by Chaz McGee
I thought back to the case files from the investigation that Danny and I bungled so thoroughly. Would anything in there put Maggie on to Hayes? Would his behavior last night be enough to alarm her? Could Danny somehow be persuaded to raise the issue himself?
Would Danny be of any use at all? He’d been stupid enough to interfere with Maggie’s investigation. What else might he try? And why was he trying to block a new investigation? I had to find out.
Maggie had not told Gonzales about Danny’s appearance the night before. If she had, he’d be gone. You did not defy Gonzales directly like that. Ever. Instead, I found Danny at work, where he had been relegated, sitting at a desk in the Found Property section—a department where his surliness would be tempered by the public’s joy that their stolen possessions had, miraculously, been recovered. Plus, there was very little work, as virtually nothing of value was ever reported as found. Gonzales was smart. It was the perfect place for Danny to wait out the five months until he retired. There would be little asked of him and even less that he could screw up.
But Danny, being Danny, did not intend to make things easy on himself. As always, he loved to invite disappointment. He sat at his desk, in full view of others, reading skin magazines and sneaking sips from a flask in his top drawer, occasionally begrudgingly taking a message from some hopeful victim wanting to know if his bike or lawn mower had been recovered. Few people noticed Danny’s blatantly antagonistic behavior as coworkers had long since learned the best way to endure Danny was to ignore him. Perhaps that was why he had escalated his apathy in recent years, flaunting his disregard for what others thought. He had a deep need for attention, and he did not care if it was positive or negative attention. Ever since his life had failed to measure up to his dreams, he’d been driven by a compulsion to provoke and spread his unhappiness. I knew because I had seen that compulsion take root and grow.
But something else was tormenting him that morning, something beyond being reassigned by Gonzales. Was it the night before, the scene with Hayes, or the barely disguised accusation of cowardice Gonzales had thrown at him? I did not blame Danny for my death. I had died of my own incompetence and no one else’s. That didn’t mean Danny saw it the same way.
I sat and watched my old partner for a while, wondering how well he had investigated Alan Hayes and whether he would ever be willing to admit that he had blown it. Danny’s agitation grew steadily as he sat at the desk, finally becoming so severe I wondered if he was taking something. I‘d known him to rely on speed—or worse—before. He began to flip more rapidly through the pages of his magazine, not even bothering to glance down. Finally, he gave up entirely and threw the porn in a bottom drawer before booting up the department’s computer network. This act alone astonished me. Danny had treated anything related to the computer with contempt, maintaining that all it did was add to his workload. Yet there he sat, searching through computerized records, checking out who in the department was online, following some unknown cyber trail with a determination I had not seen from him in years.
He was tracking Maggie. As he pulled up our old case files, at least the ones that had been computerized, I realized he was checking the dates to see the last time they had been accessed, trying to determine whether Maggie had reviewed each file or not. He was wondering how much she was checking up on him and whether Gonzales had ordered her to do so.
What a fool, I thought. Did he not realize that he was leaving his own trail of having been in those files? That Maggie could just as easily track him in return?
Oh, Danny. That was my partner in a nutshell. Always so busy thinking of his own grandiose plans that he never stopped to consider what someone else might be doing.
I left him and drifted upstairs to Maggie’s desk to wait for her arrival. She showed up in late afternoon, freshly showered, smelling of oranges, crackling with energy. Oh, my Maggie. She did not need me to tell her that something was wrong with Alan Hayes. The encounter the night before had been enough for her. Within ten minutes, she was deep into the computer, bringing up all the data she could find on Alissa’s father, downloading his curriculum vitae from the college site, tracking his lecture appearances at conferences around the world, chronicling all the places where he had studied or taught—in short, compiling a list of everywhere he had been and everywhere he had lived over the past twenty-five years. It was astonishing how much information she pulled from the Internet, her attention so absolute that hours passed before she even noticed that almost everyone else in the detective division had left for home or dinner.
Once again, I wondered what drove her so hard, what triggered her obsessiveness.
Her desk phone rang. It was an old-fashioned model and she stared at it as if surprised that it even worked. “Hello?” she said tentatively. “Hello?” She stared into the receiver, then placed it firmly back on the cradle, thought a moment, and picked it back up and dialed.
“Dad?” she asked. “Did you just try to call me at work?” She was silent. “No, it’s nothing. Not a lot of people have this number is all.” She smiled at his reply. “No, I have not been giving my number out to men. Who in the world told you that?” A shadow crossed over her face. “She’s getting senile. Trust me. You’ll be the first to know.”
She smiled again at her father’s answer before bidding him good-bye. She’d barely hung up the phone when Danny appeared, shattering the quiet of the squad room with his blustery, panting approach.
“So, Princess,” he said, perching on the edge of her desk. “How goes it?”
“Don’t call me that,” she said, without anger. “I’ve worked harder than you ever have to get where I am. And get off my desk.”
Danny looked surprised, but recovered and shambled to his feet. “I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink.”
Maggie looked up from the computer and stared at him without comment.
“I’m not hitting on you,” Danny said quickly.
She ignored him and returned to her computer screen.
