When the high priest had selected two cigars, he pressed a folded bill neatly into the woman’s right palm. She closed the box.
Larry ran a cigar under his nose, taking in an exaggerated breath.
“All right, Larry, what’s going on?”
He laughed a little self-satisfied laugh, clipping the end off a cigar and handing it to me. He repeated the motion and used the outside of his pinkie to sweep loose bits of tobacco off the white tablecloth. Katy and the waiter arrived back at our table simultaneously.
The drinks served, the cigars lit, I noticed Larry’s escort had seemingly vanished in a haze of smoke. The tension was gone. Larry reached into his pocket and placed a small, unwrapped box on the table in front of him.
“This,” he said, sliding the box toward me, “is yours if you want it. No strings attached.”
Though it was nauseatingly cliched, I picked up the box, placing it to my ear. Then, almost involuntarily, I shook it. I think I knew exactly what it was the second I felt its weight. I had a replica of one in my sock drawer at home.
“Open it, for chrissakes!” Larry prodded, cigar smoke gushing from his mouth.
My hand trembled. I immediately put the box on the table and hid my hands beneath the tablecloth.
“Open it, Moe,” Katy urged, curiosity getting the better of her.
My hands somewhat settled, I placed one on the box and slid it to Katy. “You go ahead.”
She removed the lid without a moment’s hesitation and gasped. Katy’s too-thin lips formed a smile fraught with a sense of deep-seated satisfaction. It was the kind of smile you smile not for yourself, but for your kids, or for your team when they pull off an impossible comeback. Katy slid the box back in front of me.
Inside was a hunk of gold-plated metal in the shape of a glittering nine-pointed star. Within the rim of the star was a field of cobalt blue enamel. At the center of the rich blue enamel was more gold in the guise of a Dutchman and an Indian standing on either side of an eagle perched atop a coat of arms. The words CITY OF NEW YORK POLICE formed a gilt-lettered horseshoe around the central symbol. Beneath the symbol was another word: DETECTIVE. In a rectangle below was the number 353.
“The pay ain’t great and the hours suck, but it’s yours for the asking,” Larry rephrased his earlier offer. “You can take Gloria’s spot in Missing Persons. If that doesn’t move you, you can work a precinct or inside with me. It’s your call. In me, you got a rabbi and a Dutch uncle all wrapped up into one.”
I heard a voice that sounded like mine say: “Thanks, Larry. I … I don’t know what to-”
“Don’t give me an answer now,” he said, squeezing my shoulders. “There’s no rush. I know it’s a surprise and you’re running a successful business and everything. I’m sure you and Katy and you and that brother of yours got a lot to talk about. Call me in the next few days and we’ll discuss pay and grade and benefits and that crap.”
“This on the up-and-up, Larry?”
“Just as if you got that promotion they fucked you out of in ‘72 when you found the little girl.”
“But my knee, the pension stuff.”
“Hey, didn’t Rabbi Larry just tell you he’d take care of it? If you didn’t notice, schmuck-sorry, Katy-you solved a case involving a cop’s daughter. A case no one in this town wanted to touch with a ten-foot pole. You made a lot of people happy, Moe, a lot of people. Forget Geary and Brightman, everybody from the Queens DA to the mayor got mileage off this. Why shouldn’t you get what you’ve always wanted? Believe me, buddy, I had no problem smoothing out the bumps to get you that shield.”
“Thank you, Larry,” Katy said, reaching for my hand. “You’re right. We have a lot to talk about.”
I pushed the box toward Larry Mac.
He winked, pushing it back. “You hold on to that. Try it on for size.”
We finished our drinks in a sort of peculiar silence. Standing up to leave, I noticed that my barely smoked cigar had put itself to sleep. Larry had meant it to be a kind of victory cigar to celebrate my return to the job. It was good, I thought, that I hadn’t smoked it. There was nothing to celebrate, not yet.
The silence followed us from the Blind Steer home to Sheepshead Bay. Katy understood without needing to be told that there was nothing simple or easy about the decision with which I was now faced.
To the casual observer, even to some participants, all silences can seem equal. But there are differences in silence as there are in darkness. The absence of sound or light reveals little about what has caused the silence or the dark. There is a difference between a broken bulb and a moonless night, no? So it was with my silence. Katy understood one piece of it, the piece I gave her access to. There were, however, layers and textures in my silence to which she was not privy. Once before, in 1978, at a restaurant in Bay Ridge, I’d been offered a detective’s shield. And though there was much about the current offer that bore no relation to that situation, there were certain undeniable similarities impossible for me to ignore.
Rico Tripoli, the closest friend I ever had or was ever likely to have, had brought me into the case of Katy’s missing brother. At the time, it seemed like a perfect fit. Both parties, the Maloneys and myself, were just desperate enough to take a chance on each other. The Maloneys had exhausted all conventional options in the search for their son. As for me, I was just retired, in terrible pain from my second surgery, and flat out of ideas on how to raise the money for my share of the business. I think I would have tried almost anything. But Rico, as it happened, hadn’t brought me in to find Patrick at all. No, I had been brought in to play the foot, to be used as a conduit to leak information that would ruin my father-in-law. Ultimately, I managed to both find Patrick and ruin his father’s career, accomplishing the latter without exposing his family to the pain and embarrassment my users had intended for me to unleash.
Understand this, I despise my father-in-law, Francis Maloney Sr. He is a cruel, calculating bastard who, through God’s mysterious grace, helped create my wife. I haven’t lost a second’s sleep in five years over his loss of political sway, nor would I shed a tear on the day of his death. But the notion that my best friend, a man whom I had trusted with my life, had set me up and betrayed our friendship for career advancement has plagued me every day since. Rico’s handlers had wanted to gift me with a shield for my keeping my mouth shut and a job well done, kind of like rewarding a dog with a treat for giving his paw and rolling over. I took a pass. I didn’t do tricks.
In spite of the quiet in the car, it was noisy in my head. I kept telling myself that this time it was different, that Larry wasn’t like our old precinct mate, Rico, that he was high enough on the totem pole not to sell me out. I told myself that it was different this time because I had done good for the right reasons, like when I found Marina Conseco. Not because I felt guilty or threatened, but in spite of those things. Sure, luck had played a part. It always does.
It wasn’t luck I was worried about. I was worried about me. That, I decided, was what this apprehension and jitteriness was all about, not the past, not betrayal. Was I up to it? Could I handle the job after so long away? For years I had wanted that shield so badly I could taste it. Now, with all that had gone on, the miscarriage, the second store, did I really want it anymore? My father-in-law, of all people, had once warned me to watch out what I wished for. Did wishes, I wondered, have a shelf life? How long after you stopped wishing could they come true?
Chapter Fourteen
I slept like a baby. There were no ominous dreams in which Larry morphed into Rico or the cigar girl into Brightman’s wife. There were no dueling pistols in the humidor, nor was my father-in-law dressed like a jester. He did not cackle or forewarn. I don’t think I dreamed at all.
When I got up, Katy talked around Larry’s offer. Eventually we’d get around to discussing it, but there was little doubt she would tell me to follow my heart. As it had once led me to her, she knew to trust it. She also understood I needed to speak to Aaron first of all. Dealing with my big brother would be a more complicated affair. Beyond the obvious issue of our business partnership, he had never really approved of my being a cop. It was Aaron who breathed the biggest sigh of relief when I was put out to pasture. I had every reason in the world to believe he would not be so accommodating as my wife if I chose to go back.
“I’m going to-”
“I know where you’re going, Moe. Kiss your brother for me.”
I was around the corner from City on the Vine when fire engine sirens began blaring. I pulled to the right. So
