You Can Go Home Now Page 18

  “I see. Then you know my history.”

  “Most of it,” she says. “And unfortunately, that makes you a suspect.”

  I repeat my true story: that I am the daughter of an abortion provider who was murdered, likely by a pro-life assassin, possibly Clyde. I give them that. I admit I am looking for my father’s murderer; in fact, it is close to a life-defining obsession. I tell them I promised my late mother and brother I would find that man and bring him to justice, so he could be tried by the State of New York, convicted by the people of New York, sent to prison to rot in the company of the most violent convicts in Attica. I also hope he will be brutally stabbed to death in a shower with a sharpened screwdriver by one or more of his fellow convicts. Failing that, I wish him abject misery for the rest of his life. If Clyde Fairbrother is dead, I don’t take any satisfaction in him skipping a trial or naming any of his coconspirators. I didn’t kill him. I’m a police officer; my duty is to capture criminals, not kill them. I take that seriously. Whew.

  They understand, but I had a real motive, and they aren’t impressed with my story that I was home watching television with my boyfriend of dubious character on the night of the murder. The male cop adds, “The dude’s black, isn’t he?”

  He just made his first mistake.

  “Would you like to tell me and your recording device what his race has to do with anything?” I say.

  “Not much,” he says. “Just asking.”

  “You want to know what show we watched? Empire. Nice talking to you both. This little chat was your freebie. Next time, I’m bringing a lawyer from my union.”

  “Sure. You’re entitled,” the male cop says.

  Cards are exchanged, we say good-byes and I get out of the Lexus.

  “Detective Karim?”

  “Yes?”

  I turn around and face the male cop—like the suspect does in every episode of Columbo—and he says, just like Peter Falk, “Just one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “We know you were on the thruway.”

  Unlike the suspect in Columbo, I don’t make a run for it, grab a gun and try to shoot my way out, or trade knowing glances with Peter Falk—mine: You got me, his: All this time you thought you were smarter than me.

  I didn’t ride the thruway, so I walk away. They just blew their whole interview. They have nothing. I am in the clear. I got away with murder. I’ll cook a Persian dinner for Bobby and me: lamb kebabs, baghali rice, yogurt and cucumber salad. Afterward, we’ll watch our sex tape and then repeat it for real just before we erase it. Yes, that would make a fun evening. Then I remember what I have to do first: betray the women in Artemis and find the cowardly bastard.

  Chapter 36

  Lieutenant Hagen listens to Bobby’s voice mail as he pretends to be my crazy husband. “Listen to me. I’m at the end. I’m feeling like I got nothing else. Just you and Lucas. Got to be a family again. I can’t live like this—life isn’t worth shit. I’ll find you. When I do, we will be together. In heaven if we can’t be together here.”

  She purses her lips, approves. “Impressive. You played this for Phyllis?”

  “She was convinced. She wants Bobby’s address.”

  “She asked for it?”

  “Yes.”

  Lieutenant Hagen feels she has enough information to get the DA to approve a sting on Phyllis and her unknown accomplices. The point of this drama will be to catch Phyllis or her friends about to kill Bobby, and get them to confess to the murders of Ronald, Derrick, and Joey, or possibly more. I’ll be the spouse in jeopardy, Bobby the dangerous husband. It will be standard procedure.

  I’ll give Phyllis Bobby’s address. I’ll tell her about his routines, when he is alone, on duty, off duty, the bar where he drinks, the gym where he works out, the Food Bazaar market where he shops, and Rosario’s Delicatessen, where he goes when he wants Italian takeout. These are the places where Bobby goes alone and can be snatched, kidnapped, or drive-by shot on the way home. I will give her the make and license plate of his car if they want to arrange a minor traffic accident on a deserted street that gets him out of his vehicle, then shoot, stab, or break his skull with a baseball bat. As an undercover police officer, I will be a part of the conspiracy to kill Bobby. I can also just give Phyllis the information she needs to arrange the murder herself or with her accomplices. For Phyllis, the less I know, the better. For me, the more information I give her, the better. What a dance. There will be other cops assigned to watch Bobby and protect him. If they don’t, he will be a real victim.

