Happy Policeman

by Patricia Anthony

He roused himself from his reverie and banged the receiver into the cradle. The phone had gone unanswered too long.

  If Bo hadn’t been with him, DeWitt would have driven to Hattie’s, even though Hattie couldn’t make up for the pink and gold perfection he’d lost. DeWitt had loved Janet from the time he was seventeen. Yet when he was home with her, he felt he was trapped in a cut-throat game with an invisible ball.

  As he walked away, the phone rang. He walked back and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Checking to see if there is damage,” a Torku voice said. “You abused the phone. Damage can result if you abuse the phone.”

  “I’ll remember that.” DeWitt slammed the receiver home with such force that the cradle snapped.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You all right, Wittie?”

  DeWitt glanced up from his brooding scrutiny of the dash. Bo had parked in a rutted clay drive before a white clapboard house.

  “You coming, or what?” Bo’s door was open, one long twill-uniformed leg outside the car.

  Disoriented, DeWitt looked around. Behind the house was a long chicken coop, its awning half-closed to the wind.

  “Yeah.” He zipped up his jacket and got out.

  “Miz Wilson?” Bo called as they reached the porch.

  DeWitt knocked on the chipped front door. “Police, Miz Wilson.”

  The house was churchyard quiet. Bo stepped back a couple of paces, his boots loud against the wood. “Etta Wilson!”

  Etta Wilson—Janet’s dubious alibi. “Maybe she’s out at the barn.” DeWitt walked to the end of the porch and peeked around the house.

  “You don’t think . . .” Bo began.

  In the window to his right DeWitt caught a flicker of movement. He retreated, his rear colliding with the porch railing.

  “What?” Bo whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  The two men stood uncertainly. Bo’s heel made a nervous staccato on the old boards. Then white lace curtains parted with a jerk and a pallid face swam out of the gloom of the parlor.

  “Go away.’ The elderly woman’s voice came faintly through the glass. The curtains closed again.

  DeWitt knocked on the pane. “Miz Wilson? We got to talk to you now. Come on, Miz Wilson. If s the police.”

  As though forming of ectoplasm, the face reappeared. “What do you want?”

  “Just want to talk, Miz Wilson. You all right?”

  “Stay out there, DeWitt. We can talk just fine.”

  “Ma’am?” DeWitt put his ear to the window, but she rapped on the pane. Deafened, he reeled back.

  “Don’t get so damned close. Ain’t you heard about the cholera?”

  “What’s she saying?” Bo asked.

  DeWitt’s ear still rang. “Cholera.”

  Bo took his place at the window, “Miz Wilson? Cholera can’t spread by droplet.”

  “By what?”

  “Through the air, Miz Wilson!” Bo was screaming. Even without the barrier of the glass, the old woman was a bit deaf. “It doesn’t spread like flu! It breeds in feces!”

  “In what’!” She squinted.

  “Feces!”

  “—what?”

  Bo’s mouth worked in indecision. He looked to DeWitt for help.

  “Bodily fluids!” DeWitt shouted.

  “Oh.”

  “We need to ask you about the murder,” Bo continued.

  “I ain’t killed her.”

  “We know that!” Bo was losing his temper. His cheeks were a furious red. “But maybe you saw something!”

  The face vanished. The curtains slowly undulated as they came to rest. When the front door opened and the two men walked inside, Miz Wilson maced them with Lysol.

  DeWitt threw his arms up, but he was too late. His eyes streamed. Bo bent double coughing.

  “I ain’t seen much of anything. Don’t know as how I’ll do you much good.” The old woman sprayed a layer of disinfectant on her sofa. “Now you boys just sit down.”

  They collapsed on the sofa.

  “Y’all want coffee?” she asked.

  “No, we don’t have time, thank you.” Bo wiped his eyes and coughed again. “Just wanted to know if you saw anything strange Sunday.”

  “Nothing. You mind if I have myself a cup?”

  “Go right ahead,” Bo said before DeWitt had the chance to ask if she had visitors on Sunday.

  Miz Wilson walked into the next room, still talking. “Loretta tore out of her place in an all-fired hurry, though.”

  Bo sat up as though he’d been hit with a cattle prod. “What time?”

  From the kitchen came a clatter of china. “Around five-thirty.”

  “You sure it was Loretta?”

  A cabinet door opened with a squeal and closed with a bang. “It was Loretta’s car.”

  “Did you see it come back?”

  “Didn’t notice.”

  Bo said to DeWitt, “The car. I knew it. The car’s the answer. Where’d Loretta go? And, more to the point, where’s the car now?”

  Miz Wilson came back, balancing a cup of coffee and a plate of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Bo turned to her so fast that she nearly dropped her load. “You didn’t see who was driving, then?”

