Enemy within

15

The morning after, one of a series: actually, it was early afternoon before Marlene awakened from a hideous dream of being smothered by jellyfish, to find her dog licking her face with a tongue the size of a washcloth. The usual raging thirst, pounding head, disorientation in time and space. The usual panicked thoughts: What did I do drunk now? Then a really awful thought, as the events of the evening just past surfaced like corpses rising from a shipwreck. No, I couldn't have, not even drunk, I absolutely refuse to believe that I took that jerk back here and… But now she registered that she was fully dressed, and that her luxurious underpants were intact, bone-dry and in place. What now, false memories? He had been here-there was his jacket on the chair. She rose slowly from the bed and looked around the room. Trained detective that she was, it took her hardly any time to cop to what had happened; the torn strips of tuxedo trousers stiff with dog drool told all. It made her feel better than she had in ages, and she hooted and hugged the dog and immediately called her good friend the concierge and ordered a large pepperoni pizza and a bottle of merlot.

So they brunched together, Marlene sucking abstemiously on the wine and slipping warm, greasy, spicy triangles down the animal's maw; schlup, schlup, they vanished like dollar bills into a change machine. Her career as a drunk seemed to be entering a new phase. The first shock was over; the deep, embarrassing scenes would not happen again, she told herself-that was like the shaky, wobbling start of a kid on a new two-wheeler. There would be rules now: a little pick-me-up in the morning to get her through lunch, when she would deserve a couple or three for being good, and then cold turkey for the P.M. while doing useful work, and then the evening when she would keep a comfortable level until it was time for oblivion, the nightcap, as they called it. Plenty of people, she knew, even famous and successful people, did it for years, and so would she. This way she could go back to work, face them all down, go back to her family, discharge her responsibilities, for as long as her liver held up. Not quite ready to go back home yet, though, wait a while for the routine to kick in, not quite ready to face Butch, definitely not ready for the daughter. But soon.

So she went to work, in her new outfit, a neat little black suit with a cream silk blouse sporting a demure black ribbon at the throat. So she was welcomed back: by Lou Osborne, who looked nervous now, having sold his baby. He had to worry about becoming a takeover target, about the stockholders, about the latest Nasdaq quotes (453/4, down a quarter for the week), about growth targets-message, pull your load, Marlene; by Harry Bellow, who looked at her with a sad eye, from his own dryness, and tried clumsily to talk to her about it, but she put him off with a barrage of funny one-liners; by her staff, who were happy to cover for her. Which she needed. She did not go out anymore, no poking around with the clients. She sat in her office and moved paper while the expensive watch counted off the hours until lunch, until quitting time. They wrote her speeches, which she gave to frightened women. They made sure she did not interview new clients in the afternoon. Good old staff. Oleg was out of town, she learned, which was a pity. Oleg was always willing to go out for a quick one. He did not have the new American attitude toward drink. Good old Oleg. But in the long afternoons she had plenty of time to think. Her thoughts were not particularly clear, but they were vivid and disturbing. The money, root of all evil. The money came from the stock. Why had the stock gone through the roof? The publicity about the Richard Perry rescue. How convenient for Osborne! Still, that was life-good luck, bad luck. What had Oleg said that day, before the kidnapping? Something about events make market. And hadn't Oleg been a little evasive that day, some meeting or other that she hadn't heard about. Of course, evasive was Oleg's middle name. She turned to her computer and brought up Osborne's intranet. Every call that came into the phone system was logged and digitally recorded in compressed form. Everyone's call file was protected by a twelve-digit password known only to the user and to the system administrator and his staff. That's why she couldn't find out what Oleg had been up to on the phone in the weeks before the kidnapping. She typed out a message for Wayne Segovia, encrypted it, and sent it out. Wayne couldn't work in the field anymore, at least not for a long time, but he was a bright kid. They had put him in the computer department.

Then she called her husband. She spoke with Butch every day. He told her how the boys were doing, and she talked to them, too, sad little conversations with long pauses. When Karp asked her when she was coming home, she said, "Soon, a week." She said, "Pretend I'm in Chicago." She said, "I miss you," which was all true. And he said, "I miss you," too, but he did not mean the same thing by it.

