Red on Red (2 page)

“But you don’t believe the dog,” countered Lopez, with a jubilant smirk. “You can’t write the ticket if you don’t believe the dog.”

“Touché.”

“Qué?”

“Exactly!”

Nick didn’t believe Lopez, but he was delighted by the oddly theological detour of the conversation. He didn’t pretend to be useful, and didn’t always want to be. Nick preferred cases that went nowhere, or rather, he was drawn to mysteries that were not resolved with a name typed on an arrest report—funny things or lucky things, glimpses of archaic wonder and terror, where life seemed to have a hidden order, a rhyme. Here, a witness was hanging himself in his story about a hanging woman, and the detectives were becoming entangled.

Esposito stepped heavily through the mud to borrow a flashlight from one of the uniformed cops. When he returned, he shone it back and forth between Lopez’s face and the suspended woman, which somehow suggested a line drawn between them, connecting the dots.

“Do you have identification?”

Lopez handed Esposito a driver’s license, which Esposito put in his pocket without looking at it. One of the cops began talking to another about the Yankees game, and Lopez looked over at them, irritated. Nick escorted Lopez to the back of their unmarked car, suggesting it might be more comfortable, more private, and situated him in the backseat. Nick
sat beside him, not too close, and Esposito took the front passenger seat, leaning back. Nick put a hand on Lopez’s shoulder, in a gesture that might have seemed more friendly, had the space not been so confined.

“Thank you. Thank you for calling us,” Nick said. “Nobody should end up like that.”

“I try to do the right thing.”

“You did. Tell me, I’m not much of a dog person myself, just because you gotta walk ’em all the time. How often do you gotta take him out?”

“Three, maybe five times a day.”

“That’s a lot. How do you have the time? Are you working now?”

“I manage a shoe store. My daughter takes him out, too.”

Esposito leaned in, as if he disbelieved that Lopez had much acquaintance with either work or women, and looked down. Lopez’s boots were mucked over, like everything else, making it hard to tell much about them. Esposito did not relent. “What’s your kid’s name?”

“Grace.”

The response came without hesitation, as did Esposito’s follow-up. “What’s your dog’s name again?”

The seconds that passed before Lopez spoke were few—three or four—but painful to endure. “Lucky,” he said, which was not true in either sense. He squirmed and pleaded, “Can I have my ID back now?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Esposito, blithe for a moment before becoming abrupt and demanding again. “Let me see your hands.”

“What? My God, this is a bad dream….”

“Wake up, then. The hands. Now.”

Lopez looked to Nick for support, but found none. The detectives did not feign anything in their hoary old binary roles—each hard look and kind word was authentic, heartfelt—but all of it was nonetheless deployed for effect, joined to a purpose. Nick took the flashlight from Esposito and turned it on—“Just procedure. Don’t worry. Relax.”—as Lopez raised his palms for examination, turning them over slowly, to show unblemished, unmarked skin. That, at least, did not lie. He might as well have slept in mittens and kept them on all day. Esposito grunted, noncommittal. Lopez shook his hands as if they’d been dirtied, then pointed outside.

“See? I told you—this is not me! I’m just here, same as you. It was already over, finished, done! This is just this. I don’t know why you keep trying to put me in the picture…. This is simple—”

Esposito cut him off as he climbed out of the car, disdaining even to look at him as he left. “The funny part is, it coulda been.”

Nick thanked Lopez again and asked him to wait there—“It won’t be too much longer”—before joining Esposito outside, where they continued their conference beneath the tree. He understood what Esposito had been doing and why, respected its necessity. It wasn’t as if Esposito were a bully demanding lunch money. Still, there was something unappealing in the unfairness of the contest, which bothered Nick, and he saw little to be gained from regarding Lopez as an adversary instead of a distraction.

“Lighten up a little on him, would you?”

The request was amiably offered, received with an obliging shrug.

“Whose is this, anyway?” asked Esposito. “Whose turn is it for what?”

“If it’s a homicide, it’s yours. If it’s a suicide, it’s mine. And it’s a suicide.”

“Good. I mean—you know what I mean. This is not my cup of shit. Your case, your call.”

