Red on Red (44 page)

A
t work, there was something wrong with the phone. Not on every call, but every third or fourth time Nick picked it up, the cord slipped out of the receiver at some point in the conversation. Usually when he was asking a difficult question. There would be a lack of response on the other end when he challenged, “So, you never threatened the girl your boyfriend left you for? She has your guy, but she calls you all the time? When I pull the phone records, is that what it’s gonna say?” Or, “What do you mean, he says he’s coming after you? And you don’t owe him money? How is he threatening you, with a lawsuit or to break your legs?

“Hello?”

Nick would take the lack of response as the person being evasive. It would make him angry. And then he’d realize it was the connection, and sometimes he could fix it, plugging the cord back in, and sometimes he had to call back. And sometimes when he asked the questions again, he got evasive silences that had nothing to do with the phone. Was it still October? Yes, for a few more days.

“Hello?”

The interpretation of silences, this was his new pastime. No answer—not happy, or not there? Nick wanted to quit, to go home. And then he remembered he’d come back to work early. He could have stayed home for another few weeks, at least, but he couldn’t stand to stay there. Even the voices in the pipes had been quiet lately. He was deskbound, which meant he was confined to the minor complaints. Double-checking stories, poking for holes. “You can’t say who stole your wallet if you passed out with twelve people in the apartment.” At least half of the cases could be closed on the phone, after a kind word or a pointed challenge. Nick
was an abstraction to them, and he felt abstracted himself; he was a handful of stock phrases repeated from a cubicle. “Sorry for the inconvenience.” “Is there anything else I can help you with?” He could have been a customer service rep in Bangalore.

“Hello?
Hola, Señora
. Does anybody speak English? Hello?”

Day after day, there were litanies of petty grudges and grievances, eating time like tapeworms. Not that Nick lacked for time, but he resented its waste, at least when strangers were wasting it. He’d call the number on the report and find that it was disconnected, or he’d call and call, leaving messages, and when he sent someone to knock on the door, they’d say, “Why you coming to my house? I don’t want people to see cops at my house!” Other people wouldn’t stop calling; they wanted to talk every day.

Even when nothing could be fixed, everything had to be typed. Paperwork, then more paperwork. Handwritten, computer-entered, typed on triplicate forms. Pointless reports, stapled together and filed, like scraps of prayer stuck in the cracks of the Wailing Wall. Identity theft, credit card fraud, almost always a blind alley, a cold trail, and collective hours spent waiting on automatic switchboards, routed to more automated messages, his colleagues in India. Fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise at a Home Depot in Texas, fifty dollars of gas in Vermont. One victim was an earnest man, a Senegalese immigrant, English his third language, almost. He believed in the system. Twice a week, he called to report more purchases, or new fraudulent cards in his name. Groceries in Nevada, furniture in New Jersey, all the buys weeks old before the bills made their way to him.

“There is … 
development
in my case?”

He said it like a French word. Maybe it was.

“No.”

“No progress?”

“No.”

“Ah. Why not?”

“I haven’t tried. I told you that I wouldn’t. We don’t travel for these cases. Can’t go all over the country because these companies give out credit cards to anybody and his dog.”

“Un chien? Pardon, parlez-vous français?”

“No.”

“This man, he is not me.”

“I understand. I understand completely.”

“Thank you, Officer. I call you tomorrow!”

More paperwork, in the form of divorce papers from Allison. Nick knew it was coming, but he hadn’t expected it to arrive in a stack of junk mail, between supermarket circulars and a preapproval for a credit card. The same day, at the office, more legal papers, a notice of claim for a wrongful death suit. The estate of Millicent Cole sought ten million dollars from him, Esposito, and the City of New York, in no particular order. Michael Cole had been taken in after the assault at the wake, but he wouldn’t make a statement, and no witness would come forward to make a positive identification. Nick wished he’d been there; he couldn’t have broken Michael, he knew, but he might have tempted him to brag. As it stood now, Michael was a free man, and the law was there to serve him. Maybe litigation was a better outlet. He could throw subpoenas instead of rocks from roofs. Nick skimmed through the reams of pig-in-a-wig indignation. The legal precedents were many, the claim harrumphed, but in the annals of human depravity, there were few precedents. Nick threw the papers against the wall before he’d finished reading.

