There were four
Fetterolfs
in the Manhattan phone d
i
rectory. Two were single initials, which meant they were probably women living alone. I chose Herman
Fetterolf
on West Eighty-sixth.
The apartment building was nice, with a carpeted lobby and deep comfortable sofas. I said to the doorman, “Please tell Mrs. Dottie
Fetterolf
that there’s a private investigator to talk to her about her father-in-law’s death. My name is Joe Carter. Ask her if she’ll come down to the lobby to talk to me.”
He gave me a startled look and conveyed the message.
When Mrs.
Fetterolf
came down, I could see she was ready to be furious at somebody, anybody.
Long skirt swishing, long vest flapping, she steamed across the lobby.
“You the
private investigator?
Who are you working for?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, Mrs.
Fetterolf
. But it’s someone who, like you, has lost an elderly relative to su
i
cide.”
“Suicide!
Ha! It wasn’t any suicide! It was murder!”
“Murder?”
“They killed him! And no one will admit it!”
“What makes you think so?”
“Think?
Think?
I don’t have to think, I
know
! One week he’s fine, he’s friends with this Mrs. Kaplan, they play Scrabble, they read books together, he’s happy as a clam. Maybe even a little something gets going between them, who am I to say, more power to them. And then on the same night— the
same
night—he hangs himself and she walks in front of a bus!
Coincidence?
I don’t think so
!…
Besides, there would be a note.”
“I beg your—”
“My father-in-law would have left a note. He was thoughtful that way. You know what I’m saying? He wrote everybody in the whole family all the time, nobody could even keep up with reading it all. He would have left a note for sure.”
“Did he—”
“He was lonely after his wife died. Sarah.
A saint.
They met fifty-six years ago—”
In the end, she gave me her father-in-law’s entire hi
s
tory.
Also Rose Kaplan’s.
I wrote it all down.
When I called Johnny
Fermato
, I was told by a wary desk sergeant that Lieutenant
Fermato
would get back to me.
In my dreams.
“Somebody’s being screwed over, Margie,” I said. “And it’s probably costing somebody else pay-off money.”
She lay there in the fetal position, her hands like claws. She was still connected by tubes to the humidified air supply, the catheter bag, the feeding pump. The pump made soft noises:
ronk
,
ronk
. I laid my briefcase on the bottom of her bed, which Susan would probably object to.
“It wasn’t depression,” I said to Margie. “Della Fra
n
cesca and Mrs. Smith went up to that roof together.
Alone together.
Samuel
Fetterolf
and Rose Kaplan were in love.” J-24 chemically induced love.
The bag in Margie’s IV slowly emptied. The catheter bag slowly filled. Her ears were hidden under the dry, brittle, lifeless hair.
“Johnny
Fermato
knows something. Maybe only that the word’s been passed down to keep the case closed. I did get the coroners’ reports. They say ‘self-inflicted fatal wounds.’
All eight reports.”
Somewhere in the hospital corridors, a woman screamed.
Then stopped.
“Margie,” I heard myself saying, “I don’t want to come here anymore.”
The next second, I was up and limping around the room. I put my forehead against the wall and ground it in. How could I say that to her? Margie, the only woman I’d ever loved, the person in the world I was closest to.…On our wedding night, which was also her nineteenth birthday, she’d told me she felt like she could die from happiness.
And I’d known what she meant.
And on that other night eight years later, when Bucky had done his pills-and-vodka routine, Margie had been with me when the phone rang.
Gene…Gene…I did it.…
Did what? Jesus, Bucky, it’s after midnight—
But I don’t…Father Healey…
Bucky, I
gotta
start my shift at eight tomorrow morning. Good night.
Gene, who’s calling at this hour?
…say…good-bye.…
Of all the inconsiderate…the phone woke Libby!
Tell Father Healey I never would have made…good priests don’t doubt like…I can’t touch God anymore.…
And then I’d known. I was out of the apartment in fi
f
teen seconds. Shoes, pants, gun. In my pajama top I drove to the seminary, leaned on the bell. Bucky wasn’t there, but Father Healey was. I searched the rooms, the chapel, the little meditation garden, all the while traffic noises drowning out the thumping in my chest.
Father Healey shouting questions at me.
I wouldn’t let him in my car. Get away from me you bastard you killed him, you and your insistence on pushing God on a mind never tightly wrapped in the first place…Bucky wasn’t at his mother’s house. Now I had two people screaming at me.
I found him at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows.
Where I should have looked first.
He’d broken a stained glass window, just smashed it with a board, no subtlety. He was in front of the altar, breathing shallow, already unco
n
scious. EMS seemed to take forever to get there. The on-duty cops were faster; the stained-glass was
alarm-wired.
But when it was over, Bucky’s stomach pumped, sleeping it off at St. Vincent’s, I had crawled back in bed next to Margie.
Libby asleep in her little bedroom.
I’d put my arms around my wife, and I’d vowed that after Bucky got out of the hospital, I’d never see him and his messy stupid dramas of faith again.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said to Margie, inert in her
trach
collar. “Sweetheart, I didn’t mean it. Of course I want to be here. I’ll be here as long as you’re breathing!”
She didn’t move. IV bag emptying, catheter bag filling.
Susan came in, her nurse’s uniform rumpled.
“Hi, Gene.”
“Hello, Susan.”
