The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  Seth is studying me quizzically. I take a drink, swallow, inhale. “It kind of figured I’d go into the force. Although I had to work to convince one person.”

  “Your mother?”

  “My father. He took it as a personal affront that I wanted to go through the academy. He did his best to make me drop out.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  I give him a tight grin and raise my glass. “First in my graduating class.” I finish the drink and signal to the waitress for two more.

  “Is it harder being a female on the force in Brooklyn or here?”

  “Much, much harder up north.”

  “Really?”

  “What, you don’t believe me? Oh, now you’re all disappointed that Texas cops aren’t as hard-assed as Brooklyn cops? Those guys, man. Let me tell you, they were old school. Three generations of pounding concrete, fighting slum wars, and resisting bribes from gangs and the Cosa Nostra grafted onto their genes. All you guys had to fight were some cattle rustlers and a few Native Americans on horseback.”

  “Was there a moment you knew you were in with them?”

  “Police academy. Defensive tactics. The trainer puts me in a choke hold. I don’t have to tell you that’s a no-go anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was behind me, had his big ol’ meatpacking arm around my throat, squeezing. And I was starting to go black around the edges. It made me mad, because I knew that he knew it was not proper training. Just as I was about to lose it, I went limp for a second and bent forward, which brought him forward as well. We were only a few feet in front of the wall, so I pushed off the floor with my legs—I mean, I gave it everything I had—and sent us flying back against the plywood so hard it knocked the urinal loose on the other side. The trainer’s head hit the wall so hard, he got a concussion. He admitted to me later that he’d been put up to it. Never would say by who. But after that, they pretty much left me alone. Well, mostly.”

  “You think it was your dad who told him to do that?” Seth asks.

  I shrug.

  Seth folds his arms across the table and leans in as though he’s confiding something dangerous. “So, Riz, what did you give up to be such a great cop?”

  “What do you mean?” I say, but in my head I’m remembering Benny talking about my dad starting out as a good cop but ending up a lousy human being.

  “You don’t get to be good at this job without letting something slide. So…what’re you giving up?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I say, rattling the ice in my glass like a tambourine.

  He gives me a doubtful look but raises his glass to meet mine. “What’s Polish for ‘screw ’em’?”

  “Pierdol sie. Actually, it means ‘go fuck yourself.’”

  “That’s good enough for me. Pierdol sie.”

  When we leave, the bar is crowded with patrons and I get a few appreciative looks as I walk by. The whiskeys have made me feel both heavy-limbed and buoyant, careless. One long-legged girl wrapped in black leather smiles at me and tells me that she likes my boots. I imagine kissing her, without preamble, without even a hello. But that would have been the pre-Jackie, unreformed Betty.

  Outside, the humidity folds around Seth and me like wet blankets, and we say our good-byes in between slapping away the mosquitoes swarming around the outdoor lights.

  “You’ll remember to bring Jackie flowers, right?” Seth reminds me. “To make up for being such an asshole earlier today.”

  I smile, pleased with myself. “Already in the car.”

  Seth checks his messages and begins grinning. “Just got my date for the night.”

  I watch him loping off to his car. “You mean hookup,” I yell after him. The smallest particle of jealousy raises its oily little head, but I bat it down. The days of impersonal, vengeful sex are over. Meeting Jackie changed all that.

  My work phone rings and I pull it out of my pocket. It’s not a number I recognize, but I answer it anyway.

  A breathless voice says, “Hey, I need to talk to…I need to…” Then the line cuts off. It was a female, but the voice sounded high and reedy, almost like a kid’s. I call back but get only an automated message restating the number. I put the phone in my pocket and forget about the call.

