“I cannot
believe
I’m here again,” Spencer said to Liz Monroe.
“Well, we have some sworn affidavits we wanted to talk to you about.”
He looked around the room. She said
we
but she was alone this time. Just him and her in the rectangular air-conditioned conference room.
“Why don’t you sit?” She opened up a letter. “This one here is from a Constance Tobias.”
“Okay.” He sat.
“Do you know who she is?”
“Well, obviously, Ms. Monroe.”
Monroe cleared her throat and buried herself in the letter. “Her sworn statement says that a few weeks before Nathan Sinclair’s death, you came to see her at the New Hampshire maximum security prison, where she had been serving six years for a crime she says in this statement she did not commit.”
Spencer had no comment.
“Do you want to add anything to that?”
“No. Should I? There is nothing so far I need to respond to.”
“For a crime
she
did not commit.”
“No, Ms. Monroe. For a crime she
says
she did not commit.
Two different things. The jails are full of innocent people, if you ask the inmates.”
“Are you convinced she is guilty?”
“I’m convinced that she pled down to a manslaughter from a murder charge, saving herself from life in prison. I’m convinced that she balked from being tried by a jury of her peers because the evidence was overwhelmingly against her. I’m convinced that though there may be a few innocent people in jail, she is not one of them.”
“She says in her letter that you seemed disturbed by your conversation with her.”
“No more or less disturbed than I am by many things of that nature, Ms. Monroe. Is there anything else?”
“Let’s stay with this for a moment. Miss Tobias’s letter alludes to the fact that you might have also believed she was not guilty of murder, in which case you might have sought out the one who you thought was guilty of murder and who got away scot-free. Is that possible, detective?”
“Is it possible?” Shrugging, Spencer raised his eyebrows. “It is not impossible.”
“Well, let me say this, while we’re on the subject of sworn affidavits, I have two here from your co-workers. One from your former partner Chris Harkman, and one from Gabe McGill. We interviewed them—”
“Detective Harkman, retired from the force, is still giving interviews from his hospital bed?”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant, Detective O’Malley. This is what Detective Harkman told us. He told us that once or twice a few years ago when you had been drinking after work, you told him, and here I quote him, that ‘the Greenwich bastard got what was coming to him.’”
Spencer laughed. “Hang on a minute. When I’ve had a few to drink I’ve told my partner that the Greenwich bastard got what was coming to him?”
“Yes.”
“All right, even supposing that I had said that, you think that’s proof of guilt of capital murder?”
Impassably, Monroe went on. “I’m just telling you what I have in your file, Detective O’Malley. Gabe McGill, however, who has also been drinking with you and who has known you for five years, swears to your unimpeachability, drunk or sober. So does your captain.”
“That’s nice,” said Spencer dismissively, “but getting back to my drunken rantings. I’m asking you again, how does Harkman’s statement constitute my confession?”
“It doesn’t per se.”
“Oh, per se.”
“But it’s just one more thread of circumstantial evidence against you.”
“Very thin circumstantial evidence, Ms. Monroe, if you don’t mind me saying so. I don’t think it’s going to hold up in court, that I had something to drink and said some guy in Greenwich got what was coming to him.”
“Detective O’Malley, moving on for a moment, do you consider yourself the kind of man who would set up an earlier daytime and public visit to his future victim, knowing that clothing fibers belonging to you—or hairs, or fingerprints—might be found at the scene, and you would need plausible deniability complete with witnesses, which is how the Suffolk County Police Department began investigating this matter to begin with?”
“No.”
“No? Well, do you consider yourself the kind of man who would buy dark clothes and boots that were too big for him on purpose, and a dark bag he could throw the clothes into and then throw away, or bring a gun untraceable and easily dismantled, or park in a public place, or provoke Nathan Sinclair into firing first?”
“No.”
