Red on Red Read online

  Both of them glanced up at the sky to see whether more rain threatened, but night had already fallen. The breeze was heavy with September weather, the edge of a hurricane that had blown out to sea lower down on the coast. Their shoes were muddy, as were the cuffs of their pants, which bothered Esposito especially. He was strongly built, with a bit of a belly on him that he would slap after meals; he had thick black hair and fair skin, and though he was not a particularly handsome man, he carried himself like one, and women responded. He had his vanities, many of them only half-serious, most well earned. Lately, he seemed to be taken with his own nose; Nick had made offhand mention that it was a Roman nose, and Esposito had been delighted, as if he’d won it at a raffle. He worked the subject into interviews: “The guy who robbed you, tell me about his face. Was his nose flat, or upturned, or was it … a Roman nose, like mine?” Tonight, Esposito had walked into the office looking like a mob lawyer, in a blue pinstripe suit and flowered tie; now, from the knees down, he could have been mistaken for a zoo janitor on elephant detail. Nick noticed a great deal about Esposito, not only because they were partners, but because he had agreed to keep an eye on him. Esposito didn’t know that. He knew only that he was appreciated, and he was grateful. Nick dressed in the G-man standard—dark suit, white shirt, dark tie—but his vanity was grandiose in comparison. He thought he could betray his partner, just a little, and they could still be friends. He was like Lopez, he thought, in his desperate insistence that only his better motives mattered.

  Nick thought about the cold and then felt it, shivering a little. The wind rose again, and the branches shook, and the red and gold oak leaves fell around them, landing on their shoulders like tame birds. The smell of the body, faint but foul, crept through the wet leaves. Esposito wrinkled his nose in disgust and moved away. “You mind going up?”

  “No. It’s my case. You won’t have to worry about your manicure.”

  “All yours. Go ahead, work your magic.”

  “I will. I’m going to make it all disappear.”

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  When they returned to the little crowd of cops, Esposito put his hands on his hips and announced the course of action, “Okay. We’re gonna need to take the tree down. Where’s your sergeant? I need you to get Emergency Services here with a chain saw, cut it down, pack the whole thing up—with the body—for the medical examiner. You’ll need a flatbed truck, a lot of plastic tarps. What else, Nick?”

  Nick’s mouth tightened. Even though Lopez was probably out of earshot, Nick thought this was disrespectful. There were mysteries to be preserved here as well as mysteries to be explored. Still, he had his partner to consider, his part to uphold. To hell with it, he thought. He’d take the low road, too, and make up for it later.

  “Strobe lights,” he deadpanned. “Generator.”

  “Right, strobes. All right, guys, it looks like it’s gonna be a long night for you. Maybe you can ask the guys for coffee when they bring the lights.”

  With another gust of wind, the black sky emptied rain onto them again. Nick saw two of the cops’ faces. One was blank and sorrowful, as if he’d learned he’d been drafted; the other looked to be near tears, though the weather made that hard to tell. Only a guffaw from one of the older ones, who held back for a moment, broke the scene of perfect misery.

  “All right, but you know I had three of you,” said Esposito, to their general relief. “Anyway, let’s get hold of a ladder. Maybe two of you drive over to a building, borrow a ladder from a super. The other two, you might as well wait in the car.”

  The cops agreed gladly, retreating to the warmth and dryness. One car drove off, sending a spray of mud from beneath its wheels. The detectives took shelter beneath the tree, keeping a wary distance from the potential drop zone. Neither detective wanted to join Lopez in the car, to ask him more questions or even to pass the time out of the elements. As they waited, the conversation dwindled, and their moods turned as gloomy and autumnal as the landscape. Esposito inclined his head up toward the woman and frowned.

  “What kind of grown woman climbs a tree?”

  Nick imagined her pursued by a pack of hounds, even imaginary ones, like Lopez’s. “Treed,” that was the word, in hunting. The dogs couldn’t follow, but the chase was over. Nick knew that feeling, knew this place.

  “I might have climbed this tree, when I was a kid.”

  “That’s right, you’re a native. I forget, when you don’t wear the war paint and carry the tomahawk.”

