Unknown - The Genius

He came into the room silently. That’s his way. My father is tall, like me; like his own father, he has a very slight stoop. He was at the time over fifty, but his hair was still dark and thick, like his mother’s. That morning he wore a black suit, white shirt, and gray tie; what I saw first, however, were the caps of his shoes. I was lying on the ground, refusing to get up, and these two shiny torpedo heads were coming toward me.

I rolled over and buried my face in the carpet. There was a long silence. For a moment I thought he had left. Then I opened my eyes and saw that he was right there, still looking down at me, although now he was holding the pre-knotted tie, as though it were a leash and I a stubborn puppy.

“If you don’t get dressed,” he said, “then you’ll go exactly as you are.”

“Fine,” I said.

The next thing I knew I was being dragged, kicking and screaming, down the hall to the elevator. The nanny had me by one arm, a maid by the other; my father was two steps ahead, never looking back as I howled. You can imagine that the house was especially quiet that morning, so this tantrum sounded even more horrific and piercing than my usual ones. As the four of us stepped into the elevator I saw my father wince. This only encouraged me. Maybe if I shouted loud enough they would let me go. We glided down to the first floor, where the doors parted on a scene that startled me into silence: twenty-some-odd faces—women tearstained, men flushed and grimacing—all staring at me as I thrashed against my captors. The entire house staff had gathered in mourning to see my father and me off.

At that moment I realized what I was doing—what was happening— how I looked—what humiliation I stood to suffer if I didn’t get properly dressed. I began to beg my father to allow me to go back upstairs. He said nothing, just stepped out of the elevator and walked stiffly through the parted ranks of the grieving, again two steps ahead of me and the nanny and the maid, who obeyed my father’s orders by carrying me, half-naked, through that gauntlet of horrified stares and down the front steps to the idling limousine. Tony had my pants waiting in the car.

THE PROBLEM WITH COLD CASES, McGrath explained, was that they didn’t kill anybody. They didn’t crash planes into buildings. They didn’t release toxic gas on the A train, or detonate themselves in the middle of Central Park, or spray bullets into a crowded open-air market. National and local priorities being what they were, it had gotten harder and harder for cold-case detectives to find the time, money, and departmental approval they needed.

McGrath had worked the squad for the last eight years of his career and kept in touch. “Solid bunch, tip to tail,” he said. “They’re dedicated guys, and they don’t like to give up. But it’s not up to them. The world’s a different place.”

Different meant that old murders got in line and waited. It meant that even as the line grew, the number of detectives working the cases shrank, as the sharpest minds got bounced to counterterrorism or got fed up and left. It meant that literally thousands of boxes of evidence—boxes much like the one McGrath had in his dining room, the box we would spend the next several weeks poring over—had gone unexamined for decades, even though the intervening years had turned the DNA inside to gold.

“Right before I left,” he said, “we got a Justice Department grant. Five hundred grand to use for pulling old DNA. You know what, I still don’t think they’ve used all that money. Crap just sits there, waiting for someone to pick it up. They don’t have the manpower. Every time you want something, you have to schlep down to storage, send it to the lab, fill out the paperwork—how the hell are twelve guys supposed to do all that for every unsolved crime in New York? And then we got people breathing down our necks, the Feds whining about port security, the press making noise about stuff that happened last week. You try being the one who gets to approach his commander, ‘Hey, you know what, I have something thirty years old that I think I might maybe be able to put a name on. Sure the perp is probably dead, but wouldn’t you like to ease the family’s minds?’ Never gonna happen.”

Since retiring, he had kept himself amused by paging through old cases that continued to bother him. His former colleagues were all too happy to have an experienced thinker shouldering a small portion of their burden. Most of the time, he said, what solved a cold case was the passage of time, as witnesses who had been afraid to talk now came forward. That had its own set of drawbacks: namely, that people forgot what they’d seen or died before bothering to tell. With the Queens murders, though, there hadn’t been anyone, willing or unwilling, to talk to. No rumors, no drunken bragging in a bar. It seemed hopeless. But McGrath had long ago promised himself to go down swinging.

“What else am I gonna do?” he asked me. “Watch Dr. Phil?”

HAVING GOTTEN USED TO running the gallery while I was working with the drawings, Nat was all too pleased to take the reins back, and so for a few weeks my life went like this: a car would come for me around three o’clock; I would get in and endure the fight to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel; through the rear window I would watch the Manhattan skyline turn to backdrop, watch the gray highway, listen for gulls circling above Riis Park. We would pull up outside the entrance to Breezy Point just as the bar was setting out the marker board with the evening’s drink specials. By four thirty I would be sitting at McGrath’s dining-room table, talking about the case. A good portion of that time was spent waiting for him to go to the bathroom.

Most nights I stayed until Samantha showed up. Actually, my cue to leave was the sound of her coming up the front steps. There was always a moment when she had to put down the bags of food and her work stuff and look for her keys, which apparently were never where she had last put them. By the time she succeeded in finding them I had opened the front door for her, and while she gathered her bags back up we would have a short and invariably banal conversation. She seemed both puzzled by and grateful for my presence, asking in a detached way if we’d turned anything up. No, I would tell her. She would shrug and tell me not to give up. Really what she meant was: don’t leave him alone. If I tried to help her with the bags she waved me away, straggling into the darkened house as McGrath called out to me, “Same time Wednesday!”

I justified taking off from work by telling myself that I had to protect my artist. I wanted to keep McGrath on a short tether, so that if he turned up anything on Victor Cracke, I’d be the first to know, and could apply the correct spin. As for McGrath, I assumed that his motivations were similar. By making me a party to the investigation, he could prevent me from interfering, or at least be better positioned if I had done so. Not to mention that—incapacitated, virtually alone—he needed a pair of legs, and I had been the first person to come along.

I had another motive, though, in going to Breezy Point. Being there gave me those few moments with his daughter.

Now that’s a detective-novel trope for you: instantaneous romance. But this one requires a little explanation, as I am not generally subject to infatuations. Besides, I had Marilyn. As I mentioned before, she and I expected of each other a certain amount of extracurricular activity. Or at least I did: the size of her sexual appetite put most men’s to shame, and we spent too many nights in our own apartments for me to believe that she had never taken home one of the opening-night waitstaff. As for me, I didn’t fool around too much. Having gotten a lot out of my system between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, by the time I hit thirty I realized how lucky I’d been never to catch anything more virulent than a few choice words and a faceful of undergraduate-caliber champagne. There had been only two or three other women in the last five years. You could blame my age, but the fact remained that I still had a full head of hair, I still fit into the same size pants, I still ran four times a week. I hadn’t lost my edge; I’d merely learned that the old saw about quantity and quality applied even to sex. Sex without any sort of challenge bored me. To a large extent that explained why I stuck with Marilyn as long as I did: she never failed to keep me on my toes, and she could be ten women in a given day.