  Phyllis knows that planning to kill someone is a conspiracy to commit homicide, or attempted homicide. She will be smart enough to keep that out of the conversation or deny it. When I said, “I know what you are talking about,” she didn’t reply, I am planning to kill your husband.

  At best, we want her to make an attempt to murder Bobby. If not, if we can produce a weapon, plus my testimony, my notes on our conversations, her proximity to Bobby—the closer the better—it will be enough. There is one last matter.

  “Should we be worried this might be entrapment?”

  “Entrapment?” Lieutenant Hagen says. “You bet. This woman is offering to kill your husband; it’s something she may have done at least to three other people, including a police officer. Goddamn right, it’s entrapment. You are the one who will entrap her, Karim, and I will be the one to arrest her. Then we will get a confession from her for the other murders . . .”

  She stops herself, looks at me, and not in a friendly way. “You’re not suggesting we call this off, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You have a problem with any of this, Detective?”

  Detective is the reminder that I am a policewoman, she is my superior officer, and if I do doubt her, then I am untrustworthy, since doubt itself is untrustworthy, and she has a reason to demote or even fire me.

  We both know entrapment is a perfectly legal police procedure. The jails are filled with husbands and wives who thought they were hiring “hit men” to kill their spouses and discovered they were making deals with undercover police. Cops joke it’s always better to kill your husband yourself—don’t outsource the job.

  “I’m good with all of this, Lieutenant,” I say.

  Chapter 37

  I find a parking spot on Steinway Street for the Prius and begin my walk to the shelter. On Thirtieth Avenue, I see him looking in the window of the Tea Plus Cafe. He sees me. I won’t ask him if he is following me. Or has been.

  “Hello, Higgins, what a coincidence.”

  “Not so much,” he says. “It’s only Astoria. I buy green tea for Danielle here. Cures her asthma. What about you?”

  “Doctor. Checkup.”

  I’m lying. It doesn’t mean Higgins is. Relax.

  “Buy you a coffee, or an exotic tea?” he says.

  “Sure.”

  Inside, we study the menu.

  “I recommend the fresh mint. I don’t think it cures anything, just tastes delicious.”

  “Sure.”

  We settle in. Cozy. Friendly. We are just two cops having tea.

  Higgins sips his tea and says, “Sure. You said it twice. There’s a poem by Delmore Schwartz, ‘The Beautiful American Word, Sure.’”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “Do you like poetry?”

  “Some.”

  “Here’s a bit of it.”

  “‘The beautiful American word, Sure,

  As I have come into a room, and touch

  The lamp’s button, and the light blooms with such

  Certainty where the darkness loomed before,

  As I care for what I do not know, and care

  Knowing for little she might not have been,

  And for how little she would be unseen,

  The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear.’”

  Higgins recites it in a dry, undramatic manner. As I listen, my mind wanders. One line stays with me: “Knowing for little she might not have been.”r />
  “Lovely,” I say.

  “It’s about how precious life is.”

  “I got it, but I don’t need a poet to tell me that.”

  “No, of course not. I think our work demands we be reminded. We deal so much in needless death.”

  What’s this about, Higgins? Poetry and tea, needless death?

  I want out of here. I need to end this innocently, like we began, like we met coincidentally.

  I ask him about his family, then if he watches Game of Thrones. He does. We are into Jon Snow rumors and close to the end of our tea. He insists on paying. I leave the tip.

  Outside, we play Who’s going in what direction?

  “My car is around the corner.”

  “I’m just down the street,” he says.

  We say good-bye. I walk back to my car. Beautiful poetry aside, I drive away and remember I don’t believe in coincidences.

  Chapter 38

  Amanda sits on the steps of the shelter, doing homework, listening to music. She looks up, removes her earbuds.

  “Hey,” I say.

  I sit down next to her.

