Reed Coleman - Empty ever after

“Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“I told you I knew it was dumb.”

“Dumb! This isn’t dumb. This is stupid. I would never have closed a case if I looked for every little thing to make me miserable. The stars don’t ever align the way you think they should.”

“But why would he lie to me? He had nothing to gain from it.”

“C’mon, Moe. You’re looking for logic where there is none. The kid was a piece of shit. He was in the game. You know what hustlers are like. He lied because that’s what skells do. It’s a reflex, they don’t think it out.”

The cop’s blanket answer for everything. I had known all of that before she said it. I’d uttered versions of it several times myself. I even agreed with her, yet…

I was wise enough not to share with Detective Feeney the reason I asked him to lunch. We met at a Chinese restaurant on Avenue U near Ocean Avenue. His choice. He was already seated in a red vinyl booth when I arrived. He was dressed as he was the first time we met: white shirt, same polyester tie. His hair must’ve been made of real bristles the way that brush cut stood up to the humidity. We shook hands and stared at the menus. I don’t understand why people stare at Chinese menus. They always know what they’re going to order.

“Food good here?”

“Who cares? The air conditioning’s great.” Feeney grinned.

Feeney was old school down to what he ordered: egg drop soup, chicken chow mein, and pork fried rice. Christ, it was like eating with my parents. I ordered crispy duck that wasn’t especially crispy and was barely duck.

“So,” he said, shoveling a fork full of fried rice into his mouth, “does this mean we’re goin’ steady?”

“I just wanted to say thanks for not making it as hard on me as you could have.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Prager.” Funny, I had said those same words to the kid. “You got a bug up your ass about something. Wait…” He put down his fork, wiped his mouth with his linen napkin, and then reached under his chair. “You wanna take a look at the file, right?”

“I do.”

“Last person who said those words to me had my children.”

“From me, you’ll have to settle for the chow mein,” I said.

He plopped the file on the table, but kept his forearm across it. “Before I let you take a look-see, I just wanna give you a chance to forget it, to finish your meal and walk away.”

“And why would I do that?”

He tapped the folder with stubby fingers. “Because you ain’t gonna find what you’re lookin’ for in here. The only thing you’re gonna find is unhappiness.”

“How do you know what I’m looking for?”

“I know. Believe me, Prager, I know. You think you’re the first ex-cop I ever dealt with?” Feeney didn’t wait for an answer. “Ask your partner, Melendez, she’ll tell you.”

“She already did.”

“See, this here file contains the answers to questions of what and when, but that ain’t what you want. You don’t wanna know a what or a when. You wanna know a why. Am I right or am I right?”

“Right. But why agree to have lunch?”

“I was hungry.”

“Very funny, but why do this for me?”

“I didn’t do it for you. I did it for me, so I can get some peace. If I didn’t let you see it, you’d be calling me with all sorts a stupid questions. Eventually, you’d show up with a court order and I don’t got time for that shit. I got cases on my desk from the year of the flood. This way, I figured to save me a lot of time and grief.”

I didn’t argue. Why argue with the truth? When I reached for the file, however, his arm didn’t budge.

“Last chance, Prager. Take my advice. There’s only more unhappiness waitin’ for you in here.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“First, I wanna know what’s eatin’ you. Then you can see the file.”

I guess I blushed a little bit.

“That stupid, huh?” he said. “Oh, this is gonna be good.”

I explained about the kid lying to me about his name. Feeney had enough respect to let me finish before he started laughing. When he got done wiping the tears from his eyes, he slid the file across the table.

We didn’t speak again for another quarter hour. During that time, Feeney finished his meal, had a dish of pistachio ice cream and a plate of pineapple chunks. When I was done, I slid the file back across the table to him.

“You satisfied?” he said, patting his full belly. “What’d I tell you? It’s as solid a case as I ever made. We got every kinda evidence against Ray Martello that’s ever been invented and then some.”

“Yeah, it was like he wrapped himself up in a neat little package for you and then by getting himself squished, saved the mess of a trial. No loose ends. Nice and tidy. Pretty convenient all the way around.”

“Perfect.”

“Yeah, maybe a little too perfect,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s take a ride.”

Feeney agreed, a look of resignation on his face. My guess was he knew this was coming and he had already cleared a few hours to waste with me.

I parked my car on Avenue Y in approximately the same spot Ray Martello had parked his Yukon on the night he killed the kid. As I slipped into the space, Feeney’s resigned expression reshaped itself into a knowing smile. When I unlocked the doors, he didn’t move.

He said, “Where’re you goin’? We can do this in here in the air conditioning, you know?”

“Do what?”

“Weren’t you gonna ask me to explain why Martello would park his SUV on the west side of Ocean Parkway while he committed the homicide on the east side? That’s six busy lanes of traffic he had to cross at night to make his escape, right? Why would he do that? Then you were gonna point out to me that most of the witnesses, includin’ the drivers that hit him, swear Ray Martello was runnin’ not away from the crime scene but towards it when he got smacked. Am I right?”

“You know you are,” I said.

“See, Prager, it’s all those why questions, they’re gonna make you miserable. I don’t know why he parked his Yukon here. Maybe he couldn’t get a spot on the other side of Ocean Parkway or maybe he didn’t want anyone to notice his car. Why was he running the wrong way? Maybe he thought he forgot something at the crime scene. Maybe he got disoriented because he didn’t know Brooklyn so good. Maybe because really killing someone ain’t as easy as people think and it fucks ’em up a little. Maybe because he had twice the legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream mixed with Xanax. You see, I don’t have to know why he did those things. I only have to know that he did them.”

“What about the alcohol and Xanax?”

“What about them?” Feeney asked. “You ever kill anybody?”

“No.”

“You think if you were gonna have to kill someone you knew in cold blood, and a kid at that, that you might have to fortify yourself a little? I know I would.”

“But he had enough alcohol and drugs in him to make an elephant loopy.”

“He was a cop, not a pharmacist, Prager. Besides, maybe that’s why he was disoriented and ran in the wrong direction.”

What he said was making sense and it made me realize how silly and desperate I must have sounded, but I guess I’d already passed the point of caring just how silly.

“Did he have a prescription for the Xanax?” I asked.

“You’re shittin’ me, right? We can drive into your old precinct and within twenty minutes I could buy enough Xanax, Valium, methadone, and Oxycontin to put out a herd of fuckin’ elephants. Trust me, Prager, as a brother cop and as a guy who’s seen a lot of good men torture themselves over stupid details, leave it be. The answers you’re lookin’ for, you ain’t gonna find here, not on these streets, not in that file. Ray Martello was a sick bastard who was willin’ to go a long way to get his revenge. He killed the kid, panicked, and ran into traffic. End of story. You’re never gonna know why the kid lied to you about his name. He just did.”