Roast Mortem

wondering who that fireman is, the mysterious one who’s secretly seeing Lucia.”

“Me, too,” Mike said. “If that woman was looking for expertise in torching her dad’s caffè, she couldn’t do any better than a fireman.”

“You’re speaking from experience?”

Mike didn’t answer directly. What he said was, “Firefighters are experts in the methods of starting blazes, not just stopping them. It’s part of their training...”

And there’s my opening...

“So tell me, Detective, why didn’t you ever go through the training? I mean, given your hero father and your younger brothers...” Not to mention your evil twin of a cousin. “Why aren’t you a fireman, too?”

I’d kept the tone light, but my question failed to amuse. Mike’s body tensed beside mine; his prolonged silence felt heavy. So I took a guess — and not a very wild one: “Is that the reason why you and your cousin don’t get along? Because you didn’t follow family tradition and join the FDNY?”

He exhaled. “That’s part of it.”

I shifted on the sofa, getting some distance so I could see his eyes. This was a situation I’d faced before with this man — How do you interrogate a trained interrogator?

Not with tricks. When I wanted answers from Mike, I asked him straight. “I’d like to know what started the beef between you two.”

“What started it...” He let out another audible breath. “I guess you could say it started a long time ago... when we were in the academy together.”

“Police academy?” I assumed.

“Fire academy.”

“Fire academy? You went to the fire academy with your cousin?”

Mike nodded.

“What about that story you told me? About always wanting to be a cop? That schoolyard epiphany thing...”

Just like me, Mike had gone to Catholic school, where the priests and nuns were big on the idea of vocation. At some point in our lives, they told us, God was supposed to reveal our life’s calling.

I’d gotten the cosmic message with the birth of my daughter. According to Mike, he’d picked up the Almighty’s voicemail at the age of thirteen during a vicious fight that had broken out between two boys in the school courtyard.

Instead of standing on the sidelines with the others, Mike jumped in to stop it and got a beating for his trouble — from both boys. The Jesuit who finally broke it up told Mike that with his zealousness to leap into human matters and make things right, he was destined to become a priest or a cop.

“I probably could have been a priest,” he’d told me when we first started seeing each other. “I just couldn’t hack the chastity.”

“So how did you end up in the fire academy?”

“My dad wanted it. I respected the man, so I gave it a shot...” He shrugged. “It just wasn’t for me. After a few weeks, I quit.”

“And your cousin Michael couldn’t understand?”

Again, Mike shrugged. “He thought we were in it together...”

“So he turned on you?”

“Like I said, that’s how it started. Trust me when I say that my cousin has no love for me, and I’d like you to stay away from him. Can you do that for me, Clare?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Thank you.”

As we sat gazing at the hearth, I felt Mike’s hand brush aside my hair, begin to caress my shoulder. His heavy body leaned into me, and I felt his lips at my nape, applying little kisses.

I knew what the man wanted. (I wanted it, too.) But I couldn’t let go. An idea kept banging around my brain, a pithy piece of police wisdom Mike once shared: If a smart perp wants to dodge an interview, he doesn’t clam up or even argue. He keeps feeding the interviewer information — just not any key information...

And that’s what Mike had done with me. I was sure of it. Considering the Quinn clan’s history with the FDNY, I figured there had to be more to his story. Not that I was some expert on familial expectation.

After my mother left us, my father expressed zero thoughts about my future apart from I just want you to be happy, cupcake... The equivalent of a “Good girl, Lassie” pat on the head. My old-world grandmother, who’d primarily raised me, never pushed me to be anything — beyond a well-behaved young lady.

It wasn’t until college that I realized not everyone was like me. A number of my classmates were pressured children, saddled with the baggage of parental aspirations. When the stars aligned, they had few issues: I always wanted to study contract law... Electrical engineering works for me... Sure, I’m going for the PhD...

But when one future had two different maps, kids got lost.

The strong ones waged external rebellion, raising shields against arrows as they followed the sound of Henry David’s drummer. The pragmatic ones chose deafness — screw the different drummer, he’s suspect — and locked down their spirits to the road often taken.

The ones I worried about lived in the gray purgatory of indecision, giving their families the appearance of going along while quietly burning for another life. These kids saw the lights of an inspiring new highway yet continued to plod along the deadening old one, nurturing quiet resentment with every step. (And I knew from my own lousy marriage that a pretense like that was about as healthy as feeding a piranha in your stomach. Inevitably the thing grew bigger and bigger, gnawing at your insides until it completely hollowed you out.)

Given the Quinn legacy, Mike’s father must have been devastated when his eldest quit the fire academy. It couldn’t have been the casual decision Mike was now making it out to be.

I cleared my throat: “I noticed you like sharing that story about the schoolyard fight, but there’s something more, isn’t there? Something you don’t want people to know about why you became a cop.”

The kisses stopped. The magic fingers quit moving. Mike leaned back, taking his hand and lips with him.

“Mike?”

“It’s not a pretty story, Clare.”

“I don’t care. I’d like to hear it...”

For a full minute, he stayed silent, shifting a few times on the sofa. Then just when I thought he would clam up for good, he rubbed his jaw, took a breath, and said —

“When I hit high school, I started dating a classmate. Leta was her name, Leta Diaz. Bright girl, beautiful smile. She was my lab partner in chemistry, a class we both enjoyed, so we hit it off...”

He paused to glance over at me. I nodded. “Go on.”

“Leta’s family came here from the Dominican Republic. They ran their own little convenience store just off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. One afternoon, Leta’s dad was robbed at the store. He resisted and was shot to death.”

“Oh God, that’s awful. Your poor girlfriend.”

“Yeah, she took it extremely hard. I tried to be there for her. But I wanted to do more than just hold her hand and watch her cry her heart out, you know? I wanted to do something. So I did.”

“What do you mean? You were just a high school kid.”

“I had a gut feeling. The week before, at one of the school’s basketball games, I noticed the father of a classmate talking to Leta’s father. There was something about the way he was chatting up the man — it seemed odd, like a hustle.”

“So?”

“So this robbery that happened — it was during a very narrow window of time when Leta’s father had a great deal of cash on hand at the store to pay their packaged-food distributor. Once a week they got that delivery, once a week on a certain day, between certain hours.”

“And you thought this man, this father of your classmate at school, was the stick-up guy?”