SILENCE WAS AT THE heart of the job.
On TV detectives ran around waving guns, cars screeched and flipped over, bad guys shouted and jumped fences. In real life there was violence and noise during the crime, and there would be crying and confusion after, but in these first moments of discovery, the scene was still as a painting.
The condo was expensive and freshly painted, the few items of furniture new and pricey, but the place was a mess. Dirty clothes lay in heaps around the bedroom and the hall, beer cans and junk-food wrappers spread like confetti in the living room, crusty plates were piled in the kitchen sink. As usual, Jack was afflicted by the desire to start tidying up, to make some sense of the disorder; as usual, he refrained. A few posters provided the only decor: a Bud Light ad; a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model over which someone had pasted Hillary Clinton’s head; the ghoulish made-up face of some rock star called Marilyn Manson. The magazines on the coffee table—Money, Entrepreneur, Playboy, GQ—were addressed to one Bruce Serinis, who was currently splayed out on the living room carpet, DOA.
Jack had caught the fresh case so soon after his talk with Sergeant Tanney that he suspected his boss had tampered with the sacred rotation order. He was angry, but realized that little would be gained by a fight. Not until he had a solid lead on the Berrios case.
For now, he had this job in Park Slope. Most Brooklyn homicides took place in rough areas like East New York, which saw scores of drug-related slayings and simple diss murders—citizens popped just for looking at their neighbors the wrong way. But the Slope was a bastion of yuppies with baby carriages, health food stores, renovated brownstones. The rare homicides on the eastern side of the seventy-eighth Precinct were likely to be the result of a mugging gone wrong, not this sort of inside job.
It was a busy Saturday night—the usual crew of Crime Scene techs and other interested parties had not arrived yet. The local detective, one Tommy Keenan, was a clothes horse: cream linen jacket, red silk tie, gold bracelet on one wrist, a Rolex or a damn good imitation on the other. The linen jacket was not a great sign, Jack thought—it didn’t indicate any eagerness to get in close to the blood and guts of the job. And Keenan was a rookie.
Even so, he’d evidently been on the job long enough to become blasé about the sight of a murder victim. He seemed more interested in a photo of a half-naked woman than in the body of the late tenant. He whistled and held the picture up in a rubber-gloved hand. “Check it out. This is that chick from the new Star Trek. You know, the one who plays the shrink on the Enterprise?”
“That’s very exciting,” Jack deadpanned. “Make sure you include it in your Fives.”
It was clear from the get-go that drugs might be involved in the case—they’d found a professional scale on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room, a tin of silica gel packages in a drawer, seven boxes of sandwich-size Baggies in a cupboard, a stack of wax-paper squares for wrapping grams of coke. If that wasn’t enough, there were pot seeds in the crease of the Grateful Dead double album—an LP, historical relic—on the coffee table. An empty bong lay on the carpet next to a foul-smelling stain. Apparently the vic had been hit while sitting on the couch, then sprawled forward, knocking over the pipe.
“Thank God for AC,” Keenan said. Serinis might have been dead for a couple of days, but the apartment was so chilly that he hadn’t started to smell much—or at least not worse than the bong water.
“I remember the first DOA I ever caught,” Keenan said. “This guy’s neighbors smelled something bad coming out of his apartment—and it was the middle of a heat wave. We break down the door and there’s this old guy laid out on his kitchen floor; he’d been dead a long time and he was blown up like a parade float. My partner gives me a couple cigarette niters to put up my nose. I see this half-empty bottle of roach killer lying next to the vic. One of the neighbors walks in. ‘Oh, shit,’ she says. ‘He just come home from the clinic last week. They told him he had roaches of the liver.’”
Keenan dug a finger in the back of his collar. “Can you believe it? Cirrhosis of the liver.” He laughed, a ghastly booming noise, then moved closer to the body. “How do you see this? I mean, there’s no forced entry, so the vic probably knew the killer. Some customer comes over to make a buy, figures why give old Brucie the money when he can just take it, instead?”
“Maybe,” Jack said. “But it looks more personal than that.”