“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was an asshole. And Fahey and I were fuckups, I admit it.”
Speak for yourself, partner. I wasn’t the one who’d been responsible for looking into Alan Hayes and the rest of the family.
“Maybe I could make up for last night,” he suggested. “I owe you one.” He sounded sincere. “Really. Thanks for not telling Gonzales about . . . you know, what happened.”
“You mean you showing up drunk out of your mind in the middle of an investigation you’d been expressly taken off and inciting the witness to cause the department trouble?”
Danny blinked. “I don’t know that I’d put it that way exactly.”
“Well, I would,” Maggie said. “And Tommy and Fritz agree. I had a hell of a time convincing them not to say anything.”
Danny’s voice rose an octave. “I know that. And I’m grateful. I just want to make up for it. You can ask me anything about the Hayes case you want. I might remember something that could be of use to you.”
“I’m not telling you anything about the case,” she told him flatly. “Not after last night. You’re lucky you still have your badge.”
“I won’t ask you a thing. It’ll be a one-way street. You need me. You know how it goes. You can pore through the files from now until Christmas, but there are still things we never wrote down. Things that might help you now.”
She stared at him, weighing her desire to avoid him versus her desire to solve the case. The case won. “Okay,” she said. “But we’re going someplace decent with real food. This is my dinner break and I am not spending it getting drunk with you in some dive bar. Got it?”
“Deal.” Danny held both hands up in surrender, but I felt something odd rolling off him, an emotion I could not pinpoint until he looked down at the floor, unable to meet Maggie’s eyes. Then I had it: Danny was afraid. Why?
“I’ve only got an hour, tops,” she warned him.
“Fine.”
“Give me a moment,�
� she said, grabbing her knapsack and heading for the hallway. “I’ll be right back.”
I think I knew what was going to happen before Danny did. The moment the squad room door shut behind Maggie, I knew he would not be able to resist the unlocked drawers of her desk. Hands trembling, he pulled them open, one by one, flipped through files, lifted stacks of paper, pocketed something small he found in a top drawer—I could not see what—then stopped abruptly when he ran across the old photo that Peggy had given Maggie, the one showing Danny and me posed, rifles high, above a bound suspect. Maggie had stashed it at the back of a lower drawer, behind some hanging folders. When Danny pulled it out and saw what it was, his face went white. He started shaking so hard I thought he might be having a heart attack. He looked down at the photo, then up at the squad room door, stunned by a fear I did not understand. It was only when he heard Maggie’s footsteps approaching that he recovered from his paralysis. Shoving the photo back in place, he shut the drawer and took a seat on the edge of Maggie‘s desk just as she returned.
“Get off my desk, Bonaventura,” she barked at him.
“No problem,” he said. His voice sounded rusty. “It’s just been a long day.”
“Then don’t make it any longer,” Maggie said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Chapter 19
Being a drunk has its advantages, with loss of pride being the most merciful of them. But lack of pride was a trait I no longer shared with Danny, and so it was that I felt embarrassed for him when I realized how many of the other restaurant patrons were sneaking glances at him, wondering what a drunken old slob was doing with such a lovely young woman.
Had people looked at me that same way when I was stumbling through the last years of my life? I couldn’t recall and I was glad I had been spared the self-awareness of how far I had fallen. There had certainly been plenty of times I had invited contempt, including right here in this same restaurant. I had often taken the women I was running around with here for dinner, knowing all it would take was that one meal to get her into bed and that my investment in both time and money would be limited. I wasn’t proud of it, and I hadn’t been proud of it back then. Drinking had helped me overlook that.
Maggie sat as far away from Danny as she could, but, to her credit, she appeared perfectly composed. I knew she was aware of Danny’s drunken state. She had reacted to his order of a double bourbon with something close to contempt. But she was determined to get what she could out of him. I admired her perseverance.
“Did you even look into the father as a suspect at all?” she asked Danny as soon as the waiter left with their orders.
“Fahey took care of it,” Danny answered, taking a gulp from his bourbon on the rocks.
The lying bastard. He’d been the one to pursue family members. I’d had my hands full interviewing classmates and tracking the boyfriend’s movements.
“Fahey seems to have taken care of a lot of things when he was your partner,” Maggie observed. She had ordered a glass of white wine, but it sat untouched in front of her. Danny had that effect on people: he made them treasure their sobriety.
“Look, I admit Fahey had lost his edge,” Danny conceded. “It’s possible he missed something.”
“I’ve looked over the report,” Maggie said. “I’m no expert, but the interview notes with the father look an awful lot like your lousy typing, Danny. So why don’t you cut the crap and tell me what you remember?”
Danny would not look her in the eye. “I don’t remember much of anything,” he said after a moment. “I remember the guy was pretty broken up. He’d just lost his daughter and he’d lost his wife only a couple of years before that. How hard was I supposed to push him?”
“I think he did it,” Maggie said flatly. “I think he killed his own daughter and I think he killed Vicky Meeks.”
Danny stared at her, amazed. “You can’t mean that.”
