The Misfortune Cookie

on a few occasions. But stark and sincere. And, as apologies go, sufficient.

It kind of took the fight out of me.

I sat down on a chair that definitely cost more than I made in a year.

After a long moment of absorbing his apology in silence, and realizing that hearing it had helped, I nonetheless knew that I still needed an explanation.

I said, “I don’t suppose . . .”

“What?” he asked.

“. . . that you were abducted by space aliens?”

He gave a puff of laughter. “No. Sorry. Is that what you were hoping?”

“It would have been an acceptable explanation. That, or being dismembered by marauding bandits. Or maybe having your tongue cut out by—”

“I get the picture,” he said. “Ouch.”

“I just kept trying to think of . . . why.”

“My reason’s not as good as any of your theories,” he said. “Or as colorful.”

“Well?” I prodded.

“It’s so complicated, I don’t even remember where it . . .” He gave himself a shake. “Yeah. Wait. I do. When I got to work that morning. Christmas Day. After I left your apartment. I was still floating on cloud nine. Didn’t even mind when Napoli gave me a hard time for being late. All I could think about was . . . well, you. Us. That night. I was sleep-deprived and flooded with good hormones and really relaxed, and I thought . . .”

“What?”

“That it would be smooth sailing for us from now on. You and me. Because, of course, one night of great sex completely fixes everything between two people.” He shook his head. “God, I’m an idiot.”

“You know, it helps a lot of if you use a telephone at some point after the sex,” I pointed out.

He decided to ignore that and press on. “Anyhow, then reality intruded. The way it does. I was supposed to be writing up my report about Fenster’s. That’s why I’d gone to your place that night. To find out what the hell you were doing in the middle of that mess, in the middle of the night, with Max, his neurotic dog, a Gambello capo, and a bunch of really confused elves and reindeer.” He paused, maybe hoping I’d jump in and explain—or maybe just bemused all over again by that image. “So that morning, I still didn’t know what to say in my report, and I didn’t really want to think about it. Not right after we’d . . . I just didn’t want to think about you and a police report in the same space that morning. You know?”

“I appreciate that.”

“So I set it aside. And since it was Christmas Day, there wasn’t much else to do besides paperwork. So I decided to start sifting through the mountain of stuff we’d been collecting on the Gambellos during the Fenster investigation. Someone had to do it, after all, and it was a good way to avoid worrying about out how to keep you out of a police report—again.”

And that was when he found it. While sleepily leafing through scattered pieces of evidence that had been collected in the past week or two because OCCB was looking in the wrong place for the Fenster hijackers, he found solid evidence that Bella Stella was laundering money—and he could connect various members of the Gambello crew to it, as well as Stella herself.

“I was jazzed at first. Barely awake,” he said, “but pretty excited. OCCB had known—or had assumed—for years that Stella’s place was a laundry for the Gambellos. But we’d never had any proof. And suddenly, there it was. Right in front of me. Before lunch on Christmas Day, when I’d only been poking around in that pile because I didn’t want to write a report that was going to mess with my love life.”

Speaking of which . . . Then he remembered that I worked for Stella—and that I considered her a friend. Above all, he recalled that I was broke, down on my luck, out of work after Christmas Eve, feeling low, and counting on working at Bella Stella after the holidays.

“And that’s when I really lost the plot.” Lopez’s voice was heavy with self-recrimination. “I knew what I should do—what I was supposed to do . . . But I stalled. And then . . .” I could see that this was hard for him to say to me. Hard for him to remember or admit—even to himself. “I buried the evidence.”

“You did what?” I blurted.

“I still can’t believe I did it. All I could think about was . . . Look, I’m not putting this on you, Esther. I’m not. It’s all on me. No one else. But all I could think about was what it would mean to you. How upset you’d be. Stella in jail, your job gone, no income . . . And so I did the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

“Lopez . . .” I shook my head, having no idea what to say.

Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn’t this. I knew he had fudged some reports here and there to protect me, to keep my name out of things—and that his conscience troubled him over that. Troubled him a lot, in fact.

So if anyone else had told me that Lopez had deliberately buried evidence against the Gambellos . . . I just wouldn’t believe it. No way.

I stared at him in stunned amazement.

I knew it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t known about it, and I certainly hoped I wouldn’t have asked him to do it . . . But when I recalled how angry and upset I had indeed been when he shut down Stella’s that night, I couldn’t pretend that this really was all on him. I knew he’d concealed that evidence for me. And I knew he must have despised himself for it—and must have been wrestling with some pretty complicated feeling about me, too, as a result of that.

He continued, “I was so wrapped up in that . . . that whole thing all day, I didn’t even check my phone for the first time until I was on my way out to Nyack that night to see my family.”

By then, I recalled, Max’s festive Christmas gathering at the bookstore was winding down, and I was starting to wonder why Lopez hadn’t called me yet. It was the beginning of my long, steep slide into tail-chasing craziness.

“That’s when I got your message,” he said. “The one you left me after you woke up. I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t want to. You know? I didn’t want to tell you what I had done. I didn’t want to lie to you. And I couldn’t think about anything else. So I figured I’d call you later, when I wasn’t such a basket case.”

By the time he got to his parents’ house that night for a late Christmas dinner, his exhaustion, his tension, and—above all—his shame had put him in such a rotten mood that he had quarreled badly with his mother, his father, and both of his brothers.

“None of whom are speaking to me yet,” he said. “Though my mom still calls regularly to tell me she’s not talking to me.”

Lopez went straight back to the city early the next morning, leaving his family fuming. He returned to work, though he was supposed to be on leave, because he had to fix what he had done. He couldn’t live with it. So he retrieved the evidence he’d hidden. Then he did the next stupid thing, he said, in an impressive line-up of idiotic moves. He shifted the evidence so that someone else at OCCB would find it.

“I figured we’d still get the right result,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be my fault that you lost your job and your friend went to prison.”

However, no one else spotted the evidence he tried to slide subtly under their noses. This made him so exasperated and guilt-ridden that he quarreled with a number of his colleagues, none of whom knew why he was being such a temperamental ass.

So Lopez finally realized he had to man up, “find” the evidence, and bring it to light.

“There was no other way. I couldn’t face myself, you, my family, my colleagues, my priest— anyone—until I did what I should have done from the start. My sworn duty. My goddamn job. What I’m supposed to do.”

He was still worried about how I’d react, though. So he decided the best way to handle the problem would