Later Page 8

  “Was it really cocaine?” I had also been crying, but didn’t realize it until I heard my voice come out all husky.

  “It was. And since you already know so much, I might as well tell you I tried it in college, just a couple of times. I tasted what was in the Baggie I found, and my tongue went numb. It was coke, all right.”

  “But it’s gone. She took it.”

  Moms know what kids are scared of, if they’re good moms. A critic might call that a romantic notion, but I think it’s just a practical fact. “She did and we’re fine. It was a nasty way to start the day, but it’s over. We’ll draw a line under it and move on.”

  “Okay, but…is Liz really not your friend anymore?”

  Mom used a dishtowel to wipe her face. “I don’t think she’s been my friend for quite awhile now. I just didn’t know it. Now get ready for school.”

  That night while I was doing my homework, I heard a glug-glug-glug coming from the kitchen and smelled wine. The smell was a lot stronger than usual, even on nights when Mom and Liz put away a lot of vino. I came out of my room to see if she’d spilled a bottle (although there had been no crash of glass) and saw Mom standing over the sink with a jug of red wine in one hand and a jug of white in the other. She was pouring it down the drain.

  “Why are you throwing it away? Did it go bad?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” she said. “I think it started to go bad about eight months ago. It’s time to stop.”

  I found out later that my mother went to AA for awhile after she broke up with Liz, then decided she didn’t need it. (“Old men pissing and moaning about a drink they took thirty years ago,” she said.) And I don’t think she quit completely, because once or twice I thought I smelled wine on her breath when she kissed me goodnight. Maybe from dinner with a client. If she kept a bottle in the apartment, I never knew where she stashed it (not that I looked very hard). What I do know is that in the years that followed, I never saw her drunk and I never saw her hungover. That was good enough for me.

  20

  I didn’t see Liz Dutton for a long time after that, a year or maybe a little more. I missed her at first, but that didn’t last long. When the feeling came, I just reminded myself she screwed my mom over, and bigtime. I kept waiting for Mom to have another sleepover friend, but she didn’t. Like ever. I asked her once, and she said, “Once burned, twice shy. We’re okay, that’s the important thing.”

  And we were. Thanks to Regis Thomas—27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list—and a couple new clients (one of them discovered by Barbara Means, who was by then full-time and actually ended up getting her name on the door in 2017), the agency was back on a firm footing. Uncle Harry returned to the care home in Bayonne (same facility, new management), which wasn’t great but better than it had been. Mom was no longer cross in the morning and she got some new clothes. “Have to,” she told me once that year. “I’ve lost fifteen pounds of wine-weight.”

  I was in middle school by then, which sucked in some respects, was okay in others, and came with one excellent perk: student athletes with no class during the last period of the day could go to the gym, the art room, the music room, or sign out. I only played JV basketball, and the season was over, but I still qualified. Some days I checked out the art room, because this foxy chick named Marie O’Malley occasionally hung out there. If she wasn’t working on one of her watercolors, I just went home. Walked if it was nice (on my own, it should go without saying), took the bus if it was nasty.

  On the day Liz Dutton came back into my life, I didn’t even bother looking for Marie, because I’d gotten a new Xbox for my birthday and I wanted to hit it. I was all the way down the walk and shouldering my backpack (no more one-armed tote for me; sixth grade was in the prehistoric past) when she called to me.

  “Hey, Champ, what the haps, bambino?”

  She was leaning against her personal, legs crossed at the ankles, wearing jeans and a low-cut blouse. It was a blazer over the blouse instead of a parka, but it still had NYPD on the breast and she flapped it open in the old way to show me her shoulder holster. Only this time it wasn’t empty.

  “Hi, Liz,” I mumbled. I looked down at my shoes and made a right turn onto the street.

  “Hold on, I need to talk to you.”

  I stopped, but I didn’t turn back to her. Like she was Medusa and one look at her snaky head would turn me to stone. “I don’t think I should. Mom would be mad.”

  “She doesn’t need to know. Turn around, Jamie. Please. Looking at nothing but your back is just about killing me.”

