City of the Sun

by David Levien

  “And a bicycle. A blue bicycle.”

  “Yes. Jamie’s bike was blue.” Paul spoke again. Carol’s stomach turned over at the possibility that this woman’s vision was real.

  “You’re on a trip. Down south. Jamie has gone for a bike ride.” Ms. Raven became agitated, her breathing short and sharp.

  Paul and Carol grew confused.

  “The bike has fallen and Jamie seems hurt,” she went on. “He’s not dead, but hurt.”

  Carol moaned involuntarily and her face squeezed the way it did before her tears came.

  Seeing this, Paul was prompted to speak. “Look, Ms. Raven. I think you’ve got it wrong. We weren’t on a trip. We were right here. We’ve checked around. The police, the hospitals. It was no bicycle accident. Thank you for trying, but maybe we should, you know, stop.”

  Ms. Raven sat there for a minute, then two, breathing through her mouth, before she answered. “This is not an exact science.”

  “I understand that. Look, we appreciate your help, but I think this is upsetting my wife.” Carol didn’t dispute him. “What do we owe you for this?”

  Ms. Raven put down the cap and gathered her coat and bag. “You don’t have to pay me. It’s quite all right,” she said, slight offense in her voice. “If we schedule a time for me to come back, I can look at his room. Try further …” She shrugged on her coat.

  Paul showed her to the door and held it for her. “Please, let me give you something. For your time,” he offered again.

  “Well, I’m normally thirty dollars an hour,” she said.

  Paul handed her some bills. “Here you go. Thanks a lot.”

  She gave him a flyer from a store where she worked reading palms and tarot cards. “Here’s my number if you want to consult further.”

  “Thanks again.” Paul closed the door and returned to the kitchen.

  Carol was still sitting there. Tater had left the room.

  “Do you think we should have listened to her more?”

  Paul said nothing and tried to keep the cynicism off his face, knowing that if he spoke he could not keep it out of his voice.

  “She was right about the van. And the bike.”

  “She’s got a friend at the station. She probably read the file.”

  “We should have her back and try—”

  “She took money,” he said with finality, “at the door.” He crumpled the flyer and fired it in the general direction of the trash can.

  Carol began to tremble. A sob started and died within her. Paul moved to hug her. She drew away and into herself and left him standing there, unable to put his arms around her. It was always that way now, the turning away from each other. They didn’t touch intentionally anymore. There was a gulf between them in bed at night, and when an arm or a foot crossed the divide and contacted the other, it was quickly retracted in near apology. Their lovemaking was completely frozen over. The day Jamie disappeared was the first of its extinction. They were hardly friends anymore but lived as mere housemates. They were scrupulously polite to each other as they moved about the place.

  SIX

  TROUBLE CAME IN BATCHES. That was Frank Behr’s experience. And he was sure he’d find a fresh lot if he went ahead and pursued the case of this missing boy. It was late in the afternoon after the quiet man, Gabriel, had left and he’d finished with his trash. As Behr sat back in his recliner, he saw the folder on the television tray. His first instinct had been to leave it where it was, to call information for Gabriel’s number and tell him to get the hell back over here and pick it up. A man should recognize when no meant no. He didn’t call information though.

  Instead Behr stretched, his knees and shoulders popping and cracking. He pounded out push-ups and wrestled with the idea of taking the case. Between sets four and five, he bounded up and flipped open the police file that Gabriel had left. He read the particulars, nodding to himself, unsurprised and unmoved at what he saw, until he came to the ranking officer’s signature at the bottom of the third page. Even now, nine years later, the cribbed, slanted writing was familiar to him. James P. Pomeroy, Captain Pomeroy now. He had been Behr’s lieutenant, his C.O., long ago. That signature, on change of duty orders, on poor performance reports, on demotion sheets, had changed Behr’s life.

  After reading the file, there was no question about calling the father and chiding him for leaving it behind. He couldn’t do that. So he put on gray sweats, tied his running sneakers, and filled a frame pack with a fifty-pound bag of road salt and hardcover books. He strapped on the pack, which now weighed more than seventy pounds, cinched the belt around his waist, and set out for Saddle Hill Road, near the junior high, to run sprints.

