by Jeff Gelb
For maybe four weeks now, we’ve been campaigning a “War on Drug Gangs” in Oakland, because of all the drug-related killings, so now, it’s figured, their retaliation has begun. Two weeks ago Butch arrested a projects gangster for breaking into a car, and maybe the perp flipped Butch for the target. Who knows, the dirtbag could be related to some big crack gangster. So maybe the gang-bangers start following Butch and decide to hit him where it’s easier for them and for a bigger psychological effect on the department. We can get you right in your homes, cops. You can run but you can’t hide.
“Thing is, they know the spraypaint could be a fake, Butch,” I tell him. “Planted to throw them off. Could be some fucking lunatic who’s been watching her for a while, got obsessed with her, maybe somebody she knows.”
“I hope so,” Butch says, “because then maybe we could nail him. And I could kill him myself.” With a catch in his voice.
It’s while I’m watching Jeopardy!, Jilian’s favorite show. All of a sudden, right at the start of Double Jeopardy, I think: He’s a suspect. After Jeopardy!, I’m watching Wheel of Fortune. The phrase letters the contestant has, are:___A___ ____D PE____C____. Something makes me squirm in the La-Z-Boy while I’m watching this. The contestant starts to fill in the letters. My wife, who’s the brainy one, figures it out first. “War and Peace,” she says.
“Yeah, that’s …” I don’t finish what I started saying, and she looks at me.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” I’m feeling sick, though.
“I feel weird too,” Jilian says. “God, Delia was just over here taking care of Ashley and Ben. It was hard explaining it to them, Hank.” She starts to sniffle, and I go to the couch and put my arm around her.
“I know. But they’re a cop’s kids. They know the world a little better than their friends.”
She shakes her head, her face getting swollen from crying. Her nose going red on the end, the way it does. “That’s maybe the worst part of being a cop’s kids.”
Another time, I might get a little put off. The worst part, like it was all bad one way or another. But I’m thinking about War And Peace, and Jilian’s attitude is low on the priorities.
I remember Butch, the older kid across the street, helping me with football, soccer, basketball. I was twelve and thirteen, the nerdiest kid with a ball, the Jerry Lewis character, and Butch was like my surrogate big brother. Or my dad. He liked to talk about sex with me, looking at those Playboys, and that was some heavy duty intimacy for a thirteen-year-old kid, when it came to hanging with a senior. There was a circle-jerk feeling about it, though he never touched me. Makes me embarrassed now.
He took me to the drive-in with him sometimes too, and he’d leave me in the car to watch one of those 60s movies where hippie girls in paisley miniskirts get involved with Hell’s Angels and paint flowers on their chests and do a lot of making out to psychedelic music but never quite screw— while Butch went to drink some beer with his football friends in Andy’s van. But he always came back and snuck me a can of beer, and told me some incredibly dirty joke and asked me how I liked the sex scenes in the movie and what did I think about who did what to who. He could turn back to thirteen with me, just like that, though he was about to go into community college.
I know for sure he strangled Delia.
* * *
There’s no detective work about it. I just know him, and the “War” thing is like some bullshit from a Mel Gibson movie, and Butch loves that stuff: Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis’s Diehard. He makes fun of it, like all cops do, because it’s such fantasy, but he loves it anyway. Like all cops do. And thinking about that “War” spraypainted on the car … how Jilian got a skeptical look when I told her about that. And I remember Butch, oh, six months before Delia was murdered saying he thought about divorcing her, but he’d still never be rid of her, there would be alimony fights, and fights over the house and she knew all his friends and it’d be awkward going out with people and he finished up by saying, “So I still wouldn’t get any peace from her.”
People talk about divorcing all the time. It’s no big deal. They fought a fair amount. That’s no big deal either. Me and Jilian fight our share.
War and Peace.