Nick did know what he meant. Esposito disliked noncriminal investigations, the runaways and accidental deaths; they could be almost as much work as murders, but there was no contest, no opponent—no bad man to put in handcuffs at the end. Esposito was a fighter, and this fight had already been lost. For him, the dead woman in the tree might as well have been a live cat, a sad situation but not an urgent problem, not one that made his neck stiffen or heart soften. Lopez was the only figure of interest for him, and only because of a professional aversion to certain forms of deceit. Nick could see the impatience gather again in Esposito’s face and then recede.

“However you wanna handle it, Nick. But tell me, you don’t have a problem with a guy standing by a dead body, telling you lies?”

Nick took the flashlight and shone it upward. The midair fixity of the woman, taut on the tentative line, reminded him of a dog straining against a leash. The rope held, but would not for long. He didn’t want to think of dogs, and he contemplated pointing the light accusingly at Lopez, as Esposito had. He pictured holding it under his own chin, as if to tell a campfire story. Which is what Nick was convinced that Lopez had done, making up nonsense because he had been caught sneaking out in the dark. Still, Lopez didn’t matter; the woman did. He shut off the light and turned to Esposito to work through the practicalities.

“Say you got a guy, he’s on his way to a whorehouse when he witnesses a bank robbery. He’s a good witness, your only good witness, but he tells you he was going to church. Do you use him?”

Esposito smiled, taken by the fable, even more appreciative that Nick could disagree with him without argument. “That’s why you gotta break him. You get in there and straighten him out. You let him know how it’s gotta go. You break him, you avoid the whole problem.”

“All right, but you know, it’s my analogy here, and you don’t get to change it. In my story, he won’t break. And my story isn’t this story—nobody robbed a bank. I mean, we’ll cover the bases, but this guy didn’t kill her. Nobody did. Come on. If this guy confessed to killing her, here and now, you’d kick him in the ass, tell him to go home and sleep it off.”

“You’re right. But his story still matters. It changes things, even if it’s not true. And I still might kick him.”

“Do me a favor and don’t,” said Nick, almost sure Esposito was joking about the kick, unready to consider the full meaning of the other remark. “Let’s look at this, run through it, worst-case. How did she get up there? She climbed or someone took her. Say it’s a homicide. He killed her there? Alive? Not even leopards on the nature shows do that. They kill them first, then they hide the food in the tree, so the lions don’t steal it. That didn’t happen here.”

“Was that on the other night?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw that. Not bad. Still, you can’t beat Shark Week…. I’m glad she’s not a floater. They’re a pain. You never know with them.”

Esposito was right about floaters. They were far worse. You rarely could establish whether they’d jumped, fallen, or been pushed into the water. He and Nick had only worked with each other for a few months, but Nick had learned to follow his partner’s trains of thought. Esposito had begun to shift from anger to boredom, disengaging—not that he was often or especially angry, but when he was in the game, he was all in, with all emotional color on display like a peacock’s tail. If they’d been at a bar, leaning over drinks, it might have been interesting to puzzle over the situation, to spitball and tease the possibilities among the four categories: homicide, suicide, accident, and natural. They’d talk as if they were playing themselves on TV, looking for the odd detail, the brilliant twist. As it was, the case had the fascination of a flat tire for Esposito.
Floaters, leopards, bank robberies—the comparisons had become a way of avoiding the subject instead of illuminating it.

“Anyway. The crime scene is the body, the tree, the ground,” Nick reasoned. “The ground’s already gone, with the rain, all of us here. The body’s the main thing. We’ll check it out as best we can. In theory, the tree should have scuff marks from the climb, bits of clothing, whatever trace evidence.”

Things rub off on each other. The woman had a bit of tree on her, the tree a bit of woman, commingling in constant, invisible transactions. The oak seemed mournful and uneasy, as the branches shifted and the raindrops splatted from leaf to leaf with a staticky whoosh, a radio station that didn’t quite come in. Nick looked at Esposito, and Esposito looked at his watch. They hadn’t rubbed off on each other so much just yet.