Liz Monroe sat across the long conference table, staring at Spencer. “Detective,” she said, “let me ask you something. Do you consider yourself the kind of man who would kill another
man for some vigilante sense of justice, if you thought that justice had not been done? Would you be tortured, made crazy by the thought that someone got away with a murder of an innocent? Would you risk your job, your professional credentials, your standing in your police community, your very freedom and livelihood, to take the law into your own hands?”
Spencer’s palms were calmly on the table. “Ms. Monroe, I spend every day of my life watching people get away with all kinds of things. People who sell drugs to little kids, parents who sell their children into prostitution to score some H, fathers who abuse their children so badly that the children would rather run away and be exposed to unimaginable predators than face their own parents. Mothers who drown their toddlers in lakes and then report them missing. Men who drop girls’ dead bodies into oceans from chartered planes. Tell me, are all those people behind bars? Certainly not. I’m only one man, I can only do so much.” He stood up. “I do what I can. But what you’re accusing me of does not reflect my record, my history, my three years on the force, or the recommendations of my superiors and my co-workers.” Spencer paused—for emphasis. “So the answer to your question based on everything you know about me or can infer from observing my work for nearly a quarter century is no.”
He remained standing, she remained sitting. Her eyes were on him, his eyes were on her. Her gaze was so steady, so penetrating.
“Detective, I have spoken to your commanding officer, Chief Whittaker. I have spoke to his commanding officer about you. I have spoken to the president of your PBA union. I have spoken to your co-workers. You are right—you are highly regarded. Your direct supervisor cannot say enough about you. In over two decades there has not been a word against you—except this one. You have not been involved in any other sustainable complaint, not in the suspicion of excessive force, nor bribery, nor extortion. But these claims just won’t die down. Not at Suffolk County. Not here. I know that you transferred out of SCPD because of
these rumors. Nathan Sinclair, for one reason or another, seems to be the albatross around your neck.”
“The fact that Nathan Sinclair came to a bad end, I will admit, does not leave me with much regret. I do not cry at the death of the wicked. I am barely able to cry at the death of the virtuous.” Spencer’s throat caught a little on those words. “Now, is there anything else I can help you with?”
Monroe closed his file. “No. I will evaluate all the information and then make my recommendations accordingly. You will remain on duty until and unless you are notified otherwise.”
“I look forward to seeing your report when it crosses my desk, Ms. Monroe.”
She gave him her hand. Without taking it away, she said, “Harkman mentioned in his affidavit that he thought you drink too much. Be careful.”
Spencer let go of her, and for some reason thought she regretted having said the words she must have meant as a caveat, not a rebuke. “Thank you, I am always careful.”
“You certainly are, Detective O’Malley.”
“Please,” he said. “After all you’ve put me through, do call me Spencer.”
“Lil, I think I’m going to lose my job.”
“What?”
He told her what had happened with IA. She listened intently. “It’s so ridiculous, no?” she said at last.
Spencer remained silent.
Lily studied his face and then looked away.
Later, hours later, with night there and Lily drifting in and out of sleep, she pulled him to herself and whispered, “Spencer Patrick O’Malley, I trust in you completely, I believe in you completely. The angels already know the truth. And I don’t need to know anything.”
“Good. You know too much as it is.”
She said, “Maybe the way Liz Monroe hounds you, you understand how my brother feels, being pursued by you.”
Spencer didn’t say anything for a long time. Lily thought she had fallen asleep, he had fallen asleep. But the breaths he was taking were breaths of a thousand whiskies, breaths of sepulchral suffering.
“What I understand is this,” Spencer said. “The ground swells up. Lies, secrets, deceptions, untruths rise to the surface. The universe rights itself, the demons burst open, truth is uncovered.”
It was deep summer, and the window was open, and July was blowing in. Pollination, nectar, life was blowing in. Lily didn’t want to think about cold things. She wanted warmth. Spencer, naked in her bed, across from him on the wall her
Girl in Times Square
painting that he had moved into the bedroom, her corkboard full of her young life, the life she had when Amy was still with her, the life she had when she wasn’t dying. And stuck onto the corkboard with thumbtacks was her lottery ticket they gave her back as a souvenir, 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1, and near that was a photo booth black-and-white strip of four silly pictures of her and Spencer.
