“Unofficially officially.”
“Yeah, what’s that pay?”
“What it’s worth.”
“Now who’s fencing, Mr. D.A.?”
“
“Sorry, my only interest in this was Larry. Whether he committed suicide or not, he’s dead. My interest ends there.”
“How about if I could give you some incentive to come work for me?”
“Incentive. Incentive like what, a gold shield? Money? The shield doesn’t interest me anymore. That ship sailed years ago. Money? Between my pension, my wife’s income, and my business, I already make more money than I need.”
“Money, yes, Mr. Prager, but maybe something else, something you might not have more of than you need.”
“That would be?”
“Information.”
“Information. What kind of information?”
“The kind you want, but don’t have.”
“You’re fencing with me again, Mr. D.A.”
He whispered, making me draw near. “How about your brother-in-law?”
“Patrick!”
“What if I could tell you what’s become of him? Would that be worth-”
“You know where he is?”
“Did I say that, Mr. Prager? I asked would your involvement be worth it
Fishbein had pushed the right button. I was dizzy. The thought of Patrick reappearing out of the blue was one of the things that kept me up nights. Yeah, sure, he had been gone for a dozen years now. Did I think he’d ever come back? Probably not, but there was always a chance. And if he did return and he told Katy about what had really gone on, about how I had found him and let him go, about the things I knew about Francis. . That would be it, the end of our marriage, and the end for Katy and her dad. With our marriage at low ebb, maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. But what about Sarah? She was eleven years old. She would never understand. Christ, I still didn’t understand why I hadn’t just brought Patrick in when I found him.
“Okay, Fishbein, you’ve got my attention.”
“Good.” He patted my shoulder like we were old buddies. “Go home. Get some rest. Go to the wake. We’ll talk.”
The ride back to my car was decidedly quieter than the ride to the dump and, given that my wrists were uncuffed, decidedly more comfortable. Murphy was less than his chatty self. Detective Melendez seemed completely distracted, lost in a world of her own thoughts, a world with no visas, visitors, or border crossings. I was pretty lost myself.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
CHAPTER NINE
For some inexplicable reason, I’d slept well. Neither Larry’s question nor his ghost kept me from sleep. I was vaguely aware of Katy tossing and turning. Her relationship with Larry Mac was less complicated than mine. Because my wife offered Larry no usable career commodity, they were free to enjoy each other’s company without holding bits of themselves back for purposes of negotiation. And for this reason, Katy felt Larry’s loss in a way I was incapable of. I envied her that.
The morning was not quite so peaceful for me. Larry McDonald’s name and face were splashed all over the TV, news radio, and papers like green on St. Patrick’s Day. A regular cop’s suicide is big news, never mind a chief’s. When a chief does himself in, it’s a cross between the first day of hunting season and a shark feeding frenzy. Every aspect of his life becomes fodder for speculation. And the fact that the police had yet to turn up a suicide note only added to the smell of raw meat in the air.
I had called Margaret as soon as I got into the house yesterday afternoon to tell her the bad news, to warn her before the pit bulls could latch on and pull. I was too late. Police Commissioner Cleary had laid the word upon her. Between her tears, all Margaret could do was ask me the same simple question over and over again.
Then there was the earlier exchange between Melendez and me as we both searched along the curb for the car keys she had earlier tossed out her window.
“You still haven’t told me why you were at the Six-O yesterday.”
“I didn’t, did I?”
“Don’t be smug, Mr. Prager.”
“This isn’t smug, it’s silence.”
“Yeah, well, before this thing is through, we’re gonna need each other.”
Detective Melendez didn’t seem interested in explaining herself any further. I found my keys. We left it at that.
I did what any self-respecting detective would have done when investigating the suicide of his friend-I ignored it. With the press so busy crawling over Larry’s corpse, I figured there was little to gain and a lot to lose by my nosing around. The press tended to use cleavers when scalpels were called for, but they could be pretty effective. The problem was that they, too, often left huge scars on the lives of people they mowed down as they struck out blindly in pursuit of the story. Time was a luxury not afforded the press, so they sacrificed innocence for expediency. Other people’s innocence, their expediency.
I was also worried about being noticed. It was one thing for me to show up at Larry Mac’s wake, at the cemetery at the memorial, if there was to be one. But if some stringer or crime beat reporter caught wind of me nosing around in Larry McDonald’s past, the red flags would fly and it would only serve to confirm any suspicions about dirty dealings in my dead friend’s closet. Instead, I called in a favor.
There was noise on the other end of the phone, but not human speech.
“Wit? Wit, for chrissakes, is that you?”
“God’s day may launch come dawn, but mine does not get into swing till well after morn.” You had to admire an angry man who woke with poetry on his lips. “This had better be of consequence.”
Yancy Whittle Fenn, Wit to his friends, was like Truman Capote pulled back from the abyss. Well, that’s an inexact description if you knew the man, but it served those unacquainted with him. When I met Y.W. Fenn in 1983, he was just as famous for his brand of celebrity pseudo-journalism as his taste for Wild Turkey. That’s the kind you
Never quite as beautiful or wealthy as the company he kept, Wit had invested unwisely, married badly, and began drinking. He became a hanger-on instead of one of the crowd, but as I was once told by a crony of his, “He used to be fun back in the day, a life of the party sort-funny, biting, and bitchy.” Then his grandson had been kidnapped and brutally murdered. Wit had always done crime reportage, but dealt with his grief by becoming vindictive and focusing on the rich and infamous. He’d write exposes for the big magazines whenever crime-murder in particular-money, and celebrity aligned.
He had been assigned to the Moira Heaton investigation. By
