Their legs were still intertwined. Codella closed her eyes, and for an instant all of her was in the bed, between the sheets, with him. But in the very next instant, Julia Merchant’s voice was in her mind pulling her away from this comfortable reality. You’re a daughter, too. A daughter. You’re a daughter. And then she was thinking about the oxycodone Muñoz had detected in the rug fibers. “I’m going over to that Park Manor place tomorrow,” she told Haggerty. “I’m going to get my own carpet sample. I’ll have Muñoz run a test on that one, too.”
Haggerty’s lips were against the back of her head. “Do you always mix business with pleasure?”
“Sorry.”
He sighed. “Remember, those test kits can lie. It could be a false positive.”
“I know, I know. And I vouchered the fibers and sent them to the lab, but it could take weeks to get confirmation, and Julia Merchant’s evidence would never be admissible anyway. I have to get my own sample before there’s no sample to get.”
He rested his warm palm against her bare stomach. “Are you sure you’re not just manufacturing a homicide case because McGowan won’t give you one?”
His question was justified, she knew, because for three months he had been the sounding board for her frustration. He had listened patiently as she described every daily slight McGowan and Fisk had dealt her. And he had talked her off the ledge the night the Manhattan North duty sergeant steered a homicide to Fisk when she was the detective on call. “That case was mine,” she’d told Haggerty as they sat in a vegan restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue eating organic coconut açaí bowls. Well, she was eating hers and he was looking at his skeptically. “McGowan’s got his people deliberately shutting me out. I should go over his head with a complaint on that.”
“And then he’d really have it in for you,” Haggerty had said as he tentatively sampled the muddy mixture in his bowl. “Listen, Claire. You’ve got to keep your cool. Don’t let him see how you really feel. Remember, he’s only there because he’s got two uncles with captain shields. Wait him out. Sooner or later he’ll do something really stupid and they’ll ship him off to some other unlucky squad.”
Now she placed her palm over Haggerty’s hand. She looked out the window and tried to see the tip of the Empire State Building’s spire—on very clear nights it was just visible over the rooftops—but tonight the falling snow concealed it. “Thanks,” she said.
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Just thanks for being here.”
“Does that mean I get to spend the night?”
“Maybe. If you stop leaving the toilet seat up.”
She could feel him grinning in the dark, and she thought about how she had liked that grin from the moment she had met him eight years ago, the day she had joined the 171st. Three detectives had been sitting in the squad room that day, she remembered, but only Haggerty had looked up at her.
“Which one of these desks is mine?” she’d asked.
He shrugged and patted the metal desk next to his. “This one’s free—if you want to sit by your new partner.”
The flirtation was harmless, but the last thing she wanted was a squad of male detectives infusing every word to her with sexual innuendo. “Thanks,” she answered coolly.
He seemed to get the message. “Where you from, Codella?” he asked in a neutral voice, speaking low.
“Cranston, Rhode Island.”
“Cranston, huh? Aren’t you supposed to pronounce that Craaaaanston?” And then he had shown her that grin.
“Pretty good.” She smiled. “But it needs to be a little more nasal.”
“Don’t you want to know where I’m from?”
Codella booted up the computer terminal at her new desk and wondered if it had been vacant because no one wanted to listen to his chatter.
“Staten Island,” he volunteered.
“The borough nobody wants?”
“Hey, we don’t get to choose where we’re born, now do we?” He raised an eyebrow, and she had the uncanny sense that he was telling her, I get you. I know who you are.
Haggerty had been her partner her entire time at the 171st, and she had come to know all his habits as well as he knew hers. If he’d spent the night with some woman he’d picked up in a bar, he arrived the next morning in yesterday’s clothes, shaved in the second floor precinct bathroom, and slapped on too much cologne, which she had to breathe all day. If he’d spent the night with a bottle of Knob Creek, his breakfast would be hard-boiled eggs and tea loaded with sugar. He smoked when he was thinking. And when he was depressed, he flirted with her to distract himself and she’d have to say, “Cut the bullshit.” But Haggerty hadn’t really opened up to her until three years ago when she and Vic Portino pulled him out of a pub after he picked a fight with a guy at the bar. She took him to her apartment, sat him on her couch with a cup of strong coffee, and just watched him.
“You got a boyfriend, Codella?” he asked her.
“You know I don’t do boyfriends, Haggerty.”