For Lucy, the days started at five. Her tutor lived not, as Lucy had supposed, in a godfather-type mansion with an iron gate and extensive grounds, but in an ordinary, if large, brick, five-bedroom house in an old neighborhood in north Bridgeport. The neighbors were local bourgeoisie, people who owned insurance agencies and car dealerships, and Tran seemed to fit in well. His lawn was immaculately mown and tended, and the shrubbery was minimal, low, and perfectly shaped, affording, as Lucy was not slow to notice, excellent fields of fire in all directions. Four people lived in the house besides Tran. Dong drove the Mercedes, Vo kept up the house and grounds, Dinh seemed to be some kind of accountant or business manager, and Mrs. Diem was the cook and housekeeper. All three of the men had the quiet, hooded look of soldiers, and Lucy knew that they were not just domestic workers.

When Mrs. Diem knocked at her door at dawn, Lucy arose with alacrity because if she did not, Tran would arrive and deliver a blistering lecture, with quotations from The Analects, The Tale of Kieu, and Chuang Tzu, about the vital importance of duty. She would wash herself and dress in pajamas and go down to breakfast, which was tea and congee or noodles and fish. Then she and Tran would go out into the back garden and do tai chi. Lifting Water. Flying Diagonally. White Crane Flaps Wings. All the twenty-four patterns of the simple set, for an hour, rain or shine. Lucy had done some of this in Chinatown, but never as seriously as she did now; she had not known Tran was an adept. His strong, scarred hands moved her body through the evolutions. The chi started to flow again in its secret channels; it settled in its proper home below the navel. She breathed more easily; the impacted garbage began to drain from her head.

After that, study all morning with Tran, math and science. He was a good teacher. Use your strengths, he said, math is a language, science is a language. She saw that it was true. The quadratic equations, the sines and cosines, the chemical formulas started for the first time to make sense, like Chinese. The boiling of foreign tongues in her head slowed to a mild bubbling. She spoke French to Tran, Vietnamese to the others. In the afternoons she would be driven to the University of Bridgeport to do research for the papers she owed. Then back home, where after dinner she would work on papers and do the assignments Tran had given her. After a few days of this she called Dr. Shadkin at the lab, another duty. He was appalled.

"Lucy, for God's sake," he cried, "you're sweating high school? High school? Okay, let me fix this-by the authority vested in me by the trustees of Columbia University, I hereby grant you a Ph.D. Now, come back here."

She laughed, she said she would be back when she got this worked out. Her parents wanted it, she had let them down, she had to do it.

"What is this, some kind of Confucian thing?"

"Yes, something like that," she said.

"I'll send you stuff."

He did, tapes and books on Lithuanian. At night, after she had finished her schoolwork, she dived into that language with relief, as a runner finishing a distance race walks easily for a while to cool off. Lithuanian was important to the Indo-European project, being the closest living language (they thought) to the mysterious root language from which nearly all the tongues of Europe had sprung. Pitch accents; richly case-inflected nouns; three rather than the usual two number designations. Fascinating!

Thus, she succeeded in occupying her mind entirely with work, leaving barely a fragment for thinking about her family, or about David Grale. Only momentarily, just as she drifted into sleep, did the shadow come back again, the one around David Grale, the secret and never-examined fear. She had a dream once about the tunnels: She was running through darkness, lit intermittently by sparks, full of the roar and screech of the trains. A figure leaped out at her, the electric discharges shining on the long knife in his hands, on his mad saint's face.

Weeks passed in this way for the divided family, and Karp waited, something he was good at. Like all first-class athletes, he understood that sometimes, for mysterious reasons, you suddenly couldn't sink the shot, hit the ball, find the inside corner of the plate. Some people railed and went a little crazy when this happened and sought doctors and witch doctors and changed how they did what they did, and beat up on their loved ones, but not Karp. It was Karp's instinct to stay the same, to be the unmoving center around which the bad luck or juju or mishegoss fluttered or screeched, in confidence that if he did that, it would all come back to the way it had been before. Or not. He could live with that, too. Meanwhile, he was not idle. He had a number of lines in the water, and from time to time he would give them a twitch or two.

One morning he summoned his favorite twitchee. "Murrow," he asked, "what are you doing with yourself these days?"

