by Leslie Glass
From time to time she played with the Chinese cop’s business card. It wasn’t a real business card. It was a police department card that said on it 20 Detective Squad and below that Det. ——— . April Woo had written her name in the blank by hand. The blank below that was for a case number, but no number was written there. Maybe Bobbie’s case didn’t have a number yet. Gunn thought about calling the cop and asking what was going on about Case number-nothing-yet. She thought about calling all day, about giving herself up. Then it got too late.
At eight o’clock she went downstairs and peeked out the glass front door to see if someone was watching the building. She didn’t think Bobbie would come home if there were cops around. She prowled around the back windows of her bedroom, but it was dark out there in the garden and she couldn’t see anything but the shapes of old heaps of garbage. She went down the stairs a second time at nine, then a third time at ten-thirty. There was no light under Bobbie’s door. Each time she returned to her own apartment she had a few drinks. At eleven, she went down the stairs one last time. This time something didn’t feel right. The last of the three dim light-bulbs in the hall ceiling fixture had gone out. It was dark in the hall, and dark under Bobbie’s door. It didn’t feel right. Gunn leaned close to the door. She heard the toilet flush.
“Bobbie?” Gunn whispered. “Bobbie? Are you there?”
Nobody answered.
sixty-eight
Tuesday was a quiet night in the squad room of the Two-O. Except for the Boudreau case, nothing much was going on. One detective was at his desk on the phone; everybody else was out. Mike and April sat at the table in the locker room, the tension between them unrelieved. It had been a long day. Their shift had been over many hours before, but neither wanted to go home. April knew that she would be out of there tomorrow, headed toward another life, but she wasn’t ready to detach from this one yet. Mike had sent Detective Andy Mason to watch Boudreau, whose only response to his interview with Daveys had been to ask for a lawyer. The D.A.’s office felt there was only circumstantial evidence, no direct evidence, that the suspect had tampered with Dickey’s scotch bottle. In addition, Boudreau’s prior history, though persuasive to Agent Daveys, was also based on circumstantial evidence. In any case, nothing he’d done in the past would be admissible in court in the present instance. They needed a stronger case before they could make an arrest Behind the mirror, April and Mike had watched Daveys put on a show for nothing. They didn’t feel good about him.
Boudreau had been released for the moment, and a completely unapologetic Daveys took off after him. A bad day was turning out to be an even worse night. After Daveys had gone without leaving a forwarding address or beeper number, they’d received some disturbing information from the lab. Lab techs confirmed the presence of Elavil in the Johnnie Walker bottle found in Boudreau’s apartment. Boudreau’s fingerprints had been found on the bottle along with those of the deceased.
But the print experts also found smudges and partials of a third person on the bottle. Those partials turned out to match the only other set of prints found on the folder containing Boudreau’s file: Gunn Tram’s. Dickey’s fingerprints on almost all of the pages of Boudreau’s file suggested that the file had been in his office and he had read it. Gunn’s prints were mingled with the dead man’s in such a way as to suggest that she had handled it after he had, and she had probably been the one to return it to her office. If Boudreau had taken the file from Dickey’s office, April and Mike reasoned, he would never have returned it to the personnel office. He would have destroyed it.
Gunn’s prints showing up in two places where they weren’t supposed to be bothered the two detectives enough to keep them sitting at the table with their notes, and Boudreau’s file, for many hours. April dialed Gunn’s number a few times to make sure the little lady hadn’t gone anywhere. Her line was always busy.
At ten P.M., they’d been on the job for fourteen hours, and they were still debating what they should do next. A lot of people would have gone home hours ago, waited for another day, another supervisor to deal with it. Tomorrow was their day off; whatever came down would be off their watch. But Mike and April didn’t see it that way. They had one suspect they considered dangerous out on the street who was being tailed by one or more FBI agents, as well as by one of their detectives. And now they had a brand-new suspect, the first suspect’s girlfriend, who happened to be a little old lady. Suddenly the case was beginning to sound like a boyfriend/girlfriend thing after all. April sighed gustily. They had to bring Gunn in and talk to her. Should it be now or tomorrow?
At ten-thirty Andy phoned in to say Boudreau had gone into his building and looked as if he might have settled in for the night. April suppressed a yawn. If all was quiet, maybe she could go home now. She picked up the phone and dialed Gunn’s number again just to make sure the old woman was all right. She let the phone ring ten times, then hung up, shaking her head.
“It’s been busy for hours and now suddenly she’s not there.”
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.