Tuesday, August 21
1500 hours
New York City
There was a slow rain coming down the day they gave Laputa and Paznakaitis the Honors. Keogh and Butler were in harness for the first time since the last cop funeral. They were sitting in one of the Charlie Unit cars, a dark-blue Plymouth Fury. Keogh had a thing for dark blue, and this squad car was one of the last of the ’83 Police 440 Interceptors, really a traffic car, but Pulaski owed Keogh for a couple of collars Keogh had given Pulaski’s nephew, so when the car came through from Motor Pool, Keogh called in the favor.
The rankers and the pipe band guys were standing around outside the church. It was still hot and the air was like sea water. Butler had the passenger window rolled down and he was waving his hand back and forth in the air. Then he’d bring it in and show Frank how the damp had made the blond hairs on his wrist wet where it stuck out of the sleeve of his blue dress jacket. Out on the steps of the church perhaps a thousand cops from the NYPD, from Yonkers and State and all over the East were standing around smoking cigarettes and saying hello to people they hadn’t seen since they’d buried a Bronx detective a couple of years back. For cops, it felt kind of like a racket, sad but solid-feeling, with the brothers all around and that slow rain.
Keogh was still in that guilty euphoria he always felt after a shooting. He felt bad for Paznakaitis and worse for the female cop who had died behind the wheel of her squad car, never even getting a shot off, just calling in a Ten-Thirteen when that Marielito had turned the muzzle around on her. Keogh had dreamed a little about it on the night it had happened, tossing and rolling in his wife’s brass bed in their house up on City Island.
Butler and Keogh were supposed to be out on the sidewalk with the rest of the boys, but sometimes they made the other cops nervous. There was a kind of distance in the job that the ordinary patrol cops felt even if they couldn’t describe it. Snipers. Enough of the harness guys had seen some hard-corps duty in Vietnam, and even now they found it difficult to be friendly to snipers. Keogh and Butler were names in the Department, and being a name was not always a good thing. There were a lot of cliques and jealousies in the NYPD. Everybody wanted to get onto Citywide Emergency Services. Outsiders saw it as a glory detail.
Keogh was quiet for a long time, content to watch the crowds and looking forward in a passive way to the ride out to Cypress Hills and the moment when the pipe major would play “Lord Lovat’s Lament” and the Marine Hymn and, finally, “The Last Post.” The music would drift over the fresh-turned earth on a hillside slick with mist, the smell of cut earth and grasses, the jingle and stamp of horses and the murmur of talk from the long blue ranks, over the flag rolling in the breeze like a sail for Paznakaitis, the sailor going to sea. Butler waited a while, watching the rain on the windshield and the blurred figures. He was at heart a happy man and it was against his nature to settle into the kind of Irish melancholy that Keogh drifted into after a killing. After a few minutes he pulled a silver flask out of his tunic and unscrewed the cap.
Keogh watched him take a long pull, the liquid running into Butler’s thick blond moustache, his unshaven throat working as the liquor went down. Butler finished with a long sigh and handed the flask over to Keogh, who took it without turning his head and swallowed a long draft. When he put it down, Keogh’s eyes were running.
“Jesus, Pat. That stuff is awful.”
Butler looked a little hurt.
“Well, maybe it is. But it’s good too.”
“So why’re we drinking it?”
Butler thought about it while he had another long pull. “Maybe it’s bad in a true way.”
Now Keogh turned to look at Butler, his one blue eye very blue and his green eye as green as new grass.
“It’s bad in a true way? Pat, what the fuck does that mean? What the fuck is that?”
Butler tried to look at Keogh in the way his priest looked at him when Pat told him he was still screwing around on his wife. Butler liked his wife, but that wasn’t the point. Life was short—that was the point.
“Frank, I gotta say this: Your language skills are really deteriorating. Fuck this and fuck that. It’s not dignified. It’s not a good example to set for your youthful partner here. You’re polluting my mind.”
Butler was one year younger than Frank Keogh.
