The Graving Dock (21 page)

The day before, when he got back to the office, it had occurred to him that maybe Tommy Balfa had not planned to leave town alone. The man had bought only one plane ticket, but that didn’t mean that his female friend had not booked a seat, too. Balfa, unexpectedly deceased, had never boarded the plane; Jack called the airline and asked who else had not shown up for the flight. Only two other names popped: a businessman from Kansas City who had missed his connecting leg, and one Maureen Duffy from Brooklyn, New York. Jack called the DMV and got her driver’s license photo—
bingo
.

He shifted around in his seat, trying to get comfortable. Anybody who thought detective work was nonstop excitement should be forced to participate in a long stakeout. It would make a hell of a reality TV show: a bunch of cops sit in cars for hours; they get booted off the show one by one as they succumb to the need to doze or to pee. He glanced in his rearview mirror, wondering if the young woman was already out of the house, maybe on her way back, but a large van obscured his view. He heard a high-pitched yapping. On the sidewalk a few houses down an elderly woman was walking a little sculpted poodle.

Some other motion caught the corner of Jack’s eye. His body tightened. No mistaking that red hair, it was Duffy and she was already halfway down the front stoop. He swung his door open, got out, and began crossing the street. Duffy had stopped on the sidewalk and was staring his way. There was something odd about her gaze, though, and it took him a moment to figure it out. She was staring in his direction, but not at
him
.

He looked over his shoulder: Two men were walking quickly down the middle of the street, toward Duffy. He took in quick impressions: One was big as a soda machine, the other just very large. They shared the meaty, disgruntled look of men who threatened other people for a living.

“Tipsy,
no
!”

He swiveled back. The neighbor with the poodle had returned, and was trying to remove something from the animal’s mouth. Jack looked over his shoulder again: The two strangers had paused at the sight of the old woman, but they were moving forward again, and opening their jackets.

Duffy stared at them like a mouse hypnotized by a snake.

Jack reached into his own coat. Not for his gun—he wasn’t about to instigate a shootout on a Cobble Hill street—but for his badge. He pulled out the leather case, flipped it open, and held it up high so everyone could see.

“Miss Duffy,” he called out. “I’m with the NYPD. I need to speak with you.”

He looked over his shoulder: Thankfully, the two men had stopped. The badge seemed to work on them like a cross on vampires. They stared at it, stared at Jack, stared at each other, confused and clearly pissed off, and then—without a word—they turned and strode away.

Jack turned back. Maureen Duffy had slumped down on her stoop, and as he came near he could see that she was trembling. He sat down next to her, then lifted up a bit to tuck the back of his coat between his ass and the cold brown concrete.

He nodded at the street. “Do you know those charming individuals?”

The young woman shifted away from him until she was backed up against the curlicued stair rail. She wasn’t sultry, or beautiful—she was
cute
. “How do I know you’re a cop?” she said. “You can buy a fake badge in Times Square.”

Jack shook his head somewhat ruefully. “Those days are gone. It’s all Disney now.” He took out his business card and his cell phone. “Here. You can dial my office number, or get the NYPD number from Information.”

She took the card and stared at it dully.

Jack stood up. “It’s freezing out here. Can we talk inside? Or in a coffee shop somewhere?”

She stared up at him. Green eyes, freckles, rounded cheeks. A quirky mouth that under brighter circumstances might curve up into a mischievous grin.

She wasn’t smiling now.

“Who
are
you? What do you want from me?”

Jack shrugged. “If you ask me, your real worry is what those two meatheads want.”

Maureen Duffy tried to look defiant, but couldn’t hide the fact that she was scared stiff.

“I’M NOT HUNGRY,” SHE
said, pushing away the menu. They were in the back of a Greek coffee shop, which didn’t fit in with the neighborhood’s new program of trendy bistros and swank bars.

The waiter, a doleful little man with stringy hair that looked coated with black shoe polish, shrugged sadly, then turned to Jack.

“I’ll just have a cup of coffee.”

A little sign on the table said that there was a five-dollar minimum, but the waiter looked too resigned to the general injustice of life to attempt to enforce it.

