wiring, plumbing, building management, all carefully underlined, annotated even. Records of his buildings, going back twenty-five years. On the other side of the shop stood a row of rusty file cabinets containing copies of every one of his case records, going back to 1982, the year he made detective, got the gold shield. Completely illegal to have these records, but no one in the NYPD minded. Part of the institutional memory. Old cops remembered things, after all. Ray had read hundreds of these cases, including the unsolved ones. You read a few dozen, though, and soon saw how tedious police work was. He opened a drawer for the 1983 cabinet, pulled out a folder at random. Flopped it open, started to read a DD-5 form, the basic report detectives filled out: 'Suspect walked south to Grand Central Station, where he was observed making a call from the last phone on the left in the east exit, and then suspect was observed exiting on 42nd Street, where he stopped at a newsstand for three minutes. He then walked…' And so on.
Ray slipped the folder back, shut the drawer. He didn't want this jam-up with Jin Li to be his father's last case. His father had already solved his last case, a blackmail that involved a young woman and a banker in his fifties. He knew because he'd read the file: the older guy had screwed the woman for a couple of months in one of Manhattan's better hotels, and when he got tired of her, she got tired of pretending that she liked him. Happened all the time, except that she expected real money for her trouble. The executive had paid her a few times, then warned her he was sick of it and to back off. By this time she was fucking a lanky, well-spoken Dominican who needed extra funds for his coke habit. At his urging she went back for more money to the banker, who told his wife they were going to New Zealand for the summer. She would fly there first and he'd meet her, which he did, after telling Ray's father everything about the affair. Yes, he preferred it be kept quiet. By the time the girl was arrested, the Dominican had left town for Santa Fe, escorting a young heiress with a drug habit. The girl could afford only a cheap lawyer, and when the banker and his wife finally returned from their restful sojourn in New Zealand, the girl had already accepted a quick plea bargain and was doing her two years. 'A stupid last case,' his father had said at the time. 'But there it is.'
But of course there had been more cases. Once a detective, always a detective. It was a way of thinking about human reality. After his retirement, his father had occasionally helped out his friends who now ran private investigation agencies, mostly by making a few calls or going along on a car ride to talk to someone, his service revolver tucked in his coat. Or setting up on someone, waiting in a car for six hours sipping coffee and pissing into a bottle. But mostly he had run his houses and once a year indulged in a fishing trip down to the Bahamas. He'd had a few girlfriends, after first asking Ray's permission if he could take off his wedding ring. He wanted to keep it on, he admitted, because it made him think of Ray's mother, but he was never going to find any companionship that way. His hand was the first place the women looked. Ray understood that. And so the wedding ring had reappeared in the little silk cuff link box in his father's underwear drawer, where he kept his military and police medals, his gold detective shield, his own father's watch, and other sacred items.
His father had gotten about five good years. The fishing trips, a cruise to Alaska. A couple of girlfriends who kept him busy, insisted he take them to Broadway shows, out to dinner, a few trips to Atlantic City. Companionship, laughs. Ray hadn't asked much about the women. He didn't want or need to know about them. Maybe they would help with his father's loneliness, and if so, then good. He wasn't much use to his father, anyway, being so far away and often out of touch. And in fact it had been one of the old girlfriends who called Ray while he was in Malaysia to say that his father had just had emergency surgery for blocked kidneys except that they had found a rare cancer everywhere and would Ray please come home, it didn't look good.
He didn't tell me he was having problems, Ray had said.
He didn't want to worry you, came the reply.
Ray stood now looking at his father's framed commendations and badges, as well as the inscribed photographs with Mayors Koch, Din kins, and Giuliani. The letters from men and women thanking him for locating their children or finding the murderer or solving the robbery. His father had once put on a coat and a tie each day and taken the subway into Manhattan, where he'd done most of his tours. He had worked his way steadily through the ranks of the city's four thousand detectives, never accepting a promotion to manage other detectives and become part of the bureaucracy. Never getting caught up in the intrigues and petty betrayals, a relentless fact of police work. Staying out of the cop bars, avoiding any contact with Internal Affairs. Accepting reassignment from precinct to precinct, squad to squad. 'Just do the work, son,' he'd always said. 'Just do the work and the rest takes care of itself.' He stayed on foot, in the car, and on the phone. Or free, as he saw it. A bad fall off a wet fire escape when he was in his early fifties had slowed him a bit, but worse, when he was fifty-six, off duty and sitting in a neighborhood bar watching a Yankees game, he tried to step in between two fighting patrons, one a short fat man who had started it. His reflexes were gone and he had taken three punches, one a roundhouse flat to his cheek, a second into his solar plexus, doubling him over, and the third an uppercut beneath his jaw that broke six teeth. He fell over and had the presence of mind not to draw his service revolver, given that he was in no condition to use it properly. The assailant was caught two days later, and it was discovered he been a pretty good club fighter ten years before, in his twenties.
But the bum knee and the bad jaw led Ray's father to have a long think. He had his pension coming to him, he had his rental houses, he was set. More than that, he'd been a cop too long. The cop life was a hard one and had worn him down.
'You could do this, you know,' he'd said to Ray many times. 'You have the whole package. The judgment. Good with people. Tough. I should know, too.'
'I don't think so, Dad,' Ray had said every time back. 'I'm not ready to do it.'
'That's why you'd be good.'
'No.'
'There's still time-I could call a few-'
'No. I'm not able to-' Kill people, he'd never quite been able to say, something police officers very occasionally had to do.
'You'd be surprised what you're able to do.'
'Not shooting someone.'
'You'd shoot if it meant saving others' lives.'
'Maybe not.'
And in time his father had let it go, disappointed certainly but perhaps relieved, too. Lot of cops ended up as damaged men, one way or the other. There were some lost years in there, what with what happened to Ray, his mother getting sick, the beating his father took.
Ray climbed the basement stairs with the equipment and dropped it all into a box in the hall.
'Mr. Grant?'
Ray looked up. Wendy stepped into the hall. She wore a trim white nurse's dress and an unbuttoned blue sweater.
'What's up?'
'Your dad is comfortable now, sleeping.'
'He seem pretty lucid to you?'
'In and out.' She smiled in understanding. 'That's normal. We expect that.'
'It's the painkiller?'
She nodded vaguely. 'Mostly.'
'Please just tell me. Tell me the facts.'
'Okay. It's a lot of things. The Dilaudid, yes. But the brain is an organ, too, and it's subject to the stresses of the disease. The cancer could be in the brain, in fact. He's not getting enough nutrition and that has its effect. But also there are the emotions. He is dying and he knows he is dying and he is worried about you.'
Ray studied her. She was young and earnest, much different from Gloria, the night nurse who'd seen everything.
'It'll be like this, in and out?'
Wendy nodded. 'As the pain gets worse, we'll have to increase his Dilaudid, and as that goes up, he'll be out more. He'll sleep a lot, too.'
'How much longer?'
'So hard to say.' She kept Ray's gaze, almost aggressively, it seemed. 'As I said before, his heart is very strong for a man his age and the lungs are clear. It's not in the next few days. But sometimes these things take a turn.'
