by Leslie Glass
Mike tapped a pen on the arm of his chair. “Maybe she’s in the bathroom.”
April made a skeptical face. “Maybe she’s not.”
“You’re worried?”
“Yes, aren’t you? Boudreau was harassing the one doc; and he, or Gunn, or both of them, killed the other doc. The whole thing stinks.” April actually looked at him for the first time in hours. “You know we have to make a move.”
“Hey, I don’t have anything scheduled right now. I’ll go over and bring the lady in for a chat. Would that make you feel better?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. You go home and get some sleep. I’ll go get her.” Mike tapped the pencil, shrugged again. “Will I see you in the morning?” he asked.
April shook her head. “They’ve probably got somebody new coming in here tomorrow.”
“Look, April, I’ve been thinking about what happened this morning and I know you’re wrong about me being a loose cannon. I’m not a wild man. I just—” He took a breath and let it out. “I just didn’t know it was there, that’s all. Sometimes you just go along with certain assumptions and then something happens to knock them out.”
Uh-huh.
He gave her a helpless look. “You know I’m a gentle person.”
She frowned and looked at her hands. “No, I don’t know that anymore.”
“Yes, you do. You know me. That wasn’t me. That was …” He searched for a word.
April didn’t help him find one.
He dropped the pencil and started tapping his finger against his lip, glanced through the open door at the other detective out in the squad room. He was a young black man, new to the squad, talking heatedly on the phone. From the tone of his voice it sounded like an argument he didn’t want to lose. “You’re making it hard,” Mike murmured to April.
She didn’t say anything.
“Okay, you’re right. I did play with some rough people in my time. I did get into some trouble, but it was a long time ago. I never hurt anybody who didn’t deserve it, and I got out of it, didn’t I? You know I’d never hurt you. You know that, don’t you?”
That was the excuse they all gave: every thief, every abuser, every batterer, every killer. Now April looked out at the other detective on the phone. He was winding down now. It was time to go.
“I didn’t know it was there. I know now, so it’s a factor,” Mike said.
“What’s the factor?”
He glanced around, caught—guilty, lifted a shoulder. “I guess I love you.… It took me by surprise. I didn’t know I would get … violent about it.”
April glanced down at her hands as the heat rose to her face. There hadn’t been a lot of people in her life who’d said that to her. Certainly not any of the people who should have. Somehow that made it worse.
“¿Y qué más?” he said softly.
She shook her head. Somehow it hurt not to feel the way she’d always thought she would when a man she admired finally said he loved her. Safe and secure and happy like in the movies. A lot of things were in the way. A cop couldn’t be unpredictable, couldn’t fly off like that—should never, never fall in love with a partner and go crazy over her honor. Love made Mike dangerous, not safe. He was always going to be dangerous. She wondered if real love was like this.
“¿Y qué más?”
“Nada más. Let’s go.”
“You’re coming with me?” He was surprised.
“Yeah.” Wearily, she reached for her bag.
sixty-nine
Bobbie left the police station on Eighty-second Street and headed west toward Broadway. He had a lot of things to be angry about—the humiliation of cops coming to get him at work was the least of it. Then, as he thought about it, he got angrier and angrier. The cops had evicted him from his home, from life itself. He wanted to go to work, back to his patients and his old life at the Centre, even headed in that direction. But even as he walked west, he knew he couldn’t risk going back there right now. Maybe later.
He told himself he didn’t give a shit about the tail. He didn’t see a tail, but he knew there had to be one. The cops and the FBI asshole thought he’d killed Dickey. That had to be the biggest laugh of all time when they were the ones who almost killed him. Where was the justice? There was no justice. Had to be cops and FBI behind him. They wouldn’t let him go without a tail.
Whoever it was, Bobbie wasn’t about to give the bastard the satisfaction of turning around. He didn’t care. He didn’t give a shit, craved a drink, wanted to think things over. The temperature was dropping. It felt as if there’d be another freeze that night. Bobbie was wearing his nylon zip jacket. He needed something warmer, couldn’t decide where to go.
