Red on Red (55 page)

“Say a kid steals a car, gets into a crash,” he began in a professorial tone, pleased with the opportunity to show off his thought. “The other driver runs away. Cops come, they find a body in the trunk of the second car. Do you lock the kid up?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. Say it’s not a body—it’s a lady tied up, taped up, in the trunk. She’s alive. The kid saved her life. He’s a good kid, never been in trouble before. Do you still arrest him?”

Nick hesitated, resistant to accept the terms of the analogy. The role reversal was as touching as it was troubling. It showed how close they’d grown, how much they’d rubbed off on each other, but if Esposito could play the hypothetical game, Nick was all the less necessary. The theme of unintended consequences did not reassure him, and his answer was churlish.

“Nobody ever just goes out one day to steal a car, just once.”

“This one did. It’s my story, Nick. I get to say what happens.”

Nick snapped back—“Do you?”—harsher than intended, brittle and volatile, but when he began to apologize, Esposito turned up the radio. He drove around the corner, found a quiet block—here, a school, closed for the day—and pulled over. “C’mon. Let’s get coffee.” There was no coffee shop where they’d parked. When they got out, Esposito put an arm around his shoulder, leading him down the street. More affectionate than usual, more intrusive. Reminiscent of more old mob movies, checking for the wire on the chest.

“You okay, Nick?”

“I don’t know. I’m not crazy about this, Espo. You know that. I can see a hundred ways it can go wrong. I can’t see one way it could go right.”

“I know that. It’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if I can trust you.”

Esposito slid his hand off Nick’s shoulder, patting him on the side and back. Was he feeling for a microphone? Didn’t he know they didn’t do it that way anymore? Nick stopped walking, tossed his tie over his shoulder, and began to unbutton his shirt, offering his chest for examination.

“C’mon. You wanna feel? You wanna go swimming somewhere, so we can strip down, or you wanna go through the metal detector at the airport, X-ray my key ring to see if there’s a bug inside?”

Despite his anger, Nick almost smiled at the irony. He had been trusted completely when he had been a spy, but now that he had severed that contact, his loyalty was suspect. Esposito straightened his tie and patted him again, shaking his head. He kept a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Stop it, Nick. I know. I know everything.”

Nick looked blankly back at him, almost grateful to be exposed. Was it all over now? If he were in an interrogation room, he’d put his arms on the table, lay his head down, and sleep a guilty sleep. Almost grateful. He held back from any admission until the accusation was complete.

“I was a little mad you didn’t tell me yourself.”

The tone was too kind, nearly sympathetic, but maybe Esposito wanted him to lower his guard. Nick waited for him to finish.

“Lena told me about the miscarriages, the three girls. I understand, though—some things are just easier to tell a woman. With the rest of it—your father, your wife, Daysi. Too much. And I know you went to visit … that guy … in his apartment. Fuck it. Enough games. You went to see Michael, and Malcolm told me. He didn’t know it was you, or why you went, and I didn’t put it together till later. Not even really till yesterday. And I swear to God, Nick, I almost threw up at the thought that you were gonna say goodbye to Michael Cole and not me.”

For a moment, Nick was sick, too. He’d expected the back of Esposito’s hand, cursing at his treason; instead it had been held out to help him, magnanimous but unyielding in its grasp. He hadn’t considered what harm it might have done to other people if he’d died—there hadn’t seemed to be other people, then—only what suffering he might have spared himself. For the first time since they’d known each other, Nick felt like a man without secrets. All but one, and he almost felt clean. He just nodded, and Esposito went on.

“I know you don’t like this play, this move, but I think it’s gonna work out. It’s you I’m worried about. You ain’t the same guy I started with. I told you, you know about my last partner. I couldn’t tell my kids—I couldn’t face ’em—if you did something to yourself. You holding up?”

Nick nodded again.

“If you weren’t, would you promise to tell me?”

Nick didn’t answer, and Esposito put both hands on his shoulders, fierce in his grip, not checking for microphones.

“You’re not going anywhere, unless I get a promise. I swear to you, I won’t let you go unless you swear to me. Your word’s enough for me, but I want to hear it.”