“I’ll have a corn muffin, too,” Jack added, mostly for the old guy’s benefit. “Toasted.” He shook his head at Maureen as the man trudged away. “I can never believe how long the menus are at these places. There’s no way they could keep all this stuff around fresh.” Bullshit small talk, to put the girl at ease.

It wasn’t working. She had her paper napkin in her hands and was twisting it as if it were some kind of abdominal exerciser.

“Did Tommy treat you well?”

That got her attention. She looked frightened all over again.

Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of antacids. “Here—take one of these. I’m a bit of a worrier myself…”

“I know it’s wrong,” she blurted, “but I didn’t think it was an actual
crime
.”

Jack did his best to keep his eyes from widening at this shift into confessional mode. “Whoa. Slow down a minute. You didn’t think
what
was a crime?”

She slumped back into the booth’s padded seat. “I knew he was married. I’m not stupid.”

Jack raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay. Nobody’s saying you are. But
what
wasn’t a crime?”

She looked at him as if he was stupid. “Having an affair. It’s not illegal, is it?”

The waiter swung by with Jack’s cup of coffee and he waited until the old man was out of hearing distance before he continued. “Why don’t you tell me about those two creeps?”

She returned a look of wide-eyed innocence. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen them before. Maybe they were sent by Tommy’s wife?”

Her ditziness sounded convincing, but Jack wasn’t quite buying it. A changeup, to throw her off balance: “Where did he get the money?”

She frowned. “What money?”

“Come on, Maureen. I already know about it.”

She just stared. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then why were you running away with him?”

She looked confused. “Running? What do you mean? He said he wanted to take me on a vacation.”

“With less than twenty-four hours notice?”

She nodded. “He’s…he was a very spontaneous kind of person.” She paused a moment to snuffle back a tear. “He was a lot of fun. And I work a flexible schedule. I got some of the other girls to cover my shifts.”

Jack frowned. This description of a freewheeling, joyous Tommy Balfa didn’t exactly accord with his own experience. But then, he wasn’t a cute twenty-three-year-old…“Why did you buy a oneway ticket?”

She shrugged. “That’s what he told me to get.”

“And you didn’t think that was strange?”

She looked down at the table and sighed. In a softer, more tentative voice: “I was hoping he was going to tell me he was leaving his wife. And that he was going to propose to me. I thought maybe he had booked tickets for some sort of trip to celebrate from there. That’s just the kind of thing he would do.”

Jack blinked at this mention of proposals, a subject much on his mind of late. He stirred some sugar into his coffee, taking a moment to think. The girl’s story was getting convoluted, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. He would need to follow up, to probe for holes, maybe talk to her supervisor at the hospital…His beeper went off. He glanced down. “Excuse me a sec.” He pulled out his cell phone and called Stephen Tanney.

“I want you to get over to the Seven-six house right away,” the sergeant said. “Your fax from the Pentagon came in.”

Jack’s eyes widened at this unexpected bureaucratic efficiency. He pinched his lower lip; he desperately needed to see the fax, yet he wanted to finish this interview. “I’m not on until four,” he said.

“A cop’s been shot,” his boss replied. “You have something more important to do?”

Jack winced at this uncomfortable echo of his own comments to a distracted Tommy Balfa. “I’ll be right there.”

He flipped the phone closed, then looked at the girl. “Listen, Maureen: Those gorillas are gonna be back for you. There’s only one way for you to be safe here, and that’s to tell me exactly what Tommy was up to.”

She just stared at him with those guileless green eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

Jack groaned, glanced at his watch. “You can’t go back to your apartment. Do you have a friend or somebody you can stay with?”

She thought about it, looking like a worried little kid.

He stood and reached into his pocket for his card. “Let me know where you end up. And call me. I can’t help you if you don’t help me.”

As he rushed out, he passed the old waiter, bearing his corn muffin. The man raised his arm and was about to say something. Too late: Jack was gone.