Here’s the thing: Butch and I stole some money from the department. Well really, it was from the bugs. It was money confiscated from drug dealers and it was a lot of fucking money, see. It was about four hundred eighty grand. We took it from an evidence locker and covered our tracks clean, but they could still find out. So, we were sitting on it. We weren’t going to spend it for five years. That was our deal, a blood oath. No calling attention to yourself. Save it for later. No matter how broke we got in the meantime. Don’t touch it.
But suppose Butch is about to go down for killing Delia. If he killed her for sure. Suppose he wants to bargain with the department. Suppose he shafts me. Hey Captain, remember that half a mil that took a hike?
By about two p.m. the next day I am almost sort of nearly pretty sure I was wrong. He didn’t kill her. You can do that; it’s like one of those rides at Great America where you go in a loop, completely upside down. That’s how I feel while I’m following Butch over the bridge into Oakland. Like the bridge is going into a loopdeloop.
And it’s the worst thing in the world, somebody you knew all your life turns out to be something else. I mean—what’s real, then? Nothing. Not a fucking thing. So it can’t be right, what I’m thinking about Butch.
I’m officially supposed to be on a Drug Task Force detail, in the unmarked car, which basically means watching the basketball court next door to the high school to see if anyone buys or sells, and then I buzz the detectives who get the glory of the collar. But I coop it off. I am following Butch.
Why is he driving into Oakland?
He’s on special leave, and he might be going to see a therapist or something, and then I’ll feel like a jerk.
He didn’t fucking kill her, you asshole.
And the whole time I am mumbling this I am keeping my car back in traffic so Butch doesn’t see me follow him.
He drives to San Pablo Avenue, and he cruises a whore. She makes eye contact and points down the road, not knowing he’s a cop, and he picks her up. What the fuck.
She’s a black girl, or maybe what they call a High Yellow, wearing an elastic tube-top thing, and that shows her stretch-marked middle, and a short fake-leather skirt. Probably no underwear: if they can’t do it all giving head, you cough up a little extra money and they hike up their skirt.
They like to do it in the car. It’s easier than keeping a room somewhere—those Pakis who run the weekly-rate hotels wring money out of the whores same as pimps. And it’s faster just to do it in the car. They’re always thinking ahead to the next trick; to the time they got enough money to go kick it. And the faster they fuck, the faster they get it over with.
They all have their choice spots picked out getting it done in a car: back parking lots of warehouses; certain kinds of dead end streets; dirt tracks along deserted railroad yards; out next to the dumpster behind Safeway; oh, and parking lots under freeways. The butt-end of the city.
That’s where Butch has the pavement princess. They’re under a freeway, in a county equipment storage lot. Dull yellow road graders, defunct street cleaning trucks, stuff like that. Butch has some county keys, and he’s unlocked the gate.
I watch from across the street, with a piece of fence and a parked truck in between; I’m peering around the truck, through the fence, between a couple of road graders. I can make them out in there. Butch is showing her his badge and she looks royally pissed off. I can read her lips. “Oh, man you motherfucker.” But it’s not a bust. I watch as he makes her bend over his car, spreads her legs, her hands flat and far apart on the trunk, while he checks out her pussy, grinning the whole time, slapping her thighs wider apart with a nightstick he’s taken out of the car.
Then he starts shoving the nightstick in her, slapping her ass, pinching
her titties, and playing with himself. I can make out what he’s saying. “You a ho aren’tcha, huh? You a ho, right?”
He’s having a good time. The son of a bitch strangled Delia.
I can’t watch this.
Jilian says, “You shouldn’t go, you’re not supposed to bug people with too much attention and giving them all kinds of stuff, you’re supposed to leave them to feel their grief.” She went to a grief workshop when her mom died. She’s like that.
“It wasn’t my idea!” I tell her. “The fucking fishing trip is his idea! He wants to go!”
So we go, me and Butch. Driving up in his Bronco, he’s really pissed off that Stinson made him get permission from the captain to leave town. “Eighteen years on the force and they’re treating me like a dirtbag!”
“Hey and you’d be with me the whole time anyway,” I say. That was the wrong thing to say somehow. He gave me this look.