If he went to the French Quarter, the Mick might bother him. It wasn’t safe to hang out at the hospital now. Someone might hassle him. He picked up a bottle in a liquor store he never bought from and walked around with it for a while, trying to figure out where to go. He didn’t like not having a place to go. It upset him. He drank from the bottle as he wandered the area. When he was tired of looking at people, he headed over to Riverside Park and watched the Hudson turn into a choppy black oil slick.
He was angry that the only thing the assholes did all day was bug him about old stuff from his life, real old stuff nobody in the world could possibly care about anymore. Who gave a shit what happened thirty years ago? It didn’t matter anymore. No one cared. Bobbie sat on the cold ground and watched the lights in New Jersey, knowing that the old bitch was responsible for all this. She’d given his file to Dickey. She’d talked to the cops. She’d told them things about him that were private, that he’d never told anybody else. He didn’t know why he’d ever bothered to talk to her. He felt hurt and wounded. After all those things she said about loving him, she turned out disloyal, just like everybody else. She talked to a douche bag of a cop who didn’t know anything—anything about life at all—and who tried to kill him. A piece of shit who worked with a slope almost killed him. She’d told the FBI guy that he’d killed Dickey. That really made him mad.
As he sat in the park, he was aware of the dog walkers and joggers running on the paths after work. He knew the old bitch was out there somewhere anxiously trotting around like someone hunting for a lost dog. He was pretty sure if he went one block up Riverside Drive, he’d run into her. He hoped a car ran her over.
As he took some time to think about that, Bobbie was aware of some black guys hanging around thirty yards up the hill from him. The hoods of their sweatshirts covered their heads, and they were smoking dope. The sweet smell of grass drifted out toward the Hudson in the frosty air. The whole thing disgusted him. He’d never smoked dope himself. He thought it was dangerous, made a person stupid. He muttered to himself, really annoyed about these coons menacing people and polluting the environment. For a while he thought they were going to come over and try to mug him. If they did, he knew they’d be stupid, and he’d bash their coon brains in.
They left him alone, and after a while he was mad enough to go home.
seventy
Bobbie liked the basement apartment even though the heat from the hot-water pipes was so intense, no one else could stand it. He said it reminded him of Louisiana. Sometimes in winter the pipes were so hot a splash of water could turn the place into a steam bath. Bobbie said where he came from there had always been a lot of steam rising off the bayous, where his father and brothers went out fishing almost every day before the war in ‘Nam changed everything.
Bobbie said he never did have the patience for fishing himself, and even now the smell of fish made him sick. He told Gunn how his father used to tease him about his chickens. The men in his family fished and never did anything else since time in Louisiana began. Gunn imagined Bobbie as a good boy. He always gave his mother the money he made from those eggs.
Bobbie, Bobbie, Bobbie. Gunn’s head was full of him, his stories of the oyster pies and tickling the crayfish holes in the hard ground with a stick to tease them out, and the heat
, and the father who wasted away for years before he finally died coughing up streams of bloody phlegm. And his brother who went to prison for killing a man Bobbie knew for sure his brother never even got close enough to touch. And Bobbie’s humiliation in Vietnam, where everybody saw things through the haze of drugs and Bobbie was the only one sane enough to see what was going on. He was too good. Gunn reviewed the events of the last year in the light of the questions the Chinese cop had asked.
Gunn remembered Bobbie’s gentle way with the patients on his ward, how soft and kind he had been no matter how crazy and vicious and off the wall the patients had been. He had picked them up and put them down, wrapped them and unwrapped them like precious dolls, never, never hurt anyone. She knew he’d been hurt over and over, but he had never hurt anyone else.
For hours Gunn lay rigid on her bed in her pull-on pants and several layers of tee shirts. She had not wanted to go to bed in case Bobbie called, even though she knew Bobbie would not call. He was mad at her for not destroying his file a long time ago, for keeping it there in the wall of files for somebody to find someday and use to put him out of the Centre. He’d been afraid of dying, homeless, on the street. No matter what she said to assure him such a thing would never happen, he had refused to believe her. He didn’t understand that the files were sacred. Gunn knew other people tampered with them, lost them, destroyed them, but she never would. That’s why she’d had to get Bobbie’s file from Dickey’s office and put it back. The whole point was to keep Bobbie out of it.
