by Gemma Files
Asked me why.
I swore to Christ I did not know.
Now: Four years later, and I know it all. Not that it helps one fuck.
* * *
“Lieutenant Beckwith Lookinland, Ritual Crimes.”
“Beck.”
Silence—not even breathing. Went on so long I actually started saying, into it: “It’s, uh—”
“I know who it is, David.”
So cold.
I bit the inside of my cheek. Told myself: Don’t say it. Do not say it.
“This girl in the lot—”
“I’m not going to discuss police business with you.”
“Look, I just think I might have something.”
“Well, we did set up a line for tips—just a minute, I’ll get you their number.”
“Fine, that’s how you want to play it. Here’s your tip, okay? The Cyprian Temple’s reopened. Down on Quentin. Off of Jenner.”
“We’re already looking into some leads.”
“That one of them?”
No answer.
“C’mon, Beck,” I said. “You know what this reminds you of.”
“Talking to you reminds me of a lot of things, David.”
“You gonna check it out, at least?”
Beck paused. Carefully: “You are not my partner any more, David. You aren’t even a cop. This is not your case, and I am not having this conversation.”
“Oh, fuck you, Beck,” I snapped back. “All I want to do is help.”
“And why would that be, I wonder?”
Thinking: Do not.
Synaptic finger-pop. Bone echo.
Anything else but that.
Electroshock crackle to the limbic region. My dick jerking up like Hitler’s arm, meat-puppet on a string.
Blurting, unable to stop myself:
“Because I love you.”
“So you keep saying,” he replied, and hung up.
* * *
Four years. It was a milk run, pure career P.R.: Do your superior a solid, and move on up. Eugene Silas, career Narco snitch, twenty years departmentally connected—gave up the straight line, time after time, on anybody dumb enough to try for a crossover market in weed, pills, H. Main hobbies included whores and wife-beating, up until Mrs. Silas went suddenly missing. Instant recipe for dinner party disaster, right there; shaky host, no hostess.
So: Silas called the Cap, Beck and me caught the squeal.
We met at the Silas house, traded coffee for a wedding photo two-shot—Mrs. S., dark-haired and delicate in off-white with pearls, pancake makeup layered on over what looked like fresh welts.
“I ran the initial interview already,” Beck told me. “No prior skips, no relatives in town. No friends—or boyfriends—he knows of, though I suspect that doesn’t mean much.”
“Gumshoe shitwork,” I said. “Better wipe your day-planner for the next week or so.”
Beck shrugged. “Maybe not.”
Easy call—some meter-reader made Silas’ car an hour later, parked outside the Temple. Cyprian for Cyprus, birthplace of the Greek love Goddess Aphrodite, lez poet Sappho’s favorite patron. This according to Beck, who did enough degrees (Eng. Lit, Crim. Psych, Anthro) to quote me in detail more books than I ever had time to read. Like so:
Nothing is left of me each time I see you . . . tongue numbed, arms, legs melting, on fire . . .
I took a pull off my paper-bag bourbon breakfast, absorbed this. “And the moral is, thinking with your dick rots your brain.”
Beck’s crooked smile, the sardonic version: Oh, you big lug! “Sappho didn’t have a dick per se, David.”
“Yeah, well—whatever.”
Another pull. I offered Beck the next; he passed, like I knew he would. Never saw him drink once, on the job or off.
Not even . . . later on. When I—
But anyways.
The Cyprians worshiped Love with a capital L, that catch-all cheat of a concept. Intimacy, affection, loyalty. Lust. Ideal into intent: The generative and the destructive. The spiritual lighter-flick at the heart of every secret thing.
Or, as Georgia puts it:
I touch your lips, and all at once the sparks go flying . . . .
“So they shack and fuck, and call it a religion,” I said, slugging the bottle dry. “So Mrs. Silas likes a little ceremony with her extracurricular cock. She’s over eighteen.”
“Silas wants her back—what happens after we drop her off is their business. Besides, laissez-faire only goes so far, when some cult leader’s busy making bucks from whipping his followers into an erotic frenzy. Love’s a pretty volatile emotion at the best of times.”