Both of them glanced up at the sky to see whether more rain threatened, but night had already fallen. The breeze was heavy with September weather, the edge of a hurricane that had blown out to sea lower down on the coast. Their shoes were muddy, as were the cuffs of their pants, which bothered Esposito especially. He was strongly built, with a bit of a belly on him that he would slap after meals; he had thick black hair and fair skin, and though he was not a particularly handsome man, he carried himself like one, and women responded. He had his vanities, many of them only half-serious, most well earned. Lately, he seemed to be taken with his own nose; Nick had made offhand mention that it was a Roman nose, and Esposito had been delighted, as if he’d won it at a raffle. He worked the subject into interviews: “The guy who robbed you, tell me about his face. Was his nose flat, or upturned, or was it … a Roman nose, like mine?” Tonight, Esposito had walked into the office looking like a mob lawyer, in a blue pinstripe suit and flowered tie; now, from the knees down, he could have been mistaken for a zoo janitor on elephant detail. Nick noticed a great deal about Esposito, not only because they were partners, but because he had agreed to keep an eye on him. Esposito didn’t know that. He knew only that he was appreciated, and he was grateful. Nick dressed in the G-man standard—dark suit, white shirt, dark tie—but his vanity was grandiose in comparison. He thought he could betray his partner, just a little, and they could still be friends. He was like Lopez, he thought, in his desperate insistence that only his better motives mattered.

Nick thought about the cold and then felt it, shivering a little. The wind rose again, and the branches shook, and the red and gold oak leaves fell around them, landing on their shoulders like tame birds. The smell of the body, faint but foul, crept through the wet leaves. Esposito wrinkled his nose in disgust and moved away. “You mind going up?”

“No. It’s my case. You won’t have to worry about your manicure.”

“All yours. Go ahead, work your magic.”

“I will. I’m going to make it all disappear.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

When they returned to the little crowd of cops, Esposito put his hands on his hips and announced the course of action, “Okay. We’re gonna need to take the tree down. Where’s your sergeant? I need you to get Emergency Services here with a chain saw, cut it down, pack the whole thing up—with the body—for the medical examiner. You’ll need a flatbed truck, a lot of plastic tarps. What else, Nick?”

Nick’s mouth tightened. Even though Lopez was probably out of earshot, Nick thought this was disrespectful. There were mysteries to be preserved here as well as mysteries to be explored. Still, he had his partner to consider, his part to uphold. To hell with it, he thought. He’d take the low road, too, and make up for it later.

“Strobe lights,” he deadpanned. “Generator.”

“Right, strobes. All right, guys, it looks like it’s gonna be a long night for you. Maybe you can ask the guys for coffee when they bring the lights.”

With another gust of wind, the black sky emptied rain onto them again. Nick saw two of the cops’ faces. One was blank and sorrowful, as if he’d learned he’d been drafted; the other looked to be near tears, though the weather made that hard to tell. Only a guffaw from one of the older ones, who held back for a moment, broke the scene of perfect misery.

“All right, but you know I had three of you,” said Esposito, to their general relief. “Anyway, let’s get hold of a ladder. Maybe two of you drive over to a building, borrow a ladder from a super. The other two, you might as well wait in the car.”

The cops agreed gladly, retreating to the warmth and dryness. One car drove off, sending a spray of mud from beneath its wheels. The detectives took shelter beneath the tree, keeping a wary distance from the potential drop zone. Neither detective wanted to join Lopez in the car, to
ask him more questions or even to pass the time out of the elements. As they waited, the conversation dwindled, and their moods turned as gloomy and autumnal as the landscape. Esposito inclined his head up toward the woman and frowned.

“What kind of grown woman climbs a tree?”

Nick imagined her pursued by a pack of hounds, even imaginary ones, like Lopez’s. “Treed,” that was the word, in hunting. The dogs couldn’t follow, but the chase was over. Nick knew that feeling, knew this place.

“I might have climbed this tree, when I was a kid.”

“That’s right, you’re a native. I forget, when you don’t wear the war paint and carry the tomahawk.”

Before Nick could dwell too much on his childhood, still less his recent return to Inwood, the wind shifted the branches, and the body swung gently, a movement that suggested a plea—
Please
—and a threat—
Don’t make me
. They moved farther out of range. Suicides intrigued Nick, or they at least held out the possibility of interest. Most cases had a distraught or demented aspect, bad guesses by bad gamblers. With other cases, though, there was a hint of chill insight, like that of a cardsharp who cheats to lose rather than prolong a game he cannot win. Nick hoped that she had left a note. In his worst moments, Nick didn’t understand why more people didn’t kill themselves, as they seemed to take so little pleasure in life, served such scarce purpose. Why wasn’t there a forest of suicides, a body hanging in every tree of the park, from every branch of every tree, dangling like morbid ornaments? Nick added that thought to the long list of those he’d never share.