“You don’t see yourself getting married, making a couple of babies, having the perfect life?”
“Who the fuck has the perfect life?”
“I don’t know.” His speech was thick from the alcohol. “I see these rich moms in their tight yoga outfits dropping kids off at private school every morning. Their lives seem pretty damn perfect.”
“Drink the coffee, Haggerty.”
But he didn’t sip it once, and his eyes were so red and squinted she wondered if he could even bring her into focus.
He leaned forward and set down the untouched coffee. “I once thought I’d get married, have kids. Even bought an engagement ring. Cost me twelve big ones I didn’t have, but I was in love.” He laughed. His laughter turned almost uncontrollable.
“Drink some coffee,” she said again.
He still didn’t touch the coffee. “Her name was Cindy. Had a big apartment in Murray Hill—courtesy of Daddy.” His head flopped back on her couch, and he stared at the ceiling. “God, I loved to go out with her, Codella. I loved to be seen with her. Stupid, huh? Shallow of me? But she was smart and beautiful. A law student. I couldn’t believe my luck. Why would someone like her want to be with me, you know?” He lifted his head and looked over. “I fucking agonized over that ring. Would she like it? Was it impressive enough? And I must have rehearsed a hundred times how I was going to propose. I was so fucking nervous.”
He was nervous now, she thought as she watched him bite his lower lip.
“So I showed up at her apartment one afternoon. Doorman always gave me the key. I had it in my head we’d make love and if it felt like the right time, I’d take the ring out and ask her the big question, but I never got the chance.”
Codella watched his hand grip his jaw as he spoke. She didn’t know why he had chosen this moment to tell her this story, but she sensed he was determined to get it out, even if he woke up tomorrow and regretted it.
“She was in bed with another guy. They were naked. Her hair’s all tangled. They’ve obviously just finished fucking. I’m too stunned to think clearly. So I say, ‘What’s going on?’ She just looked at me with her mouth gaping, but the guy, he smiles, pulls her close, and says, ‘What do you think’s going on? She’s done slumming with an Irish cop. Now get the fuck out of here.’ I can still hear how that fucker laughed as I turned to leave.” Haggerty leaned forward and stared at Codella’s rug as if he were looking at an enormous, shiny cockroach. “That motherfucking bastard. Bet he dumped her the same way she dumped me.”
“Why are you telling me this, Haggerty?” she asked him gently.
He met her eyes, and he looked absolutely sober. “Because that asshole in the bar tonight—that was him.”
After that Haggerty went to the bathroom, vomited, and fell asleep on her couch.
He was gone when she woke up the next morning, and he didn’t say a word to her when she walked into the squad room, so she knew he remembered his confession. He still hadn’t spoken to her when they signed out a car and drove to the BMW dealership on Eleventh Avenue to investigate a string of car thefts. He was embarrassed, she figured, and she gave him his space until they returned to the precinct two hours later and he still wasn’t talking to her. She motioned him into an interrogation room, closed the door, and stood right in front of him so he had to meet her eyes. “Look, you’ve been holding that rejection inside of you for a long time. It had to come out. It’s a good thing.”
“If you ever tell anyone, Codella—”
And then she grabbed both his shoulders and pushed him up against the wall. “Stop. Don’t even say it.”
She wasn’t sure if he was stunned by her grip on him or by the words, but he just stood there.
“Look, I’ll tell you something,” she said still holding onto him. “I don’t have a bunch of girlfriends I shoot the shit with. I don’t do friends or boyfriends very well. You want the truth? You’re the closest thing I have to a best friend. And I would never humiliate you. Get that straight.” Then she’d released him and walked out of the room, and they’d never spoken about Cindy again.
The drone of a garbage truck on the street below brought Codella back into the bed. She twisted around to face Haggerty. “My father’s out of prison, by the way. He and my mother are back together.”
“Huh?” Haggerty propped himself on his elbow. “Did I just miss a transition?”
Codella sat up. “When Julia Merchant showed up this afternoon, I took an instant dislike to her. She made me feel ashamed of myself.”
“You? Ashamed of yourself?”
“It’s strange, I know. But she’s the devoted daughter I never was. When I left Cranston, I didn’t look back. I haven’t seen my mother in eighteen years. After Muñoz did the presumptive tests for me tonight, I went back uptown and ran a DMV on my mother. She’s got a suspended license on a DUI—her taste for alcohol hasn’t changed—and she’s still living in the same yellow cracker box on Pleasant Street where I grew up.”
