A Quiet Vendetta

really could have gone down that way.

Well, however it might have gone down it was enough to invalidate the affidavit and testimony she had given. As far as the Grand Jury was concerned she was a cocaine user who’d hired three male hookers to fuck her in the ass in a motel near Calvary Cemetery. Visceglia was pissed beyond measure. His rage registered somewhere on the Richter Scale. He went out and got drunk. Ray Hartmann – against his better judgement, against the tearful promises he’d made to his wife and daughter – went out too. It was in the early hours of Thursday morning in the first week of December when he rolled in through the front door of his Stuyvesant Town walk-up, as drunk as a man could be while still conscious, and collapsed in a heap on the kitchen floor. Thankfully he collapsed onto his side, and not his back, because sometime before his eleven-year-old daughter found him he puked. And when she did find him he was still there, his head resting in a pool of dried vomit on the kitchen linoleum, and she said nothing, did not try to wake him, merely walked back to her mother’s room and woke her.

Carol Hill Hartmann, incensed into silence, took a bowl of freezing water and tipped it over her husband’s sleeping form. He barely stirred. Finally she woke him by kicking the soles of his shoes, and when he slurred into semi-consciousness, when he opened one sick-caked eye and looked up at her, he mumbled Leave me the fuck alone, will ya?

Jessica started crying. She didn’t know why, she just did, and though they did not leave the house that day, though they packed nothing for a trip upstate to Carol’s mother’s place, they agreed that they would not talk to Ray Hartmann for four days straight. They kept to their word, and despite his begging, his pleading, despite bringing flowers and take-out, despite his promises to stay clean and sober for the rest of eternity, mother and daughter held out.

On the following Monday morning Ray Hartmann found a note on the kitchen counter. Carol had already taken Jessica to school and he was alone in the house. The message was very simple. Carol had written it but it had been countersigned by Jessica.

Ray. We both love you. You are a good husband and a good father. We don’t want to be without you. If you get drunk again we will leave you behind. We have lives to get on with, and the man we know and love can come with us or he can get drunk and crazy all by himself. You decide. Carol. Jessica. xxx

When he returned from work that evening both of them were speaking to him. They asked about his day. They chatted between themselves and included him in their conversations as if nothing had happened. The note they had written was in Ray Hartmann’s wallet, and he made a practice of looking at it every day and reminding himself of what was important in his life. He held it together, he really held it together until Christmas came around and his professional world collapsed once more.

Christmas was tough for Ray Hartmann, always had been, always would be. Christmas was a time for family, and though he had somehow navigated the potential disaster of losing the family he had created, he nevertheless took it hard when December came around. Once upon a time he’d had a father and mother of his own, a younger brother whom he’d loved and adored as much as Danny had loved and adored him. There were four of them, and now there was one. A week couldn’t go by without him thinking of Danny at least once. Wide-eyed and mischievous, the pair of them haunting the streets, playing tricks, filling the house with the sound of their laughter and catcalls. Danny would always and forever be a kid in Ray’s mind, and that Christmas, the Christmas it all came apart at the seams, it was a kid that started the trouble.

Ray was still living on a promise. He still had the note his wife and daughter had given him, a note he had covered with scotch-tape to prevent it falling apart. But there was something about kids, something that made everything different in the most different kind of way. Many times before Jess had been born he’d spoken to people who were parents. Do anything for my kids, they’d say. Kids are the most important thing in my life. Anything happened to my kids, well… And he’d listened, a degree of interest perhaps, but always objective and somehow separate. When Jess came he knew exactly what they were talking about. Bullet came, well you’d get right in there, no questions asked. You’d kill for your kids, die for them, breathe for them if needs be, and there was no way to share that kind of sentiment with anyone who wasn’t a parent.