"Oh, mainly coram nobis petitions. Things seem kind of dead on Marshak."

"They do seem that way. Handling petitions is good training, though."

"Yeah, but what I don't understand is how come we convicted all these guys who didn't do it. Something's not right."

"Or else some of the convicted prisoners who're petitioning are not telling the truth. They're just trying to get out of prison."

"Really? Gosh, I never thought of that. My boyish heart is shattered. What's going on with the big cases?"

"Oh, not much. Jack's going to run out of time before he has to decide on the death penalty on Benson, which means he'll have to decide sometime next week."

"He's going to go for it?"

"Assuredly."

"And you're going to prosecute it?"

"Mine not to reason why. I've given him enough stuff that he can pretend to discover after he wins the June primary so that he really doesn't have to make a jackass of the office by trying to actually hang Benson. Of course, if McBright wins, he's probably going to go ahead with it anyway, just to show he's an equal-opportunity oppressor of the innocent."

"I've been following his campaign with interest. I notice he doesn't include Benson in the justice-is-color-blind speech anymore. He heats up Marshak and Lomax, though, in compensation. As to Marshak, do you know a Detective Paradisio?"

"The bum-slasher task-force guy?"

"That guy. I'd like you to go down and see him, and tell him… get out your little book, Murrow, this is a little complicated."

Later that day Karp could, therefore, in good conscience explain to a judge that he should not summarily dismiss the case against Sybil Marshak, as her counsel had moved, because the crime in question appeared to be part of a larger criminal conspiracy subject to a continuing investigation, which was expected to throw a clearer light on the claims of self-defense. Shelly Solotoff was livid. Surely, this was something for a grand jury to decide. Why had the DA's office declined to bring this case before its grand jury? Ms. Marshak was a public figure; it was inconceivable that she would be involved in anything criminal. She was enduring enormous pain and suffering by having this felony charge hanging over her head. Dark conspiracies were hinted; the phrase star-chamber was used more than once. Judge Frederick North Davis, a portly and phlegmatic gentleman the color of wet coffee grounds, was not overly impressed by these arguments. He pointed out that Ms. Marshak had, in fact, killed a young man with a firearm, and that her pain and suffering might well be assuaged by the fact that she was still living on Central Park West rather than Rikers Island, where almost all of the many other people who had killed young black persons with firearms were presently languishing. In the interests of evenhandedness, the judge also looked sharply at the people's rep and asked when this investigation might be expected to conclude.

Karp reached deep into the back of his trousers and pulled out a date. "No more than two weeks, Your Honor."

Solotoff followed Karp out of the courtroom and accosted him in the hallway.

"Up to your old tricks, huh, Butch?"

"What old tricks are those, Shelly?"

"Spreading confusion, looking for an angle. You know as well as I do that there's no ongoing investigation here. You just can't stand the thought that a grand jury might refuse to indict in a clear case of self-defense. This one is a lot more blatant than Bernie Goetz. The guy came at her with a knife. End of story."

"Did he? We'll see."

Solotoff laughed pityingly. "I hate a sore loser. Actually, I hope you do indict. I'm looking forward to creaming you in court."

"Me, too," said Karp amiably.

"Also, telling fibs to a judge…" Solotoff waggled an admonitory finger. "You could get into trouble, assuming I wanted to press the issue."

"It's not a fib. There is an investigation."

"Oh, horseshit! There is absolutely nothing going on in Marshak and you damn well know it."

This was said in so forceful a manner that passersby looked over, and Karp seemed to notice Solotoff in a different, far more interested way. He turned the famous gaze up a notch. "No, I don't, but I was kind of wondering how come you're so positive. Got a pal in the DA, hmm?"

