Saints Of New York (20 page)

Caitlin
came into the room. She approached Radick hurriedly. The expression on her face
was somewhat awkward.

'How
long have you been with my dad?'

'Yesterday,'
Radick replied.

'He
drinks. You know that, right?'

Radick
didn't reply.

'He
drinks and he gets morose. There's a lot of history between him and my mom and
he doesn't deal with it very well—'

'Miss
Parrish ... I don't know that you should be tell—'

She
pressed a slip of paper into Radick's hand. 'That's my phone number here, my
work number and my cell. Call me if he gets too fucked up, okay? Call me if you
start worrying about him.'

'Miss
Parrish—'

'Seriously.
Call me—'

'Coffee,'
Parrish said, and Caitlin turned suddenly. She smiled as he came into the room.

'I
thought you were getting ready,' Parrish said.

'I am. I just
came in here for a barrette and I cannot find it.'

Caitlin passed
her father and left the room.

Parrish handed
Radick a coffee cup, told him to take a seat.

Radick stuffed
the slip of paper into his jacket pocket and took a chair near the window.

Parrish set his
coffee cup on the table, said he'd be a moment.

Before long
there were raised voices in back of the apartment. This was some
father-daughter thing that Radick really didn't want to be involved in. He
drank his coffee, sat patiently, tried not to listen but it was difficult.
Frank was going on about her job, where she was going to be working. Sounded
like he wanted her to be one place, she wanted to be another. Sounded like the
sort of discussion that would only ever become a disagreement, an argument, a
bone of contention. To Radick she seemed more than capable of making up her own
mind, deciding where she wanted to live, where she wanted to work. But what the
hell did he know? He was twenty-nine. He wasn't married, never had been, had no
kids, no relationship. This was way beyond his territory, and he was glad of
it.

Ten
minutes and Parrish was done. He reappeared, that apologetic expression on his
face that people wore when they felt guilty for having subjected a stranger to
some of their life issues.

He didn't
apologize however, merely told Radick that they were leaving.

Radick set his
cup down. He followed Parrish to the door.

'Thanks for the
coffee, Miss Parrish,' he called back, but there was no answer.

He dropped Parrish
off at his apartment building, glanced in the rear-view as he pulled away from
the sidewalk. Parrish stood there for a moment as if he was trying to remember
something important, and then he seemed to shrug his shoulders disconsolately
before walking up the steps.

Radick
drove home. He was not averse to a few shots of some- thing-or-other himself,
but he knew if he started with Parrish they would wind up in a bar someplace,
Parrish telling Radick his life story, feeling sorry for himself, starting down
the slow decline. Radick wanted definition between work and personal. He didn't
want to be Frank Parrish's drinking buddy. He wanted to be his partner. He knew
of John Parrish - the
mighty
John Parrish, stalwart of the OCCB and the Brooklyn OC Task Force. The man had
been a beast, and if his first couple of days with Frank were anything to go by
he reckoned John would have been a little disappointed how his son turned out.
But Frank Parrish
had
been good. One of the best, or so the rumors went. The man could teach you
things. He had seen things, done things, solved crimes that no-one else had. He
was a small legend, but a legend all the same. He was not his father. Hell,
no-one was like John Parrish. But even if Frank had taken a percentage of his
father's brilliance, and if that percentage was watered down five times and
then five times again, even that would be enough for Jimmy Radick.

Parrish
stayed home for no more than half an hour. He should not have walked out to
DeKalb Avenue, but he did. He stood there at the corner, looked back towards
his apartment on Willoughby, then left to Clay's Tavern. He vacillated. He
always vacillated. He went left. He
always
went left.

Frank
Parrish was a loyal drunk. He was loyal to Bushmills,
loyal
to his corner booth, loyal to the tunes
he chose from the jukebox. Tom Waits' 'I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With
You'
and
'Shiver
Me Timbers'; Miles Davis' 'It Never Entered My Mind'; Stan Getz's 'Desafinado',
and finally, predictably, so predictable that someone would call it from the
bar . . .

Hey, Frank.

What?

Do it.

Do what?

Play Misty for
me.

And
Frank would smile, and amble to the jukebox, and drop a quarter in and punch
the buttons, and Errol Garner would
lull
them
all into a hazy, drunken sense of nostalgia.

Frank
Parrish would stay until eleven, sometimes eleven
-thirty,
and then he would find his way home.

His father had
drunk here. It wasn't Clay's Tavern back
then, it
was The Hammerhead, but a change of name
hadn't changed the decor, the atmosphere, the reminders. Talking with Doctor
Marie
Griffin was proving easier than he'd
imagined. Yeah, maybe
it
was
time to talk. The asshole was dead, after all.