  The woman hovered above an overstuffed chair, then sat as decorously as her age allowed. “Didn’t have my glasses.”

  “Miz Wilson?” DeWitt asked. “Were you home Sunday’?”

  “All day.”

  “Anybody come over? For a visit, maybe. Anybody who can verify your whereabouts?” He steeled himself for the answer.

  “Nope. I need witnesses and all?”

  DeWitt quickly changed the subject. “What do you know about Billy?”

  She leaned forward. “They was having them marital problems. He never was no good. Have yourself a cookie, Bodeen.”

  Bo placed the platter out of DeWitt’s reach. “How’ve you been feeling?”

  She bit into a cookie. “Got the arthritis real bad in my knee. Been down in my back . . .”

  “When?” Miz Wilson must have gotten her days confused. Janet had come over Sunday. They both had a laugh when Janet admitted she’d forgotten the old woman’s toothpaste.

  “Couple of weeks ago. Sometimes it don’t even pay to get out of bed no more.”

  “Uh-huh,” Bo said. “No stomach upset or anything?”

  “Used to love that Mexican food. Can’t eat it now.”

  “Nothing else?” Bo asked.

  She considered the question; considered her cookie. “Get the palpitations sometimes.”

  “What about the Torku?” Bo asked.

  Miz Wilson, like Seresen, was a good conversation shifter. “They put up a roadblock the other night.”

  DeWitt stared dejectedly at the plate of cookies.

  “Roadblock?”

  “Yeah. With flares and them orange traffic cones. That was the day her road up and disappeared. Oh! And I got one of them little skin cancers about three weeks ago. Doc burned it off for me.” She held her arm toward Bo. There was a brown spot on the crepe skin.

  “That’s the only time you saw any Torku?”

  Miz Wilson was delicately sucking the chocolate off her fingers. “I imagine.”

  “And you didn’t see who was driving Loretta’s car?”

  “Nope.”

  “Could it have been a Torku?”

  DeWitt tried to remember the last time Janet had made Toll-house cookies. Six years ago. Before she began her affair.

  “Might have. Did I tell you about the palpitations?”

  “Pass the cookies, Bo,” DeWitt said.

  “No.” Turning to Miz Wilson, he explained, “I’m trying to make him watch his weight.”

  Miz Wilson titt
ered and threw DeWitt an embarrassingly flirtatious glance. “Oh, now. He don’t look near fat enough to me.”

  “Have you seen any activity at all at Loretta’s?” Bo had taken a small notebook from his pocket and was scribbling.

  “Just that blue flash when they up and made her house disappear.”

  “I see. Thank you.” Bo got to his feet and stuck his notebook in his pocket. “You might want to start boiling your water, Miz Wilson. Just as a precaution.”

  As DeWitt rose, his gaze dropped to the cookies, and comprehension hit.

  A pale hand flew to Miz Wilson’s generous chest. “Oh, Lord. You think them Torku pushed them boys down in that well, don’t you. And them bodily fluids is in that water.”

  “Just as a precaution.”

  She jumped up, her arthritis forgotten. “You think them bodily fluids is down there percolating around.”

  “There’s no reason to . . .”

  But with a flutter of her skirts, Miz Wilson darted out the front door.

  DeWitt turned to his officer. Without the sunglasses, Bo looked no older than eighteen—as young as the boy he killed. For an instant DeWitt felt he could tell him anything. But his urge to confess broke against the granite of Bo’s jaw.

  “Bo? You ever wondered about the gas? Why it’s the one thing the Torku don’t deliver on time?”

  “That’s because you don’t remind them. You can’t see the level in the tanks, so I suppose it slips your mind.”

  DeWitt was irked that Bo guessed correctly. “So where did you get yours yesterday?”

  “I hoard it. Like Doc. Like a few others. Anyway, the motorcycle uses less.”

  DeWitt nodded. Cost—the reason Curtis and the city council made Bo a motorcycle cop in the first place. “Who was out on the street yesterday?”

  “B.J. But then he only uses the three-wheeler when his and his daddy’s trucks are dry.”

  And Janet. DeWitt always made sure the Suburban had gas, even when his squad car didn’t.

  “Bo? I can’t see Loretta hauling gas cans around.”

  “Shit, of course. You’re right. It had to be a Torku driving. “

  DeWitt bit his lip. That hadn’t been the conclusion DeWitt wanted Bo to reach at all.

  A door banged. The two men walked onto the porch. DeWitt took a deep breath. The air outside the house smelled bland without the Lysol.

  In the side yard Miz Wilson was loading chickens into her Dodge station wagon. The Rhode Island reds had been startled into nesting posture. They sat—small, neat boxes of sorrel feathers–motionless but for the deft, anxious jerks of their heads. She plopped a pair of hens on the back seat and ran for more. When she came out, a chicken under each arm, Bo tried to stop her. She pushed past him without breaking stride. Two more trips, and she was done.

