Red on Red Page 5

  The baby began to scream, and Malcolm stood to walk over, casting a last glance down, shaking his head. But whatever belligerent spirit left him did not linger long without a new host. Michael looked up from his mother, his eyes hardening. He was angry again, and Nick could tell that Michael liked the feeling. Nick envied him, thinking back to his own apartment, his own mother, decades ago but just blocks away. Last breaths, but here a son held on, fighting, as if she would not go if he did not quit. Was love a gift of sight, or the refusal to see?

  “Where you going? Get back here! Let’s go!”

  Malcolm sat heavily down on the couch, picking up the boy to nuzzle his neck, burying his face in him. He seemed less like an adult with a child than a child with a doll. He closed his eyes, and Nick closed his, too, just for a second, to picture it—mother dead, brother dead, his own life a life sentence. Nick opened his eyes to see Malcolm lifting the boy, his nephew, to kiss him on the lips. This was all he had, this baby, this moment; he chose what he could hold, whom he might help, here, now.

  “She gone, yo. In God’s hands. She gone.”

  Michael breathed again into his mother, heavily this time, and moved around to press down on the chest. The compressions now were forceful and precise, and gave a drill sergeant’s percussive punch to his speech. “We don’t stop! Get over here! Now!” He was no longer sidelined by circumstance; he was suddenly in command. The walls could crack and shudder, the roof could buckle down on him, but he would not be kept from his purpose. His life did not matter, and even his mother’s mattered less than the stand he had taken—“Get up! Get over here!”—to hold fast without breaking against any disease, despair, or white boys the dirty world could send against him. Malcolm seemed shaken by the new man beside him, and stood up as summoned. He knelt beside his mother’s face to offer empty breath.

  There was a knock at the door, and Nick opened it for two paramedics. A man and a woman, both young, one white, one Spanish. The woman was small and certain in her movements; the man less so, accepting her guidance as to the placement of the stretcher and oxygen. She stepped aside to let her partner and the Coles lift the old woman onto the stretcher. “Who lives here with her? You? Go get her meds.”

  Malcolm went to the back, and Esposito followed him. Michael tensed visibly, and relaxed only a little when they returned with fistfuls of pill bottles. The female took them to study the labels as the male put an oxygen mask on Miz Cole. The male paramedic looked at the opposing pairs of men, taking in that this was not an ordinary ambulance run, that the detectives were not there merely or even mainly to help.

  “So … who’s gonna ride with us to the hospital? Both of you?”

  Michael answered, “Both of us.”

  Esposito said, “Malcolm’s gonna come with us, try to help with Milton.”

  “No. No he ain’t,” said Michael. “You took enough of my family today.”

  Nick went to the door and held it for the paramedics, waving them on. They moved forward, pushing the gurney. Malcolm hesitated; he was past fighting, but he could not lose face in front of his younger brother. It was a deadlock, for the moment, but it could have been worse. Nick ran through the possibilities: The detectives could stay with Malcolm until the paramedics left, and bring him to the precinct later; they could bring both Coles in and leave Michael outside while they talked to Malcolm, all night if necessary. They could not let them both go to the hospital, and they were not staying here with them. If they went outside, there was a chance Malcolm would run; he had run before, and they were low on living Coles to draw him back uptown.

  “Go on, Mike,” said Esposito. “Go ahead with your moms.”

  “The name is Michael.”

  “Okay, Michael.”

  Michael stepped in front of his brother, hands on hips. The male paramedic paused near the door, where he was leading the stretcher—“Well, who’s going with us? We can’t wait!”—until the female shoved him ahead with an audible thud. Nick was beside them as the stretcher slipped past, clearing the door. As the wheels bumped over the threshold, Miz Cole’s arm slipped off and dangled. Esposito stepped between the Coles, one arm holding Malcolm, the other guiding Michael forward.

  “Look! Your mom! She moved her hand, she waved!”

  Nick was taken too by the unreasonably hopeful turn, reaching down to the wrist to feel for warmth, a pulse. He didn’t think it was possible, and knew at once that it wasn’t. As Nick tucked the hand back onto the gurney, Michael spat at him, “Don’t touch her! Get your hands off her!”