Keenan bent down for a closer look at the dents in Bruce Serinis’s forehead. “I guess you’re right.” The perp could have come up behind Serinis when he was cleaning the seeds out of his Maui Wowee—knock him over, take the money, get out. But this was a facial assault, which often meant that he had something emotional against the vic.
Keenan yawned. “Those Crime Scene guys are taking their goddamn time. You wanna watch the tube? He’s got cable.”
“No. Go ahead if you want.”
Jack’s new partner didn’t move toward the TV. Instead, he perched on a stool, careful not to disturb anything on the counter. The clock in the kitchen ticked loudly. The refrigerator hummed. Keenan shifted on his seat. “You remember the first time you saw a body?”
“A body?” Jack said. A chill flicked the base of his spine.
“Yeah. Not at a funeral—I mean, out on the street.”
Jack looked down and pinched some carpet lint off his knee. “I don’t know,” he lied. He had been fifteen years old. November 14, 1965. One o’clock in the afternoon.
“I guess when I was in the Army,” he said instead.
“You saw somebody get shot in Nam?”
“No. It wasn’t a gunshot. And it was in Germany. I was stationed there for a few months before I got shipped to the Philippines. It was winter, and we had to go walk guard duty—it was so cold that sometimes our feet would literally freeze. We’d start up a jeep, then take off our boots, sit on the back, warm our feet in the exhaust. One night this grunt was doing that and some hot dog swung a personnel carrier real fast into the compound, crushed him right into the back of the jeep.”
“Oof.” Keenan grimaced.
Jack wandered over to a sleek black answering machine. The counter said three messages. He pulled on a glove and then pressed play.
“Bruce, it’s your mother. Your father and I were wondering if you’d like to come up for the weekend. You can bring a friend if you want. What was that nice girl’s name—Laurie? Anyhow, call us. We might have a barbecue on Sunday.” Beep.
“Serinis, you stud-muffin, it’s Alan. That chick looked pretty wasted by the time we left. What a cow. So, did you fuck her? Let me know—I’m at work.” Beep.
“Yo, Brewster, man, it’s Dingo. Can I come over and get something later? Like around midnight? I’ve got the cash right now. Call me at home. Thanks.” Beep.
Jack turned to his new partner. “Could be our perp right there. If some cokehead was dumb or stoned enough to leave a message like that, he might have been dumb enough not to erase it after he did the murder.”
“We need to find old Dingo.”
“Let’s look for an address book.”
“Hold on.” Keenan walked over to a desk in the corner, where animated tropical fish swam across a computer screen. He nudged the mouse and the Desktop blipped into view. He sat down and clicked on various icons.
“I’ve got an address list,” he said after a minute. “No ‘Dingo,’ though.”
He returned to his clicking and scrolling. “Wait a minute. Here we go. Boy, he did a great job of hiding the file—he called it ‘Cheech and Chong.’ Phone numbers, even addresses. And here’s our friend Dingo.”
“Tell you what,” Jack said, sitting wearily on a stool. “If you want to go pick up our boy, I’ll wait here for the Crime Scene guys. Get some backup before you go over there.”
Keenan grinned. He made a quick call to request that a couple of patrol units meet him at the location.
“I’ll let you know how it goes down. Thanks, Leightner.”
Jack sat in the silent apartment, remembering a victim in Germany. And another one in Red Hook.
To shut out the past, he went over and stared down at the present vic.
Bruce Serinis was dead. He wouldn’t be attending the Princeton alumni reunion marked by the invite on the coffee table. He wouldn’t watch any of the programs listed in the TV Guide for the rest of the week, would never again call any of the customers in his computer file. But Jack could watch the TV and he could pick up the phone. That was one of the strange lessons of the homicide squad: a life could be snuffed out in an instant, but the world went right on.
Serinis lay in a twisted, awkward position. The side of his face was smashed into the carpet and his mouth sagged slack. Human life was a battle to stand up, take steps, fight gravity. With a blow or gunshot—bang!—gravity suddenly won. Every crime scene was a testament to that victory.