T
HE SEVEN-SIX SQUAD ROOM
was packed and loud, but all the noise and commotion faded from Jack’s awareness as he funneled down into the stack of Pentagon records on the desk in front of him. The dense military and legal terminology mixed in his mind with a series of old snapshots, and the sound of Gene Hoffer’s begrudging voice, and family memories of his own, and soon the squad room disappeared altogether, replaced by a series of grainy imagined scenes running through a Super-8 film projector in his head.

A group of crew-cut boys in plaid shirts and wool pants push down on the black barrel of a cannon. Behind them, across the harbor, the gray stone towers of lower Manhattan rise up in the dusk. “Somebody keep an eye out for MPs,” says one of the boys. “Not you,” he adds, pointing to ten-year-old Bobby Dietrich Sperry. “We don’t trust German spies.”

(Gene Hoffer: “We used to tease him a little, because his ears stuck out so much, and because of his middle name. Just boys, you know, kidding around…)
Just kidding
, Jack thinks bitterly. He knows this teasing all too well: His parents came to the United States from the Ukraine, and the Red Hook bullies loved to make fun of their accents, and to call him “Commie” and “Pinko.”

Young Bobby and his mother and father are seated at a dinner table. The boy asks his father about an upcoming training exercise. He loves the way Lieutenant Colonel Ted Sperry is at the center of such plans, loves his father’s uniforms and medals and the way everyone salutes him, loves his dad, his hero.
Unlike Jack’s father, the bitter drinker, wielder of a strap.
Like Jack’s father, Lieutenant Colonel Sperry is tormented by an inner demon, but unlike Jack’s old man, he never speaks of it, never takes it out on his family. He’s a model father, a model husband, a model soldier, a model man.

New scene.
A parolee on work detail paints a house in Nolan Park. He brushes white trim around the yellow exterior walls he painted the day before. His name is Lowell Cates and his shirt is off because it’s a sweltering August day. He is a small young man with a bit of the swagger of movie star John Garfield, though he is hardly a gangster
—
he has been put in the stockade for the crime of coming back to the island late from weekend leaves.

What happened next was pure speculation.
Maybe the lieutenant colonel’s wife had taken the ferry into the city. Maybe the boy had gone with her. Maybe the screen door opened and the officer came out with two glasses of lemonade. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” the parolee said. The officer handed him a glass. “Enough with the lieutenant stuff. You can just call me Ted.” Maybe they chatted for a while on the porch.

Jack moved from speculation into the cold hard facts of the Army’s court-martial report. Seven weeks later a neighbor, a Colonel from Fort Wayne, Indiana, happened to wander into the house and find Sperry and Cates engaged in an act severely frowned on by members of that man’s army. The legalese of the records did little to disguise the disgust of the other officers involved in the court-martial, especially after Lieutenant Colonel Sperry stood up and made a brave but suicidal speech to the effect that his love for Lowell Cates was no one’s business but God’s and his own.

Jack was well into his second reading of the minutes before the full significance of the verdict caught his eye. Lieutenant Theodore Sperry and Corporal Lowell Cates had been summarily, dishonorably discharged from the Army for conduct unbecoming to an officer or enlisted man. For “gross indecency.”

And there it was:
G.I.

Gene Hoffer had reluctantly filled in the rest of the tale. Young Bobby Sperry had seen his father stripped of all dignity and respect, kicked out of the Army, divorced from his family, sent reeling in disgrace. And the other kids’ casual ribbing had turned to fierce, full-throated jeers. It only took six or eight of them to get together and finish destroying Bobby’s world, to tip it until his small heart fell out, and then to stuff that heart into a cannon and hurl it spinning (along with a significant, never-to-be-recovered part of his mind) toward the distant moon.

T
HE PROBLEM WAS WHAT
to do with all his keys.

Jack stood in the jogging lane of the Prospect Park roadway staring down at his baggy new sweatpants. They had pockets, but when he put his house keys and car keys in there, they slapped against his leg with every step, and he jingled like one of Santa’s reindeer.

He clutched the keys in his fist and set off around the park in the early morning light. Well, not
around
the park—he would have been happy to make it a quarter of the way. He prided himself on having a pretty trim physique for a middle-aged man, but he was still not entirely recovered from his gunshot wound, and this jogging business was turning out to be surprisingly hard work.