“A good one. The best.”
And my father would ruffle my hair, the flip side of the light cuff he would dispense whenever I did something that displeased him. Never a slap, never a punch: it wply� punch: ias enough to cuff the back of my head with his hard, callused palm, a signal that a line had been over-stepped. Further punishments would sometimes follow: grounding, the withholding of my allowance for a week or two, but the cuff was the danger sign. It was the final warning, and it was the only kind of physical violence, however mild, that I associated with my father until the day the two teenagers died.
Some of my friends, tired of living in a town defined by cops, were wary of my father. Frankie Murrow, in particular, used to curl in upon himself like a startled snail whenever my father was around. Frankie’s father was a security guard at a mall, so maybe it was something about uniforms and the men who wore them. Frankie’s father was a jerk, and perhaps Frankie just assumed that other men who wore uniforms and protected things were likely to be jerks too. Frankie’s father had asked him if he was a fag when, at the age of seven, Frankie had gone to take his father’s hand as they prepared to cross the road. Mr. Murrow was a “royal sonofabitch,” as my father had once put it. Mr. Murrow hated blacks and Jews and Hispanics, and he had a string of derogatory terms on the tip of his tongue for every one of them. He hated most white people too, though, so it wasn’t as if he was a racist. He was just good at hating.
At the age of fourteen, Frankie Murrow was put in reform school for arson. He’d burned his own house down while his old man was at work. He’d timed it pretty well, so that Mr. Murrow was turning onto his street just as the fire engines were arriving behind him. Frankie was sitting on the wall of the house opposite, watching the flames rise and laughing and crying at the same time.
My father was not a heavy drinker. He didn’t need alcohol to help him relax. He was the calmest man I had ever known, which made the relationship between him and his partner, and closest friend, Jimmy Gallagher, so difficult for the boy to understand. Jimmy, who always walked near the head of the town’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, who bled Irish green and cop blue, was all smiles, and almost-playful punches. He was taller than my father by three or four inches, and broader too. If they stood side by side on those occasions when Jimmy came to the house, my father would look a little embarrassed, as though he felt himself to be somehow wanting when compared to his friend. Jimmy would kiss and hug my mother as soon as he arrived, the only man, apart from her husband, who was permitted such intimacies, and then he would turn to me.
“There he is,” he would say. “There’s the man.”
Jimmy wasn’t married. He said that he had never met the right woman, but he’d enjoyed meeting a lot of the wrong ones. It was an old joke, and he used it often, but my mother and father would always laugh, even though they knew it was a lie. Women didn’t interest Jimmy Gallagher, although it would be many years before I understood that. I often wondered how difficult it must have been for Jimmy, keeping up a front for all those years, flirting with women in order to fit in. Jimmy Gallagher, who could make the most incredible pizzas from scratch, who could cook a banquet to please a king (or so I had once heard my father tell my mother) but who, when he hosted a poker game at his house, or had his buddies around to watch a ball game (because Jimmy, being single, could always afford the best and most modern TVs), would feed them nachos and beer, potato chips and store-bought TV dinners or, if the weather was good, cook steaks and burgers on the barbecue. And I sensed, even then, that while my father might have spoken too d�ve spoken my mother of Jimmy’s secret culinary skills, he did not make such references carelessly among his brother cops.
Jimmy would take my hand and shake it just a little too hard, testing his strength. I had learned not to wince when this occurred, for then Jimmy would say, “Ah, he has a way to go yet,” and shake his head in mock disappointment. But if my face remained still, and I returned the grip as best I could, Jimmy would smile and slip me a dollar, with the admonition: “Don’t spend it all on booze, now.”
I didn’t spend it all on booze. In fact, until I turned fifteen, I didn’t spend any of it on booze. I spent it on candy and comic books, or saved it for our summer vacation in Maine, when we would stay with my grandfather in Scarborough and I would be taken to Old Orchard Beach and allowed to run riot on the rides. As I grew older, though, booze became a more attractive option. Carrie Gottlieb’s brother, Phil, who worked for the railroad and was believed to be of slightly subnormal intelligence, was known to be willing to buy beer for underage kids in return for one bottle out of every six. One evening, two of my friends and I pooled our cash for a couple of six-packs of PBR that Phil picked up for us, and we drank most of them in the woods one night. I had liked the taste less than the frisson of pleasure I experienced from breaking both the law and a rule of the house, for my father had made it clear to me that there was to be no drinking until he said it was okay. Like young men the world over, I took this and other rules to refer only to things about which my father knew, since, if he didn’t know about them, then they couldn’t possibly be of any consequence to him.
Unfortunately, I had brought home one of the bottles and stashed it in the back of my closet for future use, which was where it was found by my mother. I’d taken a cuff on the head for that, and was grounded, and required to take an involuntary vow of poverty for at least a month. That afternoon, which was a Sunday, Jimmy Gallagher had come by the house. It was Jimmy’s birthday, and he and my father were going to hit the town, as they always did when one of them celebrated another year of not being shot, stabbed, beaten to a pulp, or run over. He had smiled mockingly at me, a dollar bill held between the index and middle fingers of his right hand.
“All those years,” he said, “and you never listened.”
And I had answered sullenly: “I did listen. I didn’t spend it all on booze.”
Even my father had been forced to laugh.
But Jimmy still didn’t give me the dollar, and after that he never gave me money again. He never got the chance. Six months later, my father was dead, and Jimmy Gallagher stopped coming around with dollar bills in his hand.
They had questioned my father after the killing, for he admitted his involvement as soon as they confronted him. They treated him sympathetically, trying to understand what had taken place so that they could begin to limit the damage. He had ended up at the Orangetown PD, since the local cops were the primaries. IAD had been involved, as had an investigator from the Rockland County DA’s office, a retired NYPD cop himself who knew how these things were done, and who would smooth the feathers of the local boys prior to taking over the investigation.
My father had called my mother shortly after they came for him, ana m� for him,d told her of what he had done. Later, a courtesy call was paid to the house by a pair of local cops. One of them was Jimmy Gallagher’s nephew, who worked out of Orangetown. Earlier that evening, when he was not yet on duty, he had come to our house in his casual clothes and had sat in our kitchen. He had a gun on his belt. He and my mother had pretended that it was merely a casual visit, but he had stayed too long for that, and I had seen the tension on my mother’s face as she served him coffee and cake that he barely touched. Now, as he stood again in our house, this time in uniform, I understood that his earlier presence had been connected to the shootings, but I did not yet know how.
Jimmy’s nephew confirmed for her all that had occurred, or appeared to have occurred, on the patch of waste ground just a short distance from the house, without ever referring to the fact that it was his second visit to the house that evening. She had wanted to join her husband, to offer him support, but he told her that there would be no point. The questioning would go on for some time, and then he would probably be suspended on full pay pending an investigation. He would be home soon, he promised her. Sit tight. Keep an eye on the boy. Tell him nothing for now. It’s up to you, but, you understand, it might be better to wait until we all know more…