What You Break Read online

  I thought I might get lucky and happen into Mr. Smith in the coffee shop, that I might engage him in conversation, to see if he was going to present an issue. No such luck. The place was already empty at a quarter past nine. It smelled of frying eggs, burnt toast, grilling onions from the home fries, and fresh roasted coffee. I had to hand it to the Bonackers. The Paragon wasn’t the Waldorf, not by a long shot, but they didn’t cheap out on the coffee. There were only small take-out cups, so I filled two of them up, added my Sweet’N Lows and half-and-half, and slurped a little off the top of each before lidding them. As I turned to leave, my cell buzzed in my pocket. I put the coffees down on the counter.

  It was Bill Kilkenny.

  “If it isn’t my favorite ex-priest,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Good day to you, Gus Murphy.”

  Bill was Bronx born and to the bone, but affected a kind of B-movie Irish lilt. It was, as he told me, a thing he had started doing when he was an army chaplain in Vietnam. “It made me seem older and wiser than I was, and the guys seemed to want and need that from me.” He had never gotten out of the habit, not even after taking off the collar.

  “Back at you, Bill. Listen, I’m headed over to see Doc Rosen now, so—”

  “I need to see you, to talk. Do you think you might be convinced to come my way after your appointment with the good doctor?”

  I checked my watch. “Sure. Wanna meet for lunch over at All-American Burger on Merrick Road? Say around noon? My treat.”

  “A lovely offer, for sure, Gus, but I think I’d prefer us discussing the matter to be spoken of in a more private setting.”

  “Like your apartment?”

  “Just so. Just so. Noon then.”

  “Noon it is.”

  I hung up, picked up my coffees, and went back into the lobby. Mr. Smith wasn’t there, either.

  “Felix, can you check the schedule? Is Slava on tonight?” I asked, passing by the registration desk on my way out.

  He shook his head, his mop of black hair dancing. “Off.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  I sat in the front seat of my new-used Mustang, sipping coffee against the morning chill. It had been that kind of April from the day it arrived, the weather only ever threatening warmth without delivering. Today there was no ambiguity, no promises or threats of warmth. It was turn-your-collar-up raw, a nasty gray mist enveloping the pudgy middle of Suffolk County. Even the cars along Vets Highway seemed to want to get in out of the weather. Jet engines droned and whined a mournful tune as the nose of a Southwest 737 emerged from the overcast above me. Another flight from Florida full of returning snowbirds. But the trick would be on them when they stepped out of the terminal into the current lies of springtime.

  3

  (SUNDAY AFTERNOON)

  Bill Kilkenny, a lanky stick of a man, lived in a spare basement apartment in North Massapequa. It was as inglorious as it sounded, but Father Bill—I didn’t call him that any longer, though I would always think of him that way—was used to having very little and didn’t want for much. As he’d told me once, he was a prisoner of his past. Who wasn’t? He said that a priest, unless he rises up through the ranks, learns possessions are cumbersome things that blind you to your calling. And it was the whole moving-up-the-ranks thing that had helped drive him out of the priesthood.

  “When I rediscovered my faith, I found I had very little use for the mechanics and hierarchy of the church itself.”

  I supposed I owed as much to Bill as I did to Doc Rosen, for they were the two men who helped keep my head above water for the two years following John’s death. It was almost as if Bill had handed me off to Doc after he’d done all he could do in that first year. Bill had the harder job, of course. Bill, he was still Father Bill then, walked into the raging shit storm in the immediate aftermath of John’s death. He bore witness to Annie, Krissy, and me tearing ourselves apart because it was all we could do with our grief. I owed Bill Kilkenny for that. For other things, too, like literally saving my life. But the debt I owed for John Jr. was so great I could never fully repay it.