  “Where’s Bobo?”

  “Sniffing out the new arrival.” She shudders slightly. “Guess what? Phyllis gave her Haneen’s room.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Scared, beat-up. The usual. She’s not talking a lot. Most of the new ones don’t. You didn’t say that much either when you first came here.”

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Sharon.”

  “I brought you a present.”

  I hand her a comic book: one of Sammy’s graphic novels. After Sammy died, I went to Jericho Pines to collect his belongings. The staff prepared everything for me—his clothes lay neatly folded on the bed, a pair of jeans, a pile of underwear and socks, his T-shirts, his favorite, a yellow SpongeBob that I held to my face in search of him, his smell, but they’d washed everything, and my little brother was gone.

  Sammy’s gray Gap hoodie, Mets cap, flip-flops, and a pair of black Vans sat on the floor. His toilet articles, meds, computer, flip phone, and comic books were stacked on his desk. I went through the pile of comics—they were a fraction of his collection; he’d only brought his favorites with him to Jericho Pines. The rest are packed in boxes in a storage locker along with the material remains of our family. I am left to deal with it. I will, I tell myself, I will. One day. But what am I to do with everything my family owned? The precious and the useless, the sentimental and the utilitarian, it doesn’t matter. It’s all heartbreakingly sad. Storage is just another grave, and I don’t have the stamina for another one.

  Whatever money Sammy earned from odd jobs, his allowance, birthday presents, he spent on comics, or as he liked to remind me, graphic novels. My mother and I, his virtuous, academically proper sister, disapproved. My father didn’t.

  “I don’t care what he reads; the important thing is that he reads. Today it’s Batman—tomorrow, Tolstoy. You’ll see.”

  He was wrong. Sammy didn’t live long enough to read Tolstoy, but I came around to comics. I was the older sister who only read good books, important books dictated by my English teachers. Sammy read comics; I read literature. Until one day I accepted his Oh, yeah? Try this challenge and read Preacher, a baroque tale of a man born of the union of the devil and an angel, and his sidekick, an Irish vampire. The Irishman was hundreds of years old. He was fond of recounting stories about the IRA and the Easter rebellion, and quoting Irish writers: Behan, O’Casey, and Shaw.

  The comic book got Sammy interested in Irish history and literature. He read The Hostage, and we watched The Informer and Michael Collins together. It was all so much more relatable to him than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a novel Sammy was struggling with in his eighth-grade English class. I stopped bothering him about the Western Canon, encouraged him to read whatever the hell he wanted, and we traded comic books from then on.

  Later, Sammy turned to another theme: a postapocalyptic world, a place he lived in his mind. There were two. The first was Y: The Last Man. In it, all males, human and animal, died as a result of a plague. Sammy knew the irony would hit my feminist sensibility. From the introduction of The Last Man:

  Welcome to the Unmanned World:

  In the summer of 2002, a plague of unknown origin destroyed every last sperm, fetus, and fully developed mammal with a Y chromosome (with the exception of one young man and his male pet). The “gendercide” instantly exterminated 48% of the global population, or approximately 2.9 billion men, including 495 of the Fortune 500 CEOs.

  In the comic book, airplanes dropped out of the sky because ninety-nine percent of the pilots were male, suddenly there were only a handful of people in Congress, armed widows clamored for their husbands’ seats, ninety-five percent of all truck drivers and ship captains died . . . as did ninety-two percent of violent felons. And my favorite: “Worldwide, 85% of all government representatives are now dead . . . as are 100% of Catholic priests, Muslim imams, and Orthodox Jewish rabbis.”

  It wasn’t original—there have been other “last man” stories; but this one had tough women characters: one-breasted Amazon motorcycle gangs, widows of dead congressmen demanding their seats, the few remaining women combat soldiers.

