The waitress came back and refilled my coffee yet again. “You’ll be bouncing off the walls today,” she said and laughed. Yeah. Bouncing off the walls.
“No,” I said when she was gone, “we didn’t get him killed. Sanabria did, I think, and Harrison’s involved.”
“The phone calls suggest that, at least.”
“Speaking of which, why don’t you have a damn wiretap on these guys?”
“Don’t have the probable cause, and you know that. Maybe I can get it now, but not before.”
“Great,” I said. “Ken’s made a break in the case. That’s all the poor bastard wanted to do. Don’t think he wanted to die to get it, though.”
Graham sighed again. “Linc, how’s your head?”
“What, the coffee?”
“No, not the coffee. The way you went at it today, brother . . . I can’t have you doing that. You’re lucky Harrison’s not pressing charges. He may change his mind. Either way, I can’t afford to have you—”
“I screwed up with him.”
“No shit you screwed up with him, and I’m just saying—”
“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t understand, Graham. I don’t mean in general terms. I mean specifically. In the heat of the moment, when I had him out there in the parking lot, I said something I shouldn’t have.”
He looked at me like a man who was waiting for a diagnosis and wasn’t optimistic.
“I told him you know about the burial,” I said. “The Shawnee elements.”
Diagnosis delivered, and the result was what I’d expected—a flash of shock, replaced quickly by anger. Deep anger. He stared at me and then turned and looked down at the table and blew his breath out between his teeth.
“You told him we know about the burial. The one thing we’ve got hope on, waiting on those damn lab results—”
“If you get the lab results, it doesn’t matter that he knows. Maybe it doesn’t anyhow. How can he prepare to deal with that, Graham? How can that knowledge really help him?”
I was arguing out of a natural sense of self-defense, but I still knew it had been a mistake, and a potentially damaging one. The detail of the grave was the one card Graham had to play on this one, the only thing he’d held back from the media and the only firm link he had to Harrison. It wasn’t all that firm—the definition of circumstantial, actually—but it was what he had.
“That’s beautiful,” he said, shaking his head. “That is just beautiful, Linc.”
“Graham, I’m sorry. Like I said, heat of the moment.”
“Yeah, heat of a moment you shouldn’t have been in. You were police, you know better than that.” Another head shake. “No, it’s on me. It’s on me, damn it, I know that, I see that, I got him dead and you knocking suspects around and divulging information and driving out to Sanabria’s with intentions I don’t even want to guess at . . . yeah, Linc, I made the wrong play when you boys called me. I did. No question.”
I didn’t say anything to that, didn’t want to argue anymore, wanted to try to retain some dignity. Graham and I were feeling a lot of the same things, really. We’d both made some mistakes we’d be thinking about for a long time to come.
“So he knows,” Graham said eventually. “He knows what I know now. Level field now, right? Level field.”
“It’s not level. He knows a hell of a lot more than you do.”
He looked up at me then, held my eye for a moment, then nodded. The waitress came back and dropped a check off and Graham reached out and took it and folded it.
“Linc, there’s something I need to ask of you.”
“You want me out.”
“Oh, yeah. Wanted you out yesterday, you know that, but after this morning, the way you went driving around, stirring shit up—that cannot continue.”
“Let me head you off here,” I said. “I am out.”
He leaned back and gave me a bemused look, not buying it.
“That’s a promise, Graham. The minute you and I finish this talk, I’m done. When I say that, I mean it.”
“Why?” he said.
“Why do I want out? Because it’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Never did, though.”
“I know it, and I should have paid more attention to that. Ken showed up and asked, and I went along with him because it is what I do, Graham. This is what I know how to do. He gave me a case and said here is what we know and here is what we need to know, and I couldn’t stop myself from joining up. I’ve done it for too long to stop, evidently. Until today. Because I’ll tell you something—I went down to see the spot where his body was found. I stood down there and I thought about my girlfriend’s body ending up there instead, or my partner’s. They’ve both come close over the last two years. I stood there and I realized what you just said: that it never did have anything to do with me, and that I can’t make a decision to put people in danger for things that aren’t personal. Call it a revelation, an epiphany, whatever you’d like. Here’s what I’m promising you: I will not put other people at risk for a case anymore. I’m done with it. If I’d sent that poor bastard back to Pennsylvania the day he arrived, he’d be alive, too.”