Looking at the slumped, wasted bodies, Jack found it hard to believe in an afterlife. It was difficult to look at Serinis and consider him more than just blank flesh. And he didn’t feel his usual curiosity about the victim. That was partly due to an instinctive distaste: he didn’t like the rampant sense of irony in the apartment, from the posters to the victim’s T-shirt, which read: Welcome to New York. Now Fuck Off. He didn’t like the sound of the friends on the answering machine; didn’t like the picture of a shallow and slobby life. He had dealt with all sorts of mutts as victims, but they didn’t have the opportunities this kid had had. It was one thing to sell drugs if you were trying to break out of the ghetto, but this graduate of an Ivy League school should have made better use of his head start.
Maybe it wasn’t the victim. Maybe he was just getting burnt out on the job. Sick of all the corpses. He’d seen plenty of old workhorses who didn’t give a shit anymore, who just plodded toward their pensions. The Homicide beat didn’t foster an optimistic outlook. Dive bars and casual sex didn’t help. He had to cast far back to find moments—making love with his new wife, holding his infant son for the first time—when he’d been certain that the body was filled with a spirit.
The clock ticked on. He picked up the copy of Playboy from the coffee table and flipped through a pictorial. The July Playmate of the Month had tits that were perfectly round and so freestanding that they had to be fake. And she had one hand between her legs. Christ. He remembered Playboy from the days when he could really get excited about it, at thirteen, fourteen. Back then the models had big tits but they were real and slightly droopy. And the women were modest, wearing negligees coyly placed to conceal even the slightest trace of bush. He’d been thinking a lot lately about whether life tended to get better or worse—this seemed like a crazy way to mark the progress.
He remembered a stack of magazines in an old shed, a clubhouse where the more streetwise Red Hook kids smoked cigarettes and speculated about sex. He’d been initiated into the club after he boosted a carton of smokes from a five-and-dime. That was a time when, despite his father’s heavy hand, Jack had started taking pleasure in small acts of rebellion. His brother followed him to the clubhouse one day, but Jack told him to buzz off, to come back when he was older. If only he could take back those moments—if only he could go back in time and invite him in.
Peter, who left this world before he really lived in it. Who never saw men land on the moon. Never watched the Beatles turn hippie. Never knew that Nixon became president. Or Ford or Carter or the rest. Never used a computer, VCR, or fax machine. Never even had a chance to make love to a woman.
Jack sighed, then stood up. His heart was heavy, but he’d been carrying this weight for thirty-five years.
Out in the hallway a uniform kept guard, a beefy Irish kid. He held one hand to his belt in the stance of an aspiring gunfighter, but his eyes were dull with the boredom of the job.
Jack pulled the door closed. “Don’t touch anything in there, okay? If the Crime Scene guys show up, tell ’em I just went out for a cup of coffee.”
“Yes, sir,” the kid replied.
Jack pulled out a cigarette. He coughed as he took the first drag. A little voice in his head said, Those are gonna kill you someday. Another voice answered: Everybody died.
The sidewalks of Park Slope buzzed with couples and hungry singles, crowds streaming across Seventh Avenue against the lights. A group of yuppies in rumpled business suits spilled out of a bar and swaggered around Jack without a single “excuse me;” the air was thick with alcohol and testosterone.
Happy faces floated past, but he was sinking. He thought of calling Michelle—he wanted to call Michelle—but her image in his mind was blended with a picture of Mr. Gardner lying helpless upstairs. Was that the only reason he didn’t call? No, he dug deeper into his heart and hit ice: he was afraid.
And tired: he hadn’t slept well in a week.
There was always Sheila. He hadn’t spoken to her since his last drop-in; now here he was considering a call. What a sad sack.
He could fall into a bar instead; he was in plainclothes, so who would be the wiser? He wanted to bury himself—in flesh, in alcohol, it didn’t matter.
Go home, he told himself. Go talk to your son.
He was afraid of that too.
Instead, he walked. Off Seventh Avenue, the side streets were quiet save for a few dog walkers and couples promenading in the warm night air. He turned a corner outside a church. Through a tall iron fence, a group of little white statues gleamed amid some dark ivy. A shepherd. A wise-faced little lamb. The Virgin Mary, sad and sweet.