  Sammy lived vicariously through Marvel’s extreme heroes: Iron Man, Captain America, and the Hulk. After our father’s murder, he gravitated to the DC world for heroes whose pain mirrored his own: young Bruce Wayne, who saw his parents gunned down; Peter Parker’s Spider-Man avenging his uncle Ben, who was murdered by a burglar; Frank Castle becoming The Punisher after his wife and two children were killed by mobsters in a cross-fire shoot-out in Central Park; Kal-El, exiled to earth to become Clark Kent. Sammy shared grief with these comic book characters. It was solace for Sammy to know there were characters like him, who also lived in a memory world of horror, loneliness, and loss. Unfortunately, his past didn’t flash forward to acquiring bat wings or spider strings or discovering the strength to bend steel and fly faster than a speeding bullet. Sammy just remained sad, human, ordinary, and powerless. It was for me, his sister, to be the superhero.

  “Did you find him?”

  “Not yet, honey, but I will.”

  His other favorite comic book was Garth Ennis’s Rover Red Charlie. The one I gave to Amanda.

  “You should read it, sister,” Sammy said to me. “It’s about what it’s like to be a dog.”

  “That’s it? What’s the story?”

  “Hmmm. Okay, it’s about three dogs who travel across the country after the apocalypse. Like a dog Odyssey.”

  “Is this another apocalypse story like The Last Man?”

  “No, in this one all the humans are dead. Only animals are alive. The dogs want to go to the Pacific Ocean, which they call ‘the big splash.’ They have adventures along the way. There’s a crazy German shepherd who won’t stop guarding his dead master’s truck, and an abused fighting bulldog, and they eat chickens.” He laughed. “Chickens are really dumb, sister.”

  Amanda looks at the comic book, flips through the pages.

  “My brother liked this one a lot, Amanda. It’s about dogs.”

  She tosses it on the step next to her.

  “I’ll give it to Bobo.”

  I can hear traces of anger in her voice.

  “You okay, Amanda?”

  “No, I’m not. You’re leaving us, aren’t you?”

  There it is. Pure Amanda. Total honesty, no passive aggression, sarcasm, sulking. The terms of commerce among teenagers and adolescents are unused by Amanda. I still haven’t found the words to ask why she is so direct, so straightforward, without guile or manipulation. I decide it is time to ask.

  “Why are you so honest?”

  “It’s a decision I made. I knew everybody around me was lying, and it didn’t seem to make them any happier. I wanted to see what happened if I told the truth. See if it was a better way.”

>   “Was it?”

  “Sometimes. Mostly it didn’t make much difference. I found if I kept the truth in me, then I had a better way of figuring out when people were lying to me. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure. You didn’t play their game. It takes people a long time to learn that.”

  “Have you?”

  “That it’s better to tell the truth? Not when my husband asks where I am.”

  “Duh.”

  “I guess so.” I don’t tell her I’m a cop and I lie for a living. “We’re friends now, Amanda. I take friendship seriously. We’ll always be in touch.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s a promise.”

  She looks at me. Fixes a silent stare on me. I say it again. “I promise.”

  “Okay.”

  “Who’s cooking tonight?”

  “No one. It’s pizza delivery night.”

  “Silverware or plastic?”

  “We’re on cleanup. Plastic.”

  We both sit silently for a moment. A big, wet, hairy face nuzzles itself between us and tries to push us apart.

  “Hey, Bobo.”

  We each move a few inches. Bobo squeezes in between us. Her tail wags as we scratch and pet her. Hooray for the simple things: girlfriends on a stoop in Queens, comic books, and a goofy dog.

  Our reverie is interrupted by a text from Lieutenant Hagen.

  “I have to go, Amanda. See you at dinner.”

  Chapter 39

  Detective Keller is at the water fountain. He gives me a chin up and points a finger.

  “Hey, Karim, your pal is here. He wants to confess.”

  McDermott is seated at a table in the interrogation room facing me. The place stinks of coffee, sweat, and lies. I’ve asked Tessa to watch the interview on a CCTV camera in another room.

  “Has someone read you your rights?”

  “The Miranda warning? As in, I can call a lawyer, everything I say can be held against me?”