“We’re about the same tonight.”
I could see that. And then the
Camineur
kicked in and I could see something else, in one of those unbidden flashes of knowledge that Bucky called heightened connective cognition. Bucky hadn’t phoned me because he didn’t r
e
ally want to know what had happened to those old people. He already had enough belief to satisfy himself. He just wanted J-24 cleared publicly, and he wanted me to start the stink that would do it. He was handing the responsibility for Rose Kaplan and Samuel
Fetterolf
and Lydia Smith and Giacomo
della
Francesca to me. Just the way he’d handed me the responsibility for his break with Father Healey the night of his attempted suicide. I’d been used.
“Fuck that!”
Susan turned, startled, from changing Margie’s catheter bag. “I beg your pardon?”
Margie, of course, said nothing.
I limped out of the hospital room, ignoring the look on Susan’s face. I was angrier than I had been in eighteen months. Anger pushed against the inside of my chest and shot like bullets through my veins.
Until the
Camineur
did its thing.
A dozen boys crowded the basketball hoop after school, even though it was drizzling. I limped toward my car. Just as I reached it, a red Mercedes pulled up beside me and Jeff Connors got out from the passenger side.
He wore a blue bandana on his head, and it bulged on the left side above the ear. Heavy bandaging underneath; somebody had worked on him. He also wore a necklace of heavy gold links, a beeper, and jacket of supple brown leather. He didn’t even try to keep the leather out of the rain.
His eyes met mine, and something flickered behind them. The Mercedes drove off. Jeff started toward the kids at the hoops, who’d all stopped playing to watch the car. There was the usual high-fiving and competitive dissing, but I heard its guarded quality, and I saw something was about to go down.
Nothing to do with me.
I unlocked my car door.
Jenny Kelly came hurrying across the court, through the drizzle. Her eyes flashed. “Jeff! Jeff!”
She didn’t even know enough not to confront him in front of his customers. He stared at her, impassive, no sign of his usual likable hustle. To him, she might as well have been a cop.
“Jeff, could I see you for a minute?”
Not a facial twitch. But something moved behind his eyes.
“Please? It’s about your little brother.”
She was giving him an out: family emergency. He didn’t take it.
“I’m busy.”
Ms. Kelly nodded. “Okay.
Tomorrow, then?”
“I’m busy.”
“Then I’ll catch you later.” She’d learned not to argue. But I saw her face after she turned from the boys sniggering behind her. She wasn’t giving up, either. Not on Jeff.
Me, she never glanced at.
I got into my car and drove off, knowing better than Jenny Kelly what was happening on the basketball court behind me, not even trying to interfere. If it didn’t happen on school property, it would happen off it. What was the difference, really? You couldn’t stop it. No matter what idealistic fools like Jenny Kelly thought.
Her earrings were little pearls, and her shirt, damp from the rain, clung to her body.
The whole next week, I left the phone off the hook. I dropped Libby a note saying to write me instead of calling because NYNEX was having trouble with the line into my building. I didn’t go to the hospital. I taught my math classes, corrected papers in my own classroom, and left right after eighth period. I only glimpsed Jenny Kelly once, at a bus stop a few blocks from the school building. She was holding the hand of a small black kid, three or four,
dressed in a Knicks sweatshirt. They were waiting for a bus. I drove on by.
But you can’t really escape.
I spotted the guy when I came out of the
metroteller
late Friday afternoon. I’d noticed him earlier, when I dropped off a suit at the drycleaner’s. This wasn’t the kind of thing I dealt with anymore—but it happens. Somebody you co
l
lared eight years ago gets out and decides to get even. Or somebody spots you by accident and suddenly remembers some old score on behalf of his cousin, or your partner, or some damn thing you yourself don’t even recall. It ha
p
pens.
I couldn’t move fast, not with my knee. I strolled into
Mulcahy’s
, which has a long aisle running between the bar and the tables, with another door to the alley that’s usually left open if the weather’s any good. The men’s and ladies’ rooms are off an alcove just before the alley, along with a pay phone and cigarette machine. I nodded at Brian
Mu
l
cahy
behind the bar, limped through, and went into the ladies’. It was empty. I kept the door cracked. My tail checked the alley,
then
strode toward the men’s room. When his back was to the ladies’ and his hand on the heavy door, I grabbed him.
He wasn’t as tall or heavy as I was—average build, brown hair, nondescript looks. He twisted in my grasp, and I felt the bulge of the gun under his jacket. “Stop it,
Shaunessy
!
NYPD!”
I let him go. He fished out his shield, looking at me hard. Then he said, “Not here. This is an informant hangout— didn’t you
know
? Meet me at 248
West
Seventieth,
apartment 8. Christ, why don’t you fix your goddamn
phone
?” Then he was gone.
I had a beer at the bar while I thought it over. Then I went home. When the buzzer rang an hour and a half later, I didn’t answer. Whoever stood downstairs buzzed for ten minutes straight before giving up.
That night I dreamed someone was trying to kill Margie, stalking her through the Times Square sleaze and firing tiny chemically poisoned darts. I couldn’t be sure, dreams being what they are, but I think the stalker was me.
The Saturday mail came around three-thirty. It brought a flat
manilla
package, no return address, no note. It was a copy of the crime-scene report on the deaths of Lydia Smith and Giacomo
della
Francesca.