  And there was Bill as I always found him, smoking a cigarette by the side of the beige, vinyl-sided ranch. He was a hopeless casualty of priestly fashion. He wore a ratty cable-knit sweater that had once been white but now matched the dirty beige siding. His pilled black slacks, worn shiny at the knees, hung off him like a scarecrow’s, but worse were those ugly black priest shoes I could never get him to abandon. I’d even bought him a pair of running shoes at Costco, to no avail. When Bill saw me coming, he lifted his left foot and snuffed out his cigarette on the sole of his ugly shoe.

  “Gus Murphy, prompt as always,” he said, tossing the butt on the ground and wiping his palms together.

  I took his right hand in mine. “Bill. Good to see you. What’s this about?”

  “I’ve got the wine opened and the glasses cleaned. We’ll discuss it inside.” He nodded toward the rear of the ranch.

  “Sure, Bill.”

  Walking ahead, I turned back to see him bend over and scoop up the dead cigarette, cupping it in his hand like a fallen nestling.

  “Go on.” He shooed me away with his other hand. “The door’s open.”

  I walked down the concrete steps and pulled back the door to his basement apartment. The place was much as it always was: neat, bare, musty. Beyond the dampness, there was an acrid petroleum tang of home heating oil from the boiler room. The boiler hummed on just the other side of the living room wall. The odor smacked me in the nose every time I walked in, but after a few minutes I got used to it and the stink seemed to vanish. The same could not be said of the scent of cigarette smoke. Although Bill never smoked in the house, he carried the smell with him on his clothes, his hair, his breath, and his skin. Of late, Bill’s habit was worse. I suppose killing a man will do that to you, even if the man deserved killing.

  When Bill came in a few seconds behind me, he headed straight to the kitchen. I heard the lid of the garbage can open and close. Heard him wash his hands in the sink. Heard the tinkling of glasses and the glug glug glug of wine being poured.

  “Here we are, lad,” he said, handing me a glass of red wine so dark it was nearly purple.

  One glass of wine before we spoke. It was a ritual of ours established during my rage and grief. It was a way to step back from it, to put a fence around it for a few brief moments. The ritual became my sanctuary. The rage was gone, but the ritual remained.

  “Sláinte, Gus.”

  “Sláinte.”

  We clinked glasses and sipped.

  “Christ, Bill, this stuff must’ve cost you a fortune.”

  “Amazing stuff, is it not? But I must confess to you that it was a gift from an old acquaintance.”

  “You must be keeping better company these days.”

  He shrugged. And we finished our glasses of wine slowly, savoring the wine’s complexity, each sip revealing a different aspect of the wine from the one preceding it. It was rich with notes of berries and black pepper, and it tasted differently on the tip of your tongue from how it did at the back of your throat.

  “Okay, Bill, we’ve had our wine. So, what’s the deal?”

  Just as I asked, there was the scratchy sound of grit caught between shoe soles and concrete on the stairs leading down to the apartment. A mischievous smile bent the corners of Bill’s thin lips and there was a glint in his eyes. I got the sense that a spider might wear that same expression when it detected a stray termite stuck in its web.

  “That’ll be Micah now.”

  “Micah?”

  “Micah Spears.”

  “Should I know that name?”

  Before Bill could answer, the door opened. In stepped a man with a cruel mouth and cold green eyes, who looked like he was wearing sins in the pores of his skin, the deeply etched lines on his face, and in the pockets o
f his fancy green tweed and tan suede blazer. I didn’t believe in God, but I believed in sin. Sin was real because there was wrong in the hearts of men and women, but it wasn’t put there by a seductive serpent or because of apple eating out of turn. Sin was born the first time a human being wanted more than he had or deserved. And I didn’t need to know anything about Spears to know he was nipple deep in hell. I knew because I had been there myself. Sometimes late at night, when I was alone in the van or half asleep, staring up at the ceiling of my room, I’d forget that I wasn’t still there.

