

Days later, when my fever dropped far enough for me to comprehend his royal proclamations, Dr. Ramirez paused at the foot of my bed. Trailed by eight or nine fawning residents, he peered at me over half-moon reading glasses before tossing me a few well-chosen words.

“A temporary colostomy. We reverse it later on.”

Temporary? Later on? Did that mean an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade? Ramirez sauntered off, his white surgical gown swinging behind him like the robes of a high priest, before I could ask the obvious question.

I suppose he knew he could handle me. Not only was I running a fever, I was tied to the bed by two IV’s and a sump pump. Lorraine, on the other hand, suffered from no such constraints. She cornered Ramirez near the elevator, endured his irritated sighs, and got the facts.

Temporary meant at least a month, assuming he managed to bring my infection under control.

It took him longer than he would have liked, too long for my taste, and I transferred myself to Mount Sinai in New York, where they’d practically invented bowel surgery. Unfortunately, Mount Sinai didn’t have much better luck with the tenacious bacteria dining beneath my liver. All in all, it took six weeks before they put me back together. Six weeks of intermittent fever and IV needles that turned my veins as black as any junkie’s.

Lorraine stayed with me for the first few days in Guardian Angel, then went back to her folks in New York. At the time, I figured that was the end of that. But when I arrived in New York, Lorraine was waiting beside my bed. Koocek was there as well, and the two women formed a curious relationship over the next three weeks. Koocek had never been much of a talker, but compared to Lorraine, she was a magpie. Lorraine went about her business with a furious concentration, bumping into things, stopping to fix them in her memory, going on to face the next obstacle. Koocek spent the hours in a plastic chair sketching the two people least able to complain—blind Lorraine Cho and delirious Roland Means.

When I finally came home, Lorraine and Marie came with me. Both stayed for the first few days, but then Koocek drifted back into her professional life, making the rounds of parties and openings as she pursued her own career path. Koocek had always been ambitious; she had to be. A painter may be able to finance her vision on the income derived from waiting tables. A monumental sculptor, on the other hand, has to have access to big bucks. For Koocek, those bucks came from grants, and the sources of those grants were often to be found at the parties and openings she religiously attended.

I assumed that Lorraine would follow Koocek’s lead. I was weak but clear-headed, with no need for moment-to-moment care. Lorraine apparently had other ideas. She rarely left the apartment, insisting that her parents come to visit her, that she would not move in with them. At first, I put it to the fear all victims, even sighted victims, experience after a brutal assault. Later, I realized that a bond—always unspoken—had formed between us. I can’t say that I understood that bond, or even that I spent much time analyzing it. Only that it was there and I didn’t have any desire to break it.

It was nearly Labor Day when Vanessa Bouton, attaché case in hand, showed up with what she called “your options.” Bouton had been to see me a number of times over the weeks. She’d accepted my official version of the events (that I was delirious most of the time, that Kennedy was going into the cabin for a weapon, that I shot him in the back in self-defense) without comment, submitting it to the prosecutors and the department brass who accepted it, also without comment. The issue became moot when Kennedy, perhaps fearing extradition to a death penalty state, decided to plead guilty to all the offenses surrounding his capture, including the premeditated murder of his wife.

Kennedy’s admission paved the way for Bouton and myself to be elevated to the status of NYPD heroes. The media had already canonized us, but the department, fearing embarrassment if we had to testify at trial, kept its praise confined to a few clichés from the mouth of a now obscure (and thoroughly expendable) Chief Bowman. Two hours after Kennedy entered his guilty plea, however, the biggest big monkey in the job, Commissioner Bernard Jackson, held a press conference on the steps of One Police Plaza. Bouton and I were to receive the department Medal of Honor, a green breast bar dotted with gold stars. In addition, I was to receive the Police Combat Cross and a Silver Star.

Yay, team.

All this is a long way of explaining why I wasn’t surprised when Bouton turned up in the uniform of a full inspector. In fact, what interested me as I stepped back to let her enter the loft, was the fact that she’d shown up in uniform at all. Whatever she’d come for had to be official.

“Means,” she said, “how are you feeling.”

“Good enough to know I’ll get better.”

Lorraine was over at my desk pounding away at an IBM Selectric. She turned at the sound of Bouton’s voice, waved once, then went back to work.

“She writing a book?” Bouton asked, a frown of disapproval pulling at her lips.

“All by herself.”

The truth, which I didn’t bother to tell Bouton, was that Lorraine had been contacted by a dozen television talk-show hosts and nearly every publisher in the country. The offers had been monumental, beginning at six figures and spiraling out of sight. She’d refused the TV shows, then negotiated through an agent with the publishers, finally accepting the one offer that would allow her to do the book on her own. The others, without exception, had refused to part with the big bucks unless she accepted a professional ghostwriter.

“Are you part of this, Means?” Bouton turned to face me, her new authority evident in her regal bearing. “You wouldn’t be the coauthor?”

