"Your parents?"
"General hysteria. Which died down eventually, but my father never got past his anger over my decision. I no longer had the right image for the family. I wasn't someone he could parade around and talk about how successful I was."
"Families are complicated."
"Yeah. Well, there were other complications, too. I got married when I was a senior at Princeton. Her name was Alicia. And…um… she liked the idea of being married to a Harvard doctor too. It took a lot of adjustment to go from that to being the wife of a Providence cop."
"She left you?"
"No, no. God, no. We were incredibly in love and that was what counted. At least that's what we thought."
He fell silent, stared away from Deena, off to the side, into the darkness of the motel room.
"What happened after that, Jay?"
"Alicia and I had a kid, that's what happened. And I turned out to be a hell of a cop. I liked being a tough guy. Took the meanest calls, got a reputation on the streets. It took me three years to work my way up to Homicide. I got there because I solved a murder no one else could figure out. An academic, guy in his mid-fifties, history professor at Brown, disappeared. His wife reported him missing, said he just didn't show up one night. Everyone thought she did it; I didn't think she was the type. I spent some time with her. She was his second wife, she told me; they'd only been married a few years. Her husband had a son from his first marriage; she said he was a nice boy but had problems. She didn't tell me what the problems were. The kid was in his twenties now; he was staying with her to help her out during this difficult period. I talked to him, something didn't seem right. So I did some checking. There was no first wife. There was no son. The kid was a street kid, an orphan. This very respectable professor, he'd been molesting the boy since the kid was ten, twelve years old. The boy lived with the professor, didn't know anything else, so he let our guy support him as an adult, too. He had an apartment that the professor paid for. They were lovers right up until the night the kid killed him."
"Oh my God. Why did the guy get married if he was-"
"I don't know. It wasn't my job to psychoanalyze him. People are sick. They hurt in all sorts of ways. People do things that, until you actually see them firsthand, you think are inconceivable. I used to tell Alicia about some of it, but she didn't want to know. She didn't like that I knew it either. Didn't like that I saw the things I saw. I didn't blame her. She thought she was marrying a doctor and that she'd spend her nights going to charity dinners and dances at the country club. She didn't want to know about men fucking little boys and people getting chopped up and the garbage that I had decided to cover our lives with." He was trembling again and he knew it was time to finish the story. "So, anyway, I became a hotshot. The star of the force, if you will. And when I wasn't being a cop I was a dad. We had a little girl. Lili, we called her. That was Alicia's favorite movie, the one with that French actress and all those puppets. She was a great kid. A lot like Kendall. Smart and funny-and sweet. God, so sweet. Even my dad, who's not the warmest guy in the world, couldn't resist her. Spoiled her like crazy. He loved her so much he could almost forget what a disappointment I was. Then, right before Lili's eighth birthday, I made a big arrest. Providence has a decent-size organized-crime population. There was a guy there, been there for years, basically the number-two guy in the New England Mafia. Involved in a lot of union stuff and local politics. Louie Denbo was his name. He was a bad guy but everybody pretty much left him alone. Cops, politicians, no one wanted to deal with it and it was just about money-there wasn't much killing-so no one really cared. It's a separate world, the Mafia up there. He was a character, he talked funny, and he was quoted a lot in the papers, so people thought he was-I don't know-a cute Mafia guy or something. But then he crossed the line. He hit a banker, someone my dad knew pretty well. There was a financial scandal going on and the guy owed a lot of money and some of it he owed to Louie. So Louie took him out. Only he overdid it. He had his guys do the hit in a restaurant and they took out three others, innocent bystanders. Well, I got him. It was three months of serious police work-Louie was incredibly well protected-but I got him. And he knew I had him.
"The day before the trial started, I was home with Alicia and Lili. It was after dinner. I didn't hear anything-I don't know how, but I didn't. In my dream, I do. I hear them every single time. It's like a premonition. But that night I didn't hear a thing. I was watching TV and I looked up and there were three guys in my house. They worked for Louie Denbo. I knew them, and as soon as I saw them I knew why they were there. But the crazy thing is, what they wanted to do, it didn't matter. I mean, I was going to testify against Louie, but the prosecution didn't need me. I was the icing on the cake. So they couldn't even help him. It was just spite. I'd taken Louie down, so he was going to take me down. I was sitting in a lounge chair, with my feet up. Lili was helping Alicia do the dishes. They were going over the multiplication tables while they were cleaning up. One of the guys-his name was Jerry-he pointed the gun at Lili and he pulled the trigger and he killed her. He didn't even say anything. He just shot her. She was standing next to Alicia and-" Justin closed his eyes now, he could see it all, picture it perfectly with his eyes closed-"and my daughter's brains splattered all over my wife's pants and shirt. I tried to get out of the chair, but they shot me. Once above the knee, once in the chest, once in the back. I went down. Stayed on the floor. They thought I was dead."
"Oh my God, Jay… they killed Alicia?"
"They were going to, but they decided to rape her first. Jerry, he was such a sick son of a bitch, he told her they wanted her to see my face while they were raping her. They wanted her to see who'd really done this to her. So he walked over to me and kicked me, to turn me over on my back. He didn't know I had my gun with me. I'd gotten home late and hadn't put it away. I mean, I always put it away-I never wanted Lili to even touch it. But that night-I don't know why-I just didn't. I'd fallen on it when I went down on the floor. And I managed to put it in my hand while I was there. So when he kicked me I turned over and I shot him. In the chin, while he was staring down at me. He died instantly. One of the other bastards shot me again, but I kept firing, and I killed them, too. Then I passed out. When I came to, a couple of days later, my little girl was dead and Alicia… Alicia, she…"