Solotoff realized what he had done and tried to cover it by saying, "Come on, Butch, you know you're my only pal in the DA," followed by a hearty, patently false laugh. Karp did not join him, continuing only to stare, as at a cockroach of unusual size. In the blank seconds thus occupied, Solotoff found that instead of thinking what to say now, to recoup his advantage, his mind was playing over the images of that horrible night: creeping down the back stairs, calling a limo, sneaking out the service entrance of the hotel, stinking, in rags, shoeless, creeping into his apartment where, by miserable chance, his wife was up and entertaining some of her old school friends. He'd said he'd been mugged, an absurd story, which was accepted, if not believed. And the bitch must have told him all about it (she had not, in fact), and he was gloating over it right now. He thought briefly of just bringing it up (Speaking of pals, your wife's a friendly girl; I was squeezing her tits the other night…), but no, especially as he hadn't scored, better forget the whole thing. The key was to distract Karp from this particular line of questioning, but as it turned out he did not need to, for Karp glanced at his watch and distracted himself.

"Yeah, well, I'd love to stay and chat, Shelly, but I have an appointment. A former pal of yours in the DA. You remember Ray Guma, don't you?"

"Oh, yeah. Good old Ray. Send my regards," Solotoff said, still smiling, but with a fading voice. Karp shook his hand and strode off. If Solotoff had hold of his client's pistol, he would have shot Karp right there in the courthouse hallway.

For his part, Karp wasted little time thinking about Solotoff as he took the elevator down to street level. The weather had changed within the last few days, and it was warm enough now to venture out without a coat. A presage of spring, and Karp took it as a sign. Maybe the ice would break up now, maybe Guma had something to go with. He walked up Baxter to the China Palace, as unimperial a place as could be imagined despite its name, a red-daubed, dark, and dingy joint smelling of oriental greases, with a dying snake plant in the front window. It was favored by bail bondsmen and an older generation of courthouse workers for its dimness, its quiet, and its cheap food; more important, like most Chinese joints over a certain size, it had a full bar.

Guma was sitting in the back at a table he had frequented for over twenty years. He was wearing a powder blue knit shirt and a check jacket, which made him look more like a minor Mob guy than he usually did. He had a Scotch started, and Karp ordered an iced tea to keep him company.

"You know," Guma said, "I'm gonna do this, I should get a PI ticket. Then I could charge expenses. I must've blown a hundred bucks on cabs alone. Not to mention the drinks I had to buy."

"I'll take care of it. You find out anything?"

"A little. I'll give you the bad news first. You ever know Bud Cropsey?"

"Rings a bell. He was a snake, wasn't he? One of the guys Mollen used."

"You got it. Bud started out as a field associate, then he got blown on that case up in the Two-six where the cops were running a bunch of whores, '89 or so, and then he went inside and went right up the line, retired captain, head of Confidential Investigation Unit One. His specialty was OC connections to the cops, so I saw a lot of him. Anyway, like I say, he's retired now, got a place out in Great Neck. I got him to make some calls for me. Not a whisper. Zilch."

"Cooley's clean? He can't be!" said Karp with a sinking feeling.

"What can I say? That's what the man told me. And he's got no reason to lie. The man's a snake for thirty years, he's got no friends in the department. I tried to tell you that before. The Cooleys are their own breed-they don't take shit and they don't take money."

"Okay, okay, I believe you provisionally. Crap! Was there any good news?"

"Yeah, that shooting, Lomax. There was a smell on that, and it got up pretty high in the department. One PP got involved. Chief Battle, our old pal, handled it personally."

"He got to Catafalco."

"Yeah. The funny thing is, it was a straight-up report. Steve Amalfi did the homicide. He noted the funny stuff. The skid marks and the traces on the guard rails were wrong for the story Cooley was telling, and so were the bullet wounds, which you picked up when you read the abridged report."

"Abridged?"

"Must've been, unless you left something out when you told me about it. I went to see Amalfi, too. He wouldn't talk to me, but he said the report speaks for itself, and it does, if you get the whole thing. It's adding up the little bits that knocks Cooley's story all to shit. On the surface it's just barely plausible. A DA who wanted to find something would've said, whoa! Hell, a DA who was above room temperature would've seen it."

Karp was not really interested in why Catafalco had not seen it, more likely, seen it very well but had declined to act. Karp understood that part of it perfectly. What he still did not understand was Cooley. He asked, "Why did he do it then? Amalfi have any ideas? Or Cropsey?"

Guma shook his head and drained his Scotch. "Not a clue. Cropsey thought it might be something personal. The Cooleys got hot tempers, and they hold grudges. Speaking of which"-here Guma checked his watch-"we should get going if we want to beat the rush to Jersey."

