Boyle fixed it.
In the three days that followed, an article ran daily on the front page of the Post ’s Metro section, detailing the violent events that transpired in the house near Fort Totten Park. Every day that week, when I arrived for my shift at the Spot, a newspaper was left for me by Darnell, folded behind the register to the story’s page.
Darnell had not spoken one word on the ride back that night, had never mentioned the name Frank Martin, and he would never speak about any of it again. With Boyle it was the same, though he could not enjoy Darnell’s anonymity. Boyle’s daily entrance at the Spot invariably created a nervous flurry of whispers from the regulars. The papers had made him out to be the city’s premier badass, a Wyatt Earp-style lawman in a town whose initials had come to stand for Dodge City. No one took a stool next to Boyle at the bar again.
By the time of the last article, some basic facts had been embedded in the public’s mind: Two detectives, Boyle and Goloria, had gone into a house without backup and had attempted to arrest a group of low-level bookmakers headed by a man named Bonanno. After the gun battle, in which Bonanno, his cohorts, and Goloria were killed, Boyle came upon evidence, through the notes of a young reporter killed months earlier, linking the group to a series of arsons, which in turn connected them to the reporter’s own murder. The murderer turned out to be a cop killer named Solanis, wanted in several states by the FBI.
As for Goloria, he had died a hero, and he was given a hero’s burial, with separate features on his career in the Post and on the local TV news. His family was the recipient of a full pension, along with several remunerative gifts from local police associations and booster clubs. In one of the pictures that ran in the newspaper, Goloria’s wife and children stood graveside, the veiled wife holding a handkerchief to her grimacing face. Behind her in the picture, posture-straight and stone-faced, her badge clipped to her breast pocket, stood a stoic Detective Wallace.
A card arrived at my apartment a few days later. The envelope was postmarked D.C., without a return address, and the card was plain white. Inside the card was a short note, in handwriting I didn’t recognize. The note read, “Nice work, Stefanos. And thanks.” It was signed, “A Fan.”
I threw away the newspaper clippings on the case shortly thereafter and kept the card.
A couple of weeks passed. February announced itself with a sunny, seventy-degree day. Two days after that a front traveled down from Canada and dropped a foot of snow on the area, and the cold air that hovered above for the next week kept the snow in place. Temperatures inched back up into the forties, and after another week the snow was gone. ‹ ab/p›
On one of those dull gray days in late February, as I was sifting through the mail at the Spot, I opened an envelope addressed to me from Billy Goodrich. Inside the envelope a check had been made out in my name for services rendered.
The bar was slow that day, and it gave me time to sit next to the register and consider the check. As I did, I looked into the bar mirror, stared at my reflection between the bottles of Captain Morgan’s and Bacardi Dark, and I thought about the night that Billy Goodrich had walked into the Spot, and how I had been staring into that same mirror, between those very bottles, that night.
The moment gave me the feeling that there was something dangling, something left to do. I stared harder, and my eyes began to burn from it, and I heard someone ordering a drink from far away, but now I wasn’t listening.
I turned the bar phone toward me and punched Billy’s number into the grid.
“Hello.”
“Billy, it’s Nick.”
Billy paused. “Nick, how you doin’?”
“Good.”
“You get my check? I sent it-”
“I got it.”
“It’s okay, isn’t it?”
“It’s fine.”
Billy cleared his throat. “What’s up, Nick?”
“We got some unfinished business, Billy.”
There was another pause, longer this time. I listened to the sounds of the Spot. “I’ve been waiting for your call,” he said.
I said, “It’s time we settled up.”
“That’s what I want too.”
“Where and when?”
Billy thought things over. “Down at April’s property, at Cobb Island. That’s where it is, right?”
“That’s right, Billy. That’s where it is.”
“You working tomorrow?”
“I’m off.”
“I’ll pick you up, then, at your place. About eleven?”
“Eleven’s fine.”
“See you at eleven.”
“All right.”
I hung the receiver in its cradle, waited for a dial tone, and phoned Hendricks at the station in La Plata. When he told me what I needed to know, I said good-bye, and stood there for a long while, running my finger along the thin scar on my n scar ocheek, a permanent reminder of the bungalow on Gallatin Street.
I went to the men’s room to wash my face. When I was done I stood outside the bathroom door, rubbing my hands dry on the blue rag that hung on the side of my jeans. I walked back into the bar and finished off the remainder of my shift.