  As Behr sweated and chugged up the hill, he thought back to the days when Pomeroy had been his commander and personal hair shirt. It had long been his practice, despite the advice of numerous people, to comb through his history as he worked out. Whether it was the department shrink or his ex-wife, Linda, they had all warned him that he’d remain mired in the past if he kept it up. Fighting the burn of lactic acid and sucking in oxygen, Behr went back to the time right after his son, Tim, was born, after he’d guarded the witness in the hospital and been promoted. He’d gotten a pay raise and Linda had started looking for a bigger house he knew they still couldn’t afford.

  It wasn’t long, a little over a year into his new assignment, when Behr’s first partner as a detective, Ed Polk, got lit up. Ed was off duty, as was Behr, and they weren’t even together. Ed was out on a roust of an illegal social club, where liquor was served. The club was on the north side, and back in those days, before it was cleaned up a bit, even off-duty cops tried to avoid that part of town. Polk, though, was a graft taker and was trying to shake the club down when words led to a fight and he caught two in the lung from his own backup piece, a .380 auto he wore on his ankle. There was no reason for Behr to have been there backing him up, but his lieutenant, Pomeroy, didn’t make this distinction. He said, unofficially but widely, that a cop’s always got to have his partner’s back. It was also known, unofficially but widely, that Ed Polk was the lieutenant’s cousin. Behr became a pariah and things started to unravel.

  He strained to the top of the hill for the tenth time, sweat jumping off his brow like grease from a hot pan. Making a hopeless attempt to solve a case his old boss couldn’t was just one reason not to take on this kind of work, he thought. What the case would do to him because of his own past was another.

  There were days of stillness, stretches of inertia. Sections of calendar passed when Paul felt he hadn’t moved one foot in front of the other. The house had become a crypt. He and Carol were mirrors that reflected each other’s grief, intensifying the pain and futility until it was almost searing.

  They tried to create positive momentum by attending some local encounter groups for the relatives of missing persons. Those in attendance would stand and speak of their loved ones (always in the past tense, as was the rule), giving the details of their particular story. It wasn’t so that others there could provide any help or information. The theory was that by intoning the events, one could gain power over them. Denial of the situation, clinging to the idea that the loved one was going to return — these were supposed to dissipate. Healing was supposed to ensue. Paul quickly came to dread the meetings. Withered, they sat in stale church basements, in classrooms after hours, like dead trees or tombstones. They poured coffee down their throats, not tasting it, chewed doughnuts, not tasting them. Everyone was missing somebody. Sons, daughters, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers. Where were they? The reasons for the disappearances were criminal, medical, accidental. But where were they? They were just gone. Carol seemed better after the meetings. Perhaps the sense of community helped her, or perhaps it was the forced talk that made her come alive momentarily. But he had felt it start to work on him, felt his belief that Jamie was coming back start to ebb, and that drove him away for good. He ceased going and returned to stillness.

  There were days, too, of m
otion. Bursts of activity. The yard — mowed, weeded, seeded, watered. After weeks of neglect. The car — lubed, washed, waxed. After months of dirty buildup. He began to stay out of the house, selfish as that was. It had surprised him at first, this instinct in himself. But he pursued it and took to spending long hours at work. He managed to get busy and sell policies with no problem, forgetting the terrible state of his real life. As he gave his regular pitch about being prepared for the unexpected, he could read the faces of those clients who knew his story. The worst could happen. The policies sold themselves.

  The most unseemly aspect of his behavior, he knew, was his staying away from Carol, but he couldn’t help it. To this end he bought and hung a heavy bag in the garage, so even when he was home he still wasn’t at home. He began punching it daily, making it swing and shriek on its chain. He pounded out his rage and pain in hourlong bursts. In that bag he saw the faces of anonymous attackers, drunk drivers, predators, who had come for Jamie. He lashed out at the formlessness. The dark leather of his bag gloves grew streaky white with sweat salt and creaked around his fists. After three weeks he felt some of the flab begin to melt away from his once rangy 195-pound frame. Forgotten muscles rose to the surface despite themselves. But most of all he punched to escape the weakness inside of him, a softness he knew was there and couldn’t eliminate.

