“Could it be true, Miss Quinn,” said Harkman, “that Andrew Quinn does not recall Amy?”
“I guess so, it can be true, yes,” Lily said with breathless panic, placing her hand over her chest to still her heart. It was Impossible! Perhaps an interrogation room was not the place for such exclamations of the soul. Her voice lost its fight and got progressively weaker. She was whispering now. “It can be true.” She was nearly inaudible.
And then the three of them were silent. Spencer watched her, Harkman watched her, and Lily stared at the table. Her whole body felt to be suddenly emptied and re-filled with nerve endings, all shooting electrical anguish into her skin.
“Miss Quinn…”
“Please.” She jumped up. “If we’re done, I have to go. I do, I can’t sit here another minute.” Lily groaned in the middle of room Interrogation #1 and ran out. Spencer followed her. He stopped her on the street outside the precinct.
“Lily,” he said, slightly panting. “Are you running away from me?”
“Yes,” she blurted. “No.” She tried to push past him but he stood firm in front of her. “Just let me through. We’re done, aren’t we? Let me through.”
Spencer took her by her arms to stop her from moving. She was shaking.
“Please,” she said. “Leave me alone.”
“Lily,” he said gently. He was still holding her arms, he almost brought her to him in an embrace; she was too stirred up to know what it was. “I’m sorry. I am. We’re just trying to find Amy.”
“Oh, giving out traffic tickets on the LIE gives you experience in missing persons, does it?” Lily exclaimed, trying to wrest from him. Her knees were buckling from sadness. “No,” she said, furiously shaking her head. “No!” Even more adamantly. “Whatever it is you’re thinking, there’s a simple explanation.”
“I’m not thinking anything.” He let go of her, and she stood still, but leaned against the dirty wall of the building. “You’re the one doing all the thinking. Because you’re the only one who knows whether his statement is true.” Spencer looked at the pavement. “And from your reaction, it seems to me that you know it can’t be.”
Turning her head to look inside a window pane, the glass reflecting off her own filmed over glass eyes, Lily put her hands over her face, struggling to keep the tears back.
When Spencer got back to his desk, he sat down heavily, looked around the office, and thought it was time to go—perhaps permanently. Harkman sitting across from him was by contrast jubilant. “Finally! A break in the immovable case. A lead.”
“Yeah, a lead.” After a few minutes Spencer said, “I think Sanchez and Smith can handle it from here.” He turned to Harkman on the swivel chair. “I’m going to give this to them. I can’t do it, Chris. I have to get off this case.”
“Which case? The McFadden case?”
Spencer nodded.
“What the hell are you talking about? We finally made some headway. A U.S. Congressman!”
Blood ties. Brother and sisters. How Spencer craved a drink. “I know. That’s just the thing. I can’t do it.”
“O’Malley, what’s gotten into you?”
Spencer thought back to the white, wet buildings of Hanover, New Hampshire, to Dartmouth College, to the black shutters on his soul; thought back to Greenwich, Connecticut and the tangled web he had once weaved investigating another missing girl and the duplicity and manipulation of the ones closest to her. Their squalid story swallowed him. He couldn’t go back to that place twice. It took him years as a traffic cop on the Long Island Expressway before he could face being a proper investigator again. There were some things in life for which once was enough. There weren’t many of them. Many of life’s offerings were renewable pleasures, like sex, or renewable miseries, like alcohol. But this drowning in shallow waters was not something he wanted to relive even while saturated in Scotch.
“O’Malley, you’re overwhelmed. Give your smaller cases to me. Concentrate on this one.”
“I’m not overwhelmed. Stop psychoanalyzing me. This is precisely the one case I don’t want. I’ll keep the smaller ones. I got plenty else 1 need to be doing, and you, too. Sanchez and Smith are more than capable of taking over for us.”
“I don’t want them to take over for us! This is a big case. A Congressman, O’Malley! There might be another promotion here for me and for you, too. I’ve got a family to think of. I’ve had three heart operations. What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“Chris, I’m sorry. I just don’t want to do it. What can I tell you?”
