The Hard Way by Carol Lea Benjamin Page B

him a huge tip to buy his silence. He’d smiled and nodded, as if to say it was perfectly normal to take your dinner partner’s glass when he wasn’t looking, as if to say it happened every day of the week, no big deal. But when we left, I saw him watching us through the window, his own face reflected on the dark glass the way Eddie’s had been.

6
    I called the precinct in the morning and asked for the detective I’d met because his partner had named me executor of his will and then was found dead one day under mysterious circumstances. Since I’d hardly known his partner—I’d met him while doing pet-assisted therapy in a post-traumatic stress group shortly after 9/11—the detective had offered to have the department do the work, to relieve me of the burden. That had only made me more curious. I wanted to know why this man had chosen a perfect stranger to do the job that usually falls to family, and in the process I got to know more than I’d bargained for, including, to an extent, the man’s taciturn partner.
    â€œBrody,” he said when he picked up. I bet the windows still hadn’t been washed in the detectives’ squad room. I bet his ashtray was piled up as high as the famously tall gourmet food at the Gotham Bar & Grill, only incredibly less appetizing.
    â€œIt’s Rachel,” I told him, then quickly added, “I need a favor,” to keep it businesslike.
    I heard him strike a match—from the scratchy sound, he must have been using wooden ones. I heard his chair move, perhaps closer to the desk. I heard him clear his throat, too.
    â€œWhat can I do for you?” he asked as I remembered the odor of Old Spice, the same aftershave my father used to wear.
    â€œI have a set of fingerprints on a wineglass,” I said into the phone, trying to keep my voice neutral. “They belong to a young soldier who served in Iraq and is homeless now.”
    â€œAnd you think he committed a crime?”
    â€œNo, Michael, I think perhaps a crime might have been committed against him. He served his country and now he’s living on the street.”
    I heard the ashtray sliding across his desk.
    â€œAnyway, he doesn’t know who he is. He’s wearing an army jacket with a name over the pocket, but he says it’s not his name. He says the jacket may belong to someone else.”
    â€œIt may?”
    â€œHe’s an okay kid. And he seems to be thinking clearly. Except that he can’t remember his name and possibly much of anything about who he was and where he came from before Iraq. He’s lost some hearing, too. He says he was at the VA Hospital in Brooklyn. That’s about all I know so far. So I was wondering if you could run the prints, check with the army, find out what his name is.”
    â€œI could,” he said. “No problem.”
    There was nothing but silence on the line now. If he’d gone over to those dirty windows, he could have seen the gate to my cottage, but we might as well have been an ocean apart. Sometimes things happen between people that are the opposite of what happens in pet therapy. Instead of building a bridge with the help of a friendly dog, circumstances remove the bridge that was there, they burn it to the ground, the way the old warehouse where Eddie used to stay got gutted, nothing usable remaining.
    â€œYou say you have his prints on a wineglass?” he asked.
    â€œI do.”
    He didn’t ask why the prints were on a wineglass, or how I’d gotten them, given the fact that the man was homeless. He didn’t ask if the man was a wino, too, nor did he comment that most homeless people usually drank straight from the bottle, skipping not only the delicate aroma of the wine but the stemware as well.
    In fact, there was no small talk of any kind, no extraneous conversation at all. He’d started out that way when we met, but we’d gotten beyond it, to where we could talk