“The Pakistanis. They want to nuke it.”
“Nuke what?”
“Maia. They made some kind of a proclamation. They cannot leave the survival of their proud and sovereign people in the hands of the Western imperialist et cetera et cetera et cetera.”
“The Pakistanis, huh?” says McGully. “No kidding? I thought Iran were the pricks to worry about on this thing.”
“No, see, the Iranians have uranium, but no missile. They can’t fire it.”
“Pakistanis can fire it?”
“They have missiles.”
I’m thinking about my snow chains, feeling the lurch of the road spinning out from under me, remembering the shudder and the thud of impact.
Culverson’s shaking his head. “So the State Department is saying, basically, you try to nuke it, we’ll nuke you first.”
“Good times,” says McGully.
“I have a pretty clear memory of checking the chain latches,” I say, and they both look over at me. “Monday morning, first thing.”
“Jesus, Palace.”
“But, so, wait. Let’s just imagine I am a murderer. Let’s imagine there’s a detective who’s working the case, and he’s, he’s”—I pause, conscious of coloring a little—“he’s closing in on me. So I want this detective dead.”
“Yes,” says McGully, and I think for a second he’s being serious, but then he sets down his sandwich, rises slowly with a solemn expression. “Or maybe it was a ghost.”
“Okay, McGully.”
“No, I’m serious.” He comes over. His breath smells like pickles. “It’s the ghost of this hanger, and he’s so annoyed that you’re trying to pretend he got murdered, he’s trying to scare you into dropping the investigation.”
“Okay, McGully, okay. I don’t think it was a ghost.”
Culverson has pulled the Times out of the trash, he’s reading the story again.
“Yeah, you’re right,” says McGully, going back to his desk and the remainder of his lunch. “You probably forgot to latch the chains.”
* * *
Another of my father’s favorite jokes was the one he rolled out whenever people asked why we lived up in Concord, considering that he worked at St. Anselm’s, half an hour away, outside Manchester. He would reel back, astonished, and just say, “Because it’s Concord!” as if it that were explanation enough, like it’s London or Paris.
This was to become a favorite joke between Nico and me, in our years of surly teenage discontent, which for Nico have never really ended. Why couldn’t we find a place to eat a decent steak after nine p.m.? Why did every other city in New England get a Starbucks before we did?
Because it’s Concord!
But the real reason my parents stayed was for my mother’s work. She was the department secretary for the Concord police, planted behind the bullet-proof glass in the front lobby, handling visitors, calmly accepting complaints from drunks and vagrants and sex offenders, ordering a cake shaped like a semiautomatic pistol for every retiring detective.
Her salary was maybe half of my father’s income, but she’d held that job before she even met Temple Palace, and she married him only on the express condition that they would remain in Concord.
He was trying to be funny when he said “because it’s Concord!” but really, he didn’t care where he lived. He loved my mother a whole heck of a lot, was the explanation, and he just wanted to be where she was.
* * *
It’s Friday, late, coming up on midnight. The stars are gleaming dully through a gray wreath of clouds. I’m sitting on my back porch, looking out on the undeveloped acreage, former farmland, that abuts my row of townhouses.
I’m sitting here telling myself I was honest with Nico, and there’s nothing else I can do.
But she’s right, unfortunately. I love her, and I don’t want her to die alone.
Technically, I don’t want her to die at all, but there’s not much I can do about that.
It’s way past business hours, but I go inside and pick up the landline and dial the number anyway. Someone will answer. It’s never been the sort of office that shuts down for nights and weekends, and I’m sure that in the asteroid era the schedule has only gotten busier.
“Hello?” says a voice, quiet and male.
“Yeah, good evening.” Tilting my head back, taking a deep breath. “I need to speak to Alison Koechner.”
* * *
On Saturday morning I go for a jog, five miles along an eccentric route of my own invention: up to White Park, over to Main Street, and then home along Rockingham, sweat trickling down my forehead, mingling with the dusting of snow. My leg drags a little from the car accident, and there’s a tightness in my chest, but it feels good to be running, to be outdoors.
