changed.” I smiled at Dulcie, who was listening intently to my conversation. She reached out her hand. I saw the bandage and winced. “Do you want to talk to her?” I asked him.
“First tell me if you are okay. I know how you panic about her.”
The problem with still being friends with the man I used to be married to was that he wanted to know how I was, too.
“Like I said, it’s really only a minor burn. Here’s Dulcie.”
I handed my daughter the phone, and while she told her father the whole story, from the moment of impact with the soup, I tried to figure out why Cleo’s book was as much on my mind as anything else. A distraction? Something to dwell on other than the randomness of fate and the horror that I had to go on sending my daughter off to school every day not knowing when something else would happen to her?
“And then the doctor came and he looked at it,” Dulcie was saying, still only halfway through the story. She was making it dramatic, stringing it out and turning it into performance art for one-half of her best audience.
I was surprised that Cleo’s book had affected me as much as it had. I listened to people talking about sex all day, about their issues with their bodies and brains, and how they functioned or didn’t function. What was different about this woman and what she was saying?
As I watched my daughter, I realized my own armthrobbed. Ever since my child had been a baby, I’d experienced the same pain she did. I knew that it was psychosomatic and that if I worked on it, I most probably could stop it from happening. But I didn’t mind. She was my girl. I would have preferred to take all of her pain than to stop feeling it.
I motioned to Dulcie to wrap it up.
9
S aturday night Detective Noah Jordain had played piano till almost 12:00 a.m. in the same restaurant in Greenwich Village he had first found when he moved to New York City four years before.
He’d been homesick for New Orleans that night. And that led to him thinking about his father: a good cop whose name had been sullied and who’d died before he could clear it. Whoever had set up André Jordain, a thirty-year veteran of the New Orleans Police Department, might have thought he had gotten away with it, but Noah was still working on the case.
André and his partner, Pat Nagley, had busted a cocaine ring. It was cut-and-dried. Or so everyone thought. Until the defense attorney got the evidence thrown out of court by proving that André and Pat had been on the take, accepting payoffs from the dealer for five years until finally turning on the dealer when he refused to increase the payoffs.
There was a string of evidence presented that, on the surface, damned the two New Orleans detectives. But Noah knew, just as his mother and his brothers and sisters knew, it had all been fabricated. His father had upheld the law every day of his life. He’d been a devout Catholic and faithful husband. Yes, he drank too much sometimes, he could let his temper get the better of him, and he was a big flirt. But a bad cop? No way. The documents and evidence had to have been manufactured after the fact.
There was no question of collusion, and there was some connection between the drug dealer and someone higher up with more power than André Jordain. One day Noah would find out who’d been involved and clear his father’s name. He owed him that.
A year after the indictment, his father had died. A few months after that, Noah had broken up with his live-in girlfriend. His mother had three other sons and two daughters and six grandchildren around her. That left him free.
Noah had come to New York to get away from a police department that was as corrupt as often as it upheld the law, and so that he might see things more clearly from a distance. No, that was bullshit. At least he could be honest with himself. He had come to Manhattan to work the case from the New York angle, since there was evidence that the drug ring was tied to
“First tell me if you are okay. I know how you panic about her.”
The problem with still being friends with the man I used to be married to was that he wanted to know how I was, too.
“Like I said, it’s really only a minor burn. Here’s Dulcie.”
I handed my daughter the phone, and while she told her father the whole story, from the moment of impact with the soup, I tried to figure out why Cleo’s book was as much on my mind as anything else. A distraction? Something to dwell on other than the randomness of fate and the horror that I had to go on sending my daughter off to school every day not knowing when something else would happen to her?
“And then the doctor came and he looked at it,” Dulcie was saying, still only halfway through the story. She was making it dramatic, stringing it out and turning it into performance art for one-half of her best audience.
I was surprised that Cleo’s book had affected me as much as it had. I listened to people talking about sex all day, about their issues with their bodies and brains, and how they functioned or didn’t function. What was different about this woman and what she was saying?
As I watched my daughter, I realized my own armthrobbed. Ever since my child had been a baby, I’d experienced the same pain she did. I knew that it was psychosomatic and that if I worked on it, I most probably could stop it from happening. But I didn’t mind. She was my girl. I would have preferred to take all of her pain than to stop feeling it.
I motioned to Dulcie to wrap it up.
9
S aturday night Detective Noah Jordain had played piano till almost 12:00 a.m. in the same restaurant in Greenwich Village he had first found when he moved to New York City four years before.
He’d been homesick for New Orleans that night. And that led to him thinking about his father: a good cop whose name had been sullied and who’d died before he could clear it. Whoever had set up André Jordain, a thirty-year veteran of the New Orleans Police Department, might have thought he had gotten away with it, but Noah was still working on the case.
André and his partner, Pat Nagley, had busted a cocaine ring. It was cut-and-dried. Or so everyone thought. Until the defense attorney got the evidence thrown out of court by proving that André and Pat had been on the take, accepting payoffs from the dealer for five years until finally turning on the dealer when he refused to increase the payoffs.
There was a string of evidence presented that, on the surface, damned the two New Orleans detectives. But Noah knew, just as his mother and his brothers and sisters knew, it had all been fabricated. His father had upheld the law every day of his life. He’d been a devout Catholic and faithful husband. Yes, he drank too much sometimes, he could let his temper get the better of him, and he was a big flirt. But a bad cop? No way. The documents and evidence had to have been manufactured after the fact.
There was no question of collusion, and there was some connection between the drug dealer and someone higher up with more power than André Jordain. One day Noah would find out who’d been involved and clear his father’s name. He owed him that.
A year after the indictment, his father had died. A few months after that, Noah had broken up with his live-in girlfriend. His mother had three other sons and two daughters and six grandchildren around her. That left him free.
Noah had come to New York to get away from a police department that was as corrupt as often as it upheld the law, and so that he might see things more clearly from a distance. No, that was bullshit. At least he could be honest with himself. He had come to Manhattan to work the case from the New York angle, since there was evidence that the drug ring was tied to
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