“But you’re the one who came to me with this!” Harkman exclaimed. “You’re the one who remembered reading what Andrew Quinn had said. I mean, what the hell? Why are you doing this?”
Spencer wasn’t about to explain anything to Harkman. “You can’t change my mind. I don’t want to get mired in this. There’s too much baggage here for me. I’m putting Sanchez and Smith on it.”
“No, you’re not, O’Malley.”
Spencer’s clouded gaze cleared slightly.
Harkman stood and came over to Spencer’s desk, leaning over him. Spencer moved away, and it must have seemed like wariness, thought it was nothing but distaste. “You selfish bastard,” Harkman said. “You think you’re the only one who knows things. But I know things, O’Malley, I know things about you, the kind that Internal Affairs would be very interested in hearing. I’ve been very good to you, but don’t fuck with me on this one, because I need this case. As always, you’re only thinking of yourself.”
Spencer looked steadily at Harkman’s small angry eyes, at his swollen, contorted face. “Don’t come any closer to me,” he said, standing up himself, and pushing his chair away. “What could you possibly know about me?”
Harkman backed away, half a step. “O’Malley, I promise you. You fuck me over, I’m going to fuck you over, and good. You want a leave of absence? I’ll make sure you get a nice long one.” Harkman stormed out of the office—like a wounded woman.
Spencer sank back down at his desk. What the hell was Harkman talking about? Was he being selfish? Probably. He did not think of how giving this case to Sanchez would affect Harkman. He only thought of how it would affect him—whether he could handle it. He didn’t think he could. He couldn’t tell Harkman that what he wanted was…not to get personally involved, not to hurt Lily. If she was going to be crushed, he didn’t want her crushed at his hand. His recusal would be the kindest thing, the best thing for her—and certainly the best thing for him. Spencer felt the murkiness, instinctively sensed the muddy and shallow waters, the swamp of design instead of the ether of accident on Amy’s vanishing.
His feeling for his partner changed for the worse. Even more than most people, Spencer hated to be threatened. Of course Harkman was just bluffing. Spencer did have some secrets to keep, and he kept them, certainly from his relatively new partner, practically a stranger. He grabbed his jacket and left.
16
Reality: The Actual Thing that it Appears to Be
Lily let him in, but so reluctantly she didn’t even open the door all the way. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said coldly, but couldn’t help noticing his drawn face, the somber twist of his mouth.
“I want you to come with me,” Spencer said, pushing the door open and walking in, “I want to go talk to your brother.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Spencer took a deep breath. “Do you want to help him or don’t you?” He walked into Amy’s room.
She followed him. “How is talking to him going to help him?”
He was looking around, swirling his hand through the air. “Lily, once again you’re deliberately misunderstanding me. You and I can go and talk informally to your brother right now in his home or my partner and I will have to pay him a police visit.”
“Detective O’Malley,” Lily said, wringing her hands in supplication. “Don’t you understand? My brother, Andrew Quinn, is a U.S. Congressman.” She lowered her voice.
“He is married. He has two school-age daughters. He’s just about to begin a campaign for election to the Senate. It’s not just talking as you put it, it’s his career and family. Don’t you see that? You’re a detective, you can’t be that thick!”
“Excuse me, yes, I wish I were as sharp as a tack,” said Spencer. He was looking at the walls, in the closet. He was opening the drawers of Amy’s dresser. He got on his knees and looked under her bed. “Didn’t she keep a journal?”
“She did. I thought you read it.”
“Oh, that wasn’t a journal, it was a day planner. It had nothing in it. I mean a real journal. Dear Diary, you won’t believe what happened to me today, I kissed a boy, that sort of thing. All girls keep one.”
“I don’t.”
“Of course you do. Your little sketchbook you don’t go anywhere without. The one that has your lottery numbers doodled all over it. What do you think that is?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lily crossed her arms. “Do you want to go, or not?”