“Can’t put all that on yourself, Linc.”
“Oh, I’m not. Some of it’s on you, and plenty is on him. Then there are the guys who actually, you know, killed him. They probably require a bit of blame, too. What I’m saying, though, is that I’m not going to be involved in any attempt to settle up with them. I burned that desire out this morning, and screwed things up for you while doing it. Now I’m just going to apologize and step aside. So save whatever speech you have prepared.”
He was watching me with a deep frown, and now he braced his forearms on the table and leaned close, eyes on mine.
“I’ll close this case,” he said. “Word as bond, Linc, I’ll close it.”
“I hope so, Graham. You have to try, at least. It’s your job—but you know what? It doesn’t have to be mine. I’m finally understanding that.” I stood up and tossed some money on the table. “I wish you luck, and if you have more questions, you know how to reach me. Otherwise, though, save yourself any worry on my part. I’m gone.”
John Dunbar came by my apartment that afternoon. I’d been waiting for Amy, but when I heard a knock instead of a key turning I grimaced, knowing it wouldn’t be good. I let him up, and he sat in my living room, loosened his tie, and told me that we had to get to work.
“Look, Perry, I understand how you feel right now. The anger, the sense of futility. You feel that way because you know who’s responsible and yet he’s walking around free. Sanabria’s done that too long. We can’t let it continue. We can’t.”
“Did you ever consider,” I said, “that you might be responsible for this?”
“What?”
“Everything that happened with the Cantrells. Think about it. Do they ever leave that house if you don’t conceive of the brilliant idea of planting Bertoli there? Does anyone ever get killed? Or are they still living in that place and helping people, Dunbar?”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to let you put that at my feet. I didn’t invent the trouble they had as a couple, didn’t even come to Joshua with the idea. He came to me. I don’t regret what we tried to do.”
I stayed silent and made a point of looking at my watch. Anytime you want to leave, Dunbar . . .
“Your idea,” he said, “would be that if we just gave up on justice, fewer people would get hurt? If we just let Sanabria run wild, without persecution or prosecution, the rest of us are fine? That’s a pretty selfish idea, Perry. He killed other people before your friend, and he’ll kill other people again.”
“How long have you been chasing him?”
He couldn’t hold my eyes. “A long time.”
“How many years?”
“Twenty. About twenty.”
“And you’ve done nothing but add to his body count.”
“I don’t have to listen to—”
“I
f you want him that bad, why didn’t you just kill the son of a bitch, Dunbar? You’d have had an easier time doing that and getting away with it than you would have getting anything useful with Bertoli and that half-assed sting attempt.”
He got to his feet slowly, his jaw tight. “That’s not how it’s done. I do it right.”
“You haven’t yet.”
“I will,” he snapped. “I will. I’m retired, Perry, and still I’m here, asking for your help. That doesn’t mean anything to you? Doesn’t tell you anything about me?”
“It means something to me,” I said, “but not what you want it to.”
He stood there for a moment and stared at me, and I saw contempt in his eyes.
“You could do something about this,” he said. “A real detective would.”
He left my apartment then. I thought about what he’d said, and thought that a year ago the words would have been coming out of my lips. A year ago, I wouldn’t be back in my apartment right now or for many hours yet to come, I’d be chasing every lead, believing that I could do something to set things right. Why didn’t I now?
