Godchild Read online

  The low midday clouds showered the sloping landscape in wet snow. The white stuff came down fast and furious as it fell against the crooked, leafless branches of the trees, against the bleached marble headstones and miniature churchlike mausoleums.

  I stood over the five-by-ten plot with the granite marker at its head inscribed with Fran’s birth and death dates.

  Setting the bundle of wildflowers onto the plot, I watched the petals begin to disappear in the falling snow. But what I saw was a battered black, four-door Buick sedan with tinted windows slamming directly into the passenger side of my Ford Bronco at fifty miles per hour, Fran’s head and shoulders going through the windshield, the jagged edge of the glass taking her head clean off like a razor blade, her body slumping back into the seat as though nothing at all has happened. Like her life hasn’t slipped away in the split second of time it takes for that windshield to shatter. Then the screaming of the witnesses and the spattered blood and the sight of that black Buick tearing away. But not before the driver rolls down his window, just enough for me to get a good look at his bald head, hoop earring, and a thin mustache that covers only half of his upper lip.

  The Bald Man.. .

  I stood in the falling snow and I recalled the two full years I’d spent in search of the Bald Man, only to have come up empty. There were the endless hours spent sifting through mug shots, photographic kits, evidence folders, and case files. There were the posters printed with the Bald Man’s likeness—the likeness I viewed for only a split second but committed to memory—that I stapled to telephone poles all across the state. There was the ten-thousand-dollar reward offered for any “verifiable information” leading to his whereabouts.

  The entire two-year effort now resided in my brain, neatly categorized under FAILURE with a capital F. I knew that with my marriage to Val only a few minutes away, I had no choice but to once and for all give up the search for good, call it another unsolved mystery, just like the Albany cops did less than a year ago. All that was left was to move on with my life, remember Fran the way she had lived.

  I stepped away from the plot.

  The wildflowers were gone now. Completely covered over. I had barely ten minutes left to make it—you guessed it—to the church on time. Ten minutes to put the past behind me for good.

  I might have made it too.

  If it hadn’t been for the battered black Buick sedan that drove in through the cemetery gates.

  It was the car I remembered. The car that rammed into my Ford Bronco, sending Fran to her death.

  The Buick.

  My black Buick with the tinted windows, just sitting there idle, the engine running, exhaust smoking out the rusted tailpipe, rising up gray-black in the falling white snow.

  Here’s what I should have done: pulled out my .45, blasted a couple of rounds over the roof of the car. Or maybe blown out a rear tire.

  But here’s what I did instead: not a goddamned thing.

  I just stood there, as stuck to the ground as Fran’s marker, while the driver of the Buick backed up, spun the front end around, and drove back out the same way he’d come in.

  Some time went by before I was able to move.

  I wasn’t sure how much time.

  Seconds maybe. Or minutes.

  Time was relative. It was hard to read.

  But at some point I forced myself up off my knees, made my way back to my 4-Runner through the snow and ice to place a call to the APD, South Pearl Street Division, the precinct that had originally spearheaded Fran’s hit-and-run. I sat inside the SUV, drinking sweet whiskey from the emergency fifth I kept in the glove box, fighting off the tremors, waiting for the cops to arrive, knowing I should have been calling Saint Mary’s rectory to explain what had happened. Explain why I hadn’t shown up yet for my own wedding.

  But there was no explaining anything.

  I just sat there, watching the snow fall, drinking from the bottle, feeling my body shake and my brain buzz. It was all I could do to swallow the whiskey without bringing it back up. And that was that.

  By the time the cops pulled up, I was already ten minutes late for the ceremony. The two black-and-whites that parked outside the cemetery gates made me think of the black-and-white taffeta gowns Val had chosen for her bridesmaids to wear. I pictured the dark blazers and white button-downs my best man and ushers were wearing at that very moment. I imagined their blank expressions and their wide eyes staring into watch faces that didn’t lie. From where I sat shivering inside the 4-Runner with the heat blasting against my wet shirt, I saw the small beads of sweat that had begun to form on their foreheads when the guests who had filled the church pews started whispering to one another, “I’ll be damned, Keeper’s not coming.”

