The Heights

by Kate Birdsall

  “It might be inappropriate as shit, but something is obviously wrong. Please tell me that you’re going to be okay, whatever it is.”

  She frowns but nods. “I’m taking a leave of absence to attend to a medical issue. I plan to be back in about six months.”

  Medical issue? Fuck. No. Back surgery? Hip replacement? That wouldn’t take six months. She’s too young for—

  She squeezes her eyes shut and pops them open again. “I have breast cancer, Liz, and it’s spread to the bones in my back. I have to have chemotherapy and probably radiation.”

  Suddenly the air gets stuffy and hard to breathe, and I slump back into my chair. “Holy shit. No. Are you sure? I’m sorry. That’s a stupid question. Will you be okay? I’m sorry. That’s stupid too. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Not really, no.” She chuckles. “There’s really nothing anyone can do. I guess I just hope for the best and try to stay sane, myself, through treatment.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.” Tears prickle against the backs of my eyelids, so I blink fast several times.

  “Let’s set a goal to have next week be our goodbye.” Her eyes search mine. “It’s a temporary goodbye. I have every intention of being back to work in the spring. You’ve done such great work, Liz, and I’m proud of you. I’ll give you the name of my colleague in case you need her, but I’m confident that you’ll be okay.”

  I feel like a baby bird getting ready to leave the nest. I barely hear the words coming out of her mouth. All of a sudden, I have an image of her in a hospital bed, small and scared, and it occurs to me that I don’t know anything about this woman who knows everything about me. It becomes harder to stop the tears, so I rake my hand across my face. “Do you have someone to help you? Josh is an oncologist. Pediatric, but he knows his shit. Do you want me to give you his—”

  She shakes her head. “It’s not your job to fix this. You have to know that by now. It’s up to me to handle what’s happening in my life. I have an excellent support system and an excellent team of doctors and the ability to take the time off to recover. It could be much worse. Please don’t worry.”

  “Right. Like I’m not gonna worry.”

  “Well, try not to worry too much.” She chuckles. “That’s our time for today.” She pulls a business card off the table next to her chair and starts writing on the back of it. “Here’s my colleague’s name and number. Her name is Jacqueline Rhodes, and I think you’ll like her very much. She’s in the office downstairs.”

  I don’t want to talk to Jacqueline. I want to talk to you. I stand.

  She hands me the card, and I stuff it into my jacket pocket.

  “I’ll see you next week,” she says.

  “Okay.” I smile and slide through the door.

  In the car, I remove the card from my pocket and turn it over and over in my hand before shoving it back inside.

  It startles me when Gillian Swift calls me just as I’m leaving the parking lot.

  CHAPTER 28

  “Hi, Detective Boyle,” Gillian says in a sultry tone.

  “Call me Liz.”

  “Okay, Liz, what are you doing tonight? Want to get that drink with me? I have something interesting to tell you. I went back through those chapters and found something that might help. And you didn’t tell me you were a local celebrity,” she adds. “Guess I’m not the only one in the paper, huh? I Googled you.” She laughs.

  I ignore that last bit and ease the Passat onto the Shoreway. What am I doing tonight? I have no plans, beyond watching the corruption surrounding me grow deeper and deeper and worrying about my boss and my therapist.

  I could use a break. Maybe I’ll have some epiphany while I’m out drinking with the English professor. “Yeah, tonight works. Where?”

  “You’re the native,” she replies. I can hear the smile in her voice.

  I think about it for a minute. “Where do you live?”

  She laughs. “That’s bold.”

  “I didn’t mean—I just—”

  “I know.” She chuckles again. “I live in University Heights. Don’t all the professors live there?”

  “Only the arrogant ones,” I reply, letting a smile creep into my voice too. Holy hell, I’m flirting on the phone.

  “Well, I’m not arrogant enough to suggest that I know a good bar yet that doesn’t charge a million dollars for a beer. Give me time,” she replies.

  “Do you want to grab a bite too? Or just drink dinner?” I ask.

