The Quickie Read online

  “Give me some good news on your canvass, Sarge,” Mike said to a stocky black cop filling out a report in the open door of his double-parked police van.

  He looked up, his face disappointed.

  Good, I thought. Disappointment was good.

  “We got an Amelia Phelps, eighty-year-old African American lady lives in that rattletrap over there,” the sergeant said, pointing to a vinyl-sided Victorian on the corner.

  “She said she saw a car park near her driveway,” the sergeant continued, “and a man carrying something out of the trunk.”

  “White, black, Hispanic?” Mike asked. A loud shout interrupted him.

  “THAT’S WHAT YOU GET!”

  It was one of the hoodies in front of the bodega. His arms and hands were outstretched.

  “FIVE-0 FINALLY GOT WHAT’S COMIN’ TO ’EM!” he yelled again. “ ’BOUT TIME!”

  Mike moved out into the street at the bodega so quickly I had to jog to keep up.

  “What was that?” he said, putting a hand to his ear as he ducked under the crime-scene tape and closed in on the men in front of the store.

  Most of the St. James sales personnel had wisely dispersed down the block, but the rabble-rouser, a thin, green-eyed, light-skinned Hispanic, inexplicably stood his ground. He looked to be in his early twenties.

  “What? You don’t like hearin’ the truth?” he said as he cocked his little bantam rooster head at Mike. “Then, do somethin’ about it, chump.”

  Mike picked up the metal garbage can off the corner and threw it at the guy, two-handed like a basketball pass. Its steel-rimmed side knocked the punk instantly on his back and into the gutter. Mike lifted the can and turned it upside down, burying the kid in garbage.

  “How’s that for somethin’?” he said.

  “He’s nothing,” I whispered into my partner’s ear after I caught up. “You want to get jammed up over this mope? Open your eyes, Mike. There’s bosses everywhere.”

  Mike rubbed the vein throbbing at his temple as he finally let me walk him away.

  “You’re right. You’re right, partner,” he mumbled with his head down. “Sorry, I lost it.”

  That’s when I remembered.

  Mike was a second-generation cop whose father had been killed in the line of duty. His dad had been a transit cop, and he’d walked into a subway car where a rape was in progress and was shot in the face. It was one of the few cop murders in the history of the NYPD that had never been solved.

  So there actually was one thing that could rile my even-tempered partner, I thought as I pulled him toward the witness’s house.

  A dead cop.

  Things just kept getting better and better.

  Chapter 26

  HERE WAS OUR WITNESS. And what exactly had she seen?

  Amelia Phelps, tiny, elderly, and black, was a retired Bronx High School of Science English teacher.

  “Would you like some tea?” she inquired with perfect diction as she brought us into her dusty, threadbare parlor. Books covered every surface and were piled chest-high like trash in a landfill.

  “That’s okay, Mrs. Phelps,” Mike said, taking out his bifocals and putting them on.

  “Ms. Phelps,” she corrected him.

  “Sorry,” Mike said. “Ms. Phelps, as you know, a police officer was found dead in the park. We’re the detectives conducting the investigation. Can you help us?”

  “The car I saw was a Toyota,” Ms. Phelps said. “A Camry, I believe, and a recent model. The man who exited it was white, five eleven maybe. He wore glasses and dark clothing.

  “At first, I thought he was here for the same unfortunate reason most Caucasians visit our community; namely, the purchase of illegal drugs from our neighborhood boys. But then, oddly, I saw him open the back door of his car and emerge with a large something rolled up in a blue sheet. It could very well have been a body. He returned approximately five minutes later, empty-handed, and drove away.”

  When I glanced at Mike, he looked as happily astonished as I felt dismayed.

  Because this Bronx witness, this former schoolteacher, was a rare species indeed. We’d done midday gas station shootings where not one of twenty people had seen anything. Drive-bys of weddings where both sides of the family hadn’t seen or heard a thing. Now, here we had a middle-of-the-night dump job in a drug spot, ostensibly the most difficult of all homicides to solve, and we run into photographic-memory Grandma.