  It was the tinny drone of a cop radio that broke the spell as a tall, black-haired detective by the name of Ryan tapped on my windshield. Ryan claimed he was a new guy, having just been transferred from the New York State Office of General Services to South Pearl Street’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. Together we walked side by side while I led him to the spot where I first saw the black Buick. Wearing a leather car jacket with wide epaulets and buttons, this thirty-something Detective Ryan checked my PI license along with my laminated permit for carrying a concealed weapon. He then questioned me calmly and methodically while we walked, sometimes asking and re-asking the same question two and three times to check for “accuracy and consistency of testimony.” But then, sometimes cops forget that former wardens know as much about due process as they do.

  It all went as smoothly as something like that can on a snowy day in March. That is, until we came to the spot near Fran’s grave where I’d first seen the Buick. The problem, if you want to call it that, was that no sign of the Buick remained. The ruts the tires had made when it peeled out were gone, wiped smooth by the still-falling snow. Or, in the words of Detective Ryan, “Just maybe, Mr. Marconi, the tire tracks, along with the Buick, were never there to begin with.”

  “The snow,” I insisted. “It must have covered the tracks.”

  I slipped and skidded my way to Fran’s plot. I dug my hand through the snow. I pulled up the bouquet of wild-flowers, shook them off.

  “I’m not imagining these,” I said.

  Ryan stood there, studying the white flakes collecting on the tops of his black lace-up shoes.

  He let out a resigned breath. “You’re that ex-warden,” he said. “You lost your wife some years back. I’ve been over the file at Division.”

  “Hit and run,” I said.

  “And you’re getting married again, is that it?”

  I was missing the wedding as he spoke.

  “You came back here out of guilt.”

  “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “Maybe you imagined the Buick.”

  I dropped the flowers, struggled back to my feet.

  “All I’m saying,” he went on, “is that in times of emotional stress and turmoil, it’s only natural to imagine things. Especially in a spooky place like this.” He pinched closed his leather collar, cocked his head in the direction of the gates.

  I took a couple of steps toward him. “Is this what a Behavioral Science cop is supposed to do?” I asked. “Convince me of what I didn’t see?”

  He walked up to me, brought his face to within inches of my own, sniffed me up and down with his nose. Like a police dog.

  I knew he could smell the whiskey on my breath.

  Because he could smell the whiskey on my breath, I knew exactly what he was thinking, although neither one of us said anything about it. In fact, the D word never came up. Not even in passing.

  I cleared my throat. “I took a couple of shots.” I said. “You know, to ease the jitters. After I saw the Buick.” But I could tell by the furrows in his brow that he didn’t believe me.

  “Tell you what,” he said finally, his gray breath mixing with the snow. “I’ll have an officer take down your testimony. And if we see a black Buick matching the description, we’ll pull it over
, question the driver. How’s that sound?”

  “Don’t go out of your way,” I said.

  “Call it a courtesy, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “One lawman to another.”

  Back at the south-side gates, he called over another plain-clothes cop to take my statement.

  As promised. One lawman to another.

  The beefy cop dressed in uniform blacks asked if I got “A good look at the supposed black Buick in question…enough to create a composite image, that is.”

  He was trying so hard to hold back the laughs, he was making little raspberry noises through clenched lips.

  When I finished with my description of the Buick, I made my way back to Ryan.

  “Sorry I wasted your time,” I said as he was about to get back inside the cruiser.

  I was standing right beside him, the passenger-side door to the cruiser wide open, his left foot already inside, a wave of hot air blowing out the dashboard heater onto my legs.