“I swear it.”

Nick nodded again, and he was released. After they went back to the precinct to sign out, Esposito asked him if he wanted to go out for a drink. It was late, and they had to be back early in the morning. Nick was afraid that his stunned gratitude would mix like whiskey with his beer. Three or four rounds in, if Esposito asked to borrow his gun for a bank robbery, he would not have refused. “Nah, but tomorrow, definitely.” Esposito dropped him off at his apartment, without checking the rooflines or the street. Nick started to but caught himself, deciding to take his chances. Esposito had faith enough for both of them. For tonight, at least, it was more than enough.

N
ick walked out of his apartment early the next morning, groggy after a restless night of half-sleep, to see two young cops at his lobby door, putting up yellow tape. They blocked his exit, telling him he had to wait, it was a crime scene. He looked at their faces and didn’t recognize them; they had to be new. He was unused to this kind of arrival, this kind of reception. What occurred to him first was that he was in trouble, that IAB had found out he was living there, in the precinct. The petty vanity made him wince, but he decided not to say who he was to the cops at the door.

“What’s going on?”

They looked at each other, a stocky Spanish one with a mustache and a spindly white female with librarian glasses. They knew they should detain witnesses, control the scene, alert their sergeant to suspicious persons and facts of potential significance. They knew they should be wary about disclosing information to the public.

“There’s been an incident, sir,” said the female, in a country accent, somewhat Southern. What had brought her here, to do this? “Do you live here?”

“No.”

The absence of further detail in Nick’s response provoked both curiosity and irritation. The Spanish one stepped up to him.

“So, who you visiting? What’s going on? Where you coming from? What’s your name? Lemme see some ID!”

He started to reach to Nick’s waist, to pat him down, and Nick pushed the hand away before the cop found the gun.

“It’s Detective Meehan, kid. Slow it down.”

He pulled his jacket aside to show his shield, which only the female
cop saw. She grabbed her partner before he could react too forcefully to the push-away. Nick suddenly felt tense and dizzy; he wanted to run. He wanted to be somewhere else, do something else, be someone else. Part of his mind had taken in the situation, but it wouldn’t share; he wasn’t talking to himself.

“Easy, Juan. May I see some ID, Detective?”

She said “I” like “Ah.” Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee. Indian names that were songs in themselves. Nick carefully angled his body, right hand raised, and took his ID out from his left back pocket. The Spanish cop veered between anger and embarrassment. As he stepped back, his partner stepped forward.

“Detective, you shoulda told us that, straight out,” she said. “An unfortunate situation coulda happened, right here.”

Nick considered the opinion and nodded. He clapped them both on the shoulders and walked them out of the lobby, talking fast to divert them, to divert himself from where his thoughts were headed.

“Yeah. You’re right. So, what do we got?”

“We got a male shot.”

“Likely?”

That was police idiom for the estimate of whether a person was likely to die. New doctors, new EMTs, were often offended when they were asked to make a bet on the fatality of an injury. New cops took no such offense, but they didn’t claim any expertise, and formed opinions based on whether the man who was shot was angry about it or didn’t move much.

“More than likely.”

“Let’s have a look, then.”

The cops held up the tape for him, and he walked down the stoop. No one from the squad was there yet. A man on the sidewalk in a suit, facedown, briefcase less than a foot from his splayed hands. He had the look of someone running for a bus, on a vertical axis, down into the earth. Nick squatted down to examine the body, scanning it half a minute before he found the dime-size tufted circle equidistant between the shoulder blades. The fabric was too dark to show any stippling, but he guessed it was close range, an instantaneous death, clipping the spine and stopping the heart like a clock.

“What time we got for this?”

“Maybe six. Half hour ago, forty-five minutes.”

“How’d it come over? Anybody see it or hear it, or they just find the body?”

“Guy heading to work, he hears it. Heard a shot a minute before, when he was around the corner, but he didn’t see anything before he saw the guy. Probably happened right before he called it in.”