  She sounded like she really felt bad, and that made me feel bad. I turned around. The blazer was closed again, but I could see the bulge of her gun just the same.

  “I want you to take a ride with me.”

  “Not a good idea,” I said. I was thinking of this girl named Ramona Sheinberg. She was in a couple of my classes at the beginning of the year, but then she was gone and my friend Scott Abramowitz told me her father snatched her during a custody suit and took her to someplace where there was no extradition. Scott said he hoped it was at least a place with palm trees.

  “I need what you can do, Champ,” she said. “I really do.”

  I didn’t reply to that, but she must have seen I was wavering, because she gave me a smile. It was a nice one that lit up those gray eyes of hers. They weren’t a bit sleety that day. “Maybe it will come to nothing, but I want to try. I want you to try.”

  “Try what?”

  She didn’t answer, not then, just held out a hand to me. “I helped your mother when Regis Thomas died. Won’t you help me now?”

  Technically, I was the one who helped my mother that day, Liz just gave us a quick ride up the Sprain Brook Parkway, but she had stopped to buy me a Whopper when Mom just wanted to push on. And she gave me the rest of her Coke when my mouth was so dry from talking. So I got in the car. I didn’t feel good about it, but I did it. Adults have power, especially when they beg, and that’s what Liz was doing.

  I asked Liz where we were going, and she said Central Park to start with. Maybe a couple of other places after that. I said if I didn’t get home by five, Mom would be worried. Liz told me she’d try to get me back before then, but this was very important.

  That’s when she told me what it was about.

  21

  The guy who called himself Thumper set his first bomb in Eastport, a Long Island town not all that far from Speonk, one-time home of Uncle Harry’s Cabin (literary joke). This was in 1996. Thumper dropped a stick of dynamite hooked up to a timer in a trash can outside the restrooms of the King Kullen Supermarket. The timer was nothing but a cheap alarm clock, but it worked. The dynamite went off at 9 PM, just as the supermarket was closing. Three people were hurt, all store employees. Two of them suffered only superficial injuries, but the third guy was coming out of the men’s when the bomb blew. He lost an eye and his right arm up to the elbow. Two days later, a note came in to the Suffolk County Police Department. It was typed on an IBM Selectric. It said, How do you like my work so far? More to come! THUMPER.

  Thumper set nineteen bombs before he actually killed anybody. “Nineteen!” Liz exclaimed. “And it wasn’t as if he wasn’t trying. He set them all over the five boroughs, and a couple in New Jersey—Jersey City and Fort Lee—for good measure. All dynamite, Canadian manufacture.”

  But the score of the maimed and wounded was high. It had been closing in on fifty when he finally killed the man who picked the wrong Lexington Avenue pay phone. Every kaboom was followed by a note to the police responsible for the area where said kaboom occurred, and the notes were always the same: How do you like my work so far? More to come! THUMPER.

  Before Richard Scalise (that was the pay phone man’s name), a long period of time went by before each new explosion. The two closest were six weeks apart. The longest delay was close to a year. But after Scalise, Thumper sped up. The bombs became bigger and the timers more sophisticated. Nineteen explosions between 1996 an
d 2009—twenty, counting the pay phone bomb. Between 2010 and the pretty May day in 2013 when Liz came back into my life, he set ten more, wounding twenty and killing three. By then, Thumper wasn’t just an urban legend, or an NY1 staple; by then he was nationwide.

  He was good at avoiding security cameras, and those he couldn’t avoid just showed a guy in a coat, sunglasses, and a Yankees cap pulled down low. He kept his head low, too. Some white hair showed around the sides and back of the cap, but that could have been a wig. Over the seventeen years of his “reign of terror,” three different task forces were organized to catch him. The first one disbanded during a long break in his “reign,” when the police assumed he was finished. The second disbanded after a big shakeup in the department. The third started in 2011, when it became clear Thumper had gone into overdrive. Liz didn’t tell me all this on our way to Central Park; I found it out later, as I did so many other things.