Her voice weakening at the feel of his hands on her lower back, she lay in his arms, but didn’t look at him because it was easier to talk to him without watching his face close up, shut in, tighten, and she said, “If you lost your job we could leave here. We could leave New York and go somewhere warm.”
He didn’t say no. He whispered,
you’re the sweetest girl, you’re a beautiful girl.
Then he said, “Where are you thinking?”
“Like south of Miami maybe. Somewhere in the Keys? Key Biscayne? I hear it’s nice. We could get a place, build a place right on the water. You could have a boat.”
“I could have a boat,” Spencer said slowly. “And what would you do?”
Be with you, Lily wanted to say. Kiss you. Learn to cook maybe. I’d make you Irish Stew and spaghetti and meatballs and maybe something Polish from my grandmother, though she never did learn how to cook so good in Ravensbruck. I’d paint you and paint for you, and clean your fish if you learned how to fish. We’d swim every day, and the water there is warm year round, and so is the air, we’d be outside all day. We’d make furniture and bicker about wood or wicker. We’d be together. We’d be alive. I’d be alive.
It was a beautiful dream.
She didn’t say any of it. We’re supposed to be at peace now, have peaceful choices. We’re not supposed to be at war any more,
she wanted to cry. Didn’t Tomas already do that? We can pick up and move to warmth, we can get new jobs, we can make our lives better, with just the boxes in the trunk of our car and our free will, we can make them better. We don’t need to go fight the Germans. Tomas already did that. We don’t need to go to Ravensbruck. Klavdia Venkewicz already did that. We don’t need to deny our children with all our hearts as they run to us. Anya Pevny already did that. They did it so we can have a choice of New York or Miami, of police work or boat work.
To Drink or not to drink?
To have Cancer or not to have cancer?
To Love or not to love?
It was occurring to Lily with startling clarity that perhaps even peace was an illusion. Perhaps they still and constantly had to fight and pay a price for that simple joy of living. And perhaps even the simple was an illusion. The struggle was all.
And this is life eternal so that they might know truth, might bear witness to the only truth.
“All right, no boat,” she said, shifting from despondent to mock cheerful in a pained breath. “But we can open our own gumshoe agency in Florida, the
Spencer and Lily Private Investigations, no case no matter how trivial will go unsolved.
We could chew tobacco and have snakes in a tank, and punctuate every sentence with a spit into the urn. I could wear those cute cowboy boots, and a little skirt, and walk around on high heels, saying, will that be all Detective O’Malley, will that be all?”
“Now, that,” said Spencer, kissing her, “is a beautiful dream.”
DiAngelo stopped chemotherapy for Lily. He gave her Vicodin for pain, antibiotics for infections, and sent her home. “If the pain gets too bad, come back, we’ll give you morphine.”
“What about the results for the marrow samples?”
“Need a little more time on them.”
“Really?”
“Really. We’re also looking into the International Donor Registry, just in case. And your Detective O’Malley, we’ll take a sample from him.”
Lily watched DiAngelo. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s as good as it can be.” He smiled pastily. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you a donor. We just need to wait a little bit longer for the results.”
Without chemo, Lily wasn’t as nauseated, and her mouth stopped bleeding. But she was getting bruises all over her legs again. They looked like her mother’s legs. She was tired. She was fading, a day at a time.
She knew she was fading because she stopped painting.
Still she went with Spencer to the Benevolent Patrolmen’s annual picnic, thrown and funded by Bill Bryant.
It was on a warm New York summer Sunday, on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Spencer gave Lily his glasses to hold and
his shirt and his weapon, and played a game of soccer with the patrolmen from Brooklyn, and a game of baseball against the robbery detectives from Queens. The officers were all there with their families, and there was popcorn and cotton candy, and a trampoline pit and Frisbee, and beer and nuts. And the music was Loud.
