Red on Red (48 page)

Nick picked up his broken phone and left, taking a roundabout walk back to the office. He wished the little bastard had at least managed to get out an accusation, so Nick would have an idea if there was a new kettle of shit on the stove, or just the old one boiling over. He didn’t know the cause, couldn’t guess its effect. Would Daysi be furious at him for hitting her son, or desperately apologetic for the outburst, grateful for his restraint? It felt good, but it wasn’t good, of that much he was certain; what he didn’t want to consider was whether that same phrase described the rest of the relationship, what he and Daysi had together. And now, he couldn’t even call to ask. He didn’t remember her number, since it was programmed into his phone.

At the squad, he shifted papers on his desk, distractedly played with his computer. He didn’t want to work, didn’t want to talk to anyone who wasn’t Daysi. Whenever the phone on his desk rang, he hesitated before answering, hoping someone else in the office would pick up to screen the call. The delaying tactic bought anxious intervals of twenty minutes or half an hour at a time, until he began to catch annoyed looks from his colleagues. He took the next call on the first ring.

“Detective McCann. Can I help you?”

“Detective McCann, I’m glad I caught you. You’ve been hard to find!”

“Which McCann? We have several in this office…. Would you hold on, please?”

Nick transferred the call over to Garelick, who was not pleased to receive it. Nick stuck with the tactic, the name, when the phone rang again.

“Nick? Is that you?”

It was Daysi. She didn’t sound like herself, either.

“Sorry, I’ve had some crazy person calling me all day.”

“I didn’t mean to call you here, but your cellphone was off.”

Nick thought of what he might say, but it had the same whining sent-to-the-principal’s-office tone as “He started it.”

“Huh.”

“Can we meet? We have to talk.”

“Yeah, I know—is everything all right?”

“No …”

“Should I come to the shop?”

“No, that’s not the best place.”

“Where?”

“Come downstairs. I’m here outside. I need to talk to you. Let’s take a walk.”

Despite his resolution not to speculate, Nick had nonetheless assumed she would be angry at either him or her son, the only two reactions he could conceive at the crossroad. But she sounded frightened and resigned at once, and he didn’t understand how she could be both.

“I’ll be right down.”

It had been an odd winter, with balmy stretches broken by cold snaps, but there had not been any snow. It was still mild, even as the weak sun was setting, but Daysi shivered in her long leather coat, a red silk scarf around her neck. Her lips were cold when they kissed. How long had she waited outside? She took Nick’s arm and led him down a few blocks, to 180th Street, before they walked west. She wanted to avoid passing the shop. They were at the river before she clenched his hand again and found the courage to speak. The speech was planned, maybe the scenery, too. The night fell faster this time of year. You could not see beyond the black water; you could not see the black water. You just knew it was there.

“I can’t take this, Nick.”

God, no, he thought. This was what was coming? Done, was it? Every childish impulse he’d fought for the past hours flooded back, and this time, he did not fight them. He would not go down with dignity.

“It isn’t that cold.”

“Don’t. You’re not like that.”

“Maybe.”

“No, you’re not. I’ve been with you because you’re not.”

Nick didn’t know if she expected him to say something, but he didn’t. The news was for her to break, for him to bear.

“The sneaking around, the hotels, it seems so sleazy to me—not sleazy, really, but tired. It was fun, at first. But I’m not a kid. I don’t want to be. My mother, she thinks it’s beautiful, but Esteban … I don’t know what he knows about his father, what he thinks, what he thinks he knows. That’s the past, you know? And, Nick, I’m glad you never asked. Esteban and his father, I get shit from both of them now. Neither of them has any right. Esteban does. I love him, and I understand why he has a tough time with this. Not his father. It isn’t right.”

“What does he say?”

“He says, ‘My son tells me you’re sleeping with the police.’ ”

Nick wasn’t asking about the father.

“Maybe I should talk to him.”

