As I walked down the street, it was quiet save the sound of lizards in the brush and the coos of hidden quail. It was so quiet I heard the click of Sammy’s front-door dead bolt. I listened for more, for voices, for a fight, but nothing came.
Emily was here. She didn’t look like she was being held against her will, but she didn’t look good. Addiction could be its own kind of incarceration. And I didn’t like the way she flinched when Sammy came at her, though I had to admit—my phrase of choice again—that he hadn’t, in fact, struck her. Maybe this is right where she wants to be, I thought. And who was I to her when it came down to it? A random encounter, a short-term leg up, an obliging mark she’d tried to use. What of it? Plenty of people choose and rechoose abusive, destructive relationships every day. Who was I to get in the way of another’s rock-bottom living room? Shaw’s story could have been just that—a story, one where he’d get to rescue her, take her back to his bedroom at his mom’s house, a tube sock full of the mess of wishful thinking.
But Sammy. Sammy was the problem. He said people would come after me, would kill me, if I said anything. Maybe it was just his drug operation he was trying to protect, or theirs, or maybe it had something to do with Emily, too. Or maybe he was just afraid that Emily could expose him. I didn’t know. How could I have known? How could I know anything? It might have been only an empty threat, a bid for me to leave his girlfriend alone, a girl who, sober, wouldn’t have given him a glance if he were on fire. I needed to think, but the adrenaline kept thoughts short and circular. The possibilities presented and re-presented themselves like shuffled flash cards of what to be afraid of—an endless, circular solitaire.
A car passed at high speed, and I realized I’d been dead to the world, walking slowly, staring at my shoes. I looked up. A short way ahead was my truck, parked among the pucker bushes. Another car came over the hill, doing maybe seventy-five on the two-lane road. It was a police cruiser. Then there was a third, and a fourth. They left me in a fine dusting of pulverized granite. A fifth came over the hill, partially off-road, and almost swiped my truck. This one braked hard and came to a stop next to me. The glare on the windows was flinty and opaque. I peered harder until the doors opened and two young men pointed their two young guns at me.
One shouted for me to put my hands on my head. I did. The other came around and knocked me roughly to the ground. He cuffed my hands behind my back, high enough that it felt like my shoulder blades would burst through the skin. Gravel ground my cheek and nose. From this vantage, I almost imagined I was out on some kind of barren prairie, and I wondered why I’d come to this strange place and how many rainbows I’d have to hurdle to get back to my real, monochromatic life. If someone had been offering, I would have clicked my heels and taken a drink right there.
14.
A COP GAVE ME A BOTTLE OF WATER ONCE THEY HAD ME IN A CELL AT THE Ramona Substation. I guessed they hadn’t gotten the running kind yet and looked forward to taking advantage of a bedpan. I asked for a cup of coffee, and a blond cop brought me one. When I asked him if they’d also picked up the girl, he gave a sweet, dumb look and said, “What girl?”
The coffee settled my nerves, and when an hour or two later they brought me some food and told me to get comfortable, I knew I’d be there for the night. No one would tell me why, though I could guess a few versions of the story they were writing.
The coffee, though, let me sleep. In the morning, before breakfast, a tall Samoan, half-bald and solidly built, walked me down to an interrogation room and let me sit awhile longer. The floor only had six dozen deep gouges in it. I know. I counted. That’s a bunch of rough interrogations, I imagined, or one shitty cleaning service.
I would have counted other things in the room, but that’s all there was. I was trying to keep things slow. I knew what would happen if it went the other way. Under the circumstances, I assumed it would go the other way. There was a weird calm, though, on the other side of normal. It was like me and coffee, a counterintuitive reaction from a challenged central nervous system. I was in an interrogation room, had been arrested, had been threatened by a kid I used to evangelize with. The terms were different suddenly, and I didn’t know what to expect, so there was nothing to be prepared for. What else was there to do but wait?