In the flickering light of the TV, Gunn shivered, even though the woman cop had pointed out it was warm in the building. Very warm. She turned off the TV and lay back on her bed, shivering in the dark. She worried about the toilet flushing in an apartment where no one was home and wondered if she was just a crazy old fool.
Her eyelids began to feel heavy, and she drifted off into a familiar nightmare. She dreamed her cozy little apartment—with all its overstuffed furniture, floral fabrics, pillows, and lace—burst into a wild, raging fire that forced her up against the leaded window, which she could not open. With the fire at her back, Gunn tried and tried, but the window would not budge. It was rusted shut.
She could hear the crackling flames eat up her couch, her rocking chair and the lace shawl hanging over the back, feel the heat press her against the frozen, leaded glass. Then a burst of cold air hit her face as the window opened. She whimpered with terror as the dream changed shape and she tried to wake up.
As she struggled in her dream, she heard a voice in her ear. “Gunn, wake up.” Two powerful hands took her shoulders and shook her roughly.
She opened her eyes. “Bobbie?”
“Get up,” he ordered.
Gunn started crying. “Bobbie, please don’t be mad at me. I’ve been so worried.”
“I said, get up.”
“All right, all right.” She got up, pulled her tee shirts down over her hips, and scrubbed at the tears on her face.
“Go in there.” He marched her into the living room and sat her on her pretty couch. “What did you tell them?” he demanded.
Gunn’s mouth opened. “I didn’t tell them anything.”
“That’s not what they said.”
“Bobbie, I—did something bad.”
“You stupid bitch.” He kicked the couch.
She cringed at his anger. “Don’t be mad at me. I was afraid. I’m … still afraid.”
Bobbie’s eyes were cold. “That FBI guy you were so friendly with said you fingered me.”
Gunn’s eyes widened with shock. “I told them how good you were with the patients, how much they all liked you. That’s all I told them. Bobbie, that’s not how I was bad.”
“Oh, yeah, Gunn, how were you bad?”
Bobbie looked so mad. Gunn wrung her little hands, unsure how to say it. “I only wanted to help you. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. I just did it—to help.”
She had no time to scream. He grabbed her and squeezed her neck until the roar of asphyxiation filled her ears. Her lungs screamed for air. She reached for Bobbie with both hands, couldn’t reach him, ended up clawing at the pillows and peeing in her pants. The next thing she knew, Bobbie was sprinkling her all over with water from the antique brass watering can that she never used for anything but decoration.
Gunn gasped, coughed, couldn’t catch her breath. She was aware of being wet all over and stinking, tried to vomit. Nothing came up. Bobbie stood over her, his broad, freckled face and huge, bulky body a mountain. He held the watering can above her so that it continued to dribble all over her. His face was bloated, swollen with rage. She’d never seen anything like it. She looked around wildly for the cops. The cops had to be watching him, watching the building. She probed the throbbing bruises on her neck. She was terrified. Bobbie had described killing chickens like that, then cutting their heads off after they were dead. It occurred to her for the first time that he was crazy.
“Bobbie, don’t hurt me.… ” Her voice was a croak.
“I don’t hurt people.” His strange blue eyes pulsed with the death-rays of the voodoo people. He once told her people with eyes like that could kill.
“You don’t hurt people?” she whimpered.
He banged the watering can against the sofa arm.
“I’m a good person, loyal to a fault. I don’t hurt people.” He stuck his fingers in her face. “Do you hear me? I don’t hurt people.”
She wanted to throw up.
“I told you I don’t hurt people,” he insisted.
“You hurt me,” Gunn said softly. “You almost killed me, Bobbie.” Gunn hung her head.
“You hurt me, Gunn. Say you’re sorry.”
“You know I’m sorry.”
“Nobody says they’re sorry. They fuck you over. And then when they’re wrong they don’t say they’re sorry—You bitch! You set me up.”