  Behr drove his burgundy Toronado toward Dekuyper and the house that had once been his. The neighborhood was modest, but the homes were comfortable in size. It was a place for young families to stretch and grow. He had been a real face on this street once. As a cop, he had been a near celebrity. Everyone had felt safe with him around, and he and Linda had hosted many a barbecue. Turning onto his former street, he saw the old road sign, smashed and dented, the iron pole to which it was connected bent down to the ground the way it had been for ages. Behr thought back half a dozen years to the night he had done it. He’d been on a grief-soaked drunk and had pulled over, half out of his mind, taken out the aluminum bat he kept in his trunk, and beaten the sign down to the ground. No one had stopped him that night. The neighbors had just stood back at a distance and watched with their hands over their mouths. The sign still had not been repaired. It read PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN. Behr wondered what he’d been thinking that night as he rolled up in front of his old house. Number 72. The house was a small center-hall colonial. It had been white when it was his but had been repainted a creamy yellow by the current owners. He could see a swing set around the side in the backyard. Behr looked at the house. Sweat prickled along the back of his neck. He hadn’t been by in years and had not stayed in touch with any of the neighbors, his old friends. But the street was still familiar, as if he’d last left it to go to work that very morning. His stomach hollowed out and his throat went dry and stiff. His old life was a relic. He didn’t belong here anymore. “Fuck it,” he said aloud, jerked the gearshift into drive, and lurched away from the curb.

  Carol had taken to thinking about her past most afternoons as the house darkened and she sat looking out the window onto the street. It was the only way to escape the fog of blackness in her mind that was the present. She’d sit and listen to the low thump of Paul punching the bag in the garage and remember the wild times she’d had when she was young, during college, when nothing mattered. She’d gone to school in Michigan and she and her friends had been fixtures on the local saloon circuit. They’d owned the Spaghetti Bender outright. She could still smell the sawdust and peanut shells on the floor in the bar section. She and her girls would roll in early, around 7:30, in their Champion sweatshirts, their hair up in ponytails, and split dinner specials, not wanting to get too full to blunt the drinking. As the frat boys began trickling in, she and her group would start flirting with them and tag them for pitchers. After the first few icy beers and shots of tequila, accompanied by salt, lemon, and screams, the middle part of the night became a blur. The music they played at the Bender was predictable, and she’d be flying by the time AC/DC came on. Her group would take over the dance floor, mugs in hand, and shout the words to “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

  The nights would end, often, with young men. Too many. Sometimes they brought the promise of a relationship, other times not. She was no angel, and she didn’t want to be. She was learning about life, she told herself. She knew things no angel knew. Oh, those boys and their firm bodies. It led her, as predictably as AC/DC, to a cold clinic one morning her junior year. She’d had an accident, she was pretty sure she knew with whom, and needed it taken care of. She was put on a Valium drip, her head lolling on a stiff sheet, and the sticks were inserted. She’d wondered back then on that lonely morning, if in the future one day, when she was ready, if God would remember that moment, if He would judge her unfit to be a mother. This was the year before she had met Paul and calmed down. Before life was serious. And as she sat in the gloam of the living room, she thought differently about those nights. She knew what they were now and that God had judged. They were nights of sin and she was being punished for them.

  There was something about the way the man punched. He wasn’t trained. He didn’t have form. He moved around the bag flat-footed and didn’t put his full weight behind his shots. But there was real emotional content in his blows and no quit in his routine.

  “You’re carrying your hands too low. Your jaw’s open for a counter-right.”

  Paul Gabriel dropped his hands all the way, stepped around the edge of the bag, and saw that it was the detective, Behr, standing in the open door of the garage.

  “That happens when you only practice on a bag without leather coming back at you.”