"We're going to Jersey?"

"Yeah. Oh, right, I didn't tell you. Connie Cooley said she'd meet with us. She's over in Harrington, her house. It's forty-five minutes if we miss the traffic."

"Guma, how're we supposed to get to Jersey? The bus?"

"What, they don't give you a driver anymore?"

"Yeah, I have a driver, but this whole thing is off the books. And the driver is a DA squad cop, and the DA squad works for Norton Fuller."

Guma shrugged. "We could rent a car."

"We could, but… wait here a minute."

Karp got up and found a pay phone in the hallway near the men's room. A crazy notion, but something about it seemed right, a way to break some of the Lilliputian threads that were tying his life to the ground. He called her private number and after some preliminary chat, he blurted out, "Marlene, I need to borrow your limo. Me and Guma have to go to Jersey."

"Uh-huh. What's wrong with your driver?"

"We're visiting a brothel, Marlene. Look, I'll explain later. Just make the call, okay? And, Marlene? Order something kind of discreet."

The limo, when it pulled up in front of the restaurant twenty minutes later, was a superstretch Caddie large enough for all the Spice Girls, white with smoked windows.

"I always wanted to ride in one of these," said Guma, sinking back contentedly into the pillowlike upholstery. "I especially like the way little honeys stare in the windows. Look at this trifecta coming up here. You could fit all three of their butts in a grocery bag, like casabas." He grinned horribly, waved. "Yes, girls, it is Brad Pitt, but it's my day off." To Karp he remarked, "We should make quite a splash out in Harrington."

"A lot of cops live in Harrington, I hear."

"Yeah, there's quite a population. Connie hasn't been too happy there since the divorce, but he won't let her sell the house. A funny guy, Brendan."

"How so?"

"He has his little ways, she tells me. But I'll let you hear it from her." Guma leaned forward and switched on the television, flicked through channels, and got the third inning of the Mets game. He poked around in the built-in bar and found that someone had filled the tiny refrigerator with Bud. He cracked one, offered one to Karp, who declined, took a long swallow, and sat back with a gratified sigh. "This is the life. You could get used to this."

"Yeah, you could, but then it wouldn't be the same. It's great because we're not used to it. If we rode around in one of these things every day, it'd get old fast, and then we'd feel like shit in a regular cab, forget about a bus or a subway."

"Yeah, well, you can say that because you're rich. Look at that fucking guy! He should've had that ball. You notice nobody can field nowadays?"

Karp was about to say that he wasn't rich, his wife was rich, and only paper-rich at that, but he let it go and watched the game companionably with Guma as the gorgeous vehicle took them north to the Washington Bridge, over the river, north again on the Palisades Parkway, and then through smaller roads lined with suburban trees coming into leaf, past a school, a shopping center, then through still narrower roads, until they came to the house.

Karp got out and stared at it. It was remarkably like the house he had grown up in, a good-sized split-level, clapboard painted pale cocoa, set on a little hill with a sloping lawn bordered with low shrubs. A blue Voyager sat in the driveway. Above it hung a basketball hoop. Two bikes leaned against the garage door. The woman who answered their ring was petite and dark, with remarkable, large black eyes, and glossy black hair cut in a jaw-length shingle. She looked about thirty, but seemed younger because of her slightness, and at the same time older because of the circles under her eyes and the deep lines under each one, tear trails, Karp thought. The woman was a crier. She looked as if she had recently been crying. She wore a tan tracksuit with blue stripes up the seams and Adidas. She smiled at Guma and kissed him on the cheek and showed Karp a graver face as she shook his hand.

The living room was spotless, almost unnaturally clean for a house with at least two kids in it. A beige wall-to-wall was on the floor, and the furniture was medium-quality department store, bought out of model rooms, on credit, or with the envelopes the bride got at the wedding: modest and respectable. Karp thought the room looked unused, like an old-fashioned parlor; the family must do its living not in this living room, but in a basement or the kitchen, where the TV was. He took in also the expected picture over the mantel, the colored photographic portrait of the whole family in a gilt frame: Cooley looking proud and satisfied in his dress blues with the green bar of the medal showing over the head of a towheaded boy of about five. A younger Mrs. Cooley with a smoother, less stress-worn face held a baby girl. The current version pointed them to a tweed sofa and offered coffee, which they declined, then beer, also declined, and she sat in an armchair opposite.

