Red on Red Read online

  “Somebody’s pointed that out before, haven’t they?”

  “You’re not the first.”

  Nick enjoyed Esposito’s stumble more than he should have, but she seemed to take no offense. Esposito was undeterred. “The first detective, though, right? The first to notice it right away?”

  “The garbageman noticed it, too. And the super, and half the bums on the block.”

  Esposito laughed again, because he knew it was no stumble. Even to step on her toes was a kind of touch, and Nick hadn’t touched her. He’d only thought about it.

  “The name comes from ‘day’s eye,’ like the sun, because the flower looks like the sun,” Nick said. Daysi looked at him and smiled.

  “This is not a detective who just notices,” she said. “This is one who knows.”

  If only that were true! Because the pleasure of that moment was so intense, Nick knew he wasn’t having a seizure but what could be considered a cardiac episode—a minute bodily mutiny as his heartbeat upticked from one-two, one-two to waltz time. Esposito laughed again and put a hand on Nick’s shoulder. Nick wondered if his partner had seen that he might need steadying.

  “He knows a lot, my friend Nicky does, and what he doesn’t, he wants to find out. Which means we gotta come back to see you. Do you need anything? Can we bring anything?”

  “What would I need?”

  “I don’t know,” he mused, looking around. “Dirt?”

  “No, I think I’m fine, dirt-wise…. Nicky? I should have something for you in the next day or two.”

  “ ‘Nick’ is fine, Ms. Ortega. I’ll stop by.”

  “Nicky, please, call her Daysi,” Esposito said.

  “You can.”

  “Thanks, Daysi. I’ll see you.”

  They shook hands, and Nick turned away, Esposito a half-step behind. At the door, Esposito stopped and turned again.

  “There’s just one more thing, Ms. Ortega …”

  “Yes, Detective?”

  “Don’t leave town.”

  Her laugh was easy and musical, and began even before he finished his fake tough-guy admonition. Nick laughed, too, as they walked back to the car.

  “I’ve always wanted to say that,” Nick said.

  “I say it all the time.”

  “To who? I’ve never heard you.”

  “I say it to my wife and kids whenever I’m mad at them.”

  “Does it work?”

  “They haven’t left yet.”

  “She was something, huh? Daysi?”

  “ ‘Like the sun, the day’s eye.’ I could have cried.”

  “She liked it.”

  “Hey, and you thought you had that useless bullshit in your head for no reason, right? Little did you know, right? It makes you think, there’s gotta be some kind of plan….”

  “That’s a little deep for you, Espo, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, probably I should stick with bad movie lines. What next?”

  “I dunno. My mind’s not exactly in the game right now. Gimme a minute.”

  “I’m not talking about work. Daysi! C’mon, man, you gotta get in there! This is the game! Don’t walk away from this, don’t let this drop!”

  “Yeah … well …”

  “ ‘Yeah, well’? That’s what you got for me? C’mon, Nick, you gotta go for this, or I’m gonna be back at that store tomorrow. I’m gonna buy so many flowers for my wife, she’s gonna think I’m cheating on her, and she better be right. You’re lucky you saw her first.”

  As they drove off, Nick looked at his phone—a missed call, another blocked number, no message. The semi-police or the semi-wife? Yes, that was it. He remembered what he had tonight. He snapped the phone shut. He’d made a deal, too. As they turned off 181st, he saw a small, dark figure on the far corner, near the turn for the highway, with armfuls of flowers for sale. She would be back tomorrow, here or somewhere else. As Nick had said, his mind was not in the game.

  “Listen, can you run me to midtown?” Nick said.

  “Yeah, no problem. What is it?”

  “Dinner with my wife.”

  The last message she’d left, a day or two ago, had been that she’d be happy to see him but it would be okay if he couldn’t make it. She’d only asked that he call if he wasn’t coming. They had reached the point where civility masked regret, which masked things they were unwilling to consider. It was a point past the point. Esposito had noted how Nick had replayed the message several times, probing it for codes. Come, go; stay, don’t. Esposito didn’t ask questions, even when Nick asked him to drop him on a corner in Hell’s Kitchen where no restaurant was immediately apparent.

