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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2017
Marty is waiting for me in the parking lot. I know he’s nervous because he can’t keep his hands off the buttons of his coat and from across the parking lot I can see that his forehead is creased with worry. He’s wearing one of his beige suits that looks like it time-traveled from 1972, and he’s even got a tie on, brown, with rust-colored flowers, ugly as sin.
Martin Cascic is the commander of the Suffolk County Homicide Squad, and my boss. He’s also my friend and I feel a little guilty prick of conscience that he has to take this meeting because of me. I’ve brought him a danish to make up for it. “Here you go,” I say handing it over. “It’s pineapple.”
He nods. Pineapple danish from a deli on New York Avenue is his favorite, for some reason I can’t even begin to fathom, and he takes a giant greedy bite of it, knocks a few crumbs off his chin, then opens his car door and puts the rest of the pastry on the dash. “Ready?” he asks me.
“As I’ll ever be.” We look up at the front of the county building. The district attorney’s office is in the Suffolk County office building complex in Hauppauge. The building looks like a concrete egg carton; it’s hard to believe anyone ever thought people would want to work in a building like that.
We do the ID-and-metal-detector routine, check our service weapons, and head to the second floor. District Attorney John J. “Jay” Cooney Jr. steps out to greet us, a big smile on his face. He’s an objectively nice-looking man, no way around it, with a squared-off head; full, thick hair that’s still mostly light brown though he’s past fifty now; a narrow, aristocratic nose; and eyes a startling shade of blue. If his mouth were a different shape, he’d look like a Kennedy, and he’s got a little of that charisma. There’s something robust yet elegant about him; his suits fit perfectly, his shoes are perpetually shiny, and he always looks like he’s just had a fresh shave. I once saw him running an electric razor over his face in the back of a car just before a press conference. I’ve never been inside his house, but I suspect the décor involves a lot of whales. He’s a Republican, but a moderate one, and before this past November, he usually got a lot of Democrats to vote for him, too. It’s dicier now. But the fact that his father, John J. Cooney Sr., known as Jack, was a longtime Suffolk County judge and then DA before him doesn’t hurt; voting Cooney for DA is a habit around here.
“Please sit down,” Cooney says. “Do you want coffee?”
Marty does, but he shakes his head. I shake my head, too, because I’ve had the coffee here before and know it’s bad. Cooney even once told me he knows it’s bad, which made me like him a tiny bit more than I did before, which still wasn’t much.
He doesn’t say anything else, so Marty gets us going. “Jay, thanks for agreeing to meet with us. As you know, Maggie has some questions about your decision not to charge Frank Lombardi. Maggie, do you want to explain the new information you have?”
I’ve been practicing all morning. I know I need to keep my voice even, my emotions in check. But the office is too warm, the old furnace chugging away in the basement of the building.
I fix my gaze on the family photo behind Cooney’s desk to try to keep myself calm. It shows Cooney and his wife with their three children, two teenage girls and a boy of about ten, all wearing matching white outfits on a beach somewhere. Right in the middle are an older couple, also wearing white. I focus on the black Lab sitting in front of them, its tongue lolling. The frame around the picture is polished sterling silver, simple, masculine. Cooney’s office is drab, painted beige, standard-issue desk and chair from the ’90s, and the frame and the picture clash with their surroundings. Jay Cooney’s not your average civil servant, I think they’re meant to convey.
“I know the statute of limitations on the rape charge is up,” I say. “But I’ve been thinking about something. I think we might have a good case against Frank for impeding a criminal investigation. Even though the case was being investigated in Ireland, there was an initial report made by my uncle to the Suffolk County P.D. and later to the FBI. The Garda told him to do it. Now, that case was never closed and so any actions by Frank over the past twenty years would be within the scope of what we could charge.” I hand him a folder filled with typed notes. “I had a conversation with someone who is willing to testify that Frank asked someone who had been at the party to keep quiet about it as recently as five years ago, and I can—”
Cooney’s been sitting on his desk, leaning back and pretending to listen, but now he stands and says, “Maggie, let me just stop you there. I know this has been a hard time for your family, and I know you want to see justice, but we made the decision not to pursue any charges against your ex-brother-in-law here and I don’t want to waste your time. It’s not here. The evidence, the legal basis, none of it.” He waves the folder in the air. “Too much time has passed, and pursuing something so … uncertain takes resources away from the cases we can win.”
I try to keep my voice upbeat, collaborative, as they say. “But if you’ll just read what I have. I talked to one of Erin’s classmates, who was at the—”
He smiles sadly. “Maggie. Please. We have limited resources, limited manpower. We need to focus it on more recent crimes. The MS13 threat is growing in Suffolk County. You know that better than anyone. And there are bad people out there, people who are committing crimes now. Let’s work together to direct our resources toward getting those people.”
Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Stewart Taylor
