Red on Red (34 page)

“So! A pigeon! Of all things …”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever see a baby one?”

“No. Why?”

“Me neither. Nor anyone I know. Odd, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And yet, it only holds that there have to be.”

When his father’s eyes narrowed, heralding the arrival of another thought, Nick began to drift toward the door, preparing to dodge the
next daft digression. But his father surprised him, even more than Jamie had, and Nick worried he might have read his mind after all, and seen how much of it was still on Daysi.

“Ah, well. I know you and Allison struggled, Nick. You can put up with more than you think you can. Still … Hard, I know, for both of you. Harder on her. It’s always worse for the woman. Your mother and I had almost given up, when we had you. Not given up, but resigned … Well, you know—God’s hands …

“D’ye think we should go to Galway first? Her sister Mary, I always liked. She was the best of the bunch. Second best! A widow. No children, either. She’d be touched to see you. Take Allison, if you want—my treat. I have money now, and I don’t know what to do with it. If not—I don’t mean to pry, you understand—why not Esposito? He seems like a good man, good fun. Does he eat normal food? I don’t suppose we’d have to pack for him, the … spaghetti and such? We’ll make do. Ireland’s a very modern country now, Nick, it can’t be helped. Ah! That reminds me, would you have some stew?”

“Sure, Da.”

The last question was the easiest, and Nick had no trouble with the answer. He found that he was already sitting at the kitchen table, drawn back, drawn in. He enjoyed his stew, and didn’t speak until it was finished. Digestion would come in time.

“Da, how long has the front door been broken?”

“Is it? I didn’t know it was. I used the key only this morning, when I went for the newspapers. But then, I always put the key in the door, without thinking.”

“Any strange phone calls lately? Or anybody call and hang up?”

“No, not so I noticed. Wait, last week, a woman called. She yelled at me in Spanish. Very angry about something, she was. She didn’t listen when I tried to interrupt, to say I wasn’t … Well, in truth I never caught the name.”

“I see … but no hang-ups?”

“No, not that I recall. Why?”

“Well … burglars … the door. Sometimes they break a door, make phone calls in a building to see if anybody’s home.”

“Aren’t they devious, then! The criminal mind!”

Another knock on the door, and then footsteps inside the apartment, in the hall, but before Nick could react, Esposito called out to announce
his return—“Hey, Seanee, it’s me!”—as if he lived there. He shouldn’t barge in like that, Nick thought, given the circumstances. That Esposito called his father by his first name was slightly jarring, notwithstanding that it was by request, but “Seanee” struck Nick as extravagant. Mr. Meehan responded in kind, greeting him like an old fraternity brother. “Espo! Hello, lad!” Nick was bemused by the enthusiasm, mostly, and also felt a twinge of something between envy and chagrin that his relations with his father rarely showed such camaraderie and cheer. That was foolish, he knew. He was his father’s son, and neither of them were much inclined toward emotional display. And it was worse than foolish to begrudge any exuberance in the house, as if his father were a museum piece around which his partner was throwing a football. The thought of museums reminded Nick of Daysi, and it warmed him, relaxed him. He left the two of them in the kitchen and went to change clothes.

When he returned, he found Esposito finishing a plate of stew, and a story about how he once caught a fugitive perp from a triple shooting by spreading a rumor that he was seeing the man’s girlfriend. It was one of the standards from his repertoire, and Nick knew it well. Esposito made repeated, purely professional visits to see her, and upon leaving the apartment, he’d always make a fuss of buttoning up his shirt, fixing his tie, checking to see if his zipper was zipped. Word traveled, and the perp was arrested trying to knock down her door.

“The best part? Later on, I did hook up with her. She was a little … cutie. Ecuadorian, I think. Sandra? Something like that. She came down to see me testify at his trial. The guy took a plea right then and there. Fifteen years.”

Nick was apprehensive about how graphic Esposito would get in his telling, and he was relieved at the effortful delicacy of “cutie.” His father listened avidly, offering back lively “Ah”s and “No!”s as if he were in a revival tent. It heartened Nick to see him like that.