“No, Bobbie, I was trying to save you.” Gunn started to cough and cry again.
“You set me up.”
“No.” He was wrong about that. She shook her head. She’d helped him. Tried so hard to help him. Her eyes jumped around, looking for something to save her from this.
“Loyal to a fault,” he spat at her. “I took care of you.”
The wrongness of this made Gunn shake her head. Bobbie was all mixed up. The truth was she, Gunn, had taken care of him, got him a job, brought his old mother up north, found her a place to stay, took care of her while she was sick. She’d given Bobbie money and seen that the old lady got buried right. It had been expensive, but she had done it for him. “Bobbie—” He was all wrong. She wanted this to stop now.
“Admit you set me up,” he said, his wrath erupting again.
“I’m sorry, Bobbie.… I feel real bad. I didn’t mean to kill Dr. Dickey. I just wanted him to get a little confused and forget about you. Please believe me, I didn’t know it would kill him.”
“You killed him?” Bobbie screamed. “You?”
“I was trying to help you, Bobbie—”
“You … bitch. You didn’t help me. You finished me!” He shook the watering can in her face. The water was all gone. Furiously, he slammed it down on the side of her face, splintering her nose and cheekbone. He hit her with it again, bashing her skull in with almost no effort. Then he dropped the watering can and without a backward glance returned to the bedroom, where Gunn never locked the leaded window because she was afraid of fire. He went down the fire escape and out through the garden.
seventy-one
April drove her own car up to Ninety-ninth Street. Mike sat in the passenger seat, unusually quiet until they hit the block. She had a feeling he was upset because she hadn’t said she loved him, too. But who knew, maybe he had other things on his mind.
“I’ll go up and get her,” he said.
“It’s my call,” she protested. “I’ll go up. You wait in the car.”
“I’m not waiting in the car.”
Good sign, they were fighting again.
&n
bsp; “Fine. How do you want to do it?” April asked.
“I go up. You sit in the car.”
“She’ll respond better if it’s me,” April argued.
“You want to both go up?”
“If I have no choice.” April parked the car at a hydrant. She switched the lights off and killed the motor. The night sky was overcast. Not many people out on the street. She got out of the car and spotted Andy running toward them from the alley by the building. He had the hood of his parka up and a scarf wrapped around his neck.
“He got away—” he panted. “Daveys went after him.”
“Fine, let Daveys deal,” Mike said.
Then they went up to Gunn’s apartment. Another old lady was standing in the hall, banging on Gunn’s door. “I heard him screaming at her. I called the police,” the old woman cried. “Gunn, it’s all right now. Open the door.”
seventy-two
A light powder of snow filled the sky as Bobbie went over the wall into the garden of the house next door and disappeared. He didn’t think anybody had seen him come out onto the street six houses down, almost at the end of the block, and saw no shadow behind him. Somewhere behind him an asshole or two were huddled in the cold, watching the building he’d left. So he thought.
But he didn’t really care who was behind him. Like an animal seeking his lair, Bobbie was driven by a great urgency to get to the Centre, without any clear idea of what he would do when he got there. If only he got there, he knew he’d be all right. He was a survivor. He’d been trained in combat years ago and still knew how to fight and hide. If he got there he’d have some time to work things out. It would be many hours before anyone called Gunn. Maybe a whole day before anyone found her.
Bobbie hugged the side of the buildings on Riverside, keeping as far out of the lights as he could. He was still furious at Gunn for killing Dickey and then telling the Fed bastard he had done it. He was stunned by the magnitude of the betrayal. It was the worst betrayal ever, and now it seemed clear to him that Gunn had been at the bottom of all his troubles. Dickey hadn’t set him up a year ago. Dickey hadn’t gotten him fired from the job he liked. It was Gunn, all Gunn. She was the one they questioned about every case. She was the one who kept the files. She knew what was added and subtracted to every file and why. She had control of everyone through the things written in their files. She helped people get raises and get fired. She got him fired because it was a way to make him dependent on her, to need her. She even killed his helpless, innocent mother.