  “You did the right thing,” he said, taking hold of my forearm, giving it a sympathetic squeeze, as though the cops were still my fraternal cousins-in-arms. “Go get married,” he said with a grin. He got in and closed the car door, smiling at me through the lightly fogged glass.

  But it was way too late to get married. In more ways than one.

  As I walked slowly back to my 4-Runner, I couldn’t help but look into each of the cop’s faces as I passed them, one by stinking one. I couldn’t help but pick up on the way they whispered into one another’s ears, thinking I had to be out of earshot when they referred to me as “One paranoid bastard.”

  That’s what I remembered.

  The rest was either repressed or just a dream, or both.

  I wasn’t sure how long he’d been staring at me. Christ, I wasn’t sure how long the entire crowd had been staring at me. But when I came out of my trance, Bill was standing across from me, his chubby face somehow tight, his receding hair slicked back, his customary white bar rag slung over his right shoulder.

  “You okay?” he asked me.

  My hands were wrapped tight around the empty beer bottle to keep them from shaking. The bottom of the caramel-colored bottle made a clickety-clack sound against the solid wood bar.

  “Maybe it’s time to go home, Mr. Marconi,” Bill said.

  There, I thought. He said it. My name: Jack Harrison “Keeper” Marconi. He knew who I was. Just like everyone else probably knew who 1 was —Keeper Marconi, former maximum-security-prison warden turned unemployed private investigator.

  “Tell you what,” Bill went on. “I’ll call you a cab.”

  I’m pretty sure it was then, when Bill went for the phone, that I pulled out my Colt. Come to think of it, that’s exactly when I got a good look at my sad face in the mirror behind the bar, pulled the piece out, and emptied the entire eight-round clip, blowing away Jim Beam and Jack Daniels and even managing to nail some Wild Turkey in the process. It was a damned shame too, having to waste good booze like that. But I suppose, in the end, it would have been a worse shame to have wasted me.

  Chapter 2

  The cops had to be on their way before I decided to blow away my reflection in the mirror. Not those off-duty cops scamming free beer. But on-the-job cops in black uniforms who stood out in the white light of the aluminum-and-glass entryway, black .9-millimeter automatics drawn and poised—combat position.

  But then, the cops came as no surprise.

  It was the sudden appearance of Tony Angelino that came as the real shocker. He stood square at the head of the pack, dressed in a camel-hair overcoat and a blue blazer, just like mine. His dark gray slacks had been cut and tailored for his medium but stocky build. His white wedding carnation was still pinned to his lapel, and the wide-brimmed fedora on his head matched his threads.

  To a T.

  He wasn’t smiling.

  Neither was I.

  “How about a drink,” I said.

  He just stood there, staring at me with those deep-set brown eyes of his, the rhythmic flash of red, blue, and white cruiser lights streaking across the wall.

  I stood up then, on the rungs of my stool, towered over the entire bar, the faces of all those regulars looking up at me, their hands gripped around their drinks even now.

  “Bill!” I shouted. “Whiskey!”

  But Bill never moved a muscle. He was still on the floor, covered in spilled booze and shards of glass.

  Tony came closer. Slowly.

  He raised his fists to chest height. The fists were covered in brown leather driving gloves. He rubbed them together, like a boxer waiting for the bell to sound.

  “No drink for me,” he said, eyes on me, going through me.

  I sat back down on the stool. “Was it something I said?”

  But I guess Tony didn’t have the time for stupid questions. He simply raised his right fist high and knocked me cold.

  Chapter 3

  I fully expected to wake up inside the county lockup. But when I opened my eyes there was no concrete plank ceiling to close me in, no bright overhead lamps to sting my retinas. There was no concrete floor, no iron bars, no Plexiglas shield. Instead, I saw a white vaulted ceiling and a long wall of glossy black bookshelves filled with colorful volumes.

  Without having to look too much further I knew I’d come to on the leather couch inside the living room of Tony’s downtown condo.