“And you’re brown-nosing for a rank raise. Get it straight, Beck—not everything’s a favor or photo op.”
Coolly: “No. Just the things that matter.”
Two days before Valentine’s; I Luv Eazy-Rock from every passing car window, rising candy-apple stink. Scarlet sans-serif magazine covers, blaring bad advice. TEN SEX SECRETS MEN FLIP FOR! WHAT WOMEN REALLY WANT! LONELY HEARTS ASK: “HOW WILL I KNOW?”
“Love,” I said, “ain’t nothing but sex misspelled. To lift a well-worn phrase.”
“Why, David, I never knew; you’re a genuine romantic.”
“Just a realist, college boy. Strip away the fancy rhymes, it all comes down to this—nobody ever said ‘I love you’ for free.”
. . . for though it burns me and it turns me into ashes, my whole world crashes without your kiss of fire.
* * *
I can still remember not loving Beck—not liking him even, all that much. Me, Big Dave Proulx, slow-track shithouse uniform loser. Bruiser, cunt-hound, borderline crank-junkie: Bad attitude personified. A string of formative moral clusterfucks had left me disappointed with the world, so I made up for it by toiletizing my own last chances, one by one by one. Spent my shifts getting high and wasting time, cruising for trouble in bad neighborhoods, waiting to get insulted and go ape on some (mainly) undeserving repeat offender.
Officer Beckwith Lookinland was the only one who ever trusted me to do more than lose my temper and botch my collars. A prodigy, Cap’s pet pick for surrogate son: He’d done his research, heard about a couple of righteous busts I’d done Year One, wanted to know more. He chatted me up, drew me out—sat quiet with me whenever I showed up to work with the cold sweats, three days no sleep, all bed-stink and bad breath. Covered my procedural blank spots. Wouldn’t leave me alone.
And after the brass implied he could basically name his own partner, he asked for me.
He rewrote me, that pretty, prissy rookie. Got me sober. Made sure I stayed sober, those times it really mattered. There was a puzzle called human evil that needed solving, and he wanted me in on it. He made detective, made sergeant, took me along for the ride. My fitness reports went up for the first time in ten years.
He was a living rebuke: An effortlessly good cop. Not that he ever saw it that way. Or ever conceived that I could have.
It poisoned me, poisoned us—what happened at the Temple, with Mrs. Silas, just its most overt expression. This whispered curse from a beaten bride, this unlooked-for gift from a long-dead Goddess. This friendship I never wanted. This partnership I never prized. This . . .
. . . love, Detective.
Back in the here and now, I close my eyes, pound booze. Lee Earle at my elbow—somebody else wants the phone.
Beck’s wry/cold voice in my head, looping back on itself. Two versions, overlapped: Past and present; pre- vs. post-; before and after.
All my muscles knotting and humming just to hear it—my heart, my groin. This unkillable love still alive in every part of me, like cancer.
“I love you, Beck,” I told him for the first and worst time, that Valentine’s Day night, on the steps of his suburban house. “I’m you
rs, you’re mine. I could never hurt you. Never.”
Not ‘til a few minutes later, at least.
* * *
Last call. Out onto the street, booze-burned and fever-bright, glass in my lungs again. Down to check out the Jenner lot: Blurred chalk outline, yellow tape just left lying—homicide haiku.
Some of my sources still talk to me. I used them to dummy up my own case-jacket, following Beck’s semi-warm evidence trail.
The dead girl’s name: McLay, Monica Ellen. 26. Good tits, bad buck teeth. Good record down at the Quentin Street Safeway—two years, night-shift floor manager. Her boss said he’d seen this guy from the Temple checking her out.
Illiterate mash notes slipped under the back door. “Afrodytee sez yr da 1 fr me.” Met the guy on a bank run, told him to take a hike. Laughed hard about it later—as if.
Forensics: Cracked skull, blunt instrument; swelling and haematoma at the base of the brain—she was unconscious before it started, dead ten minutes in. Rape kit positive, post-mortem. Trauma to the outer genitalia, cauterization to the inner.
