You look back to the truck. “He won’t be pressing any charges,” you say.
Toby Garrett’s baby brother nods that you’re right about that. Then, no eye contact, because this is the part of his job he hates, he reaches back for his cuffs.
5.
THE SHERIFF IS A WOMAN named Felson. She wears her service revolver high on her hip, waits until morning to talk to you.
“I’m in county?” you say, rubbing your eye too hard with the heel of your hand.
She sits down, explains that the interstate David Garrett arrested you on was out of his jurisdiction, even though it was in the city limits.
Just to get it over with, you say it: “I know you?”
When you can see again, she’s watching you, both her hands on the table. No ring.
“Trying to butter me up?” She smiles in her hard, no-lipstick way, says that she was a senior your first year of junior high. You were beneath noticing, for her. But now you’ve got her full attention.
“Felson,” you go on anyway, like actually remembering, “yeah…”
“It’s my ex-husband’s name, Mr. Bruiseman. He was from Andrews.”
This is where she’s supposed to slap your wrist, explain that the fourteen cents a day it costs to feed you isn’t worth it. That the cell you were in last night is actually bigger than the storage unit you slept in this weekend, that its thin mattress is better than the couch in the office that’s usually your bed. That, if you want detox, you should pay for it like everybody else.
Instead, she leans forward with something like a question. “‘Custom.’ That’s the part I’ve never understood. Aardvark, I mean, it’s stupid, nothing to do with Stanton, but it works, gets them at the front of the phonebook. But—I mean, there’s fourteen units, right? Each ten by twenty? What’s ‘Custom’ about that?”
“Forgetting about ‘Economy,’” you add in a salesman’s bored voice. “Five dollars off a month if you pay a year in advance.”
“To say nothing of the security on premises,” she says.
“Speaking of that,” you say, making like you’re going to stand. Making like, “Thanks and all, but things to do…”
She doesn’t move, though.
“Rory’s not pressing any charges, is he?” you say. “I mean, he was who I was there for…”
Her irises are flecked with hazel, you note. Because she’s staring right the hell into your soul.
She sets a silver microcassette rig between you.
You’re suddenly frantic that you kicked out the side window of the patrol car last night on the way to booking.
But, no. The ride was only about three minutes after Toby Garrett’s baby brother called in the wrecker for Rory’s truck. All you talked about, you’re pretty sure, was the one coach the two of you had shared (Baker), and his fascination with running bleachers. His fascination with other people running bleachers, anyway. “More of a fetish, really,” you’d said.
Toby Garrett’s baby brother had tried not to laugh.
You nod like this microcassette recorder is no big deal—nothing to hide, right?—study the calendar on the wall,
suddenly drowning in panic. Did you hit something on the way back from Big Springs last night? But even in that big-ass truck you would have felt it. And…yes: parked on top of the bridge, you’d walked around the nose of the truck, traced the top of the grill guard with your palm. If there’d been blood, human, animal, or other, you would have felt it, smelled it hissing on the radiator.
“So we’re making this official,” you say, about the recorder.
“For the record, you are?”
“Nicholas A. Bruiseman.”
“Occupation?”
“Former homicide detective, current security guard,” you say. “Just the facts right?” You laugh a little about this, lean to the side as if the recorder only works when you’re sitting in one place, and ask if she wants you to start over.
“You’re doing fine, Mr. Bruiseman.”
If this were anything serious, they’d have a detective in to talk to you, you tell yourself. Somebody trained in the delicate art of interrogation. Maybe even a tag-team: hick cop, slick cop.
Sheriff Felson pushes the recorder two inches closer to you.
“So what’s this about?” you ask.
“You tell me,” she says.
“It’s not about that waitress, is it?” you say, both your hands palm-down on the table now. “Because that guy I was with, I told him, we had a deal. I’d pick up the tab, he’d take care of the tip.”
Sheriff Felson shakes her head no. Not even close. Not even close to close.
You ping-pong your eyes from side to side, as if you’re really having to think about what minor infraction you could be guilty of. “I guess, technically, from some severely limited point of view, you could say I might have stolen a few gallons of diesel.”
No.
“It’s not Thomas, is it? I mean, I don’t know where they get that beer…” You lift your shoulders in defeat. “It’s that I don’t have a ticket, right? There’s a fine for that?”
“A ticket?”
“A license.”
“To practice what, Mr. Bruiseman?”
You’re embarrassed to say it, do anyway: “Private investigation.”
She lets herself smile about this. A real live, female smile. “That what you call it?” That the license that lets you impersonate a Midland Homicide Detective? The one that provides immunity for grand theft auto—”
“Wait. Just let me talk to Rory about that. He’ll—”
“The license that lets you operate a motor vehicle while obviously inebriated, park in a strict no parking zone…” She flips her notebook open for the rest. “Oh, and hit and run parked vehicles, trespass a body shop, take unauthorized photographs?”
She’s sounding a lot like the judge in Midland, ticking your charges off on her fingers. At the time, you’d had to just stand there. Now, though, now you’ve had some time to think about it, to prepare.
She’s not going to have enough fingers.