  Facing me directly: a long, winding staircase that accessed the second and third floors. Embedded in the bottom of the stairwell: a two-way fireplace. I didn’t have to turn over to know that behind me, a wall of windows looked out over Eagle Street and the governor’s mansion, which almost never housed the governor and his family (they preferring to reside “where the action is,” in Manhattan). After all, I’d been inside this room a hundred times over the years. Maybe a thousand.

  For now the windows were covered in dark, floor-to-ceiling drapes. And had I not closed my eyes again, I might have screamed out in pain from the splitting hangover. But I suppose there’s something to be said for self-control. Because when I opened my eyes once more, a very stiff-looking Tony was standing in the center of the white-and-black-checkered marble floor.

  I knew without asking that he had been responsible for keeping the heat off, keeping me out of lockup. Now he stood there with arms crossed at his chest, staring at me with distant, glassy eyes, as though I’d never woken up on the couch at all but had died in my sleep.

  “Morning,” I groaned, the back of my throat feeling like it had been scraped with a razor.

  “Exactly,” Tony said.

  He had dressed down since the night before, when he’d knocked me cold. Now he wore only the dark gray slacks, along with the white oxford, sleeves rolled up neatly, all the way to the elbows.

  Without another word he turned and stepped into the kitchen.

  I forced myself up and lit a smoke.

  When Tony returned, he was carrying his leather briefcase. He laid the case flat on the lid of the grand piano, thumbed back the spring-released latches, pushed open the lid. He pulled out a number-ten envelope, tossed it onto my lap. When I looked down, I could see that my name had been written on it in Tony’s unmistakable loopy handwriting.

  “Don’t open that yet,” he said, while stepping behind the couch, pulling hard on the drawstring that opened the drapes and let the blinding sun shine in.

  I knew the envelope must have had something to do with the wedding.

  Maybe that’s why the panic alarm sounded, the little voice inside my brain that told me to get up and head straight for the door. No bothering with goodbyes or It’s been swell, Tone. Just get up and get the hell out.

  But when I stood up I felt a hand grab at my collar. The hand yanked me back down onto the couch. That’s when Tony made a beeline for his briefcase. He reached inside, pulled out a Colt .45.

  I patted the space under my left arm where my own Colt should have been.

  The holster was empty.

  “That’s my piece,�
� I said.

  “You can have it back,” he said, “after you listen to what I have to say.”

  “You’re supposed to be my best friend,” I said. “Or did you forget?”

  “Who are you to talk about friends,” Tony said, “when you don’t give a rat’s ass about standing them up?”

  Tony set my gun down inside his briefcase.

  He stood straight and stiff, right foot planted on a square of black tile, left foot on a square of white. His heavy forearms were crossed at his chest. He couldn’t have been more than five-foot-eight, but from where I was sitting he looked big and powerful.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” he said.

  “I’m not working right now,” I said.

  “You can’t afford not to.”

  “Who says?”

  “Your bank account says.”

  He went back to his briefcase, pulled out an envelope with a Key Bank logo printed on it. The kind of envelope a bank statement usually comes in. My bank statement.

  “You’ve got a couple of C-notes to your name. That’s it. How the hell did you expect to pay for a wedding?”

  “Val was footing the bill,” I said.

  He laid the statement back inside the briefcase. “Val’s gone now.”

  That hard sinking feeling, in the pit of my stomach. “I already know that,” I said. “I should have known.”

  “One of my clients has an emergency,” Tony explained a minute later, after handing me a mug of coffee. “Man by the name of Richard Barnes.”

  I recognized the name, and said so to Tony. But that didn’t stop him from telling me a whole lot of what I already knew. Barnes was a rich guy, a producer who ran public-relations campaigns. Mostly for politicians, if I remembered correctly. And the only reason I remembered correctly is because I recalled how his Reel Productions worked on the governor’s campaign during the last election. During a time when any employee of New York State worries about job security. Or the lack of it. Which I used to do. Until I lost my job: suddenly, elections meant nothing to me.