"Thanks for seeing us, Con," said Guma. Karp nodded agreement and wondered why she was seeing them. The continued presence of the portrait argued against postdivorce hatred.

"I'm doing it for Brendan," she said.

Guma said to Karp, "Butch, I told her about your interest in the Lomax shooting, about how some things about it didn't add up."

"Yes, we really appreciate it," said Karp. "It must be difficult…" His eyes went to the portrait.

She saw that and said, "I don't want him hurt. He needs to stop what he's doing, where he's going, but I don't want him hurt. Just so you know, I will never testify against him in court. They can't make me, can they, Ray?"

"Not if you're his wife, Con. But technically you're not anymore."

"I'm still his wife. I'll always be his wife. The decree isn't final. I keep losing the papers."

After a moment, Karp asked as gently as he could, "Connie, do you actually know anything about the circumstances under which your husband shot Mr. Lomax?"

"You mean specifically that? No. I don't know anything about my husband's life on the job. That was part of the problem." She flapped her hands helplessly. "I don't know where to begin."

"Begin with the Cooleys," Guma suggested.

"Oh, right, the Cooleys! I could talk about the Cooleys all day, maybe not as much as they could, but pretty good. You have to learn if you want to be in that family. Not that I ever could really be in that family because my dad works for Con Ed, not on the job, so I couldn't really ever understand. According to Rose. That's my mother-in-law." Connie shook her head like a dog shaking off a flea. "No. I'm starting wrong. I don't want this to be just complaining, like on a TV show. Okay, first of all, when I met Brendan, he wasn't like he is now. We dated in high school. We were high school sweethearts. I never thought he'd join the cops. Brian was in the cops, and Brendan figured that was enough Cooleys. He got a job at Newark, with Continental, he thought he might go into flying, that or air traffic control. Anyway, not the cops. And they let him, I mean Ray did, but I could tell Ray was disappointed Brendan was outside the club. I mean all their friends, everyone they know is in the job. We'd get together at their house, when Brian was alive, and I could see how they closed Brendan out. Nothing obvious, but I could see it, and it hurt him. He loves his family. He loved his brother, worshiped him practically. Not that they ever talked about that. The Cooleys don't talk, not like me. So I guess this was building up under the surface, for years, Brendan thinking that his family thought he was, I don't know, a wimp for not being a cop. Anyway, we lived with it, we even joked about it sometimes, about the job, cop jokes. We were happy, I thought. Brendan passed the air traffic controller's test, he was going to start training. He was all pumped about it, and then Brian got himself killed."

She sighed and pulled a wad of tissues out of her tracksuit pocket and blew her nose, then let out a harsh, forced laugh. "God, look at me! I feel like one of those jerks on Sally Jessy Raphael."

"You're doing great, Con," said Guma. The two men waited, hardly moving. They both had heard a lot of confessions.

She sniffed, dabbed, resumed. "Okay, Brian got killed, shot in the street. Do you know this story?"

Karp said, "He was killed protecting one of his informants."

"Yeah, he gave his life for a junkie snitch. That's what he was like, Brian. A hero. The funeral was huge, delegations from all over, the widow and the three kids, the flag-folding thing. And all the time I kept thinking, I couldn't help it, even though I was ashamed, you know? I'm so glad it's not Brendan. And I thought he should've been thinking about his family, Brian. I mean it's one thing to go through a door or chase a guy down an alley, up fire escapes. That's part of the job, but not take a bullet to protect a… a skell. You think I'm awful to think that, right?"

"No," said Karp, "it's natural to think things like that."

She gave him a long look to check him out, and she saw that he was sincere, that he'd been there, too.

