The Sniper's Wife (18 page)

“He was found under the 145th Street Bridge, dressed like a bum. The assumption was he’d fallen and hit his head. He had no ID, nobody in the area knew who he was, so they declared him an accidental and took him to the potter’s field on Hart Island yesterday. We’re lucky they started photographing these folks a while back and cataloguing where they’re buried. We can have him exhumed first thing tomorrow morning.”

Willy pursed his lips, drawing connections in his head. “Anything on the other one—Ron Cashman?”

“No, sorry. We only came up with this ’cause of a habit of mine. Anytime somebody living hand-to-mouth goes missing, even if he fancies himself an independent businessman, as I’m sure Mr. Lee did, I check the Hart Island index. I figured this was him. They’ve only had four this past week, and he was the only one fitting the description.”

Willy nodded. “Well, I appreciate it.”

Ogden checked his watch. “It’s getting late. I got a couple of people keeping the search engines running on some of our inquiries. I suggest we get a good night’s sleep and meet at Bellevue after they bring the body back from Hart Island.”

“I’d like to be with him,” Willy said softly.

Ogden gave him a surprised look, but instantly grasped his meaning. “At the exhumation?”

Willy simply nodded, not making eye contact.

Ogden immediately defused any possible debate. “Sure. We’ll all go—make it a field trip. It’s a beautiful spot. How ’bout the dock on City Island at eight
A.M.
? You need directions?”

“I know where it is,” Willy said, turning to Gunther and Sammie. “Where’re you two staying? I’ll pick you up.”

Joe gave him the name and address of an inexpensive hotel, followed by, “You want to have dinner together?”

But predictably he shook his head. “No. I better pay somebody a visit I haven’t seen in a while.” He smiled sadly at Sammie and added, “Maybe make amends. I’ll see you seven-forty-five.”

It wasn’t all that late when Willy reached Washington Heights by subway and began walking toward the street where he’d spent his entire youth. If she was keeping to her old habits, which he had no reason to doubt, his mother would be lost in whatever television was beaming out after suppertime, and would probably stay there until eleven. She’d always been a night owl.

He wasn’t making this journey with any great conviction, or holding out much hope. In fact, he wasn’t sure he fully understood his own motives, aside from the fact that Sammie had indirectly made him feel he should make some sort of gesture—that and Nate’s death being confirmed right afterward. Sammie’s comment about his abandoning people who didn’t do him the service of either abandoning him or dying first had struck a chord. Despite all that had befallen him, Willy had never seen himself as one of life’s victims. However insensitive, clumsy, and even brutal his ways of fighting back, he had never considered quitting. So, while the cynical pessimist in him was gearing up for a disappointment, he was nevertheless going to show Sammie that he was at least sometimes capable of making the first move.

As he approached its perimeter, the old neighborhood seemed to echo similar contradictions to the ones he was struggling with. The buildings and streets were familiar, the roll of the terrain underfoot like an old and comforting home movie, but the foreground of language, people, and general spirit was utterly foreign, as if the old hometown had been completely taken over by a busload of tourists.

Gone were the sausage shops and beer parlors and the guttural shouts of angry hausfraus yelling at children running in the streets. Gone, too, were the synagogues and kosher delis and serious men all dressed in black that had been as much part of the landscape as trees were to Vermont. The Irish Catholics, whose presence here had wobbled between the entertaining and the threatening, depending on who you were and what the alcohol intake had been that evening, were also just figments of memory. Now, nearly everywhere he looked, Willy saw a world almost completely become Hispanic.

As a result, he noticed with some amusement, the old stomping grounds had been blessed with a lot more life and color. He knew the area had suffered hard times, including violence, drugs, and civil unrest, but there was also an exuberance now that he didn’t recall from before. The music spilling into the streets, the effervescence of the neon store lights, even the swagger of the people loitering on the sidewalks, laughing, catcalling, and having a good time after work, were all things he wished had been there when he’d been young. Admittedly tainted by retrospection, his memories were of a dour place of Germanic discipline and disappointment, and of traditions he’d longed to escape.

He continued walking up St. Nicholas Avenue, to where Washington Heights becomes Fort George. Here were the remnants of his youthful experience, surviving like an outpost on foreign soil, and sure enough, the old familiar restlessness began welling up inside him like an instinct.

He turned the corner onto 187th Street, now just a few blocks away from his mother’s apartment, the smell of some familiar German meal drifting by on the cool night air, when he heard a tired, slightly querulous voice say behind him, “Hey, mister, gimme a buck?”

The question wasn’t directed at Willy. He was already too far past the spot for that to be the case. It was also nothing he hadn’t heard before, especially given the streets he’d been walking recently. But there was something about the plea that made him turn around. Later, he thought it might have been the utter silence following the request, instead of the usual muttered evasion. But whatever the cause, when he looked back, he saw not the bum propped up against the wall, but the man who’d stirred him to speak.