Two detectives came in eventually. One was the big Samoan, the other a white guy with unusually long and fulsome hair for a cop. He introduced himself. “I’m Detective Lawrence,” he said, “and this is Mose Tuitele.” His accent straddled midwestern reserve and southern gentility, though he pronounced the voluminous vowels of the Samoan name easily and well.
“Look,” I said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. You guys can’t hold me like this.”
Tuitele lowered his solid frame into a chair in the corner and gave his partner a half smile. Lawrence folded his arms and remained standing. “Mr. Haines, you’re right in some ways and not in others,” he said. His cadence was that of a long-suffering history teacher. “You haven’t broken any laws, that’s true. And we aren’t going to suggest you did.” This made him laugh, silently, to himself. “We don’t work like that. But there are a lot of gaps here. I’m always trying to understand people. That’s the part of this job I enjoy the most. So help me understand how a man like you ends up walking away from a man like Samuel Gans, someone with a history of dealing drugs, after getting into an altercation with him?”
I found myself holding up my hands. It was something a guilty person would do, I realized, and put them on my knees. “He was a friend from a past life. We’d been out of touch. An acquaintance told me he’d fallen on hard times, so I thought I should check up on him. That’s all it was. And a mistake, obviously.”
“Past life?” Tuitele said. “You don’t mean past life past life, like you and him used to feed grapes to Cleopatra together?”
“No. Not that,” I said. “I just mean that we knew each other when we were younger, a long time ago.”
Tuitele laughed and balanced a notebook on one knee to write something down. In his hand, the pencil looked like a sewing needle. “We get all kinds,” he said. “Never assume, you understand? I had to ask.”
Lawrence was giving his partner an inscrutable look, but Tuitele never met it. “Now that we’ve established that beyond a doubt, another question,” Lawrence said. “It’s less than a week ago that you were interviewed regarding the death of a Michael Padilla. I understand he was also your friend. I spoke to Detective Harper with the Carlsbad PD. He gave me the full background. But it is noteworthy, to be at the scene of a murder and then a few days later get picked up on the premises of a raided drug house, where you’d gotten into some kind of confrontation.”
I began to respond, the maw of the events he invoked opening up gaping holes of negative space inside me, but Lawrence kept on, raising his voice gently to show he wasn’t ready to cede the floor to me: “We’re not saying you’ve done anything wrong. I’m not suggesting that, sir. But these are questionable circumstances. The facts, when placed together in this manner, are suggestive.” He rubbed his lips, muddling through those suggestive possibilities, I guessed, or at least making a show of it to give me time to do the same. But I knew where I stood. “Would you care to elaborate on anything that this should be suggestive of? Anything we might need to know about?”
“Just that my luck seems to be working against me,” I said.
“And you’ve been feeling well?” Lawrence asked.
“My coworker got killed and I was just roughed up by a tweaker, so I’ve been a little more maudlin than usual. But sure, just fine.”
“In a larger sense, though. You’ve been stable? It’s been a long time since your last arrest for drunk in public—about ten years, it seems. Have you been drinking?”
That was as far as I wanted this to go. I stood, roughly knocking the chair away behind me; it left a new set of gouges in the floor, I noticed. Didn’t take much. “No. And I haven’t done anything wrong, and you two can pull whatever you want o
ut of my record, but it doesn’t change that. If you’re trying to scare me or insult me or whatever, I want to get a lawyer. I’ve been clean and sober for nine years running, not hurting a fly. This is all a little too much.” Lawrence had poked the flopping, thirsty fish always splashing around my insides, and it made me angry—angry, looking back, because of how much that feeling of thirst had crept back around, how the brick wall I thought I’d built was full of doors and secret passageways and framed over a forgotten aquifer.
“Please, Mr. Haines,” Lawrence said in a conciliatory tone. “This isn’t an interrogation, and like I said, we don’t think you did anything.” He gave a quick glance to Tuitele, eyes communicating something. “This is just a helpful conversation. Helpful for us. Have a seat, please.”
