by James Sallis
Shon Delany was in the next room, seated behind a high, desk-sized table. They'd put a canned Coke, a cellophane-shrouded sandwich from a vending machine, a pack of Salems and a Bic lighter on the table. Delany was drinking the Coke.
Don introduced himself and asked if there was anything else he could get.
"You want another Coke, maybe? some ice? a slice of pizza?
"No?
"Look, son, I'm not supposed to-my superiors find out, I'm in for a major ass-chewing-but I feel like I have to tell you this. Your buddy in there rolled over on you. Told us about the burglaries and all the rest. Names, dates, details. What you did with the take."
"But I don't know about any of that."
"Well. Sure you don't. But…"
Don spread his hands imploringly as DeSalle stepped forward.
"I'll but him," DeSalle said.
Don smiled. "See what I mean? Day comes to an end, folks like yourself shoved in here, all this paperwork, I've just naturally got to have some kind of answers for the people upstairs."
"But I don't know anything," Delany said. "I'd help you if I could."
"I'm sure you would. So for a start why don't you tell us why you killed Daryl Anthony Payne."
"What?"
"Come on, Delany. Rauch told us all about it. How he begged you to stop, let it go, but you wouldn't. Out of control, he said. Totally OOC."
"Wait a minute, okay? I didn't kill anyone."
"You think that matters, Shon? The meter's ticking. I gotta draw a line at the bottom, add it all up, column A, column B. That's what the city and the citizens pay me for. And my wife's expecting me home for dinner.
"You saw anything maybe you weren't supposed to see, something that could put this in a different light for us, now's your time to lay it on the table."
"Only chance you'll get," DeSalle echoed.
"He's right. I don't blow smoke, Shon. We're doing our best here, trying to be up front with you. Your cousin's going down. Up to you whether he drags you down with him or not."
"You need paper and a pen?" DeSalle said. "Want to write it all down for us?"
Shon Delany shook his head.
"Okay, Shon," Don said. "Okay. I understand. DeSalle?"
"Yessir?"
"You want to drop the dime on this young man for me? Just tell County we've got a newfish for them, they want to bring the hooks, come get him."
"Look, I do get to make a phone call, right?" Delany said.
Don looked surprised.
"Man hasn't had his call yet? How'd that happen?"
"I'm not sure, sir. I'll look into it"
"You do that, Detective. Butfirst you take Mr. Delany into my office, let him use my phone."
"Yessir."
"Then you call County. And me, at home, to let me know it's all been taken care of. Pot roast tonight. Should be coming out of the oven just about now. I don't want to miss it."
DeSalle and Shon Delany left.
"Pot roast, huh?" I said. "And a wife."
"Not bad, huh? Maybe I should start writing novels. What can I say? Attitude's eveiything."
Don looked up at the clock on the wall opposite the interrogation rooms.
"Don't guess you want to grab some dinner this late?"
"Why not. What the hell, I might even spring for it."
"Whoa… Scary."
Don glanced back at the clock. We both knew he didn't want to go home.
"Give me a minute or two, okay, Lew? Meet you outside."
"Sad thing is," he said half an hour later, as we settled back in a booth at a hole-in-the-wall named Tony's, one of Don's favorites, "the kid, Delany, he's probably gonna take a hit for this. A small hit, but a real one. Got a sheet now, carry it around for the rest of his life. Never did crapola, probably doesn't have even half a clue. While this other shit, just because he knows the system, he'll get all the breaks."
A huge platter of oysters cruised into port before us.
"Thanks, Tony," Don said.
"You gonna work on these awhile?"
"You better believe it."
"Want another beer?"
Don said yes. He got it instantly.
"You want anything else, just let me know, right?"
"Right."
Tony disappeared into the kitchen. We heard rapid-fire chopping back there.
"You still seeing this O'Neil person?" Don asked. He loaded horseradish onto an oyster, forked the whole thing into his mouth.
I nodded.
"Tilings going all right there?"