He paused, weary. He supposed he should get back to the crime scene, but he was sick of the smell of bong water, sick of searching the remnants of Bruce Serinis’s wasted life. What was he doing? he wondered. A Jewish man standing in the dark outside a church? He didn’t have to be Christian to be moved by the Virgin, though. She had the face of any mother grieving over her murdered son.
“The meeting’s down there,” someone said in the darkness.
Jack spun around. Under the little bit of light that filtered down from a street lamp through the dense trees, a man sat on the steps of the church, smoking. The stranger leaned over the railing and pointed. A flight of stairs led down below street level to a door. “It’s okay. It hasn’t started yet. Go on in.”
“I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”
The man sat back and took a deep drag of his cigarette. “Whatever. It’s an open meeting.”
Jack stepped away. He looked at his watch and realized that he’d only killed ten minutes. Chances were that the Crime Scene team hadn’t even arrived yet. On impulse, he turned back and walked down the stairs.
He felt awkward entering the church, even if it was only the basement. When he was a kid in Red Hook, some neighborhood boys had dared him to go inside Visitation Church. They told him he’d be hit by lightning because he was a Christ Killer.
He walked down a corridor to a large fluorescent-lit basement hall. Rows of people sat in folding chairs facing a low stage with a faded red velvet curtain and an American flag on a stand. It reminded him of his elementary-school auditorium. Out of old habit, he found a seat near the back.
A lanky red-haired man casually mounted the stage and sat behind a card table. “Okay, let’s get going,” he said. “If this is your first time here, you should know that we have a regular meeting every night, and on Fridays we have a special Step meeting after that.”
Jack glanced around and noticed small red-lettered signs on the walls which proclaimed One Day At A Time and Take It Easy. His eyes widened at a big scroll headed The Twelve Steps. He’d stumbled into an AA meeting. Would it suddenly stop when they noticed the arrival of an impostor?
Flushed, he was about to jump up, but when he looked around no one seemed concerned about his presence. The forty or so members sat calmly, many of them with arms folded across their chests. He’d never been to such a meeting before, but he’d imagined they’d be full of old men with stubbly beards, wearing dirty raincoats. Alcoholics. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might look like this, these people who might have walked in off a busy downtown street. People in suits and ties. Normal-looking people.
Nowadays his own father would probably be called an alcoholic, though he hadn’t drunk steadily through the week. Paydays were the worst, when the old man would go on a bender, spinning like a tornado through the row of waterfront bars. But back then, you were simply a “drinking man” or “dry,” and there weren’t many of the latter down on the docks.
On a bulletin board at the Homicide Task Force office, someone had posted a flyer for ACOA meetings. Adult Children of Alcoholics. Jack scoffed at the notion. Meetings, steps, counseling—it all seemed riddled with weakness. So what if he’d had a tough childhood? Who didn’t, down in the Hook?
The red-haired man glanced at his watch. “Okay, let’s start with our qualifying speaker.”
A young woman in the front row stood and walked up on stage. She sat and cleared her throat.
“Hi, my name is Janet, and I’m an alcoholic and an addict.”
“Hi, Janet,” everyone around Jack replied. Startled, he looked around, thinking that someone was sure to notice his silence.
“I’m going to talk for a while,” Janet said. “Then we’ll open this up to anyone who wants to share.”
She wore a businesswoman’s suit with a skirt and a silk bow, and her blond hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail. She looked as though she belonged in some suburban country club. She was pretty, Jack noticed—he glanced under the table and saw that she had great legs. Inwardly, he snorted—what hard-luck story could she tell? That she sometimes drank an extra glass of white wine after a tennis match?
“I had my first drink when I was twelve,” she said. “I was a chubby girl. My parents were always pushing me to join different groups or take classes after school, but I never felt comfortable with other kids. I didn’t want to go to school at all because I was so scared of talking to people.”
“My parents went out a lot to social events, political fundraisers and things. We got left with this baby-sitter who would fall asleep right away. My dad kept his liquor on a little side table in his den. There was this green bottle sitting there; I was curious, because my father always drank some when he came home from work. One night I went in and poured a little bit into the cap, like mouthwash. I swallowed it in one gulp. It tasted terrible. I swallowed a couple more capfuls and—this may sound strange—I realized immediately that I had found something I could be good at. I could be good at drinking.”
