O’HARA NURSES A beer and seethes. As far as she is concerned, the $250 coffee-table book, with its thick stock, lavish jacket, and fawning commentary, is more offensive than rank porn. At least porn is up-front. That this piece of crap is even in her home, and that she is looking at it on the same couch where Axl and Bruno do some of their best napping, disturbs her. As best she can, she avoids thinking about Ben’s face. After they left the show, O’Hara had to tell Ben and Jamie that Herc was dead. Since the story was going to be on television in hours, and the papers the next morning, they deserved to hear it from her. Ben took it as hard as a sibling and blamed himself, and his crumpling face was one of the saddest she’d seen since she became a cop. O’Hara studies the catalogue, and learns as much as she can from it about the charismatic subject of its most expensive photograph. When she looks at the Tigers cap, she remembers the Yankees atop his skull in the garden and how even in the grave he seemed to be smiling. The hat shows that the grave was also a phony tableau: whoever staged it kept getting the details wrong. For starters, he wasn’t a Yankees fan. He probably wasn’t a baseball fan at all, but if he was going to be buried in a baseball cap, he would have wanted it to be a Tigers hat, not a Yankees cap, for Christ’s sake. Same thing with the Batman comic and the Coldplay CD. Whoever dressed the kid and threw in the gifts didn’t know him that well.
On the other hand, Herc did like comics, and he did like music, and he did wear baseball caps, so whoever it was hadn’t got it completely wrong either. They got it half right. What kind of people get those things half right? It’s not your friends. Your friends, God bless them, know exactly what you like to wear and smoke and drink and listen to. The people who get those things wrong, or half wrong or half right, however you want to put it, are your fucking family, so maybe the kid had a family after all. As O’Hara thinks about the semi-ignorance, semi-loneliness of families, and sinks deeper into her funk, her cell rings, and it’s an area code she doesn’t recognize.
“Is this Darlene O’Hara?”
“Who are you?”
“Connie Wawrinka, a detective with the Sarasota Police Department.”
O’Hara panics, fearing that something has happened to Axl. She reminds herself that she talked to him a couple nights ago and he didn’t mention anything about Florida. Of course maybe he wouldn’t. She’s just the kid’s mother, and not a particularly good one. “We got a match,” says Wawrinka.
“A match?”
“From ballistics.” O’Hara realizes Wawrinka is talking about the ballistic report on the .22-caliber bullet. NYPD sent it to every police department in the country. “Six months ago,” says Wawrinka, “we pulled the same kind of bullet, shot by the same weapon, out of the brain of an eighty-seven-year-old resident of Longboat Key named Benjamin Levin.”
“What happened?” asks O’Hara.
“He put the barrel of the rifle in his mouth and shot himself.”