from the kid today?”
“Nah.”
“I still feel bad about throwing him off-”
“Forget it, Joe. Get some sleep.”
Cain’s eyes fluttered. Face down in a few inches of yellow-dyed diesel, he should have been coughing but couldn’t. He wasn’t breathing very well either. It was the weirdest thing. He knew he should be in a lot of pain, but he just wasn’t. He had been beat up real bad, so bad he couldn’t remember much. He was cold mostly. Only his head hurt a little. He knew he should have been scared, but he wasn’t.
He had better get up, he thought. He couldn’t move. His hands and feet wouldn’t work. Now he panicked. He tried screaming.
“Frank!”
But when he opened his mouth, diesel rushed in. He couldn’t cough. He was drowning from inside and out. His eyes were stinging and the taste of the diesel was hard to take. His tongue was thick and slow.
“Frank!” he tried again.
Again the diesel rushed in and he couldn’t spit it back out.
He moved the only part of him that worked anymore. He banged his head against the tank as hard as he could, hoping morning had come and that Frank or Joe could hear him. He split his scalp wide open, his blood mixing into the diesel.
Silence.
He stopped banging. Even if morning had come, no one would be there. It was Sunday. The panic was gone.
Thursday,The Day of the Funeral, February 19th, 2004
B ob Healy didn’t bother waiting to get back into the house to unfurl his Newsday. Normally he’d check the sports headlines before scanning the front page, but the Knicks could wait. No, there was a story he’d been following since Monday morning when he saw the first reports on News Channel 12. It was tragedy enough that the poor retarded boy had been murdered and tossed into an oil tank to rot, but there was another aspect of the case that Healy couldn’t get his head around. Initially, he hadn’t made the connection between the victim, Joe Serpe, and Mayday Fuel.
Then it clicked.
The murder was headline material again today:
NO LEADS
Funeral Later Today
Bob Healy crossed himself. Seeing Joe Serpe on Saturday had gotten to him. Maybe it was because that day had been so cold, so haunting, so full of Mary’s absence. For whatever reason, Healy had taken Joe Serpe’s appearance at his doorstep as a sign. He had wanted to talk to Serpe on Saturday, to say some things that needed to be said, but old ways die hard. Healy couldn’t help but treat Serpe with the practiced condescension he’d cultivated over his years in Internal Affairs. Before Healy could change his tune, Serpe’s truck was rumbling down the street.
He hadn’t slept at all well that night, going over his cases in his head. Until Mary’s death, Healy hadn’t been much of a second-guesser. It didn’t suit him or his career in I.A.B. But since he had seen Joe “the Snake”, all Bob had done was second-guess himself. In a lightless, lonely bedroom in the midst of a snowstorm, there’s time enough to dissect the individual molecules of a case; time to rehash every decision, every question, every unkindness.
Healy went to Mass the following day, confessed his sins, took communion. He went on Monday as well, but found neither solace nor answers in the words of the priest nor in the serenely frozen face of the crucified Jesus. Then, when he got home and flipped on cable to see the story of the murder in the oil yard, Bob Healy knew what he had to do. He would have to meet with Joe Serpe. Not only was it the right thing to do, but Mary would have demanded it.
He scanned the articles in the paper, ignoring his cooling coffee. There it was, the detail he’d been searching for. He tore the article out of the paper, put his mug in the sink, and went upstairs to shower. He had to be at Mass in twenty minutes.
Joe and Frank came in separate cars, but they met in the parking lot at Kaplan Brothers. Joe was surprised to see Frank alone. He had just assumed Frank would bring Tina.
“The wife’s not feelin’ too good,” Frank volunteered before Joe had a chance to ask.
It was a lie. Joe could see it in Frank’s face, could hear it in his voice. He knew it was a lie just like he knew it was a lie when his snitches would look him right in the eye and swear they weren’t using or dealing. It was pro forma. I say X and you say Y. I cha cha and you cha cha cha. Joe sometimes wondered why people went through that song and dance bullshit. He wasn’t pointing fingers. He had been just as guilty of it as anyone. Maybe it was a basic human instinct, he thought, the need for preliminaries before the main bout.
He knew Frank was lying the same way he had known that Ralphy was lying to him over the last two years they were together. With Ralphy, it was little things at first. By the time they got busted, Ralphy’d gotten so outrageous it was almost funny. Almost. He was like the punch line to a bad joke:
How did you know I was lying?
Your lips were moving.
Joe and Frank didn’t say much to each other as they walked from the parking lot into the funeral home. Besides the lie, there were a lot of other factors adding to the unusual level of discomfort between the two men. Neither was at ease in a suit and tie. Frank especially, kept adjusting his tie and shirt collar. Joe could see his boss’ neck chaffed red at the constriction of a closed top button and taut knot.
Then there was the fact that Frank had never been to a Jewish funeral before. Unlike Joe, who’d grown up in Bensonhurst with a pack of Jewish friends and who had worked in the city until the troubles began, Frank was strictly a Long Island guy. In fact, his friends used to call him the Babylonian, because he had been born, raised and rarely left the village of Babylon until he started in the oil business. Even now, he was more likely to fly to Orlando than drive into Manhattan.
“Why ain’t the coffin opened?” Frank got up the courage to ask when they settled into their seats at the back of the chapel.
“Tradition,” Joe said. “Only the immediate family can see him and then only for a few minutes. Jews usually bury the dead within twenty-four hours, but with the autopsy…”
Joe, checking his watch, noticed the front rows of the chapel were empty. The family would take those seats. The family-they were the biggest reason for Joe and Frank’s disquiet. Frank had tried since Monday afternoon to contact them. Neither parent would come to the phone and the relatives who had picked up were either crying or curt. Frank wanted to believe it was all grief, but feared it was more than that.
Suddenly, the chapel fell silent. Everyone stood. The rabbi entered and took the podium. Behind him trailed a group of about fifteen people, all red-eyed, some crying. Though he had never met Cain’s parents, Joe immediately recognized them. Cain had been a fifty-fifty child-tall and thin like his dad, darkly handsome like his mom. Cain’s dad practically carried his wife along, her wailing so wrought with despair it cut through everyone like jagged shards of glass.
A few rows behind the family and to the right, Joe spotted a group of about eight people he assumed were from the group home. Some seemed very distracted or alone in this room packed with people. One, a stocky girl with Down’s Syndrome, was crying with an intensity and purity that Joe had never quite experienced. Her tears were so unselfconscious, Joe was embarrassed for her. Or was he just jealous? It was hard to lose family. It was hard to lose friends. Joe had lost his share of each, but if he started crying, he feared he might never stop. Somehow, crossing paths with Bob Healy no longer seemed so important.
Finally, a woman came to comfort the girl. Joe guessed she was in her early thirties, elegantly slim, with