“You’re not answering the question. You’re also bogarting that bottle.”
“Hah! Tastes like shit and such small portions, too—is that it? I’m saying that Cuervo Gold is bad in a true way, a way that’s true, you follow?”
Keogh took the flask.
“No, I don’t follow.”
Butler gave him a look full of compassion and condescension. “You know, I try and I try and you never seem to learn a damn thing. How many years have we been partners, Frank? Including ESU, and forget the part where you got me stuffed into Communications for a year.”
Butler watched Keogh work it out as a squad car from Midtown North went whooping by with the rack flashing, a couple of black-gloved cops staring out the sidescreen at the church where Paznakaitis and Laputa were being cut adrift.
“Technically, you weren’t my partner in Bronx Vice. I was working strictly with Pulaski then—”
“Hah! Nobody works ‘with’ Pulaski. We were all working for that son of a bitch, and anyway, why you hanging me up on ‘technically,’ you prick?”
Keogh laughed. “You told me my language skills were deteriorating. I was trying to be accurate. Okay, so we’ve been ‘associates’ for, say, three years in Bronx Vice—”
“Plus we worked together on the Lazado thing—”
“Shit, Pat, everybody on the job did the Lazado thing. And now we’re, what? Two years in this job?”
“Yeah, more like three. Plus one year you worked Citywide Armed Robbery while I was UC with the Joint Task Force over on Fifty-seventh.”
“What the hell were you doing there, anyway?”
Butler gave Keogh a long smug look over his ragged yellow moustache. “Can’t tell you that, buddy. Sorry, but I just can’t go telling any hairbag who has a thing for undercover work. So we’re looking at all-told maybe six years you and me have been side by each in this rat’s-ass city, right?”
“Yeah, so …?”
“So … you ever screw around on Tricia?”
Tricia was Patricia Corliss-Keogh, an O.R. nurse who worked at Bellevue. Tricia was a sore point for Keogh. She was working shifts and he was working thirty-six-hour on-calls and they had a thirteen-year-old kid named Robbie, who … No, damn it, he was fourteen now. Well, thought Keogh, that’s the whole thing right there. They were goddammed strangers rooming in a bungalow up on City Island. Keogh couldn’t remember when it had stopped bothering him, the way you can’t hear a machine until it stops.
Keogh hesitated. “No. Not once.”
Butler looked sideways over at his partner.
“You’re lying to me, right?”
Butler slammed his fist into the padded dash of the squad car. A glow-in-the-dark statue of the Virgin Mary flew into the air. Keogh caught it in his right hand.
“But I knew you were lying, right?”
“If I’m lying, then yes, you knew I was lying.”
Butler waved that away. “So … it’s bad that you lie to me, because you and me, we’ve been through the program and we ought not to be lying to each other, but—now get this, Frank, because it’s gonna be on the final exam—it’s good that you’ve got somebody like me to tell these lies to who knows you’re lying and you know he knows you’re lying so your lie is really the truth. You follow?”
Keogh did follow. The fact that he did follow was another thing that was worrying him. “Yeah. So …?”
“So! That’s how something can be bad in a true way, like Jose Cuervo Gold tequila is bad, only it’s bad in a way nothing else is bad. In a way nobody else could mistake for something that’s just fucked up, or done badly, or faked out, or just not a true thing, a thing that would be true even if all the lying sons of bitches in the world said, hey, man, no, that’s not the way it was. It’s bad in a true way, like you are, Frank. You’re the genuine article.”
There was something in Pat’s voice that was different. Whatever it was, Keogh wasn’t up to it. One thing you can count on, thinking deep thoughts can only lead you downhill. He tried to look at Butler as if he could give him cancer if he got it right. Butler was used to that look.
“Pat, you’ve been into the Hemingway again.”
Butler looked hurt. “Don’t you start into me about that again, Frank. Ernie’s my role model.”
“Pat. Pat Pat Pat. Ernie ate his twelve-gauge. What kind of role model is that?”