  Finally, two days ago, they got the break in the case they’d been waiting and hoping for. Son of Sam was caught by a parking ticket. Ted Bundy got caught because he forgot to put his headlights on. Thumper—real name Kenneth Alan Therriault—was nailed because a building super had a minor accident on trash day. He was wheeling a dolly loaded with garbage cans down an alley to the pickup point out front. He hit a pothole and one of the cans spilled. When he went to clean up the mess, he found a bundle of wires and a yellow scrap of paper with CANACO printed on it. He might not have called the police if that had been all, but it wasn’t. Attached to one of the wires was a Dyno Nobel blasting cap.

  We got to Central Park and parked with a bunch of regular cop cars (another thing I found out later is that Central Park has its own precinct, the 22nd). Liz put her little cop sign on the dashboard and we walked down 86th Street for a little while before turning onto a path that led to the Alexander Hamilton Monument. That’s one thing I didn’t find out later; I just read the fucking sign. Or plaque. Whatever.

  “The super took a picture of the wires, the scrap of paper, and the blasting cap with his phone, but the task force didn’t get it until the next day.”

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  “Right. As soon as we saw it, we knew we had our guy.”

  “Sure, because of the blasting cap.”

  “Yeah, but not just that. The scrap of paper? Canaco is a Canadian company that manufactures dynamite. We got a list of all the building’s tenants, and eliminated most of them without any fieldwork, because we knew we were looking for a male, probably single, and probably white. There were only six tenants who checked all those boxes, and only one guy who’d ever worked in Canada.”

  “Googled ’em, right?” I was getting interested.

  “Right you are. Among other things, we found Kenneth Therriault has dual citizenship, U.S. and Canada. He worked all sorts of construction jobs up there in the great white north, plus fracking and oil shale sites. He was Thumper, pretty much had to be.”

  I only got a quick look at Alexander Hamilton, just enough to read the sign and note his fancy pants. Liz had me by the hand and was leading me toward a path a little way beyond the statue. Pulling me, actually.

  “We went in with a SWAT team, but his crib was empty. Well, not empty empty, all his stuff was there, but he was gone. The super didn’t keep his big discovery to himself, unfortunately, although he was told to. He blabbed to some of the residents, and the word spread. One of the things we found in the apartment was an IBM Selectric.”

  “That’s a typewriter?”

  She nodded. “Those babies used to come with different type elements for different fonts. The one in the machine matched Thumper’s notes.”

  Before we get to the path and the bench that wasn’t there, I need to tell you some other stuff I found out later. She was telling the truth about how Therriault finally tripped over his dick, but she kept talking about we. We this and we that, but Liz wasn’t a part of the Thumper task force. She had been part of the second task force, the one that ended in the big departmental shakeup when everybody was running around like chickens with their heads cut off, but by 2013 all Liz Dutton had left in the NYPD was a toehold, and only that much because cops have a kickass union. The rest of her was already out the door. Internal Affairs was circling like buzzards around fresh roadkill, and on the day she picked me up from school, she wouldn’t have been put on a task force dedicated to catching serial litterbugs. She needed a miracle, and I was supposed to be it.

  “By today,” she went on, “every cop in the boroughs had Kenneth Therriault’s name and description. Every way out of the city was being monitored by human eyeballs as well as cameras—and as I’m sure you know, there’s plenty of cameras. Nailing this guy, dead or alive, became our number one priority, because we were afraid he might decide to go out in a blaze of glory. Maybe setting off a bomb in front of Saks Fifth Avenue, or in Grand Central. Only he did us a favor.”

  She stopped and pointed at a spot beside the path. I noticed the grass was beaten down, as if a lot of people had been standing there.

  “He came into the park, he sat down on a bench, and he blew his brains out with a Ruger .45 ACP.”

  I looked at the spot, awestruck.

  “The bench is at the NYPD Forensics Lab in Jamaica, but this is where he did it. So here’s the big question. Do you see him? Is he here?”

  I looked around. I had no clue what Kenneth Alan Therriault looked like, but if he’d blown his brains out, I didn’t think I could miss him. I saw some kids throwing a Frisbee for their dog to chase (the dog was off his leash, a Central Park no-no), I saw a couple of lady runners, a couple of ’boarders, and a couple of old guys further down the path reading newspapers, but I didn’t see any guy with a hole in his head, and I told her that.