  4

  (SUNDAY AFTERNOON)

  Spears was probably Bill’s age, maybe a bit older, though he did not share Bill’s priestly modesty or taste in clothing. His clothes were perfectly tailored to his still-athletic body. He was one of those guys who you just knew worked hard at cheating death. He ate right, spent hours on the treadmill, worked with a personal trainer. But all the fancy tailoring and gym time in the world could only hide so much and delay the inevitable just so long. It was my experience that these death-cheating types weren’t so much in love with life as they were afraid of death. I laughed to myself, thinking that belief in God was a curse. To believe in him you had to believe in his judgment. Did people really imagine judgment awaited them? What judgment could be harsher than our own? And by the look of him, of his icy, distant green eyes, Micah Spears seemed impervious to judgment. God’s or otherwise.

  Bill pointed at me and then to Spears. “Gus Murphy, Micah Spears. Micah Spears, Gus Murphy.”

  Spears offered me his hand and I took it. He had a firm grip and he held on to my hand even as I tried to take it back. He was one of those guys, the type who thinks he can know you by your handshake. I didn’t possess that skill. It was like believing I could know a man by how he reacted to having me cuff his hands behind his back or how he blinked when I recited the Miranda warning. Do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you? I had known cops who swore they knew someone was lying by how the suspect’s fingers twitched or whether the suspect looked up or down when he answered their questions. It was all so much horseshit.

  “Bill’s told me a lot about you, Murphy,” Spears said, turning his head at an angle to take my measure.

  More assessment. More horseshit.

  “Then I’m at a disadvantage.”

  He nodded and clapped his hand on my right biceps. He smelled intensely of Old Spice aftershave, which, if it hadn’t reminded me of my drunk prick of a father, would have been a relief from the dank apartment’s cigarette and home-heating-oil perfume.

  “How’d you like the wine?” Spears asked, changing subjects.

  Now I knew how Bill had come by it. A gift? An inducement? A bribe? Sometimes three different words meant the same thing. But Bill wasn’t bribable. All a stranger had to do was look around his apartment or at his clothes closet to know that. As a priest and confessor, Bill Kilkenny knew things about important people that they would surely kill for or, at a minimum, pay a lot to prevent from seeing the light of day, but Bill had been the kind of priest to match his B-movie lilt. Even after losing his faith, he was a diligent priest. I think he would sooner die than break a trust. So if Bill had thought it important for me to meet Micah Spears, I would listen.

  Still, I took an immediate dislike to Spears. Was it his handshake test? His belief that a fancy bottle of wine could buy Bill’s favor? Or was it something as petty as his aftershave reminding me of my father?

  “Great wine,” I said. “Must’ve cost you.”

  Bill answered for him. “Micah can afford it. He owns a . . . remind me again, boyo, what it is that it’s called?”

  “An ESCO. An energy service company. I own three, actually. I buy and sell electricty and natural gas to commercial and residential consumers.”

  Bill shook his head at Spears. “And there’s money in that, is there?”

  “Horse-choking money, Bill.”

  “But I assume that’s not why I’m here,” I said, “to discuss your net worth or to watch you choke a horse with a stack of hundreds?”

  “You were right about this guy, Bill.” Spears pointed at me even as he looked at Kilkenny. “He’s sharp and he already doesn’t like me.”

  “You’re a hard fella to like, Micah, if you don’t mind me saying. You don’t make it easy.”

  “Fuck easy, Bill. What’s easy in this world?”

  That much we agreed on.

  “Okay, Bill asked me here. I’m here. I’m guessing it was to talk to you. So talk.”

  Micah Spears reached into his pants pocket and removed a sleek cell phone that looked more like a shrunken tablet. He tapped the screen a few times, then scrolled with his right index finger. He tapped again and handed me the phone.

  “That’s my granddaughter, Linh Trang,” he said, as if that explained the universe. For him, maybe it did.

  She was a pretty girl, slightly built, with a disarming smile. Her Asian eyes, overdone with blue eye shadow, black liner, and mascara, smiled to match her mouth. She had a button nose and black hair blown back by the wind. She wore a blue mortarboard atop her head, a gold tassel hanging off to one side.