“A ladies’ man, I knew you were, Espo. Me and Nick, well … How would you put it, Nick? The Meehans haven’t that gift, or maybe we’re inclined to wait our turn. Is that right? No—”

“Are you kidding, Sean? You should see the broad Nick went home with last night! Awesome, really unbelievable. You gotta see this woman. You wouldn’t believe—”

You gotta shut up, Nick thought. He thought it with some violence, so much so that Esposito knew it at once, and there was a Mexican standoff
of distressed expressions—Esposito at Nick, seeing the gaffe, the breach of privacy; Nick at his father, knowing that he had not followed the same path of rugged, lonely duty; his father away from both of them, simply sad again, and deciding it was none of his business. Nick’s anger at Esposito dimmed when he saw his woebegone grimace, the genuinely stricken contrition. He had never seen that before; he had almost assumed that Esposito was immune to guilt or shame. Nick’s idea of Esposito changed, and it was the dueling imbalances, the sea-sickening shifts in the ground with the two men who amounted to his family, that inclined him to hold steady.

“Well. All right, Da. We got … things to do. Espo?”

Esposito stood slowly, extending a hand across the table.

“Mr. Meehan, thanks for lunch. It was great.”

“Anytime, lad.”

His father sounded vague to Nick, which troubled him, as did Esposito’s chastened return to formality. Too much and too little were equally poor choices. They were escorted down the hall, and when the door closed behind them, Nick heard the lock click.

“Nick, I am so sorry. The last thing I wanted was—”

“I know. Don’t beat yourself up over it. You meant well.”

Nick strained for a dismissive, affectionate tone, and the words came out of him more credibly than he’d expected. Esposito had done far more for him than he’d done for Esposito, and there were other accounts he never wanted to settle. Beyond that, Jamie Barry would be waiting.

Nick saw Jamie leaning against the lobby door and waved him in, giving Esposito an elbow. Jamie walked over, slurping a coffee that Nick guessed was half-sugar, casting surreptitious glances behind him like a confidential agent. Esposito took out another set of pictures, looking at them first, to make sure they were the right ones. Black-and-white mug shots printed on letter paper, six of them, six young black men, the pages folded in half, lengthwise, so that the name and the rest of the information was hidden on the back. Jamie would only see faces, one at a time. He studied each for a minute, then moved on to the next.

“Nah, none of these guys.”

“None?”

“Listen. To me, they all look alike, but none of them was him.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, pretty sure.”

“Who does he look most like?”

“I mean, a little like this one, a little like that.”

Jamie shrugged, and Nick was impressed by how he had adjusted in twenty minutes, from hophead punching bag to portrait connoisseur. He picked Malcolm, and another, with diffidence. They bore a closer resemblance to Michael than the others, for what it was worth, which was little. Esposito pushed on.

“What is it about either of these guys that rings a bell?”

“What rings a bell? A punch in the face. Whaddaya think?”

Esposito grabbed Jamie by the shirtfront, and Nick signaled him to lay off as Jamie protested.

“Take it easy! Nick, c’mon, you know me! You want me to say something different, I’ll say what you want, but these guys ain’t the guy. The two I picked are close, but that’s it!”

“All right, Jamie. Here’s your money, the ten I promised. Espo, you got what he had before—eleven bucks? Good looking out, Jamie, but don’t be hustling in front of the building. It kills your father to see it. You gotta quit this.”

“Yeah … I know,” he said, with a wistful and downcast pause. And then he looked up at Nick, offering a twitchy wink and smile, his last gag, his send-off. “I quit every day….”

The three of them walked outside, but only Jamie had a spring in his step as he headed downtown, at a brisk pace, without looking back.