  “Did you get the plate number?” Mike said expectantly.

  No, I thought, wincing. Please, God, make her say no.

  “No,” Ms. Phelps said.

  I had to force myself to release my breath silently.

  “It was too dark?” Mike said, disappointed.

  “No,” Ms. Phelps said, looking at him like he was a student who’d forgotten to raise his hand. “There were no plates.”

  “Did you call the police and tell them what you saw?” I said.

  Ms. Phelps patted me on the knee.

  “In this neighborhood, Detective, staying out of other people’s affairs is an acquired necessity.”

  “Then, why did you tell the police officer who knocked on your door that you saw something?” Mike said, curious.

  “They asked,” Ms. Phelps said with a prim nod. “I am not a liar.”

  That makes one of us, I thought.

  “Would you be able to pick out the man you saw from a lineup?” I asked with a tight smile.

  “Undoubtedly,” Ms. Phelps said.

  “Terrific,” I said as I handed Ms. Phelps my card. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “You can count on it,” added Mike.

  Chapter 27

  MIKE HAD HIS BIFOCALS on top of his head as we left Amelia Phelps’s house and walked back into the park. He mumbled to himself excitedly as he went over his interview notes. He was pumped. He had to feel we were getting closer to the killer. It was a great feeling, I knew. Being a detective, being the good guy.

  I missed it terribly.

  I felt horrible about lying to Mike and the rest of the cops who were traipsing around in the rain out there. When one cop goes down, all cops feel it. There’s the instant outrage, of course, but underneath is unsettling fear. Have I made a mistake in choosing this dangerous job? Is it worth dying for?

  I knew my friends and co-workers were reeling, hurting. By telling the truth, I could erase their anxious tension. The thought that somebody else could possibly get hurt out there made me almost physically sick.

  I closed my eyes, listening to the crackle of police radio chatter and the rain in the trees.

  I didn’t say anything to anyone about what I knew, what had actually happened to Scott.

  I kept my head down and my mouth shut.

  I looked up only when I saw some commotion alongside the fountain.

  A couple of dozen uniforms were arraying themselves in parallel lines from the fountain to the medical examiner’s black station wagon, waiting underneath the rusted el on Jerome.

  “They’re taking him out,” I heard one of the uniforms say as he rushed past me to grab a place in the line.

  An honor guard of six cops carefully stepped into the water of the fountain and received from the medical examiner’s team the green-black body bag Scott had already been placed in. They handled him as if he were a sick person who was still alive. Oh, God, I wished that were true. I wished I could take this entire night back, every second of it.

  Along that stock-still, midnight-blue rank, someone started singing “Danny Boy” in a high, clear, haunting tenor that would have made Ronan Tynan jealous.

  You want a definition of forlorn? How about half a dozen cops slowly bearing one of their dead through a dark Bronx tenement valley while the rain falls and the pipes, the pipes are calling. Was Scott even Irish? I didn’t know. All dead cops are Irish, I guess.

  I watched the rain splatter like flung holy water against the body bag as the procession passed me. Everywhere men were weeping openly. I watched as even the commissioner, standing beside the ME office’s hearse, cupped a hand over his eyes.

  An overhead passing number 4 train sounded out a martial drum snare as Scott was slid into the back of the wagon like a file returned to a drawer.

  Tears drained out of my eyes as if my tear ducts had been slit.

  Chapter 28

  I CAUGHT A WHITE BLUR out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly I was enveloped in a wall of warm Tyvek.

  “Oh, Lauren,” an academy classmate of mine, Bonnie Clesnik, whispered in my ear as she hugged me to her side. “This is so horrible. That poor guy.”

  Bonnie had been premed at NYU before she dropped out to become a cop, and she was now a sergeant in the Crime Scene Unit. As the only female former professionals in a class filled mostly with twenty-two-year-old, smooth-faced boys from Long Island, we had formed a quick bond. I’d stayed over at “the Bonster” and her partner Tatum’s loft on St. Mark’s Place so many times, they named the futon after me.

  Bonnie fished a Kleenex out of her suit and wiped the corners of her eyes, then handed me a tissue, too.