Jack shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable on the hard metal chair. He glanced around. The other listeners sat back patiently, half of their attention focused on the speaker and half directed somewhere deep within themselves. A couple of them nodded their heads sympathetically.
“Before, when I went into a room full of strangers, I was so scared I felt like I was going to pass out, but I found that if I drank a little first I could deal with it. It wasn’t that hard to get ahold of the liquor. My parents ordered a lot and they didn’t keep track of it. And drinking helped me to start making friends with other kids at school. We’d sneak off during free time and get people to buy us some Boone’s Farm or André cold duck.”
The listeners chuckled, remembering their own drinking days.
“When I was fourteen, I got shipped off to prep school up in New Hampshire. I don’t remember much from those years because I was so drunk most of the time. Or high. A lot of the kids had really good pot. Or quaaludes. We had ways to get into town and get adults to buy liquor for us. There were a lot of fucked-up kids there, kids whose parents were famous, or psychiatrists, or whatever. These were sophisticated kids: they didn’t drink cold duck. We had Amaretto drunks, Drambuie drunks…
“I don’t know how I managed to graduate. I guess you had to do something really terrible to get kicked out of that school.
“In college, it was easy to drink. It was even encouraged. I joined a sorority and we used to make the rounds of all the frat parties. We’d get wasted on grain-alcohol punch. It tasted like Kool-Aid.”
“The second semester of my sophomore year, I went to this Halloween party. I must have blacked out. When I woke up I was in a storage room full of old bedframes and stained mattresses, and this guy was on top of me. He might have been raping me, or maybe I started it. I couldn’t remember. The next thing I knew there were a couple of his friends in the room. They gave me some shots of bourbon with Coors chasers. Boilermakers. And then they took turns fucking me. One of them even threw up on me.”
Jack looked around. He felt uncomfortable listening to this raw confession, but the others were impassive, still. It seemed incredible that someone would stand up and say such things to a group of strangers, and nearly as incredible that the strangers would calmly listen.
“I woke up the next day,” she continued. “Somehow—I have no idea how—I got back to my dorm room. I should have felt horrible, but I didn’t let myself feel anything. I took a couple of quaaludes and went to this bar in town and drank three pitchers of beer.
“After college I went to law school. To this day, I can’t imagine how I got in. Maybe the interviewer thought I looked cute. I was sort of conventionally pretty by then, and of course I was blond. I used my looks a lot. On the inside, I felt like I was really ugly, that I was just shit, but guys were always coming on to me, so I used it.
“I was still a functioning alcoholic. I was able to do my schoolwork during the day and party just at night and on the weekends.
“The pressure that first year was really terrible, with such a heavy course load, but I met this guy in the library who turned me on to speed. I started getting into coke too, into freebasing. I remember one time I went home for Thanksgiving and I was so wired that I almost ground my teeth completely down. My mother asked what was wrong, and I just told her that I was under a lot of stress with the studying. They didn’t know, my parents. They were too fucked up themselves. Five o’clock cocktails.
“I hardly ever went out anymore. I’d just stay in my room, ’base, drink. I didn’t eat. I spent all the money my parents sent me on staying drunk, staying high. I would even drink in lecture classes. Take an orange soda and pour out half the can, fill the rest up with vodka.
“The school finally kicked me out. I told my parents I was taking a semester off. I started hanging out with some really bad people. I would black out a lot, but somehow I always made it back to my apartment. I’d get phone calls, people telling me that they’d found my purse somewhere. I’d pass out on trains, get shaken by cops at the end of the line. Sometimes I’d wake up, and I’d have pissed all over myself. Or worse.”
Jack winced. He looked around, but no else seemed to be judging the speaker. The others sat and listened, some of them nodding or shaking their heads ruefully, as if they knew exactly what she was talking about. A man sitting next to him quietly got up and went to a table in the back of the room, where he poured himself a cup of coffee. When he came back, he offered Jack a chocolate-chip cookie. Jack shook his head.
