The Poisoned Rose (23 page)

EPILOGUE

 

There was an early autumn that year, the August nights for the most part unseasonably cool. Some mornings it was even cold in my apartment. During my free time I did little more than watch over Elm Street from my three front windows. I watched as the days passed. Eventually I found work at the Mexican restaurant next door to the Hansom House, washing dishes and cleaning up after the cooks. Weekends I worked double shifts, from seven in the morning to well after midnight. The money wasn’t any better than what I was used to but it was all I was willing to do. I didn’t leave my block at the end of Elm Street for weeks at a time. Augie said there was shit going down in town and I didn’t want to know about it. I needed to play it safe. When I wasn’t working, I was home, at my windows; when I wasn’t at my windows, I was trying to sleep. This was as much life as I was allowed. It was all I wanted now.

I barely saw Augie. He made it clear enough right off that he was there for me if I needed him and then left me alone. I appreciated that more than anything. Augie knew the hurt I was in, had felt it himself when his wife was killed in Colombia.

Marie Bishop wasn’t my wife, but I had loved her, and she me, in our own ways.

Tina stopped coming around. School started, but of course it was more than that. We all knew that if it weren’t for Tina, if I hadn’t had to stop at the Hansom House that night to look for her, Marie Bishop would be alive and long gone right now. Tina was a kid and I tried not to blame her for Marie’s death. There was no way she could have known, there was no way she could have seen it coming. I knew that if she had she would have done things differently. But what happened had happened, and it was because of this that Tina stayed clear of me.

Eventually after a few months of my self-imposed house arrest I did venture off my block and into town. I hadn’t planned on it. It was my only day off from the restaurant and I stepped outside one afternoon and sensed a stillness in the air I hadn’t known in a long time, since last spring, since that night I came down looking for Augie. It seemed, this stillness, to be coming from the heart of town. This was the kind of East End day we locals lived for, that day when the tourists are finally, completely gone and the town, which had vibrated all summer long with crazy energy, goes suddenly quiet, like a ringing tuning fork pinched into silence between two fingers. I put on my denim jacket with the missing third button and walked the length of North Main into the village.

I looked south, in the direction of Village Hall, but I didn’t head toward that part of town. I had learned one thing, and that was quiet didn’t necessarily mean safe.

I walked west instead, past the IGA, walking with no real direction. A breeze brushed my unshaven face. The town was as silent as it was empty. Maybe it was this sense that led me to continue west. After a few minutes I was passing the cinema, where Long had picked me up and taken me to the Bishop home. At this point I was aware that I was heading somewhere specific, though I still wouldn’t admit to myself where that was. I just kept on, moving at a steady pace, heading into the breeze, deeper into the stillness. It wasn’t till I turned from Hill Street onto Halsey Neck Lane that I finally admitted to myself where it was I was going.

The Bishop estate, behind its hedges and gate, looked all closed up, the way so many houses here did at the end of the season. The gate had been chained but there was enough slack in it for me to squeeze through. I walked the gravel drive to the front door. I remembered being told by Marie’s father so long ago how that door, so heavy and ornate, had been rescued from a ruined church in France and brought over when the house was built in the twenties. I remembered passing through it as a boy freely, how it was never closed to me. I remembered how I had felt inside that house, running down its long halls or feeling the sun on my skin as I ate meals with Marie’s family in what their father called the open room. I remembered how the sun was made even more intense by the thick glass it shone though, glass that ran in long, narrow lead-lined panes from ceiling to floor.

I walked around to the back of the house. I felt safe within my connection to this place. I was no trespasser. I walked confidently and stepped out onto the patio and looked across Taylor Creek to the Dupont Sanctuary.

I walked down the lawn to its edge. I thought of winter coming, of ice. I thought of the body buried there, of the man Jean-Marc Bishop had killed out of perverse jealousy, of year upon year of frozen ground tightening its hold on those forgotten bones.

After a while I had enough of ghosts and memories, and enough of this silence, so I turned to head back up to the house. But I was stopped short by the sight of someone standing on the patio. I looked at him for a moment, then started back up the lawn. We stood on the slate and faced each other. There was a good ten feet between us.