Without looking up from his notepad, Tuitele asked brusquely, “What about the sexy stuff? Was that a part of your and Gans’s past life?”
The question took me by surprise, didn’t fully compute at first. It allowed me to overtake my overheating brain, which had started to get away from me. I knew I shouldn’t let that happen. This wasn’t the moment to get out of control.
Lawrence sighed. “That was going to be our next topic of conversation, but I guess we can go there now.” He pulled the chair back to the table and held it out for me. I took a seat. The more I watched Tuitele, the more I was sure he was drawing and not writing in his notebook.
“In the past or present,” Lawrence continued, “is there anything you can tell us about Mr. Gans’s sexual appetites?” By the way he asked, I could tell something about the question made him uncomfortable.
All I could think of was what Shaw had told me. “I’d heard some rumors,” I said. “About some things that were maybe not consensual or maybe drug related. But yeah, it sounded like he had them. Today was the first time I’d seen him in fifteen, sixteen years. I’m not the expert. What did the girl say? She’s known him more recently.”
The two cops exchanged looks. Tuitele drew a sharp vertical line on his notepad, grimaced, and asked, “What team was he playing for? Any unusual things ring his bell?”
“Excuse me? If you’re asking me if Sammy is gay, I wouldn’t know. He never said as much to me. But I was his pastor, so why would he.”
“Pastor, eh? That’s surprising,” Tuitele said.
“It was a long time ago,” I said, and then a moment later: “I think he had some kind of relationship going with the girl—Cindy or Emily or whatever her name is. She’d be able to give you more information about all this, I imagine.”
Tuitele said, “Right.” I don’t know if it was to himself or directed at his partner. Lawrence rubbed his flat chin and narrowed his eyes, a cliché of a thinking face if I ever saw one. But he must have been thinking sincerely. Abruptly he said, “Excuse me a moment, please,” and left the room.
Tuitele didn’t even glance up. Whatever he was drawing must have been a Mona Lisa, to judge by the attention he gave it. We sat in silence a good long while.
“Any idea what your partner is up to?” I asked.
“Of course, man.”
“But you’re not going to tell me.”
“You’ve got the right idea there.”
I tried to stay silent, but the sound of his pencil scratching itself to oblivion against that paper irritated me. I felt like I was the lead, wearing away. “You’re both not from around here, are you?”
He laughed a little. “Who would want to be from around here?”
He had a point, but still I said, “I’m sure some people.”
“If I was from around here, I wouldn’t be a cop.” He glanced at me, briefly, squinting one eye my way with a cool, cetacean intelligence. “I’d be a surfboard-riding burrito maker and a part-time improv comedian, doing a healthy web-design-slash-pot-growing business on the side. It tells you something’s odd about a place when most of its cops are outsiders.” He went back to his drawing with a heave of his body that suggested he’d given his final word on the subject—on any subject. I went back to waiting.
I didn’t like any of this. I didn’t like being questioned, didn’t like how it forced me to admit how little I knew of Sammy—even when we knew each other. If they wanted to know what he was afraid of when he was seventeen, what he asked for prayer about, how many times a week on average he committed the sin of self-pollution against his better intentions, I could dig all that out from somewhere in my brain. I could tell them that Sammy had been desperate for approval, for the love of an authority figure, but how he had a self-destructive streak that kept him thinking he always had something to apologize for. He couldn’t see love unless it was contingent on miraculous and undeserved forgiveness. If he wasn’t looking for that, he didn’t know what he was looking for. But all that was the polish on the piano, the public presentation he found acceptable in our confession-based environment. How the wires were strung, what gauge, and the kind of tension by which they were made straight—I didn’t know that, had never known that, not with him, not with anyone. Confession usually pulled up well short of the deeper truth.
I don’t know how long it was until Lawrence came back, but it felt interminable. Then he walked in hurriedly, like he was an obstetrician late for the birth of a child. “Sorry for the delay. Things always take longer than you think.”
