Reed Coleman - Hurt machine

He wasn’t enthusiastic. “All right. Whatever.”

“Another drink?”

“Nah, just let me know when you get what we need.”

He stood to go, but I grabbed his arm.

“I think I’m dying, Brian.” The words came out of my mouth involuntarily.

He sat back down. “What?”

“Stomach cancer.”

“Jesus. Fuck!”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“It’s bad, huh?”

“It’s not good.”

“Why tell me? I was gonna do the job for you anyhow.”

“It’s not that, Brian. I would never manipulate a friend that way. Weird thing is, I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone, but I think I would have exploded if I didn’t tell somebody. I knew I could tell you. You can’t say a word about it.”

“Not to Devo?”

“I suppose you can tell him,” I said. “But that’s it.”

“Okay, you got my word.”

“Shit, Doyle, lighten up. I’m the one with the cancer. You look worse than me.”

He stared at me for a long few seconds and said, “No, Boss, I don’t.”

After he left O’Hearn’s, I watched him walk away down Church Street. I caught a reflection of myself in the window. He was right.

Maya Watson was less than thrilled about doing what I asked, saying that it seemed like getting dirty all over again. I thought that was sort of a strange thing to say, but I wasn’t in her shoes. Reading the hate mail made me feel a lot of things-angry, shameful, disgusted, eventually bored-but not dirty. Then again, I was a third party and the hate and racism weren’t directed at me. Who was I to judge? No matter, Maya said she’d take care of it as soon as she could.

In the meantime, I headed back to Bordeaux in Brooklyn to make sure the wine order for the wedding was ready for shipment up to Vermont. When Sarah and Paul first told me they were getting married in Vermont, I thought it was going to be a relaxed affair in a ski chalet or local bar somewhere. I nearly broke out in hives when they told me it was to be a black tie wedding at Paul’s parents’ country club. The last country club wedding I’d been to was in the early ’80s, just after Katy’s miscarriage. It was at that wedding that the seeds of Katy’s murder were sown. It was impossible for us to know then that those seeds would take seventeen years to sprout and that when they did the world would fall in around us. It frightened me to think I had become my mother’s son. Were we, like she believed, always just one breath short of disaster, one nightfall away from the sun’s refusal to shine? Had she been right all along?

I was also kind of shocked that they had country clubs in Vermont or enough Jews and other ethnic groups to actually form them. What surprised me even more was that tuxedos weren’t contraband. I mean, I enjoyed my time in Vermont. It was a lovely and serene place that made Brooklyn seem like an Earth colony on a distant planet in a far-flung galaxy, but it had its quirks. After only a few trips up there to visit Pam, I was convinced that it was against the law for men to trim their beards or to get a decent haircut. The state police clearly seized most shipments of women’s makeup at the border and banned all fashion magazines from sale. Pam must have smuggled her clothes, jewelry, and makeup in under cover of darkness. The state bird was the Subaru Outback and you could get a thousand different varieties of granola or cheddar cheese at the local convenience store.

I thought about what Rico Tripoli, Paul’s biological father, would have made of all this hoopla, of French wines and country clubs. Rico, like me, had grown up a poor schmuck in Brooklyn. In that Brooklyn, the Brooklyn of immigrant parents, sewer to sewer stickball games, and ring-a-levio, you didn’t dream of country clubs or black tie weddings. Well, maybe Rico did, which is probably why his appetites destroyed him. That was the thing about Rico, he could never tell you exactly what he wanted, only that he wanted more of it than he already had. It was why he sold his soul several times over and so cheaply. The first time it was for his gold detective’s shield. Then he sold that for cocaine gang money, and, eventually, for the cocaine itself. Funny thing is that when he wound up in prison, he somehow blamed me. I suppose I should forgive him for that. By then he had been so long without a soul that he had forgotten the meaning of love and friendship.

Bordeaux in Brooklyn on Montague Street was our second wine shop and the only one I really cared for at all. The wine business paid my bills, sent Sarah to college and helped buy her vet practice, yet even now, it meant very little to me. The business had been my brother’s dream, not mine. All I did was invest some money and go along for the ride. I hadn’t ever really invested, not emotionally. Over thirty years in the business and I didn’t give a shit. And if I hadn’t cared up to now, dying wasn’t going to make me see the light. All I could see was the time I’d wasted, the things I hadn’t done. When I was gone, all that would be remembered of me was that I had been a shopkeeper. Does anyone dream of being a shopkeeper? Does anyone dream of dying as one?

I’d done a lot of thinking lately about the what ifs in my life. What if I hadn’t slipped on that piece of carbon paper in the squad room in 1977 and torn my knee to shreds? That was the what if that really haunted me. Of the many things that had befallen me, that one careless step changed my life more than any other single incident before or since. Owing to my wrecked knee, the NYPD forced me into early retirement. From that day forward I limped down the road previously not taken until that road had taken me. Where would I be? Who would I be? What would I be? See, it’s like what I said about asking why me? Once you start, you can never stop asking. Signs that read Watch Your Step meant more to me than a simple warning.

The trucking company arrived soon after I finished checking the wine order. I watched it loaded into the semi’s box, then watched it disappear down Montague Street into the wilds of Cadman Plaza and beyond. I thought about heading back into Manhattan-only a very short ride over the nearby Brooklyn Bridge-and over to the High Line Bistro. Since, in spite of my better instincts, it seemed I was buying into the connection between Robert Tillman’s death and Alta Conseco’s murder, I supposed it was time to look into that aspect of things. But no, I wasn’t up for it today. I wasn’t up for pretending, for lying to people who would invest their trust in me when I told them I was a cop or an insurance man or a PI employed by the lawyers representing the Tillman family.

I’m not one of those people who much believes in the truth as an imperative or an elixir. If anything, it had been my experience that the plain truth often made things worse, much worse. It sure as shit didn’t set you free. But I’d come to think that there was a price to be paid for lies. Not a price come judgment day with God as the cosmic accountant, having kept the ledger of sins great and small. Nor am I saying there’s any individual cost to the liar him-or herself. It’s a common cost, a price we all pay. Each uncovered lie is a corrosive thing, eating away at whatever trust there is left that binds us together. Without trust, we have nothing, and I just wasn’t in the mood to add to the weakening of those bonds, not today.

…

McPhee’s wasn’t exactly hopping in mid-afternoon. I don’t know. I guess I went looking for trouble, half-hoping that asshole Hickey would be there and I could embarrass him in front of his friends or better yet, a woman. I also wanted to see Flannery again. I liked the guy for having the cojones to be honest with me when it would have been easier to just let it be. There was something else about him too. He had the sadness in him, the demons. Fuck if I knew that was why he drank. There are a thousand reasons for a man to drink and only some of them have to do with tamping down the demons. I was curious about why he didn’t want to talk about his heroics and why he was so eager to drink to guilt. Guilt, now there was a subject I knew a little something about. Maybe I was looking for answers in him for the questions in me. Short of running into my attacker or seeing Flannery, I hoped the same barman was on duty. He seemed a chatty sort and I was in the mood to chat.