“Love that name. Pleasant Street.” Haggerty combed his fingers through her hair.
“Trust me. It didn’t deserve the name. I checked my father’s incarceration status, too. He was paroled four years ago and he’s back on Pleasant Street. My mother waited for him for twenty-two fucking years, and now they’re back together. Nothing has changed for her.”
“But it has for you.” Haggerty’s hairy legs brushed against her smooth ones. He kissed her lips gently. “Go to sleep, Detective.”
Five minutes later, he was sleeping soundly, and she slipped out of the bed, pulled on an NYPD sweatshirt and shorts, and tiptoed into the dark living room. She hadn’t been on Pleasant Street in Cranston for twenty-six years—since she was ten—but she still remembered her last night there. And that wasn’t so surprising, she reflected. Didn’t people always remember the childhood events that caused them spectacular joy or profound sadness? She could only summon a fuzzy, featureless image of her mother standing at the kitchen sink that night, but she effortlessly reconstituted every detail of her father’s face—his puffy jowls with a dark five o’clock shadow, his thick chest hair coiling over the V-neck of his T-shirt, the sheen of sweat on his forehead below his combed-back hair. Claire had been sitting next to him at the round faux-marble kitchen table that night as he ate his meal in silence. When he finished, he wiped his mouth on a white paper napkin, crumpled it, and tossed it on his plate. Then he pushed out his chair. “I gotta go.”
“What else is new?” Her mother slammed her shot glass on the Formica counter. “You must think I’m running a restaurant here or something. You think you can just pay the check and go every night?”
Claire watched the napkin on her father’s plate absorb the pool of red marinara.
“What’s got into you?” he snapped.
“I’m up to here. That’s what.” Her mother raised her palm to chest level.
“What do you want from me? I got a job.”
“Yeah, sure. And what’s your job’s name?”
“Shut up, Maureen.”
“Because I’m not one of those ditsy little Italian housewives who looks the other way, remember? I’m Irish, even if I make a better gravy than your mother.” She waved a disdainful hand at his dinner plate and poured herself another shot. Her father’s expression was cold and implacable, but her mother refused to heed the warning signs. She continued, “What does she do for you, huh? What’s her job?”
He pounded the table with both fists. His plate jumped. “I said shut up, Maureen.” He turned to Claire. “Don’t you have school work? Go do it.”
Claire got up.
“Does she get on her knees?” Her mother’s taunts were fueled by cheap vodka. “Does she get down there and say, ‘Oh baby, it’s so big’?”
From the next room, Claire heard her father shout, “Shut your fucking mouth, you stupid Irish cunt, or I’ll shut it for you!” She heard the familiar crack of his hand across her mother’s face. She moved reflexively back into the doorway as her mother staggered, lost balance, hit the Formica counter, and fell. When her mother got back on her feet, blood was rolling down her forehead. She was smiling. “I see I touched a nerve, huh? I guess I got it right,” she said in a scornful voice that precipitated another blow to her jaw. Then Claire’s father turned and saw Claire in the doorway. “Get the fuck out of here.” He raised his fist. “Unless you want some too.”
Claire could have run upstairs and crawled under her bed. She could have hidden in the basement or at the back of a closet. But in the panic of the moment, she ran out the front door to the silence of the street. To the end of screaming and slapping. She was breathing fast. She stood at the end of the driveway and looked both ways down the block. The neighbors’ houses appeared warm and inviting, but then, so did hers. She walked to the end of the dark block and back, hugging herself. She had not thought to grab her jacket, and in the biting winter air, her teeth were chattering. The bottoms of her feet absorbed the coldness of the concrete sidewalk through her thin sneakers. Her fingers grew stiff. She tugged at the heavy garage door—it would be warmer in there—but she did not have enough strength to lift it. She could no longer feel her toes. Her ears burned. She looked into the next-door neighbor’s house. Mrs. Nardallillo was sitting in front of her television. But Claire knew that knocking at a neighbor’s door was not an option, that exposing her family’s secret violence would have dire consequences she could not quite articulate.