“She must have had something,” he muttered. “She must have kept something somewhere.”
“I want you to know I don’t want to go,” said Lily.
“Believe me when I tell you I want to go even less than you.” He straightened up. “I’ve been down this way before.” Spencer glanced away before his gaze became steady again. “This way corrupts the soul. I want to take myself off the case, but—I can’t. Perhaps I should have chosen a different line of work. Chances are about even that after this case I just might. But right now, let’s go. Perhaps like you said, there’s a simple explanation.” He paused. “Perhaps like you said Amy will be walking through that door any minute.”
In the car, he asked again about the lottery, and this time Lily told him. Spencer was incredulous and disbelieving.
“You’re Irish, you’re Catholic,” she said. “Don’t tell me you don’t understand. Half my family is like yours. The other half was across the North Sea from you, living in northern Poland, in the wetlands, praying Hitler wouldn’t come up to the parts near Danzig, near the Polish corridor. This stuff can’t be all foreign to you.” Lily shook her head.
“Irish and a Catholic, yes, but not crazy. What, you think because I say the Lord’s Prayer I would let a ticket worth eighteen million dollars sit on my wall amid my family photos? And besides, Lily, your not calling New York State Lottery does not change the order of things, it does not change the fact that the numbers came up and your name was on them.”
Lily looked away from him to her passenger window, to watch the Long Island Expressway rush by, her lids heavy, her legs aching, her fingers slightly trembling. “That, Detective O’Malley,” she said, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
Spencer asked Lily to tell him about her brother.
Andrew was married. Twice. The first time was for love, and lasted eleven days. They were together prior to the wedding for seven years, but the marriage itself lasted eleven days. It produced nothing but a scar from deflecting the knife that was aimed for his heart. The second and current one was…who knew. For her love? She loved him, so he married her. And she had a little money. So far so good. Fourteen years later they were still married. And she still loved him. And she loved being a congressman’s wife, and she would love being a senator’s wife. And perhaps…somewhere down the road…a president’s wife. For anyone who knew Andrew since he was a child knew this about him—he was a born leader of men, and to continue to be one at higher and higher levels was his only stated ambition in life.
He was the president of every club he had ever joined, the president of the National Honor Society, the president of the Law Club, the president of the Student Council. At Cornell, he was the president of the student union, and the captain of the All Ivy Big Red football team in the fall and of the crew team in the spring.
Andrew never failed to get a single thing that he wanted.
So at thirty-four, he ran for the congressional first district in Suffolk County and after a bloody battle and a bitter recount with accusations of wrongdoing by both sides, won by fifty-two votes. In 1998 he won his fourth re-election by a few thousand—he called it his “landslide victory.”
“So, Lily, tell me, how well did Andrew know Amy?”
“I introduced them. He knew her through me,” she said, gripping her arms. “Not only did we campaign for him, but he took us out to lunch, to dinner. Amy and I came to D.C. once or twice to visit him. We went shopping with him in D.C. last Christmas, we had such a good time.” She lowered her head. “Amy came to Thanksgiving with me last year, she came to our Fourth of July barbecue. She was my friend, she came with me. He knew her like Anne, Amanda, Grandma know her. You see? It was just a misunderstanding what he said to Harkman.”
The Quinns lived in a large colonial off Old Post Road in Port Jefferson. It almost looked like a regular house if you discounted that it was set about a hundred yards away from the sidewalk, with well-positioned, perfectly-trimmed shrubs on the outside so you couldn’t get a good view from the street of any of the windows or doors. Regular if you didn’t count the American flag on a twenty-foot pole flying in the middle of the front yard, and an old campaign poster still stuck into the ground near the side-walk: “Re-elect Congressman Quinn—he is good for Long Island and for your family”. Regular if you didn’t count the unmarked car across the road with two Treasury agents inside.