He
found his corner booth. He ordered a double and
collected
it. He waved a 'hi' to a couple
of regulars propping up the east wing of the bar. Retired cops. Guys who eased
out the last two or three years of their thirty back of a desk someplace, and
now spent their time talking about the
good old days
and
wondering why they'd been so desperate to leave. Spend thirty years a cop
you're gonna die a cop. There was no easy way out of it. It was not a job, it
was a vocation. After that it became a passion, an addiction, a crutch, a
belief. Either that, or you got out. Cops didn't marry well. They were lousy
fathers. They walked out of the house into a world that no-one else could see,
as if only they could perceive the thin veneer that lay between what people
believed was reality and reality itself. Reality was behind the crime scene
tape. Reality was found at the tip of a stiletto, down the muzzle of a .38,
back of a sawn-off Mossberg pump-action shotgun as it unloaded its guts into
half a dozen diners in a restaurant on Myrtle Avenue. Reality was a stabbing, a
beating, a strangulation, a drowning, a suicide, an overdose, a hanging.
Reality was twelve- year-old junkies, fifteen-year-old hookers. It was stealing
and running and hiding, and backing up into a corner while the world looked for
you, and knowing full well that soon the world would find you and it would all
be over.

Reality
was people like Rebecca Lange, a girl who wore red nail varnish and reminded
Frank Parrish of Caitlin. That was what it had come down to - a dead girl who
reminded him of his daughter, a daughter he could still argue with about
nothing at all.

And
then there was John Parrish, the Saints of New York, the whole fucked-up mess
of Frank's own history that had somehow followed in the wake of his father - a
man who wore one face for the world, but was someone else entirely.

Three
double Bushmills and Frank Parrish realized that the road he had started
walking down with Marie Griffin was long and winding, and it didn't really have
a destination.

And
he thought of his father, what he should have said to the man:

No, I don't love
you. I don't even respect you. I know who you are. I see the rosettes and the
plaques, the medal ribbons, the citations and commends, and I listen to you and
your buddies talking your smart shit over Schlitz and hot dogs in the back
yard, and I see right through you all. I see right through the host of
motherfuckers that you really are.

And
it isn't the money that pains me. It isn't the cheating, the backhanders, the
bribery. It isn't even the killing. The thing that pains me is that you spent
all your time lying to people, and you didn't even admit how much you were
lying to yourself. At least I know I fucked up. At least I possess enough
humility to see that. I screwed up my marriage, screwed up my kids, but hell, I
can at least admit it, you know? That's what galls me. That's what makes me
ashamed to be your son.

And
he thought of Caitlin, and he wondered whether he really should ask Jimmy
Radick to keep an eye on her. Just for her own good. Just to make sure she was
staying on the right side of the road.

Eleven-thirty
Frank Parrish made his way home to his apartment.

Arriving
in the austere and undecorated living room, nothing more than a sofa, a table
and chair by the window, a TV set and an old stereo unit with a turntable, he
resigned himself to the fact that whatever he had started with the counsellor
woman would now have to go on. His father had been dead for sixteen years. That
did not seem so long ago until he realized that Caitlin had been four years old
at the funeral. To consider it this way made it seem like forever.

The
TV did not distract him, and so he turned it off. He sat at the table, the
drapes inched apart, and through the window he looked down towards Willoughby
Avenue. Directly west, no more than three or four blocks, was Brooklyn
Hospital. North-west, again little more than half a dozen blocks, was
Cumberland. Caitlin could work at either. He could see her every week, perhaps
a couple of times. They could meet for lunch in Auburn Place or St. Edwards.
They could pretend that they were close until they became so. They
- he -
could make up for the past ten years of
noise and bullshit that had pulled the family apart.

Frank
fetched a bottle from the cupboard above the sink. He poured three fingers,
returned to the window, tried to focus on Rebecca, the manner of her death, the
reason, the rationale, the possible resolution.

Her face haunted
him. The short hair. The painted nails.

He
wondered if she had known her life was going to end, or if she had been
strangled as she slept, waking only in those last handful of seconds before
everything guttered and was extinguished.

He
wondered if she had seen her killer's face, or if he had tied a scarf around
his face, had worn a baseball cap tipped down low so she saw nothing but the
muscles in his jaw line as he tightened his grip.

He
wondered if Rebecca had tried to fight back, even though against someone so
much stronger she had possessed no hope at all.

He
wondered if she had pleaded, begged, prayed even . . . prayed to God for
respite, for release, for forgiveness for whatever she might have done that had
brought this upon herself.

Honestly?
Frank Parrish would have liked to believe in God, but he felt that faith should
be mutual. It should be reciprocated. And he knew, with certainty, that God did
not believe in him.

He
fell asleep on the sofa shortly before two. He was still dressed - pants,
socks, shirt. An empty bottle sat on the floor, beside it a glass.

He
seemed to remember waking near to dawn, but he made no effort to move. He just
rolled over, buried his face in a cushion, and tried to push away the images of
a dead Rebecca.

'Marty
Krugman was small time, a wig salesman. He ran a wig store someplace and he had
these late-night TV commercials, but beyond that he ran bets for people. Every
once in a while he got something going with someone that added up to a few
bucks. One of these people was a guy called Louis Werner. Lou was not a smart
gambler. He was impulsive, went on the fly, and he wound up owing Marty
something like twenty grand. This is 1978 now, you understand. This is a lot of
money. So Marty is giving Lou a hard time about this money, and Lou is thinking
of every which way he can get Marty off his back, because Marty is the kind of
guy that just gets onto you and he won't let go.'