  Before Nick could dwell too much on his childhood, still less his recent return to Inwood, the wind shifted the branches, and the body swung gently, a movement that suggested a plea—Please—and a threat—Don’t make me. They moved farther out of range. Suicides intrigued Nick, or they at least held out the possibility of interest. Most cases had a distraught or demented aspect, bad guesses by bad gamblers. With other cases, though, there was a hint of chill insight, like that of a cardsharp who cheats to lose rather than prolong a game he cannot win. Nick hoped that she had left a note. In his worst moments, Nick didn’t understand why more people didn’t kill themselves, as they seemed to take so little pleasure in life, served such scarce purpose. Why wasn’t there a forest of suicides, a body hanging in every tree of the park, from every branch of every tree, dangling like morbid ornaments? Nick added that thought to the long list of those he’d never share.

  Esposito fidgeted, wiped his mouth, rubbed his temple. Nick couldn’t tell if he was bothered or just bored, ready to move on, out of the rain. Esposito shook his head; he was more than bored.

  “And what kind of grown man walks in the woods at night?”

  “Some people just like walking, you know.”

  “Whatever.”

  Over the summer, Nick had seen a pheasant in the park, strutting across a meadow clearing on the wooded ridge, a brilliant thing of crimson and copper, tail feathers long and jaunty, and it had seemed less out of place than out of time, a figure from heraldry. It had been a ceremony in itself, and he’d found that he could not move until it had passed. Neither Lopez nor the woman shared his reasons for wandering here, he guessed; other people are just that, otherwise haunted, otherwise hopeful. Again, Esposito pulled him back from his reverie.

  “You’d have to be crazy to kill yourself. Do you think she was crazy, Nick?”

  “No.”

  The almost pensive tone of the question troubled Nick, as did the casual certainty of his own answer. Other people—Esposito was one of them. Nick recalled that one of Esposito’s old partners had killed himself, though the two men had never spoken of it. The partners were not supposed to have been close, and there had been other problems—a divorce, some drinking. Esposito was begrudged his failure to see it coming or to stop it, all the more so because he was so richly gifted in his vocation, in which perception was the means, and protection the end. When Nick had first started working with Esposito, two or three detectives had told him about it, in hurried and stagy whispers, as if warning him that a house he was about to buy had a reputation, a history. The insinuating manner had made Nick defensive of Esposito, though he’d known that other aspects of that history, that reputation, were the reasons they had come together. Esposito had been wrong, then, in his last words to Lopez: The situation here never could have been simple.

  The other patrol car returned, ambling over the field, and Esposito directed both cars to face the tree, shining the headlights against it. The borrowed ladder was set up, and Nick took out a camera from the trunk of their car, as well as a pair of latex gloves from a box borrowed from an ambulance. Lopez stepped out from the backseat as Nick did so, and Nick, seeing his pained—though still dishonest—expression, did not instruct him to return. Nick slung the camera around his neck by the strap, and as he ascended the ladder, the camera bumped against the rungs. The flashlight beam chanced upon a spot on the trunk where it illuminated a blockily carved heart. The narrow, trembling focus and yellow warmth gave the light the look
of a drama club spotlight, and within the valentine were the initials MR, a plus sign, the number four. An unfinished equation, lacking whoever, forever.

  The knots, Nick remembered. He should save the knots in the rope. As he climbed up, he took in the woman’s form, slight and almost child-like—the one shod foot; the jeans, stained at the seat; the black winter jacket worn before the season, most likely because it was that jacket or none; the purse, still over the shoulder. The body didn’t smell as bad as it might have, a day old at most. She had gone out when the storm had been heavy, the wild weather matching her mind. He looked at one of the hands, the fingers dark and thick with lividity. Shining the light on the fingers, he saw a ring, barely visible, as the swollen skin had begun to push around it, nearly covering the stone. Engagement? No, the wrong finger, a red stone. He snapped a few pictures of the hand. The bare foot would show the lividity, too, but it was a little farther away, and he didn’t want to turn the body.

  “How’s it going up there?”

  “Great, fine, beautiful. Wish you were here.”

  “How are we gonna get it down?”

