I knelt beside what was left of the hijacker as the assistant MEs laid him onto the showroom carpet. I borrowed a pair of rubber gloves and slowly pulled off his mask. The back of my fist flew against my forehead when I uncovered a second black rubber mask beneath it.
A skin-diving mask.
That’s how they did it! How they had gotten away. They’d used scuba-diving equipment to escape under the water.
I borrowed a phone and told Will Matthews about my discovery. After some choice expletives, he called in more harbor units from Jersey and the Coast Guard.
After I hung up, I pulled off the hijacker’s rubber mask. The deceased was a Hispanic man in his late thirties, early forties. Nothing in his pockets. A nine-millimeter Beretta pistol in an underarm holster, but the serial number had been filed away. I groaned when I looked at his hands and saw his fingerprints were gone, too. I’d seen similar prints on the hands of crackheads, ridges melted down to a nub from holding too many hot pipes.
No! I thought, these bastards weren’t going to disappear without leaving me at least one lead. I found Lonnie Jacob, a crime scene investigator I’d worked with several times. I showed him the jacker’s hands.
“Think you can get anything?” I said.
“Maybe a partial,” Lonnie said skeptically. “I’ll have to work on him back at the morgue. I really doubt we’ll get anything, though. This dude did not want to be identified.”
“What’s up, Mike?” Commander Will Matthews said moments later as he came across the broken glass toward me. “You transferring to Sanitation on me?”
“Thought I’d put out some feelers after this home run,” I said.
“We did all we could, Mike,” Will Matthews said, staring at the carnage all around us. “That’s the truth, and it’s the story I’m sticking to. I advise you to repeat after me during the impending shit storm.”
“Will do,” I said. “We did all we could. Happens to be the truth.”
“Now get out of here and see your family. My driver’s outside waiting for you,” Will Matthews said. “That’s an order.”
A cold wind was whipping down 57th when I stepped outside. I had hardly noticed it before, but this Christmas had turned out to be one of those stainless-steel-colored December days when you have the feeling winter will never end. As I got into the back of the cruiser and my thoughts shifted toward my wife, I decided I didn’t want it to.
If Maeve wasn’t going to see another spring, why the hell should anybody else?
Chapter 100
SOME SAY NOTHING compares to Christmas in New York, but I’d never seen the city look grimmer. After I got home and changed, I drove my brood to the hospital. I couldn’t see the wreaths and lights anymore, only the endless gray corridors of blank windows, the grimy concrete, the steam rising from the broken streets. Some Irish writer once referred to Manhattan as a “cathedral,” but as I stopped our van in front of the hospital, it looked more like a sad construction site to me, cluttered and cold and pitiless.
I had to hold myself up against the van’s door frame in order not to fall over from exhaustion as Mary Catherine fed my kids out in their good clothes, clutching their brightly wrapped presents.
Even the stern nurses, stuck there on Christmas, seemed teary-eyed as our cosmically sad procession passed through the lobby to good ol’ Five.
“Wait a second,” I said, patting my pockets as we approached Maeve’s corridor. “The pageant tape. I forgot to …”
“It’s right here, Mike,” Mary Catherine said, handing me the small plastic case.
I was about to thank her yet again for being such a lifesaver. Au pair, I thought. Was that Gaelic for fairy godmother? She would have had a cheerier Christmas in Afghanistan than here with my crew, but she’d jumped right in up to her neck.
“Give my love to Maeve,” the amazing young woman said quietly. “I’ll be in the lounge if you need me. Go.”
I could see Seamus kneeling beside Maeve in her wheelchair when we turned into her corridor.
A lump formed in my throat when I saw the open Bible in his hand. I stopped when I watched him make the sign of the cross on her forehead. Last rites? I thought.
How was I going to get through this? Today of all days?
Somehow Maeve was smiling when I knocked on the door frame. She was all dressed up as usual, this time a red Santa hat replacing her Yankees one.