  7

  Jackie and I stand on the sidewalk outside a small, two-bedroom house in East Dallas, waiting for the real estate agent to arrive. It’s early morning, and we’re perched in the shade, the air syrupy with jasmine. There are old-growth trees lining the streets of this neighborhood, which is within walking distance of White Rock Lake. One enormous branch of an old red oak in the front yard stretches over the roof of the house, and I pass the time thinking about what one good ice storm could do, imagining that branch crashing down through the slate shingles, tearing through the drywall, crushing us in our bed as we sleep…

  I catch Jackie watching me out of the corner of her eye, and I give her a grin.

  She pats me on the arm and says, “Fingers off the cynical scale, right? And stop checking your watch every thirty seconds. This will take only twenty minutes.”

  I nod, and she goes happily back to studying the front of the house. We’ve been two years in an apartment and Jackie is eager for a bigger nest. She thinks the stress of my job may be getting to me and that a house and a yard and a two-car garage, along with larger water and electricity bills, will help ease the pressure.

  She also thinks I may be ready to snuff the neighbor upstairs.

  Finally, the real estate agent pulls up in front of the house in a white Lexus. She gets out, cradling her cell phone between her neck and her ear, struggling to gather up her notes, coffee, and keys. In their ads, Dallas real estate agents—their expertly Photoshopped head shots appearing next to the featured houses—all seem to have variations on the same rigid, immobilized visage, probably acquired from the same cadre of surgeons: graduates of the Wind Tunnel School of Medicine. Seth once told me that there were more churches per capita in Dallas than in any other city in the United States and more plastic surgeons doing faces and boobs here than in LA. Where he got the latter bit of information, I didn’t want to ask.

  But this agent looks like a perky suburban mom, which is probably what she is, wearing a brightly colored suit and sandals, the kind with heels and unforgiving straps across the instep and ankle.

  “Hi,” the agent calls to us; she walks over energetically and shakes hands with Jackie, who has done all the legwork checking out the neighborhood.

  She turns to me and shakes my hand. “Hi. I’m Donna Mitchell. My, but you’re a tall one,” she says cheerfully.

  “Hi, Donna.” I find I’m smiling in response to her eagerness to be likable. “I’m Betty. And, yes, I am tall.”

  She turns and leads us briskly toward the front door. “So nice to meet you. What gorgeous red hair you have. My daughter is tall too. Basketball player for Baylor. You are so toned. You must work out all the time…” She keeps the banter going all the way to the porch.

  “I think you’re going to like this little house, Jackie.” Donna retrieves the key from the key box, opens the door, and leads us into the foyer, all the while telling us about when the house was built, the square footage, how long ago the bathrooms were retiled.

  Jackie explores the house with Donna, asking questions, making lists of what would be needed in time and money to make the house move-in ready.

  I think of our apartment and how good, how easy life has been, even with the infuriating neighbors. This house is staged, furnished with items that look uncomfortably new, a bit of a Western flair in the details—a leather couch with metal studs and a large landscape with a farmhouse and bluebonnets. I stare at the painting, remembering the row house in Brooklyn where I grew up. The place was dark morning, noon, and night, the windows small and facing south. Ever present was the vaporous fug of tarry smoke from my mother’s cigarettes, which she kept lit in the ashtray whenever she was home. The music she played in the afternoons as soon
as she got home from work at the local OTB. She listened to it all: jazz, Latin, rock, Top 40. A few hours of peace before my father came home from working with Brooklyn’s Finest, ready to pop the first beer of the night, turning off the music, turning on the tube. The tension groaned outward from his core self like an oil spill, engulfing everything and everyone in its path, until the overflow caught fire, scorching my mother, me, and my brother, in that order.

  Abruptly, Donna has found her way back to me. She tells me she’s giving Jackie “some space.”

  She asks me, “You two been friends long?”

  “Mostly,” I say, laughing, but it’s a laugh-fest of one because Donna is looking puzzled. “Actually,” I clarify, “we’re partners.”

  “Oh, you’re a doctor too?”

  “No.” I pause. “I’m a police detective.”

  Jackie has wandered back into the living room and is examining the hardwood floors, following the course of the conversation. Now Donna is looking back and forth between Jackie and me.

