Man of the Year

by Caroline Louise Walker

  “Come on, Simone.”

  “The medical examiner’s office called this morning. Did you know that?”

  “No.” I step toward her. She doesn’t cower. She doesn’t move away from the door like she ought to. “What did they want?”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t called back yet. Guy named Walsh wants to talk to me though.”

  “I’m sure he wanted to talk to me.”

  “He asked for me by name.”

  “Fine. Call him.”

  “I will.”

  I’d like to scream, What is it you want from me? while shaking her hard against the wall, but I’m not sure what’s happening here. “Well,” I manage, “maybe you don’t have to be so by-the-book if they ask those things.”

  “No?”

  “You can just keep that stuff between us, because even though there is nothing to hide, I’d forgotten about that appointment completely. Forgot to mention it to the first responders. It’s an irrelevant detail that would only complicate a simple tragedy. Nick needed a checkup, so I did him a favor. That’s all. If we give people a reason to overthink it, they will.”

  “Oh yes. I imagine they will.”

  “So you’ll keep that to yourself?”

  “Sure.” With that, she stands tall, smiles, uncrosses her arms and becomes herself again. “I just wanted to be sure I understood what you meant when you assured me I’ll finish first. Whose integrity I’m protecting if I stay in the race. It’s much clearer now.” She smiles. “Don’t worry about a thing. Have I ever let you down?”

  “Never,” I say.

  “Then let’s keep this entire conversation between us.”

  “That sounds great.”

  “Excellent.” She glances at her watch. “Oh man. It’s almost eight. Better get to it.” She opens the door, and with the perkiest smile—the old Simone I know and love—says, “Why don’t you take care of that flower situation yourself.”

  • • •

  Six physicals in one day. One mononucleosis follow-up, one viral conjunctivitis, one set of stitches. One Munchausen by proxy. One epileptic not tolerating his meds. One migraine. One livewire running reception. Simone wouldn’t. Would she? My schedule is too full to allow for obsession, but even as I say, What hurts? or How’s your quality of life? and even as I tell myself I’m fine, a choir congregates in the back of my head, warming up discordant layers of unintelligible phrases: little voices rehearsing a fugue in my mind. And I’m not fine.

  When you hear hoofbeats . . .

  Kill ’em with kindness . . .

  Shut it down . . .

  Finish first . . .

  [Laughter. Applause.]

  Do you know who I am?

  “Salt of the earth . . .”

  “Dr. Hart, what did you do?”

  “Investigator Walsh, please,” I tell the operator who answers the number on Zebadiah Walsh’s business card. “Dr. Robert Hart calling in regard to Nick Carpenter’s death. Yes, I’ll hold.”

  If I’d handled things before they got bad, like Ray suggested, I wouldn’t have had to resort to psychological torture, and Nick wouldn’t have fulfilled his own prophecy, so I wouldn’t be in this mess. Fool me once and all that. It won’t happen again. This time, I’ll engage the preemptive strike. I won’t wait for Simone to defame me or worse.

  “Walsh,” the guy says.

  “Robert Hart here. Returning your call.”

  “I didn’t call you,” he tells me.

  “You didn’t? But—” Strategic pause. “Oh God. This is so Simone.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My secretary, Simone. She told me you called for me, which didn’t make sense, and now I know why. She’s easily confused. Happens all the time. Too many names and faces, day in and day out, I guess. So sorry to bother you.”

  “No bother.”

  Walsh doesn’t mention the fact that he called Simone this morning. Ah, so he’s the type of guy who gets people to talk by saying nothing. I’m not falling for that, but I ask, “While I have you on the line, maybe you can tell me if you’ve heard about funeral arrangements?”

  “Services won’t be until the end of the week,” Walsh says. “Up in Bovina.”

  “Catskills, huh?”

  “That’s right. Your boy can fill you in. Investigation should wrap up before too long.”

  “Investigation?” I ask. “What’s to investigate?”

  “Cause of death.”

  Dumbed down by death and its dealings, I say, “Oh. We figured it was obvious he jumped off the roof.”