  The sound of her laugh makes me happy. “Food would be good, though after the week I’ve had, I care more about the beer.”

  Yeah, me too. I ask her if she knows where the Cedar Lee theater is, and she does—she’s been there before. I tell her to meet me at the tavern next door at eight thirty, but then it strikes me that I should offer to pick her up.

  “I’ll see you then,” she says before I get the chance. “Gotta run. Bye.”

  The line goes dead before I can reply or even think about what I’m doing.

  I decide to walk to the tavern from my apartment. I live only fifteen minutes away on foot, and it’s turned into a gorgeous fall evening, complete with light clouds against a dark, ominous, moonlit sky. This isn’t a big deal. It’s just two people meeting to have beers and dinner and talk about some jerk’s book some more. Maybe whatever she has to tell me will break the corruption case wide open.

  This is what I’m telling myself when I see her, leaning against the brick wall outside the bar, with her weight on her good leg and her cane to the side and her head back and a totally contented smile on her face. This is what I tell myself as I walk up to her and notice the light in her eyes change—it darkens, it focuses—when she sees me. This is what I tell myself when she leans in and kisses me lightly on the cheek to greet me. And when she tells me that I smell good, and when I notice that she does, too, and when I open the door for her, and when I let her walk in front of me as we move to our table, and when I notice how good she looks in those jeans and that sweater.

  “What’d you figure out?” I ask after we order our first round. She has good taste in beer too. I will myself to pay attention. I’m here for a work thing, even if I’m off the clock.

  “Let’s get right to work, huh?” she asks, a sardonic tone to her voice. “Are you one of those workaholic, can’t-ever-unwind kind of cops?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I feel myself blush. “Tell me why your week calls for booze, then,” I say, not adding that my weeks usually do just that or that I’m determined not to become a drunk asshole like my mom was for twenty-five years.

  She smiles. “Other than that meeting with you, which was splendid, it was a complete cluster fuck.” The waiter brings our beers, and she has hers in her hand almost before he walks away. She takes a sip of the porter and groans. “The Midwest does beer better than anywhere,” she muses.

  “Tell me more,” I reply then take a sip of my own pale ale. Splendid. Only an English PhD uses words like that in normal conversation. Splendid. I think about the word until it has no meaning anymore.

  “About beer? Okay,” she says, interrupting my train of thought. “I’m a beer snob. And I mean it. The best microbreweries in the country are here. Well, here and in Michigan. That’s not what you were asking, is it?”

  Her eyes twinkle, and I look back and forth between them before I catch myself and gaze at her lips instead. I know exactly where this could go, and I’m not stopping it. “Let yourself be vulnerable,” Shue would say.

  “Have you been to the brewery?” I ask.

  “It’s pretty pathetic to go to a brew pub alone,” she replies over the top of her glass.

  I’m tempted to ask her to go, but I don’t. Cora flashes in front of me. This is not Cora. This is someone else, someone new. Someone who doesn’t know me yet, doesn’t know the kind of crap I’m capable of and how much she’ll regret it if she spends too much time with me. I feel guilty for things that haven’t even happened yet but not guilty eno
ugh to kill it before it materializes.

  She catches my hesitation. “So my week. Yeah, it sucked,” she says. A piece of hair falls in front of her face, and I resist the urge to tuck it behind her ear for her. She tells me about some weird situation with the head of her department, a student crying in her office, and a rejection she received for an article that’s close to her heart.

  “Yeah, mine sucked too,” I reply. Callous. I lack empathy.

  “I would bet that, on a scale of things, your weeks usually suck a lot more than mine,” she says. Kind, genuine.

  She must catch my surprise. “Remember my dad’s a cop,” she adds. “The workaholic kind.”

  I make appropriate noises and ask appropriate questions, and we’re talking about her family all of a sudden. Then she asks about mine, and I don’t know what to say, other than an abridged version of the truth. I end with Christopher’s anger last week at the football game, since that was the last time I talked to either of my two living relatives.

  “See? The NFL,” she replies. “I’m telling you, it’s no good,” she says after we order burgers and more beer.