  Nick stepped back. They were at the elevator, and one of the paramedics had already hit the button. Michael was losing control, his facial muscles electrified with twitchy anger. Nick tried a line that Esposito might have ventured, though it had the disadvantage of being true.

  “Michael, I’m sorry. I know—I lost my mother—”

  “Fuck your mother.”

  “Fuck yours.”

  Though Nick regretted it the instant he said it, the insult lifted him to a higher level of animal readiness. Michael’s eyes did not leave his own; they were radiant with hate, and Nick could picture them blazing in the dark. Was hate a way of seeing, or not-seeing? Michael whirled and threw a punch, wide and weak. Nick caught it with both hands as if it were a tossed softball, twisting Michael’s arm, lowering him to the floor.

  “You muthafuckin’ cops! I will kill you! Dead men! Dead! Dead!”

  “Stop. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  The ease of his takedown was a further indignity, and Nick held the arm firm, letting Michael feel how easily it could break. He felt the breathing slow, the rage abate. Or maybe it was just better controlled.

  “You can go with your mother, or you can go to jail,” Nick said, with civil indifference. “It won’t be with your brother. You can do some good for your family, or you can screw up everything for yourself. Go on now. Your mom’s at the elevator. Don’t leave her alone.”

  Michael twisted his head and glared at Nick. The hatred in his face was no less, but it was cold instead of hot; Nick took it as a cease-fire and released him. Michael shuddered and rolled over, stood and stared again at Nick. He would never be frightened again, he knew, but he had learned that he could be fooled. The paramedics were at the elevator door, which thankfully opened. Michael looked at them, at Nick. Michael began to walk to them, still fixing Nick’s eyes.

  “No way this is over. No way.”

  Nick looked at him without answering and withdrew back toward the Cole apartment, trusting that Esposito could handle whatever went on inside. Michael knocked at the apartment door next to the elevator, and when an old woman answered, he told her she had to take care of the babies, he had to go. The woman stared at the stretcher, at him, at Nick, and nodded. When Michael Cole turned away, Nick waved on the female paramedic, who patted Miz Cole’s arm, offering soft assurances that from now on, all things would be good.

  Nick could only guess at what oaths Michael uttered in the next hours of his vigil, as grief seeped from him to harden into tougher, stranger stuff. But Nick was reminded of his own agreements, sometime before dawn. They were back at the squad, and Nick had stepped out of the interrogation room to get coffee, when his cellphone unexpectedly rang. The number was blocked. His wife’s office line was blocked, but it couldn’t be her, not now, not from there. Nick hesitated, then decided to answer. The caller did not identify himself. Nick did not know him, nor did he need to ask.

  “Meehan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Milton Cole homicide, the woman’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well? What happened?”

  “The report’s in the system. You don’t have access?”

  “I’ve seen it. And?”

  “What happened is what’s in the report.”

  “Are you sure?”

  There was guile in the question, and Nick waited for the nex
t.

  “The other brother wasn’t assaulted? We have a witness that will testify that Esposito assaulted the other one. That the bastard actually told a young man who had just lost his mother, and I’m quoting here, ‘Go fuck your mother, you asshole.’ ”

  Nick had to think about that, about who had been there in the hallway—Michael, the EMTs … and the woman Michael summoned to take care of the children. No, she was later. Anyone else, looking out their peephole? Still, he had to agree that no decent man could ever utter such words in such a circumstance.

  “That was me.”

  “What?”

  “And the kid tried to hit me, not the other way around. The quote’s not exact, either, but it’s not that far off, I guess.”

  Now there was a pause on the other side of the line, disappointed, then accusatory.

  “Then, why didn’t you arrest him?”

  “Half his family had just died. I wasn’t hurt. I didn’t think it was worth it.”

  “This is not about you, Detective. We’ll be in touch.”

  Mornings, Nick woke to the thought that waking was a mistake. Not that he wasn’t glad to—he just didn’t believe it, didn’t believe that what he woke to wasn’t some devious subconscious subterfuge, some dream within a dream. It was not just the ashy light in the alley outside the window, the aged creak of the springs in the bed, or that his feet dangled off the lower end. Nor was it the fact that he slept in a bunk bed, even though he was an adult man and had been an only child. A large neighbor family had outgrown it decades ago, and his father had accepted the hand-me-down with the remark, “You never know,” which of course is what you always think before you know.