Butler thought about it for so long that Keogh was beginning to think Butler wasn’t going to answer. He rolled down his window and the noises of New York came into the car like an aural tide, the low roar of the traffic and the permanent murmur of wind and rain and tires, the sound of people walking by on the sidewalks, the distant rising call of a siren. Across the street the big pipe major was working up his Great Highland bagpipe. Keogh could hear the first atonal flats and wheezes from the instrument. How could something so ridiculous have the power to cut through your heart like a hot wire?
Finally, Butler said, “How old are you, Frank? Forty-one? Forty-two?”
“Forty-two.”
“And how old was Ernie when he bailed out?”
“What is this, Jeopardy? Wait, Robbie’s had him in English … Nineteen sixty-one, I think it was … Ketchum, Idaho. Ernie was sixty-two or something. Poor bastard.”
“Poor bastard nothing. He was a hell of a writer. Just that the job got to him. He was … He had no shell left. He was nothing but an egg without a shell anymore.”
“Yeah. We going somewhere with this?”
Butler sighed and looked across the street at the church. There was a pale-yellow sheen on the west wall of the church, a shaft of misty sunlight through the clouds. People were coming out of the doors, and the rankers were forming up again. The pipe major had the bag under his left arm, the bellows full, his heavy bearskin angled, the chin strap tight into his chin. Behind him two drummers rumbled into a muffled roll that carried across the avenue and echoed off the walls and windows. The high hysteric skirl of “Over the Sea to Skye” rose into a low gray sky. A sergeant called the cadence. Out in front a long black hearse floated at the curb, a twist of fumes like lace fluttering from the tailpipe. Now the doors were full of blue and black and gold. A heavy wooden casket was carried out of the doors, followed by another, like trees borne downriver in a flood. Bright bursts of flowers rode the flag on each casket. The faces of the pallbearers were pale blurs. Each of their badges was wrapped in a thin black ribbon. They came slowly down the worn stone steps into the gray light of the afternoon.
Butler pulled on the flask. “What’s the point? I don’t know. I’m seeing this kid, Ruthie Boyko. She’s the one was at the shooting. The PW? She says the thing you gotta do is talk this stuff out. Like it boils over if you don’t. She talks all the time to that stress counselor?”
“Owens.”
“Yeah. They got stress classes in the Academy now too. Ruthie says it keeps her from going crazy. She thinks Pike oughta go see him. If he had, maybe Pike wouldn’t have screwed up last week.”
“You think when you shoot, Pat?”
“What … no. Can’t do that.”
“You ever feel … good? After it?”
Butler looked across at Keogh. “You know, the thing is, it’s like with Ernie. We’re only in the forties. We gotta be careful. It’s early days for both of us. That’s the point. We gotta watch ourselves. That’s all.”
They rolled out onto the Williamsburg Bridge, a mile of cop cars and black Fords, the light changing as they came down into the dense streets of Brooklyn. The cortege rolled along Broadway under the weight of the rusted El, past the shops and the empty lots, the red brick and twisted wooden frame homes, up onto Myrtle, into Queens and the cemetery at Cypress Hills.
Keogh and Butler stood at attention with the rest of Charlie Unit and the members of the 40th Precinct while the piper played “Amazing Grace.” Troopers fired their M-14’s into the air. A pile of raw earth was covered with a sheet of plastic grass. Typical, thought Keogh. Nobody wants to see things the way they are. So where was Art Pike? The thought came to the surface and he looked around at the cops, the women, at the press of media people whose hands were busy with cameras, the chatter and the occasional flare of lights, but Pike wasn’t around anywhere. Now the PBA man was giving Paznakaitis’s widow an envelope, and the chaplain was talking into the wind and the slow rain. The valley of death. Fear no evil. Thy rod and Thy staff. Comfort me.
Now the stillness was broken and the solid thing the crowd had been started to break and drift. There was another cortege forming for Patsy Laputa, who was to be buried near her sister in Forest Hills. Butler and Keogh walked in silence back to the blue Plymouth. When they reached it, Butler opened the driver’s door for Frank and handed him the keys.