  “Oh,” Donna says, still confused.

  I point to Jackie. “We’re buying the house together.”

  “Okay,” Donna says, but she does not look like it’s okay. A little crease in her brow is threatening to break through the Botox. “Roommates?”

  “You can say that,” I tell her.

  There’s a long pause and Jackie and I exchange looks. I know that Jackie told Donna that she was not single.

  Donna says, “I’m not sure I follow you. Jackie, I thought you said you were married.”

  Jackie walks to where I’m standing, and, reaching down, clasps my hand tightly in hers. She brings my fingers up to her lips and kisses them. “I said I was part of a couple.”

  Donna stares at Jackie with the same fascinated yet slightly repulsed look people get while watching a reality show about intestinal parasites. Something that’s exotic and potentially fatal, like amoebic dysentery. Thinking about my family has summoned forth a defensive meanness. I feel like a Saracen facing a swarm of Crusaders.

  “We will be married,” I say to Donna, looking down at the still life that is her face. “As soon as gargoyles like you will let us.”

  Donna breaks her hostile staring, her mouth open, and right then, she needs to make a phone call. She walks rapidly away and into the kitchen.

  Jackie purses her lips, but a smile is tugging at the corners of her mouth. “That was a bit harsh, Betty.”

  I shrug. “Maybe. But you know what that holier-than-thou gaze does to me. Especially when it’s directed at you.”

  “I know,” she says, stroking the length of my arm with her fingers. “It’s just not going to get any easier with you becoming contentious with the real estate agents.”

  “Is that what I was being, contentious? I thought I was just being a bitch.”

  She bites down on a laugh. “Anyway, I’m not sure I even like the house.”

  “Oh, really?” I say, putting on my tragic face. “I love it. Especially the horseshoe wine rack.”

  Jackie suppresses a smile as Donna walks back into the living room, apologizing for having to get to another appointment that she just now remembered. We’re hurried back out onto the sidewalk so Donna can leave. Jackie and I stand on the walkway, holding hands, waving good-bye as we listen to Donna’s fast-retreating, clacking footsteps.

  Before I leave for work, Jackie turns and kisses me. She says, “Don’t think this means we’re not looking at more houses.”

  I brush a strand of hair from her eyes. “Sure. But I get to pick the next agent.”

  8

  I get the call on my way to the station. It’s Hoskins, his voice sounding tight with stress. “Detective, you need to get yourself to Bender’s house now. We walked in on one female body and a guy hiding in the laundry closet, so freaked out he can hardly talk. Homicide’s on its way.”

  Through the phone, I can hear the sounds of wailing sirens and a male voice, maybe Craddock’s, announcing that he’s Dallas Police.

  There are some rustling noises, as though Hoskins is moving the phone closer to his mouth. “From what I can tell, the female may be Lana Yu.”

  The short hairs on the back of my neck begin to rise. “What do you mean, from what you can tell?”

  “I think I recognize her from the photo during the briefing yesterday, but I can’t be sure. No one’s touched the body yet. Just get over here as quick as you can, okay?”

  I call Seth, who picks up on the first ring, and let him know about the body. He tells me he can make it to the house in ten minutes. The Tollway is jammed for morning rush hour, and because of construction feeding three lanes into one, it takes me a full twenty minutes to make it to Bender’s place. Texans may be polite pedestrians, but put them in cars and it’s every man for himself.

  By the time I arrive, there are two EMT vehicles and six local patrol cars. Several of the officers are already putting yellow crime scene tape in front of the house; others are searching around the yard, trying to ignore the frightened but curious neighbors who have started to gather in the streets for the second time in as many days. My partner’s car is parked on the curb, the driver-side door open, a sign of Seth’s rush to get into the house. The Forensics team is there, suiting up.

