Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

reflex and more of a hope. I looked for a moment into his eyes.
    “I’m his new grounds keeper and house sitter,” I answered. “In case you haven’t heard, he got busted into recently.”
    “You’re telling me this is an advance for some yard work.”
    “Something like that, yeah.”
    The Chief thought about that for a moment. “So how’d you get this job to begin with. Last I knew you didn’t want anything to do with the Halsey Neck Lane crew.”
    “I got it through Augie.”
    “I didn’t know Augie knew James Curry.”
    “I don’t think he does. But their daughters went to school together. Before Amy Curry got murdered, that is.”
    The Chief smiled at that and looked around the cluttered front room. “What makes you think she was murdered?”
    “What makes you think she wasn’t.”
    “I never said she wasn’t.”
    “So then why the shoddy police work?”
    The Chief finished his look around the room and said, “Your working at that frog place on Job’s Lane, aren’t you?” He looked at me squarely. His jaw was set hard, like it was ready to snap. I could see his hate for me in his eyes, in the way he stood, in the sound of his breathing. I could smell it on him. I had maimed his son for trying to rape Tina the summer before. Of course he hated me.
    “I just got hired there, yeah.”
    He nodded and looked straight at me. “You give me the excuse, MacManus, any excuse, and I’ll arrest. As you know, once I arrest you there’ll be about a half-dozen cops with night sticks waiting for you in the basement of Village Hall. We take care of our own. So, you jaywalk in this town and I’ll bust you. You take up with another fifteen-year-old, and believe me, I’ll know before the night is over and I’ll be here to bust you before she kisses you good morning. I’d prefer a big mistake, like what Augie did, but I’ll take what I can get. All I care about is seeing to it that you have to learn to walk all over again, just like my son had to. That you kiss whatever putrid dreams you have, if a lowlife like you has any, good-bye, just like he had to. My boy could be playing for Michigan. He was that good. Now he can barely take a bath without help.”
    I could sense that he was flexed under his clothes, flexing to keep his rage and hate from spraying out of him. The Chief was the kind of man who made an art out of sitting on his feelings and waiting for the right time to strike.
    “Do you want to take a swing at me, Chief? Is that what you came here for?”
    “Don’t tempt me.”
    “It’s just you and me here. You’ve got the stick, you’ve got the gun. I’ve got nothing.”
    He tossed the check on the couch. I left it there.
    “I grew up with Augie, you know that,” he said. “Frank Gannon, too. And, believe it or not, your father. The four of us were best friends. We played football together in high school. And your father was quarterback. He played in the Empire State Games. You didn’t know that, did you?”
    I knew little of my father, my real father, the cop from Southampton who left me with strangers after my mother died. I knew even less of her – shadows, smells, the sound of her voice but no words. I cannot remember her entire presence, but I can remember close to much of his – chain-smoking in a tiny hotel room in Riverhead on his afternoons off, sitting by the window in silence, in chinos and a white T-shirt, looking out, me watching him from my cot, smelling fried food from the restaurant below, hearing the voices of strange men in the hallways, only men’s voices except for Saturday nights when I heard the laughter of drunken women and words and sounds I did not understand.
    I was seven when he left me in the care of a man with eyes like the sea. I do not remember my father dropping me off, I do not remember us saying goodbye. I have lost those memories, lost them a long time ago. I used to allow myself to imagine what it was like, but at some point in my life I gave that up.
    I thought of the Chief’s devotion to his son, however blind and misguided it may be. I tried to imagine a world in which the Chief and I were family, where Tommy Miller was my kid brother, where we all lived under the same roof and protected each other with fierce loyalty. It was too hard to imagine, nearly as hard as it was to try to imagine what my father was beyond the handful of memories and what I’ve always heard and what the Chief just told me. I wondered if Tommy Miller looked at