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The message light on my answering machine was flashing. I hit the button, and heard Jimmy Gallagher’s voice. He sounded a little drunk, but the message was still clear and simple, and the timing of it preordained.
“Charlie, come on down here,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
IV
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. -BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790),
POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JIMMY GALLAGHER MUST HAVE been watching for me to come, as he answered the door before I even knocked. I imagined him, for a moment, sitting at his window, his face reflected in the gathering dark, his fingers tapping on the sill, anxiously seeking the one whom he was expecting, but as I looked into his eyes I saw that there was no anxiety, no fear or concern. In truth, he appeared more relaxed than I had ever seen him. He was wearing a T-shirt over a pair of paint-stained tan trousers, topped off by a Yankees hooded top and an old pair of pe
He didn’t say anything when he saw me. He just opened the door, nodded once, then turned around and led the way to the kitchen. I closed the door behind me and followed him. A pair of candles burned in the kitchen, one on the windowsill and a second on the table. Beside the second candle stood a bottle of good-maybe very good-red wine, a decanter, and two glasses. Jimmy tenderly touched the neck of the bottle, stroking it as though it were a beloved pet.
“I’ve been waiting for an excuse to open it,” he said. “But these days, I don’t seem to have too many causes for J `Ø[1] `end celebration. Mostly, I go to funerals. You get to my age, that’s what you do. I’ve been to three funerals already this year. They were all cops, and they all died of cancer.” He sighed. “I don’t want to go that way.”
“Eddie Grace is dying of cancer.”
“I heard. I thought about going to see him, but Eddie and me-” He shook his head. “All we had in common was your old man. When he went, Eddie and me had no reason to talk.”
I recalled what Eddie had said to me before I left him, about how Jimmy Gallagher had spent his life living a lie. Maybe Eddie had been referring, however obliquely, to Jimmy’s homosexuality, but I knew now that there were other lies to be uncovered, even if they were lies of omission. Still, it wasn’t for Eddie Grace to judge how any man lived his life, not in the way that he had judged Jimmy. We all presented one face to the world, and kept another hidden. Nobody could survive in it otherwise. As Jimmy unburdened himself, and my father’s secrets were slowly revealed to me, I came to understand how Will Parker had buckled under the weight of them, and I felt only sadness for him and for the woman he had betrayed.
Jimmy took a waiter’s friend from a drawer and carefully cut the foil on the bottle before inserting the tip of the corkscrew into the cork. It took only two twists, and then a single pull, for the cork to release with a satisfying, airy pop. He looked at it to make sure that it wasn’t dry or decaying, and cast it to the side.
“I used to sniff the corks,” he said, “but then someone pointed out that it tells you nothing about the quality of the wine. Shame. I liked the ritual of it, until I found out that it made me look like a know-nothing.”
He positioned the candle behind the bottle as he decanted it, so that he could see the sediment approaching the neck.
“No need to let it stand for long,” he said, once he was finished. “That’s just with younger wines. It softens the ta
He poured two glasses, and sat. He held his glass to the candlelight to examine it, lifted it to his nose, sniffed, then swirled the wine around before sniffing again, holding the bowl in his hands to warm it. Finally, he tasted it, moving the wine around in his mouth, savoring the flavors.
“Fantastic,” he said, then raised his glass in a toast. “To your old man.”
“To my old man,” I echoed. I sipped the wine. It tasted rich and earthy.
“Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, ninety-five,” said Jimmy. “A pretty good year for burgundy. That’s a six-hundred-dollar bottle of wine we’re drinking.”
“What are we celebrating?”
“The end.”
“Of what?”
“Of secrets and lies.”
I put my glass down. “So where do you want to begin?”
“With the dead baby,” he said. “With the first dead baby.”
Neither of them ha R ar of themd wanted to work the twelve-to-eight that week, but that was the way the cookie had crumbled, them was the breaks, or whatever other cliché one might have decided to apply to a situation when there was only one end of the stick to grasp, and it wasn’t the fragrant end. That evening, the precinct was holding a party at the Ukrainian National Home over on Second Avenue, which always smelled of borscht and pierogi and barley soup from the restaurant on the first floor, and where the director Sidney Lumet would rehearse his movies before begi
New Yorkthen wasn’t like it was now. In the summer of ’64, the racial tensions in the city had come to a head with the killing of fifteen-year-old James Powell in Harlem by an off-duty patrolman. What started out as orderly protests against the killing turned into riots on July 18, when a crowd gathered at the One-Two-Three in Harlem shouting, “Murderers!” at the cops inside. Jimmy and Will had been sent up as part of the reinforcements, bottles and bricks and garbage-can lids raining down on them, looters helping themselves to food and radios and even weapons from the neighborhood stores. Jimmy could still recall a police captain pleading with the rioters to go home, and hearing someone laugh and call back: “We are home, white boy!”
After five days of rioting in Harlem and Bed-Stuy, one person was dead, 520 had been arrested, and the writing was on the wall for Mayor Wagner. His days had already been numbered, even before the riots. The a
None of these concerns about the state of the city came as news to the men of the Ninth. The Ninth was affectionately known as “the Shithouse,” by those who served there, less so by everyone else. They were a law unto themselves, the men of that precinct, and they guarded their territory well, keeping an eye out not only for the bad guys but for some of the good guys too, like captains looking to kick ass on a slow day. “Fly in the Shithouse,” someone would call in over the radio, and then everyone would stand a little straighter for as long as was necessary.