Okay. I could have forgotten to latch one of the chains on the tires, sure, I could see that. I’m hurrying, I’m anxious. Maybe I neglected to latch one. But all four?
I get home and turn on my cell phone and find that I have two service bars, and that I’ve missed a call from Sophia Littlejohn.
“Oh, no,” I mutter, pressing the button to play the voicemail. Forty-five minutes I’d been out, an hour maybe, and it was the first time I had turned off my phone in a week, the first time since I laid eyes on Peter Zell’s body in the bathroom of the pirate McDonald’s.
“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you,” says Ms. Littlejohn on the message, her voice neutral and steady. I’m cradling the phone under my neck, flipping open a blue book, clicking open a pen. “But the thing is, I really don’t know what to tell you.”
And then she just starts talking, a four-minute message that does nothing but recapitulate what her husband told me at their house on Wednesday morning. She and her brother had never been close. He had reacted terribly to the asteroid, become withdrawn, detached, more so than ever. She is obviously disappointed that he chose to kill himself, but not surprised.
“And so, Detective,” she says, “I thank you for your diligence, for your concern.” She stops, and there’s a few seconds of silence, I think the message is over, but then there’s a murmuring, supportive whisper behind her—handsome husband Erik—and she says, “He was not a happy man, Officer. I wanted you to know that I cared for him. He was a sad man, and then he killed himself. Please don’t call me again.”
Beep. End of message.
I sit drumming my fingers on the warped tile of my kitchen counter, the warm sweat of my exertion drying and turning cold on my forehead. In her message, Sophia Littlejohn hadn’t mentioned the aborted suicide note, if that’s what it was—Dear Sophia. But I had told her husband about it, and it’s a safe bet that he told her.
I call her back on the landline. At home, and then on her cell, and then at work, and then at home again.
Maybe she’s not answering because she doesn’t recognize the number, so I try all the numbers again on my cell phone, except halfway through the second call I lose all my bars, no signal, dead plastic, and I throw the stupid thing across the room.
* * *
You can’t see it in people’s eyes, not in this weather: winter hats pulled down low, faces turned down to the sleet-covered sidewalk. But you read it in their gaits, in that low weary shuffle. You can see the ones who aren’t going to make it. There’s a suicide. There’s one. This guy’s not going to make it. That woman, the one with face front, chin up high. She’ll hold up, do her best, pray to someone or something, right up until the end.
On the wall of the former office building, the graffiti: LIES LIES IT’S ALL LIES.
I’m walking over to the Somerset for a bachelor’s solitary Saturday night dinner, and I go out of my way to pass the McDonald’s on Main Street. I eye the empty parking lot, the stream of pedestrians going in, coming out with their paper bags, steaming from the tops. There’s an overflowing black Dumpster along the side of the building, partially concealing the side entrance. I stand for a second, and I imagine that I’m a killer. I’ve got my car—it’s a WVO engine, or
I’ve put together a half tank somehow.
I’ve got a body in the trunk.
I wait patiently for midnight to roll around, midnight or one. Well past the dinner rush but before the tide of late-night postbar customers starts to wash in. The restaurant is mostly empty.
Casually, looking around the dimly lit lot, I pop the trunk and pull out my friend; lean him against my body and walk with him, three-legged, like a couple of drunks supporting ourselves, past the barrier of the Dumpster and in that side entrance, right down the little hall to the men’s john. Slide closed the lock. Take off my belt …
When I get to the Somerset, Ruth-Ann nods hello and fills up my coffee. Dylan is playing from the kitchen, Maurice loudly singing along to “Hazel.” I push the menu aside, surround myself with blue books. Listing and relisting the facts I’ve got thus far.
Peter Zell died five days ago.
He worked in insurance.
He loved math.
He was obsessed with the oncoming asteroid, collected information and tracked it in the sky, learning everything he could. He kept this information in a box marked “12.375,” for reasons I have yet to understand.