I don’t say anything about how a few days after they found his wife dead he’s gleefully rousting prostitutes and playing with their asses. I don’t say anything, but I’m thinking about it. How I could tell, watching him play sick games with the whore, he’s done this a lot. You hear people talk about how you know somebody for years but you don’t really know them. This case, it’s like he’s almost not even the sex I thought he was. I mean I don’t know shit about this guy. And now I’m driving up to a remote mountain lake with him. This is great.
We go to Robins Lake. It’s one of those reservoir lakes, a sweetheart arrangement between developers and some senator who swung the dam. Except for a little bit of gas slick around the edges from the outboards and the jet-skis, it’s pretty clean, and they stock it with fish. If you go to the north end, the jet-skis they keep at the south end scare the fish up to you.
It’s the kind of sunny day that looks friendly and waits till its gets you out in the open and then it pulls out the glare. Have a headache, buddy. We rent an aluminum outboard, and since it’s the middle of the week we’re almost the only guys out on the lake. We both got sailor hats on, folded down like bowls on our heads, and Ray-bans. Buteh’s brought a Styrofoam cooler full of Coors Lite. I’m wishing I brought sunscreen for the back of my neck, after just a half hour it’s already rasping. I’m asking myself why I’m out on the lake with a murderer.
Because I have to talk to him. Because he’s been my more-or-less best friend for, what, fifteen years or so. Because it’s inertia, and he asked me.
We fish, either end of the boat, and he doesn’t say much. Until finally, “I guess you could see the idea of a fishing trip as kind of weird, now. But I had to get away.” I can see sundogs off the lake in his dark glasses.
It’s like my lower jaw got real heavy, as I say what I’m supposed to. “People adjust in their own ways. If this keeps you sane, hey, go for it.”
He doesn’t say anything for a minute. “You think there’s anything weird about how they came back last night?”
I feel some hope, then. Maybe it wasn’t up to me.
“Buddy, when they don’t have a name—I mean, okay, they got the gang-bangers lead. But when they don’t have a name, or even a description … they fall back on the family. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“You mean, the 24/24 rule.”
“Yeah.” The 24/24 rule is that the most important time in a murder investigation are the last twenty-four hours in the victim’s life and the first twenty-four hours after the body’s found. “So it’s been longer than the twenty-four, and they feel like it’s getting cold. They clutch at straws.”
My lower jaw’s really heavy now. I can barely force myself to say this horseshit. I’m thinking about his small hands, and figuring he didn’t do it with his hands, he did it with a cord or a scarf or something. Thinking he’s cute for choosing strangulation so she doesn’t bleed all over the place. Only, the gang-bangers pretty much never strangle people. They love guns and knives. Just fucking love them.
I decide I can’t sit here like this anymore. It’s too quiet out here and I just keep seeing him go through the laundry for just the right scarf and then I see him with the ho.
You have to think things through. That’s a rule. You’re sorry if you don’t think things through.
I come at it from left field. “I mean, shit, even if … if a cop flipped out and killed his wife, the department’d be stupid to push too hard on it.”
He stares at me. My mouth goes dry. I open a beer.
I make myself go on, not sure what I’m trying to accomplish, and thinking it might be good to leave the lake early in the afternoon. “I’m just thinking about ?l’ Detective Sanson’s point of view. Or anyway, the captain’s.” He opens his mouth to say something like What are you getting at? and I put in real quick, “See, they could talk themselves into thinking you did it.” (He did it.) “And the DA could get wind of it and then they got to go through with it. I mean, we know you didn’t do it.” (He did it. By now he knows I know he did it.) “But you know, if they haven’t got a suspect they’ll keep turning to look at you and you know how people can kid themselves into shit.” (He killed her. We have a picture of Delia feeding Ashley with a baby bottle.)
“So what’s the point?”
The smell of gas from the outboard is making me ill. “Well … is there anything that could give them the wrong idea? Something they could misunderstand and think it was physical evidence.”