  Nick didn’t answer. Up another rung, and another, as the ladder angled in closer to the wet bark. He reached over to the woman’s head, flashlight in one hand, clasping a branch with the other. She had long black hair, loose, wavy, and luxurious, and the strangled grimace made the woman look put together from two different dolls, a princess wig on a monster face. She looked Mexican. Immigrants didn’t kill themselves. Not often, Nick had found, which he assumed had to do with them being accustomed to struggle. A note would be helpful, but only one in four suicides left them, that was the statistic. Who knew if she had been able to write? There were Mexicans here who didn’t even speak Spanish, Indians from the in-country hills who picked up how to hablar en español on Amsterdam Avenue. Nick pictured a graph of the trajectory of this woman’s journey from Mexico to this tree: three thousand horizontal miles, fifteen vertical feet. Moving up, moving out. It didn’t fit, but there it was.

  Poor girl, poor girl. God have mercy…. Nick’s father would have said that. It sounded like him even as Nick said it to himself. A brogue in the mind; he heard it more often since he’d moved back home. The girl was poorer now. She was the poorest, by the old precepts. Despair was the only unforgivable sin, a kind of heresy, holding that the clock was stuck on this hopeless hour, and God had lost track of time. Then again, maybe suicide was unforgivable just because you quit, chucked it in, game over. Forgiveness was for the living, when you could raise your hand to ask for it, when the possible is still possible. Stupid girl, he thought, with unexpected harshness. That didn’t sound like himself, either.

  Nick took a few more pictures. The ligature had yanked the head to the side, creasing the neck with a sharp upright line, dark above and light below. The rope was white wool, wrapped round and round a branch above, like a cat’s cradle. She had unspooled a ball of yarn into a noose, and dangled gently less than a foot below a branch. It didn’t seem strong enough, and yet it held, and the physics-problem curiosity took Nick away from the grimace and the smell for a moment to consider the logistics. Her hip was beside another branch, and she must have sat there and slipped off—a few inches, no more—so that the force of the drop didn’t break the yarn. She must not have struggled, which could suggest drugs or drink, a sedative to edge her beyond second thoughts. There were so many better ways to do this; its difficulty was impressive, and he caught himself thinking that she was lucky that it had worked out. What was the Sinatra song? “I’ve got the world on a string …”

  The tactlessness made Nick look away from her, as if he’d sung it aloud and she’d caught him making fun. Just above her, to the side, there was a plastic bag tangled in a branch—in color somewhere between water and white—that must have been hanging there for some days. It had frayed at the handles, and dank water that had collected inside made it swell like a belly. Nick wondered if she were pregnant, if that had been her reason, and his stomach tightened for the first time. The sight of the bag bothered him more than the body. Reckoning that it was not part of the crime scene—if there even was a crime, which there wasn’t—and that it could leak down on cops or the ME later, he pinched a corner and tore it. He hadn’t thought about what it might look like, from another point of view. As the fluid gurgled and streamed down, there were stifled cries from below—“Ugh!”—from less familiar voices, and a concerned query from a familiar one.

  “Nick? You okay, buddy?”

  “Yeah—don’t worry. It’s not me. Not her, either. It’s just water from—never mind. Don’t worry about it.”

  Tactless again, not just in his imagination. Was he himself tonight? Yes, unfortunately. Nick resumed his task, shining his light on the body, determined to finish, to see whatever had to be seen. It was his case, and it wouldn’t take any magic to make it disappear. If this was a staged crime scene, the killer deserved an award. The hands were Nick’s main concern, to check if they were dirty but undamaged; the rest would have to wait for the autopsy. He stepped down a rung, leaning out slightly. The woman was facing him, her arms barely bent at the elbows; the left hand was practically pressed against the coat, palm-in, but the right was slightly askew. The body swayed gently. Nick leaned out farther, and as far as he could make out, her hands were dirty but undamaged, streaked by rain. As he pondered his next step, weighing the available science against the sadness, he heard Ivan Lopez begin to screech from below.

  “There you are! Here! C’mere, boy! C’mere, Brownie! I told you, I told you!”