“You forgot jaywalking, yeah?” you say. “That was the day of the body shop. I crossed way before the crosswalk. Oh, and littering, too.” You shrug, caught. “I had this twenty-ounce styrofoam cup from the Town & Country, see? Just, I mean, I was even ashamed doing it, right? Dropped it right there on the ground like a common criminal. Can you make a citizen’s arrest on yourself, or is that just some kind of public bondage?”
“Let me tell you what we’ve got,” she says, leaning forward through all your bullshit. “Darryl Koenig, a cropduster out of Greenwood. He was east of town yesterday, saw you taking the back way to the old Gates place.”
You don’t disagree.
“You don’t contest this?” she says for the recorder.
You pull it up to your lips, say it right into the mic: “No. I, Nicholas Bruiseman, of sound mind and some kind of body, don’t contest this.”
“And, last Thursday—correct me if I’m wrong here—you called the Gates household, here in town.”
“I told you—”
“Yes or no?”
“It was probably Thursday, yeah. Sure.”
“Good. Thank you. This is the Gates household of Rory Gates, whom you have something of a colorful history with.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“And a history with the wife, Gwen Gates, as well.”
“Gwen Tracy,” you correct. “I don’t know who she is now. Anymore.”
“Mr. Bruiseman answers in the affirmative,” Sheriff Felson narrates into the microphone you’re still holding.
“Would Sheriff Felson like the details of the aforesaid history?” you say, your lips curling into a smile. “I mean, no crime there, I don’t think. We were both consenting juveniles…”
She ignores this, says, still reading, “And the truck you were driving, that according to multiple witnesses has been parked—”
“Multiple?”
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“This truck, distinctive because of its Dallas Cowboy paint scheme, has been in your possession since that same Thursday?”
“Wednesday, actually,” you say with something like a game-show lilt.
“And from Thursday afternoon until last night, you’ve been…” she flips through, as if the answer’s in her notebook.
“Drinking,” you fill in. “Trying to get my tolerance up for football season.”
She’s still not amused.
“Just ask Rory,” you say. “Ask Gwen, too. They both hired me.”
“As a private investigator?”
“As a private investigator, yes,” you say into the recorder. “You want to punish me for practicing without a theme song or a sidekick, be my guest. Been feeling kind of guilty about that one anyway.”
After that, it’s the big stare-off. The finals.
But you’re not worried. Worst they can charge you with is a DUI, and even that, it’d be a joke, since Toby Garrett’s baby brother didn’t make you find your nose in the dark.
Reckless endangerment, then.
It’ll be your second.
“You say Rory Gates hired you,” Felson says. “Why did he need your services?”
“Because Gwen kicked him out, maybe? Because he was living out in a—this haunted-ass house?”
“Where he grew up?”
“You seen it lately, ma’am?”
“Go on.”
“Gwen was—” You open your hand before your face, close it back. “She was seeing somebody else. Rory wanted evidence. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. I guess adultery looks good in court.”
“It’s called sexual abandonment,” Sheriff Felson corrects. “And Gwen Gates also had need of your services. Supposedly.”
“No ‘supposedly’ about it. Seems she kind of caught something teaching English over in the federal pen. He’s big, blue, and, well—won’t go away. That a good way to say it?”
“You’re saying she told you that Fin Payne was stalking her?”
“That’s it.”
“I don’t suppose you thought to record this, get an affidavit, sign a contract?”
“I wasn’t even a PI, then,” you tell her.
Sheriff Felson pulls her top lip between her teeth. “And you were supposed to…?”
“She was afraid he was going to get violent,” you say. “Kind of has a history of that, as I understand.”
“Then Fin would be the one Rory was suspicious of?”
“Yes. Ma’am. Just like watching Dallas.”
“Nobody watches Dallas anymore, Mr. Bruiseman. And Gwen Gates will verify this…this state of affairs?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Maybe because you ran into her car?”
“Her mirror,” you correct. “And that wasn’t me.”
“She filed a report, Mr. Bruiseman. We have the physical evidence.”
“There’s another set of keys.”
Sheriff Felson stares at you about this.
You look away. “So we’re back to me, like, impersonating myself again?”
“Impersonating the cop you used to be,” she says. “Yeah.”
“Tell me what this is really about. Or I guess I’ll have to get a lawyer involved.”
She closes her notebook, guides it spiral-edge first into the slope of her chest pocket. “Rory Gates is dead, Mr. Bruiseman,” she says.
You turn your head to the side, towards Midland. Because it’s twenty miles away from the chair you’re in now.
6.
YOU’RE NOT REAL SURE what race, ethnicity, or caste your lawyer is. His name is Arnot King. The only reason you have his card in your wallet is that three years ago, on a lonely Christmas day, you let him slide on what was looking to be a DUI, some statutory issues with a minor, possession with intent to distribute, and the destruction of city property. The city property was the flag in the front of the courthouse; he was shooting salt at it with a little .410 and missing badly.
At the time, the main reason you didn’t haul him in was because it was downtown, where the wind wraps around the buildings, whips you in the face, and you’d left your black Walls jacket at the station house for some stupid reason. Because you’d been too worried about what your breath smelled like, probably. Whether your eyes were bleeding.