Then she remembered the old blanket in the back of her father’s Impala. She opened the rear passenger-side door. The blanket was balled up on the floor behind the driver’s seat. She crawled into the car and closed the door behind her so the dome light wouldn’t draw attention to her. She was draping the blanket over her shoulders when the front door slammed. She dropped to the floorboard and pulled the blanket over her head. The driver’s door opened and shut and the driver’s seat pressed into her shoulder as her father adjusted his position. She was too terrified to breathe. Her teeth began to chatter from fear, not cold. She bit into her hand hard to stop them. The car rolled down the driveway, and she stayed beneath the scratchy wool blanket, her cramped, rigid body in agony, as they twisted and turned through the dimly lit streets of Cranston.
Finally the car came to a stop. The driver’s door opened and slammed shut again. Her father’s heavy footsteps moved away from the car and faded into the night. She remained under the blanket for several minutes. Then she peeked out, sat up slowly, and peered over the driver’s seat. Through the front windshield she was staring at an unfamiliar street. She looked over her shoulder, through the rear windshield, and saw that her father had backed the car into the driveway of a small, aluminum-sided house. He had popped the trunk of the car, obstructing part of her view.
She waited and waited. Each exhalation became a small cloud in front of her mouth. She stuffed her hands between her legs to warm them. Her shivering made her aware that she needed to go to the bathroom, and the more she tried to ignore this need, the more it intensified. She held her legs tightly together and rocked in time to a song she had learned in school. O Mary, we crown thee with roses today. Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May. She mumbled the words over and over until the song ceased to distract her from her physical discomfort, and she opened her door, walked up the driveway at the side of the house, and peered through a window into a small living room.
She saw it all like a silent movie. The woman’s terrified face. Her mouth forming words. No. No. Please. Her arms moving up to shield her face. Her father’s surprisingly placid expression as he swung the bat into her stomach so hard that she bent forward and vomited. The second swing that bent the woman’s knees unnaturally and sent her to the floor. The third and fourth blows that must have broken vertebrae. Her father mouthing some words while the woman writhed in pain and pleaded for mercy at his feet. And then the home run hit that crushed the left side of her skull.
Claire did not realize she was screaming until her father looked up and their eyes met through the windowpane. He dropped the bat and came outside. He clamped one latex-gloved hand over her mouth and dragged her into the house as she kicked and screamed. “You stupid little shit.” He launched her into a corner, and her head slammed against the wall. Only then, as she watched him unfurl an industrial-size black plastic bag, did she realize that she had urinated. Her father worked the trash bag around the body, stuffed the bloody bat inside, and carried out his handiwork. Then he came back for her, and when they emerged, two Cranston police cars were blocking the driveway.
At the Cranston Station, they called Claire’s mother. When she showed up, she was so inebriated that they refused to let her take Claire home. She slapped Claire’s face over and over in the station bullpen and screamed “Look what you’ve done! This is your fault!” until two officers pulled her off and arrested her on a DUI and child endangerment. Then a social worker was called and Claire had to talk to a detective, and then she began her odyssey through the Child Protective Services system while her mother “stood by her man”—unlike Joanie Carlucci, the woman Claire’s father had punished for not standing by hers.
Now Codella stared through her living room window at the snow blanketing Broadway. She touched the side of her abdomen where the lymphoma had been. In the wake of cancer, this touch had become habitual, a way of reassuring herself that the cancer was gone. She saw a yellow cab—the only vehicle on the snow-covered street—fishtail when the light turned green. She thought of her mother and father, now in their sixties, whose only intimacy had ever been violence and a shared bottle of cheap vodka. Codella had been an afterthought in their lives. She had existed in their physical space but not in their emotional world. When she had left, her mother never reached out in an effort to reclaim her. She had discarded Claire as easily as New Yorkers let go of flyers people shoved at them in Times Square. Codella supposed it was natural to feel sadness about that, but she had compartmentalized her sadness well—or at least, she thought she had. But this afternoon, Julia Merchant had flaunted her mother-daughter bond and reminded Codella that her mother had chosen a bottle and a monster over her.
Codella exhaled a deep breath. She was lucky her mother had let her go. She had escaped and made herself into the opposite of her mother. She had never allowed herself to become someone else’s victim, and now it was her job to avenge those who were victims.
She turned away from the window. If someone had killed Julia Merchant’s mother, she told herself, she would find out who. And then she returned to the bed and fitted her body against Haggerty’s warmth.