and Sugar had had their share of beefs in the past, in the three years since his retirement from the Dempsy PD he had become a first-rate gagger, one of a rarefied breed of PIs who, by creating dozens of false identities for themselves over the phone, could assemble a portfolio as thick as the Bible on anyone living or dead, without ever having to leave their apartment.
To various police departments around the country, to the IRS, to credit retrievers and to innumerable banks, he was an FBI agent doing a workup on a suspect. To the Central Insurance Bureau, he was a fraud investigator from Blue Cross needing a history of claims. Referencing the staff rosters of every public and private hospital from New York to California, he was an affiliated doctor compiling the medical history of a new patient; and to former employers he was either an executive headhunter needing off-the-record feedback on a potential recruit, or a political campaign manager doing a background check on a new volunteer.
The secret of his success, especially with the evening at-home calls to former employers and sometimes even neighbors and relatives, was that Sugar, like any halfway decent detective or journalist, knew that once you got people talking, the problem was to shut them up.
“So how’s the kid,” he asked, sliding into the chair across the table from her, an open box of Dunkin’ Donuts and a plastic punch bowl filled with off-season candy canes between them.
“Darren?” Nerese shrugged, tore off half a doughnut. “Darren’s Darren.”
Looking out the window over Bobby’s shoulder, she saw a Chinese restaurant cheek by jowl with a funeral home, four lanes of two-way traffic tearing up the blacktop down there like time was money.
“Neesy.” Bobby leaned over the dinette table, chest hair sprouting from the V neck of his T-shirt. “The thing to remember with kids? Is that they tend to outgrow themselves.”
She nodded as if in deep acceptance, although she had a hard time envisioning her son outgrowing anything save for his clothes. Nonetheless, in the last few years whenever Bobby Sugar had something to say about children Nerese always made a point of opening herself up to it.
This had not always been the case; in fact, when they had first worked out of the same detectives squad in the mid-nineties, whenever Sugar had occasion to open his mouth on anything, Nerese more often than not had been inclined to put her fist in it.
In October of ’95, when the O.J. verdict came in, Sugar had gone apoplectic at Nerese’s lack of outrage; Nerese dismissing his smokescreen tirade at the sorry state of American justice as what a friend of hers called soft bigotry. But when O.J. was finally nailed in civil court, they had actually wound up throwing punches in the squad room after she came in to work and found that he had plastered her desk and locker door with torn-out “Guilty” headlines from every newspaper in the New York–New Jersey area.
In response to her calling him a Ginny-assed redneck motherfucker that day as she was being dragged away by two other detectives in the squad, Sugar had pulled himself together, smoothed back his hair, readjusted the knot of his noose-yanked tie and said, “I’m not a racist. I’m an empiricist.”
Because she was embarrassed that she had no idea what that word meant, his declaration went a long way in momentarily cooling her off; but after consulting the dictionary that night, she came in the next day saying, “Empiricist, my ass. Some people just see what they want to see.”
After that, the two of them had barely made eye contact until the day, a year and a half later, when her then twelve-year-old son was rushed to the hospital with a ruptured appendix while she was stuck on an extradition assignment, picking up a fugitive rapist in California.
By the time she finally made it to the Dempsy Medical Center a full day and night after the surgery, she found Bobby Sugar at his bedside, the
To various police departments around the country, to the IRS, to credit retrievers and to innumerable banks, he was an FBI agent doing a workup on a suspect. To the Central Insurance Bureau, he was a fraud investigator from Blue Cross needing a history of claims. Referencing the staff rosters of every public and private hospital from New York to California, he was an affiliated doctor compiling the medical history of a new patient; and to former employers he was either an executive headhunter needing off-the-record feedback on a potential recruit, or a political campaign manager doing a background check on a new volunteer.
The secret of his success, especially with the evening at-home calls to former employers and sometimes even neighbors and relatives, was that Sugar, like any halfway decent detective or journalist, knew that once you got people talking, the problem was to shut them up.
“So how’s the kid,” he asked, sliding into the chair across the table from her, an open box of Dunkin’ Donuts and a plastic punch bowl filled with off-season candy canes between them.
“Darren?” Nerese shrugged, tore off half a doughnut. “Darren’s Darren.”
Looking out the window over Bobby’s shoulder, she saw a Chinese restaurant cheek by jowl with a funeral home, four lanes of two-way traffic tearing up the blacktop down there like time was money.
“Neesy.” Bobby leaned over the dinette table, chest hair sprouting from the V neck of his T-shirt. “The thing to remember with kids? Is that they tend to outgrow themselves.”
She nodded as if in deep acceptance, although she had a hard time envisioning her son outgrowing anything save for his clothes. Nonetheless, in the last few years whenever Bobby Sugar had something to say about children Nerese always made a point of opening herself up to it.
This had not always been the case; in fact, when they had first worked out of the same detectives squad in the mid-nineties, whenever Sugar had occasion to open his mouth on anything, Nerese more often than not had been inclined to put her fist in it.
In October of ’95, when the O.J. verdict came in, Sugar had gone apoplectic at Nerese’s lack of outrage; Nerese dismissing his smokescreen tirade at the sorry state of American justice as what a friend of hers called soft bigotry. But when O.J. was finally nailed in civil court, they had actually wound up throwing punches in the squad room after she came in to work and found that he had plastered her desk and locker door with torn-out “Guilty” headlines from every newspaper in the New York–New Jersey area.
In response to her calling him a Ginny-assed redneck motherfucker that day as she was being dragged away by two other detectives in the squad, Sugar had pulled himself together, smoothed back his hair, readjusted the knot of his noose-yanked tie and said, “I’m not a racist. I’m an empiricist.”
Because she was embarrassed that she had no idea what that word meant, his declaration went a long way in momentarily cooling her off; but after consulting the dictionary that night, she came in the next day saying, “Empiricist, my ass. Some people just see what they want to see.”
After that, the two of them had barely made eye contact until the day, a year and a half later, when her then twelve-year-old son was rushed to the hospital with a ruptured appendix while she was stuck on an extradition assignment, picking up a fugitive rapist in California.
By the time she finally made it to the Dempsy Medical Center a full day and night after the surgery, she found Bobby Sugar at his bedside, the
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