  At the head of the bed, there were water pipes, and sound traveled down them sometimes, with passages of uncanny clarity broken by schlock-horror sound effects, reverbs and echoes, muddy slow fades. The voice was male, usually calm, never happy. It didn’t happen every day. It didn’t happen most days, but Nick didn’t remember it at all from when he was young. The pipes, the pipes are calling … He wondered if it would have bothered him more or less if it had been a female voice—it had been a house without women for a long time—and he decided that the malcontent manner made the gender immaterial. There was no good company to be had. After a few minutes, he threw back the thin sheets and rough wool blanket, and began to shake off sleep to figure out what day it was, whether he was late for work or could just lie there for a while. He’d stretch and scratch, like he was sloughing off skin, as the exhalation of warmth left the bed. When he was married, he would walk to the kitchen without a cleanup stop in the bathroom, at home in his home. He was still married, he remembered, but often he’d have to remember. Here, which was also his home, and had been at all states and stages of his life, he was newly self-conscious. He’d wash his face, brush his teeth, run a comb through his hair, and examine the mirror for a moment, half-expecting to be met with the reflection of a pensive child, or an aged man, blinking through milky eyes. He’d then go out to see his father, who was almost always there, whatever the time. It was nearly ten in the morning; Nick had slept for three hours.

  Since he’d come home some six months before, his mother had been more in his thoughts. She had been a shy woman, never at home in the world. There had been an awkwardness to her that he’d noted even as a young child—at the grocery checkout, the rapidly downcast eyes, the slight fumble with the change purse—that had had little to do with being an immigrant, or a country girl come to the city. Early on, she would give Nick the money to pay at stores, thinking it educational for him and a relief for herself. “You’re a powerful help,” she’d say, and Nick loved how she said it. She and his father were from “the other side,” a phrase meant to convey a family sameness of Irish wherever they scattered, but for Nick it was suggestive of otherworldliness. The fact that she’d died when he was twelve carried the phrase deeper into that sense. The other side was a kind of intersection between Galway and heaven, foreign and familiar. “Don’t go,” were her last words to him, as if he were the one who was leaving.

  Nick was with his mother when she was struck by a car, crossing the street at a distracted moment, when she remembered she had forgotten to buy stamps. Though she suffered no more than a bad bruise to the hip, he was horrified by her lurching, unnatural movement, by her being taken unwillingly from one place to another—five feet, maybe, but a mile, it seemed—and by the sight of the bulky plaid purse that shot away, dumping its contents as if in a rush to escape, dollars and coupons and rosary beads spilling onto the street. It was seconds before the look of raw mammalian fear left her eyes for an expression of twice-tearful pity, because of the pain and because her son had seen the accident. Nick could never decide whether it had been the fear or the pity that had told him, but he’d known then that she would die. He was likewise unresolved to the nature of her death, when the subsequent hospital visit—pro forma, it was thought, protested against but insisted on by the apologetic driver—led to the discovery of the cancer that killed her in a month. A brute accident, but also a cabal in her blood. Nick learned that there could be knowledge without profit, and that other, larger forces were always at work, no matter whether you slept or kept watch. Still, vigilance seemed the better stance.

  After she died, his father drank a bit more for a while, then less, and now hardly at all. It was the better way, Nick knew, but there was something pointlessly thrifty about the way he took care of himself, the small portions and boiled vegetables and brisk walks. To what end? That was the way the old man would phrase it, were the question turned around, something from catechism, the first principles. But Nick never asked him that, in part because he couldn’t answer the question himself, and in part because he was fond of his father. He’d asked the question in interrogations, and had drawn baffled looks from both crooks and cops. “Why are you here? Not in this room, in handcuffs. Why are you here in the world?” The cops thought it was a trick, and wondered where he’d go with it. Nick honestly hoped to learn something.

