After Her Read Free

didn’t.

 

    Chapter Two
    O ur father had earned a few medals in his days as a police officer, but it was being a detective that he loved. It was all about psychology, he told us. Reading a person’s character. This was what his own father had done, back in North Beach cutting hair and listening to his customers’ stories. Not so different from what my father did, when he’d bring a criminal into the interrogation room with the goal of getting him to confess.
    First you had to understand what made the person tick. Then you got inside, like a watchmaker.
    Among the detectives in the Marin Homicide Division—and beyond that, the greater San Francisco Bay Area, and probably beyond that too—it was known that nobody was better at breaking down a perpetrator than Anthony Torricelli. “His own mother could have had this secret she swore she was taking to her grave,” his friend Sal told me once. “Ten minutes in the room with Tony, she’d be crying into her hanky that she had sex with the milkman. That’s how good he was.”
    Not just good. The best.
    O NE OF THE SKILLS REQUIRED of a person if he or she is to be a first-class detective, our father told us ( he or she, he said; that was like him), was the ability to pay close attention. You had to know the questions to ask, and how to listen well when the answers came. You had to recognize when the person you were talking to was handing you a line, and spot all the things he wasn’t saying too.
    But as much as anything else, you had to pick up on all the things besides the words he handed you ( he or she; women could be criminals too after all, as well as objects of worship).
    You had to pick up on a person’s body language. Can they look you in the eye when they say where they were last night? What does it mean that their hand is on their hip, that they keep crossing and uncrossing their legs? Are they picking at their sleeve when they tell you they never heard of some guy named Joe Palooka that sold crack down in Hunters Point? Why is it their nails are chewed down to the quick, or past it? Widow Jones might be wearing black, but why is it that three days after the funeral she’s got a hickey on her neck?
    (That last observation of our father’s was nothing he ever shared with my sister and me, actually. I overheard that one when he was cutting Sal’s hair, and he was explaining to his friend how he broke a case in which the wife of some banker type got her lover to do him in for the insurance money. What our father forgot sometimes, when we were around, was that at least one of his daughters had inherited the attributes of a good detective herself. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: I pay attention.)
    My father didn’t stop paying attention when he went off duty either, if he ever went off duty, and I doubt he ever did. Most of all, he paid attention to women, but not in that way some men have, of turning their gaze to the breasts, or sizing up a woman’s rear end and grinning. He listened to what every woman he talked with had to say and seemed to take it seriously. He might like to see her naked, but he would also like to massage her feet or touch the skin on the inside of her wrist. He would ask about her children, if she had them, but he also made it plain that in his eyes, a woman was never simply a mother. She could be eighty, and he would still manage to locate the girl in her. I am not sure he ever met a woman he didn’t look at without picturing how it would be in bed with her.
    W E WERE AT A CONVENIENCE store one time. Buying cigarettes, his usual Lucky Strikes.
    â€œDon’t move,” he said to the woman behind the counter, with a sudden urgency that may have left her thinking this was a stickup.
    He reached over the counter toward the side of her face, and for a moment his hand seemed almost to disappear in her hair. When it emerged, he was holding an earring. So small