  “Jumped or fell. Those are modes of death, though, not methods. As a doctor, you can appreciate the distinction. We need to determine specificity: whether he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol, whether he had any medical conditions that might have caused him to lose consciousness, whether he could have slipped and fallen—and then what actually did it. Head injury, cardiac arrest. You know, specifically.”

  “I hadn’t thought of those things. Seemed cut-and-dry.”

  “Probably is. Occam’s razor. Investigations are standard for all unnatural deaths. Can I do anything else for you, Mr. Hart?”

  “Doctor, actually. Dr. Hart.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No,” I say. “That’s all for now.” I hang up and open the door to find Simone standing in front of me with her fist raised, poised to knock. “Had to take a call,” I tell her. “Medical examiner’s office.”

  “Zeb Walsh?” she asks. “Nice guy, right?” She doesn’t tell me how she knows this, when she spoke to him, what she said or didn’t, what her game is, just, “Your four o’clock is getting impatient.”

  I check my watch. 4:26. “Send her in.”

  Alexis

  4:27.

  Off the clock at five and still a mountain of paperwork to file.

  “You coming out tonight, Diaz?” Lincoln asks me. Such a twinkle-in-the-eye kind of guy.

  “Not tonight,” I say.

  He laughs. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  It’s a joke at this point. People want me to share their social lives, because they like their social lives and can’t imagine people not liking what they like. My personal life might as well be string theory—a way of thinking about existence that doesn’t jive with their concept of reality. Brains break around here when I say I’m happy on my own.

  If these guys weren’t so annoying, I might be impressed by how hard they work to interpret my independence as low self-esteem. Randos like to tell me, unsolicited, that I’m a catch. They say it like I need convincing, which breaks my brain, because yeah, no shit, I’m a catch. Doesn’t mean I want to be caught. Definitely not by a colleague’s sister’s coworker’s friend’s tutor’s ex, who’s “really nice,” just not the tutor’s type.

  “Maybe tomorrow, maybe not,” I tell Lincoln—and fine, I admit it feels good to be invited, despite the odds.

  “Suspense.” He rolls his eyes. “See you tomorrow, Alexis.”

  Four thirty. Half an hour to knock this out.

  Top of the pile: traffic citation from the weekend. Tedium.

  Robert Hart. The rainy day guy. Kind of an ass. Where do I know that name? I log into our system and track down his file. Clean record, but his name comes up in conjunction with a recent incident report. Very recent. Fatal accident. Well, shit. So that’s where I know his name.

  This morning’s paper is still in my wastebasket. I shake off the dirty Kleenex and rice cake dust, open to the local page and find the death announcement under the “pending” section of the obits. There’s no funeral scheduled yet, no details or picture, but I google the dead kid and find his photo online in seconds.

  “Whoa,” I say out loud. Chicken skin on my arms and legs. Creepy for no other reason than just knowing I laid eyes on a kid in his last days or hours. I should have looked harder. Poor kid seemed bored. Tired. Depression looks like that: boredom, fatigue.

  I revisit the accident report. Responding officer: Micha
el Buchanan. Not a close friend, but friendly enough for me to feel comfortable visiting the Investigations Unit and interrupting his game of sudoku. “Hey,” I say. “Just saw your report about the fatality response yesterday.”

  “Oh man.” He shakes his head. “Gruesome.”

  “Mind if I ask what happened?”

  “Waiting for the autopsy.”

  “Accident?”

  “Might be an accident. Probably suicide. Strange deal, the way he threw himself against the banister, but I’ve seen stranger.”

  “Strange how?”

  He crinkles his face and says, “Why are you so interested?”

  “Not sure yet if I am interested. Strange how?”

  He smiles, like I said something cute. Cute, like a little kid. “Well, okay. There’s no good reason for him to have been up there teetering at the steepest point if not to tempt fate and gravity. The homeowner says he called the roof a ‘death trap’ and ‘suicide central’ in front of the kid days earlier. Gave me a list of four witnesses, plus the man’s wife and son, who were all there and heard it. Jumping from thirty feet isn’t exactly a sure thing, but finding the key and sneaking up are deliberate moves, right? Sad either way you cut it. Walsh at the ME is the lead investigator. We’ll see what he comes up with.”