He was in civilian clothes, slacks and a sport shirt and jacket. The shirt and jacket looked wrinkled. His face was like mine, unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and restless. Looking at him was nearly as difficult as looking at my own reflection. He looked to me precisely like what he was, which was a man who had lost it all.

“Came to savor the victory, MacManus?” he said.

“What are you doing here, Long?”

“I’m here to get a few things.”

“Isn’t it kind of late in the game to be tying up loose ends? Didn’t the FBI tear this place apart already?”

“It’s not loose ends I’m after today.” He paused. A breeze came up, carrying the smells of fall. “So I take it you’ve heard,” he said. “News travels fast in your neck of the woods.”

“Heard what?”

“That’s why you came here, isn’t it? To savor the victory?”

“What victory?”

“Someone cut Bishop in prison this morning. Cut his throat.”

I said nothing.

“Apparently,” Long continued, “he pissed off the wrong person. Can’t say I’m all that surprised. Of course, maybe it was something else. Maybe the Chief talked to someone who talked to someone, if you know what I mean.”

“Jean-Marc’s dead?”

“They don’t get any deader. Saves the state the cost of a trial, right? From what I heard, he had a shitload of doctors lined up. He was planning on claiming that he was the victim of lifelong abuse at the hands of his father. Scum to the end.”

“Jesus,” I muttered.

“You don’t look too happy, MacManus. I thought of all people you’d be thrilled to hear that particular piece of news. Well, you and the Chief, anyway.”

“Are you sure about this?” I said.

“Yeah. And your other friend, the one whose eyes you took out, they connected him to the cop that got killed last spring. He planted the gun and badge on that other leg breaker, the one who had been extradited here from Jersey. Automatic death penalty for your friend if he gets convicted, which he I’m pretty sure he will.”

I glanced across the water toward the refuge. When I looked back at Long, his eyes were on me.

“I doubt it’s still there,” he said. “The Chief has been doing some pretty elaborate dance moves these last two months. I’m pretty sure digging up and moving that body was one of them. If not first among them.”

“How’d you know?”

“About the body?”

“Yeah.”

“Bishop.”

“He trusted you that much?”

“No, he just wanted me to want the Chief out. He knew how to get to people. He knew how to get a person to do what he wanted them to do. You know that maybe better than anyone. Right? I mean, you knew Bishop the longest.”

“No, I knew him a long time ago. There’s a difference. Tell me, did you know the gun was a trick, that Searls still had the real one?”

Long nodded. “It wasn’t personal, MacManus, you know that. Sometimes your only choice is to make a deal with the devil.”

I said nothing, just looked back toward the refuge and thought about the dead and the wounded, the scarred and the maimed. I thought about my own injuries, the ringing in my ears that started that night it rained nightsticks on me and has yet to go away.

After a while I looked at Long and said, “So what are you going to do now?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Where do disgraced cops go?”

“Why did you do it? Why did you care that the Chief was doing what he was doing? Why’d you risk everything and take him on?”

“I’ve got a daughter, MacManus. I’ve got a wife. We live in this town, or will anyway till the bank kicks us out of our house. I was supposed to make this town safe for them, for everyone, not just for a chosen few, not for the Chief’s sociopath son and for rich scum like Bishop. I just couldn’t sit around on my hands and watch anymore. It was getting harder and harder to look at myself in the mirror. It was getting harder and harder to see the reflection of my face in my daughter’s glasses. Do you have any idea what kind of hell that is?”

Again, I said nothing.

Long shrugged. “Anyway, they’re proud of me. They don’t care if we lose the house. As long as they don’t learn the shit I did before my big brave stand, then maybe they’ll stay proud.”

“We’ve all done shit, Long,” I said.

He waited a moment, then said, “I remember the morning I found you all shot up on the floor of that kitchen. You were in and out of consciousness, and you kept saying, over and over, ‘I was too late. I was too late.’ I find myself saying that a lot lately. Maybe there’d be a lot of people still alive if I had done this sooner. You can drive yourself crazy just thinking about that, though, right? About what could have been. What should have been.”