  “Look at us,” she said with a laugh. “Badass cops, huh? It’s been — what? A year? You did something to your hair. I like it.”

  “Thanks,” Mike said, stepping between us. “I just washed it. And you are?”

  “Bonnie, this fool is my partner, Mike,” I said, introducing them. “I thought you worked days.”

  “When I heard the news, I came running, just like everybody else,” Bonnie said. “I haven’t seen this many cops in one place since St. Paddy’s. Or Ground Zero.”

  She took off the freezer bag that was strapped across her chest beside several cameras.

  “I’m glad I did, though, Lauren. I’m really glad. I think I found
something.”

  I accepted the freezer bag from her, held it up.

  Every light in the park and beyond seemed to surge suddenly with a white-hot brightness. The rain felt like it was falling right through me.

  I turned Paul’s silver, wired-rimmed glasses slowly in my hand.

  “They were in the sheet Scott was wrapped in,” Bonnie said. “I already called one of the guys in his narcotics unit. Scott didn’t wear glasses. If they’re prescription, we can go through the files of every ophthalmologist in the tristate area and nail the four-eyed son of a bitch who did this.”

  I felt a tingling behind my left eye as Mike whooped and gave Bonnie a high five.

  A stream of electrified chatter leaked from Mike’s radio a moment later.

  “It’s the boss man, Lauren,” he said. “The commissioner has entered the donut bus and wants a briefing.”

  “Are you okay, Lauren?” Bonnie said, putting a hand on my back. “You don’t look so hot.”

  I looked at her, at the concern in her eyes. Christ, how I longed to break down right there and then. Bonnie was a friend, a woman, and a cop. Out of everybody, she’d be the most likely to understand. Tell me what to do. Help me.

  But what could I say to her? I was screwing the deceased, who, by the way, was blown away by my husband? I looked away from Bonnie. Nobody could help me, I realized. I was completely and utterly on my own.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “We’re all a little overwrought,” Mike explained to Bonnie as he led me away toward the Command Center bus. “Even some of those dealers by the bodega teared up when that red-haired uniform was singing ‘Danny Boy.’ ”

  Mike put his arm around me as we walked. He really was a good guy, one of the best.

  “Our guy is messing up, Lauren,” Mike said. “At first I thought we were screwed. You know as well as I do how hard dump jobs are to solve. But look. Mistake after mistake. We’re looking at an amateur. I can almost see him out there thinking he’s covering his tracks, but his mind is racing and he’s fucking up, just leading us closer and closer. A twelve-pack of Sam Adams says we lay hands on his sorry ass by this time tomorrow. You down?”

  I shook my head as I labored to stay on my feet, to keep moving toward the bus.

  “That’s okay, Mike,” I said. “I don’t take sucker bets.”

  Chapter 29

  A SHORT BLUR OF TIME LATER, I was making myself stand up straight in the antiseptic glare of the Command Center bus interior.

  Everywhere there were cops in front of laptops. White-shirted bosses were barking into cell phones. A map of the area was projected up in a wide-screen PowerPoint display. It looked like the situation room at the Pentagon, or maybe on the TV show 24.

  I could feel my heartbeat pulsing crazily in my eardrums, behind my eyes.

  And Paul was the enemy.

  “Commissioner,” my boss was saying with a formality I was unaware he was capable of. “This is Detective Stillwell, the primary investigator on the case.”

  A large hand shook mine, and I looked up into the famous, fatherly black face of the police commissioner of New York, Ronald Durham.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Detective Stillwell,” Durham said in a warm, honey-laced tone. “Some of your reports have crossed my desk. You do very good work.”

  My God, I thought, feeling dizzy again. My first “attaboy” from the police commissioner. Put another shelf in the career trophy case.

  Then I came down like a crackhead after a three-day binge when I remembered the utterly damning evidence of Paul’s glasses.

  The cottage cheese in my fridge was going to outlast my career.

  “Thank you, sir,” I fumbled.

  “Tell me what you have so far,” Durham said next. His eyes were huge and pinned on mine.

