Edelman, shrewd man that he is, had learned enough from the dispatcher to bring an ambulance along. Two white-uniformed attendants had helped Jane into the rear of the vehicle and taken her away. They would take her to the closest hospital and the police would decide what to do from there.
Edelman had also brought along a big red thermos full of steaming coffee, which we shared as we stood at the railing overlooking the river.
“You aren’t getting any younger, Dwyer,” he said, smiling, taking note of my gray-flecked hair.
“At least I’ve got enough hair to turn gray.” I smiled back. Martin Edelman stands six-two, looks as if he trains at Dunkin Donuts, and is sweet enough in disposition to make an unlikely cop, a profession he took up only because, as he once drunkenly confessed to me, he’d been called a sissy during early years. Now the kids who called him names were pencil-pushers and Edelman had earned the right to ask them with his eyes: Who was a sissy and who was not? Like many of us, Edelman spends his older years trying to compensate for the pain of his younger ones.
We stood silently for a time, blowing into the paper cups of coffee, watching a few straggling birds pumping against the dismal, sunless sky.
Then he said, “She’s one of the most beautiful fucking women I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know her?”
“She used to be a friend of mine.”
“Friend. When we were growing up, friend usually meant somebody of the same sex, you know? I can’t get used to the way that word is used today.” He paused. “You mean you slept with her?”
“Yeah. We lived together for a year or so.”
“This was after you left the force, I take it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t sound happy.”
I stared out at the water. “I’m a little confused right now, Martin.”
“The gun, you mean?”
“Confused about a lot of things. My feelings, mostly.” He had been a good enough friend from my detective days that I didn’t have much trouble talking to him. “I had all these plans for us, including marriage. She worked at an advertising agency and fell in love with a guy named Stephen Elliot there. She left me for him.”
“A good Catholic boy like you should maybe think that God was paying you back for living in sin.”
Both of us knew he was only half joking.
“It was a lot more than shacking up, Martin. A lot more. I really loved her.”
“This Elliot, that’s who we’re checking on now, right?”
“Right.”
I had explained to Edelman that I’d had no idea where Jane had called me from when she’d hysterically begged me to meet her here by the river. But what with the gun and all her “he’s dead” references, I thought that the police should check Stephen Elliot’s house, which they were doing now.
“Heartbroken, huh?” Edelman said.
“Yeah.”
“That happened to me, just before I met Shirley. This little Polish girl. Goddamn, she was cute. She kept telling me how much she liked me and I took her real serious. I asked her if she’d marry me and she looked like I’d asked her if she’d get down on the ground and push dog turds around with her nose.”
“Well, then you know what I was like for a year or so.
“Greatest diet in the world,” Edelman said. “I dropped thirty pounds. My parents wanted me to stay heartbroken.”
I laughed. He was good company, a good man.
He took a sip of coffee, then said, “You think maybe you made a mistake leaving the force?”
“Sure. Sometimes I do.”
“I mean, the acting thing—”
He paused, trying to be delicate. With my ex-wife, my mother and father, and every single person I knew on the force, what I want to do with my life will always be “the acting thing”—something pretty abstract and crazy, as that phrase implies.
What happened was this: One of the local TV stations asked me to play a cop in a public service announcement about drunk drivers. Easy enough, since that’s what I was, a cop. Then a talent agent called and asked me if I would be interested in other parts on a moonlighting basis, which I was. A year later I’d appeared in more than two dozen commercials and was taking acting classes from a fairly noteworthy former Broadway actor. Then my marriage started coming apart. I suppose I got obsessive about acting in front of a camera where I could put off the guilt and pain. I decided, against the advice of everybody I knew and to the total befuddlement of my captain, to give up the force and try to become a full-time actor, supporting myself in the meantime with a P.I.’s license and employment with a grocery store security company, busting shoplifters and trying to figure out which employees were stealing.
That was me, Jack Dwyer, thirty-seven, a man who’d become a bit of a joke. Maybe more than a bit, as certain smirks and eye-smiles sometimes conveyed.
“It’s what I want to do with my life,” I said, and I could hear the defensive tone sneaking into my voice. If I’m so damned sure that what I’m doing makes sense, then why do I always feel the need to defend myself? Only my fourteen-year-old son seems to understand even a bit of my motivation. He always gives me a sad, loving kind of encouragement.
“Yeah, sure, hell,” Edelman said, afraid he’d hurt my feelings. “I wanted to be a surgeon at one time.”
I laughed. “Maybe you should start cutting people up. You know, practice it a while, see if you like it. The way I did with acting at first.”
“You’re a crazy sonofabitch, Dwyer. A genuinely weird guy.”
But I couldn’t keep up the patter any longer. “She’s probably in big trouble.”
“Probably. Yeah.”
A uniformed man came running down the hill from his patrol car, through the slushy dead grass and the wraiths of fog and the winter cold.
“Malachie called from this Elliot’s house,” the patrolman told Edelman breathlessly. “Said there’s a body there and that the building manager has positively identified it as Elliot.”
Edelman shook his head and put his big hand on my shoulder. “Looks like we’ve got some problems, my friend.”