It stacked up on you, after a while. The violence. If you kept your distance, maybe you could avoid that; if every corpse and every crime scene photograph you looked at represented somebody else’s friend, somebody’s else’s brother, somebody else’s daughter, maybe you could hold that distance. It wasn’t working that way for me anymore, though. I sat in my living room after Dunbar left and I began to see the ghosts, Ken Merriman and Ed Gradduk and Joe before the bullets found him that day by the bridge over Rocky River. There was Keith Appleton, a sweet kid who’d been one of the first members my gym had and was murdered before his high school graduation, and Alex Jefferson, my onetime nemesis, and Julie and Betsy Weston, mother and child, long gone from this city and still present in my mind every single day.
It stacked up on you.
That afternoon I got out the CD Ken had burned for me and played it for the first time: Something I need that I just can’t find. Is it too late now? Am I too far behind?
I heard those lyrics, and I thought of Ken, chasing Alexandra twelve years after she’d left, and of Dunbar, pursuing Sanabria two decades after he’d missed a chance to stick him in prison, and I wondered why they no longer felt like colleagues to me, like comrades.
Now there’s a whole new crowd out here, and they just don’t seem to care. Still I keep searching through this gloom . . .
I wouldn’t keep searching through the gloom. Because you couldn’t catch them all. Look at Dunbar. A full career behind him, and years after retirement he was still consumed by Sanabria, still hungered for him every day—and if he got him, finally? It wouldn’t mean much. There’d be another to take his place. Every detective had his white whale. I wondered how many of them ever lifted their heads long enough to see that the seas were teeming with white whales.
I took the CD out and put it back in its case and put it away, and when Amy came by that night I asked her if she could take a few days off. I wanted to go to Florida, I said. I wanted to see Joe.
“What about the funeral?”
“I don’t know anybody he knew, Amy. It’ll be a roomful of strangers, maybe strangers who won’t want to see me there. He was working with me when he got killed.”
“Still, it’s a gesture.”
“One he’s gonna see?”
She didn’t answer that, and I said, “Amy, I need to talk things out with Joe. I need you with me.”
She nodded. “I’ll call my boss.”
I went to the Hideaway alone that night. I drank a beer and a bourbon and I toasted to a dead man. Scott Draper, used to dealing with the emotions of the drunk or the emotion-drunk, left me alone until I waved him over and launched into a debate about the prospects of the Cleveland Browns. He saw the forced nature of it, but he asked no questions, and I was glad. I had one last bourbon before calling it a night, muttered a toast to Sam Spade, and then spun the whiskey glass back across the bar. It was done for me now. It was absolutely done for me.
28
__________
We left two days later, took a direct flight from Cleveland to Tampa and then rented a car. Even in the airport parking garage, among the shadows of cold concrete, you could feel the intensity of the Florida summer heat, opening your pores and baking into your bones. I put our bags in the trunk of the convertible Amy had insisted we rent—if I’m going to sweat, I might as well get tan—and then tossed the keys to her. I didn’t want to drive. Felt more like riding.
We took I-275 south out of Tampa and drove over the Howard Frankland bridge toward St. Petersburg. A few miles past the bridge, I pointed at a sign indicating “gulf beaches,” and Amy turned off the interstate. Joe was staying in a place called Indian Rocks, one of the hotel-and-condo communities that lined the beach from Clearwater to St. Pete. The last time I’d been on the gulf side of Florida, I was nineteen and on a spring break trip. We’d been much farther south then, too, so none of this was familiar to me. I could understand why Joe had enjoyed it during the winter, but now, with the unrelenting sun and humidity that you felt deep in your chest, enveloping your lungs, his motivation for staying seemed a little less clear. This Gena must be one hell of a woman.
We hit a stoplight just outside of Indian Rocks and watched an obese man with no shirt and blistered red skin walk in front of the car, shouting obscenities into a cell phone and carrying a bright blue drink in a plastic cup. Amy turned to me, her amusement clear despite the sunglasses that shielded her eyes, and said, “Think Joe’s turned into one of those?”
“I’m sure of it.”
