Presumed innocent kc-1 Page 12

  Who that?

  Open up, Tyrone. It's your fairy godmother.

  We reminisce; he tells me about Maurice Dudley. I have already heard the story, but I do not interrupt. Maurice, a 250-pound brick, a killer, a cur, is deep in Bible studies down at Rudyard. He is going to be ordained.

  "Harukan-the Night Saints' leader-is so pissed, they say, he don't even talk to him. Can you imagine?"

  "Who said there's no such thing as rehabilitation?" This strikes both of us as unbearably funny. Maybe we're each thinking of the woman on whose arm Maurice, with a kitchen knife, once wrote his name. Or the coppers from this station house who swore, in the inflated lore of cop and courthouse stories, that he had misspelled it.

  "Are you passing through or what?" Kenneally asks me finally.

  "I'm not really sure," I say. "I'm trying to figure something out."

  "On what now? Carolyn?"

  I nod.

  "What's the story there?" Kenneally asks. "Latest thing I'm hearing from downtown is they're sayin it's not really rape. I give Lionel two minutes' worth on the state for our evidence."

  "So you're figurin what?" he asks. "The guy she's having cocktails with is the one who done her?"

  "That seems obvious. But I keep wondering. Didn't we have a Peeping Tom, maybe ten years ago, who'd watch couples and then go in later and take a piece of the lady himself at gunpoint?"

  "Christ," says Kenneally. "You really are lost. You're lookin for a law enforcement typo-a cop, a P.A., a private dick-somebody who knew what he wanted to make it look like when he cooled her. That's what I'd figure. She had any boyfriend who was with her that night, and left her alive, you'd have heard from him by now. He'd want to help."

  "If he doesn't have a wife to explain things to."

  Kenneally considers that. I get something like a shrug. I might be right.

  "When's the last time you saw her?" I ask.

  "Four months or so. She come out here."

  "Doing what?"

  "Same shit you're doin: investigatin somethin and tryin not to let on what."

  I laugh. A coppers' cop. Kenneally gets up. He goes to a pile of transfer cases in the corner.

  "She got some rookie to look through all this crap for her, so she didn't chip her nails or run her nylons."

  "Let me guess," I say: "booking sheets on cases from nine summers ago."

  "Right you are," he says.

  "Did she have a name she was looking for?"

  Kenneally considers this. "I think she did, and I'll be fucked if I remember. Something was wrong with it, too."

  "Leon?" I ask.

  Lionel snaps his fingers. "La Noo," he says. L-N-U: Last Name Unknown.

  "That's what was wrong. She was playin in the dark."

  "What'd she come up with?"

  "Spit."

  "You sure?"

  "Fuck yes. Not that she'd much notice. She was most of the time tryin to keep track of everybody who was watchin her ass. Which was everybody in the house, as she well knows. She was havin a good time bein back here, let's say."

  "Back?"

  "She worked the North Branch when she was a P.O. She didn't know what the fuck she was doin then, either. A real social-worker type. I never could figure Horgan hiring her as a P.A."

  I had forgotten that. I probably knew it, but I did not remember. Carolyn worked the North Branch as a probation officer. I think about the secretary that Noel's boyfriend mentioned. He didn't say white or black, fat or skinny. But he did say Girl. Would anybody hang "Girl" on Carolyn, even nine years ago?

  "You didn't like her much."

  "She was a cunt," says Kenneally, to the point. "You know," he says, "out for herself. She was sleepin her way to the top, right from the git-go. Anybody coulda seen that."

  I look around a moment. Our conversation seems to have come to an end. I ask one more time if he's sure she did not find anything.

  "Not a fuckin thing. You can talk with the kid that helped her if you want."

  "If you wouldn't mind, Lionel."

  "What the fuck do I care?" He reaches for the intercom and summons a cop named Guerash. "Why you still botherin with this thing?" he asks me, while we wait. "It'll be somebody else's problem pretty soon, don't you think?"

  "You mean Delay?"

  "I think he's got it in the bag." In the last week, that is all you hear from coppers. They've never pretended to like Raymond.

