The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  I watched the detective, still confused but already knowing I wasn’t up for what he would say next. He seemed to register the change in me and looked down at his notebook, but he said it anyway. “Michael Padilla is dead. He was killed last night, in the back of that shop.”

  8.

  THE NEWS DIDN’T SINK IN RIGHT AWAY. MAYBE IT STILL HASN’T. IT NEVER does, not really. Loss only becomes the injury you don’t remember ever not having, until someone asks how you got your limp and for a second you think, What limp? But at that moment it was incomprehensible. Mike was killed while I lolled unconscious a few feet away. How had he so radically changed, so suddenly, from being to not-being? How had I been given the gift of a straightforward concussion? I had trouble coming to grips with how they changed the name of Hill Street to Coast Highway.

  And there were the questions I’d been asked for the last forty-five minutes. Too many of them now seemed like ways to probe my relative sanity. The detective/Dockers pitchman named Harper told me I was free to go and, with his eyes and the suspicion in the grip of his handshake, that they weren’t sure about me. Of course they weren’t. I wasn’t sure about me. It was my most basic trait, the one thing I could truly trust in myself. It wasn’t unjustified. There were reasons I should be skeptical of myself—reasons the police, without a doubt, had read in the tabloid of my official record.

  But still they sent me home. All I could think while I drove was, Mike is dead, Mike is dead. Just the words. It didn’t feel like he was dead. It felt like he was somewhere, over those hills to the east, a few miles into the past—not here with me but somewhere, still somewhere real. What feelings feel is a joke. It’s always just the past, always just yourself. Feelings don’t know dick. Still, my feelings expected to sit across from him in a diner booth and taste some bacon and hear his endlessly crude jokes, but no.

  The details were still unclear to Harper, and he didn’t reveal much. Mike’s body was found wrapped up in a tarp, in a corner of the shop. He’d been shot in the chest and then bled to death, no doubt quickly. It looked like Mike came in through the front door; no signs of forced entry there or at the roll-up door in back. They thought there was a struggle. I must have looked like a potential partner in that. The story I told about the burglars didn’t make much sense if nothing had been stolen.

  I found myself doubting my own story, too, but no, there were at least three or four people in the shop. Mike must have come after I’d been coldcocked, must not have run the way I’d done. And someone killed him for that. Mike was killed, Mike was killed, I reminded myself, saying this a few times. Then a feeling came over me that made more sense: a kind of despair at not knowing what lay at the center of his last few minutes. It settled hard into my stomach, this maw of unintelligibility, of unknowledge. It was familiar, a despair I’d worked over before.

  I was exhausted, distraught, and hungry, but every thought of food reminded me of our bet—loser buys breakfast—and only sent me deeper into myself. He was just a guy I worked with. We didn’t hang out, didn’t go surfing or fishing, didn’t talk about much beyond bullshit meant to kill hours before escaping back into our respective lives. But, I had to admit, he was the person I’d seen most often, most regularly, in the last ten years of my life. Still nearly a stranger, but not nearly enough. It had been a mistake, I saw, to let someone get even that close. I simmered with hatred at having made that mistake—hatred for myself, hatred for the grief I now felt. It wasn’t grief for Mike, not only for Mike—a wide-open expanse of it, lurking at all times beneath the veneer of the world.

  I went home and climbed into bed still wearing my uniform. Mike was dead, Mike was dead, and I was washed out: exhausted, numbed, gray.

  I woke up to pitch black. The clock said 2 a.m. I got a drink from the kitchen. That’s when I noticed that Cindy was gone.

  I went from room to room: all her things packed up, none of my own taken. Only a single sheet of paper left on the back coffee table, something I hadn’t noticed the night before. On it was a cartoon of two pocket watches in bed, covers around their middles. One held a cigarette, smiling. It had a thought bubble puffing out of its head: “Oh yeah, I like a little secondhand.” The other looked disappointed and was saying, “Next time, come on my face.” I flipped the paper. Here was a rough sketch of hands—hers, I thought—with every line and crease rendered in spidery blue ballpoint ink and a bandage drawn vertically across the palm. In script below the drawing, neater and more playful than I’d expected, it said: Fate Line Plastic Surgery: Buy One Get One Free Special. Financing Available—and Definitely in Your Future! She didn’t have a bad eye, and her line was strong.