He sat in the chair across from me. The three of us made the points of a right-angled triangle. It was all a little Pythagorean, this distancing between us, too mathematical. The cops exchanged looks. Tuitele sighed and nodded, then Lawrence faced me.
“Let me give you a little background. I was just speaking with the Oceanside PD, who have searched your house.” I must have colored. Lawrence knew it was coming because he used his sweetest voice to say, “A warrant was issued, you can see it if you like, but nothing was found. And”—he tried a smile here to see if it would soothe me—“I have their assurance nothing has been too disturbed. No one’s flipping mattresses or kicking over bookcases.”
I didn’t smile, didn’t laugh. I felt a numbness in my jaw like I’d been struck by a brick. A big black cloud of thoughtless, helpless rage bloomed in my brain. I recalled waking up in the machine shop’s silent, dusty office. I didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything to say, but it was the second time in a week I’d been considered a suspect, and that idea of me felt lodged, like a blade, between two ribs—the point pressed against but not yet puncturing my heart.
“We had to look,” Lawrence said apologetically. “We didn’t think we’d find anything, and we didn’t. But at Gans’s residence we found materials of a disturbing and illegal nature.”
My first thought was a meth lab in the garage, but Tuitele interjected: “Porno shit. Stuff’d make you sick for a week and look into hiding your kids until they become adults.”
Lawrence cleared his throat. “Mose.” He never looked away from me, which I took as a sign that he was still watching for a suspicious response despite what he was saying. “But yes. There was a laptop in the garage with what looks like underage pornography, animal snuff, other things. So you see, what with your relationship to Gans having, at one point, involved youth activities, we had to take any possible connections seriously.”
“To me,” I said. “Connections to me. To see if I was involved in it, too.” Tuitele was right. I did feel sick.
“Yes,” Lawrence said, almost timidly. “Right.” He seemed to lose his train of thought studying me. “Can I get you a glass of water or a cup of coffee? This may be a lot to take in, I know.”
In the rising heat of my mental circuitry, I knew what my brain wanted. Instead, I took the coffee, and Lawrence left to get it.
“Wasn’t anything to find at your house, right?” Tuitele said from his corner. “You look a little green.”
I said of course there wasn’t, that this was just overwhelming. I was nauseated. My thoughts were moving more quickly than I could keep up with. All there was—all there was were boxes of letters and books, journals, notes
of my discussions of other people’s private struggles, the crazy writings and drawings of a man in the midst of recovery, some in a child’s hand but somehow made by my oversized, clumsy adult one. All this secret life, mine and that of others. It had all been sifted through like it was nothing, nothing because it hadn’t pointed to outright crime. Crimes that Sammy was involved in or interested in. Crimes that may have involved Emily and who knows how many other kids.
Tuitele nodded. “That was my sense. Lawrence, he likes to check all the corners. Good for him, right?”
“Right,” I said, feeling out of breath.
“Waste of my damn time, though,” he said, not unkindly, “and now yours.”
The door opened and Lawrence returned. He gave me a paper cup of coffee. I willed myself to bring it to my mouth slowly, to sip instead of guzzle. But the way it burned my tongue, the way it hit my gut and immediately made my nerves snap to attention, it took the edge off. And it was good coffee. He must have skipped the prisoners’ scaly pot and gone to the staff break room for it.
“Hey,” Lawrence said, slapping me on one shoulder in a friendly way that made me want to pop him in the eye. “Your house was clean. I only made it to the ‘due diligence’ chapter in my police playbook. And that takes time, hence why you’re still here.” He sat across from me again. “Gans is claiming that the laptop we found was someone else’s, and he’d never used it. Not likely, but possible. It doesn’t show prints, but we’ve got the computer forensics guys checking it. Between that and the bit of weed we found, we can hold him for a little while until we figure it out. But there’s another part of the picture we’re trying to put together, some things we found in the house.”
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