  Before he became a cop, there was some time in the service, some time in college. He worked on Wall Street for a while, married. Allison was a kind of athlete, driven but unhurried, and she rose steadily as an analyst at her brokerage. They had known each other in grammar school, but her family had moved. It was a dozen years later when they ran into each other again, downtown, at a restaurant. The transformation was storybook, from the spectacled twig of a kid, studious and awkward, to full-blossomed beauty with a sly, kind smile. She knew the probabilities but called it destiny, just to be sweet. Nick said he didn’t know what the chances were, but he’d take them. They trusted each other, seemed to fit; Nick moved in within months, and they married a year later. They could talk or not talk, take hold of each other or leave each other alone, and each felt natural and apt. When he joined the police department, Allison thought it would be better for him, for them, and she was half-right, which was a low percentage for her. They were in no hurry to have children, but when they decided it was time, it didn’t happen. A year of kamikaze lovemaking followed—in the park, in the back of a car, once in a stuck elevator—when they joined forces as much as bodies, it felt, delighting in the cause, determined for the effect. After several false starts, you might call them, sex became part of a regimen that included vitamins and calendar markings and thermometers, undertaken with the eye-rolling good sportsmanship of office mates during a fire drill. Pleasure gradually became duty, and both of them became increasingly derelict. Management terms popped up in Nick’s mind as he tried to see it as Allison might—results and goals, returns on investment, viability. As their confidence in each other, in what they had together, slowly dwindled, both of them fell back into their jobs. With her long hours and his odd ones, their easy drift became an empty one.

  Together they kept each other company for the off hours, which meant a little food in front of the television, a few nights a week. Sundays were a slight confusion for them. She liked tennis, or games wi
th a purpose; he preferred pastimes without one. He liked to go for walks, looking up at the windows of the tenements and towers, catching a face here and there, and picturing the rest of the story—in one, the old man yelling at the television; in another, the young woman weeping by a phone that doesn’t ring; in a third, the couple shocked with love, leaning over the crib of their newborn. He thought she liked these walks too until one week she twisted her ankle and didn’t come out again. That was her excuse, at first, until she realized she didn’t need one, telling him with a note of touching embarrassment that she’d rather lie in bed and read the papers. The walks got longer, and in time, more and more often, Nick found himself heading from where they lived on the Upper West Side to Inwood, back home.

  Earlier in the year, his father had felt dizzy and had fallen, breaking his collarbone. It had been some kind of spell, he’d said. Nick had stayed with him in the hospital for three days of tests, and then had gone back home with him for a while. The doctors had agreed, it had been some kind of spell. Bit by bit, and then more and more, Nick had left Allison, but they still spoke, still met, when they found the time. What had begun as a rescue had become a retreat; both of them knew it, but neither brought it up. It would have felt like fighting to talk about it, and they hated to fight. Tonight, in fact. He would see her tonight—some sort of company dinner—and the venue would keep their conversation from straying beyond public-room limits. Still, there would be a pull toward the subject of themselves, whether from gravity or curiosity. Unwatched words had a way of going where they are warned not to stray. Words were like children, just like them. Nick decided to stick to conversation about the weather and work.

  When he’d first moved back, his father had asked him if he would be staying. Nick had nodded, and his father had said it was a shame. Nick’s father spoke his mind without restraint or thought of consequence. Not loudly, not often—but when you asked his opinion, it was like picking his pocket. What was there came out, and if you didn’t like it, you shouldn’t have reached. Days later, he’d felt obliged to clarify, to say that it didn’t mean he wasn’t glad to see Nick, didn’t mean Nick wasn’t welcome. No offense had been taken, Nick had assured him. He had understood the first time around. There really wasn’t a question of hurt feelings, Nick had realized later, only that the old man said so little that he had time to dwell on the ramifications of each word. There was a luxury to that way of living, and a poverty, depending on whether the man in the cell was an inmate or a monk. His father didn’t seem like either, very much. His range seemed limited to slight bemusements and mild regrets. Five years ago—longer?—Nick had bought him a recliner, which had inspired the sole evidence of his father’s capacity for fascination and delight: “What an astonishing thing, to invent such a great machine, just for sitting on!” This morning, when Nick went into the kitchen, he was met with a question in the more accustomed range. His father had clearly put some thought into it.