Seamus closed his Bible and hugged me hard. “God give you the strength, Michael,” he said in my ear. “Your girl is a saint. You are too.” Seamus paused. “I’ll be back; I need to get some air.”
I guess my heart wasn’t already broken because I felt something snap like a guitar string in my chest when Maeve scooped Chrissy and Shawna into her withered lap.
I glanced up at the ceiling. My family’s story could become a new holiday classic, couldn’t it? I thought ruefully. Christmas in the Terminal Ward.
It wasn’t fair. Maeve had always exercised regularly, ate right, didn’t smoke. I bit my lip as a searing pressure built in my chest. I wanted to, needed to, scream my guts out.
But something strange happened when my son Brian helped her back onto her bed and put the pageant on the TV. Maeve started laughing. Not polite little giggles either, but gasping-for-breath belly laughs. I moved next to her, and her hand found mine behind the wall of our kids.
For the next ten minutes, the hospital room disappeared, and we could have been on our beat-up couch at home, watching the Yanks or one of our favorite old movies.
My useless anger exploded into guffaws as Shepherd Eddie tripped over his staff halfway up to the gym’s stage.
“What a great job you did!” Maeve said, throwing high fives all around after the tape had ended. “Bennetts bringing the house down. I’m so proud of all you guys.”
“Would you listen to the shameful amount of ruckus coming from this room?” Seamus said to giggles as he came back.
Maeve beamed as he gently took her hand and kissed it. “Merry Christmas,” he said, smuggling a gold box of Godiva chocolates behind her back with a wink.
It looked like someone had rolled a hospital bed into a Hallmark store after the handmade gifts and Christmas cards were handed out. Julia and Brian stepped forward with a black velvet box. Maeve’s smile, when she opened it, seemed powerful enough to banish the illness from her body forever. It was a thin gold necklace. The attached pendant said #1 mom.
“We all chipped in,” Brian said. “All of us, even the little ones.”
She kissed him on the cheek as he did the necklace’s clasp for her.
“I want you to keep on chipping in, guys,” Maeve said, leaning back, struggling to keep her eyes open. “Many hands lighten the load, and if it’s one thing we have a lot of, it’s hands. Little hands and big hearts. You couldn’t have made me prouder. Dad will show you what I got for you later, kids. Merry Christmas. Never forget, I love you all.”
Chapter 101
I STAYED BEHIND after Seamus took Mary Catherine and the kids back home. For some reason, I felt strong all of a sudden, calm, completely alert, not even tired. I closed the door to the room and sat behind Maeve in the cold bed, hugging her. After a while, I held her hand, staring at where our wedding rings touched.
When I closed my eyes, I pictured Maeve from my first days of courting her in the hospital emergency room. She had always been holding someone’s hand then, too, I remembered. Black, white, yellow, brown, young, old, mad, maimed, broken, bloody. I thought about all the human hearts she’d lifted in her life. Mine most of all. And our ten children.
As I stood up to stretch around midnight, Maeve opened her eyes wide and crushed my hand in hers.
“I love you, Mike,” she said urgently.
Oh God! I thought. Not now. Please, not now!
My hand went for the nurse’s button, but Maeve batted it away. A tear rolled down her taut face as she shook her head.
Then she smiled.
Stop!
She look
ed into my eyes. It was as if she could see some distant place within them. Some new land she was about to travel to.
“Be happy,” she said.
Then she let go of my hand.
As her fingertips left the surface of my palm, I felt as though somewhere deep inside me something shattered and a hole opened.
I caught Maeve as she tipped back. She was so light. Her chest was already still. My hand lowered the back of her head toward the pillow as gently as it did on our honeymoon night.
This is it, I kept thinking. This is really it.
The room spun as I stood there gasping. It felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me, all of my air, my spirit gone.
Everything I had ever felt happy about, every laugh, every sunset, every hope, every good thing there was or ever would be shook loose and tottered and plummeted out of my heart.
I looked up suddenly when I heard the singing.
