Summer Cool

2

Yonkers gets as hot as the next place in the summer. But this summer was hotter than most. Con Edison was running at three brownouts a week, and there had already been one blackout that had threatened to turn into an East Coast disaster, saved at the last minute, so the power authority had claimed, by its nuclear turbine up the Hudson River near Peekskill named Big Alice. None of the papers had believed it, and very few of the people who read papers, and two days later, when Big Alice shut itself down, not to be reactivated until Christmas by Con Edison estimates, well, everybody turned on their air conditioners and prayed.

Paine had prayed, and his air conditioner had gone out instead of the power, and the hotbox his landlord tried to tell him was an office suite was a hotbox and nothing more. Two fans blew humid top-story air at each other, and in between them Paine sweated, and though Terry Petty sweated she was unaware of the weather.

She had been waiting for him outside his office. She had calmed down. She was more like the Terry he knew: petite, quiet in dress and manner, a cop's wife, which meant that the surface was deceptive. Underneath the quiet exterior, behind the green eyes, she was a rock_; she had raised two girls and one husband, most times with calm, with fire when needed. She was a woman Paine had often openly admired, and Petty had never contradicted Paine's compliments-and Petty had never kept his mouth shut about anything he felt.

"I'm sorry for the way I acted on the phone, Jack," she said. "And I'm sorry I dragged you away from your vacation-"

"We've known each other too long for bullshit, Terry," he said, gently. He had begun by playing with a pencil on his desk, quickly graduating to the letter opener. Nearly a week's worth of unopened mail, what he could see of it bills, was stacked roughly on the edge of the desk where he had thrown it after gathering it up from the inside of the letter slot. "I think the best thing is to go at this straight, just like Bobby would." Paine pushed himself back in his chair, continuing to finger the letter opener. "I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but I think that maybe you're being a hysterical wife."

Her face reddened, as he knew it would. She had more Irish blood in her than Petty, and when riled she could be more of a marine than her ex-marine husband ever could.

"Bullshit, Jack. Do you think I would have bothered you for something stupid?"

Paine continued to play devil's advocate. "I still think he's gone undercover for some reason."

She was growing angrier. "I thought of that. It was possible, the thing he was working on. We had a code worked out between us, if that ever happened. He would always be able to tell me if he was undercover, or couldn't talk. He even used it once."

"What was the code?"

"He'd talk about the girls, and say, 'I think we should have one birthday party for the two of them.' Their birthdays are six months apart."

"You're sure he didn't use it this time?"

"He didn't use it. He said horrible things about the girls."

Paine took a long breath. "I'm sorry, Terry, but I've got to ask you these things. Were you having any marital trouble?"

"Do you think he might have been seeing another woman?" She hesitated in silence. "I thought of that, he said he was with one."

"Is it possible?"

She took a long breath, as if resigning herself to the conclusion she had come to. "It's possible."

He hated pushing her. "Has there ever been anything like that?"

Again she hesitated. Paine thought she might be measuring the line where friendship ended and enmity began. Paine was about to say gently that maybe she should get someone else to help her when she nodded. "Once. A long time ago."

"How long?"

"Eight years ago. Just around the time we moved to Yonkers from the Bronx. It was somebody he met on a case he was working on."

"How long did it last?"

"Four months. He told me about it when it was over."

She looked up at Paine. There was a kind of pleading in her face. "He cried when he told me about it, Jack. He said it had happened and he'd felt guilty through the whole thing and he never wanted to feel guilty again. He said he'd never stopped loving me_; it was just after Mary was born and everything had changed in the house with the baby, and we weren't. ." she bit her lip, not wanting to say anymore to him. "We weren't doing it, Jack. I was tired from the baby, it was a hard birth, the doctor said I had to rest-dammit, Jack, that's not what this is!"

He stared at her levelly until the flush receded from her face and then he asked, softly and evenly, "Is that what you believe, or is it what you want to believe?"

Her eyes were just as steady on his. "It's what I believe, Jack. I don't think he'd do that to his family."

Paine had been jabbing himself in the palm with the letter opener. He put it down on the desk next to the bills. "For what it's worth, I don't think he'd do that to you, either. But unfortunately what I believe and what you believe doesn't mean anything. If it makes you feel any better, Bobby told me all about that affair of his_; we got drunk one night and he spilled it out. Nobody in the department knew about it. It sounded like it tore him up inside. But the thing I'm getting at is that sometimes people have things inside them they don't let anybody see-not their wives, not their friends. If I had to put money on it I'd put it all on Bobby not being one of those people. But I've got to be honest with you, Terry I might lose my money. Because it's just a fact that most people who disappear do it because they want to."

A little bit of her crumbled inside. He saw it happen, and he wanted very badly to go back and say it another way, so that she would stay whole. But he knew that no matter how he said it, the same thing would happen, because she had had a world built around her, and all the blocks had suddenly been yanked out of the foundation, and there was no way that world was going to look the same after the rest of the building fell into place.

"Did you talk to Coleman today?" Paine said. He spoke without force, afraid that if his voice were any louder her building might collapse completely.

"I called him this morning. He told me that Bobby had called and told him to go to hell."

"Has Bobby called anyone else?"

"Nobody else at the station. None of his other friends. We were supposed to go down to the Bronx on Saturday for a barbecue a few of his old NYPD buddies put together, but he didn't call any of them. I tried his brother in Albany, too, and Jerry hadn't heard from him."

Paine asked her to give him some telephone numbers, and she was busy for a few minutes digging them out of her purse and writing them down. Paine sat back and let hot air move over him. He thought fleetingly of the lake upstate_; the bass would be starting to jump in another hour and, from the blue look of the skies, it would have been a clear if hot night for the telescope-he had wanted to look at the Veil nebula in the constellation Cygnus, and there was a double star, two stars orbiting each other that appeared a beautiful contrast of orange and green in the eyepiece, which he wanted to find in Bootes.

Terry slid the paper with the phone numbers across to him. She seemed about to say something, and then turned instead to straightening the contents of her purse. Paine waited for her.

She finished with the purse and looked up at him. "I have to talk to you about payment," she said.

Paine almost laughed. "Terry. ."

"I won't make a discussion out of it. I'll pay your usual rates."

"We can talk about that later."

"We'll talk about it now, Jack. I insist. I called you because you're a friend, and because you know Bobby so well, but also because you're good. Bobby always said that.

There was something else, something she didn't want to get to, something that looked to make her more embarrassed and less in control than anything they had talked about.

"Terry, what is it."

Her eyes flared in anger. And yet, through her building rage, she remained mute.

"Terry-"

"Dammit, Jack, he took the money! All of it! He emptied the savings account, the checking account, he cashed the CDs and savings bonds." Her fury crested and she brought her fist down impotently on the edge of Paine's desk. She stifled a sob. She looked up at him, her pleading look returning. "He emptied the girls'college funds, for God's sake! Oh, Jesus, he's gone. . "

Her sobbing went on, and she suddenly looked very small sitting in the chair across from Paine.

He rose and went around to her, and held her and she put her head against him. "I'll get a job, I'll borrow, but I can't pay you now, Jack. I can't. . "

He told her to be quiet, that there was nothing more to say as far as payment was concerned, and he held her and let her cry, and suddenly he wasn't thinking of the heat or of jumping bass or stars, but of finding someone he very badly wanted to talk to.