  Nick frowned at the bad showmanship from his perch in the dark, the sheer and callous conceit of the performance. It was a profanity, almost as bad as the one beside him. And then he heard the dog barking, coming closer. He didn’t believe, but he had to see.

  As Nick shifted his stance on the ladder, he slipped on the rung; as he lurched to regain balance, he shoved the body. It swung like a pendulum. The noose shredded, a few strands, and then a few more. Nick scrambled on the ladder, and it began to slide from the trunk. As he tipped forward, crashing through the branches, he grabbed the woman, maybe from a reflex to protect her, or maybe to break the fall, but even the instant of contact with the stiff, sour, oddly heavy mass prompted him to shove her away. They broke through the branches, side by side, one flailing, the other as poised as a diver, arms behind her as she fell. Two of the cops jumped back, hitting the mud with a dull splatter; a third held his arms open for the calm female form, and she met him like a lover stepping off a train. The ladder struck Lopez, first on the weak hand that tried to block it, and then on the nose. He howled as he fell, bleeding, his DNA flooding into the ground, connecting him to a scene that wasn’t a crime but was becoming a disaster.

  Nick landed on all fours, grateful, after a stunned moment, that he had not hit face-first, that he had not broken anything. He was grateful again as he watched the cop fling the corpse to the side and fall down, retching. Esposito began to laugh with a violence that threatened to knock him over. The little brown mutt ran over to the circle, barking. The dog approached the body, sniffing, until a cop pushed it away. Esposito stepped back a few paces; he didn’t like dogs at all. The mutt loped over to Nick, as he crouched in a like posture, and met him, eye to eye. As the dog licked his face, Nick imagined in the canine grin a consciousness that he was not just some nighttime stray but proof of Lopez’s story. This was no mutt, but the rarest of breeds, a corroboration hound. The dog barked, twice. What instinct possessed Nick then, he did not know, but he said to the dog, not loudly but with utter sincerity, “You’re a liar, too.”

  Nick stood up and took in the spectacle of fallen men and falling ones, illuminated by the car headlights. A bad dream, dreamt by all. The older cop went over to help his vomiting partner. Lopez wailed in the mud, holding his face. “My finger, my nose, they’re broken.” Not dreamt by all. Esposito laughed helplessly, holding the tree for support. The dog wandered off, into the dark.

&nb
sp; Esposito called out, still laughing, “Look! Get up! Your dog is running away again!”

  “I hate that dog! I hate you!”

  As Esposito fell back against the tree, Nick leaned down to fish the flashlight out from the mud. He walked back to the car, and replaced his gloves with a clean pair. He returned to the woman to collect her purse, pressing on with his task as if nothing had happened. As if he hadn’t just vandalized a cadaver. Could he make it up to her somehow? He’d think about that later. Let the other ones curse, cry, puke, or laugh; he still had work to do. Work to do here. Move along. Nothing to see here, ma’am. Go about your business.

  The purse was still around her shoulder, and he slipped it off and took it back to the car, where he could examine it on the dry seat, in better light. He slammed the door shut behind him, wiped his hands, and dumped the contents out. Woman things: a brush, compact, hair band, lipstick. Knitting needles. No surprise there, but a reminder of how the fall could have been worse. A little Spanish bible, El Nuevo Testamento y Salmos. Here it was—an address book and wallet. No, not so fast. The address book had two numbers. The wallet—new pink plastic, what a child would pick—no ID. Not even a fake ID, and the cardboard square where she might have written a name and address had been left blank. She had left him with nothing, no information, which meant she hadn’t left him. She was his responsibility until he could find next of kin. Until the bad news was broken to someone who mattered, maybe who cared, the book could not be closed. He felt self-pity gather in his mind, plumping up like a teardrop—Not your night, is it?—when he caught himself, cut it off quickly. There was sufficient illustration of worse luck in the vicinity, should he care to look. Other people, they did come in handy sometimes.

  Nick scooped the contents back into the purse and returned to the scene. Esposito had recovered somewhat and was talking to the older cop—the last man standing—telling him what needed to be done with the body, the paperwork. Lopez was on his knees, holding his face and moaning, “Hospital. I need to go to the hospital….”