  “Fuck,” Liz said. “Well, all right. We’ve got two more chances, at least that I can see. He worked as an orderly at City of Angels Hospital on 70th—quite a comedown from his construction days, but he was in his seventies—and the apartment building where he lived is in Queens. Which do you think, Champ?”

  “I think I want to go home. He might be anyplace.”

  “Really? Didn’t you say they hang around places where they spent time when they were alive? Before they, I don’t know, pop off for good?”

  I couldn’t remember if I’d said that to her, exactly, but it was true. Still, I was feeling more and more like Ramona Sheinberg. Kidnapped, in other words. “Why bother? He’s dead, right? Case closed.”

  “Not quite.” She bent down to look me in the eye. She didn’t have to bend so far in 2013, because I was getting taller. Nowhere near the six feet I am now, but a couple of inches. “There was a note pinned to his shirt. It said, There’s one more, and it is a big one. Fuck you and see you in hell. It was signed THUMPER.”

  Well, that kind of changed things.

  22

  We went to City of Angels first, because it was closer. There was no guy with a hole in his head out front, just some smokers, so we went in through the Emergency Room entrance. A lot of people were sitting around in there, and one guy was bleeding from the head. The wound looked like a laceration to me rather than a bullet hole, and he was younger than Liz said Kenneth Therriault was, but I asked Liz if she could see him, just to be sure. She said she could.

  We went to the desk, where Liz showed her badge and identified herself as an NYPD detective. She asked if there was a room where the custodians put their stuff and changed their clothes for their shifts. The lady at the desk said there was, but the other police had already been there and cleaned out Therriault’s locker. Liz asked if they were still there and the lady said no, the last of them left hours ago.

  “I’d like to grab a quick peek, anyway,” Liz said. “Tell me how to get there.”

  The lady said to take the elevator down to B level and turn right. Then she smiled at me and said, “Are you helping your mom in her investigations today, young man?”

  I thought of saying Well, she’s not my mom, but I guess I am
helping because she hopes that if Mr. Therriault is still hanging around, I’ll see him. Of course that wouldn’t fly, so I was stuck.

  Liz wasn’t. She explained that the school nurse thought I might have mono, so this seemed like a chance to get me checked out and visit Therriault’s place of work at the same time. Two birds with one stone type of deal.

  “You’d probably do better with your own doctor,” the desk lady said. “This place is a madhouse today. You’ll wait for hours.”

  “That’s probably best,” Liz agreed. I thought how natural she sounded, and what a smooth liar she was. I couldn’t decide if I was grossed out or admiring. I guess a little of both.

  The desk lady leaned forward. I was fascinated by how her extremely large bazams shoved her papers forward. It made me think of an icebreaker boat I’d seen in a movie. She lowered her voice. “Everyone was shocked, let me tell you. Ken was the oldest of all the orderlies, and the nicest. Hardworking and willing to please. If someone asked him to do something, he was always happy to do it. And with a smile. To think we were working with a killer! Do you know what it proves?”

  Liz shook her head, clearly impatient for us to be on our way.

  “That you never know,” the desk lady said. She spoke like someone who’s imparting a great truth. “You just never know!”

  “He was good at covering up, all right,” Liz said, and I thought, It takes one to know one.

  In the elevator, I asked, “If you’re on a task force, how come you’re not with the task force?”

  “Don’t be dumb, Champ. Was I supposed to take you to the task force? Having to make up a story about you at the desk was bad enough.” The elevator stopped. “If anyone asks about you, remember why you’re here.”

  “Mono.”

  “Right.”

  But there was no one to ask. The custodian’s room was empty. It had yellow tape saying POLICE INVESTIGATION KEEP OUT across the door. Liz and I ducked under it, her holding my hand. There were benches, a few chairs, and about two dozen lockers. Also a fridge, a microwave, and a toaster oven. There was an open box of Pop Tarts by the toaster oven, and I thought I wouldn’t have minded a Pop Tart just then. But there was no Kenneth Therriault.