Reed Coleman - Empty ever after

“No wonder you’ve been such a bitch.” I was laughing. She wasn’t. “Come on, you know I hate to drink alone.”

“No!”

“What the fuck is the matter with-”

“I’m pregnant.”

I drank my scotch, quickly, then drank the glass I poured for Carmella. After that, I said nothing. Sometimes, the two of us would talk about my divorce and what had gone wrong between Katy and me. We almost never talked about Carmella’s social life. That was mostly my doing, I suppose. Her taste in men sucked and I wasn’t shy about voicing that opinion. I also tended to pile on when the latest asshole would inevitably disappoint her. It didn’t take her long to tire of hearing me say, “I told you so.” She thought she could read my mind.

“Go ahead, say it. I know you’re thinking it.”

“No, I’m not. What I’m thinking is are you gonna be okay?”

“I’m always okay. You know what I been through. I can take anything.”

She was right. She had been through a lot. Her whole life seemed to be one long drawn-out test of her will to survive. Outside her family, only I knew just how cruel that test had been. I walked over and knelt down in front of her chair.

“Just because you always survive doesn’t mean you’re always okay,” I said, stroking her hair. I wiped her tears away with my thumb.

“What am I gonna do, Moe?”

“I don’t know. What do you want?”

“I want not to have gotten knocked up is what I want.” The anger shut off her tears. She looked up at the ceiling. “I pray to God, always. Since I was a little girl, I pray to God, but he don’t answer my prayers.”

She crossed herself, then flipped up the middle finger of her right hand. I went back around the desk and poured myself another scotch.

“You remember Israel Roth?”

“The viejo, your friend? Sure, I remember. Nice man.”

“You know he survived two years in Auschwitz, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What Mr. Roth used to say was that the problem with God wasn’t that he didn’t answer prayers. The problem was his answer was usually no.”

“Smart man, but that don’t help me.”

“Have you told the father?”

“Fuck him!”

I didn’t touch that line. “Who is he?”

“Doesn’t matter, just another jerk in a long line of jerks.” She stood up and came to stand close by me. “It’s your fault, you know.”

“How’s it my-”

“You know,” she said, threading herself through my arms and wrapping hers around me. “Why don’t you love me?”

“Carmella, we’ve been through this bef-”

She pushed the end of the word back into my mouth with her tongue. At first, I just took it, but I was returning her kiss soon enough. When I had allowed myself to fantasize about being with her, I told myself that a second kiss would never match the first. I was right. The second kiss was better. The first kiss had been rather chaste, more a tender brush of the lips, heavy with possibility and light on passion. This kiss would not be mistaken for a chaste brush of the lips. Her slight sigh broke the spell and I pushed myself away.

“I’m not doing this,” I said.

“Not that again. That was forever ago. You can’t keep punishing me for what someone else did to me.”

“It’s never been about that.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“You mean other than your being pregnant?”

That quieted her. There was chemistry between us. There always had been, but this kiss had been about distraction, not chemistry. It had done a fairly good job of distracting me as well.

“Oh, Christ, Moe, what am I gonna do?” She pulled herself close again and rested her head on my chest.

“Do you want the baby?”

“Me? I’m a thirty-five-year-old unmarried woman. What am I gonna do with a baby?”

“That’s not an answer. Do you want it?”

“Yes and no.”

“Now that’s an answer,” I said, once again stroking her hair. “How far along are you?”

“Not so far.”

“Whatever you choose, you know, it’s good with me.”

“I know.”

I reached under her chin and tilted her head so that she was looking up directly into my eyes. “Just one thing, Carm, don’t think that because you’re not far along that you have a lot of time. The longer you wait, the harder it will get. Whatever decision you make will be a permanent one and you’ll have to live with it forever.”

She smiled sadly. “Maybe not forever, but just as long as I live.”

“Yeah, I guess everybody’s forever is a little bit different.”

Now she pushed herself away, wiping off what was left of the tears with the backs of her hands. “Come on, we got work to do. Go put that bottle away and then get your ass back in here.”

By the time I returned to her office, she had completely regained her composure. I hadn’t invested in this partnership because of her looks. Of the two of us, she was the professional detective. I’d only ever been in uniform. When Carmella needed to, she could be all business. You couldn’t’ve worked homicide the way she had without the ability to check your emotions. There were times when her knack for emotional distance verged on antiseptic and, given what was going on with my family at the moment, that was probably a good thing. I was too close to it, way too close.

She slid a thick file across her desk. “That’s what you asked for. You’ve got current addresses-home and business-phone numbers, e-mail addresses… everything. There’s only one guy, this… Judas Wannsee, that we’re having a little trouble locating.”

In 1981, Judas Wannsee was the leader of the Yellow Stars, a Jewish anti-assimilationist cult headquartered in the Catskill Mountains. His group had provided cover for the woman who had started the fire that killed my high school crush. The group had attracted some national media attention in the early part of the decade, but by 19 9 0 had fallen into the creases of history the way pocket change disappears into the furniture.

“Okay, have Devo keep looking.”

“So, where do we start?”

“ We don’t. I’m flying solo. There are some people I need to talk to by myself.”

“Okay, but-”

“You still have that package in the office?”

Carmella knew what I was asking for and pulled a large plastic bag out of her drawer.

“Good. Patrick and his boyfriend Jack had that tattooed on their forearms.”

“So you told me, but that had to have been at least-”

“-twenty-three years ago. I know, but I want you to send some people out to tattoo parlors to see if anyone’s had a tat like this done within the last few months.”

“Moe, these days aren’t exactly like when my dad was young and the only people who got tattoos were sailors and bikers. There are probably more than a hundred tattoo and piercing joints in Manhattan alone. Maybe double that. Never mind the boroughs.”

I suppose I hadn’t given it a lot of thought. “You really think there’s that many?”

“Shit, everybody’s got ink these days.”

“I don’t.”

“I do.”

“You do! What of? Where?”

“You should’ve asked me that about twenty minutes ago. There’s a good chance you would have seen for yourself. But we’ll talk about that some other time. I bet you Sarah got one.”

“I don’t think so.”

Carmella just shook her head and smiled at me. “Okay, so we’re going tattoo hunting. Anything else?”

“Casting calls,” I said.

“Casting calls! Tattoos and casting calls, what’s this about exactly?”

“At the airport…” I hesitated.

“At the airport what?”

“Remember when Raheem pointed and said that the guy that paid him to deliver the-”