“Is there anybody who can corroborate your story?”
“There’s this chick Vicki, the one who was in Manfred’s room when I went to go pick up the package. She knows he was alive when I left. But she wasn’t there when I got back.”
“The good news, Mr. Healy, is that the burden of proof is on the state. We don’t have to prove you didn’t do it. They have to prove that you did.”
Harry got off the leather couch and went to stand by the windows. Merrill seemed far away. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“If I’m going to represent you, I have no choice but to assume you’re telling the truth.”
Somehow Merrill was managing to make Harry feel guilty, even though every word he’d spoken was true.
“What we’re going to do is negotiate your surrender, and let them worry about building a case against you for this murder you didn’t commit.”
“What about all the other charges?”
“We’ll get to them. Let’s take care of your biggest problem first. You’re going to go spend an extremely quiet evening at home, wherever home is, and you’re going to be back here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Do you understand?”
Harry said, “That’s it?”
“No, that’s not it,” Merrill said. “But that’s all you need to worry about for now.” He stood up, and Harry was dismissed, like a bad boy who was finished serving his detention.
He rode the elevator for thirty floors. It was raining again, like it had every day since he got to New York, and it was icy cold. Walking down Third Avenue, trying to get his teeth to stop chattering, it felt more like November than April. He pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans and lowered his chin.
One of the thoughts Harry tried to keep on the run, with the help of a lot of scotch, was that he’d played an important part in bringing himself to this point. It wasn’t as if things had just been done to him. Bad thinking led to bad decisions, and bad decisions led to stupid actions. It made him feel dizzy, this whole interconnectedness of things. Every event in life was knotted around the thing that happened before it, and led straight into the thing that came after it.
If he hadn’t been involved with Julia, what were the odds of him meeting Leo? A billion to one? And if he’d ever bothered to make something of himself, he wouldn’t have been delivering cocaine to parties that had guests like Julia. He wouldn’t have worked for Frankie Yin, and he never would’ve met Manfred. Poor old Manfred. His poor Dutch Uncle. Was it Manfred who set off this chain reaction of bad juju? Or was it Harry? Or just destiny?
Another thought was chasing him, and he let it catch him in the foyer of a Chinese take-out joint. Harry bought a Coke with a ten-dollar bill. He asked for his change in coins. This drew a fractured complaint from the counterman, but he gave it up anyway.
A Bud Light clock on the wall said it was five after three. Harry pictured Aggie staring at her computer screen, typing in a line, maybe reading it out loud, a halfeaten cup of yogurt sitting on her desk.
She picked up on the first ring. She said hello twice.
Harry said, “Hi.”
She didn’t recognize his voice.
“It’s Harry,” he said.
Now that she knew who it was, she wasn’t talking.
“I called to see how you were doing.”
“I’m fine,” she said. There was a sinking pause, like she wasn’t going to say anything more, but when Harry let the line stay silent she said, “How’re you?”
“I’m coming back.”
“Detective Arnie Martinson will be thrilled.”
“My brother hired me a lawyer. I’m giving myself up.”
“So I should look for you on the six o’clock news. What’d you do, call to warn me?”
“No, I called to say I’ve been thinking about you. And that I missed you. Depending on the way things shake out, I was thinking maybe we could get together.”
The street door banged open and a deliveryman pushed past. He was wearing a yellow rain slicker and a pair of yellow boots that buckled up the front, like a kid’s.
“I think we’ve got a chance,” Harry said. “I really do.”
It sounded like Aggie was smoking. She said, “A chance at what?” Then she said something else Harry didn’t hear because a recorded voice was talking over her, telling him to put in more money or his call was going to get cut off. He dropped in four more quarters.
When the beeps stopped, Harry said, “A chance at being together.”
“How could you even be thinking about that? For all you know, you could be going to jail for the rest of your life.”
“All I’m saying is, I really care about you, Aggie.”
“Harry,” she said, “I’ve gotta go. I wish you all the luck in the world.”
“Can I call you?”
“I didn’t hang up, did I? Although I probably should have. Goodbye, Harry.”
Davey Boy was talking on the phone with his feet on the desk. Harry nodded on his way to the elevator, but Davey had been blowing hot and cold since Harry rented the room, friendly or not according to his mood. Today, not.
He wished he’d thrown the extra twenty-five a week for a TV. At least it’d take his mind off of things, and he could have drowned out the game show blaring next door, cartoony bleeps and buzzes knifing through the plaster.
Glancing through the sports section of the
A vampire cult in Florida made page one. Some sixteen-year-old had lured a classmate into the woods, dragged a machete across the kid’s windpipe, and drank his blood. The cops said it was the initiation into a secret society, and a bunch of teenage bloodsuckers who flipped had lined up to testify against the lead vampire. This was outside Orlando. An entire state of freaks, Florida. And Harry was going back.
Voices filtered through the door. Whispering voices, vibing wrong, a threat in the tenor of their hissing. Harry was about to get up and check it out when the door blew open and somebody screamed police. Two guys pinned him to the bed and turned him on his stomach, the flash of a third guy pointing a gun. They tore back his arms. Harry heard a pop, his shoulder dislocating again, and a spiking pain engulfed the joint. If he ended up in the Florida State Pen after all, he was going to get the surgery done on that shoulder, for sure.
The cops pulled him to his feet.
“You guys,” Harry winced through his gritted teeth, “have got this all wrong.”
The lawyers for the union assured Lili the Review Board inquiry would amount to nothing, and Kramer called her reassignment a public relations move, but Acevedo wouldn’t be back in the field until the heat from the Fernandez thing burned out, and that was going to take some time.
Which was a shame. By all rights, it should’ve been Lili who went to the airport and met the U.S. Marshalls who had Healy in custody. Instead, Kramer sent Robotaille and Martinson. He wanted to make sure there was a Beach detective on each of Healy’s handcuffed arms, and he instructed them to bring the suspect through the front door.
Martinson wanted to book him as quietly as possible. They didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with Manfred Pfiser’s murder, they were just busting him on a parole violation. But Kramer alerted his friends in the media and every TV station dispatched a crew to Rocky Pomerance Plaza. It was a slow trudge from the street to the entrance, a classic perp walk.
Healy kept his mouth shut and his chin up. No flashbulb flinching, no shackled peek-a-boo, no burying his face