Joe had told me to call when we got to the little town, so now I took out my cell phone and called, and he provided directions to the condo that had been his home for the past six months. We drove slowly, searching for the place, a different collection of oceanfront granite and glass everywhere you looked. When I finally saw the sign for Joe’s building, I laughed. Trust him to find this one.
Squatting beneath two of the more extravagant hotels on the beach was a two-story L-shaped building that looked as if it had been built in the late 1950s and tuned up maybe once since then—perhaps after a hurricane. The old-fashioned sign out front boasted of shuffleboard and a weekly potluck.
“Oh, no,” Amy said. “It’s worse than I thought.”
We pulled into the parking lot and got out and stretched, and then Joe appeared, walking toward us with an easier stride than I’d seen from him in a long time, some of his old athlete’s grace coming back.
“Trust LP to wait until it hits ninety-five before he brings you down,” he said, going first to Amy, who hugged him hard. He looked good. Some of his weight was back, and the pallor he’d had when he left Cleveland in December was gone, replaced by a tan that made his gray hair seem almost white. He stepped away from Amy and put out his hand, and I liked the strength I felt in his grip, the steady look in his eyes. It was a far cry from the way he’d looked when he left. These months had been good to him.
He let go of my hand but continued to search my eyes. We’d had a few talks since Ken had been killed, but nothing at length. I’m not a big fan of phone conversations.
“Please tell me you don’t play shuffleboard,” Amy said.
“No. The place is better than it looks, really.”
“What’s the median age of the occupants?”
“There are some kids. One guy just retired from Visa, can’t be more than sixty.”
He led us out of the parking lot and around the building, past a sparkling pool with nobody in the water and up the steps to a corner room with a view of the ocean. Now that we were out of the car, the heat was staggering. Even down here on the water the humidity settled on you like lead. There were maybe fifteen steps going up to the second floor, and I felt each one of them the way I’d feel an entire flight of stairs back home. I’ve never been so happy to hear the grinding of an air conditioner as I was when Joe unlocked the door and let us in
.
His room was larger than I would’ve expected, and bright, with all that sun bouncing in off the water, palm trees rustling just outside. Not a bad place to spend a winter. Also, tucked inside here next to the AC unit, probably not a terrible place to spend the summer. Just don’t open that door.
We spent the afternoon in or around his hotel, talking and laughing and generally doing a fine job of pretending this visit was a carefree vacation. He wasn’t fooled, though, but he waited, and so did I. We’d get our chance to talk soon enough, but we needed to be alone for it.
In midafternoon I left them in the room and wandered outside and down to the beach and the blistering heat and called the office to check my messages. Nothing new from Graham or Harrison or anyone else. I had an old saved message, though. I couldn’t stop myself from playing it again.
Lincoln, I think we’ve got something. You got us there, we just needed to see it. Last night, I finally saw it. I’m telling you, man, I think you got us there. I’m going to check something out first, though. I don’t want to throw this at you and then have you explain what I’m missing, how crazy it is—but stay tuned. Stay tuned.
I played it three times, as if listening to it over and over would reveal something I had missed.
You got us there, we just needed to see it.
I’d gotten us nowhere. In the entire course of our investigation, we had interviewed a grand total of three people beyond Harrison: John Dunbar, Mark Ruzity, Mike London. What had he seen? What could he possibly have seen?
It didn’t matter. I told myself that with a silent vigor—it did not matter. I was out of it, and needed to stay out.
29
__________
That night we got to meet the much-heralded Gena. Of course, she hadn’t been heralded at all—that wasn’t Joe’s style—which had only made the anticipation greater. If I’d expected someone like Ruth, I was surprised. Gena was about a foot taller, for starters, brunette when Ruth had been blond, blue eyes instead of green, from Idaho instead of Cleveland. She was younger than Joe, too, probably by ten years, and Ruth had been significantly older than him. She was, in almost all ways, the polar opposite of his longtime wife, but that didn’t make her any less likable. She was attractive and witty and intelligent, and Joe’s eyes lingered on her in a way that made me continuously want to hide a smile.
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