“More like the editor. But, don’t worry, Cap … Inspector. The last thing I want is to be a celebrity. People look too hard at celebrities. You wanna sit down?”

She responded by crossing to the couch and taking a seat. Part of Lorraine’s manuscript was lying on an end table. Bouton was presumptuous enough to pick it up, but couldn’t bring herself to read it without permission.

“This the book?” She held it out to me.

“That’s part of it.” I accepted the pages, dropping them to my lap. “Lorraine’s doing the last part first, which is kind of unusual. You want to hear some?”

“As long as I’m not in it.”

“When she rose up and began to cross the marsh, Lorraine knew herself as Lazarus rising from the dead. She actually thought those words: I am Lazarus rising. And like Lazarus, she had to come forth by herself. She had to leave the tomb, to return to the warm flesh of the world, the babble of words, the rush of wind across her body.

“She stepped forward eagerly, knowing exactly where to put her feet, but there was a burden there as well. One she felt, but couldn’t name. One that would become clear to her later on.

“She remembered reading a book about Lazarus. The title escaped her, but the author envisioned a Lazarus who never came back to the land of the living. A man who remained entombed even as he sat down to the evening meal. Even as he prayed to the man who’d pulled him from the grave.

“When she finally completed her journey, when she stumbled into a yard filled with the sharp bark of police radios, heard the excited voices, felt the solicitous hands on her arms, Lorraine knew that, like Lazarus, she would carry the burden of the tomb forever.”

“…
Well, what do you think?”

“She’s writing about herself as if she were someone else.”

“True. I spoke to her about it, but she wasn’t real interested in my opinion.”

Bouton shifted her gaze to the back of Lorraine’s bent head. “I think she’s a victim. And I think she’s lucky to be able to see it. Most victims try to resume their former lives before they’re ready.” She turned back to me, her eyes distant. “You put it to me pretty good, Means. That nightscope? I still can’t accept what you did. You betrayed me at every turn.”

I smiled, trying to make a joke of it (after all, what’s done is done, right?), but she didn’t smile back.

“You know, Inspector,” I said, “between the two of us, we made a whole cop. All those contradictions you found in Thong’s M.O.? I thought they were so much wishful thinking. I thought they’d jumped, full-blown, from the fountainhead of your ambition. But then, when Kennedy was right in our faces, when I could smell him, taste him on my tongue, you had all kinds of doubts. You wanted to wait for the pieces to fall into place.”

Bouton shook her head in genuine disgust. “Forget the con game, Means. This was just another hunt for you. Bowman told me about your arrangement with Pucinski. You never play by the rules. Not for a minute.”

“That’s not entirely true, Inspector. I play by rules—tomb rules. It’s not something you can understand.” I gave her a minute to think about it. “But why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind? You didn’t come here to talk about this.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because we both know there’s nothing either one of us can do about it. Because we both know that you
should
have known what I was doing. Because while I may have lied about the particulars, I never denied what I was. And most of all, because you came to me with a promise you couldn’t keep. You told me that, win or lose, I’d get out of ballistics, but what you were doing was gambling with both our careers. Besides, you got what you wanted,
Inspector
Bouton.”

She leaned against the back of the sofa and peered at me through half-closed eyes. I think she wanted me to add something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I held my peace and waited.

“You know, we found those trophies you were supposed to be looking for in Kennedy’s house,” she announced, changing the subject. “Anybody tell you about it?”

“Not a word.”

“We found jewellery and personal effects, like we expected. But we also found a stack of letters. Letters from John to his brother describing the New York meat market. Everything, Means. What he did; who he did it with; where he did it. Maybe John didn’t know it at the time, but his letters amounted to a manual on how to kill in New York City.”

The last piece of the puzzle. All along, I’d wondered how an upstate cop had managed to negotiate New York’s various strolls. Now I knew.

“Why’d he do it?” I asked. “The brothers hated each other. Why the letters?”

“I asked Robert Kennedy about that, and he told me that flaunting his sexual adventures was John’s way of getting even.”

We fell into a silence, then. I wasn’t that long out of surgery, and my body was already looking forward to sliding between the sheets.

“We found Lydia Singleton,” Bouton finally said.

“Where was she?” For once, I remembered that Lydia Singleton and Dolly Dope were the same person.

“She was in a vacant lot in the Bronx. Somebody beat her with a club, sliced her throat, covered her with garbage.”

“You have a suspect?”

“Means, we don’t have clue one. Not about Lydia Singleton or the six other women who’ve been killed in the same way.”

I wanted to keep asking questions. (Were they looking for a demented john? Did the women know each other? Were the crime scenes clustered? Scattered?) But I could smell the bait. And the trap waiting for my inquisitive nose.

“I’m heading up the task force,” Bouton said after a minute. “It won’t be like Thong, of course. There are no advocacy groups for female prostitutes.”