high racks of periodicals in a dozen languages. Behind the counter was a dense mosaic of cigarettes, pornographic videos, and breath mints. A hand-printed sign taped to the register advertised phone cards and fax services.
The curly-haired kid who was minding the store was no help to me. He didn’t glance up from his thick textbook when he told me that no, he hadn’t worked yesterday. His cousin had been the only one there, all day long. The same cousin who’d left last night on a two-week trip to Florida. No, he didn’t know where in Florida or how to contact him, or if he’d actually be back in two weeks’ time.
I left him to his studies and rode the subway back into Manhattan, all the way to Lexington Avenue and 96th Street. Then, with photos of Trautmann in my pocket, I spent the next five hours wandering the northern reaches of Central Park, in search of Faith Herman. I worked the playgrounds and footpaths, the gardens and meadows, the rambles, the ponds, and the horse trails. I saw strollers and runners and power walkers, skaters and cyclists and horsemen-and women, too. I saw singles and couples and families, dog people, cat people, even a few ferret people. I saw winos and junkies, crazies and crooks, and lots of cops and tourists. I walked until my ribs were aching and it was time for lunch. Then I ate a hot dog and a pretzel on a bench in the sun, and when I was finished I walked some more. But I didn’t see Faith Herman or anyone who looked like her.
It was oddly restful, all that fruitless walking around. The day was cold and clear, almost painfully bright, and I achieved a solitude and a detachment that I usually find only when I run. I thought about Pierro, and how the fear and anger had eroded him, and what he might be like after he’d lived with it for a year or two, the way Lenzi and Bregman had. I was pretty sure there’d be nothing left. I thought about Helene, too, and the steel she’d shown in managing her husband. Helene could take it. She could pay up and go on with life, and to hell with the other shoe. She was tough enough.
And I thought for a long time about Jane Lu. My run-in with Pell and my conversation with Neary had left me in a foul mood and full of dark thoughts, and I’d been bad company at the hospital, but Jane hadn’t seemed to mind. The ER was busy, and we’d waited on plastic seats behind a gunshot leg, a taxi hit-and-run, and a subway stabbing. Along with the patients, doctors, nurses, and orderlies, a lot of cops, firemen, and EMS guys filtered in and out. They were heavily laden with equipment and fatigue, and Jane had watched them closely.
“Did you like being a policeman?” she’d asked.
“Most of the time.”
“You don’t seem very much like these guys.”
“Not all cops are alike.”
“Were you very much like any of them?”
“Not really.” She’d turned to look at me.
“How did you get into it? Why do you like it?” she’d asked. Those questions again-both barrels. I’d been tired and irritated, and I’d started to give her some of the same bullshit I’d given Pierro when he had asked, but Jane cut me off. Annoyance flitted across her face, and she raised her hand.
“If you don’t want to talk, just say so,” she’d said, with a small laugh. “You don’t have to placate me.” I’d looked at her, surprised, and she’d looked steadily back, and I’d thought about her questions.
How? Why? There’s no short answer to either one. How isn’t a hard question, though; how is just a story-and it starts with Anne.
We met in our senior year of college, and I fell in love with her the way that I could back then-hungrily, drunkenly, and completely. And when graduation came, my only ideas about the future were that I didn’t want to spend it at Klein amp; Sons, or apart from her. So when she went back to her hometown, to take a job on the local newspaper, I went with her.
Anne’s father took me by surprise. Parents had never been my strong suit-especially not fathers-and I’d figured to do even worse with a county sheriff. But I was wrong. Donald Stennis was smart and well read, with a sneaky chess game, a dry, laconic wit, and an unsentimental but generous-and surprisingly liberal-view of life. The Adirondack Atticus Finch, Anne called him. More surprising still was Donald’s trust in his only child, and his respect for her judgment. He made me welcome.
I lived in the apartment over the garage, cooking breakfast for Anne and Donald in the mornings, cleaning up when they’d gone to work, running and reading in the afternoons, playing chess with Donald in the evenings, and making love with Anne as quietly as we could after he’d turned in. It wasn’t a bad time-it was nice-but after two months, I needed to do something with myself. I was bored, adrift, and getting antsy. Then Donald took me for a ride.
He called it the sheriff’s tour of Burr County. We rode in his battered, unmarked Crown Victoria, across the length and breadth of his jurisdiction, down county roads and Main Streets and no-name washboard trails, through towns and hamlets and places that were little more than packed earth and rusted trailers. The air conditioning was broken, and we rolled down the windows. The car filled with the smell of pines and dirt, and with heavy midsummer heat. The whole time we drove, Donald talked.
His knowledge of the county, and the people in it, was vast. He knew where they lived and where they worked, where they went to church and where they went to drink, and if they drank too much, he knew that too. He knew who had married and who had divorced, who was cheating and who’d got caught, who’d beat his wife and whose wife was never coming home again. He knew the running buddies, and the ties of blood or marriage or schoolyards or jail yards that bound them together. He knew who’d gone to prison and who’d just gotten out, who’d gotten laid off and who’d come into sudden cash, who’d left town, and who would inevitably be back. He spoke of them with something close to affection.
It was a cop’s-eye view-of greed, grievance, and rancor, of poverty, boozing, and rage, of just plain mean and just plain stupid-and how they came together and boiled over into crime and violence. It was a hard view, and often sad, he told me, but it had its humor, and, once in a while, a glimpse of redemption. It had fascinated Donald for nearly thirty years. He drove and talked for seven hours, and we were covered in sweat and dust when we pulled back into his driveway. It was there he’d made his simple pitch.
“Sometimes, you can’t do much, and sometimes you can’t do a damn thing at all. But now and then, you can make all the difference in the world. It’s not for everybody, though. You can get used up-get sick from what you see, or angry, or sad about how little you can do. You can get tired, or mean, or, worse still, bored. It’s not for everybody.
“All my guys are good guys; I get rid of the ones that aren’t. But I haven’t had a deputy with a college diploma for going on two years now. You’re smart, you’re curious, you’re not a bully, and you don’t scare easy. And I’ve got a uniform that’s about your size. Give it a try. What the hell, if it’s not for you, you got cooking to fall back on.”
But it was for me.
Why is a tougher question. Some of my reasons were not so different from Donald’s-a fascination with the whole strange pageant; a desire to help, to make a difference. I liked the chase, too, and the puzzles-the who and the how and the why, especially the why. But I also liked knowing, at the end of each day, what I’d been able to do and what I hadn’t- and knowing it more certainly, more tangibly, than a P amp;L report could ever tell.
After Anne died, I quit this work, and a lot else besides. But after a while, I came back to it-for all those reasons, I guess, and for fear of that empty time when I’d stopped.
Jane had looked steadily back at me, silent amid the ER’s buzz and hustle. I’d looked at her, and thought about the answers, and told her all of it.
It was after three when I made a last circuit of the East Meadow and the Conservatory Garden. Then I gave up on Faith Herman for the day and took a taxi home. The windows in my building were dark. It was quiet inside and empty feeling, and my apartment was filled with a cold, gray twilight. There were no messages. I sat at the kitchen counter, in my coat, in the gathering dusk.
I was tired and sore. My feeling of unassailable solitude had faded in the bleak, fading light, replaced by worries about Monday and the sense that the whole case had spun away from me. Maybe Shelly DiPaolo would take care of all that. Maybe after tomorrow there’d be no case. I shed my coat and flicked on some lights. I put a pot of coffee on and made myself a tuna sandwich. I called Mike Metz. No one was home, so I left him a message about coming up empty in Brooklyn and in the park. Then I pulled a volume of Andre Dubus stories from the shelf and read until the words stopped making sense.
