I asked the driver to pass by Brennan amp; Carr’s before dropping me at home. I didn’t get out. The place was closed, the spits had long since stopped spinning, but the aroma of the roasting meat had so thoroughly basted the air that my mouth still watered. It seemed every stray dog in the neighborhood had the same reaction. We must have been quite a sight, a long black limo stuffed into the tiny parking lot surrounded by a pack of hopeful strays. The back door opened and someone tossed out scraps to the dogs. Just then, Larry patted his envelope. It was time to move on, I told the driver. My appetite was gone.
Chapter Eleven
With the fourth of July two weeks gone, summer was in full bloom. I have always disliked characterizing my life as having returned to normal, but it had, at least, returned to a familiar, comfortable rhythm. Even the pain of the miscarriage had ceased hanging over the front door to our house like Passover blood, and the hoopla surrounding the events of June had thankfully faded.
The funeral mass and memorial services for Moira were long complete. Her mother and brother had returned to Florida, and John was back to the business of drinking himself to death. Ivan the Terrible had been replaced on the front pages by some other psycho killer whose name lent itself to witty headlines. And the men with whom I had shared a very intense few weeks had gotten back to the business of their own lives, all, of course, with a bit more cash in their pockets and some with more brass on their collars.
Captain Larry McDonald was now Deputy Chief McDonald. Detective Gloria had gotten the bump up to first grade and been moved out of Missing Persons and inside One Police Plaza. Pete’s kid had fulfilled a lifelong dream by exchanging his corrections uniform for the blue of the NYPD. With the money he received, Pete Sr. finally felt comfortable enough to let his partners buy him out of his share in the bar. Apparently, he and his wife were seriously considering moving down south. Wit’s piece on the resolution of Moira’s death and Brightman’s public absolution was to be the featured story in the August edition of
The only person who’d dropped out of sight was Joe Spivack. Soon after the last of the memorial services and dedications, which we were all sort of required to attend, Spivack closed down his office in Brooklyn Heights and moved out of the city. No one knew where he’d gotten to, and, as none of us were exactly buddy buddy with him, no one seemed particularly concerned. To his way of thinking, he’d fucked up. Nothing anyone could say was going to change that. With time, maybe he’d come to see it differently. Oh, and that dinner Geary had promised that would include our families and friends, it never came off. That was fine. We had moved on.
I was certain we had, but Wit’s phone call put a dent in that notion.
“Hey, Wit,” I picked up, actually happy to hear his voice, “what’s up?”
“I … I thought you might want to know,” he said in a sort of odd monotone.
“Know what?”
“It just came across the wire. Spivack’s dead.”
“Shit! How?”
“He ate his.357 Magnum for breakfast yesterday.”
Neither one of us was shocked by what he’d done or how he’d done it. There was a few seconds of silence between us.
“Where was he?” I asked.
“Up in the Adirondacks someplace. Apparently, he owned a cabin up there.”
“Anything about a note?”
“Nothing in the wire story, no,” Wit said, sounding a bit distracted. “I’ll find out about the funeral arrangements and get back to you.”
So, Spivack had taken his own forgiveness out of the equation. Some people are just more comfortable with punishment than forgiveness. Forgiveness is always a messy proposition; complicated, ambiguous, hard to accept. Sometimes a bullet is easier to take. I’d never put a barrel in my mouth, not in jest or in the depths of despair, but I’d been a cop. Cops understand punishment. They believe in it. On the job, they live by it. Some die by it too.
The coroner’s report was straightforward enough. Joseph Spivack had consumed nearly a liter of 100-proof vodka before pressing the tip of his big handgun to the underside of his jaw above his Adam’s apple and dispensing a single round. He had left no note, but even the most devout conspiracy theorist couldn’t have spun much of a tale out of Spivack’s death. Since closing down his firm, he’d spent most of his time drinking alone in his cabin. Still, his suicide made me uneasy.
He was afforded the honor of a pretty nice military funeral out at the Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island. There was no twenty-one-gun salute or anything like that, but there was a small honor guard and a flag- draped coffin. No family showed that I could tell. Some of his old marshal buddies and a few ex-employees came. Wit, Pete, and I were there. Rob Gloria and Larry Mac couldn’t get out of work. Neither Geary nor Brightman was anywhere in sight.
When the honor guard finished folding the flag that had draped Spivack’s casket into a taut triangle, an officer asked if there was a Mr. Moses Prager in attendance.
“That’s me.”
The officer approached. “Sir,” he said, placing the flag in my hands, “I’ve been instructed to deliver this to you. On behalf of the United States Army, my condolences.”
I was utterly and completely stunned. Though this must have been either a mistake or a very bad joke, the grave site was not the place to delve into it. As they began lowering his coffin, a Navy F-14 passed directly overhead on its way to the nearby Grumman plant. It was purely coincidental, of course, but we chose to ignore that fact and saluted the roaring jet.
We retired to a local bar. Kilroy’s Place uniquely reflected the bulk of its clientele. The decor was an interesting mixture of Grumman and military paraphernalia ranging from fighter group patches to helmets to bayonets to a piece of a lunar module mockup. In a place of honor above the bar sat a wood-and-glass framed flag just like the one I cradled in my arms.
“What do you think the flag thing is all about?” Pete Parson was curious to know.
“Fuck if I know. His life must’ve been sadder than we thought for him to have left this to me.”
Wit was noncommittal, staring into his Wild Turkey as if it were a crystal ball. “He obviously respected you and the work you did for Brightman, Mr. Prager. You should be honored.”
“Wit, I think the time has come for you to call me Moe. You think, Pete?”
“I suppose you two have dated long enough.”
Wit liked that. “Okay, Moe it is.”
Maybe because I had been ceded the flag, all the other attendees stopped by to reminisce. Two consistent themes emerged: Joe Spivack was one tough motherfucker and loyal as any man who’d ever lived.
“Even last year when the company started taking on water, he wouldn’t let any of us go,” Ralph Barto, a fellow ex-marshal and former Spivack employee, wanted me to know. “Anybody else would have started throwing anything that wasn’t nailed down overboard, but not Joe Spivack. Somehow, he pulled us through. Even when he shut us down, we all got two weeks’ severance. I bet you it came out of his own pocket. I don’t know what you did to deserve that flag, mister, but it must’ve been something special.”
“Hey, do you know why he rated such a nice funeral?” I wondered.
“No. I know he was early in ‘Nam, even before Kennedy was shot, but that’s about it. Listen, I’m out on my own now,” Barto said. “Here’s my card. If you ever need backup, I’m there.”
On the way back into the city I asked Wit if he thought there might be a story in Spivack’s suicide.
“No story for me,” he said, “but there might be one for you.”
He didn’t volunteer a further explanation and I didn’t ask him for one. I had a comfortable life that needed getting back to.