He didn’t mean that. There was nothing to be said between the Oteguis and the Meehans—the Meehan, the last of them—no bargain to be struck, no middle where they could meet. Daysi paused in uneasy thought before asking for clarification, “Which one would you talk to?”

“Either.”

Daysi looked down and shook her head. “Nothing good would come from it.”

Nick studied her face. “Are you afraid of him?”

When she smiled, Nick felt a chill; it crossed his mind that this would be the last time he saw it. She shook her head again and looked at him; the smile was gone.

“Why would you think that?”

“Just asking.”

She laid her head against his shoulder, clasping his arm. Nick could feel the subject drift away, and he was grateful. But in the silence that followed, Nick knew the subject had passed like the smile, the good with the bad, all of it gone. There was no need for them to go into it, because there was no “them”; she held Nick and began to cry.

“He was arrested at the airport this morning. My husband, my ex-husband. He called from jail, federal jail. It’s … bad. You can imagine how Esteban’s taking it. He thinks you’re behind it.”

Some blame might reasonably be apportioned to Otegui himself, Nick thought. He had a horrified intuition that she was about to ask him
for help, for legal advice, to call someone downtown to see if they might go easy on him. He was wrong. When he heard her, he wished she had.

“I can’t do this anymore, Nick. I can’t fight all the time. I’m right—we’re right—but I can’t win.”

They held each other, and Nick felt her sobbing, gentle and in diminishing rhythm, like a child who soothes herself to sleep with the sound of her cries. She looked up at him, and in the dark he could see her face glistening. In the dark, he knew she asked for approval, more, as much as release, and if he could not deny the one, he didn’t have the strength for the other, his blessing.
Yes, yes, I understand. May the saints of God go with you, and the peace of God be upon you, your rotten kid, and his rotten father and all the rotten money he gives you
. Otegui had gotten rich poisoning his neighbors—Nick’s, too—but it would be rude to bring that up. What with the busy funeral trade and all. Awkward, awkward. Mustn’t hurt the feelings of the Opium Papi. Nick choked a little at the joke.

Daysi thought he was crying, too, and she stroked his face tenderly. In any light, it would have been hard to tell the grimace from the grin, but here there was nearly none. She felt the choked spasms, two or three before he breathed a little easier, and she pressed her head against his chest. She kissed him again and looked at him.
And in conclusion, I would like to thank everyone for coming here tonight
 …

“I should go.”

Had she said that?

“Will you walk with me?”

Nick shook his head. A last kiss, a long one, and she walked away. Nick did not watch her leave. He walked off the path to sit on the rocks and watch the river, whatever he could see of the river, and the bridge, with the steady chug of after-work traffic, heading west to the missus, home to the kids. In a few minutes, it began to rain, and Nick walked away, too.

N
ick had no family life, no love life, little social life beyond phone chats with Esposito. It had been some time since he’d gotten any blocked calls. He had been back to full duty for a while, but he had never felt less able or engaged, and the daily satisfactions he’d once taken from work grew increasingly scant and elusive. At least Michael Cole still seemed to want something from him; even so, Nick skipped several appointments with the city lawyer on the Cole lawsuit. There was a dull abundance of little cases, and Nick was abrupt on the phone with complainants, hostile in reaction to the slightest sign of duplicity or evasion, impatient with delay. One of them asked for his case to be reassigned to another detective, and Nick snapped that things don’t work that way. Nick was thinking about that, wondering how things did work, when a cop walked into the squad.

“There’s a guy downstairs. He says he knows you.”

The cop was cautious, young, Spanish.

“He came in to see me, or you locked him up?”

“He’s under arrest.”

“For what?”

“He beat up three kids. Not kids, teenagers. He says they raped his daughter.”

“Did they?”

“She says they didn’t. More of a gang-bang type thing. He walked in on it. He beat up the kids, pretty bad. The parents—two out of three, one mother, one father—they’re downstairs.”

