Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

Mary Catherine and I had been scrambling on such short notice to set it up. Not only did it turn out that Naomi’s only family, her stepmother, Monica McKeon-Chast, lived in South Florida, but the poor sixty-something had stage-four bladder cancer. I’d offered to somehow transport the body down to the feisty retired RN, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

Naomi’s life was being a cop, she had told me in one of our several phone conversations. “She’d never forgive me if she wasn’t buried in New York City.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell Monica how completely crappy the department was being to Naomi. My request for an honor guard, standard operating procedure for an in-the-line-of-duty death, had been flatly denied. The department, aka Starkie, was still treating the whole thing as a suicide.

Which was a complete disgrace. But then again, so was Starkie.

Mary Catherine and I arrived early at Riverside Funeral Home on Amsterdam Avenue, carrying two large flower arrangements. Needing all the help we could get, we’d also brought along Jane and Juliana, whom I’d taken out of school for the day. The girls had been up late arranging a collage of pictures of Naom

i that we had gathered from her apartment. Naomi with her college volleyball team, at the beach, at barroom birthday parties, her police academy photo. The girls had scanned them all onto a laptop and set it all to music, and it had come out amazing. They had really stepped up in trying to give poor Naomi a loving memorial. I couldn’t have been prouder of them.

We met director John Harrison in the somber, tasteful space’s carpeted hall, and he led us into the wood-paneled room where Naomi’s closed coffin had already been set up. After we placed the flowers behind it, I walked around with Mary Catherine and crossed myself as we knelt.

“I’m going to find the people who did this to you, Naomi,” I whispered into the steeple of my fingers after my prayers.

I was setting up the In Loving Memory cards by the sign-in book when Arturo texted me that he had just picked up Naomi’s stepmother, Monica, from LaGuardia.

What? She isn’t due for at least another hour!

I looked at my watch and stared at the rows of still-empty seats and went into full-blown panic mode.

Where the heck is everybody?

This situation was depressing enough. No way could we have this dying woman see her dead stepdaughter’s coffin in an empty room.

Mary Catherine and I started calling people, everyone, anyone. I called up the Harlem crew, Miriam Schwartz, several old partners. Since this was a three-alarm Catholic emergency, I got the Holy Name principal, Sister Sheilah, on the phone and told her the situation and hung up and called Seamus.

“Father, listen,” I said when he picked up. “I need help. I need a bagpiper yesterday. Riverside Funeral Home, Amsterdam Avenue.”

“Done. I know just the man,” Seamus said without missing a beat.

I could have kissed Brooklyn when she arrived ten minutes later with Robertson and seven other cops from the Twenty-Eighth Precinct, all of them in dress uniform. Right behind her was Doyle in a suit and tie with his pretty blond wife, Erin, and three couldn’t-be-cuter miniature Doyles in little suits.

I went out the funeral home’s open doors when I heard a shriek of metal, just in time to see Sister Sheilah getting off the Holy Name school bus with Eddie’s entire seventh-grade class. Behind the bus stopped a taxi, and out popped Seamus and Rory Murphy, one of Seamus’s drinking buddies, carrying an accordion.

“An accordion?” I whispered to Seamus as I spotted Arturo and Naomi’s stepmother turning the corner. “I said a bagpiper, old man! A bagpiper!”

“Ya gave me fifteen holy minutes’ notice!” Seamus cried as Rory started up “Amazing Grace” right there on the sidewalk. “You’re lucky it’s not that Times Square Naked Cowboy fella in his skivvies!”

CHAPTER 45

AFTER THE BURIAL THE next day, we had a little gathering at a place I loved called Emmett O’Lunney’s Irish Pub, near Times Square on Fiftieth between Eighth and Broadway. We almost knocked down the proprietor, Emmett, an old Bennett family friend, carrying a case of wine past the spacious restaurant’s wood-paneled foyer.

“Mike Bennett?!” ever-friendly Emmett said with a wide smile and a wink. “Where have you been hiding yourself? I was going to put out an APB on you. I haven’t seen you in what? A year? You’re not cheating on me with another bar, are you? No, wait, you’re on the wagon?”

“Emmett. What kind of Irishman do you take me for? No and heck no,” I said. “It’s a…well…a long story. Suffice it to say, I’m back now, and I’ll be more than glad to help you get rid of a little Guinness back inventory.”

Emmett’s dark-haired beauty of a wife, Debbie, was behind the bar pouring me a perfect pint when my phone rang. It was a call I’d been dreading. It was my family lawyer, Gunny Chung, calling me back.

“Mike, haven’t heard from you in too long,” Gunny said in his calm, kind voice as I went outside to take his call. “How is everyone? How’s Seamus and the kids? Have you driven off that saintly young lady, Mary Catherine, yet?”

“Not a chance, Gunny. Forgive me for getting right to the point, but I have a problem. It has to do with Chrissy’s adoption. I had a visit at the apartment last Wednesday from two men, a young guy and his lawyer. The young guy claims to be Chrissy’s father.”

“Hmmm,” Gunny said after a long pause. “What did they want?”

“The man said he wanted to see Chrissy,” I said. “He said he had just found out that he was the father and that he had a right to see her.”

“What did you say?” Gunny asked.