Cocktail sauce this time. Another Rabelaisian swallow.
And I nodded.
"Good. That's good, Lew. Happy for you."
Don drained off half his beer in a gulp.
"Maybe we could get together, just the three of us, have dinner some night."
"I'd like that."
"Yeah. Yeah, I would too."
He poured the rest of his beer down.
"We'll work on that, then."
Tony emerged from the kitchen to slide another beer into place before Don and to refill my glass of iced tea, pouring sideways from the pitcher, just as Don's beeper went off.
He pulled it off his belt, put it on the table and stared at it.
"Maybe I should just shoot the damned thing."
"Probably go down okay, you put enough horseradish on it."
"Yeah."
Don stalked off towards the phone booth.
"Ready for menus?" Tony asked.
"Remains to be seen."
"As usual. I'll just leave them here on the table then, check back with you."
"Sounds good."
"Today's soup is cream of artichoke. Specials are trout in garlic sauce and penne pasta alfredo with grilled shrimp. Either one's guaranteed to leave you drooling into next Tuesday."
"Thanks, Tony. I'm drooling already."
"No problem. Need an extra napkin?"
"Not yet. But some more tea would be great, when you get a chance."
"You got it."
Don came back and sank heavily into the booth across from me.
"Guess you have a big night planned, right, Lew? With your new girl and all."
"Not really."
"You mind coming with me, then? I could use the company."
He stood and tucked a five under the saltshaker.
"Sure. Where we going?"
"It's Danny, Lew. They just found him. Place down on Dryades. Apparent suicide."
25
Danny was half afloat, half submerged, in a tubful of tepid water. One of those old tubs, heavy as a kettle, up off the ground on a platfonu, with clawed feet. A garbage bag around his head was tied at the neck. His tongue, swollen and purple, protruded. Blood vessels in his eyes had burst, making them look like road maps with nothing but interstates. Bladder and bowels had let go in the water.
DeSalle stepped up behind Don. He didn't speak till Don turned around.
"Looks like an overdose, with the bag for insurance. One of the uniforms told me there's a society recommends this route."
"Who took the call?" Don said.
"Patrolman you mean?"
"Yeah."
"Martinez. Young guy. Pretty new, I guess, taking it hard the way we all do thefirst few times."
"He out there?" Don gestured towards the front room.
"Yeah. Thought you might want to talk to him yourself."
"Anybody else around?"
DeSalle shook his head. "Have been, though. Two, three people at least living here, looks like. Maybe more."
"Note?"
DeSalle handed it to him. Sheathed in a sleeve of clear plastic with DeSalle's initials scrawled across the seal. There was only one light in the room, a bare bulb above the sink. Don stood under it as he read the note. Then he passed the note to me. It all comes down to choice, doesn't it? The ones we have, the ones we don't have. Those we make and those we're never able to make. Temporary choices, inadvertent choices, final choices. Fu
ck them all. While I'm at it, fuck your goddamn houses out in Metairie and your kids in private schools, fuck your minimum-wage jobs, your sorry-ass unions. Fuck your cops most of all. Am I making myself clear here? Everything's water if you look long enough, right? "It's a strange one," DeSalle said.
I handed the note back to Don. "No heading or salutation."
"Right."
"Left side's ragged. Tom out of a notebook, diary, something like that."
DeSalle looked from Don to me and back.
"Something I missed?"
"Lew's just saying the note's not addressed to anyone."
"Hell it's not."
"Yeah," Don said after a moment. "Yeah, you're right Guess any list would have been too long. Boy had a lot of anger in him. Always thought it was other people fucked up his life."
Don stepped into the front room to speak with Martinez.
"You guys go back a way, huh?"
I told DeSalle how Don and I met. Both of us little more than kids, each with his own reason to be searching for the sniper that killed all those people back in the sixties.
"Damn, Griffin. That was you?"
Don had been shot by the sniper. I'd come upon them in a downtown cul-de-sac and probably saved Don's life-at least he insisted I had. Since then he'd saved mine more times than I could count.