  We talk about that for a while. She has compelling arguments for why I should just stop caring about the Browns. Then we talk about what she calls “blind regionalism” when it comes to sports. “Think about it,” she says. “How many people do you know who call themselves Ohio State fans? And what, beyond geographical proximity, makes that happen? I mean, did they all go to Ohio State?”

  We banter back and forth about it. She’s right, but I don’t tell her that. “Explain the Oregon thing, then. ‘Go Ducks.’ Is that ‘blind regionalism’?”

  “Yes and no,” she says. “Yes, in the sense that I never would have become a fan if I hadn’t gone there. No, in the sense that I think attending a place like that really brings out the fanatic in anyone.”

  “That’s a cop-out,” I reply.

  “Yeah, I guess it is. Where’d you go to school?”

  “What makes you think I did?” I ask.

  “Because you’re sharp and you don’t hide it very well, even though you think you do.”

  “I went to CSU,” I reply after a beat. “I got two degrees there. Criminal sociology and the one I don’t tell anyone about—art history.”

  She nods. “Yeah, I thought I was getting an artsy vibe. I would have guessed music, though.”

  I laugh. “I’m a musician too.”

  “Interesting combo. Why be a cop?” she asks. “Why not be a starving artist? That always seemed romantic to me. Or grad school and an illustrious academic career?”

  “Why not be a cop?” I reply. “What’s the difference? You and I both solve mysteries. I just get a gun and OT and better retirement.”

  “Good point,” she says, “and I like that analogy.” She holds up her glass. “Here’s to a smart cop and a dumb academic having beers and dinner together.”

  We clink glasses and order another couple of rounds, and I’m surprised that it takes us so long to talk about Mattioli’s book. Turns out a couple of the anecdotes in the book are inconsistent with newspaper reports from the time in which he was quoted, but I could chalk that up to bad reporting. Either way, I make a mental note of the cases and of how impressed I am that she did a bunch of research for me.

  “There’s more, though,” she says. “I went back to my interview transcript with him and noticed that the way he describes his partner—”

  “Ray Gibson?”

  “Yeah. The way he describes him in the book isn’t anything like how he described him in person. In our interview, he made it sound like Gibson was the greatest cop in the world, so I don’t get why he wrote about him how he did.”

  Why talk shit about a guy you actually like? The plot thickens. I squint at the table. “From where I sit, that matters.” How much can I tell her? Maybe just a little. “I talked to Gibson, and he didn’t seem very fond of Mattioli. He admitted they did a bunch of bad shit back in the day, but that’s all I got from him.” Why change the story? Why tell the truth—or another lie—to Gillian? It doesn’t add up. I definitely need to talk to Mattioli tomorrow, but how am I going to get him to—

  “I have to admit, though, Liz, that while everything with the case is fascinating, I really just wanted to ask you out and couldn’t figure out how, so I used my oversized research brain to lure you.”

  I laugh, and it feels oddly natural. “I suspected as much. I’m flattered.” I feel myself blush.

  “Are you seeing anyone?”

  I tell her it’s complicated, and she lets it go. At least I don’t lie.

  Then she tells me about her accident. She’d been riding her bike to class in Sacramento traffic when a drunk asshole in a BMW hit her, going close to sixty. Life flight, the whole deal. “I don’t remember much. I was in a coma for a week,” she says. “Fractured skull, about sixteen other broken bones, various other fucked-up things. They didn’t think I’d be anything but a vegetable. Guess I proved them wrong.”

  “What about the leg?” I ask, not wondering out loud if it’s why she’s so high achieving.

  “A vestige of what once was.” She taps her left thigh. “I used to be a triathlete. Can you believe it?” She sips her beer. “I had fourteen surgeries in six years. They did their best. I ended up at Stanford Medical, of all places. They did their best,” she repeats, as if that matters. She makes intense eye contact with me. “But hey, Liz? If that’s the worst thing that ever happens to me? I’m still lucky. At least they didn’t amputate it, right? At least I didn’t die.” She smiles a knowing smile at me.