“You mind going back without me, Frank?”
Keogh looked over Pat’s heavy shoulder. There was a uniformed policewoman waiting at the side of a 40th Precinct squad car. She had her hat off and Keogh was struck by the dark eyes and the broad white forehead, the flat calm and steady regard in her eyes, the softness in them. She smiled a slow smile at Keogh. Blue-black hair in a corona caught the soft light of the emerging sun. Keogh nodded at her, and the smile went away. She looked at him steadily and without expression for a long moment. With a sense of something breaking, Keogh looked away. Butler was waiting for his answer.
“This is Ruthie Boyko, Pat?”
Butler raised his shoulders and let them drop. His grin was wry and pulled down slightly to the left.
“Hey, Frank. Life’s short.”
“Where’s Junie?”
“She thinks I’m going to the racket at the Armory tonight. Told her I’d be late. Front for me, she calls?”
Irrationally, Keogh felt an electric jolt of some indefinable emotion. Not anger. Something close.
“Pat. You seen Art Pike around today?”
Butler shook his head no. “Haven’t seen him since that thing at the Bolsa Chica. I hear he’s in a bad way. Why? You worried about him?”
Keogh realized that he was, that he’d been worried about Pike ever since he squeezed off the first shot at that Ching-a-Ling kid … what was his name? Jesus. How’s that for humanity, Keogh? Kill the kid on a Friday. Forget his name by Tuesday. Butler was right. He was the genuine article, a genuine prick. Pike had left the scene, riding in the back of the Zone Commander’s Chrysler, Keogh standing in the glow of the video lights, holding his Remington in his hand, watching the back of Pike’s head as he was driven off. He had started worrying about Pike then. And he had, of course, done absolutely nothing about it. Typical.
Butler could see this. He stepped closer, put a hand around Keogh’s neck, and shook him gently. Butler’s hand felt hot and corded, a bear’s paw.
“Hey, Frank … you’ll see him at the party for The Paz tonight. I envy you, man. The Guardians, they’re putting on a hell of a show. Even the white peckerheads are allowed to go. Gonna be a hell of a go-round. Goddam Zulus know how to throw a racket. You go, you’ll see Pike. You’ll get pissed. Pike’ll chew you out for popping one of his charity cases and getting him promoted to One Police. Chrissake, Frank. Cheer the fuck up, will you? You could be going where The Paz is going.”
Butler gave him a final shake and turned away down the slope toward the blue-and-white. Keogh called out to him: “Hey, dickhead. We’re on duty tomorrow twelve hundred on the hour. Tomorrow, Butler. You don’t show up for Pulaski’s Film Festival, he’ll have Steve and the Twins for a paperweight.”
Butler reached the squad car and looped an arm around Ruthie Boyko’s shoulders. His breast bars glittered above the gold badge on his dress blues. “Steve and the Twins? Where’d you get that? Go with God, my son.”
“Yeah,” said Keogh, watching them climb into the squad car, watching Ruthie Boyko sliding in beside Butler. “I’ll try, Pat.”
The blue-and-white burbled out into a line of blue sedans and Cadillacs trying to get out of the cemetery. Keogh stood there on the rolling green slope with the wind moving softly through the trees around him, hearing the murmur of low talk, the crowds breaking around him and flowing down toward the parked cars. It looked to Keogh like a Mafia funeral. He was trying to figure out why Butler’s infidelity was bothering him so much.
He and Butler had been through some hard years in the NYPD. There was an unspoken agreement in the life that what a man has to do to get through is what he has to do, and you don’t ask him to change. Butler seemed to take some comfort from thrill sex in various Brooklyn motels. He did what he could to keep Junie from knowing about it, and he was always home when he had to be. And Frank had his own problems.
“You’re Frank, right?”
Keogh turned around to see three men standing a little way up the hill. Two of them were almost twins, slender and reedy in three-piece banker’s suits. One had a hawkish face and the liquid eyes of a gun dog. The other man was trim and meticulously turned out. A slick, it seemed to Keogh. A lawyer, maybe.