"Not many like him on the force," DeSalle said.
"Not many like him anywhere."
"You know it. Has to be tough," looking at Danny there in the tub, "all this."
"Can't imagine anything tougher. But I think he'd been getting ready for it, something like this."
"Yeah. Lives with it every day. Has to know."
"For a long time now."
Then forensics was upon us.
Tape measures chirred, whisk brooms and tiny vacuums whispered, bits of debris tumbled into baggies. Again and again our shadows struck huge on the walls as flashes went off.
Don stood at the edge of it all, just outside the doorway, watching.
Also there, wheezing like a bad accordion, sucking alternately at metered-dose inhalers of Atrovent or Albuterol and oxygen from the portable compressor hung like an oversize binocular case under one arm, directing auteurlike this too-real dramatic moment, stood Dr. Bijur.
"Your boy, I understand."
"Yeah."
She shook her head. Squeezed off two hits of Ventolin then wheezed a long exhale.
"Sure it's top of the list for you. For me it's just one more, pick a number, twelve, thirteen, in there. Wait your turn."
"I say anything?"
"You will."
Her shoulders lifted with the effort to drag more air into faltering lungs.
"Do the same myself in your position, Walsh. No way I wouldn't. King's horses couldn't stop me."
"Special favors aren't an option here, Sonja. Okay. But I would appreciate anything you can give me quick."
What she gave him was a fit of coughing. Sounded as though nails and planks were l›cing ripped out of her body's floor.
Don waited for her to recover.
"City lets me have half the personnel I need with twice the workload I can handle. Not a good match, Walsh."
"I know something about that myself."
"My department's response time is half that of LA., beats out New York, Boston, Baltimore, and D.C. by several wide miles. Our reports hit your desk within twenty-four hours. Thirty-six at the outside. You ever got your head out of this city's ass long enough to look around, you could probably work up some pride in that."
Again, coughs racked her. She cranked up the O's from 2 L/M to 4.
"You know what it'll take, right? Some young sport's gonna come in here once I'm gone. Wear a tie to work every day, have nice letterhead, maybe an MBA. That's the new thing."
"Yeah. Yeah, we got them coming up that way through the force now too. Straight off the streets and into offices with espresso machines."
"Reports are gonna get slower and slower. They'll also get increasingly woilhless as the M-B-Assholes worry about covering their own butts above all, to hell with evidence, fact, inference, extrapolation."
Dr. Bijur dosed herself with Atrovent, inhaling the puff and holding it like a hit of marijuana, talking around it.
"We been. At this. A while now. Haven't we?"
"We have indeed, Sonja."
Another long exhalation.
"Bumpy road. Lots of lows. A few highs."
"Few enough."
"Truly sony about this one, Walsh."
Our shadows leapt on the walls again.
"Never had a family myself. Doesn't mean I don't know what it's like."
"Yeah."
"You're a better cop than you ever were a father."
"Being a cop's easy."
"Yeah. I guess." Words came in a rush, breathless, high in her chest, barely heard the last few. "You-"
Her mouth went on moving but no words came forth. Her face turned Jark.
"Sonja? You okay? Want me to call the paramedics?"
"No… no. I'm, okay. Give me. A minute."
It took more than a minute, but gradually her breathing eased, her color improved.
By then her technicians had finished and came to tell her so.
She looked at Don.
"Guess we're packing it up. Both have to get back to work now, huh? The real work."
"Looks like it."
"No more time for flirting."
"Flirting. Now, there's a word I haven't heard in a while. My God, are we really that old, Sonja?"
"How'd it happen, huh? I know. I wonder myself. Things goon, years pile up. All the lists get longer."
He stood watching her go.
"Lew," Don said.
"Yeah."
"Okay if I stay with you tonight?"
"Absolutely."