“I can,” she said. “And I do. There is something deeply wrong in that family, something terribly wrong. Anyone could feel it. How the hell could you miss it? You and Fahey let a killer walk free and now he’s done it again. And god knows how many other young women died before Vicky Meeks.”
“Look, the guy’s a little fruity. Maybe creepy even. But he’s not the killer.”
“How do you know?” Maggie asked.
“His wife alibied him.”
“His wife?” Maggie said. “The Russian? Come on. She’s a mail-order bride if ever I saw one. She would have been in America, what? Two months at the time? She would have said anything he told her to say.”
“She’d been in America over a year when I talked to her, and she’s no pushover. Take it from me. That woman is made of iron.”
“So, you remember something after all,” Maggie said.
Danny shrugged. “I may have refreshed my memory a little by looking over the notes.”
“Not much to refresh with those notes,” Maggie pointed out.
“Hey, am I supposed to take the rap for Fahey not giving a shit?” Danny asked. “I tried to save my partner’s life, and now I have to take shit for all of his mistakes on top of people giving me shit for mine?”
Maggie shook her head in disgust. She looked at Danny so strangely, I suddenly knew: she had heard every word Gonzales had said about my death and the role of Danny’s inertia in it.
I wondered if Danny realized it.
“Well?” Danny asked.
“Well, what?” Maggie replied.
“You got a boyfriend?’ he said. Oh, god, I thought—was he really drunk enough to think he had a chance?
“Are you seriously asking me that?” Maggie demanded.
“I’m just making conversation,” Danny said, sounding perplexed as he retreated from all that the question had implied and tried to pretend he was just being friendly.
“Make conversation about something else,” Maggie said flatly.
“Okay, fine. Are you looking into anything else?” Danny asked, a little too casually, as he ran his thumb over the lip of his glass. His drink was gone. He’d sucked it down in four gulps and gestured for another before Maggie had even tasted hers.
“You mean, am I looking into anything besides the Hayes and Meeks cases?”
“Yeah. Does Gonzales have you looking into anything else?” Though he was trying to sound uninterested, I could feel it again: fear rolling off Danny in waves. He had started to perspire and was looking around for the waiter bearing his new drink.
“Why would Gonzales ask me to look into anything else?” Maggie said softly.
“You’re the golden girl,” Danny told her glumly. “Obviously, you’re his pet right now. I just thought . . .”
“You just thought what?” Maggie hissed back. For the first time, I had a glimpse of the immense anger she was capable of when crossed. And, oh, she was magnificent.
“You just assumed because he trusted me to do my job that I was sleeping with him and must be his pet snitch?” she said.
“I didn’t say that,” Danny protested with the kind of truly dumbfounded look that only a drunk can produce.
The waiter arrived with Danny’s fresh drink and gave Maggie a sympathetic look. She touched his arm lightly. “I need that steak to go after all, Sam. I got beeped and have to go back in.”
The waiter nodded and withdrew without looking at Danny.
“No,” Danny insisted, rising. He drained his new drink. “I can take a hint. Enjoy your dinner in peace. I’ve got to get home anyway.”
He stumbled out before she could reply.
I stayed with Maggie, waiting quietly in Danny’s vacated seat, looking around at the couples with their heads bent together and the noisy groups who were dining together. It was the most wonderful of rituals, I realized, humans breaking bread, sipping wine, tasting the delights of food. I was sorry I had shoveled it in my whole life, either eating furtively because I did not respect myself or eating grudgingly because it took away from the time and room I had for drinking. Now I sa
w that people connected to one another by sharing the act of feeding their bodies. I noticed how it relaxed people, how it coaxed laughter to the surface and brought out goodwill toward all.
I missed having a chance to enjoy that.
The waiter had seen Danny leave and brought out Maggie’s dinner without bothering to ask if she still wanted it to go. She ate slowly, lost in thought, not noticing the waiter, who hovered around her, anxious to make her meal a pleasant one. I wished that I could tell what she was thinking. She was far away, puzzling over some detail, putting pieces of information together, focusing all of her energy on some mental task—all the while completely unaware of how rare her concentration was.
When she was done, I confess I allowed myself the indulgence of pretending I was alive. As the coat-check girl helped Maggie into her coat, I placed my hands on the woolen shoulders, as if guiding them into place, then I imagined that her smile of thanks was for me.
I had seldom displayed such gallantry while alive. But now I saw that these minor acts were the ways by which people paid homage to a life lived among others—and that I had robbed more than my wife, Connie, of their grace.
Maggie was still distracted as she climbed into her car and headed back toward headquarters. The steak house she had chosen was five miles out of town on a winding two-lane highway and there were few other businesses or homes nearby. Within a minute, we had left the lights of the parking lot behind and were deep into the dark of a country road at night. I sat in the backseat, stretched out, peering out at the darkness, watching the night world whoosh by. Far behind us, I could see twin pinpricks of light, another car, perhaps miles away, approaching fast.
I felt Maggie’s car wobble and then start to shudder before she did. At first, she did not want to acknowledge the problem. She gripped the steering wheel tighter and forced the car back on the road, but it wandered toward the shoulder once again, then began to dip and rock in a rhythm that was unmistakable: one of her tires was flat.