"And after that, it's hard to explain, it sounds stupid, but Brendan wasn't there anymore. It was like someone else was living in his body. He quit his job and got into the cops. No problems there. Graduated top of his class in the Academy. No more jokes about the job. Practically no jokes about anything. And he was always angry. The Cooleys have all got this Irish temper, especially if they think someone is trying to shaft them, and he started to blow up all the time, at me, at the kids… and when we got together at parties, now I was the one who was left out. He was in there with the cops, and I was in the kitchen with the cops' wives. And I thought it was my fault. I couldn't stand thinking of him out there on the streets. He'd work a graveyard shift. I couldn't sleep, waiting for him to come home. He started taking risks, too. About six months after he joined up, he tackled an armed robber by himself. He would've been killed except the guy's gun jammed. So they made him a detective, and then he did that thing with the hostages, going in there without his vest, unarmed. You heard about that?"

Both Karp and Guma nodded.

"Well, after that I told him I couldn't take it. It would've been one thing if he really loved it, if it was his life, I would've been prepared for it, like the other girls, like Rose was. But he didn't love it, it wasn't his life. It was someone else's life. We started fighting all the time. I was awful, I admit it. I threw stuff, I scared the kids. I wanted to shake him back to being Brendan, really Brendan. This doesn't make any sense, I know…"

"No," said Karp, "it makes perfect sense. That's why you split up?"

"Yeah, he beat me up one night. My fault, again. I hit him with a candlestick, and he punched me a couple of times and packed a bag and left. And later he said he was afraid he might hurt me if we lived together. I mean he never touched me before that. He's not that kind of man. He said we could talk about our problems later, after this Firmo thing was over. But it was never over." She threw up her hands. "And here I am. A PD widow and I don't even have a folded flag."

"The Firmo thing," said Karp carefully. "What was that about?"

"Oh, that was the only thing he'd talk about, I mean from the job. A big criminal, a Mob guy, some kind of thief or fence. Ray was always talking about Firmo, too. The One That Got Away. It was like a family joke. Like when are you going to take the trash out? Just wait, I gotta get Firmo first. Ray tried to catch him for years and couldn't, and now Brendan was going to. He was going to show his dad that he was as good as Brian… better, in fact. Better than Ray was himself."

"What, he said this?" Karp asked.

"Oh, no. Are you kidding? A Cooley thinking about why they're doing something, ruining their life, getting killed? That's not the Cooley way." She hung her head, picked at her fingernails. Karp noticed they were bitten like a child's. "We went for marriage counseling. Our priest set it up, a nice Catholic social worker. Brendan went one time. I went to her some more, by myself, because I wanted to understand: How could this happen? I wanted to know. We're good people. We both love our kids. How could this happen to us?"

Karp knew it was a rhetorical question, but he said, "I don't know."

She looked up at him. "Yeah, neither do I. She, I mean the social worker, Mrs. Ruffino, she said it's the unconscious. When you have kids, you take all the negative crap you haven't dealt with in your life and put it into them, and then they go and do the same to their kids. We don't like to deal with the dark stuff. We want to be nice, and we want our kids to be nice. But we're not nice, or not all nice, like we think we are. And we lay it on our spouses, too, that shadow. I can feel that Cooley stuff working in me, too. That need to be totally, like, upright, clean, that outrage at the bad guys. I don't know if I follow all of it, but it's a point of view." She laughed, that same harsh sound. "It's not the kind of thing we talked about when I was growing up."

"Me neither," said Karp. "But back to Firmo. Brendan didn't get him either, did he?"

"No. He had an informant. He was working him for nearly a year…"

"This was Cisco Lomax?"

"I didn't know his name," she said quickly. "I wasn't privy to the details. I mean this was incredibly secret. He didn't even register this guy as a CI because he thought that Firmo had some cops on the payroll, which was how Ray's case got wrecked back then. Maybe he thought I was working for Firmo, too, I don't know. He was a little nuts on the subject. But I heard him talking to Ray about it. My guy, he called him, just 'my guy.' They set up this scam, some big shipment of stolen gold watches, diamond watches. Brendan was really out on a limb with the department on it. I think Ray was backing him on it, or they never would have let him take it on. It was one of those things like the job does. If it works, great; if not, you're shafted. He couldn't sleep the week before it went down, hardly ate at all. And what happened was his guy screwed him on it. I don't have the details, but I got the impression that this informant leaked the scam to Firmo's people, and they pulled a switch at the place where Brendan expected to catch Firmo with the hot watches. Firmo didn't show, and when Brendan opened the package, the watches in it were cheap copies. The real ones were gone."

