Empty Ever After by Reed Farrel Coleman Page A

He recognized me and flashed a smile that still had a lot of little kid in it. It was nice to see. I wasn’t sure there was a lot of that left in me.

    “Robby, right?”
    “That’s right, Mr. Prager.”
    I thanked him for helping with Katy.
    “Sheriff Vandervoort’s not around. I’m sorry. You want to leave him a note or something.”
    “No, thanks, that’s okay. Any results from the crime scene?” I asked just to make small talk.
    He hesitated. “No.”
    He smiled like a kid and lied like a kid. The job would beat that out of him soon enough.
    “Look, deputy, you saw my ex-wife this morning. You saw for yourself what this is doing to her. Just let me know so I can be prepared when the shit hits the fan. And it’s our secret. Sheriff Vandervoort will never know we even spoke about it.”
    “I shouldn’t. I’m on probation and this is the only job I’ve ever—”
    I put my hand on his shoulder. “Listen, kid, it’s up to you.”
    That did the trick.
    “There were some shoe impressions that didn’t match any of the elimination impressions,” he whispered as if Vandervoort was lurking. “They were men’s size nine running shoes that led away from the Maloney plot, across three adjoining plots, down into the stream.”
    “No big deal in that, right? Shit, in Janus alone, how many guys are out there with size nine running shoes?”
    “You don’t understand, Mr. Prager. These weren’t just any men’s size nine running shoes.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “These were Shinjo Olympians.”
    “Shinjos? I’ve never heard of—”
    “—Shinjos. That’s right.” He cut me off. “No one has. Not no one, very few people have. That’s because they stopped making the Olympians model in 1976 and the company went out of business is 1987.”
    “Thank you, deputy.”
    I about-faced. Robby said something to me, but the blood pounding in my ears was too loud for me to hear him. I sat in my front seat for what seemed like hours. The next thing I was fully conscious of was unlocking the door to my condo.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    THE SUN FILLED my rearview as I drove along the Belt Parkway to the Gowanus. This part of the Belt could be beautiful, especially in early morning. From Bay Parkway west, the roadway swooped along the shoreline and you could race with container or cruise ships sailing beneath the Verrazano and into the hungry mouth of New York Harbor. The deep blue of the water could seem almost structural and not a trick of light. In the orange of the sun the patches of rust on the skin of the gray bridge came alive. Not today. Today I was blind to beauty, to nearly everything, but I had made this drive so often I could do it in a coma.
    Aaron and I owned four stores. City On The Vine near the American Museum of Natural History was our first. Two years ago we ventured into the wilds of New Jersey and opened Que Shiraz in Marlboro. Red, White and You was our big volume location on Long Island. But our second store, Bordeaux In Brooklyn on Montague Street in the Heights, was closest to my house and to my heart. I’d run the store for years and even after I turned it over to a new manager, it was my base of operations. It was also less than three blocks away from the offices of Prager & Melendez Investigations, Inc. That was no accident. I had to go into the store, but I had other business first.
    When I got off the elevator at 40 Court, I found Devo doing yoga in the hallway outside our office door. Carmella and I picked 40 Court Street for practical reasons. Besides its proximity to the State Supreme Court Building and the Brooklyn Tombs, it was filled to the brim with law firms. Funny how cops have no use for lawyers until they’re off the job and looking for work. Then it’s no longer about them having use for lawyers, but lawyers having use for them. And if you are going to feed
off their scraps, you better have a good seat at the trough. 40 Court was front row, ringside, orchestra. Well over