The third man looked like a fifty-gallon drum, short and solid and beefy. A red pirate beard obscured most of his face. Hard and slightly cold blue eyes glittered in his puffy red face. He looked like a man who drinks but doesn’t get drunk. He was wearing rough blue denim and biker’s boots. In his left hand was a police motorcycle helmet with a California Highway Patrol crest.
Keogh said nothing. He raised an eyebrow, not too interested in a chat right now. The men came down the hill toward him.
Redbeard stuck out his hand and said, “You gotta be Keogh. I’m Burke Owens. This is Paul Young. And Lyman Hunt.”
The hand was out and steady as a spar. Keogh decided to take it. Owens’s grip was dry and a little too firm, as if he’d taken a course in neurolinguistics and had gotten an A in First Impressions.
“Owens? The stress counselor?”
Owens leered at Frank as if he’d said something funny.
“Yeah. Don’t get all defensive, Keogh. I’m just here to say goodbye to The Paz. You know the doc here?”
Dr. Paul Young was taller than he had looked up the hill, a couple of inches taller than Keogh or Owens. He took Frank’s hand and folded both of his around it to shake. His eyes were clear and flat and unblinking. Like a couple of wet stones in a puddle of water, thought Keogh. Lyman Hunt kept himself out of the conversation but he watched Frank the way a keeper watches the tigers.
“I’ve heard of Detective Keogh,” said Young, in a voice that seemed to come out from under his vest. “I understand you used to work with Kris Paznakaitis in Schaeffer City.”
So what. “Yeah, who told you that?”
Young seemed to ignore the tone, but his eyes receded a little.
“Your boss. Lieutenant Pulaski.”
“You talking to Pulaski about me?”
“Is there a problem with that, Detective Keogh?” Owens was watching the exchange like a boy who has put two liquids in a beaker and doesn’t know what will happen.
“I get up to John Jay now and then, doc. You been running a bunch of lectures up there, part of the sergeant’s exam course. What the hell you call them?”
“Mental Disorders and Crime. A Comparison of Psychotic and Nonpsychotic Homicides. Also, Case Management of Psychopathologic Offenders Through Psychopharmaceuticals. I think I saw you at one of them last month.”
“Oh, yeah. I caught the one about how Thorazine is God’s answer to the question why am I such a sadistic prick.”
Young smiled a slow and oddly charming smile.
“I take it you’re not a fan?”
“Nothing personal, doc. Better Living Through Chemistry, right? It just gets on my nerves when guys in your profession turn up as gunslingers for the defense. Guys like you got some asshole off a murder charge—what was it, involuntary somnambulism? Fucking sleepwalking. I got no problem with whores, doc. I just don’t like seeing killers walk on technicalities.”
Young’s smile never wavered, a professional’s mask.
“Really. It seems to me more killers walk because of the incompetence of arresting officers in the presence of the Fourth Amendment. But I know the case you’re talking about. It was a Canadian case, I believe. As it happens, I agree with you in that matter. There should have been some argument for diminished capacity that could have resulted in a period of psychiatric care. I can only say that psychiatry is an art, not a science. Rather like police work. I admired your … precision, in the confrontation last week.”
Another so what. “Thanks. Is there something I can do for you, or are we just in a pissing contest here?”
Owens laughed at that.
“Jesus, what a prick you are, Keogh. Pat said you were cranky. We’re just passing through, thought we’d say hey. Don’t get your tutu in a tizzy, Keogh. Boys, we gotta go. You coming to the Laputa thing, Keogh?”
“No, no … there’s a racket for The Paz downtown.” Keogh looked down and back up.
“Look … Dr. Young. I’m sorry if I got a little rough there. It’s been a bad week.”
Young made a dismissive gesture. “Nothing done, Detective Keogh. Sorry if I gave offense. Burke, we’ll see you at the car.”