He’s almost smiling. I’m wishing I could see his eyes behind the Ray-Bans.
“Naw. No I don’t think so. I mean, I’m not…”
He doesn’t actually say it. I’m not stupid.
“You know what?” I stretch, and rub my neck. “This sun is, like, too much for me. Maybe we oughta get back a little early.”
He shrugs. He’s still not quite smiling. “Hey Hank—there’s the money we took.”
“We’re not even supposed to talk about that, man.”
“We’re out in the middle of a fucking lake, Hank. Just keep that money in mind. You wouldn’t want to lose that. And who knows what.”
I just nod.
My stomach feels like it’s got a bag of sand in it. But I just keep thinking, You got to think things through. That’s the bottom line, right there.
Stinson’s happy. Which is fucked up.
Stinson thinks he’s going to make his first detective collar. We’re sitting in captain’s office. Butch and the captain and Stinson and Mann, the heavy set black guy from Internal Affairs, and me for Buteh’s moral support.
Stinson disarms Butch, first thing, which freaks everyone out, even the captain, who looks like he’s going to object, and then doesn’t.
Butch tries to be cool. “You want my Beretta, keep it oiled. I don’t want a fucking dust speck in it when I get it back.”
I’m groaning inside and thinking, shut the fuck up, Butch.
“What’dya think of Omnichrome, Butch?” asks Stinson, putting Buteh’s gun on the captain’s desk, way out of Buteh’s reach. Like he’s going to start busting caps around the office.
“Stinson you watched too many movies-of-the-week,” Mann says. “Butch, you know what Omnichrome is?”
Butch shakes his head. He manages not to swallow.
Mann goes on, “It’s this new thing, alternate light source device, picks up stuff you can’t see with the naked eye. Foreign matter. The Omnichrome shows up stuff under special wavelengths …”
Stinson can’t contain himself. “Like paint specks.”
Mann gives him a tired glare. “Like paint specks, yeah. Same color and chemical composition as the ones on the car. Forensics found them on a pair of your shoes.”
“Like you get,” Stinson says, actually grinning now, “when there’s a real fine cloud of spraypaint, and you think you’re being real careful not to get any on you, but the stuff is so fine you can’t see it settle.”
Buteh’s voice is almost a monotone, carefully flat, as he says, “Spraypaint’s mostly all the same composition. And I helped Hank here spray
paint his kid’s bike-frame. I think it was red or orange or something.”
Everyone turns their heads to look at me.
Jilian doesn’t say anything about it till we’re halfway to Yosemite in our RV. About two months later. No charges against Butch. The kids are playing with a Gameboy far enough in the back they can’t hear us talk over the noise of the engine and the tires, and there’s been a silence for about sixty miles before she said it.
“He never was there, helping spraypaint Ashley’s bike.”
I’m wondering how come what she said makes me feel like I’m the one who killed Della. I say, “You remember that for sure?”
“I thought about it a lot, Hank. I mean, a lot. He came over the next day after the bike was dry and she was showing it off, the new paint you put on so drivers could see it better, and she was telling Butch all about it when he and Delia …” her voice catches “… when they came over.”
Is she, I wonder, going to come out and flat out accuse me of perjuring myself, which I sure as hell did, to protect Butch?
If she does, I’ll have to tell her about the money. And I haven’t figured out how to tell her about the money yet.
Should I lie to her, and pretend I remember him coming over earlier, some time when she wasn’t there, standing there with me when I was using the paint? It sounded too forced. Jilian’s smart. I elect to go around it.
“He just figured that’s where he got the stuff on his shoes, maybe from some dust that got stirred up or something.”
“Oh.” She decides to believe it.
I don’t say, You don’t really think that Butch could have …!or some such shit, because I couldn’t do that believably.
I just change the subject. Only, it’s not really a different subject. I tell her I’m thinking of joining the Sheriffs Department, maybe around Santa Cruz, so we could get the kids away from the Oakland area, all the crime and drugs and stuff. But I’d never do it if she didn’t want to.