The mayor of New York made an appearance. The Police Commissioner stopped by. Bill Bryant, the New York City councilman and a friend of the NYPD—the one who provided Spencer with his Kevlar vest—was not feeling well and couldn’t make it, but he sent his gracious wife Cameron in his place.
Lily sat in the shade under an oak, a glass of orange juice in her hands, and Spencer’s glasses. Even though it was warm, she was wearing white capris to cover her legs and a white, longsleeved blouse to cover her shrinking arms. On her hairless head was a straw-brim hat. She was avoiding the crowds, feeling a little light-headed, but watching Spencer in the field with the ball at his feet. She was thinking about him, about how he had once been this man, this boy, and played like this all the time. She had asked when the last time was he had come to one of these things and he said never. Yet he was running around the field, kicking the ball, laughing, as if he were still twenty. Twenty with his whole life in front of him.
A woman walked over with a mimosa and sat down on the bench next to Lily. “I’m Cameron Bryant,” she said. “My husband pays for this little shindig. Everyone is having a good time, right? It’ll please him. He’s not feeling well. Like you.” She took a sip of her drink.
“I’m having a great time,” said Lily.
“You’re sick?”
“I’m sick.”
“Is this the beginning?”
Lily breathed in slowly before she spoke. “No.”
Cameron was in her seventies, a well-groomed, well-presented, soft-spoken woman. Cameron told Lily all about her own bout with
cancer. Lily commiserated. People liked to talk about themselves, and Lily liked to sit and listen. Cameron told her she herself had had breast cancer twenty years ago. Had a radical mastectomy, one course of chemo, another, another, fought it on and off for the first ten years, and here she still was, clean for the last ten years.
“I’m happy you’re well,” said Lily.
“You’ll be well, too. You’ll see. So whose wife are you?”
“I’m not anybody’s wife. I’m only twenty-five.”
“When I was your age, I was already married and had three of my four children,” said Cameron.
Lily smiled, drank her juice. “Well, you know how we girls are in New York these days. We don’t get married young anymore. Or have children. We are too busy finding ourselves.”
“So did you find yourself, darling?”
“Yes,” Lily said. “I found myself with him.” She pointed to the field, and motioned Spencer to come over. “He would love to meet you. He’d like to thank you personally for the vest. But I don’t think he can see me without his glasses. He’s near sighted. Spencer,” Lily tried to yell, but she had found recently none of her words ended with exclamation marks anymore.
But Spencer saw her and heard her and came over, all perspired, panting, and happy. He put on his shirt, and Lily introduced him to Cameron, who said, “You know the doctors told me when I wasn’t feeling well like her, that to go away is the best thing. Sometimes you just need to get away for a few days.”
Spencer nodded. “Well, that
is
a good idea. I told Lily, as soon as she’s a little better, I’ll take her to Maui.” He grinned. And Lily laughed.
Cameron, not in on the joke, said seriously, “Oh, no, why there? I mean, Maui is nice, we’ve been there many times, but if you really want paradise on earth, you have to go to Cabo San Lucas. Now
that’s
a place for the gods.”
Spencer had never heard of it. Cameron told them about it, how it was at the very southern tip of the Baja peninsula, surrounded by water on all sides, and she and Bill had a little
cabin right on the ocean. “Yes, Bill and I have traveled all over the world, but on our anniversary, we go only there, it’s just magical.” She smiled. “We just celebrated our fifty-first, in May. Can you imagine, being married for fifty-one years?”
And Lily said, “To the same man?”
And Spencer laughed, and then carefully took his glasses from Lily, and put them on. “Did you say your anniversary is in May?” His eyes focused on Cameron.
“Yes, May 15. The Ides of May.”
“Ah,” said Spencer. “So you go just for that one day? A long way to fly, all the way to Mexico, no?”