  I was sure that I’d never see her again. This was the way of the world. Things arrive and pass away. Wanting or not wanting it doesn’t change a thing. I felt sadder than I had any right to feel, a weak and regretful sadness. She must have found a quicker way to Seattle, a quicker way to someplace better than here. I thought about the night on the patio, felt like I’d let her down, that I’d fucked up, that I should be ashamed. But she would have to take her place at the end of a long line of people I had disappointed. This was how things went.

  I put my surfboard in the truck and drove down to the pier and paddled out into the dark water. The glow from the lamps lining the pier sent an incomplete light onto the surface of the ocean. I splashed water on my face and felt the swells rock me as they passed. The current took me farther north, away from the pier lights. It got darker, and the clouds revealed very few stars. The only company was a band of mauve sand at my back and the rushing sound of the waves I couldn’t bring myself to catch, crashing behind me and dissipating into the shoreline. I splashed my face with the salt water. I poured water over my face again and again.

  9.

  WHEN I GOT BACK HOME, THERE WERE THREE MESSAGES FROM THE security firm: two from a receptionist telling me the boss wanted to see me before my shift that night and one from the man himself. I called back and said I’d come by at four o’clock. But I didn’t want any corporate sympathy. I wanted to be left alone.

  After I waited out the clock, I drove over to the office in Vista. North County Security occupied a building that looked like something a personal injury lawyer would have loved in the 1980s, all red marble and tinted glass and chintzy brass accents. Inside it wasn’t much better. The waiting room was furnished with the glass coffee tables and salmon-upholstered oak chairs of a thrice-divorced family therapist.

  There was a little reception window in the far wall, next to a closed door. I gave my name to the receptionist. She was new and young and her pained expression showed how hard she was trying to imagine her way into crying. “Can I get you anything?” she asked. “Cup of coffee? I think we have some donuts in the back.”

  If I asked, she might have rubbed my back and let me cry into her pencil skirt, but instead I said, “Can you get this fucking appointment over and done with?”

  She flushed. “Um . . . no. No, I’m sorry.”

  “Then I’m super.” I grinned toothily, turned, and went to one of the hideous chairs to wait this out. She typed very, very loudly.

  A few minutes later she called out in a voice that had as much emotion as a self-flushing toilet: “Mr. Watt and Mr. Gustafsson are ready to see you. Third door on the right.” I knew Watt’s office was third from the right, but I didn’t know any Gustafsson. A buzz filled the quiet room and I went through the newly unlocked door.

  There was a time I would have wanted that receptionist to revere me. That was part of the high of preaching: who it asked me to imagine myself to be, as others saw me. Charming, wise, pacing a stage like a biblical panther in semicasual wear. Cutting through the noise of modern life. Possessing a transformative truth. Seeing their compromised, convicted hearts like hotel stains under blacklight, but seeing with compassion, and with a way out: just hand over your life. Now that person sounded like a cross between QVC spokesman and bank robber who did too much shoplifting at the Gap. But once I would
have done or said almost anything to believe myself admired by a young woman like this.

  Before I headed to Watt’s office, I backed up and said to the receptionist, “Look, hey, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m an asshole, I know.” She shook her head as if to say I wasn’t, as if she had any idea who I was. “No. I am. You’re just being nice,” I went on, “which is nice and all that, and it’s not your fault that I can’t handle nice. I’m not built for it. It’s all a little too much on a good day—and I’ve been having a really bad day, which I know you know about. But I just wanted you to know that I know I’m being a dick, even if I can’t stop myself, and it’s not fair to take it out on you. Okay?” I asked, not really expecting an answer, riding along a certain kind of mania. “I’m horrible. You’re fine. Trust me.”