  The fat shooter who had the large-caliber pistol is standing on the civilian side of the tape. He’s out of his robe, wearing baggy shorts and a T-shirt designed by Omar the Tentmaker. He nods at me like a demented puppet, holding up two thumbs, and says, “Yeah, great job there, Officer. Y’all keep up the good work.”

  As I walk into the house, he calls after me, “I still don’t have my fuckin’ gun back.”

  A patrolman immediately hands me some shoe covers, which I slip on over my boots, and two pairs of latex gloves. He throws a disapproving look at my hair, certain in its untamed state to be shedding all over the evidence, so I wind it up at the nape of my neck and jab in a few bobby pins to hold it in place.

  Four Homicide detectives are already on the premises, one of whom I know. Marshall Maclin is standing in the office just off the main hallway, but he motions for me to stay in the foyer while he finishes talking to one of his colleagues. In his late thirties, Maclin is the kind of male cop who walks into a room ego-first, casting testosterone into the air like confetti, taking for granted that he is universally liked by men and sought after by women. When I was a kid, an aunt from some faraway Midwestern city, one who obviously didn’t know me, sent me a Barbie doll. To my brother, she gifted a GI Joe. Within five minutes my Barbie had beaten the crap out of Joe, tied him up, and stripped him down. I remember being disappointed to discover that the soldier, laid bare, was curiously neotenic in appearance, slick, smooth, and ill-defined.

  Despite Maclin’s bulging physique under his suit jacket, I have the sensation that naked, he would appear like that GI Joe, with no unique ridges or even impressive bits of protruding anatomy, just manufactured plastic, blockheaded and dense.

  Maclin’s and my paths have crossed professionally a few times before, too few for him to have known that he shouldn’t ask me out on a date. When I declined his dinner invitation, he teasingly asked, “Too shy?” To which I had responded, “No, too dyke.” He maintained his sense of humor about the incident, though, at least enough to stay cordial.

  “Hey, Betty,” he says, walking into the foyer and holding out his hand.

  “Hey, Marsh.” I take his hand and give him what I hope is a painful squeeze, just as a reminder that I am immune to his pheromones.

  He motions me into the office and introduces me to his partner, Bernard Tate, an East Coast transplant like myself. Compact, with the oft-broken nose of an amateur boxer, he shakes my hand in the bone-crushing manner of a self-conscious man in the presence of a much taller woman.

  “Is my partner here?” I ask Maclin.

  “Yeah, he’s here. He’s in the kitchen with Hoskins and Craddock. They’re waiting for you.”

  Tate, not wanting to appear to be
straining to look up at me, stares into my collarbone and says, “You’ve had an interesting start to the Ruiz case, Detective. Certainly keeping us busy.” He pronounces start as “staht” and it’s refreshing to hear a monosyllabic word stay that way. Southerners always seem to add extra syllables to the simplest of words.

  “What’s going on?” I ask him.

  “Your detectives showed up about forty minutes ago. Said they were searching the house on the Ruiz case.”

  “That’s right. I sent them here to look for drug money.”

  “They walked in on a body in the kitchen,” Maclin says. “Female, early twenties, Asian. Hoskins said she might be a prostitute with known connections to Ruiz.”

  I watch the Forensics crew, suited and carrying their evidence kits and cameras, filing by in the hallway.

  “Lana Yu,” I say. “Ruiz’s girlfriend. Hoskins also said there was a potential witness?”

  Maclin says, “Well, the guy’s alive, but he won’t be much of a witness. He tells us he stayed hidden in the laundry closet the whole time the victim was being murdered.”

  “Nice. Will I be able to talk to him?”

  Maclin looks at Tate, who nods. “Sure,” Maclin says, “after he finishes giving his statement to us. Although that may take a while. The guy’s a total basket case. If the victim is Lana Yu, you’ll be helping by giving us a positive ID on the body.”

  “Sure. Whatever I can do to assist.”

  “Okay,” Maclin adds, “but I just want to give you a heads-up: the body’s still a bit of a mess.”