  I nod. And then, I don’t know why, but I get curious. “Does the kid have family here?”

  “Funny you should ask. Hardly any family at all. His life was one tragedy after another.”

  Depression. Suicide. Serial tragedies. He was just a kid, too young for this shit. “Any chance I can take a peek at the report?”

  “What’s up with you? Do you know the guy or something?”

  “No, but I detained the homeowner the other day for a traffic stop and that kid was with him.”

  Buchanan squints and tilts his head and says, “You should have led with that.” But I guess he’s curious, too, because he rotates his laptop so I can read the incident report, so he can watch me read it. “Doubt it was him,” he says. “Homeowner hadn’t seen the Carpenter kid since Friday.”

  “That’s not true, actually. I saw them together on Saturday.”

  “You ID the kid?”

  “No. But it was him.”

  “You should have asked for identification.”

  “Well, I identified him with my eyeballs. Also, there’s probably dashcam footage.”

  “Probably, but the son is the same age and build. Video from the rear of the vehicle won’t help much.”

  “I mean, we could check.”

  “Nah.”

  I widen my eyes and thrust my head like a goddamn pigeon. “Hello? I’m standing here telling you that I saw the dead kid in that car on Saturday morning, and the homeowner was driving. What part of that isn’t registering?”

  Buchanan gets righteous with how composed he is. So cool and calm, with a little smile, when he reclaims his laptop, turns it back around, nods and says nothing but, “I’ll look into it.”

  “You will?”

  “Of course. If there’s a discrepancy, we always look into it.”

  Yeah. I’ve heard this before. “Listen—”

  “Diaz. I said I’ll look into it.” He stares at the door. “Thank you.”

  Interesting. Interesting because this feels awfully familiar. Too many blow-offs these days. Way too many to be coincidental. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Hm.”

  “Is this about the Voss case?”

  “Is what about the Voss case?”

  “This,” I say. “This way people keep shutting me out, then acting like they don’t know why I’m irked.”

  “Come on, Diaz.”

  “Is it?”

  As if I’m putting him out—like I’m the one acting shitty, when he’s the one behaving as though he wants a place at the cool kids’ table and the only way to get there is to adopt the cool kids’ grudges—he says, “If you need it spelled out, then fine. Yes. It’s about the Voss situation.”

  I manage not to scream or spit. I mimic Buchanan’s composure when I say, “That’s not fair.”

  “Listen, Diaz. I get it. You’re passionate—”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Don’t get emotional.”

  “I’m not emotional.” Well, that was the wrong thing to say. And the wrong way to say it. My delivery wasn’t flat enough. Not robot enough. Robot is what I have to be, constantly, between now and when I retire in twenty or thirty years. That’s all. I have to be that and I have to rock my scarlet letter: E for Emotional. Just that. I’ve got to encrypt myself because I showed a feeling once and earned a spot on some invisible internal watch list.

  “It’s great you care,” Buchanan tells me, like I need his validation. “You should care. But you cannot let this job become your whole life. You can’t get wrapped up in other people’s problems, or you’ll go crazy.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “I didn’t call you crazy.” His tone, though: Not yet. “I’m just saying, be careful.”

  “Heard. Loud and clear.”

  So that’s it. The Voss case is officially my poltergeist. Emotional, like it’s dangerous. Passionate: euphemism for sinful. My whole life, I’m taught that the only way to be taken seriously is to do my job and do it well. So I do that, and I get here, and the rules change. People like Buchanan change them. Surprise! Dedication is a detriment now. I’m supposed to detach, loosen up, lay back, back off. I’m supposed to posture for a living on top of doing work I love that I’m only allowed to love a certain way.

  It’s not like I invented the whole work-ethic thing. It was taught to me, explicitly. Find something you love to do, Mom said, and do it. Then it’s not work.