Nick touched the neck. The flesh was warm, no cooler than his own. None of the pockets had been turned out or torn, and he felt a wallet in the back pants pocket. Not robbery. Robbery-homicides were bad cases, nearly impossible to find the random stranger with the impulsive finger. Not random, not this. Whose was this? Who was catching from the squad? Nick had been out of the rotation for a while, and he wasn’t eager to jump back in. Not for this, right in his front yard, so to speak. He felt a chill, colder than the body would ever be, even when it went into the ground. He hadn’t had coffee yet—that’s what he told himself. That’s why he hadn’t thought it through, hadn’t even begun to think, taking in the larger circumstances. He walked around and crouched down to see the face, knowing even before he saw that it was Jamie Barry. Jamie looked as surprised as Nick.

“Ah, Jamie, you poor bastard.”

Nick saw the two cops looking at him, darkly collating his precipitous appearance and evasive remarks, his apparent relationship with the victim. What to say to them, to preempt a call to IAB? He hadn’t the least idea.

When the squad arrived, they huddled around Nick. He was immensely grateful to see them, all of them, as they took out their notebooks for his terse recital of facts: Jamie Barry, longtime junkie recently rehabbed, shot once in the back, no apparent robbery. He could have been dictating the sparse newspaper clip. But he added that he knew him, as a neighbor, and didn’t need it mentioned that he was staying in the building, had stumbled into the scene. He didn’t need the aggravation, he said, and they nodded, knowing what he’d been through, what the Job could be like. Sympathy was immediate, and trust was automatic. They had to look out for each other. Napolitano, Garelick, and Perez fanned out for canvasses, taking plate numbers, looking for security cameras. Esposito remained, waiting for Nick to tell him more, to see if the story was altered or amplified for his more intimate audience. When it wasn’t, he seemed almost hurt; there was always more, and he
should have been the one to hear it. He pursed his lips and put his notebook away.

“The father’s the super, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So where is he?”

A fine question. At this time of morning, he was always outside, hauling the garbage from the alley to the curb, sweeping the lobby. By now, Mr. Barry should have been gawking outside the yellow tape, or standing inside, weeping. They walked to the edge of the scene, where one of the old Irish ladies was loitering.

“Where’s Mr. Barry?”

“My God. It’s not Jamie, is it?”

“No,” interjected Esposito, sparing Nick the lie. “It’s just that we’ll be taking over the sidewalk for a couple of hours, in case there’s any deliveries or whatnot. Is he around?”

“No. He’s home, thank God. He’ll be back tonight.”

Esposito was confused, but Nick was not. “Home” was Ireland for his father or Mr. Barry, no matter how long they lived here, without intention to return. Nick wished he remembered where—Fermanagh? Tyrone?—to call him, to tell him not to come back, that there was nothing for him here, less.

“What happened, Nick? Thank God you’re here. Still, I won’t sleep tonight…. What was it? Should we stay inside?”

“I don’t know yet. These things take some time to figure out.”

If only that were true. If only there were some mystery or doubt. If Nick had been darker, shorter, fatter, with a ponytail, a different neighbor would have been mistakenly dead. What a privilege it should have been to catch a case like this. What a gift to a detective, to see a dead face and know who did it, with the certainty of a saint knowing what God has asked of him. But this was no gift, the lucid point amid the lurching shadows. Esposito took hold of his arm for some conference, but Nick pulled away, a sulky flinch like a girlfriend in a mood, to walk back to the body and crouch down again on the sidewalk. Jamie’s eyes were half-open, dull and wasted. Nick had seen them a hundred times like that, but never so close. A cartoon image, windows with the shades drawn. Twittering birds surrounding him after the knockout punch, X’s for eyes. Old folklore, old interrogation hustles, that the eyes would capture their
last sight like a snapshot. But Jamie had been shot from behind. If the lie were true, his eyes would show traffic, a bus stop, a leafless tree. Dead and blind to who did it. Nick thought of Jamie hovering near, his unsteady spirit weaving like a drunk, not sure of his death, hustling for reassurance like for spare change.
Hey, Nick! It’s me, Jamie! Got a minute? What’s going on?
When Nick stood up, knees aching, he felt like he was brushing Jamie off again.