Mildred Pierced Read Free

“Life is wonderful.”
    Corso shook his head and laughed, but it sounded more like a grunt.
    It didn’t take much to make him laugh. He had been born with the looks of a bewildered bull. I was a flat-nosed former cop pushing fifty who looked more like a backup thug in a gangster picture than a leading man. I lived from client to client and sometimes kept from getting behind on my rent by filling in for a vacationing or sick house detective in one of the downtown hotels.
    I started for the stairs when he waved me back.
    “She’s in the hospital again,” Corso said softly, looking at the family of four sitting on the bench patiently to be sure they weren’t listening.
    “She” was my brother Phil’s wife, Ruth, the mother of my two nephews, Nathan and David, and my four-year-old niece, Lucy. Ruth had been sick for almost two years, in and out of the hospital, almost not making it out the last two times. I had been at their house two Sundays ago. There was almost nothing left of Ruth, yet she had made dinner and tried to pay attention to the conversation. We had listened to The Aldrich Family , or pretended to.
    “How bad?” I asked.
    Corso shrugged.
    “Don’t know. Can’t be good. Thought you should know before you went up to see him. You know?”
    I knew. Phil didn’t accept frustration, which was most of the reason he had been reduced from captain to lieutenant a little over a year earlier. Death was an enemy. Every criminal on both sides of the prison walls was an enemy. When I wasn’t being careful, I was a convenient focus for his rage. He wasn’t going gently into that good night, and he wouldn’t let anyone else, either.
    “I’ll be careful,” I told Corso and tapped my palm on his desk.
    “Just thought you should know,” he said.
    I nodded and went up the wooden stairs to the landing and into the squad room. It was a quiet morning. There were nine desks in the space designed for six desks. Along the door by the wall was a wooden bench. No one was sitting on it. Four of the desks had cops behind them. Two were typing reports. Two were talking to victims, witnesses, or suspects. It was hard to tell since both of the people in the chairs next to the desks were young Mexicans who looked decidedly unhappy. The rest of the cops were probably out on the street.
    The squad room didn’t smell or look as bad as it usually did. The walls hadn’t been cleaned, but the floor was relatively free of crumpled paper, cigarette packs, and candy wrappers. The windows seemed to be letting in a little more light, but not enough.
    I crossed the room behind the desks and knocked at the door of my brother’s office. No answer. I knocked again. No answer. I opened the door.
    Phil’s office was about twice the size of mine, which meant his office was small. It looked as if a Benedictine monk had furnished it. Two chairs. A desk. One window behind the desk. Nothing on the walls. The office of a man who could empty his drawers into a box and be moved out in two minutes or less.
    Phil sat behind the desk, his back to me, hands behind his head looking out of the window at nothing.
    “Did I say ‘come in’?” he said evenly. Definitely a bad sign.
    “No.”
    I left it at that. He sighed, rubbed the military-style short gray hair on his head and swiveled toward me. He was twenty pounds heavier than I was, five years older, and made up in weary hardness what he lacked in homeliness.
    He was wearing suspenders today over a white shirt. He folded his hands on the desk and looked up at me.
    “Sit down,” he said.
    I sat. I said nothing. He said nothing. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. This was a tranquil Phil I had never seen before. I didn’t like it. I didn’t trust it.
    “Can I take you out for lunch?” I asked.
    “Too early. Not hungry.”
    “Can I get you a coffee?”
    “You know about Ruth?” he said.
    “Yeah.”
    “I’m taking some time off to be with her.” He looked down at his hands. “She