“Oh, no, we go for the whole week. We get there two or three days before, and stay two or three days after.”
“It does sound great,” said Spencer, not looking at Lily, who put her hands on his forearm and said in a tiny voice,
spencer, please.
“Every year, you go? Last year, too? Around May 14?” He stared blinklessly at Lily.
“Of course.” Cameron frowned. “Last year was our fiftieth! We went for ten days. From the tenth to the twentieth, I think. Had a bit of a family reunion there, too.” She smiled. “We have seven great-grandchildren; they had a blast.”
Lily wasn’t letting go of Spencer, digging her fingertips into his arm. “Well, thank you, Mrs. Bryant,” she said quickly, her mouth tight. “We have to be going now. It was a pleasure to meet you.”
Spencer said, “Oh, yes. I learned so much about Cabo San Lucas that I didn’t know.”
“The pleasure was all mine. You’re a good listener, Detective O’Malley. You both are. And I always believed,” said Cameron, “that if you aren’t listening, you aren’t learning.”
“You are so right,” said Spencer. “Especially in my line of work.”
After she left he stood blankly, and Lily turned to him, holding on to his forearms. Her hands were squeezing him, grasping him, nearly all her weight was on him.
Spencer, please
, she kept repeating. He gently peeled her off him, sat her back down, sat down beside her. For a few minutes they both just sat there,
collapsed on the bench. They didn’t speak. Slowly they walked to say goodbye to the guys, to Gabe, and took a cab home.
At home, they laid their keys and weapons and wallets carefully upon the dresser, they made tea, they got Cokes, they sat on the couch. He asked what she wanted to watch, and she said what is there that’s mindless. They watched
Ace Ventura
, and even laughed. They got ready for bed, they got in, and he turned away and she turned away, but only for a moment.
“Spencer…”
“I knew you’d break first.”
“Come on, turn around.”
“No. I know you.”
But he turned to her.
“Spencer…” Her voice was supplicating. “I’m not saying don’t go talk to my brother. I’m not saying that. All I’m asking is that you look for Milo first. That’s all. Go see Lindsey Kiplinger’s parents, they must be back from vacation. Maybe they’ll tell you something that’s helpful. Find Milo. Please, Spencer, just…a couple of days, to look for Milo. It must have slipped Bill Bryant’s mind, that’s all, when he penciled Andrew into his personal diary on a day he was not in his office in New York City.”
Spencer was silent.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Lily said.
“You have no idea what I’m thinking.”
“I do. I do. Andrew’s alibi is bust. I know it looks bad, very bad, I know, but please. Please. For me, just a couple of days to look for the man to whom Amy gave Andrew’s gifts.”
Spencer was silent.
At last he said, “You know who knows who Milo is? Your brother. He knows, and twitches in agony every time I say Milo’s name out loud. He knows but he’s not telling.”
They slept.
The next bright and early morning, Spencer and Gabe were on their way to Port Jefferson to talk to Lindsey Kiplinger’s mother.
“Prepare yourself,” Spencer said. “We’re dealing with a grieving parent. Fix up your tie, look sharp and solemn.”
Lindsey Kiplinger’s mother was not happy to see them. She showed them into her kitchen, but she moved as if she wished she could call the cops on them. She was wary and confirmed it by saying belligerently, “I don’t know what kind of questions you could possibly have. My daughter has been dead for five years.”
“And we’re very sorry about that, Mrs. Kiplinger,” said Gabe, solemnly, as instructed. He was terrible at the straightened tie and sympathy. He always looked and talked like he wanted to knock somebody’s block off. When the mother turned around, Spencer elbowed him, whispering, “Shut the hell up, will you?”
“Just trying to help.”
“Help by shutting the hell up.”
They sat down at the kitchen table. Reluctantly she offered them some coffee. Gabe accepted, Spencer declined for both of them. “No, no, Mrs. Kiplinger, thanks, but we really have to be running.” As if to prove it, he got up and made Gabe stand up, too. “Look, losing someone so young is terrible, especially in a drunk-driving accident. Was it a hit and run?”