His face. He died with bruises on his face, below his right eye.
He was not close with his family.
He appeared to have had only one friend, a man named J. T. Toussaint, whom he’d loved as a child and then decided, for reasons of his own, to make contact with again.
I sit in front of my dinner for an hour, reading and rereading my notes, muttering to myself, waving away the slow-moving cigarette clouds that drift over from neighboring tables. At some point Maurice wanders out of the kitchen, white apron, hands on his hips, and looks down at my plate with stern disapproval.
“What’s the problem, Henry?” he says. “There a ladybug in your eggs or something?”
“Just not hungry, I guess. No offense.”
“Well, you know, hate to waste the food,” says Maurice, a high-pitched giggle sneaking into his voice, and I look up, sensing a punch line coming. “But it’s not the end of the world!”
Maurice dies laughing, stumbles back into the kitchen.
I pull out my wallet, slowly count out three tens for the check and an even thousand for a tip. The Somerset has to abide by the price controls or get shut down, so I always try to make it right on the table.
Then I gather up my blue books and shove them in the inside pocket of my blazer.
Basically, I know nothing.
4.
“Hey, Palace?”
“Yeah?” I blink, clear my throat, sniff. “Who’s this?”
My eyes find the clock. 5:42. Sunday morning. It’s like the world has decided I’m better off on Victor France’s plan, up and at ’em no time to waste. The Advent calendar … of doom.
“It’s Trish McConnell, Detective Palace. I’m sorry to wake you.”
“That’s all right.” I yawn, stretch my limbs. I haven’t spoken to Officer McConnell in days. “What’s up?”
“It’s just—like I said, I’m really sorry to bother you. But I’ve got your victim’s phone.”
In ten minutes she’s at my house—small town, no traffic—and we’re sitting at my ramshackle kitchen table, which wobbles every time one of us picks up or puts down our mug of coffee.
“I couldn’t shake the scene of the crime,” says McConnell, in uniform from cap to shoes, the thin gray stripe running down the leg of her blue pants. Her expression is intent, fixed, a woman with a story to tell. “Couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Me, neither.”
“Everything about it seemed off somehow, you know what I mean?”
“I do.”
“Especially the absence of a phone. Everyone’s got a phone. All the time. Even now. Right?”
“Right.” Except Denny Dotseth’s wife.
“So.” McConnell pauses, holds up one finger for dramatic effect, a sly smile starting to tug at the corners of her mouth. “I’m halfway through my shift two nights ago, overnight on Sector 7, and it comes to me. Somebody boosted the guy’s phone.”
I nod sagely, trying to give the impression that I’ve considered this possibility and discarded it for some higher-level, detective-grade reason, all the while kicking myself, because I’d pretty much forgotten about the phone angle entirely. “You think the killer took the phone?”
“No, Hank. Detective.” McConnell’s tight pony tail flicks back and forth as she shakes her head. “His wallet was still on him, you said. Wallet and keys. If someone killed him for gain, they’d take everything, right?”
“So maybe he got killed for the phone itself,” I say. “Something on there? A number. A photograph? Some piece of information.”
“I don’t think so.”
I rise to take our mugs over to the counter, the table teetering in my wake.
“So I’m thinking, it’s not the murderer, it’s someone at the scene,” says McConnell. “Someone at that McDonald’s snatched the phone from the dead man’s pocket.”
“Serious crime. Stealing from a corpse.”
“Yes.” she says. “But you gotta do a risk analysis.”
I glance up from the counter, where I’m emptying the Mr. Coffee carafe into our mugs. “Excuse me?”
“Let’s say I’m a regular citizen. I’m not homeless or broke, because here I am at a restaurant on a weekday morning.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got a job, but it’s a scrub job. If I can pawn a cell phone to a metal bug, someone collecting cadmium, that’s a serious payday. Enough to keep me going for a month or two, maybe even get me out of work for the end of it. So that’s a reward, a significant-percent chance of a significant reward.”
