“JUST GIVE ME A few hours.”
“Take a break,” replied Sergeant Stephen Tanney. “Enjoy your days off.”
“Come on. This is not exactly an ordinary case.” Jack was sitting at his kitchen table, groggy from a night of poor sleep. He noticed that his bare feet were sticking to the linoleum: time to mop.
“I understand that, Leightner. But we’ve had word from above to not interfere with this one.”
“You realize what’s at stake here?”
“Of course I do. And Charlson has promised to work closely with the FBI and the JTTF.” The Joint Terrorist Task Force, which included a new post-9/11 unit of the NYPD. “They don’t need Homicide on this one. So we’ll see you Monday.”
The sergeant was fond of an obnoxious saying: “There are two kinds of problems in this world: the my problems and the not my problems.” Jack could actually hear the relief in his boss’s voice: if something bad went down here, it wouldn’t be Tanney’s responsibility. He grimaced, struggling to come up with a better argument.
“I know you want to help out,” Tanney said. “But they’re on it. And we’ll be available in a support capacity. I’ve let them know how to reach me twenty-four/seven if anything new arises.”
Wonderful, Jack managed not to say. I can’t tell you how much better that makes me feel. “All right. I’ll be in on Monday.”
He hung up, wondering how much investigation he could get away with on his own.
As he pulled a mop out of the kitchen closet, the memory of what he had done the previous night rose up like a bubble of indigestion. Oh well, at least it was obvious that Frank Raucci had not called in to gripe. The Mob avoided contact with the NYPD like vampires shunned garlic. And if they got really pissed off, they certainly wouldn’t bother with any official complaint. It was rare for them to stir up scrutiny by messing directly with a cop—but not unheard of.
As Jack mopped the kitchen floor, he remembered how Michelle had enjoyed teasing him about being a neat freak. He should have explained it to her: putting things in order at home gave him some little relief from the appalling disorder he saw at work every day.
There were a lot of things he should have talked with her about, instead of playing the stoic cop all the time. But would that have made the difference, if he had talked more? He frowned: maybe her new lover had been more exciting in bed. He’d always thought he did okay in that department, but who knew? If the guy was younger, maybe he’d learned some new tricks from reading those new magazines about men’s health and grooming and crap. Maybe they had discovered some new female erogenous zone in the past few years. It happened. When he was young, who talked about all this G-spot stuff? Back then, foreplay was some flowers and a nice dinner in an Italian restaurant.
He vacuumed the front room. Forty-eight hours to kill. He wondered what Brent Charlson was up to this morning, wondered if the man and his squad were getting any closer to shutting down the terrorist cell. He thought about how the feds had mismanaged their confidential informants before the 1993 Trade Center bombing and that hardly boosted his confidence—not to mention the way that warning signs had cropped up in the first few months of 2001, picked up by field agents for the three-letter outfits, only to be ignored at the national headquarters. He sat down and reorganized the papers on his desk.
He looked at his watch. The day was crawling, and he hated to think about how he was going to make the time pass during the next two evenings. He thought about calling Michelle again, but then scowled: to hell with her. There was no reason he couldn’t find someone else. For months now, his son had been urging him to try online dating. Jack liked the way computers helped out at work, the way you could search databases so easily or find common elements in different cases, but he didn’t like to use the things at home. Old dog, new tricks. He glanced at his watch again, then gave up and turned on his computer. What was the name of that dating service his son had recommended? He finally remembered it, then called up the Web site. It asked him for some basic info: his gender, zip code, what age range he was looking for.
He sighed. If he entered anything, he was probably gonna get bombarded by spam. He was tempted to just turn off the computer, but he heard his son’s voice in his head. Dad! Just give it a try! What do you have to lose? My dignity, he muttered. Not to mention my self-respect. But he entered the info, including the age range. He went with women close to his own age; he knew he could have gone for perky tits and wrinkle-free skin, like a lot of guys, but he wasn’t interested in dating someone who had never heard of Brenda Lee. Or the Beatles.