And as soon as he saw him, a tall, angular man with a large, flesh-colored bandage incongruously plastered across the bridge of his nose, Willy knew he was looking at someone wishing him harm.

He didn’t hesitate, as an innocent might have. Nor did he wait for this perceived threat to announce itself, as cops are trained to do. He simply reached under his coat and pulled out his gun.

The other man reacted with equal instinctiveness. Producing his own weapon, he ducked and sidestepped, dropping behind the bum, using him as a barrier behind which to draw a bead. Willy fired once at a spot just beside them to make his pursuer tuck in, and then made for the nearest alley at a dead run, his eyes still smarting from the brightness of the muzzle flash.

The ploy worked. The one return round sang harmlessly by like a wasp on adrenaline.

Willy ran down the alley to where an oversized metal Dumpster lay as large as a sleeping buffalo. He swung around behind it, using its bulk as a shield and its side to steady his arm, but even as he waited for his follower’s shadow to fill the opening of the alleyway, he knew it was over as quickly as it had begun.

As if in confirmation, the bum’s thin voice drifted down to meet him. “Help, police. Somebody call the cops. There’s shootin’ goin’ on.”

Willy straightened, pocketed his gun, and returned to the street, cautiously peering around the corner. The bum was on all fours, crawling around, uselessly wailing and trying to collect his scattered belongings. The rest of the block was empty, but he could already hear the sounds of startled voices asking one another if they’d heard what they thought they had.

Willy continued in the direction he’d been headed, his casual pace belying his vigilance.

But the family reunion wouldn’t happen tonight. He was not going home. He was confident he hadn’t been followed here. He’d been keeping an eye out instinctively. Which meant the shooter had known of his mother’s address, and had selected it as the perfect site for an ambush, and the perfect way to make Willy Kunkle join Nate Lee in the hereafter.

For Willy was pretty sure he’d just met Ron Cashman.

Chapter 18

W
ard Ogden was already at the dock when the three of them drove up and parked near the small shed the ferry crew used as an office and lunchroom. He was pacing the top of the ramp, watching the early morning sun flash off the mirror-smooth water of Long Island Sound. Below him, nestled into the boat slip like a foot in an open-back shoe, was the
Michael Cosgrove,
a small, steel-decked ferry with a wheelhouse and an engine room mounted like long, narrow bookends on the starboard and port sides of what otherwise would have looked like a raft.

On the horizon, as flat as an airstrip except for a low growth of trees, was Hart Island, site of the largest potter’s field in the United States.

Ogden turned as they approached. “Good morning. Everyone sleep well?”

Gunther and Sammie answered in the affirmative. Willy, typically, asked, “When do we leave?”

Ogden was unfazed. “Soon as the truck from Rikers arrives.”

Sammie looked at him quizzically.

“A detail of volunteers from Rikers comes here every day,” he explained, “along with a truck of unclaimed bodies. It helps the city cut costs and it gives the prisoners a little time outside the walls. They’re very respectful,” he added without being prompted. “Probably more so than if they were just city workers. Could be some of them appreciate the fine line between them and the people in the boxes.”

“There’s a truckload every day?” Sammie asked.

Ogden smiled reassuringly. “No, no. Not a load, just a truck. Sometimes it only has a box or two on board. It does mount up, though.” He pointed at the island. “Since that opened up right after the Civil War, three-quarters of a million people have been buried out there.” He glanced at his watch. “The ME’s office is sending a vehicle later for Nathan Lee’s body, after it’s been exhumed.”

They all turned at the sound of a large white box truck trundling down the feeder road toward them. Its sides were labeled, “Queens Health Network” over the names of two hospitals. Behind it was a Department of Correction bus.

They stood back while the correction officers and the ferry crew went through the formalized routine of loading all vehicles on board, including Ogden’s car. Once that was done, Joe, Willy, and Sammie stepped onto the steel deck themselves and watched while the ferry’s engine kicked to life, belched a cloud of diesel smoke from its stack, and began plowing a line through the cold, smooth water toward Hart Island, just over three thousand feet away.

There was a mystical sensation to the trip. Intermingled with the trees, crumbling, decrepit buildings slowly began emerging into view as the boat neared the shore, lending a feeling of a lost civilization to the already known quantity of just under a million lost souls.

Ogden continued acting as tour guide, standing at the chain closing off the ferry’s bow ramp and pointing at the various landmarks. “Lot of history to this place, beyond the potter’s field. There was a prison out here once, a shoe factory, a psychiatric hospital and drug rehab center. There’s a peace monument they put up after World War Two, and, as ironies would have it, the remnants of a missile launching pad within sight of it.”