  I went through it all. Scott’s wounds, Amelia Phelps’s perfect description of Paul and his car, the glasses we’d just found. The entire homemade recipe for my own disaster.

  When I was finished with the speech, the commissioner tapped a forefinger to his lip. Unlike a lot of the top brass, Durham had actually been a detective on his way up.

  “Have you looked over his open files?” the commissioner asked.

  “I haven’t had a chance yet, sir. That’s next on our list.”

  Durham nodded.

  “You’re closing in quickly,” he said. “The only thing that might soften the blow here for everyone is expedience.”

  Not everyone, I thought.

  “Detective,” the commissioner said, smiling. I knew he was going to ask me for something. What it was, I had no clue. I just knew that in the NYPD, after a boss feeds you a carrot, the stick isn’t far behind.

  “Sir?” I said, trying to keep the nervousness out of my voice, and failing miserably.

  “I wanted to remind you to serve the death notification to Scott Thayer’s family.”

  My jaw muscle locked and I was surprised my teeth didn’t shatter. Jesus Christ, I’d forgotten! Telling the family was part of my job as the primary.

  Scott had told me he had a mom and a younger sister somewhere out in Brooklyn. How excruciating was this going to be? Couldn’t I just feed my hand into a wood chipper instead?

  “Of course, sir,” I said.

  “I know it’s the most unfortunate part of your job,” Commissioner Durham said with a fatherly pat on my shoulder. “I just think it should be done before someone leaks Scott’s name to the press. I think it would also be better to hear it from somebody out of the same office. Then I could arrive a little later. Help soothe the blow.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  Then the commissioner sighed.

  “Though I know whatever way we do it, it’s going to be nothing short of devastating for Scott’s wife,” Durham said gravely. “Not to mention his three young kids.”

  Chapter 30

  SCOTT WAS MARRIED?

  I managed to stay upright on my suddenly numb legs by a sheer act of will.

  A married father of three?

  He sure hadn’t mentioned that.

  Not the wife. Or the kids. Scott had told me he was NYPD’s most eligible bachelor.

  “I know,” the commissioner said. “It just keeps getting worse and worse. We have ourselves a real tragedy here tonight. Scott’s wife, Brooke, is only twenty-six, and his kids are four, two, and an infant.”

  Another fatherly pat on my shoulder signaled that our meeting had come to an end. I had the feeling there must be a section on fatherly pats on NYPD promotion tests.

  “Your lieutenant has the address,” the commissioner said. “Proceed, Detective. Good luck.”

  Twenty minutes or so after we left the commissioner in the Command Center bus, we stopped in front of a cute Dutch colonial in the middle of a long block lined with them.

  All the windows of the Thayer house were dark. Bright flowers lined a curving slate path through the manicured lawn.

  There was a Fisher-Price basketball backboard at the end of the short driveway. I had to tear my eyes away from it. I checked my watch. It was coming up on 4 a.m.

  Wait a second, I thought insanely. Did I really have to go into that house? I could just walk away, couldn’t I? Forget everything. That I was a cop. That I was a wife. I mean, why be so conventional? I was in the market for a life change. Maybe I could run off to an abbey and make cheese.

  “Ready, Lauren?” Mike asked at my side.

  “No,” I said, opening the storm door anyway. Then I hit the brass knocker on the inside door a couple of times.

  Beautiful, was my first thought when I looked into the groggy face of the petite brunette who answered the door.

  Why would Scott cheat on this perfectly lovely young woman? The mother of his kids.

  “Yes?” Brooke Thayer said, her eyes widening as she looked from me to Mike and back to me.

  “Hi, Brooke,” I said, showing her my badge. “My name’s Lauren. I’m a detective from Scott’s precinct.”

  “Oh my God,” Brooke said, instantly awake and talking very fast. “It’s Scotty, isn’t it? No! What happened? Is he hurt? He’s hurt?”

  Death notices are served in different ways, none of them pleasant. Some detectives think blunt honesty is the way to go. Others soften the blow by first saying the victim was seriously injured and lead into the fact of their death.