The Quinn home was spotless, masterfully decorated, marbled, with hardwoods, and drapes that matched the upholstery, and lamp shades that matched the drapes, with not a paper out of place or a glass in the sink. Miera took care of that for Andrew. She was a good politician’s wife. She took care of the house, took care of the girls, and looked great at parties and even better on the campaign trail. Back in 1992, Andrew credited his small margin of victory to Miera’s polish, for his opponent’s spouse was not nearly as glamorous or attractive. “I’m fully aware of what she has done for me,” he said of his wife in his acceptance speech.
Nobody in Lily’s family liked Miera. She had a weird name for starters. No one could pronounce it and she hated you for not pronouncing it correctly. People would call her Mee-YE-ra, or MEE-ra, but it was simply MY-ra. Why couldn’t she have spelled it that way? She was always testing people—Lily told Spencer—by this first.
Miera opened the door. She was tall, blonde, manicured, frigidly good-looking. Showing his badge, Spencer said, “MEE-ra Quinn, right? Detective O’Malley. You know Lily. We’re here to see Congressman Quinn.”
Lily tightened her lip to keep from involuntarily smiling.
They waited in the hall, peering into the formals. Spencer noticed that the door was made of thick impenetrable metal, and the windows were tinted, and he would bet they were bulletproof. He commented quietly to Lily that the home looked well fortified.
“Yeah. It’s the politician’s life. He’s had…well, you know…a few years ago somebody shot at them as they were coming back from the movies on Route 110. They were just driving down the road and boom. They shot out the windows, scared the girls and Miera half to death.”
“I didn’t hear about that. Anyone hurt?”
“Yeah, the glass cut them up a bit. Miera had to have surgery, a glass splinter stuck in her eye.”
“Who was it?”
“Oh, just some pranksters. No one knows. Stupid kids with nothing to do but make trouble. But once, a small bomb was found by police dogs in his executive suite in Washington. They were searching the whole hotel and found a bomb in his suite. So he became a little more careful.”
“So how were you able to go to dinners, lunches out?”
“Andrew is only worried for his family, but he himself won’t live in a prison. He takes chances, what can I tell you. So far so good.”
They still had not been shepherded inside the kitchen, or inside an office, or a dining room. They were left standing without a drink, without a seat. Lily raised her eyebrows and whispered, “What did I tel
l you? She hates me. And after how you mispronounced her name, forget it, you’ll never get a drink in her house.”
Before Spencer could answer, Andrew came down the hall to greet them. He had a clean-shaven, open, happy, friendly face, a strong handshake. He had height and girth. He had gone gray prematurely, which in politics gave him an edge over his youthful and inexperienced-looking opponents. He smiled, he looked right at Spencer as he shook his hand, he put his hand on Spencer’s back and ushered him inside. He gave his sister a bear hug. That was Andrew, a bear hug of a man.
“Lily, forgive me for saying this, I love you like a brother, but you gotta get some sleep. And eat some food. Look at you. Are you hungry?”
She shook her head. They sat on padded cast-iron stools in the granite kitchen, while Andrew himself got them some lemonade. Spencer downed the lemonade, got up from the stool and said, “Can we talk in private for a few minutes?”
In the dark-paneled, cherry-wood office overlooking the coiffed and cleansed green and floral backyard, Andrew sat behind his desk and Spencer and Lily in the chairs in front.
Lily was so uncomfortable that she wasn’t able to look up from the floor. There was an unusual pain in her upper legs traveling up to her stomach that she’d never experienced before, a pain that was dull and sharp at the same time, possibly from the bruises on her thighs. If she didn’t have such an open pit in her stomach she could see how she might find the pain in her legs and abdomen breath-catching. Certainly she couldn’t catch her breath now. She looked over at Spencer, who was completely calm and his hands were not tensely strung together like Lily’s to shield him from pain. He looked almost relaxed when he said, “Congressman, do you know why I’m here?”
Andrew smiled pleasantly and shook his head.
The pain in Lily’s legs got stronger.