26
"Damn. Another mouth to feed," Zeke said. He'd passed by Don, asleep on the couch, on his way into the kitchen where I sat drinking coffee, wondering how early I could start making calls: Sam Delany to tell him I'd found his brother, Keith LeRoy to thank him for his help, Deborah.
Zeke poured himself a cup and sat down across from me. Sniffed at it and held on with both hands, huddling over it the way cons do.
"I was worried about you," I told him. "Haven't seen you in a few days."
"Well, I been working on something, just steady chippin' away at it. You know how that is."
"Getting anywhere?"
Zeke shrugged. "Hard to say. We can talk about it later. Meantime, that cop draped all over your couch out there's gotta be your friend Walsh." He'd know instantly, of course, that Don was a cop. No surprise there. "What's up?"
I told him about Danny. Zeke's eyes narrowed when I described the bathroom scene, but he said nothing.
Afterwards he shook his head and poured us each another cup.
"Guess I'd best be puttin' together some breakfast."
"Thanks, Zeke. We could probably all use it."
"The two of you could for sure. I 'Ve got to scoot on out of here." At my glance he held up an admonitory hand. "Told you. Talk about it later."
He carried his coffee to the counter, began pulling out eggs, bread, onions, a potato.
"Fifteen minutes," he said. "Meanwhile, you go start excavating the pharaoh. Oh, and Lewis?"
"Yeah."
"You might want to give some thought to checking your messages ever' week or so. Last I counted, there were a stone dozen of them out there on the machine. How long they had those things out, anyway?" Chopping onions, he shook his head. "What else they goan come up with?"
Don proved a most reluctantpharaoh, starting up instantly, wild-eyed, when Ifirst approached, settling back at once into shadowy, encumbered sleep. I poked at him, shouted, passed steaming coffee under his nose. Finally levered him up and out to the kitchen, where Zeke had filled the table with food. Don ate, drank most of a pot of coffee and shambled back to the couch. Zeke left to be about his business. I did
dishes and sat staring at the blinking light on the phone machine.
This is one of the ways our past finds us. Dots we connect to make a shape on the white page.
First was Deborah: "Hey, big boy. Remember me?"
Two and three were from the university. Please call.
Four was Sam Delany.
The next couple, I don't know what they were. People didn't seem to have much idea who they were calling but left rambling, incomprehensible messages nonetheless.
Seven was Deborah again: "Guess not."
Then another from Dean Treadwell's office, someone offering me a bank card, an old client from my PI days wondering if I'd be able to help him again, my agent saying there'd been a Hollywood nibble on one of my books and how was I these days, a couple more junk calls.
I dialed the flower shop.
"Rumors of my death, and all that," I said when Deborah answered.
"Lew! Everything okay?"
I told her aboutfinding Shon Delany, then about Don's son.
"I'm so sony, Lew. How's Don?"
"Tough, as always."
"Sounds like you've had a couple of tough days yourself."
"I distinctlyremember easier ones."
"Don't we all. When can I see you?"
"This point, I don't have a clue what the day's likely to turn into. Not another grade-A mess like yesterday is what I hope. Okay if I call you later?"
"Sure it is. Or just come by."
"Right."
I took the last of the coffee out back, sat on the wooden bench layered with bird droppings under the tree out there. The bench's underside was a thicket of cnmibling leaves and spiderwebs. Been years since I last did this. LaVeme and I spent a lot of time on that bench. Go out there late at night, take glasses of wine out while dinner simmered on the stove, coffee first thing in the morning.
I'd sat out here like this the morning I learned of David's disappearance. Later I'd written that a toad had jumped into my face, but the toad was becoming only history, and bearable.
Through the kitchen window I heaitl the radio playing. Wagner's overture to The Flying Dutchman, whose questionable hero the devil overhears saying he'll round the cape if it takes forever and decides to take at his word, turning him into a marine version of Sisyphus. An equally questionable angel intervenes, doling him out one day every seven years on diy land, telling the Dutchman he can be releasedfrom this if only he's able to finda woman who'll follow him into death.