There was some more after that, and they listened. She made some coffee and they drank it. Guma and Connie talked about people they knew, the family. They heard the hiss of a bus stopping down the street, and soon after that a blond kid rushed in, a little older than the one in the picture over the mantel. He stopped short and gave the two men a hard look, then went over and stood next to his mother, who rose and put an arm around him. Karp and Guma stood, too, and made their good-byes. Connie Cooley came to the door with them.

"Nothing is going to happen to Brendan, is it?"

"I don't know, Connie," said Karp. "I'll be honest with you, like you just were with us. I think he broke the law, but I don't have anything yet I can make the case with. I may never have."

"But… if it came out, he'd be through in the cops, wouldn't he? They'd make him leave."

"Yeah, that's probably true." Karp said it because that's what she wanted to hear. That's why she had agreed to talk with them.

Back in the white limo, Guma cracked another beer and said, "Poor kid, huh?"

"Yeah, a sad story. You marry someone and they change."

"Or they don't, which is probably worse, as my second wife never got tired of pointing out. Anyway, it sort of clears up why Cooley did what he did."

"To an extent. Lomax was clearly his rat. He thought he'd turned him, but Firmo was playing Cooley for a sucker, with Lomax's help! Cooley saw him on the street that night, took off after him, and blew him up. That's clear. Probably he's killing these homeless guys to cover his ass on that."

Guma knotted his brow. "Killing…? What, you think Cooley is the bum slasher?"

"Some of the later vics, anyway. I got my guy down at the cops checking out if any of the people who died, the vics, had ties to Firmo's organization, like this kid Ramsey did, the one Marshak shot. What I think happened was there was a nut going around killing homeless, and after Cooley shot Lomax, he had to get rid of anyone who knew about his connection to Lomax, so he adopted the nut's MO. What's a few bums more or less? It fits."

"It might," said Guma, "but right now you can't even show the connection between Lomax and Cooley. If you're right that Lomax was the snitch there, you got no one to testify. The only people who knew about it are Firmo, obviously, and maybe Cooley's partner, neither of whom are going to be witnesses for you."

"There's the Canman."

"That's the bum he's been looking for, the one Lucy knows."

"Yeah, the first time she told me about Cooley looking for him, the thought crossed my mind that he might have something to do with the homeless murders."

"Why the hell would you think that?"

"I don't know. Just a vagrant thought. I knew he'd assassinated one lowlife already, and I knew he wasn't assigned to the bum-slasher task force. Why would he be looking so hard for the one homeless the cops were most interested in as a suspect? Why would he want to rough up people who the regular task-force cops just talked to? I mean it's not characteristic of Cooley. He's got absolutely no history of brutality, as you found out yourself. But now we know a little more about Brendan Cooley. We know he's a little nuts about being the perfect cop. We know his brother died protecting a snitch, and that made him change his life, become a different person. He develops a relationship with a snitch of his own, but this particular snitch betrays him. Cooley goes crazy and kills Lomax. Now he has to cover it up or his whole life is going to collapse. He takes out the homeless guys who knew the story. Maybe only one is left, Canman. According to Lucy, the Canman's a pretty smart guy. He runs all over the city with a cart full of cans, which could make him a perfect courier and stasher for a theft-and-fencing ring. We know about the connect between Cooley, Firmo, and Lomax now. What if there's one between Lomax, Cooley, and Canman? Now Cooley catches a break because the cops have Canman as a suspect in the slashings. Cooley finds the guy, and it's heroic cop shoots and kills bum slasher, case cleared and closed."

Guma rubbed his jaw and snorted. "Oh, that's a stretch."

"Maybe. But Cooley's going out of his way to find this guy, and he seems to have started just after he shot Lomax. That's significant. Maybe finding and whacking Canman is a twofer for him. He shuts up the last witness to the fact he knew Lomax and clears the other killings he's done. In any case, I'd sure as hell like to find Canman before Cooley does."

"How are you going to do that without using the cops, or cranking up Keegan? Because I can tell you right now, the Goom is not going down those tunnels looking."

"Oh, I'll think of something." Karp reached for the telephone.