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We were in Mike's car, parking near his tiny walk-up apartment on York Avenue,
when his beeper went off. He returned the call and seemed pleased with the
message.
"The man's glove that was picked up near where Galinova was dumped, at the
Met? The one that gave up two different DNA profiles?"
"Yeah."
"Inside the glove, the DNA from the skin cells is a perfect match to Joe
Berk."
"Joe Berk? What's the exemplar they used? What'd they have with his profile on
it to make the comparison?"
"That plastic drinking cup you didn't want me to take from his apartment,
Coop. You can cut your teeth on some more breaking law. Make it legal for me
so it sticks in court. Hate to jam you up with a bad search, but the practice
will be good for you."
25
"I asked you to throw the damn cup away. Why do you risk getting good evidence
by being a cowboy?" I asked Mike.
"Hey, the first time we were in Berk's apartment, you were hoping to pick up
some white hairs, weren't you?"
"I didn't do it then, did I?"
"Garbage. I took the cup because it was garbage. Argue that to the stiffs who
sit on the appellate court bench and wouldn't know a crime scene from a
cocktail party. Let's go out of the car."
"I'll wait for you down here."
"Battaglia said to keep an eye on you. I got this far so there's no point in
letting you be a sitting target on a street corner. Don't pout about Joe
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Berk's DNA. I got what we need, didn't I?"
I followed Mike up the narrow staircase that led to his fifth-floor apartment.
It was a studio that he had long ago christened "the coffin" because of its
small size and dark interior. Since Val's death, that nickname must have made
each homecoming a reminder of his loss.
"Just throw those things on the floor and have a seat," he said, pointing to a
chair in the corner of the room. He grabbed clean clothes from the closet and
dresser and went into the bathroom to shower.
The disarray in the apartment was startling. While his department car was
usually littered with empty coffee containers and food wrappers, Mike's
personal appearance most often a blazer, button-down-collar shirt, and neatly
pressed slacks or jeans was ordinarily reflected in his home surroundings. I
started to hang up a wind-breaker that had fallen to the floor and stuff socks
and underwear in his laundry bag.
But more disturbing than the messiness was that this intimate space had been
transformed into a shrine to Valerie. There were photographs of her on every
surface, and her belongings were crowded onto shelves architectural design
books stacked on top of Mike's collection of historical biographies, and the
exotic shells she brought back from her tropical vacations. I didn't know
whether Val had moved all these things into Mike's apartment, or he had
retrieved them from her place and set them up here after her death.
I bent over to study a photograph of Val I had never seen before. It was a
close-up of her face, beaming back at the photographer Mike, no doubt from
beneath the brim of an NYPD baseball cap. I was ashamed to catch myself making
superficial comparisons how much more even Val's features were than my own,
what a fine beauty she possessed. I straightened up and dusted off the picture
with any sleeve.
And then there were the clothes several pastel-colored crewneck sweaters
stacked on a closet shelf beside Mike's darker ones, strappy sandals lined up
next to his loafers, and a diaphanous robe in Val's favorite lavender hues
that was still draped across the back of the wooden chair that he had offered
me to sit on.
I was smoothing the covers on the bed that had been unmade, probably for days,
when Mike came out of the bathroom. "What are you doing?"
"We can come back later on and I can help you straighten things up."
"It's not Buckingham Palace, Coop. It's the way I live, okay?"
"It didn't used to be."
"A lot of things didn't used to be. C'mon. Twelve-minute turnaround. Not bad,
huh?"
"Would you like me to well, to sort of go through some of Val's things with
you?"
He looked at me as though I had said something crazy, something unthinkable.
"Can you just leave it alone? I'm not ready. Can you make a goddamn effort to
understand that? Can you get it?"
I opened the door and started down the steps. I don't think Mike would have [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]