Hypothesis: Same stalker mofo from the bank approached her from behind, slugged her, dragged her to where they wouldn’t be disturbed. Got busy. Then stuck an iron up inside her (soldering or curling, battery-operated) and turned it on. An open letter to the general public, corpse-written.
Not enough, just to drop her and do her the once. This skell had ambitions—total ownership. Possession, inside and out.
I’m the best you ever had, the last you ever will. I love you so much I’d kill for you, die for you. I love you too much to let you live.
You leave me, mock me, turn me down, and I’ll eat your beating heart.
I knew the impulse, intimately.
Wished to—Christ Jesus, Aphrodite, who-fucking-ever—that I didn’t.
* * *
Back at my place, too drunk to sleep, too late for much else. Eyes closed: The Temple.
Mrs. Silas.
Beck.
Records had the Temple owned by one Adonis Herson, born Graham M. Knowlton. No priors, nothing outstanding. Beck favored the direct route; I agreed. More chances to get into something.
Long story short—she wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t make her.
“We don’t interfere,” Herson told us. “The heart wants what it wants.”
Beck shot me an eyebrow. Gently quizzical: “Didn’t I hear somebody else say that?”
I snorted. “Yeah—Woody Allen, when Mia asked him why he was bonin’ the kids.”
Mrs. Silas and her guy, some unnamed cult member, standing arm in arm behind Herson. The rest of them in a supportive U around them: Red-robes/low-cleavage. Fresh flowers everywhere you looked, huge holiday wreaths and bouquets—massy, dripping, belled cups of fragrance, spilling sickly-sweet. Red candle shadows flickering on the walls, filtered through taped-together star displays of candy-heart lollipops. Too many smiles, waaay too much smug, quiet tolerance. As though they could read all the pain and rage I ran on at once, but didn’t care enough to give it much cred—just had me tagged as kind of old, kind of sad, and kind of ineffectual, even with my gun bulging out the side of my jacket for everybody to see. Worth a warm and sticky slice of their sympathy, if not their full attention.
An offhand mental group hug from everyone in the room: There there, big man.
It made me so mad my teeth hurt.
Beck watching me, sidelong. My partner, looking for a cue to follow.
No probable cause. No legal grounds to do anything but leave, and tell the Cap we blew his choice assignments—back in the shithouse for another ten years plus, this time with Beck to keep me company. All that energy and effort, gone to waste; all right for me, sure. Par for the course.
But not for him.
To Herson: “You don’t interfere?”
“Never.”
Well, okay.
I nodded, turned to Mrs. Silas. Said, conversationally: “So how about I let you make up your own mind, lady? ’Cause here’s the options. You come home. Or this piece of beef—” I pointed out the Cyprian stud—“eats the rest of his Valentine’s candy through a straw.”
“David,” said Beck.
I started rolling up my sleeves. “Look the other way, college boy. You wanna make Chief by thirty-five, you gotta start getting good at that.”
Beck: “Dave, I don’t—”
“Shut up, Beck,” I said. And I hit Mrs. Silas’ guy full tilt boogie, so hard I popped a vein in his cheek with my high school ring: Pure black/red boom, spurt, all over my nice new tie.
Mrs. Silas was tough. It took cult-boy coughing teeth through his nose, liberally slimed with bloody phlegm, before she finally stiff-legged it over. Telling Beck: “I’m ready now.”
Beck, to me: “We’re leaving.”
A last kick to the stud, flipping him—black/red ebbing, but slow. I gave him one more stomp to the gut, just for luck. Blood on my shoes: I scraped them clean on the floor-mosaic Aphrodite’s bare breasts.
To Herson: “Nice religion you got there, shitbird. Stand back, do nothing. I could get used to this.”
He looked at me then, at last, full on. Light blue eyes—cerulean, they call them. Water on white stone; submerged Greek ruins.
“I’ll remember you said that, Detective Proulx.”
* * *
Beck made Lieutenant two months later, after they threw me off. A week of all-night drunks got me crazy enough to connect the dots—camped outside the Temple, straight-up begged Herson to take this thing off me. His only answer, just what you’d expect: He wouldn’t interfere. Ever.