  “See you tomorrow?” Esposito asked.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  Nick found the restaurant midblock, a small French place. There was a crowd inside, and Nick scanned them through the plate glass window—no Allison. Her company had closed some kind of deal, and this was a celebration. That was all Nick knew, all he needed to. Single women, divorced women, were not an exotic species in the twenty-first-century New York workforce, not even on Wall Street. At Allison’s level, though, it was still a men’s club, and he suspected she wanted cover as much as company. It would make it easier for her if he were there. That was fair, because she had made it easy for him, or at least she had not made it as hard as it could have been. The restaurant was cozy and old, paneled in wide dark planks, with antique brass lamps, impressionist prints on the wall. There was even a picture of the Eiffel Tower beside the bar. Could a gypsy violinist be far away? Nick wouldn’t have expected these people in this place; for them, the world-beaters, something new, something that flashed and hummed, a spectacle of mirrored walls and long lines, with fantastic concoctions at fantastic prices that no one really ate and no one reached into a pocket to pay for. This was the kind of place Nick would have gone to with Allison; he wondered if she’d picked it, thinking of him.

  They’d begun to meet less often over time, and Nick noted that in recent months, she’d only called him to meet for events like tonight’s, where they would be allied by their discomfort with the crowd. They wouldn’t have to think about things too much; talk wouldn’t go too deep. They were alike in so many ways, he knew: private people, who had invited each other in, knowing right away that they were right for each other. Nick scanned the bar again and saw that she was there.

  Allison was rangy and lithe, in a cream-colored suit and pale blouse, brown hair that fell around her shoulders; she had a kind of anchor-woman balance between warm and cool, engaging but discouraging too close an approach. You wouldn’t have guessed she was Cuban, a neighborhood girl. There was color on her cheeks. She must have gotten away somewhere, for a few days. Maybe she’d tell him. For a moment, Nick missed her, very much. He could almost smell her. And then he remembered the scent of Daysi amid her flowers, and felt a ridiculous twinge of guilt, as if Allison might catch a rival spoor. He laughed aloud. What a wild dog he could be, smelling two women in an hour! How long had it been since he’d felt for Allison what Daysi had done for him, to him? Years since he’d thought there was a future, back when they were all future, horizonless hope. Was she still the same woman he missed?

  This was a favor. Allison would do the same for him, he knew, should any occasion arise. Not that many had—a few cop weddings, a few christenings, but Nick would not have thought twice about going alone. This was no favor to either of them, the way it was, letting go and pretending not to, neither of them willing to raise their voices and say, No mas, no more. Let’s be married or let’s move on. They didn’t even have to raise their voices, but it had to be said. Something did. Both of them were too good at keeping their mouths shut, a good instinct that had become a bad habit.

  Nick looked through the window for indications of welcome, warning signs. He saw a male of the species, suited expensively, leaning in hard to her. Late thirties, avid and potbellied, on his third drink, at least; Nick took him as a strong earner, likely to die before fifty, arguing at a
golf course. Allison would have introduced Nick immediately to him, pointing the conversation, as if to let the guy know she had a dog in the apartment who didn’t like strangers. When the golfer stumbled away, Nick imagined that their thoughts had met, the two of them, the three.

  Allison seemed unperturbed. She talked to someone else, an older man, silver-haired. The conversation was easy, semi-confidential. He was the boss, she the protégée. A professional relationship, with fond, familial overtones. That was good for her. When the golfer came back—it was the bathroom, his zipper was open—the older man spoke sharply with him, raising a finger, and he left. Allison did not need Nick there. She wouldn’t put on a brogue and call him a powerful help. Nick scanned the scene for more portents, but there were none. A crowd walked past him, chunky ladies in sweat suits, laughing, almost late for a play. Nick looked back inside.