  "You can never tell. Maybe I'll crack this thing and save Raymond's ass."

  "God come down from Sinai ain't gonna save him, the way I hear it. Downtown they say Bolcarro's coming out for Nico this afternoon."

  I chew on that one. If Bolcarro endorses Nico six days before the election, then Raymond will be no more than a political memory.

  Guerash enters. He looks like half the young men on the force, handsome in an old-fashioned way, with an erect bearing and a military order to his person. His shoes are spit-shined and the buttons on his jersey gleam. His hair is cleanly parted.

  Kenneally addresses him.

  "You remember this lady P.A. was out here-Polhemus?"

  "Nice set of lungs," says Guerash.

  Kenneally turns to me. "See, this kid's gonna make a copper. Never forgets a bra size."

  "She the one that got it over by the riverside?" Guerash asks me.

  I tell him she is. Kenneally continues with Guerash.

  "Okay, Rusty here is the chief deputy P.A. He wants to know if she took anything when she come out here?"

  "Not that I know of," says Guerash.

  "What'd she look at?" I ask.

  "She had one day where she wanted to see the bookings. She told me there'd be like sixty, seventy people booked on public indecency. We're talking back forever, eight, nine years ago, or something. Anyway, I hauled up the boxes, right here."

  "How'd she come up with one day?"

  "Beats me. She seemed to know what she was looking for. She just told me look for the day when there were the most arrests. So that's what I did. I mean, it must have took me a week to go through that crap. There were like five hundred arrests for 42's." A 42 is a public-indecency violation. One day. I think again about the letter. There was nothing in the file I saw that narrowed the time frame like that. Maybe Carolyn gave up before she started, figured she'd just do a sample.

  "Did you find what she wanted?"

  "I thought so. I called her back and she came out to see it. I left her with the stuff right here. She told me she didn't find nothin."

  "Do you remember anything about what you showed her? Anything common about the arrests?"

  "All in the Public Forest. All guys. I thought it was probably some demonstration or something. I don't know."

  "Jesus," says Kenneally to Guerash in disgust. "For public indecency? This is the faggots, isn't it?" he asks me. "Back when Raymond got some balls for about a day and a half."

  "Did she tell you anything about what she was looking for? A name? Anything?"

  "She didn't even have a last name. Just a first. I wasn't real clear on whether she knew this guy or what." Guerash pauses. "Why do I think it had something to do with Christmas?"

  "Noel? She gave you that name?"

  Guerash snaps his fingers. "That's it."

  "Not Leon?"

  "No way. Noel. She told me she's looking for Noel LNU. I remember that because she wrote it down for me, and the Christmas thing went through my head."

  "Can you show me what she saw?"

  "Boy, I don't know. I think I put it away."

  "Fat fuckin chance of that," says Kenneally. "I fuckin asked you three times. Here, help yourself."

  He points us to the transfer cases in the corner.

  When Guerash opens the first case he swears. He picks up a clutch of loose sheets lying on the top of the file folders.

  "She wasn't real neat, I'll say that. These records were in nice order when I gave them to her." I would ask Guerash if he's sure, but there's no point. It's the kind of thing he
would remember, and I can see the orderly ranks of the remaining records. Besides, that would be like Carolyn, to take records that other people have spent years maintaining and treat them like debris.

  Guerash out of instinct begins to sort the booking sheets and bond slips, and I help. Kenneally pitches in, too. We stand around his desk, cursing Carolyn. Each booking jacket should contain a police report, an arrest card bearing the defendant's photo and fingerprints, a complaint, and a bond slip, but none of these sixty or seventy files is complete. Papers are missing from each and the sheets inside have been turned back to front, and at angles. The numerical order is gone.

  Kenneally keeps saying cunt.

  We are about five minutes along before the obvious strikes me-this disorder is not accidental. These papers have been shuffled.

  "Who the hell has been at these boxes since Carolyn?" I ask Kenneally. "Nobody. They been sittin in the corner for four months, waitin for fuckhead here to put em back. Nobody but him and me even know they're here. Right?" he asks Guerash. Guerash agrees.