  By the time I was finished, I was leaning on the little shelf of the reception window, and the receptionist was leaning away from me as far as she possibly could. Her expression was a mixture of disgust and fear, like she’d just been startled by a desperate, emotionally starved, and uncomfortably viscuous insect. Even in apology, I had a terrible way of putting people at ease.

  I headed into the hallway. Esmeralda, the night dispatcher, caught me as I turned a corner. She was wearing jeans and a magenta blouse, fake turquoise on some fishing line around her neck. The whites of her eyes were a solid red tide. Before I could say or do anything, she had her arms around me. “Jesus Christ, Haines. I’m so sorry,” she said.

  I fought the urge to push her off me and walk away without a word. “Right,” I said. She smelled of vanilla hand cream and cumin. She was a tall woman, so I had a wave of dark hair in my face until she let me go, which felt like a long time. My shoulder was wet where she’d rested her head.

  “I can’t even believe this kind of thing could happen, and happen to Mike. I talked to Darcy. She’s devastated.” She patted around her eyeliner with her fingertips.

  “Darcy?”

  “His wife,” she said. She seemed to hold back then, to be waiting for me to do something to comfort her now. There were any of a half-dozen platitudes I could offer. But instead, I thought about wives and how Mike had never once talked about his, had never said her name. I tasted acid in my throat, which tasted like whiskey, and some deep rage came up to keep that desire at bay. I was pathetic, a drunk, a disaster. I hated pathetics, drunks, and disasters. The hatred was the only thing that kept me at all better.

  “Esme,” I said tightly. “I have to see Watt.”

  Esme opened her mouth to say something but then didn’t.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say anything else. It wasn’t me being an asshole. If I said anything, I didn’t know what would happen after, and I couldn’t open that door. I tried to apologize with my eyes for not offering more. She must have understood because as I walked away she said to my back, “I’ll let you know when the funeral is. Maybe we can go together.” I should have turned back to say yes, that was kind of her, that was a good idea. But the version of me who followed up on all my “shoulds” would be a thousand years old by now and ground to a bloody pulp under the weight of other people. So I kept walking.

  The third door on the right was open and from inside came polite laughter. I knocked on the jamb. The laughter ended and was replaced with an overattentive silence, which is no kind of silence at all. It chafed. I entered the room, which was as sparsely decorated as a monk’s cloister, though it stank of cigar smoke, decomposing particleboard, and a drunk man’s sweat—which is to say, it smelled better than it looked. The two men in the room wore suits. My own uniform made me feel cheap, and I found some more anger there I could use.

  “Hey, Watt,” I said, eager to break the water of the pregnant silence.

  “Mark, come on in, come have a seat,” Watt said. He sat behind his desk, a scotch flush glowing warmly through an unkempt red beard and his wheedling kindness.

  The man I took to be Gustafsson sat across from Watt with his back to me. I could tell by the cut of his hair and the shoulders of his suit jacket that he was well-off. Then he stood and turned around, and I realized I’d underestimated him. He was tall and tanned and very fit. His shirt was open two buttons from the neck, and a heavy silver watch adorned his left wrist. He had that profound, Germanic self-confidence—that special shine in the eye—that borders on glimmering idiocy. Watt stood up behind him, shifting uncomfortably.

  I went directly for him. “We haven’t met,” I said to the stranger. “Are we switching health plans again?”

  The corners of his mouth quirked in an almost smile. “No, of course we haven’t met,” Gustafsson said, “though it seems like we might have at some point.” He paused and looked at the details of my uniform. I knew what he was doing, but I let him. I knew it because I’d done it myself. Next he’d shake my hand firmly, making sure to turn his grip just enough above my own, while holding my shoulder with his other hand. But knowing doesn’t always help, and when he did what I expected he loomed larger for a moment, became taller, more dominant.