  The maître d’ was tall and gangly, with a gleaming bald skull framed by tufts of white hair at the temples, so that his head looked like a kind of military decoration. He addressed the guests, bowing and making florid gestures with his hands, and then turned to the mestizo busboys, barking words that seemed harshly foreign even in Nick’s imagined lip-reading from behind the glass. The older man took Allison by the hand, and then Nick called, to see if she would answer. She opened the phone and looked at the number. She closed it again, shaking her head. She didn’t check the message. Nick had not left one. If only someone would say something, if one of them had the kindness, the coldness, to say what had to be said.

  Nick walked away, west down the street, to get on the subway, uptown. He called Allison again before he went underground, this time offering apologies. He’d been caught up at work, he said, and hoped she would be all right. He knew she would be. She could have picked up, he thought. He had asked for a sign, from her, from the skies. When Nick walked down the stairs to the A train, he felt grief pull him down like the hand of a drowning man.

  The next morning, Ivan Lopez went to the precinct three times. Two black eyes and a swollen nose did not make his face look any more honest, and the swaddled, splinted pinkie resembled a sports fan novelty prop, all the more so when he waved it, which was nearly constantly. When he marched up to the desk, fulminating about having been robbed and assaulted by detectives, he was kicked out for shouting at the sergeant. When he came back, in a calmer state but still flush with indignation, the sergeant called the squad. “Um, there’s this guy, he’s saying …” Nick felt a queasy confusion—robbed? And why did he want to see him? Did he want Nick to arrest himself? “Send him upstairs. I’ll take care of it.” Anger felt better than anxiety, at least at first, when the specifics of the accusation were made clear. Lopez’s driver’s license had been “stolen.” The license was on Esposito’s desk. Nick had checked Lopez’s background as part of the suicide investigation and had found that he had a warrant for traffic tickets. At the squad, Nick preempted Lopez’s tirade by informing him of the warrant and taking out his handcuffs. Lopez began to stammer an apology and collapsed into a seat, holding his sad head in his silly hand. Nick softened, and softened further when Lopez said his daughter was missing. He was sent away, one last time, for a picture of the girl. Nick had expected a lawsuit from Lopez, even respected its merits, and so this reversal in their relationship was welcome.

  On his return, Lopez presented a photograph of a girl not more than thirteen, in a miniskirt and a halter top that said I BRAKE FOR MEN, taken in front of a hot-pink background with Playboy Bunny heads printed at regular intervals. She was as skinny as a broomstick, with uneven bangs, and she squinted in anticipation of the flash. Nick could not remember seeing anything quite so sleazy.

  “She seems lovely…. What’s her name?”

  “Grace.”

  Nick was glad that he’d told the truth about that, at least, when they’d first met, but the pious simplicity of the name made the picture all the more garish.

  “How long has she been missing?”

  “Two days.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twelve.”

  “She’s been gone two days?”

  “No, thirteen.”

  “Thirteen days?”

  “No, she’s thirteen. She’s gone two days.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Thirteen years old. Two days gone.”

  “Two days, and you didn’t report it until now?”

  “I thought she would come back.”

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  He became indignant. “She is twelve years old! Thirteen!”

  Napolitano breezed in, coffee in his hand, case files tucked under an arm, talking on the cellphone—“Nah, nah, nah. Not tonight.” He looked down at the picture as he marched past. “Who’s the jailbait?”

  A brief sob escaped from Lopez as Napolitano continued on to his desk, still talking on the phone.

  “Has she done this before?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  “Once, twice.”

  “Where was she then? How long was she away?”

  “A day, maybe. She wouldn’t say.”

  “Does she do well in school?”

  “Yes, very good.”

  “Has she missed school?”

  “No, she goes. She just don’t come home after.”

  “Why don’t you get her at school, then?”