  "Lionel," I ask, "do you know Tommy Molto?"

  "Fuck yes, I know Tommy Molto. About half my life. Little fuck was a P.A. out here."

  I knew that, if I had thought about it. Molto was notorious for his battles with the North Branch judges.

  "Was he out here at the same time Carolyn was with probation?"

  "Probably. Lemme think. Shit, Rusty, I don't keep a duty roster on these guys."

  "When was the last time you saw him?"

  Lionel ponders. "Three, four years. Maybe I run into him at a dinner or something. You know, he's all right. I see him, I talk. You know me."

  "But he hasn't been looking at these records?"

  "Hey," says Lionel, "watch my lips. You. Me. Guerash. Her. That's it."

  When we are done sorting, Guerash goes through the files twice.

  "One's missing, right?" I ask.

  "We're missing a number," he says. "Could have been a mistake."

  "You book sixty faggots, you don't exactly worry about keeping a perfect count," says Kenneally.

  I ask Lionel, "But it could be that the file is gone?"

  "That too."

  "There would still be a court file, wouldn't there?" I ask. Kenneally looks at Guerash. Guerash looks at me. I write down the number. It should be on microfilm. Lipranzer will love doing this.

  When Guerash is gone, I spend one more moment with Kenneally.

  "You don't want to say what this is about maybe?" he asks.

  "I can't, Lionel."

  He nods. But I can tell it grates.

  "Oh yeah," says Lionel, "those were funny old days around here. Lots of stories." His look lingers casually, just so I know that we both have our secrets.

  Outside, there is real heat, 80 degrees. Pushing a record for April. In the car, I turn the radio to the news station. It's a live feed from the mayor's office. I just catch the tail end, but I hear enough of His Honor's blarney to get the drift. The P.A.'s office needs new blood, a new direction. The people want that. The people deserve that.

  I am going to have to start looking for work.

  Chapter 14

  Tee ball. In the waning light of the spring evening, play commences in the second-grade Fathers/Students League. The sky hangs low across the open field, a meadow of landfill laid over what was once a marsh, while Mrs. Strongineyer's Stingers idly occupy the diamond, boys and girls sporting windbreakers zipped to the collars and baseball gloves. Dads creep along the baselines calling instructions as the dusk gathers in. At the plate, a behemoth of an eight-year-old named Rocky circles his bat two or three times in the vicinity of the rag doll perched atop the long-necked rubber tee. Then, with an astounding concentration of power, he smashes the ball into outer space. It lands in left center, beyond the perimeter of the Stingers' shaky defense.

  "Nathaniel!" I yell, along with many others. "Nat!" Only now he wakes. He reaches the ball a step ahead of an agile sprite named Molly, whose ponytail flows behind her baseball cap. Nat grabs it, whirls, and wings it-in a single motion. The ball travels in a tremendous arc back toward the infield and lands with a dead thump between shortstop and third, just as Rocky lopes across the plate. Following the local etiquette, I alone may scold my son, and so I stroll along the foul line, clapping my hands. "Wake up! Wake up out there." For Nat, I hold no fear. He shrugs, throws up his gloved hand, and displays the full range of his gap-toothed jack-o'-lantern smile, his new ragged-edged teeth still looking a little like candles stuck into a cake.

  "Dad, I just lost it," he yells, "I really did." The pack of fathers on the side join me in sudden laughter. We all repeat the remark among ourselves. He lost it. Cliff Nudelman pats me on the back. At least the boy has learned the lingo.

  Did other men, as boys, dream about their sons? I looked twenty years ahead with passion and with hope. As I always saw him, my son was a gentle, obedient soul. He was good; he was full of virtue and skill. Nat is not like that. He is not a bad boy. That's a song around our house. Barbara and I have been telling each other that since he was two. Nat is not, we say, actually, we say, a bad boy. And I believe that. Fervently. And with a heart engorged with love. He is sensitive. He is kind. And he is wild and distracted. He has been on his own schedule since the time of his birth. When I read to him, he flips the pages in my hand to see what lies just ahead. He does not listen, or at least does not seem to care to. In school, he has always been a problem.