  “I’m Tom Gustafsson. I’m the owner of Carlsbad Palms North. Since you’ve been guarding my buildings, I suppose it would have been good for us to meet at some point or another. That’s what I meant before.”

  Watt pointed again to the chair. “Sit down, Haines. We wanted to—”

  Gustafsson cut in, but he did it so gently that Watt was more pleased than annoyed at being left out of the dance. “We wanted, first and foremost,” Gustafsson said, “to see that you were okay.” He brought his hands together in a triangle at his chest. “Both physically and otherwise. What’s happened is a shock and a loss for all of us, and I’m sure all the more for you.”

  I didn’t like Gustafsson’s thin, grim smile, the forced empathetic charm of it. “I’m fine,” I said, “physically and in all the other ways that matter.” The more I looked at him the less I liked: his cheese-cutting little nose, his wide-set and credulous eyes, his puppetlike mouth, his cutie-pie chin with its little dimple. He had a face marinated in a mother’s kisses.

  “My head’s sore,” I said, “and I’m a little shaken up, but nothing I can’t deal with. If that’s first and foremost, what’s next?”

  Watt dropped himself into his chair, which let out the embarrassed sigh of a wife who has caught her husband jerking off in the den again. “Why don’t we all sit?” he repeated, as if that was all he could say. Sit. Stay. Shake.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m a little bit frayed. I don’t feel like sitting. Not right now. I feel like getting to my shift, if you don’t mind.”

  Watt looked somewhat helplessly to Gustafsson for direction. Gustafsson, for his part, never relinquished that flat, corporate semismile. He made it seem appropriate, even though we were talking around someone who’d just bled to death after a bullet to the chest. He nodded at me as if agreeing to what I’d said, glanced at Watt, and folded his arms. “I can understand that,” he said. “I really can, Mark. And I admire it in a person. Fortitude. Perseverance. That’s good stuff. But to be perfectly frank, what I have trouble with is how insecure my complex has turned out to be.”

  I started to defend myself, but he stopped me with an upturned palm.

  “I’m interested in what you have to say, but let me finish.” His volume rolled up a decibel or two, and his tone became firmer. Every word he said was beautifully orchestrated, performed with a perfect ear for pitch. “Is that okay with you?” When I said nothing, he went on. “My tenants pay a premium for location and for the reputation my properties have: for high-end amenities, impeccable maintenance, and yes, for their security. The businesspeople I lease to, these places are their lives. They have expensive equipment and inventory there, sometimes a life savings’ worth. They host clients, and for the government contractors, the work they do is subject to high-level clearances.” Here he meant the missile designers, the drone aircraft R&D facilities, and all the rest of the military industries drawn to San Diego by the naval base. Every fourth person in the county
got their pay from the military in one form or another.

  “I’ve already spoken with several tenants this morning about what happened. I’m not blaming you, of course, and may Michael’s soul find peace, but”—he took a step toward me very deliberately and stooped his tanned head a little lower to look me in the eye—“I am forced to say that I expect North County Security to accept responsibility for breaches of that security and to take the steps necessary to assure my tenants that it will not happen again.

  “We’ve been talking,” Gustafsson said, and pointed back and forth between him and Watt. For his part, Watt looked like he’d just shit the bed and wasn’t sure if anyone had noticed yet. “I know North County Security doesn’t want to lose my business, and we’ve had a good record so far. But something needs to be done to account for this. I need to offer my tenants something concrete to keep them feeling secure in their choice to lease my properties. What I’m saying is that Mr. Watt and I have agreed that he will step up a certain degree of armed security at several of my complexes, at a reduced rate, and that you won’t be guarding at any of my buildings in the future.”

  He held up both hands as if I were about to start pawing at his pant legs. “It’s not personal, and that’s why I came here myself. To tell you, man to man, that I’m truly sorry about Michael and that I’m working with the police to make sure his killer is brought to justice. But I am also sorry that we need to part ways like this—for the peace of mind of my tenants, truly. I wish you nothing but the best.”