Mrs. Kiplinger looked at them as if they were speaking Russian.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “She didn’t die in a drunk-driving accident.”
“No? I’m sure that my notes say…” Spencer took out his blank notebook and started flipping through it.
“You can flip through
War and Peace
for all the good it’ll do you. I know what my daughter died of and it wasn’t drink.” She clasped a mug hard in her hand. “It was some kind of hallucinatory drug. They did an autopsy on her, she had large amounts of something called mescaline in her blood.”
Slowly Spencer closed his notebook. Gabe said, “That’s terrible. But mescaline doesn’t usually cause death, car crashes…”
“It does when the person who’s on it drives the car off a cliff in the Superstition Mountains.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize she—”
“She didn’t. What kind of notes do you have, she didn’t drive the car, her damn boyfriend did!”
Spencer opened his notebook, this time for real. He actually needed to write this down. “That’s awful. Do you have his name so we can pay respects to his family?”
“Respects? The bastard didn’t die.”
Spencer looked up from his notebook. “No?”
“No,
he
lived, the son of a bitch. He’s never come back home. They did some kind of a weird drug trip, crashed, my Lindsey died, and he suffered serious injuries, I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past his family to lie about the injuries so we don’t sue. But he hasn’t been back, that I know.” She narrowed her eyes at them. “What’s this about, anyway?”
“Was it just him and Lindsey in the car?”
“In the car, yes. I think there was a group of them involved in the—whatever.”
“Tell me, Mrs. Kiplinger, do you know anything about the Native American Church?”
“Oh, some tomfoolery thing them kids was involved in. I only heard about it afterwards.”
“Lindsey was involved in it?”
“Why do you want to know, anyway?”
“Because we’re trying to find
him.
” Spencer showed her a picture of Milo. She recoiled, squinted a little at the eyes, and then said that she would have remembered if she saw a face like that. But Spencer could tell that something in Milo’s eyes looked familiar to Mrs. Kiplinger.
“If you give us the last name of your daughter’s boyfriend, we’ll be on our way.”
“Clark. They live off Old Post Road. Why do you want to know?”
Spencer didn’t understand why people had to ask so many questions. Gabe, who was suddenly the less brusque one, replied. “Nothing serious. Just a couple of questions. Thanks so much,
you’ve been real helpful. Have a nice day now. And good luck.”
After they were in their car, Spencer said, “Have a nice day, and
good luck
?”
“Oh, I just freeze up in those situations. I don’t know what to say. All I want to do is ask my questions and go. All those niceties get stuck in my throat.”
“No fucking kidding.”
“O’Malley, what do you think the Native American Church has to do with all this?”
“Not sure. If the kids joined the church, they could get peyote, or mescaline, legally and for free.”
“How many kids are we talking about?”
“Well, Lily told me there were six of them. Lindsey and her boyfriend. Amy and possibly Milo. And two others. Out of the six of them, the Clark kid, Milo, and Amy are missing. Amy told Lily the other three are dead.”
“Man, that’s one rough joy ride,” said Gabe.
“We’ll find out. Let’s go and talk to Mrs. Clark. Do me a favor, though. Smile and nod politely, but whatever you do, don’t speak.”
Mrs. Clark was even more reluctant to talk to Spencer and Gabe than Mrs. Kiplinger, and wouldn’t open the door for them until they threatened her with a warrant. The scene thus set, she walked outside and with her arms tightly folded stood on the porch in the middle of a suburban Long Island neighborhood, with well kept lawns and double car driveways.
She didn’t look at them but at her freshly cut lawn when she said, “His life has been ruined. He has only a little peace now. Why can’t you leave him alone?”
Spencer tried to impress upon her that a crime may have been committed. Gabe McGill from HOMICIDE added weight to that nebulous statement.