“Hold it,” Gunther said. “They had missiles out here?”

“During the Cold War, yeah.” Ogden gestured to the left. “On the island’s northern end. It was one of those ramp-mounted things, lay covered up in a shallow trench till needed. Gone now, of course, but the hatches are still there, along with what I guess is a command center—all you can see is a manhole with a huge rock on top of it. I always wondered what was inside. Far as I know, nobody’s ever looked.”

They were drawing near and the crew was getting ready to dock. Through the windows of the bus, Gunther could see the dozen or so prisoners enjoying the early sunshine.

They drove in a caravan to the island’s southern end along a rutted gravel road that cut between the shore and what looked like not just an assemblage of buildings—as it had appeared from the water—but an entire village, complete with hospital, church, power plant, greenhouse, and homes, all laid out along a grid of paved streets, and all choked by a junglelike growth of young hardwood saplings, which made the whole thing resemble a bizarre northern version of some Mayan ruin.

“It’s sort of a shame, really,” Ogden said as he drove last in line. “It’s a beautiful setting, inhabited solely by the dead. Seems like somebody could find a way to get something up and running again out here.”

They rounded the island’s largely treeless southern tip, observing the faint impressions left by several long, narrow, parallel trenches in the sod, and parked near a backhoe situated beside a utility shed. There, everybody got out, the prisoners to unload and stack the wooden coffins, the others to wait and watch.

“I think it’s about a hundred and fifty coffins per trench,” Ogden continued. “Different for the children’s area, of course. They stack the adults three deep and two across, end to end. You’ll notice, as they off-load each box, that one of the prisoners will number it with a router, so they can be cross-indexed with a location map later on in case they need to be retrieved. That’s how they’ll find Mr. Lee.”

As he spoke, that’s exactly what was happening. The box truck’s back was opened and several orange-clad prisoners began dragging out the contents to where each one could be branded with a number. In the meantime, deep in the open trench, another party was getting ready to receive and stack the boxes in regimented fashion. As Ogden had said, they were quiet and respectful of their duties, working with peaceful decision.

The New York detective turned toward a long rectangular patch of raw earth immediately adjacent to the open hole. “As luck would have it, they filled in that last trench yesterday. Otherwise, we could’ve just shoveled out a little dirt and found the box we’re after. Not to worry, though, these guys are pretty good at what they do.

“They’ll be at it awhile, though,” he said. “Afterward, the prisoners will be taken to a small, secure compound near the missile pad for lunch. The exhumation will happen just before then. So, if you want to walk around a bit, feel free. It’s pretty interesting. The really old graves are to the north—lots of slightly sunken troughs—and a ton of geese that live there.”

Willy tentatively touched Sammie’s forearm with the back of his hand. “Go for a walk?” he asked.

Surprised by the unusual offer, she fell into step beside him as he headed north toward the abandoned settlement.

“I’m sorry I blew up yesterday,” he said after several minutes of walking in silence.

“You’re in a tough spot,” she answered, figuring she’d let him lead the conversation.

“Still…”

She kept quiet.

They came to the outskirts of the empty, ghostly, mostly brick-built buildings, almost every door and window of which was open to the casual onlooker. It was like touring a long-forgotten movie set.

“I reach a point, sometimes,” he continued, “where all I got left is my anger. It’s the only thing keeping me together.”

“Anger at who?”

As if proving the point, he sneered. “Oh, right. This where I say, ‘My mother’?”

But Sammie didn’t miss a beat. “How would I know?”

She watched him compress his lips, struggling to keep track. To his credit, he returned to what he’d been saying.

“I’ve always had it,” he admitted. “From as far back as I can remember. Maybe I was just born pissed off.”

She sensed some of this had been running around his head when they’d parted ways earlier, so she asked, “Is that where you were going last night? To find out? You said you were off to make amends.”

He sounded wistful. “Yeah. That was the idea. I figured I’d go visit my mother. I wasn’t holding out much hope after all this time. From what Bob told me, she’s pretty much a basket case anyhow. It’s just…I don’t know … that maybe if somebody has an idea of what went wrong, it might be her. I mean, I’m not stupid. I know there aren’t any violin sections out there, waiting to help me see the light. But I keep hoping I can find some way to get on the right track.”

Sammie was a little confused. “What happened? She wasn’t home?”

It was an obvious question, given the conversation. But he knew with a slight jolt that he wasn’t about to answer it. It would have been like opening the shutters from around a candle and allowing the wind to blow it out. And having abruptly realized how committed he was to seeing this investigation through alone, like the pursuit of the Holy Grail, he also saw that his entire supposed confession was probably corrupt. If he was truly interested in opening up and addressing his problems, being straight with this person above all others would have been the reasonable place to start. But apparently he wasn’t ready. The complex, ephemeral issue of settling emotional past dues held sway. “Something came up.”

