Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

The living room was spotless, almost unnaturally clean for a house with at least two kids in it. A beige wall-to-wall was on the floor, and the furniture was medium-quality department store, bought out of model rooms, on credit, or with the envelopes the bride got at the wedding: modest and respectable. Karp thought the room looked unused, like an old-fashioned parlor; the family must do its living not in this living room, but in a basement or the kitchen, where the TV was. He took in also the expected picture over the mantel, the colored photographic portrait of the whole family in a gilt frame: Cooley looking proud and satisfied in his dress blues with the green bar of the medal showing over the head of a towheaded boy of about five. A younger Mrs. Cooley with a smoother, less stress-worn face held a baby girl. The current version pointed them to a tweed sofa and offered coffee, which they declined, then beer, also declined, and she sat in an armchair opposite.

"Thanks for seeing us, Con," said Guma. Karp nodded agreement and wondered why she was seeing them. The continued presence of the portrait argued against postdivorce hatred.

"I'm doing it for Brendan," she said.

Guma said to Karp, "Butch, I told her about your interest in the Lomax shooting, about how some things about it didn't add up."

"Yes, we really appreciate it," said Karp. "It must be difficult…" His eyes went to the portrait.

She saw that and said, "I don't want him hurt. He needs to stop what he's doing, where he's going, but I don't want him hurt. Just so you know, I will never testify against him in court. They can't make me, can they, Ray?"

"Not if you're his wife, Con. But technically you're not anymore."

"I'm still his wife. I'll always be his wife. The decree isn't final. I keep losing the papers."

After a moment, Karp asked as gently as he could, "Connie, do you actually know anything about the circumstances under which your husband shot Mr. Lomax?"

"You mean specifically that? No. I don't know anything about my husband's life on the job. That was part of the problem." She flapped her hands helplessly. "I don't know where to begin."

"Begin with the Cooleys," Guma suggested.

"Oh, right, the Cooleys! I could talk about the Cooleys all day, maybe not as much as they could, but pretty good. You have to learn if you want to be in that family. Not that I ever could really be in that family because my dad works for Con Ed, not on the job, so I couldn't really ever understand. According to Rose. That's my mother-in-law." Connie shook her head like a dog shaking off a flea. "No. I'm starting wrong. I don't want this to be just complaining, like on a TV show. Okay, first of all, when I met Brendan, he wasn't like he is now. We dated in high school. We were high school sweethearts. I never thought he'd join the cops. Brian was in the cops, and Brendan figured that was enough Cooleys. He got a job at Newark, with Continental, he thought he might go into flying, that or air traffic control. Anyway, not the cops. And they let him, I mean Ray did, but I could tell Ray was disappointed Brendan was outside the club. I mean all their friends, everyone they know is in the job. We'd get together at their house, when Brian was alive, and I could see how they closed Brendan out. Nothing obvious, but I could see it, and it hurt him. He loves his family. He loved his brother, worshiped him practically. Not that they ever talked about that. The Cooleys don't talk, not like me. So I guess this was building up under the surface, for years, Brendan thinking that his family thought he was, I don't know, a wimp for not being a cop. Anyway, we lived with it, we even joked about it sometimes, about the job, cop jokes. We were happy, I thought. Brendan passed the air traffic controller's test, he was going to start training. He was all pumped about it, and then Brian got himself killed."

She sighed and pulled a wad of tissues out of her tracksuit pocket and blew her nose, then let out a harsh, forced laugh. "God, look at me! I feel like one of those jerks on Sally Jessy Raphael."

"You're doing great, Con," said Guma. The two men waited, hardly moving. They both had heard a lot of confessions.

She sniffed, dabbed, resumed. "Okay, Brian got killed, shot in the street. Do you know this story?"

Karp said, "He was killed protecting one of his informants."

"Yeah, he gave his life for a junkie snitch. That's what he was like, Brian. A hero. The funeral was huge, delegations from all over, the widow and the three kids, the flag-folding thing. And all the time I kept thinking, I couldn't help it, even though I was ashamed, you know? I'm so glad it's not Brendan. And I thought he should've been thinking about his family, Brian. I mean it's one thing to go through a door or chase a guy down an alley, up fire escapes. That's part of the job, but not take a bullet to protect a… a skell. You think I'm awful to think that, right?"

"No," said Karp, "it's natural to think things like that."

She gave him a long look to check him out, and she saw that he was sincere, that he'd been there, too.

"And after that, it's hard to explain, it sounds stupid, but Brendan wasn't there anymore. It was like someone else was living in his body. He quit his job and got into the cops. No problems there. Graduated top of his class in the Academy. No more jokes about the job. Practically no jokes about anything. And he was always angry. The Cooleys have all got this Irish temper, especially if they think someone is trying to shaft them, and he started to blow up all the time, at me, at the kids… and when we got together at parties, now I was the one who was left out. He was in there with the cops, and I was in the kitchen with the cops' wives. And I thought it was my fault. I couldn't stand thinking of him out there on the streets. He'd work a graveyard shift. I couldn't sleep, waiting for him to come home. He started taking risks, too. About six months after he joined up, he tackled an armed robber by himself. He would've been killed except the guy's gun jammed. So they made him a detective, and then he did that thing with the hostages, going in there without his vest, unarmed. You heard about that?"

Both Karp and Guma nodded.

"Well, after that I told him I couldn't take it. It would've been one thing if he really loved it, if it was his life, I would've been prepared for it, like the other girls, like Rose was. But he didn't love it, it wasn't his life. It was someone else's life. We started fighting all the time. I was awful, I admit it. I threw stuff, I scared the kids. I wanted to shake him back to being Brendan, really Brendan. This doesn't make any sense, I know…"

"No," said Karp, "it makes perfect sense. That's why you split up?"

"Yeah, he beat me up one night. My fault, again. I hit him with a candlestick, and he punched me a couple of times and packed a bag and left. And later he said he was afraid he might hurt me if we lived together. I mean he never touched me before that. He's not that kind of man. He said we could talk about our problems later, after this Firmo thing was over. But it was never over." She threw up her hands. "And here I am. A PD widow and I don't even have a folded flag."

"The Firmo thing," said Karp carefully. "What was that about?"

"Oh, that was the only thing he'd talk about, I mean from the job. A big criminal, a Mob guy, some kind of thief or fence. Ray was always talking about Firmo, too. The One That Got Away. It was like a family joke. Like when are you going to take the trash out? Just wait, I gotta get Firmo first. Ray tried to catch him for years and couldn't, and now Brendan was going to. He was going to show his dad that he was as good as Brian… better, in fact. Better than Ray was himself."

"What, he said this?" Karp asked.

"Oh, no. Are you kidding? A Cooley thinking about why they're doing something, ruining their life, getting killed? That's not the Cooley way." She hung her head, picked at her fingernails. Karp noticed they were bitten like a child's. "We went for marriage counseling. Our priest set it up, a nice Catholic social worker. Brendan went one time. I went to her some more, by myself, because I wanted to understand: How could this happen? I wanted to know. We're good people. We both love our kids. How could this happen to us?"