“I started living with a man,” the speaker continued, “but I wasn’t in love with him. I’d never been in love with anybody, because I was afraid that if they got too close they’d freak out when they saw what a disaster I was inside. We hardly ever went out or even had sex—we’d just sit in the apartment and drink.
“Sometimes I’d go out drinking with this woman, LeeAnne, the only friend I had left over from college. I think I really loved her—not in a sexual way, but because she was such a mess, and I didn’t have to hide anything from her. LeeAnne had shot smack, whatever. She would try anything. She was the only person I could really talk to. We cried together a lot.
“One day she told me that she’d gone to a meeting and decided to get clean. I laughed and gave her shit about it. She stopped going out, but I’d call her up: Come on, we’ll just have one beer. Don’t be such a fucking goody-goody. She avoided me. I was pissed off that she’d abandoned me. I was so angry that I even…one time when she finally agreed to come over, she asked for a Seven-UP and I took a can of Bud and put it in one of those foam insulator sleeves so she couldn’t see the label. She must’ve smelled the alcohol, because she didn’t drink. She was so upset she refused to see me after that.
“She was sober about four months.
“And then one afternoon—I was living on Boylston Street—this dealer named Henry came by and told me she’d OD’ed. One day she was going to meetings, the next day she was just gone. I was scared shitless. I was able to think clearly enough to wonder what would have happened if I’d given her a little support.”
Jack shifted again in his chair—not from restlessness, but because he felt his eyes watering.
“One day,” Janet continued, “I was passing a community center near Inman Square. I saw these people walking up a stairway and I just followed them in. I think in some subconscious way I knew where they were going. I don’t know if it was God or fate that led me there, but I do know that if I hadn’t gone in, I’d be dead now.
“That was my first meeting. I’ve got seven years sober.”
“Before I wrap up, I want to talk about Steps Four and Five.”
She picked up a booklet and read. “‘We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.’” And, “‘We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.’”
She picked up a water glass and took a sip. “I was doing okay in the program for the first year, but those two steps scared the hell out of me. Nobody could make me do them, no way.
“After I got my first year, my sponsor helped me work up the courage. I did both steps together in one weekend. I spent a whole Sunday morning in her apartment, telling her everything, even things so horrible that I always thought I would take them to the grave with me. Just talking about LeeAnne, I thought I’d die.
“And you know what happened? I didn’t die. All of those things I was so terrified to say, even to myself—since then I’ve talked about them from podiums, I’ve shared them in meetings.
“Though I can try to make amends to the people who are still alive, I know I can never go back and change the past. But at least I don’t have to pick up a drink tonight. Thanks for listening.”
She stood up and returned to the front row.
Other people took turns sitting behind the table. They thanked Janet and told her they identified with her feelings of being different and isolated. They joked about their own blackouts and lost wallets. Jack was nervous that someone would ask him to get up to speak, but he was too stunned by the confessions to leave.
One man didn’t respond to Janet’s speech—he seemed too wrapped up in his own problems. He identified himself as an alcoholic and a sex offender. He said he felt bad because he’d spent the past weekend “acting out with pornography,” but that thanks to the program he had resisted the impulse to drink or to follow up on his “other urges.”
Some of the other people in the group looked slightly uncomfortable, but no one criticized the man. Jack was amazed: it seemed that there was nothing a person couldn’t say in front of the group.
When the meeting wound down, he got up quietly and slipped out. He suspected that the session would end with the members gathering around to chat with each other and he didn’t want to be there.
Out on the street, he lit a cigarette and strode off, his mind whirling. He went back and spent another hour dealing with the crime scene. And then, the next thing he knew, he was sitting on a stool in a yuppie bar on Seventh Avenue, ordering a Bass ale.
“You want a pint?” the bartender asked.
“No, a short one will do it.”
Do what? He didn’t plan on any heavy drinking. He just wanted to feel the frosted mug in his hands, to savor that first cold sip going down. He thought of all the people in the meeting, tormented by the one drink they couldn’t have.
He remembered a joke he’d heard once sitting on another stool in another bar, a joke that seemed to explain a lot of stupid behavior.
“Why does a dog lick its balls?”
Because it can.