Twice

Ford had never touched his children in anger; in that way at least he had not lived his father’s legacy. Nonetheless, Katie and James were distant, polite strangers who made the obligatory calls on Sunday night and visited every few months. He couldn’t blame them… he hadn’t been the best father. He hadn’t really been a father at all. But they were good kids because of Rose.

He reached over to turn up the volume on the set when he saw himself on the screen. He looked even worse than he thought. He stood beneath the maroon awning of the Park Avenue building where Richard Stratton had been killed, with the reporter he’d agreed to answer some questions for when he’d been ready to make his statement to the press.

“At this time,” he was saying to the pretty blond reporter, “no charges have been brought against Julian Ross.”

He cringed to hear himself talk. Just a month ago, his partner Frank Benvenuto would have talked to the press. A good-looking guy, charismatic, funny, Frank had always handled the press with ease, knew how to use his relationships with reporters to the department’s advantage. But Ford had no such expertise. Now, with Frank retired and no new partner assigned to him, Ford had to deal with the vultures himself. He tried not to think about the fact that his chief had hinted at a reluctance to assign Ford a new partner, the assumption being that Ford, too, must be considering retirement.

“Does this murder make you doubt the jury’s decision to acquit Julian Ross ten years ago?” the television reporter asked, her smile and perky voice seeming inappropriate to him.

“There’s nothing at this time to connect the two events,” he said, curt and non-committal. Why did I keep running my fingers through my hair like that, Ford thought, hating the way his voice sounded.

But Ford wasn’t thinking about retirement. He had no idea what he would even do with himself. It was fine for Frankie, now sailing around the Caribbean in a fifty-foot sloop with his wife, Helen… his dream for as long as Ford had known him. Ford kept getting postcards from exotic locales: “The emerald water is calling you, my friend! Come meet us in St. Bart!” Yeah, right. And do what? Sit on my ass and sip cocktails?

“Where is Julian Ross now?” asked the reporter.

“She’s under psychiatric care at an undisclosed location,” he answered.

“Are there any other suspects?” the reporter pressed.

“There are no suspects at this time,” he said, moving away from the reporter and toward the unmarked Caprice that he drove while he was on duty. “That’s it. I have no further comments right now.”

As he watched himself get into his car, the camera still following him, Ford noticed that he had a huge bald spot on the back of his head. He sighed and served himself some of the sesame chicken, started eating with a plastic fork. The fact of it was that, without a partner, he’d been lucky to catch this case at all. If he hadn’t worked the first Julian Ross case, he’d be doing peripheral work for people like Piselli and Malone, a couple of junior guys assigned to work the case with him.

“As you can see,” the reporter concluded, “the police have no leads in the murder of Richard Stratton, husband of world-renowned artist Julian Ross. But inside sources say that the arrest of Ross is imminent. We’ll keep you apprised of all breaking news on the case. This is Betsy Storm, ABC News.”

The newscast was enough to switch his focus from the misery of his life back to the Julian Ross case. His visit to Orlando DiMarco had led him nowhere. The guy wasn’t about to admit that he and Julian were lovers. But Ford did get a good look at the painting Lydia Strong had described. It reminded him of the description Jetty Murphy had given him ten years ago, the mysterious man who’d left through the basement back door and disappeared into the night. He could track Jetty down easily enough, but getting him to remember might not be so simple. After Jetty raped and murdered an elderly woman in Tompkins Square Park a few years ago, he’d been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and sent to the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane. It was an awful place… made Payne Whitney look like Club Med. People who went there didn’t usually get better. So he didn’t expect Jetty’s mental health to have improved much. But it might be worth a trip up there with Lydia and Jeff, to see if there was anything they’d missed the first time.

He looked down at his plate and was surprised to see that he’d polished off all of the sesame chicken and the white rice that had come with it. He’d barely even tasted it. He pulled himself up from the table, threw the containers in the garbage, rinsed the plate off, and placed it in the dishwasher next to the plate from last night. He walked over to the refrigerator and popped a Michelob Light and headed down the stairs to his basement office. He walked past the groaning old furnace and through the laundry room.

His office was a converted walk-in pantry; it was in this small space where he had pored over the Julian Ross case, among others, over the years. It was this small space that he had chosen over the love and company of his wife and children. It was here where he had spent every ounce of his energy and his free time going over the cold cases where the answers had eluded him. It was here that he had given everything of himself over the course of his career. So it was fitting, he supposed as he reached up to pull the string and turn on the light, that it was all he should have left.

The bent old man carrying a Balducci’s bag, wearing a long black woolen coat and a plaid golfer’s hat, shuffled off the bus at Astor Place. He moved slowly with his head down, moving against the crowds of people still pulsing along the streets though it was nearly midnight.

He made his way down the stairs to the subway and walked to the end of the nearly deserted platform. He could hear the street noise from the grating above his head. When the downtown 4/5 arrived, a screeching, hissing metal bullet, the few passengers waiting on the platform got on. But the old man waited, seated on the wooden bench against the tiled wall. “Stand clear of the closing doors,” the conductor yelled, and in a rumble and flash the train was gone.

The old man walked to the edge of the platform, looked once over his shoulder, and then jumped with the strength and grace of a younger man onto the tracks, careful to avoid the third rail. He made his way along the edge, watching for the circle of light that would warn him of an oncoming train. In the darkness, small forms skittered, their tiny razor-sharp nails scratching against the concrete. They didn’t bother him anymore, the rats. They didn’t bother him at all.

He felt more than heard the roar of the approaching train before it turned the bend and he saw the glow of the light looming ahead of him. He picked up his pace to a jog, moving faster as the light approached him. The sound was louder now as the train grew close and he broke into a run. His heart rate quickened and his breath came harder in the dank and soot of the tunnel. As the train bore down on him, a frenzy of light and sound and metal, Jed McIntyre ducked into a doorway and the train went rushing past in a blaze. He leaned against the concrete for a moment to catch his breath, and then pushed through the entrance and made his way down the corridor. Water dripped from the ceiling, dropping rhythmically to the ground, collected in shallow puddles. Ahead of him, he could see the blaze of a fire and hear the echo of voices.

Beneath the streets of New York City there was an entirely other world. He’d heard of it when he’d been locked up. A paranoid schizophrenic had told him about the tunnels. But he’d never actually believed it… after all, the other people at the New York State Facility for the Criminally Insane were insane. But his unfortunate circumstances had compelled him to investigate the matter for himself.

The homeless were the invisible population of New York City. They staggered through the streets, ranting, reeking, begging for change, and yet they were barely acknowledged by even the most compassionate New Yorkers sharing the sidewalks. People didn’t want to acknowledge their existence, as if to do so were to admit that they themselves were only about a paycheck away from the same fate. The homeless were filthy and crazy, to be ignored and avoided at all costs, just like the city rats. Worse… because rats could be poisoned. He had always felt that way himself until by his circumstances he became one of them… well, in that he had no place to go.

In a small park on Rivington Street he’d met a man called Charlie, an aging Vietnam vet with a bad case of halitosis and a mean heroin addiction. Charlie approached Jed at a moment when Jed was feeling quite lost. The city was crawling with cops and Feds with his picture on their dashboards and he’d been moving in the darkness, through alleys, dressed as a homeless man for two days and nights, sleeping in subway stations. Truth was he had enough cash to stay at the Waldorf or to go anywhere in the world, but he didn’t dare go near a hotel, an airport, or a train station. Jed had been slumped on a park bench, pretending to sleep, when he heard the clattering of a shopping cart pushed over concrete and detected a dreadful odor… some combination of urine and foot rot. He looked up to see the watery brown eyes and dirty face of his savior.