Standing there, your breath frosting, the new year almost upon you, Arnot King had offered to distribute some of what he was possessing your way, if you’d maybe let him go, yeah?
Mexican, you thought at first, then nixed that just as fast. Pakistani? Egyptian? A tall guy from Cambodia, maybe, with a whispery French t at the end of his name? What did people from Greenland look like? Sri Lanka?
It was something about his black eyebrows, how they wanted to be bushy but were drawn in instead. Dense, tightly woven. Manicured, almost. His eyes dancing under them, always looking to each member of the jury, telling them anything was possible, really. That there was always room for doubt.
Though he was hammered enough that his fast-food girlfriend was having to prop him up on her hip, you could tell all this.
“So?” he said, his mouth pulled up on one side, into a coyote grin.
Slowly, so he’d know this was a gift, you put the rubberband back around your clipboard, slid the whole rig into the back of your polyester pants, your utility belt creaking in the cold. You shook your head no to the baggie he dug up from his pocket.
He said, “I remember you,” his accent a complete mystery. Minnesota, maybe? Something about the way he clipped his words.
“No,” you told him, already casting around for any witnesses. “You don’t remember me. Because I was never here.”
Parting ways, he held an unsteady business card out to you, said it was worth one get out of jail free.
You took it without looking, said to the girlfriend, “You old enough to drive, miss?”
She stared at you with lizard eyes, said she was old enough for a lot of things, then asked who you were.
“Who needs to know?”
She just stared at you.
“St. Nick,” you finally told her, the first time you’d even heard the name in years. Then, minutes after she was gone, “ho, ho, ho.”
In the patrol car, in your coffee cup, was two fingers of brandy to steady your hands. For anybody watching, you acted like it was still hot, sipped the top off, then the rest, and didn’t even look at the get out of jail free card until you were pulling away. His name, big and important, then Legal Services. Attorney-at-Large. Professional Snake Charmer. The ‘snake’ in the picture was wearing a judge’s wig, was rising up over his bench, a hammer in its hand somehow.
Indian, you thought for a moment. Like from India. Except the smile, it was Indian too, no doubt—sharpened at the corners by poverty, from having to smile all the time—but the American kind.
It doesn’t matter what he is, though, only that he shows up on Wednesday just before five, one day after Toby Garrett’s baby brother looked him up in the phonebook for you. The number on the card was dead but there he was in the yellow pages, in medieval chain-mail, sitting on a horse, a javelin or lance standing up beside him. What the caption said now was Cash Settlements. Insurance Specialist. Your Knight in Legal Armor.
Toby Garrett’s baby brother had held his finger on the ad, looked up to you. “Sure?” he said.
“Old friend,” you said back, then pretended not to hear when he said, innocently almost, like he was just trailing a thought: “This make you a—a what, then? Damsel?”
On the third ring, Arnot King picked up, denied ever having met you.
You called him back, lowered your voice to a below-the-radar hiss, told him that if he didn’t remember, then the video unit on the dash of your patrol car might help. Christmas night, three years ago? Sweet little thing he picked up in the drive-through?
For a long time he was quiet.
“So?” you said.
“This isn’t about paternity, is it?
” He was covering the phone with his hand for that, you’re pretty sure.
Twenty-four hours later, like a fairy tale, Arnot King is there to rescue you.
The first thing he asks, staring at your file on the break room table, is for some privacy with his client, maybe? He’s talking to Toby Garrett’s baby brother, who’s busy getting a cup of coffee drop by drop. You’re in the break room because Arnot King says interrogation rooms are always wired.
“Paranoid,” you say to him after the break room’s empty. “I like that.”
He looks up at you for a flash. “You saying I’m still using?”
The coffee percolates like thunder.
“How bad is it, then?” you say, about your file.
Arnot King laughs, does something with his eyes that everybody in his homeland probably does without even having to think about it. A gesture between humor and despair.
“About that tape,” he says, not looking up now.
You are already thinking about spitting in the coffee, except you might want some, too. And in the pitcher, or the filter?
You come back to Arnot King slow. “Get me out of here. I know where the only copy is.”
Arnot King closes the file, holds it down with both hands.
“Like, bail?” he says.
“You could do that?”
“No. Just asking. Because”—patting the file—“if these are the charges you want me to make disappear, you may as well go ahead and have somebody mail that tape. Tell your nice sheriff about it. Or that judge you’ve got such a crush on in Midland.”
“Optimistic, too,” you say, studying the far corner of the ceiling.
“Realistic, Mr. Bruiseman.”
“Nick.”
“Nick. Listen. Without admitting anything, yes, in my less-healthy days, I had a weakness for junk food, probably can’t remember each and every, um, wrapper I threw away. Or under what circumstances. So, yes, it’s possible that I’m in your debt. That you have me for littering, let’s say. What this translates to for you is that if you get a speeding ticket in your new and improved life here, I can probably make it go away. But this”—the file again—“this is homicide. Not manslaughter, not negligence, not self-defense. Shooting a man in the face with a shotgun, Mr. Bruiseman. Nick. Nabby.”
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