  Lopez shrugged, downcast. Half the parents of runaways were like him—clueless and listless, making the report only out of fear they would get in trouble themselves if they didn’t. It was a receipt for pretending to give a shit. They never knew a single name of any of their kid’s friends, where they went after school—if they went to school—or what they did. The chronic cases made reports every month or two, though they might have made four or five times as many, as the kids drifted in and out of the house. The police didn’t look for the kids, either, unless there were exigent circumstances, a specific danger. The paperwork was a dance of the veils, the cases opening and closing and opening again, as if the cops cared, or the parent did. And yet missings were tricky. Every now and then, one of them went bad, and you had to explain why you hadn’t hunted for the boy who’d cried wolf, as his mother wept over his bloody clothing.

  “And the mother? Is she in the picture?”

  Usually, the question was reversed—Was there ever a father, or do you just have a nickname and the late-won wisdom that you shouldn’t mix tequila and rum?

  “No…. She died, a while ago. We weren’t really together, except in the end. She came back when she was sick. When Grace was eleven, we got married, and she died the next year, cancer. I can’t be too strict. She is a little girl. And a stranger. She goes to Catholic school now, Mother Cabrini. She just started. I work, I try …”

  “All right, Mr. Lopez. I’ll look into it. Give me a call if she comes back.”

  As Nick walked him out, it struck the detective that he had reached a point in his career, his life, where decency surprised him more than the lack of it. Lopez had hit a few of the pressure points, Nick knew—mother, cancer, Catholic school—and Nick may have given Lopez more credit than he deserved. He’d been hiding something the other night, but everyone was a little odd, everyone had secrets. There were otherwise fine and functional people who walked beaches with metal detectors in the firm conviction that they would find Blackbeard’s hoard, who scanned the skies for visitors in silver ships. In the past, Nick had come across the remnants of rituals in the park—burnt ends of candles, feathers and bones left by those seeking favors from the santos. Was that what he’d been doing? As Lopez walked down the stairs, Nick called after him.

  “And by the way, why were you in the park the other night?”

  Lopez smiled and waved as he left the stairwell, as if he hadn’t heard. Nick hated the thought of having to change his mind again. Back at the desk, he slipped the picture of Grace under the blotter’s clear plastic cover. Other detectives put pictures of their children the
re, sometimes wives. Nick put Grace there so he’d remember to stop by the school later and nip this case in the bud. She would be his child for the day. No more than that, with any luck. In any case, it would take less time than a lawsuit.

  Lieutenant Ortiz was hovering near the meal room, waiting for someone to make coffee, when Esposito walked in. The lieutenant looked at him, then up at the clock on the wall. His thought processes were fairly transparent.

  “Two hours is late, even for you, Esposito.”

  “A well-rested detective is a productive detective, Lieutenant. Management 101.”

  “What have you got for me?”

  “Good news, only good news. And milk, and coffee cake. I picked it up on the way. Whaddaya say I make a fresh pot and tell you about it?”

  Lieutenant Ortiz was fully appeased; it took that little effort. His predictable habits and reactions couldn’t really be described as a “leadership style,” but it amounted to leadership, and in the style to which they’d grown accustomed. Most of the detectives knew what they were doing, and required no instruction. For Esposito, especially, in the days after a homicide, he didn’t have to be ordered to work; he had to be ordered to go home. Nick followed them into the room as the coffee perked.

  “So, whaddaya got?” the lieutenant asked.

  “I got a line on the shooter—his name, where he is. I just got that an hour ago. I got a call from a little friend out there.”

  “Is it solid?”

  “Yeah, I think we’ll get ahold of him. We got nothing on him, though, not for the homicide. He’s got a bullshit warrant—he skipped a court date on a weed case—and we can take him in. We got a long day of talking, a long night. You good to run with me, Nick?”

  “Yeah, I got a stop to make. Then I’m good to go.”

  “Good.”

  The lieutenant cut a slice of coffee cake and poured himself a cup. He lit a cigarette and collected the cake and coffee before marching back to his office, content with his breakfast and the progress of his men.

  “Let me know how it goes,” he said over his shoulder.