A column of women’s faces came up onscreen.
Christ, it was like a precinct mug-shot book. Not that these women looked like the usual scarred, dented, snaggle-toothed bunch. No, at most, these would be misdemeanor criminals: bad check passing, DWIs, maybe possession of a controlled substance. He scrolled down a bit … yikes: this one had definite serial killer potential. He kept going: so many hopeful faces, so many forced smiles, these women posing in their bridesmaid dresses or their ski jackets, holding their beloved little dogs. His heart sank lower with every face. I’m too old for this, he kept repeating to himself. His marriage had been pretty rocky, but at least it had saved him from ever having to date again. Or so he had been foolish enough to believe.
He looked at all the eager faces. What was wrong with them, that they couldn’t get a date the old-fashioned way? After a moment of reflection, he realized how uncharitable he was being. After all, he was hardly awash in offers. No, this was just what people did these days: they met in “cyberspace.” It was normal.
He turned his computer off. Some other time.
He went into his bedroom to get dressed. As he was picking out some clothes, he glanced over at the bed. He could picture Michelle so clearly, sitting up on her side of it, deep into some book, her brown hair draped over her shoulders, her face so serious as she read, her silky nightgown giving him a tantalizing hint of her lovely breasts.
He stared at his cell phone, seized by the urge to call her. But he had no idea what he might say.
He dropped the shirt and slacks he’d picked out and traded them in for a T-shirt and some shorts. He went for a long run in Prospect Park.
MR. GARDNER WAS A reliable source of company whenever Jack needed one; his elderly landlord never had other plans.
After he managed to kill most of the day with stocking his refrigerator, picking up some dry-cleaning, and doing other errands he didn’t have time for during his workweek, he picked up a pizza and a six-pack and went upstairs for a visit.
He knocked on the door but heard no answer. After a moment, he knocked again; Mr. Gardner had grown hard of hearing in his old age. Jack felt a sudden bad premonition and opened the door without invitation, remembering the morning, four years before, when he had found his landlord lying on his kitchen floor, felled by a stroke.
The apartment was dark. “Mr. G?” he called out, heart sinking. No answer. He made his way down the hall by touch, until he came to the front room. He reached up, found the pull chain for the overhead light (three delicate antique globes), and found the old man sitting in his battered recliner over by the front window, staring down at the street.
Mr. G turned in his chair. “That you, Jackie? Is Mrs. Kornfeld all right?” Their elderly neighbor across the street.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“The last couple’a nights, I ain’t seen no lights on over there.”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know.”
They sat and ate the pizza and drank their beers. For once, Jack was eager to talk; he had been thinking about calling Michelle all day, and he wanted some advice. But now, as he chewed his pizza, he considered the photo of Mrs. Gardner resting on top of the TV. The old woman had been very nice; Jack had only known her for a short time because she had passed away soon after he moved in. He remembered that she was always baking something; he could never stop by to pay the rent without sitting down for a slice of her lemon poppyseed cake or some warm cookies.
He couldn’t see asking Mr. G for advice about forgiveness for a cheating lover. The old man and his wife had been happily married for almost sixty years, and Mr. G was hardly a worldly character; he tended to change the channels when anything remotely sexy came on TV. Did your wife ever cheat on you? No, his landlord would hardly react well to such a question.
Who else could he talk to? Not Ben. His son seemed to blame him for Michelle’s departure, and he wasn’t anxious to open that can of worms. Someone on his squad at work? He liked his colleagues except for his boss, and he might have raised the matter if he was sitting in a car with one of them, staking out a suspect’s residence, but he couldn’t see calling out of the blue. Richie Powker, maybe? No, he barely knew the guy—and Powker seemed happily married too.
Who would know something about this situation?
Inspiration struck. Jack finished his beer and turned to his landlord. “I gotta go. I’ll check on Mrs. Kornfeld in the morning, okay?”
Mr. G nodded, then turned back to his vigil at the window.