  “Pretty girl,” I said, handing back his phone. “Graduation day?”

  He nodded his gray head. “From Hofstra, last May. She was an accounting major. Top grades.”

  I asked, “Okay, so what about her?”

  Spears stared down at Bill’s threadbare carpeting. “She’s dead.”

  That caught me by surprise. Bill crossed himself. That reflex had died in me long ago.

  “I’m sorry, but how—”

  Spears didn’t seem to hear me.

  “Murdered,” Bill said. “She was murdered.”

  “Christ!” Spears said. “The fuckhead stabbed her twenty-three times. It was all over the news this last fall. I’m surprised you didn’t read about it.”

  Bill spoke for me. “Gus isn’t much for the news these days, Micah. And I was too long in the priesthood to venture too far beyond the needs of the people to whom I ministered.”

  I was a little curious. “And what is it you want from me?”

  “I want you to look into it,” Spears said, sneering at me as if I was a complete idiot. Maybe I was an idiot, because the longer I stood there, the less I liked the man and the less I cared what he wanted.

  “That’s what the Suffolk County Police Department is for. I would know. I worked for them for twenty years.”

  “I think you misunderstand me, Gus—may I call you Gus?”

  “Sure. Gus works. So, what is it that I’m not getting?”

  “I’m not asking you to find Linh’s killer. The Suffolk cops caught him two days after she was murdered. His name’s Rondo Salazar and he’s in Riverhead, awaiting trial.”

  I looked to Bill, turning my palms up in confusion. “So what do you need me for? Do you understand, Bill? I’m missing something here, but maybe you get it.”

  Bill shook his head. “Micah, I know you told me before I arranged for you to meet Gus that it was to be about your granddaughter’s murder, but I’m afraid I’m with Gus in that I’m not sure what you’re asking of him. Is it that you don’t think this Salazar fella was the man who murdered Linh Trang?”

  “No, that motherfucker murdered her, all right. He’s guilty and I’d kill him if I could.”

  “Is that what you’re asking Gus to do, Micah? To gain access to this man so that he might kill him for you?” Bill was shouting, spit flying, his hollow cheeks fire red. “Have you dared use me as a conduit for such a deplorable thing?”

  Spears waved his hands. “Relax, Bill. Relax. That’s not what I’m asking, though I confess that if I thought Gus here could manage it and would consider it, I would ask. And not for nothing, but it’s not like you don’t have some blood on your hands there, Father Bill.”

  “Watch your mouth!
” I shouted.

  But Spears only laughed. “Temper, temper, Gus.”

  “Fuck you, asshole.”

  I lifted up my right hand to slap him across the face. Men detest being slapped. Punch them, they’re okay with that. Slap them, and it somehow reflects on their manhood. But before I could slap him, Bill stepped between us, his back to me. Then he turned and pushed both of us apart. His anger, though, was directed at me.

  “Stop it, the both of you. John Augustus Murphy, I fight my own battles. Always have and always will. I don’t need defending by the likes of you. And to be truthful, I do have blood on my hands.”

  “On my account,” I said. “It was my life you were saving when you shot that prick.”

  Bill wasn’t having it. “And my life and the girl’s as well. I did what needed doing.”

  “Besides, Gus,” Spears said, reaching into his jacket pocket, pulling out two checks, “you wouldn’t want to ruin this opportunity.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t need your money and I don’t want it. I’ve got half my pension, a steady job, and a pillow under my head.”

  “These checks aren’t for you,” he said. “Not directly, anyway.”

  “More nonsense.”

  He shook his head. “Not nonsense. One check is for fifty thousand dollars to start a youth sports foundation in your son’s name and the other is for two hundred thousand to Stony Brook University Hospital to help fund research in . . . well, whatever you choose. I can rip them up and you can leave or I can hand them over to you right now.”