I looked at Long and waited, saying nothing. I was back for a moment in the silence that had brought me here, brought me this far from my home.

“He’s still out for you, MacManus,” Long said finally. “The Chief. You know that, right? He’s out for you and me both now. Hell, my name is probably right next to yours on his list. I was thinking, you know, we might want to keep in touch with each other. In case some day one of us needs a friend.”

Over the flat water a hawk flew in a wide circle, hunting. There was no breeze suddenly. The air seemed cool, like a dead spot in a room.

“Maybe that’s a good idea,” I said.

“I don’t know where we’ll end up, my family and me, I mean. It’s pretty clear we’ve got a transition ahead of us. I should have stashed some cash away when I started this whole thing. But you don’t think that way, do you? You don’t think that you can lose it all. If you did, you’d probably never do anything.”

“Probably not.”

“Anyway, you’ll be around, right?”

“I’m not going anywhere. You know where to find me.”

Long looked at me for a time. I realized that he was holding a set of keys in his left hand.

“I’m sorry that she died, MacManus. You two had been through a lot together, from what I understand. Anyway, I’m sorry it turned out that way for her.”

I said the only thing I could say. “Me, too.”

“I’d offer you a ride back to town, but I’ve got some things to do here.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll walk. Take it easy, Long.”

“You, too, man.”

I left him and walked around the house to the driveway. Long’s car was parked by the front door. I saw that the gate was open, the chain that had held it closed in a pile on the grass. I walked down the drive and passed through the gate but decided not to leave just yet. I had to confirm a realization that had come to me suddenly. I crossed the wide street and stood beside a tree and waited. It wasn’t too long after this that I saw Long come through the front door. I watched him load his car with things that I recognized—Tiffany lamps, ornate wooden boxes that I knew contained silverware, gold candle stick holders, everything he could grab and sell for quick money.

I just stood beside the tree and watched. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other. After a few quick trips in and out of the house, Long locked the door behind himself and got into his car and drove down the driveway. At the road he got out, swung the gate closed and locked the chain around it, then drove off.

I hid behind the tree as he went. I didn’t care if he saw me. I just thought I’d spare him the embarrassment of being seen doing what he had to do for the sake of his family.

I retraced my steps back home, avoiding that part of town where the Chief and Frank Gannon were. I craved my home suddenly, deeply. But when I got there I felt restless. I stood in the doorway of my bedroom and looked at my unmade bed, at where we had come that night last spring, Marie and I, where I had held her in my arms, where she had told me her name was Rose and I was too drunk to know any different. I stood and watched the very spot where she had realized that I could not help her, that I wasn’t the man she had hoped I was, where I had watched her dress and where she last stood before leaving me to continue on her search for someone who wouldn’t betray her, someone who would die for her, who wouldn’t ever let her down.

That night in bed I searched for hours for sleep. When it finally came, the last thing I remember being aware of was a smoky dawn outside my windows and the sound of a neighbor’s dog barking in continuous warning a block away. I dreamed that dream again, of that long-ago morning when that rabid mastiff bore down on us, tearing into her and into me. The last thing I remember before waking from that dream was the echo of the shots fired by Chief Miller cutting the summer air and Rose-Marie Bishop pulling me across the pavement slick with our blood toward her, pulling me away from the mouth of the beast that had tried to devour us, pulling me into her young, trembling arms …

The End

Also by Daniel Judson

The Bone Orchard
, Book Two of The Gin Palace Trilogy

The Gin Palace
, Book Three of The Gin Palace Trilogy

The Darkest Place

The Water’s Edge

The Violet Hour

Voyeur

About the Author:

 

Daniel Judson, a Shamus Award winner and four-time finalist, is the author of seven acclaimed works: The Southampton Trilogy, comprised of
The Darkest Place
,
The Water’s Edge
, and
Voyeur
, as well as The Gin Palace Trilogy, comprised of
The Poisoned Rose, The Bone Orchard
, and
The Gin Palace
. He is also the author of a stand-alone novel,
The Violet Hour.