The pageant tape had come on again somehow, and on the TV screen above, Chrissy was making her way across the Holy Name gym stage in her silver angel costume as the whole school sang “Silent Night.”
I shut it off, along with the light, and lay down beside my wife. Snow was falling lightly in the dark outside the window.
How can I still be alive? I thought, feeling my heart beat on and on selfishly in my chest.
When I found Maeve’s hand, I felt the cold of her wedding ring. I remembered the happy tears in her eyes, in the small church we were married in, as I slid it on her finger. The rice that mixed with spits of snow as we came hand in hand outside and down the old wooden steps.
As I closed my eyes, I could no longer hear anything. The sounds of the hospital faded in the dark, and so did the sounds of the world outside. All that was left in the universe was my wife’s cold hand in mine and a nothingness that hummed through me like high voltage.
Chapter 102
THE HEAD NURSE, SALLY HITCHENS, came in at 4:30 a.m. She smiled as she helped me to stand up. She’d take care of my Maeve now, she promised as I stood disoriented and crazy-eyed over my wife. She’d protect her and keep her for as long as it took.
I walked the thirty blocks home from the hospital, the cold burning my skin in the predawn dark. A bartender, slamming closed the steel shutters of a bar on Amsterdam Avenue, crossed himself as I passed.
All the kids were up in the living room as I stumbled in.
I was instantly surrounded by them as I sat down. I thought I had purged away some of the pain from hours before, but I was deluding myself. My heart got heavier and heavier as my eyes slowly passed over each of my kids’ faces. My sorrow was as dense as a black hole as I looked upon the tears in my little Chrissy’s eyes.
Death notices are perhaps the hardest of realities for homicide detectives. Now, here I was having to deliver one in my own living room, to my own kids.
“Mom’s gone to heaven,” I finally said, gathering them in my arms.
“Mom’s in heaven now, guys. Say a prayer.”
After rising from their sobbing ranks, I stumbled into the kitchen and broke the news to Seamus and Mary Catherine.
Then I went into my room, quietly closed the door, and sat on the edge of my bed.
When Seamus came in, maybe ten hours later, I was still sitting there in the same clothes and hadn’t slept.
That’s when he sat down next to me.
“When I lost your grandmother,” he spoke very quietly, “I was ready to murder. The doctors who’d told me she was gone. All the people who came to her wake. Even the priest at her funeral made me unbelievably angry. Because of how lucky they were. They didn’t have to go home to an empty apartment. They didn’t have to listen to the roar of silence as they took down her abandoned things. I even seriously thought about picking up the bottle Eileen had pulled me out of. But I didn’t. Do you know why?”
I shook my head. I had no idea.
“Because of how insulting it would have been. Not to Eileen’s memory, I realized, but to Eileen herself. That’s when I realized she hadn’t really left for good. She’d just gone on ahead a little.
“One thing Eileen had taught me by her example was that you get up and put your clothes on and do what you can do until the day you don’t get up. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Maeve isn’t really gone. She’s just ahead, waiting for you, Mike. That’s why you can’t shut down. We Irish don’t always succeed, but we’re pretty decent at grinding it out.”
“Grind it out until you’re dead,” I said blankly after a moment. “Gentle words of inspiration from Seamus Bennett. You’re the new Deepak Chopra.”
“Ah, sweet, undiluted sarcasm,” Seamus said, punching my knee softly as he rose. “That’s the lad. Maeve’d be proud of ya. Music to her Irish ears.”
So after I took a shower, we made arrangements. Or, I should say, Seamus and Mary Catherine did. They called the church and then the funeral home, and I just nodded or shook my drooping head. Grind it out until you’re dead.
Chapter 103
IT WAS STONE WALL to stone wall with friends and relatives inside Holy Name Church two days later for Maeve’s funeral. At the wake the night before, and now here at the church, my wife had managed to draw a crowd that rivaled the one at St. Patrick’s for the First Lady, despite the fact that there wasn’t a news van or celebrity in sight.