They stopped before a large building with a central circular room just beyond the open double doors. The light filtering through the windowed cupola high overhead fell upon row after row of disheveled, disemboweled, and rusting metal filing cabinets, their massive paperwork contents spilling all over the floor in disastrous quantities. God only knows what files these were, whose lives they documented, and what void they’d created by being discarded here to rot.

Watching the cabinets lined up like disorderly, drunken, speechless soldiers, Sammie had to wonder about the similar repositories that everybody carried around in their heads, either ignored and neglected or simply inaccessible. In Willy’s terse answer, it was as if she’d overhead him struggling in vain with this very dilemma and realized the best she could expect right now was that this conversation might be just the first of more to come.

Nevertheless, a little disappointed, she tried another angle. “Joe says that despite all the shit you hand out, you’ve got a lot to offer.”

“Good for Joe. He’s fed me that line.”

“Maybe good for you. This is the first time I’ve ever heard you talk about why you are the way you are. That can’t be all bad.”

He turned away and resumed walking up the street. “I’m not so sure.”

“You’ve tried ignoring it,” she pressed him, her own frustration and irritation welling up. “You tried drowning it with booze. For all I know, you’re down here trying to get yourself killed avenging a dead woman you think you wronged. How can talking about it be worse than any of that?”

She heard the words tumbling out of her the way a bystander might watch a car hit a bicyclist—unbelieving and a little fearful. Nevertheless, she did have some control, and that part of her now suddenly felt relieved. The inner strength she’d experienced the night before had been suddenly reinforced with the realization that she had nothing to lose by challenging him.

And in his own way, he rose to that challenge now. Instead of bursting out as he usually did, deflecting an assault with a response of greater magnitude, he stopped dead in his tracks.

Sammie almost bumped into him from behind.“What?” she asked.

There was a drawn-out moment of silence before he said, staring at the ground before him, “You’re right. And so’s Joe. He told me a while ago I should just be straight with you—to honor you by taking the risk, was what he really said. Such a crap artist. You want to know the great thing about anger?” he asked, looking up at her. “It’s that you don’t have to worry about anything else—not the other guy, not what’s going to happen to you. There’re no consequences. You just fire both barrels and walk away if you’re lucky.”

“What about after the smoke clears?”

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t think about it. And if it gets to be a problem again, and you’re still alive, you reload and fire off another round.”

She thought about that before saying, “You’re not firing now. If you’re not angry, what are you feeling?”

He pursed his lips and smiled ruefully. “Confused. That’s why I don’t like talking. It just screws me up.”

“I think that’s bullshit,” she told him flatly. “I think you’re sick of being mad all the time, but you don’t know what to replace it with.”

He laughed bitterly, recalling what had happened to him since getting that phone call in Brattleboro a few short days ago. “Yeah… maybe I’ll try love, peace, and harmony. That would really fit.”

“You can’t tell till you try it,” she suggested.

But they both knew that was pushing things. He rolled his eyes and resumed walking. “Can we talk about something else?”

She smiled. “Yeah, for the moment. We’re going to circle this hydrant again, though. Count on it.”

He shook his head, curious as to why that didn’t sound as bad as it should have. “Good image.”

By the time they returned to the burial site, the boxes they’d arrived with had been covered with dirt, leaving the rest of the trench open, and the backhoe was scratching at the ground next to the previous hole. All but four of the prisoners were back in the bus with the driver and one of the COs. The remainder waited patiently, leaning on shovels, while the backhoe’s blade picked at the earth’s raw surface with surprising dexterity and tenderness.

Slowly, a hole slightly longer than a coffin began to grow as the operator dug straight down into the fresh, previously untouched ground.

“What’re they doing?” Sammie asked. “He’s not in the trench.”

“He doesn’t want to hit the boxes,” Willy guessed as they approached Joe Gunther and Ward Ogden.

“They exhume from the side,” the latter explained, “like an archaeology dig.”

Sure enough, after going down some ten feet, the backhoe backed off and the four prisoners jumped in and began cutting into the side wall, quickly revealing the stacked boxes, their pine sides still pale and unstained by the dirt.

“Good thing we got after this so fast,” Ogden said.

“They don’t embalm these folks. Doesn’t take long for them to get pretty messy.”

The team in the hole removed the uppermost box and lifted it to the edge. The CO above them then gestured to a waiting medical examiner’s hearse to come pick it up.

Ogden began walking toward his own car. “Okay. It’s a wrap. We go to Bellevue now so they can take a closer look at your friend. And I hate to do this to you,” he said to Willy, “but it looks like you’re going to have to play next-of-kin again in identifying the body, if that’s all right.”