AT HOME LATER, JACK tossed his keys on a side table and headed back to the kitchen to see what he could scrounge up for dinner. He hated the way his footsteps echoed in his front hallway. He knew he should have been glad to be free from foul odors and grim sights, but the fact was that he would have been happy to stay on the job all the livelong day. Hell, he would have been willing to work around the clock, but ever since a precipitous drop in the Big Apple’s murder rate, the golden days of overtime were gone.
He stood holding open the door to his near-empty fridge for a minute before he realized that he wasn’t even paying attention to what was inside. He wasn’t very hungry anyhow—at least, not enough to try to cobble together a meal from a block of cheese, a jar of peanut butter, and the remains of some Chinese takeout. He cocked his head; as always, he could hear his landlord’s TV blaring upstairs. He told himself that the old man could probably use a visit, but then shook his head—who was he kidding? They could keep each other company.
Upstairs, he found Mr. Gardner sitting in his murky front room, in his duct-tape-patched recliner, watching the local news. The old man had always been short and stocky, but the weight had melted off after his stroke a couple years back, leaving behind a shriveled, bespectacled garden gnome. Jack handed him a can of Schaefer and then dropped down onto the spavined, nubbly couch.
On the TV, a massive old console that had probably once displayed the original Honeymooners, a reporter with starched blond hair was delivering a report about a pothole in Forest Hills, intoning so gravely she might as well have been describing the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Jack shook his head. Where did they find these people, these puffed-up androids?
During a commercial for maxi pads, both men instinctively turned away from the screen’s blue glow. Mr. G trained his thick eyeglasses on his tenant. “Hey, whatever happened with that lady friend of yours, that … what was her name? I ain’t seen her around for a long time.”
Jack stared down at his beer, working up a fib. “She, ah … she got a job out in California.”
Thankfully, Mr. G—easily distracted—had returned his attention to the TV, where they were showing footage of a factory explosion in Tennessee. (Which had nothing whatsoever to do with local news, but fulfilled the station’s mission of constantly providing viewers with something to gawp at.)
Now that they had gotten past the one subject Jack didn’t want to discuss, they sat in a companionable silence. Jack glanced around the dimly lit room: a shelf of knickknacks collected by Mr. Gardner’s long-deceased wife, a bookcase holding rows of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a pair of shriveled leather slippers lying on the worn carpet. Mr. G lived a lonely life, enlivened only by visits from his health care aide or much rarer visits from his uptight son. Jack thought of his apartment below: was his own home life so different? He had been divorced for more than fifteen years, had settled into a comfortable bachelor routine where he didn’t ask for anything outside of his work—and then romance had given him a whole new life. He had become spoiled, and it had blown up in his face. He was learning to accept less all over again.
When the local news gave way to “entertainment news”—celebrities falling in and out of rehab, making babies, then bailing out on their childish marriages—his tolerance meter pushed too far into the red. He rubbed his hands on his knees and stood up.
Mr. Gardner turned away from the TV, its light reflecting sideways on his thick bifocals. “You okay, Jackie?”
Jack frowned. The old man knew; he didn’t miss a trick. He reached out and squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “I’m fine, Mr. G.”
Downstairs, he heated up the remains of the chow mein and ate it on his kitchen table with The Daily News spread out in front of him. He couldn’t focus on the words tonight. He rose, placed his dirty plate in the sink, then walked through his empty apartment. He had done his best to remove all traces of Michelle: some lotion she had left in the bathroom cabinet, bobby pins on his dresser, the earplugs she had used when he snored … Wincing inside, he went to his small office at the front of the apartment, sat at his desk, and reached under a stack of medical papers. (He’d been shot in the chest two years before, after an ambush on a dark street in Red Hook. His insurance company had supposedly covered his surgery and hospital care, but the bills kept coming.)
There was one romantic memento left, this snapshot he now held in his hands, taken by his friend and colleague Gary Daskivitch. The big young bear of a detective had introduced him to Michelle in the first place, had set up their original blind date. Occasionally they had all gone out together, Jack and Michelle, Daskivitch and his cute little red-haired wife.
He stared down at the picture. Wood paneling in the background, light glinting off rows of bottles. Monsalvo’s bar, a local dive he’d frequented for years, for a quick draft after work. Both couples had sat in a back booth, laughing, when they weren’t gathered around the jukebox—Dolly Parton singing “Crimson and Clover,” Sinatra crooning “The Way You Look Tonight”—or waltzing across the ancient linoleum floor or playing a new video bowling game old Monsalvo had (shockingly) installed, trying to keep up with the times. In the picture, Jack sat with Michelle leaning against him, her head on his shoulder, her black hair shining faintly in the dim light, eyes closed, a beautiful, soft look on her face. He had cupped her cheek in his palm and gazed down at her, heart full of love He sighed. Enough of this crap. He had worked hard to harden himself, just like he did at work. Nothing personal, that was the credo. He carried the picture into the kitchen and lit a burner on the stove. I’m through with romance, he said to himself, and lifted the photo toward the flame—but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t give up this bittersweet vestige, this last sadly pleasurable source of pain.
BROOKLYN SOUTH HOMICIDE WAS headquartered in Coney Island. When Jack stopped by early the next morning, he noticed two things in quick succession.
First, he veered into the back room, where he discovered that—pet peeve—nobody had bothered to refill the old Mr. Coffee maker that sat on one of the storage shelves.
And then he came back into the squad room, glanced up at the wall, and stopped short. A big erasable bulletin board held the names of all of the victims in current homicide cases. A new name jumped out at him. And he knew that his claim about taking every case impersonally was about to get shot to hell.