  Bust your ass, Dad told me. Your work will speak for itself.

  I was at the station the day that girl’s parents brought her in. Chief put me in the room when she made her statement, said I’d make Kayla feel safe. I thought we wanted her to feel safe because a victim’s emotional security matters. (Emotional: a handicap.) Turns out we wanted her to feel safe so she’d talk. She was miserable, mortified, didn’t want to be here. Her parents forced her, nudged her, wept. They were pissed. Justifiably. They wanted J.R. Voss to be punished, and they wanted vengeance, damn it, on their daughter’s behalf. Meanwhile, Kayla Scott died inside every time I asked, And was that consensual? What about that? And that? She hated me, then herself, more and more with every detail pried.

  Charges were filed. Noise happened. Got louder. Seemed for a while that justice might happen too. That justice might make noise too. Then, poof, out of the blue, the Scott family withdrew charges. Problem solved in private arbitration. Translation: Graham Parks and his cronies found her breaking point. Maybe it was something as simple as money. Might have been more. Might have been a splinter from the Scott family tree—something humiliating the mom or dad did in college, or some dumb thing Kayla said once, or any bit of gossip that could jeopardize or distract from their credibility. Proverbial dirty laundry to tip the proverbial scales. Whatever it was, it worked, case closed, and J.R. became a poster boy for the “wrongly” accused. Wrong is right.

  Word traveled fast when Kayla recited that fucked-up statement on the courthouse steps. We all watched at the station, hovering around a live-stream on Peterson’s computer, then watching the highlight reel from the news. Everyone was horrified. I was naive enough to assume we were horrified for the same reasons. “This is sick,” someone said, and I nodded. Sure was. Someone else said, “She needs help,” and I agreed, thinking trauma counseling, but apparently they were thinking Bedlam, because when Peterson said, “Kids these days will do anything to get on television,” the other guys nodded again.

  Not me. I didn’t nod. I asked calmly, “What the hell are you talking about?” When Peterson turned the question back on me, emphasizing you, I said, “This is bullshit.”

  When they asked if I was deaf or didn’t watch the video clip, I said no, I’m not deaf or blin
d, and fortunately, I’m not dumb, either, because, “I know how this shit works.”

  They said, “Enlighten us.”

  I said, “Guys like J.R. Voss do what they do knowing nobody wants to be in that girl’s shoes. This performance he cornered her into is a public threat to every other Kayla out there who might consider ratting out pervy old men.”

  “Voss isn’t old,” was Peterson’s rebuttal.

  Lincoln asked a fair question about how I pick and choose what to believe, but before I could answer, Dennis said, “Oh, give it up. That girl wants money and ten minutes of fame.”

  And I said, maybe loudly, “No one wants to be famous for this shit.”

  And Dennis had to add, “She’s a fame whore,” emphasis on whore, and people laughed.

  So I said, maybe yelled, maybe shouted in his face, “You are exactly why most of us keep our mouths shut.”

  Boom, splat, screech to a halt. Everyone stuck on my word-choice. You, meaning “guys like you.” Us, meaning “I’ve got skin in the game.” Translation: Alexis Diaz has trouble separating the personal from the professional. Translation: Keep an eye on her mood.

  Mood, like the symptom of a deadly disease.

  Then it was quiet and awkward.

  Chief called me into his office the next day. Said I needed to check myself. Also said the Voss case was complicated, he understood that, but I had to let it go. “J.R. Voss has done a lot for this department,” he told me, but it meant something else. It meant, J.R. Voss buys a shit-ton of pancakes at our annual pancake breakfast, so back off.

  The modus operandi around here seems to be optics first, but they don’t care about how bad it looks tiptoeing around fancy people’s feelings. So I guess Robert Hart is somebody around here—Citizen of the Year, whatever that’s worth or isn’t—so I guess we’re expected to bow down, back off, play it safe.

  If it’s optics they’re worried about, maybe someone should consider how dumb we look when we worry about fancy people’s egos more than our work.