When he left work that evening, he walked up Broadway, toward home. He glanced at his lobby and kept on walking; there was nothing for him there. Over the bridge, into the Bronx. Kingsbridge Road, then Fordham, pushing through crowded sidewalks, then Pelham Parkway, more houses and fewer apartments, the crowds thinning, a wide aisle of trees breaking the halves of the road. Night fell, and he sat on a bench for a while. Fewer walkers, more cars, moving faster as the distance between stoplights grew longer. The wind picked up, shivering the bare branches, and Nick found a yellow-gray grassy strip of highway shoulder to walk on before the bridge to City Island. Another world. He’d take it. An old village of fishing and boatbuilding, the main street now passed by wide asphalt lots, blinking neon testimonials to deep-fried clams. His feet were blistered in his shoes, and he’d sweated through his suit, even though he hadn’t walked fast. Ten miles, at least, from the precinct. What warmth you could make, alone even, even in this icy air. PT boats had been built here, yachts that won races, and the oldest men remembered the winter when the Sound froze, and you could skate across to Queens.

Closer was Hart Island, where no one lived. Potter’s Field, where the dead ones go when they have no money, no family, no friends, or no
names. Corrections sent out a work detail for the burials. One ferry left from City Island with the bodies, another from Rikers with the workers. Inmates in orange jumpsuits were glad to be outside. They didn’t have to dig. There was a machine for that now. The work wasn’t hard when you did it together. A favor to get the detail, from one island to the other; Nick thought that maybe he’d have Esposito call to get Malcolm assigned there. Maria Fonseca should have already arrived. Maybe Miguel Mendoza, too, by now. It occurred to Nick that he’d have to take Allison’s name off all the department forms as his next of kin, but he had no substitute. His own eligibility for Potter’s Field was improving.

Nick walked to the end of the street, past it, down the gravel chute to the thin beach. “Shingle” and “strand,” those were the Irish words for it. They weren’t much for swimming over there. He wanted to see the water, and wished he’d been around that winter when you could walk across. Looking out to the east, there was no horizon, no break between sea and sky in the chill and listless dark, no difference between up and down. South, to Kings Point, a green light in the distance, minute and far away, intermittent. That was what Nick was trying to see when he stepped into the Sound, with both feet—up to one ankle, one shin, before he brought the more heedless foot back to the nearer depth. Could he stand this, could he wait, or walk farther? It hadn’t frozen in ages. Nick would have liked to see that. He stood his ground, but in seconds, the cold hurt so much it felt like his bones would split. He yelled and jumped out, pulled his ruined shoes off and rubbed his feet, flailing on the beach. After a few minutes, he found himself no less wet, not much warmer, now gritty all over with sand. Nick brushed himself off and marched down the street, catching the first gypsy cab home.

In the lobby, Nick waited again, reluctant to go inside the apartment. He considered the floor for a while, the scuffed squares of checkerboard tile, and after he’d counted their numbers, reckoned their proportions, he turned to the walls. Most of the graffiti was hard to read, ghetto hieroglyphs and arabesques, stylized and semiliterate, proclamations of who was a killer, who was a whore. For all the bragging, the messages had the dull modesty of classified ads, the implicit plea that any offer would be entertained. Mr. Barry wiped away what he could, but he was getting older, slower. The chandelier in the center, a dusky spray of half-there bulbs clutched in a woozy spider of brass, with drifts of real cobweb. And more graffiti, even there. Bless ’em for the effort, if nothing
else. It was hard for Nick to read—red paint, the script loose, the aerosol spray losing focus with the distance, and he struggled to make out the letters, the word, like the stars of a constellation. But it was there. He didn’t have to project it, to start with the picture in his head of the dipper, the hunter, the dog, and rig their shapes to ragged points. The word was there: “G-Had.” “Jihad.” Death to the infidel, uptown style. How long had it been there? Nick didn’t know—who looks at their own lobby ceiling? Jamie Barry had lain down here, but when he did, his gaze went no farther than his hand. Nick leapt up to try to touch it, to feel if the paint was still wet, but he couldn’t reach. He felt like a jackass, jumping up like a kid being teased, the bigger boys playing keep-away with his hat. Was this Michael’s handiwork? Was he tall enough to reach? Nick didn’t remember him that way, but he might have grown some in the meantime.