“The kids? Where are they?”

“Hospital.”

“The girl?”

“A different hospital, in the Bronx.”

“Ah … What’s the guy’s name? I mean the perp?”

“Ivan Lopez. Do you know him? He had your card.”

“Bring him up here. I’ll talk to him. How bad are the boys hurt?”

“Two are just kinda lumped up. The third, though, he was bare-assed when he tried to jump out the window, onto the fire escape. He broke the window, and I don’t know how he managed it, but he cut open his ballsack.”

“Ouch. Is it … Are they …”

“I don’t know. I didn’t check.”

“No, you wouldn’t, would you.”

Both of them crossed their legs.

“For Lopez, it’s assault, right?” the cop asked. “But what about the kids, do I charge them, too? What with?”

“I gotta figure that out…. Did you call Special Victims?”

“Yeah. They’re all out on something in Harlem, the serial rape. The guy hit again.”

That was in the papers again the other day, the case with Esposito’s old friends. Almost two dozen victims now, aged twelve to sixty; the perp pretended to be the super’s helper, or a plumber there to fix a leak. Nick hated sex cases. They were painfully simple—
My mother’s boyfriend, he touched me
—or painfully simple, once removed—
A black man, a stranger, he came through the window when I was sleeping
. These were the worst, because there usually wasn’t any strange black man who came through the window. After hours of interview, of reassurance and challenge, the story often went back to the mother’s boyfriend. Lieutenant Ortiz fought constantly with the lieutenant at Special Victims—was the chain-snatch with the tit-grab a property crime or a sex crime? Both squads tried to steal the promising, interesting cases and kick the losing propositions back to the other side; there were rules about who was supposed to get what, but they didn’t always matter.

Grace was thirteen, below the age of consent, but Nick had to get out the law books to see how the lines were drawn for nonconsenting consenters. A test question from the Police Academy, and he didn’t know if he had gotten it right, all those years ago. He rummaged around the office for a copy of the penal law. Here it was, the wisdom of the legislature: If the boys were fifteen, it was an experiment; if they were sixteen, it was a felony.

“How old are they?”

The cop began to flip through his memo book, then nervously closed it.

“I’ll have to check with my partner. He’s at the hospital. I think the kid who got cut, he was the oldest, seventeen maybe. His mother’s downstairs. Should I bring her up?”

“Yeah. No, wait. Bring up Lopez. Mrs. Ballsack can sit tight. We’re gonna have to go to the hospital, talk to these kids, get a story. Why is the lady here instead of with her kid?”

“I dunno.”

When the cop left, Nick read over the statutes, to see who would end up where, if the story stayed where it was. It made him feel like an amateur, a rookie. Misdemeanor assaults for Lopez on the two kids, but what about the third? Reckless endangerment, probably, another catchall. Rape in the first degree, second degree, third. Look at this—sexual misconduct, which covered dead bodies and animals. Lovely, lovely. The cop brought up Ivan Lopez, who had smears of blood on his shirt.

“Officer! You must help me! They tried to rape my daughter!”

“I understand, Mr. Lopez. Have a seat and we’ll figure this out.”

Nick hated this, the pinball logic and volcanic emotions, the sticky fluids. He wasn’t up on the law, wasn’t into the subject. There was a recent case in Texas, where a woman was in bed with another man when her husband walked in. She started to yell that the man was raping her, and the husband shot him. The woman was convicted of manslaughter, recklessly causing the death of another. A fair decision, in an unfair life. Did Grace say anything when her father walked in, or did her look say something to him; did he understand that look in his daughter’s eyes, or did he understand it wrong? So many stories to hear, three boys and a girl, a father, and how many mothers, whoever else? The numbers. Ivan Lopez put one and three together, and the math drove him crazy, past caring about consequence. One was too many; three was infinite. Nick thought about all the stories he would hear, and wondered how many of them would be lies.