In the sea of sad faces, I made out her former coworkers, past patients, even most of our snooty neighbors. Not only did most of my Homicide squad show, but most of the NYPD, it seemed, was there, giving their support for a brother in blue.
At the wake, so many people had shared touching vignettes I’d never heard before about Maeve. Story after story about how she had comforted their kid or wife or parent as they were wheeled into surgery or giving birth or dying. The compassion she showed at the hardest of moments. The strength she’d provided when people were most alone.
There are times when New York can be the loneliest place on earth, but as I watched Seamus in his robes come down from the altar and encircle Maeve’s casket with incense and heard the sincere weeping of the people behind me, I could feel a sense of community that I would put up against the smallest of small towns.
After the Gospel, Seamus did the eulogy.
“One of my favorite memories of Maeve comes from, of all places, Ground Zero,” he said from the pulpit.
“We were both volunteering on the Spirit of New York, moored off Battery Park City, helping to give out hot meals to the rescue people. It was during the fourth game of the 2001 World Series, and I was on the open top deck of the boat, comforting a distraught battalion chief who had lost one of his men, when we heard this earsplitting howl from below deck. We thought someone had been shot or fallen overboard, but when we arrived below in the dining room, all we could see was Maeve, wearing headphones, jumping up and down so hard she was nearly rocking the boat.
“ ‘Tino Martinez tied it up,’ she was screaming. ‘He tied it up!’
“Someone got a TV and set it up on the buffet table. Now, I’ve listened to people say that they’ve never heard Yankee Stadium louder than when Derek Jeter hit that walk-off home run in the tenth to win it, but they weren’t any louder than the group of us crowded around that beat-up set. When I think of Maeve, I will always see her in the middle of those tired men with her fist pumped in the air. Her energy and hope and life transforming that black place and time into something unique, something I think on the verge of holy.”
Seamus’s cheeks clenched then. He, along with the rest of the church, was losing it.
“I won’t lie to you. I can’t say why God would take her now. But if the fact that she was sent here among us doesn’t point toward a loving God, then I can’t help you. If we bring away anything from today, it should be the lesson that Maeve herself showed with every full, spent day of her life. Hold back nothing. Leave nothing in the tank.”
All through the church everyone, including myself, was crying shamelessly. Chrissy, beside me, brushed my overco
at out of the way and wiped her tears on my knee.
The sun came out for the burial at Gates of Heaven Cemetery up in Westchester. The kids filed past Maeve’s casket with roses. I almost lost it again behind my sunglasses when Shawna kissed her flower before she put it down with the rest. And again when the high, bittersweet skirls of an NYPD piper’s “Danny Boy” blew off the headstones and frozen ground.
But I didn’t.
I asked myself what Maeve would do, and I swallowed my tears and hugged my kids and promised myself and my wife that I would somehow get us through.
Chapter 104
I’D OFFERED TO stay home from work with the kids, who were off on Christmas break, but Seamus and Mary Catherine wouldn’t hear of it.
“Sorry, fella,” Seamus told me. “These kids need to be spoiled like no one has ever been spoiled before, and with the mood you’re in, you’re going to have to leave that job to me and Mary C. Besides, you need to get outside of yourself there, Mick. Throw yourself into something positive. Stop sitting around and go and collar those pathetic mopes who jacked the cathedral.”
“ ‘Collar the mopes’?” I said with a faint grin. “ ‘Jacked’?”
“So I watch NYPD Blue now and then,” Seamus said with a fantastic roll of his eyes. “Is it a sin?”
So the Monday morning after the funeral, I arrived back at my desk inside Manhattan North Homicide in East Harlem. Harry Grissom, my boss, and the rest of my squadies were irritatingly supportive and polite. Who would have ever thought that you’d miss being the butt of practical jokes? Soon enough, I thought, knocking the dust off my mouse.
I put in calls to Paul Martelli and Ned Mason. And I learned that nothing really new or promising had been discovered. Every square inch of the church’s granite, marble, and stained glass had been searched and dusted for latent prints, but there had been nothing. These criminals had been extremely tidy.