Lisa Unger - Die For You

I didn’t talk to my sister for almost two weeks-which felt more like two years. Eventually, she called to borrow a pair of shoes and things went back to normal-no apologies, no discussion, no resolution, just water under the bridge. Marcus and I were married six months later in a small church up in Riverdale near my mother and stepfather’s home. An intimate gathering of my family and friends followed. Marcus didn’t have anyone to invite. At the time, it didn’t really seem strange or sad. I don’t recall thinking about it. We were happy; that was the only important thing.

Detective Grady Crowe stepped out onto Seventh Avenue, leaving St. Vincent’s Hospital. He pulled his leather coat together and brought the zipper up beneath his chin, took the black knit cap from his pocket and slid it over his close-cropped hair.

It was rush hour. The streets were packed even downtown with people hustling back and forth, huddled against the frigid air. It was a Village crowd, hipper, more casual than what he’d see if he’d found himself in Midtown at this hour. Messenger bags slung across chests instead of briefcases gripped in tight fists, leather instead of cashmere, denim instead of gabardine.

He’d always liked the lower part of Manhattan best. He considered it more the real New York than Midtown, but less the real city than, say, Brooklyn. Shop windows glittered with Christmas decoration, horns sang in the bumper-to-bumper river of traffic on the avenue. In the air he could smell the wood of someone’s fireplace burning. He always liked that smell, especially in the city. It made the streets seem less hard, less impersonal when you could imagine someone cozy at the hearth, maybe drinking a cup of tea.

He weaved his way across Twelfth Street through the stopped traffic toward the waiting unmarked Caprice. Exhaust billowed from behind, glowing red in the parking lights. His partner sat talking on her cell phone, her Bluetooth actually-a little device clipped to her ear which also had a microphone. From a distance, it made her look like nothing so much as a schizophrenic having a passionate conversation with herself. He’d told her this. She’d called him a Luddite. He kept meaning to look it up.

Inside the car, the heat was kicking. His partner, Jez, kept it at nearly eighty degrees in the winter. She was small, couldn’t stand the cold. He didn’t complain. He’d been raised to give women what they wanted. You can fight , his father told him. You can bitch. If you’re a real prick, you can overpower. But the pain over the long haul? Just not worth it, son. Surrender young and happily with fewer scars . The old man was right about that. And with three sisters, Grady had occasion to learn early. But it was his wife who drove the lesson home-then drove off in his new Acura. Turns out lip service isn’t enough; you have to live the surrender.

“So… what happened?”

Crowe pulled out into traffic, cutting off a cabdriver who leaned on his horn.

“Crowe?”

“You talking to me? I thought you were still on your communicator . You know-beam me up, Scotty” He tried to add some electronic sounds to the joke but it came off lame. Jez gave him a smile, anyway. She was cool like that.

“Very funny. Yeah, I’m talking to you. What’d you get?”

In the movies, female cops were always hot. But on the real job, to Grady’s eyes, they were generally pretty butch-dirty mouths, pumped biceps, chopped hair. Jesamyn Breslow was the exception, though he wouldn’t say she was hot exactly. She was cute. Definitely on the femme side comparatively speaking. But in spite of that button nose and blond bob, she was tough in a very real way, minus the self-conscious bravado of most cops, male or female. She knew kung fu. Really.

He relayed the story the victim had told him about her husband not coming home, about the phone call, and the people posing as FBI agents. It gelled with what they’d found, the vests discarded at the scene with the white letters stenciled on. It was a rush job. Someone who hadn’t already been distraught and overwhelmed might have noticed right away that the letters were sloppy, unprofessional.

“She thinks she’d be able to identify some of the people if she saw them again, but beyond that she doesn’t know anything about what happened, or why,” he said, reaching for the coffee in the cup holder. It was as bitter and stone cold as his ex-wife. He drank it, anyway.

“You sure? You know you’re a sucker for a pretty face.” They’d seen her picture on Marcus Raine’s desk. Jez had recognized her, was actually carrying a paperback of one of her novels in her bag. Isabel Connelly, her maiden name, on the jacket. Not Isabel Raine, her legal, married name.

“I’m sure,” he said. “She was a mess.”

Isabel Raine looked like a doll someone had dropped by the side of the road-bashed up, broken, and abandoned. He’d had the urge to dust her off, tuck her into a little bed somewhere.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“She gave us permission to look around her apartment. Said she’d call the doorman to let us in.”

“No lawyer?”

“Not yet. She’s focused on finding her husband. She thinks that’s the major problem, that he’s missing and something’s happened to him.”

“Maybe she really doesn’t know anything.”

He gave her a quick glance, raised his eyebrows at her. “I’ve still got my wits about me. Not all your partners fall in love with the victim and go off the deep end.” He was referring to Mateo Stenopolis, her partner when she was with Missing Persons. Stenopolis had fallen in love with a missing girl and pretty much laid waste to his life and his career trying to find her-nearly getting himself and Breslow killed in the process.

“No,” she said with a laugh. “You’re no romantic, Crowe.”

“Just ask my ex-wife.”

He listened as Breslow called her mother, told her she’d be late picking up her son, Benjamin. He found himself thinking that it was the one small mercy in his failed marriage-no kids. He saw how Breslow struggled with her on-again, off-again husband and the child they shared. You’re bound forever by that life you created. As it was, there was nothing to bind him to his ex, nothing at all. They split what little money there was and that was that. He’d wanted kids, a lot of them. But she hadn’t-maybe one, eventually. She was concerned about her career, didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom like her mother, not on a cop’s salary. His mom had raised four on far less than he made, had never even had a job. She’d gone straight from her parents’ home to her husband’s. Bringing this up didn’t make things better.

“Those were different times, Grady” she’d countered. “Besides, you think your mother’s happy? I’ve never heard your parents exchange one kind word-hell, I’ve never even seen them kiss each other.”

She was always talking about “happy” like it was a lottery she was waiting to win. As far as Grady was concerned, happiness was just where you decided to lay your eyes. You see three people dead in a downtown office, their faces contorted in such a way that you understand they died in agony, you feel bad. You go home and find the woman you love and your kids waiting for you, you feel happy. That simple.

“Obsessing about your ex again?” asked his partner, examining her cuticles.

“How could you tell?”

“You make this kind of tiny chewing motion with your jaw, like you’re biting on your tongue a little. You do that whenever you’re working some kind of problem in your head.”

“You don’t know everything,” he said.

“No. I don’t. But a year sitting here and I’m getting to know you . My advice: If you can’t let it go, get help. It’s turning you into a sour pain in the ass. You talk about it constantly and you think about it more. Move on, Crowe.”