  He is saved by his insouciant charm and his physical gifts. My son is beautiful, I am talking about more than the usual child-beauty, the soft features, the floral glow of being new. This boy has dark, acute eyes, a prepossessing look. These fine, regular features do not come from me. I am larger and squat. I have a bulky nose; a kind of Neanderthal ridge over the eyes. Barbara's people are all smaller and good-looking, and it is to them we routinely give the credit. Privately, however, I have often thought at moments, with discomfort, about my father and his piercing, somber, Slavic handsomeness. Perhaps because I suspect that source, I pray all the time, at my own inner altar, that this blessing should not lead Nat astray, into arrogance, or even cruelty-traits the beautiful people I have encountered have sometimes seemed to regard in themselves as natural afflictions, or worse, a sign of right.

  With the end of the ball game, we disperse in pairs toward the herd of station wagons corralled in the gravel parking lot. In May, when the time changes and the weather mellows, the team will stay after the games to picnic. Sometimes a pizza delivery will be arranged. The fathers will rotate the weekly responsibility of bringing beer. After dinner, the boys and girls will renew their baseball game, and the dads will recline in the grass, talking casually about our lives. I look forward to these outings. Amid this group of men I do not know well, there seems a gentle compact, something like the way worshippers must feel about one another as they leave church. Fathers with their kids, beyond the weekly preoccupations of professional life, or even the pleasures and responsibilities of marriage. Fathers mildly lit on Friday nights, at ease with these immeasurable obligations.

  In this cooler, darker season, I have promised Barbara that we will meet for a quick dinner at a local pancake house. She is waiting on the red vinyl bench when we arrive, and even while she is kissing Nat and receiving a report on the Stingers' near-triumph, she gazes beyond him to greet me with a look of cold reproof. We are in the midst of a dismal period. Barbara's fury with me for my role in the investigation of Carolyn's murder has not abated, and tonight I perceive at once that there is some new edge to her displeasure. My first thought is that we must be very late, but when I check the restaurant clock I find we are even a minute early. I can only guess at what I have done to provoke her.

  For Barbara, though, it has become so easy over the years to disappear into the black forests of her moods. The elements of the outside world that might have once detained her by now have been relegated to the past. Six years of teaching in the North End struck at her faith in soci
al reform. When Nat was born, she gave up being other-seeking. Suburban life, with its tight boundaries and peculiar values, has quieted her and exaggerated her willingness to be alone. Her father's death, three years ago, was taken as an act of desertion, part of his lifelong pattern of ignoring Barbara's and her mother's needs, and whetted her sense of deprivation. And our soulless moments of marital disconnection have robbed her of the outright gaiety that once counterpointed these darker spells. During these periods, her disappointments with virtually everyone are often worn so openly that at instants I believe the taste would be bitter if I were to grasp her hand and lick her skin.

  And then the weather breaks. In the past it always has. Although this disruption, caused by my infidelity, is naturally the most prolonged one of our married life, I still maintain some expectation of improvement. Even now Barbara does not speak of lawyers and divorce, as she did in late November. She is here. Set out so plainly, this fact inspires some calm. I am like a shipwrecked survivor holding fast to the debris, awaiting the arrival of the scheduled liner. Sooner or later, I believe, I will see a woman of good humor, of blazing intelligence, full of quirky insight and sly wit, who is keenly interested in me. That is the person I still think of as my wife.

  Now that same woman wears a look of diamond hardness as we wait in line to be seated. Nat has slipped away and gazes adoringly into the candy counter. His baseball pants have drooped almost to his shoe tops, and he stands with one knee and both hands against the glass case, staring with fixed appreciation at the forbidden rows of sugared gum and chocolate bars. He jiggles a bit, of course-the object in motion. As ever, Barbara and I both watch him.

  "So?" she suddenly asks me. This is a challenge. I am supposed to entertain her.

  "So what?"

  "So how's work? The big investigation still going gangbusters?"

  "No leads," I tell her, "and no results. It's mass confusion. Frankly, the whole place is sagging. It's like they let the air out of a balloon. You know-now that Bolcarro has come out for Delay."