“Sure, sure.” I like the way she’s doing this.
“So I’m standing there at the McDonald’s, cops are on the way,” says McConnell. “I figure I’ve got a ten percent chance of getting caught.”
“With cops descending on the scene? Twenty-five percent chance.”
“One of them is Michelson. Eighteen percent.”
“Fourteen.”
She’s laughing, I’m laughing too, but I’m thinking about my father, and Shakespeare, and J. T. Toussaint: motive reconsidered in the matrix of new times. “But if you get caught, that’s no arraignment, no habeas, that equals one hundred percent chance of dying in jail.”
“Well, I’m young,” she says, still in character. “I’m cocky. I decide I like my odds.”
“All right, I’ll bite,” I say, stirring milk into my coffee. “Who took the phone?”
“It was that kid. The kid at the counter.”
I remember him immediately, the kid she’s talking about: greasy mullet, flipped-up visor, the acne scars, looking back and forth between hated boss and hated cops. The smirk just screaming, I got one over on all you bastards, didn’t I?
“Son of a gun,” I say. “Son of a gun.”
McConnell is beaming. She joined the force in February of last year, so she’d gotten—what?—four months active duty before someone took an axe handle and bashed in the face of the world.
“I radio in to Watch Command I’m leaving my sector—you know, nobody cares all that much—and I head right over to that McDonald’s. I walk in the door, and as soon as that kid sees my face he takes off running. Hurdles the counter, he’s out the door, across the lot, out in the snow, and I’m like, not today, friend. Not today.”
I laugh. “Not today.”
“So I draw my sidearm and I give chase.”
“You do not.”
“I do.”
This is terrific. Officer McConnell is maybe five foot one, 105 pounds, twenty-eight years old, a single mother of two. Now she’s on her feet, gesturing, pacing around my kitchen.
“He books it into that little playground there. I mean the guy is zooming like the Road Runner, skidding through the gravel and the slush and everything. I’m yelling, ‘Police, police! Stop, motherfucke
r!’ ”
“You do not yell, ‘Stop, motherfucker.’ ”
“I do. Because you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, ‘Stop, motherfucker.’ ”
McConnell has the kid in cuffs and she leans on him hard, right there in the churned-up snow of the West Street playground, and he spills. He’d pawned the phone to a blue-haired lady named Beverly Markel, who runs a junk shop out of a boarded-up bail bondsman’s next to the county courthouse. Markel is a goldbug, stockpiling coins and bullion, but she has a sideline in pawnbroking. McConnell works the lead: Beverly had sold the phone already, to a fat loon named Konrad, who was collecting lithium-ion cell phone batteries to communicate with the aliens who he thinks are on the way from the Andromeda galaxy to load the human race onto a flotilla of rescue ships. McConnell paid Konrad a visit, and after he was made to understand that she was a visitor not from outer space but from the police department, he grudgingly handed over the phone—still, miraculously, intact.
I reward this dramatic conclusion with a long, low appreciative whistle and a round of applause, while McConnell produces her prize and slides it on the table between us: a slim black smartphone, slick and gleaming. It’s the same make and model as my own, and for a brief, disorienting instant I think it is mine, that somehow Peter Zell died in possession of Detective Henry Palace’s cellular telephone.
“Well, Officer McConnell.” I scoop up the phone and feel its cool flat weight in my palm. It’s like holding one of Zell’s organs, a kidney, a lobe of the brain. “That is one solid piece of police work.”
She looks down at her hands, then back up at me, and that’s it, our business is concluded. We sit there in easy morning silence, two human beings framed by the single window of a small white kitchen, the sun struggling to make itself known outside through the dampening gray of the low-hanging clouds. I’ve got a pretty decent view out here, especially first thing in the morning: a nice little copse of winter pine, the farmland beyond, deer tracks dancing across the snow.
“You’ll make a great detective one day, Officer McConnell.”
“Oh, I know,” she says, flash of a smile, drains her coffee. “I know I will.”
Ben H. Winters Page 11