  Gabriel shrugged, pulling off his gloves. He did throw both hands with commitment, that was the important thing, and Behr supposed that at this point the man didn’t much care if he was open to countershots.

  “Mr. Behr. I didn’t expect to see you. How’d you find me?” Paul stepped toward him.

  Behr shook his head. Gabriel nodded. Stupid question.

  “Make it Frank. You still want to do this?”

  Gabriel did nothing, said nothing, but his whole being answered in the affirmative.

  “I read the file. Your son’s dead. That’s the assumption we’ll have to work from.”

  Gabriel breathed deeply and braced himself against the diamond-hard words.

  “I’ve been coming to grips with that.” The truth was, he’d been trying to come to grips with that since the beginning but was unwilling to come any closer to doing so without knowing. “My interest is in finding who did it, learning something about it. It’s the only way we’ll be able to make peace with the situation.”

  “No promises. No guarantees,” Behr said.

  “No, sir.”

  They shook hands, Behr’s mitt enclosing Paul’s wrapped hand. “Call me Paul.”

  “Paul.”

  “My wife’s inside. Come meet her.”

  The abandoned heavy bag swung slowly as the dust motes settled in the garage.

  SEVEN

  IT WAS WORSE than he thought. Behr was on a comfortable chair in the couple’s living room. He had a half-downed cup of coffee next to him and a photo album on his lap. The parents sat across from him silently, watching, waiting, and doing the one thing he told them not to do, and knew they couldn’t help: hoping.

  “A case like this is a huge slippery wall that’s tough to get a grip on,” Behr said. He could see that the first time he’d read the file. He selected a batch of photos of the boy, Jamie, spanning a period of years, and carefully removed them from the album.

  “The idea is that these might indicate a range, a projection of how he’s aged over the past year or so,” Behr volunteered. Paul and Carol nodded. He really needed the variety to show to coroners and cops who might’ve encountered a body in a condition that couldn’t be predicted. Maybe some tiny characteristic in one of the photos would correspond to what was left of the boy.

  “Now, you two don’t have any enemies, people who were looki
ng to hurt you?” He knew it was unlikely but asked anyway. The couple’s faces were blank, and they looked at each other and grew even blanker. “Have you fired any domestic help, had a run-in in the workplace? You’re in insurance. Any angry beneficiaries who were denied payouts on policies?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  Behr nodded. The room went quiet. This was only the first of what was going to be many clipped, unsatisfying conversations. He knew it well, and also knew that there was no way around it.

  “I’ll need information on what he did. Where he went to school, his teachers. Did he play sports—”

  “He played soccer,” Paul said.

  “I’ll need his coach’s name, his teammates.” Behr spoke to the father, who nodded.

  Silence pressed into the room again. Behr realized they’d reached the part of the initial interview he dreaded most. The answer to his next question would reveal whether he was near the beginning or actually closer to a resolution in the case. He had to ask the couple if they were involved in their son’s disappearance.

  After the question had left his mouth, he would gauge them closely as they answered. There were myriad clues, both verbal and nonverbal, in people’s answers to direct, probing questions. Most cops with careers of any length and activity developed powerful abilities in deciding whether or not people were lying to them. For many it was merely the uncomfortable sensation that what they were being given wasn’t the truth. The proverbial gut feeling, so often referenced, was a reality according to Behr’s experience. For others, distinguishing fact from fabrication was a science.

  Behr’s approach fell somewhere in between. He had good instincts, but that hadn’t satisfied him. After his second year on the force he’d gone to San Francisco on his own dime for a three-day seminar given by an ex-CIA interrogator called Tactical Behavior Assessment and Strategic Interviewing Techniques. His wife hadn’t appreciated it, as his dime was actually several thousand dollars that they couldn’t afford. It was there that Behr had learned the skills that he would hone over the years. Skills that had helped him make a living ever since. He wouldn’t say he was a human lie detector, nothing like the ex-spook who had given the course, but he’d developed a hell of a sniffer. Once he got a hit of deception, he had the tools to run down the truth.