  I don’t tell her that I want to see, to touch her scars. That her visible ones remind me of my secret ones, the ones I hide.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she says.

  “I don’t,” I reply, and I’m being honest. “I respect it, what happened to you.”

  She nods and grins, and it’s genuine.

  After the waiter clears the glasses and I pay the bill against her protests, we head outside, and I walk her to her car. “I missed this weather,” she muses, and I think about kissing her but reconsider. She reads it perfectly. “At some point,” she says, “maybe you can fill me in on what ‘it’s complicated’ means.” Her eyes stay glued to mine—they don’t shift back and forth like most people’s. “In the meantime, I had a great time, and I’d love to hang out again.”

  We say our goodbyes, and I walk home quickly, briefly allowing myself to enjoy the fact that I think I just went on a first date with someone interesting, someone who isn’t Cora, and for a fleeting moment, I regret saying “it’s complicated.” It’s not, really. I push that away, though, and swing my attention back to Mattioli—I’ve got to talk to him in the next couple of days.

  Once inside my apartment, I switch lights on, top off Ivan’s food, then grab my Garrison belt, gun, and badge without pausing. I go outside and get into my car. Maybe she’s a possibility.

  My intention was to go to the Renaissance to talk to Mattioli, but I’m not doing that alone—I’ll just need to figure out who I can get to go with me—maybe Fishner. I end up in front of a familiar house, trying to figure out what I’m doing here. I pull out my phone to send a message but end up tossing it on the passenger seat—it’s late, and even if we’re friends, it’s too soon for me to pull this kind of late-night I-need-to-bounce-ideas-off-you shit, especially given that whole scene at Gibson’s last night.

  I watch her go by her front window and pray she doesn’t see my car, but she does. My phone buzzes.

  “What are you doing out there?” Cora asks.

  “Sitting in my car,” I reply. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be doing this. I should go home and go to bed.”

  She opens the front door. “Come inside before the rain starts again,” she says. And then, as if she can read my face from here: “It’s fine. Hurry up. I’m bored and can’t sleep, anyway.”

  I hang up and get out of the car.

  “You want a beer?” she says
as I remove my jacket and hang it on her coatrack.

  I follow her down the hallway. “I’d love a beer. Thanks.”

  After she grabs two beers from the fridge, opens them, and slides one across the kitchen island to me, we make small talk for a few minutes. Then I tell her what happened. All of it, all of what’s been happening. The Shue stuff, the Mattioli connection, Mistress Natalia, indicting a guy I think was put up to it, the corruption, the weirdness between Mattioli and Gibson. Briscoe and the DOJ investigation. What Gibson said about Fishner. Fishner losing her shit in her office. I say nothing about Gillian.

  “Wait a minute,” she says. “You were propositioned by a dominatrix?” She laughs, and the sound of it soothes me.

  “In essence,” I reply. “I felt like more of a private eye than a cop, if you want to know the truth. You know, using my wit and charm to outsmart the femme fatale who had info for me.”

  “But it was a dead end with the guy.”

  I nod. “And with every other guy. This stinks like shit.”

  “Yeah, sounds like it. What happened with Grimes?”

  “He showed up in my fucking squad room.”

  “Oh, it’s your squad room?” She arches an eyebrow and leans a hip against the counter.

  I grin. “You’re damn right it is.”

  I drain my beer, and without me asking, she opens the refrigerator and hands me another one.

  “I thought you were worried about my drinking,” I say.

  “You’re going to do it whether I like it or not, so you might as well do it here,” she replies. “I’m more concerned about you flying solo and interviewing shady characters by yourself out in the middle of nowhere.” She glances at my sidearm. “You should probably lock your gun up, though.”

  “I’m okay. I won’t stay long,” I say. Tomorrow, I need to figure out a way to get Fishner to help me interview Mattioli and maybe Gibson again. I can hear her voice in my head: We aren’t Internal Affairs, and they’re retired. But then I hear new-Fishner’s voice telling me God knows what.