Mrs. Silas’ curse. Mrs. Silas’ call. I would have crawled ten miles on broken glass to eat her pussy all day, if I thought it’d do any good.
Except I knew, because Beck told me—Silas had already thrown her down the stairs an hour after we took her home, for talking back. Broke her little neck like a twig.
* * *
Lying here. Burning. Tonight and every right.
Beck across town, somewhere. Working, maybe—maybe doing the same. But not like me. Not for me.
I made damn sure of that.
Valentine’s Day night, I woke up at 3:00 a.m., thinking: I gotta apologize. Gotta go find Beck, and apologize for the whole Silas thing. He thinks I was out of line, and he’s right; I gotta tell him. ’Cause he’s my partner, my only friend. And because . . .
. . . I love him.
It swept up on me, then and there—this painful need to kiss him till his lips were one big bruise, bite his tongue and drink his bloody spit. Slap him barely conscious, then go at him till he opened those narrow eyes wide—do him so rough he fought me back, fought me with everything he had, then keep right on and do him some more. Hurt him like I hurt. Break him down.
Show him I was his, and make him mine.
The truth, plain and simple, a razor in my heart: That’s love, to me—all I know, all I’m capable of.
I could get used to this. And I guess I have, in my own way. Got used to this love, like insects swarming in and on me, everywhere at once—this love, a cage of sick shivers. This love, the stink of my own quick rot. Gangrene hot flash, indistinguishable from envy, from anger, from anguish. This Goddamn love I bear for the fine fellow officer whose head I slammed against the tiles, whose ribs I broke to hold him still, who I fucked hard up the ass till he screamed out loud, clawing and squirming, smart mouth gone dumb with pain. No lube, no finesse, no climax for anybody but me—no respect, no dignity. No mercy.
Just love, love, love.
I lay there, thinking it. Wanting it. Which was bad enough, all told.
But then I got up, drove to Beck’s house. And actually did it.
* * *
Morning came, barely. Too early for Lee Earle—I leaned back against the alley wall, collar up. Caught a flas
hing red light from the corner of my eye: Cheap cop symbology, a jolt to the spine, reflexes obviously still in the process of dying hard. Two radio cars, one unmarked—Beck’s, probably.
Ritual Crimes, parked outside the Cyprian Temple.
I followed along, made myself scarce. Saw him come out, flanked by uniforms—Herson and company hanging back at the top of the steps, a shadowed red mass. Watching.
Not interfering.
Beck gave orders, headed for his car. Then stopped, as I stepped from the shadows.
Five paces left between us, give or take. My hands cold, palms wet; heart a stroked lesion, a ticking caffeine fit.
His dark eyes turned on me for the first time in six whole years. One look, one single glance—watchful fear vs. barely-controlled hate, with only a slight procedural correctness chaser—and I was already up and running, aching to fuck or fight. Or both.
Staring him down, hair-trigger; a potential breath away from death, and just about ready to come in my pants.
Quiet: “I have a gun, David.”
“Well, good. Wouldn’t want you on the job without one.”
He looked at me. I waited. Got no response. Took another step, tentative:
“Beck, I—”
He pivoted down, drawing quick—safety off, locked and loaded. Two-hand stance, held steady. Voice shaking, just a little bit.
“You just—stop. You . . . just stand right there.”
My own hands up, empty. “Okay. See? I’m doing it. This is me, standing. See?”
“There, David. I will shoot, believe me.”
“Baby, I’d probably thank you if you did.”
We looked at each other again. Me still, him calmer. After a moment: “Mind if I ask some questions?”
“As long as you don’t call me baby.”
Glance back at the Temple—doors shut, now. A soft red light in every window.
“They got your guy in there, hidden. Claiming some kind of religious sanctuary, am I right?”
“You’re right.”
“Got a warrant yet?”
“It’s on its way.”
Conversation at its curtest. Like pulling teeth, only a lot less fun.
“You talked to Herson.”
“Yes.”
“So—what did he have to say? ‘Bout your boy, I mean. Or is he still playing it strictly non-interference?”