Young and Hunt walked away down the hill, Young a gray insect picking his way through the grass, Hunt seeming to glide an inch above it. Gold glimmered at Hunt’s left wrist.
Owens stayed where he was. Now we get to the point of this, thought Keogh.
“Who’s Hunt? I know Young.”
Owens watched them walking down the hill. “Hey. Fuck ’em. They’re shrinks. I was talking to Butler.”
“Where you know Butler from?”
“He helps out with the stress classes. He never tell you?”
Frank didn’t answer. There was always something to a guy you didn’t know to look for.
Owens waited and then said, “Look, Frank. Can I call you Frank?”
“Yeah. What can I do for you?”
Owens was quiet for a while, looking for words.
“This scene here, it’s a hard thing. I know you had some service time. I did too. You were in the Sixth, right? Tet, Hue, Khe Sanh relief?”
“How’d you know that?”
“Well, come down to the question, I read your two-oh-one file. You look good. Purple Hearts. Couple Citations. A Bronze.”
“There’s a reason for you fucking around in my file, and I’m gonna hear it, right?”
“Yeah. Look, you know what I do for the Department, huh?”
“Warm fuzzies and touchy-feelies. Also some chanting and you help the guys get in touch with their mantras.”
Owens took it with a sheepish smile.
“You don’t trust the whole program, do you?”
“Do you?”
“No … That’s the point. I’m no Paul Young. I can’t even figure out how I got into this thing. I came out of the Green Machine, couldn’t seem to focus on anything. Bunch of friends also out, some of them in that gork farm in Honolulu? I started going to see them. Helping them, in a way. It gave me something to do. I don’t know … The rest just happened. Lots of guys like you in the department, ex-vets. One thing led to another. You ask Butler, he’ll tell you, there’s a minimum of bullshit in the sessions.”
“Sessions? Is this the part where you roll out the full-sized color picture of the encyclopedia and I get to see how it would look on my shelf?”
Owens seemed to shut down for a minute, going deep into some interior place. It was as if he’d emptied out and drained away and there was nothing in front of Keogh now but a straw man. Then he opened his eyes and there he was, back again. It was an unsettling effect.
“You’re really giving me the whole nine yards, Keogh. Why the fuck you so defensive? Is it because you don’t want me to find out how much you enjoy taking out these dickheads?”
Butler. It would have to be Butler.
Owens held up a hand.
“No, it’s not Butler. Not directly, anyway. But I’m talking to you because I got asked to. By Pulaski, if you wanna get technical. All the guys in your unit have been in the shit for some time now. You’ve rolled on a lot of calls. I’d like you to think about coming in. We got a whole floor above the DEA offices on Broadway. A bar, a good pool table. Nobody has to do anything. But if you feel like it, you can kick around some shit, see if you feel better. There. That’s the pitch. You want it in leather or cloth?”
Keogh had to smile.
“Leather. Plus the Great Books and the Synopticon.”
“You actually gonna come in?”
“Hell, no … but I can see you’re just doing your job.”
Keogh put out a hand. Owens shook it hard and grinned back at him. The hillside was almost empty now. The coffin waited above the grave inside a silver rectangle. Four young men in gray suits and black shoes stood at the side of the grave. They were all looking at Keogh and Owens. The four men wore identical sunglasses. A gust of wind flipped up the plastic grass cover and a plume of rich black soil eddied around their feet.
“Gotta go. Thanks for trying. Tell Bert … tell him whatever you want. Give my regrets to the shrinks. Tell them I’m sorry I was such a prick to Young.”
“Hey, fuck them. They’re consultants. What do they know?”
Keogh smiled and turned away down the hillside. When he got to the car, Owens was still standing there halfway up the hill with the open grave at the top and the four gray men in a row, and now the wind was pulling at the mound of earth and brown whirlwinds of grave dirt were flying.
Keogh looked away and started the car and accelerated out the paved drive and thought about nothing until he reached the Williamsburg Bridge, and then he was up and out over the river, and under the wheels there was the sound of drums.