“It doesn’t,” Larkin answered. “I just thought you’d appreciate knowing you’re being scammed out of money and good health.” He could hear Doyle rubbing his face, whiskers scraping against the palm of his hand.
Mable stamped out the cigarette in the ashtray, then pushed back and rolled across the floor to her desk once again. “That jab about being LGBT.”
“A statement of fact.”
“Do I look dykey to you?”
“You don’t look any way to me. One of the community’s growing problems, in my opinion, is the tendency to judge our own’s worthiness to be included, based on nothing more than physical appearance, an already widespread issue when set out among the heterosexual population.” Larkin finally raised his finger and pointed at the disaster of a desktop, although he didn’t look away from Mable. “Your wedding photo is highly visible.”
Mable’s brows furrowed. She looked at the 5x8 frame on the desk—herself in a white suit, arms wrapped around the waist of a black woman with dreads to the middle of her back who wore a hip-hugging white dress, both looking about a decade younger. Her defenses came down and Mable started laughing. “Monica’s been begging me to ditch the Marlboros. Wait ’til I tell her a pretty boy gay cop rode my ass about ’em too.” She shoved aside some junk and adjusted the frame. “We got married back in 2011, the day the Marriage Equality Act took effect in New York.” Mable looked at Larkin. Glanced at his ring. “How long you been married, detective?”
Larkin crossed his legs, folded his hands into his lap, and said in a clipped tone, “Four years.”
“It’s a work-in-progress that never ends, hmm?”
That’s enough bonding, Larkin thought. “The crabapple,” he prompted.
“Right, right.” Mable turned her attention to the computer. “That was the one near Shake Shack?”
“Yes.”
Mable clicked the mouse a few times. “What was it you needed to know?”
“When was it planted.”
She blew out a breath, shook her head, then swiveled in the chair and rocked her way toward the filing cabinets. “It’s a pretty old tree, as far as urban parks go. I don’t think that info is on the computer.” Mable yanked open a bottom drawer and began to sift through hanging folders.
The phone on her desktop rang.
“It certainly wasn’t Old Stumpy in age,” Mable was mumbling. “Remember him? I still get weepy.”
The phone kept ringing.
Mable shoved the drawer closed and yanked open a second. “It’s so silly—crying over a tree stump.”
The stink of the ashtray, the incessant ringing, the office that looked about to cave in on itself—the pandemonium of competing stimuli reached critical far quicker than Larkin anticipated. He lurched to his feet, spun around the chair, opened the office door, and stepped into the hallway. He grabbed the stairwell banister in both hands, closed his eyes, and took a few shallow breaths.
Doyle’s smoke-smooth voice said something to Mable that Larkin didn’t allow himself to decipher, and then the door quietly clicked shut and he joined Larkin. “Are you all right?”
Larkin nodded.
“It was a rhetorical question.”
“My answer was also rhetorical.”
“Okay.” Doyle let a handful of seconds pass before he asked, “Can I get you—?”
“No,” Larkin snapped. “I need a moment of quiet. That’s all.” He looked at Doyle. The other detective’s brows knitted together, but he said nothing further and returned to the office, announcing in an easygoing, everyone’s-best-friend tone that Larkin was taking a phone call.
Larkin closed his eyes again. He took a breath, counted, released it. His palms were sweaty against the banister, fingers aching from the white-knuckle grip. March 30 was not a good day.Perhaps even a bad day, Larkin considered. There were already too many associations—too many negative memories to now eat away at him every year, every spring, every March 30. The crack of thunder, the salty tear tracks, the insults and fights, the stink of Marlboros…. Larkin’s breathing escalated, pinpricks of cold heat spread across his chest like he was about to start dry heaving. He groped in his pocket, retrieved his phone, gripped it so tight that the plastic case protested. He pulled Dr. Myers up in his contacts—
Doyle’s laugh broke the escalation and gave pause to the grave Larkin was digging. Even muffled through the office door, Doyle had a top-shelf-whiskey sort of voice, with a heat in his words that pooled in Larkin’s belly as if he had actually been drinking. His breathing slowed. He put the phone away. It wasn’t a fix by any stretch of the imagination. More like a poorly patched pothole. One wrong move and he’d still fuck his suspension. But if Larkin were careful—very careful—he could drive this road—March 30—with the pleasantry of Doyle’s voice being a much-needed positive memory.
The door opened again. Larkin straightened and turned.
Doyle was staring at him. “She found the file.”
With the briefest nod of acknowledgment, Larkin slipped past Doyle and returned to the lone chair that, somehow, managed to look as if it were consumed by the landslide of shit even more than it had been—Larkin checked his watch—two minutes ago. He perched on the edge of the seat, laser-focused on Mable, who was turning discolored pages that had absolutely been spit out of a dot matrix printer. It said something as to departmental funding at the time.