Nick felt dizzy from staring at the ceiling. He reeled like a drunk before half-squatting, taking hold of his knees while his vision steadied. Such was his position as Jamie Barry strode out through the lobby, crisply attired in a charcoal suit, briefcase tucked under an arm as he talked on the cellphone. Nick gawked at him from his derelict crouch. The timing of his arrival, appearing as if conjured, and the executive metamorphosis were hallucinatory twice over. Jamie stopped and stared, equally unnerved by the sight of a decline equal to his rise. Nick was dirty, bedraggled, and wet; his eyes squinty and unfocused, as red as a rash; hair that could have been combed with a brick. Their roles were not completely reversed. There was an absence of avoidance and of ill-concealed disdain in Jamie’s greeting as Nick wobbled to his feet.

“Nick! Hello! How are you?”

“Jamie! Shit, you look great!”

“Thanks, Nick,” he said, nearly blushing. The smile faded as he searched for a compliment to return. “You … Are you okay?”

“Yeah, well … you know how it is.”

Jamie knew how many things were, but he had the tact not to ask Nick which ones he meant. Nick was so impressed by Jamie’s transformation that he had no sense of his own.

“Anyway, how long you been clean? I mean, you looked good at the funeral. How long ago is that? Did you do a program? Has it been thirty days since then?”

“Nah, I didn’t go away. Methadone and meetings. ‘Hi, my name is
Jamie….’ So far, so good. I went into the hospital for detox, right after I saw you, just twenty-four hours. Got out the day before the wake—I’m sorry, Nick, I am. It makes me appreciate my old man, what he’s put up with. I got some lost time to make up for…. I will, though. I have. I’ve started.”

The subject made Nick uncomfortable, and he jumped back into the direct questions, as if he were handling an informant.

“Yeah … and look at you! You look like a CEO! All Wall Street, with your briefcase and cellphone … and whatnot. The haircut! What are you doing now? What time is it?”

The addled list of inquiries and compliments did not fit the condescending posture, but Nick didn’t notice the wince that preceded Jamie’s reply. The goodwill that went with the patronizing blather was enough for Jamie to indulge it in return.

“Computer stuff, like I did before. Just temping now, but they like me, and something permanent might open up. It’s not bad at all.”

“Money in your pocket, people to talk to, a steady routine.”

“All that.”

As Nick spoke, some measure of his concentration returned, and he saw that Jamie’s reversal of fortune wasn’t quite as dramatic as it had at first appeared. The suit was shiny at the elbows and knees, and hung from a still-gaunt frame; the shirt and tie looked borrowed, probably Mr. Barry’s Sunday best. The reappraisal cheered Nick, even though he knew that it was ugly of him, small, to be so mindful of the comparison between them.

“Even the midnight shift, it’s not so bad,” Nick said. “You might get used to it. Or, like you say, if they like you, they’ll put you on days, a regular gig.”

“What do you mean?”

“What?”

“Nick, it’s almost six in the morning.”

“Nah …”

Jamie swept his hand out to the front door, where the gray dawn proved his point without the need for further argument. Even such poor light as this was enough to show Nick how foolish he was, falling down in life, failing in hope. If one of the old Irish ladies had passed by then, glancing at the two lost boys from the first floor, whom she had watched
grow up and come home, she might have mistaken them, but she would have known which to worry over, who would have been first in her prayers. Jamie laid a hand on his shoulder, gripping him gently.

“I gotta go. Get some rest, Nick. And if you want to talk, anytime, you know where I live.”

Nick had never been very kind to Jamie, had never cared much for his troubles and excuses as he’d rounded his hamster wheel of addiction. It wouldn’t have changed anything, had Nick offered his hand now and then, but it wouldn’t have cost him much, either. As Nick watched Jamie walk out into the pitiless light, he was pained beyond understanding to see himself pitied, knowing it was more than he deserved.