The photographs came in on Monday 23 December. Ray was on leave for Christmas but Visceglia called him in. Kid was a bystander, seven years old, walking down Schermerhorn Street with his dad. Kid was carrying a Deluxe Power Rangers Playset. Early present paid for by grandma. Dad said he could have it because he’d helped his mom clean up after grandma had gone home. Dad survived with only a single gunshot to the right thigh to show for his trip to the store. Kid took two in the chest and they broke him like a rag doll. Gang war. Family feud about some smalltime gambling operation that couldn’t have turned over more than five or ten grand a week. Gunmen missed their mark and hit the bystanders. No witnesses who had anything helpful to offer. Case was closed before it was even opened.

Ray Hartmann went home from the crime scene with a broken heart. Felt like it could have been him and Jess. Could’ve been his own mom and Danny. One of those times he started asking himself whether what they were doing was actually making any fucking difference at all. Sure it did, but at times like that all he saw was the kid’s body, the anguished and broken-down father, the resigned State prosecutors as they told him there was nothing they could do to help on this one. He didn’t drink that day. Didn’t drink the next or the one after that. Christmas Eve he had a can of beer at home, and even Carol didn’t say a word. Christmas Day itself was good, a day for the family and nothing else, and as Jess opened her gifts she told both her mom and her dad that she loved them more than anyone else in the world, and somehow it seemed like he would come through and out the other side, the kind of man he wanted to be.

Morning of the twenty-eighth he and Carol had a fight. It was nothing really, a stupid thing. She asked him to hoover the front room. He said he’d do it later. She asked him again after half an hour and he snapped back I said I’d do it later! to which she replied It is later, Ray… all I’m asking for is ten minutes’ help keeping this goddamned place clean! Ray got annoyed, there were a few more words, and then he left the house. Just put on his shoes and his jacket and left the house. Later, thinking back, he would wonder if his temper hadn’t already been frayed. That morning he’d received an e-mail from Visceglia asking if he could come in for a few hours the following day. He hadn’t replied, hadn’t wanted to reply, but knew that he would before the day was out. He had no choice. It was one of those kinds of jobs. It was a vocation, an undertaking, it wasn’t just a salary. Maybe that was what it was. Or maybe it was because he was still cut up about the little kid, a kid whose name he couldn’t get out of his mind, and how he’d lain there two nights after Christmas and all he’d been able to think about was the kid’s parents, about how this was a Christmas they would never forget. The dad had taken the Power Rangers Playset in the ambulance with him. Couldn’t take his son home, so he took the boy’s present from grandma. Wrapping paper had blood on it, paper was torn so you could see what was inside, and there was a narrow spray of blood right across it. Ray had wondered what the father would do with it. How could you keep something like that? What would the boy’s mother feel when she saw it? What would Ray say to her if she came and asked what he was going to do about the people who had killed her child?

Hindsight, the cruellest and most astute advisor of all, would be a rear-view mirror into which Ray Hartmann looked many times in the subsequent months. He’d stayed away from the house to cool down. This was a rare time, a number of consecutive days when they could be together as a family, and here he was acting like a spoiled child just because Carol had asked him to hoover. He decided to stop for a single beer at a bar three blocks from home. He lost track of time, he talked with the barman, he caught the tail-end of a game on the tube. He even played a couple of games of pool with a guy called Larry, and Larry bought him a beer, and then another, and it would have been nothing short of rude to decline the guy’s generosity, and hell it was Christmas, and what was the point of Christmas if you couldn’t have a good time?

Ray Hartmann stumbled through the front door of his house and crawled along the hallway a little after one a.m. Carol had waited up for him. So had Jessica. They were both dressed. It was then that he started hollering; it was then that he raised his fist and put it through the kitchen cupboard door. And when Carol pushed past him and he fell to the floor, when both his wife and his daughter started screaming at him, telling him to leave the house and never come back, it was all he could do to raise his bruised and bloodied hand in an effort to silence them. But he heard what they said, and he did leave, and he walked the seven blocks to the ER and got his hand cleaned and bandaged. That night was the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. He took the apartment in Little Italy, Carol and Jess stayed in Stuyvesant Town. That night marked the point at which Ray Hartmann had stopped drinking for life. He didn’t go to AA, he didn’t even do the first of the Minnesota Twelve Steps, he just decided, and it was perhaps the most certain and solid decision of his life. He’d held to that unrelentingly, and on