A
fter crossing the bridge, they checked in with the guards at the front and then headed for the infirmary. The wind was chillier here, coming off the Long Island Sound, but the day was still balmy. Speedboats left rapier-like white traces behind them and leapt up to cross the greater wakes of freighters; planes took off from LaGuardia and cast racing shadows on the shimmering water. To the east, the span of the Whitestone Bridge connected Queens and the Bronx with a gracious symmetry, three pairs of cables draped between two piers; to the west, the island-hopping centipede tangle of the Triborough knotted Manhattan to them as well. It must have been a cruel view for the prisoners, all the transit and travel, the pleasure and the progress, the symbols of things and the things themselves.

Esposito’s nurse—Audrey from Astoria—led them again to an examining room in the back, betraying no recent intimacy. Though Malcolm was friendly, the visit didn’t begin as the first had, with the sense of clandestine fun. Nick hadn’t considered how much Malcolm had done for them already. He had instigated the santero rescue, sparing a life and claiming one in revenge. Nick wondered which meant more to him, gave him greater solace. He wore an orange jumpsuit with a kind of light and knowing irony, as if it were a Halloween costume. He shook the detectives’ hands, and they sat down, facing one another. Esposito waited a few seconds for Malcolm to fill in the pause. It was an interrogator’s technique, and Nick wondered why he bothered; was there any need for a contest of wills? The moment passed, and the corner of Malcolm’s mouth lifted into a grin.

“That was fast! I mean, not Kiko, but his brother. Even better! Now he
know what it is to bury his people…. It was you, right? It was you, Espo, what done him?”

Esposito nodded, and Malcolm’s smile covered the whole of his face.

“I heard about it. Then I read it in the paper, somebody had it. I had to check myself a minute, calm down, you know? In here, you ain’t supposed to be all ‘Yippee! Yahoo!’ when a cop shoots one of us. ’Specially when it’s the cop that locked you up.”

“I could see how that might come off wrong,” agreed Esposito. “Did you hear about the guy here? He fell, split his head? Just today?”

“Yeah, why?”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard he fell, split his head. Spanish dude … Why, he roll with Kiko?”

“Yeah. He was in Kiko’s crew. Nothing funny about it?”

“Yeah, it was funny. It was like he slipped on a banana peel! There’s all kinds of rumors—there’s gonna be—but all guys got to do here is talk…. I know a guy, he was there on the tier when it happened. The lights go out a second, dude goes down the stairs. But he was alone, nobody was next to him. It wasn’t like he was sliced, or birthday-caked, or nothin’.”

Nick had to ask. “Birthday-caked?”

“They do that when you sleep. They put tissue between your toes, hold you down, light it up like candles. Sometimes they splash a little lighter fluid, whatever, to help it go.”

Nick withdrew his feet slightly below his chair, and Malcolm was kind enough to pretend not to notice.

“Nice,” said Esposito, pulling the conversation back. “With the guy, though—there was a power failure?”

“I dunno, I guess. The lights went out in the building.”

“Did they go out here?”

“I dunno. I was in the yard.”

“Act of God, I guess.”

“No shit! If I knew he was with Kiko, maybe it woulda been different…. Nah, I’m cool. I’m workin’ with you, I am. I appreciate it. I appreciate what you done for me, for my family.”

That was one way to see it, Nick supposed. A view that was both harsher and kinder than Michael’s, the inside and the upside. Closer to the truth, Nick thought, and yet selective to a degree that was either brilliant
or batty. The detectives had still scared his mother to death and put him in jail, for life or close to it. Hard to get around that; Nick doubted he could have himself. But this was the broader perspective—past was past, and they had to move on, didn’t they? Malcolm was an American, an optimist, a can-do man. Another likeness between Malcolm and Esposito, the hope so potent it seemed heartless, in certain lights. And that was not the only resemblance, Nick realized. If Malcolm took after Esposito, Nick had a bit of Michael in him, in his reluctance to let go. It didn’t flatter either of them.

“Speaking of family,” Nick remarked. “How about your brother? Does he come by, or call?”

“Nah, he wouldn’t, like I said.”

“Who does call? Who visits?”

“My sister, a couple of friends.”