But Kat had moved on. She pushed the food around on her plate, distracted. “I made this whole dinner, I came over here to help you, so you wouldn’t be lonely, that was the whole thing-now look at me.” She brushed her finger under her eyes, though no tears had come yet.
“What’s wrong? You thinking about Amy?”
“No. Maybe. It’s everything, I guess. I just wish your brother, I wish he’d give me a break. I need his help now, you know? I need my husband. And what do I get?”
“What did he do, Kat?”
“Same thing Joe always does. He fucks around. He doesn’t even bother to cover his tracks anymore. He comes home with it on his shirt, in his pockets, the stink of it, and he gives it all to me to wash for him.”
“You want me to talk to him?”
“And say what?”
“‘Keep it in your pants.’”
“He can’t keep it in his pants. I know that. I knew it the day I married him.”
“But you married him anyway.”
“I was crazy about him.”
“I could threaten to tell Mum.”
“Oh, Ricky, you think she doesn’t know? You three are such little boys.”
“Not little enough, apparently.”
“No.”
“Can I ask you something? Why don’t you just go cheat on him? Go jump the milkman, isn’t that the way it works?”
“Ricky!”
“I’m serious.”
“Because I don’t want any dead milkmen, that’s why. We’ve got enough trouble. Besides, we need the milk.”
“Well, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself, then. Trust me, you give Joe a dose of his own medicine, you’ll get his attention.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“You really don’t know?”
“No.”
“Because I’m crazy about him.” She shrugged. “He’s just not crazy about me.”
30
In the days and weeks after Amy’s murder, Michael was trapped in a whirl of activity. There were the wake and the funeral to get through, and interminable condolence calls with Amy’s family, which he took to be the Daleys’ final earthly interactions with a clan that had never much liked them. The Ryans had hoped Amy would do better than Ricky, whose indefinite profession was always fishy. Ricky had told them he was a car salesman. They figured him for a charming loafer who might be on drugs. In the end, the Daleys mourned separately for Ricky’s “wife.” Well-meaning visitors loitered in Margaret Daley’s living room, many of them virtual strangers. Their presence imposed on the entire family the role of hosts. There were multiple trips to the grocery store, the liquor store, to the corner spa for ice and cigs, back and forth to the rear porch with overflowing garbage cans. The death ritual, Michael thought, was all about make-work. The busyness it created was its only purpose, a distraction, like a magician’s handkerchief.
Only his migraines pulled him away from the group-grieving. They came more frequently after the murder; stress was a trigger. Michael had been getting migraines since he was a teenager, but they had been rare then, once a year or so. In his twenties, the attacks came more frequently, but still only three or four a year. It was Joe Senior’s death that made them a constant threat; now Amy’s death set off a rolling series of attacks that never quite receded. The recurring pattern seemed to intensify the experience. Raw exposed nerves did not have time to heal and toughen between bouts. The onset of an attack, with its visual aura and incipient head-pain, meant he had to drop what he was doing and rush home, resting his forehead on the steering wheel at red lights or stumbling down crowded sidewalks. When he rejoined the mourners a day or two later, he would find the world subtly changed. The bustle would have subsided detectably. The ashtrays were less full; there were fewer empty glasses and beer bottles about; Amy’s death had become remoter. Drained by the headache, Michael would slump in a living-room chair as strangers sat down opposite him and made expansive remarks about the inevitability of death and the importance of moving on. Over and over it was pointed out how unlucky the Daleys were-two family members murdered in the space of a year. Who would be next? A joke circulated: The Roman soldier who pierced Jesus’s side must have been named Daley; now they were cursed forever. With the men, Michael chunked his beer can against theirs and drank. The women tended to flop a hand onto his knee or his wrist as they spoke, which distracted him from whatever bromides they may have been passing along. Why did they bother? Probably they mistook his exhaustion-after a migraine attack he tended to look sallow and hollow-eyed-for prostrate grief.
But Michael was not defeated so much as mortally distracted. He could not focus. The TV lured him. News shows, vapid comedies. He drank. He shuffled out for a pack of Larks only to forget half a block away what it was he had gone out for. The weeks after Amy’s murder took on the feel of a dream.
One thing did hold Michael’s attention: Brendan Conroy, who held court in Margaret Daley’s house and draped his arm around her and pushed in her chair at the table. The more Conroy did, it seemed, the more he was beloved. Wasn’t Margaret lucky to have him? Wasn’t Brendan gracious to insert himself into the family this way? Wasn’t Joe Senior smiling down on them now, seeing his old friend and his old wife together? Michael seethed. He could not take his eyes off this pink, insinuating, coarse intruder. The small scale of the house only exaggerated Conroy’s bulk. Had Conroy murdered Joe Senior, as Amy thought? The suspicion possessed him. A spurious gravity attaches to the words of dead people, who cannot be cross-examined. Amy had known Conroy’s secret, it seemed, and maybe Conroy had killed her too-then slid into Margaret Daley’s bed with the residue of blood still on him. All wild blasphemies Michael did not dare utter. He might simply be going crazy. Certainly he would sound crazy.
On Thursday afternoon, ten days after Amy Ryan’s murder, George Wamsley appeared at the Daleys’ home to pay his condolence call. Michael escorted him around the room making introductions, then they retired to the back porch for a private chat. It was the only place they could be alone, a narrow space crowded with garbage cans.
“So, Michael. What are your plans?”
“Plans. What, um, what plans do you mean, George, specifically? I don’t think I have any.”
“For work.”
“Ah. That.”
“Yes, that. You know there’ll always be a place for you in the office, as long as Alvan is the A.G. You could just go back to Eminent Domain, if you like. Or the Civil Division. You’re a natural litigator. It might be a good step, professionally. It’s really up to you. We’d like to accommodate you if we can.”
“But not the Strangler Bureau.”
“Not the Strangler Bureau. You’re conflicted out. I think you know that.”
Michael searched Wamsley’s placid equine face for a hint of something more, some hidden motive. Michael was the obvious source of the leak behind Amy Ryan’s last story, which cast doubt on DeSalvo’s confession-a leak that compromised the case against DeSalvo, in the public’s mind at least. After that, it was unlikely Michael would be welcomed back to the Strangler Bureau, with or without a conflict of interest. He was not sure he wanted to work the Strangler case anyway. He could not tolerate the vision of Amy strung up on her bed, so he flicked it away, and flicked it away again. One reason Ricky had had an easier time of it, he thought, was that Ricky had not actually seen her. The fact made him jealous. Michael could never un-see what he’d seen. Still, he resented that the decision had been made for him, that he’d been talked about behind closed doors.
“What about Brendan?”
“What about him?”
