Absent Friends

“A defense attorney? As if.” She could hear Reporter-Laura cheering her on. “But whatever he does know, he's too slippery to tell me.” Laura let contempt for the slippery leak into her voice. She looked Rosoff straight in the eye, to say: As opposed to my admiration for the blunt and straightforward, for any man brave enough to let the chips fall where they may.

Rosoff met Laura's stare, then cocked his head, as though he'd learn something if he saw her from a new angle. She didn't move. The window behind him was filled with black water and black sky, the lights of boats and stars and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. One of the cargo ships Laura had been watching from Angelo Zannoni's terrace was slipping into the distance, going to a new job in a new place. Laura wondered if it had finished the work it had come here to do, or if that job had been disrupted, ruined by the attacks, the collapse, the new world.

“Fuck,” Rosoff said. “You're gonna skewer this guy McCaffery no matter what, right?”

“I'm looking for the truth,” Laura declared. She rolled on before he could snarl out his thoughts on truth. “I think McCaffery had something to do with Jack Molloy's death and he's been paying off Mark Keegan's family ever since. I think the money's not his, and that means someone else was also involved, probably Spano. I think the investigation into all this is what led to the death of a reporter on my paper.”

“That guy who jumped off the bridge? That was suicide.”

“It was murder.”

Rosoff peered at her again and didn't speak. Hey, come on, Laura thought, you can't run out the clock like that, it's not fair.

Fair? Laura felt an icy wash slip over her skin as she heard Harry's voice, mocking and amused. After everything that's happened, Stone, you're still complaining when things aren't fair?

Rosoff snapped his head around to look in the direction Laura was looking, toward the window. Water lay flat and moonlight sparkled, boats drifted, the bridge stood. He spun back. “What's the matter with you? You look like you saw a ghost.”

A plane, Laura realized he meant. A jet banking low. Or an explosion in the harbor, a new billowing black cloud.

“Just thinking,” she managed. “Just remembering something.”

Under his breath Rosoff muttered, “Shit.”

“About McCaffery?” Laura prompted, trying to behave like the hard-edged reporter she'd been a few seconds ago, though her face was hot and her heart was pounding. Harry, she thought, for pity's sake, I'm working! Leave me alone! No! No, wait, no, don't!

“Harry Randall,” Rosoff said. “What makes you think the guy didn't jump?”

However much of Rosoff's time Laura had left, it wasn't enough to explain that. She settled on “I knew him.”

Rosoff's right hand scratched at something on the thumbnail of the left one. “Any other time,” he said, and he seemed to be talking as much to himself as to Laura, “I'd be happy to help. To see one of those showboat Fire Department pretty boys get what's coming to him, it wouldn't bother me in the least. Now . . .” He kept his eyes on his huge hands.

“Now,” he went on, “maybe this is bigger than him. What happened back then doesn't matter. What happened to that reporter doesn't matter. People look at these guys, they went running into that hellhole, didn't come out, people need them to be better than the rest of us. Even if this one beat his wife, that one cheated on his taxes. They're dead now. Anything bad McCaffery did, he's not gonna do it again. He's not a guy now, he's a legend. What's wrong with that?”

“Because someone killed Harry,” Laura said. “Because the truth matters. Even now.”

“What you're telling me,” Rosoff said, “you're not gonna stop.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Shit.” He stood. Laura thought he was going to march to the door, yank it open, and toss her out, but all he did was turn to face the window. “Well,” he said, his back to her, “what the fuck do I know? Maybe you're right. Maybe the truth does matter. Right now, only thing that matters to me is we catch the motherfuckers who did this. Pound them into ashes. But maybe someday I'll feel different. Maybe something else will start mattering again.”

He stood silent, his broad back unmoving. When he spoke, he did not face Laura.

“That story, that we were about to come down on Jack Molloy? Like you said, it was lies. That point in time, we had nothing different than we ever had, nothing that would've stuck. The story was planted, and I was never sure why. I don't know how it got to Keegan. But I've always been pretty sure it came from us.”

“From you?”

“In those days, it wasn't like now. Guys were in Al Spano's pocket. And the Molloys'. Tom, Jack, Big Mike—they all had their own guys, bought and paid for. Nothing I could do about those guys, the bent ones, but I kept an eye on them. There was one guy. Ted O'Hagan. Bad temper, sticky fingers. A real piece of work. He's dead now, four, five years. DUI, into a tree in Jersey.”

Laura waited, watching Rosoff watch the water.