  “There’s no reason to panic,” Bo said.

  Miz Wilson got in the car and slammed it into reverse. The Dodge tore backward down the rutted drive, its windows turning rust-colored as the motion alarmed the hens into flight.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Possible locations of the kids’ bodies,” Bo said, marking the points off in his notebook. His chestnut hair was dark with rain, and a lock of it had fallen into his eyes. DeWitt barely listened. “One, the trunk of Loretta’s car . . .”

  Janet might have killed Loretta, but how could she put a knife into baby fat? Strangle bright round faces to a dull gray?

  DeWitt’s own childhood had been so secure that it hadn’t prepared him for the trouble that would come. Bo was prepared: his mother an alcoholic, his father vanished before he was six, one sister a suicide, a brother in Huntsville Prison.

  “. . . but Loretta’s car might have been in the garage when the Torku destroyed the house,” Bo was saying. “Okay. Two, the well . . .”

  DeWitt’s daddy had been the perfect father, active in Boy Scouts and Little League. Yet Bo, despite his childhood, had grown up more self-assured than he.

  Suddenly Bo stopped scribbling. “Where are you headed?”

  “You ever think about when you were a kid?” DeWitt eased the car onto the two-lane asphalt highway, but didn’t accelerate. Blue-bellied clouds were scudding south, leaving the sky a newly washed azure plate.

  “Not much. Where you headed?”

  “Just poking around.” DeWitt pulled up behind a fire-damaged Dairy Queen and stopped.

  The windows of the fast-food restaurant were boarded. Pooled rainwater pattered through a hole in the sagging eaves. He rolled down his window and heard music-as faint as that on Granger’s radio. “Remember Dandy Mill? The one that burned? We used to hang out there. Did you?”

  “Burned down the rest of the way before I was big enough to bike out there.”

  “What if the kids aren’t dead?” Bo looked up in surprise.

  “Let’s get out. Don’t close your door.”

  The two men crept to the rear of the building. The back of the ruined restaurant smelled of old smoke and stale urine. Over the persistent beat of rock music came a soprano giggle; a baritone laugh.

  DeWitt stepped over the sooted threshold, his boots grinding charred litter.

  “Preston?” a boy’s voice called.

  DeWitt froze.

  “Hey, Preston! You bring the stuff?”

  “He’s trying to scare us,” someone said to someone else.

  Three paces, and DeWitt was at the rear of the counter. Around a table sat five teenagers, cans of whipped cream on the grimy Formica, paper sacks in their hands.

  Tammy put her can on the table with a rattling clunk. “Daddy, I can explain.” Her voice shook with inappropriate glee.

  Bo walked to the table. DeWitt switched off the tape player.

  “Get up,” Bo said.

  Tammy, a small thing of pink and gold. Her face looked so much like Janet’s when Janet was a girl that it brought a catch to DeWitt’s throat.

  Bo shouted, “On your feet!”

  The three boys rose with the awkwardness of inebriation and youth.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  The boys glanced at one another. The girls snorted laughter into cupped hands.

  “Now!”

  DeWitt made his way to Bo’s side. Tammy wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  The restaurant had the sordid, littered look of all secret places. Stubs of candles squatted on the tables. A tattered mattress lay in one corner. Greasy food wrappers were scattered on the floor.

  There wasn’t much in the boys’ pockets. Candy. Pocket knives. A condom.

  The red foil package of the condom gleamed in the light from the poorly boarded windows. DeWitt stared at it, mesmerized, until Bo swept it off the table.

  “Any marijuana?”

  The merriment evaporated. Heads down, the boys flicked cautious glances at Bo. “No, sir,” one said.

  Eddie. DeWitt remembered the kid’s name. A sixteen-year-old. Maybe Janet wasn’t the one having an affair. Maybe sixteen-year-old Eddie had made it in the family Suburban with DeWitt’s thirteen-year-old daughter.

  A humming silence pressed its thumbs into DeWitt’s ears. Distantly he heard Bo ask, “Glue? You boys got any glue to sniff?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You come in here, sniff laughing gas, and then go out and break streetlights? Do you? You spraypaint stuff on the walls in town?”

  A girl tittered.

  Bo whirled to her. “You think this is funny?”

  Her smile died. “No, sir.”

  “A nitrous oxide high doesn’t last for more than a minute or two. You’re sober. Act like it. Get up. I said get up!”

  The girl nearly fell getting to her feet.

  A sound behind them. Preston Nix was standing in the doorway, a box of whipped cream in his hands. The carton fell with a crash. He ran.
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  “I could arrest you. You know that?” Bo asked.

  They nodded. Tammy’s graceful neck was like her mother’s. Thirteen years old and there had been a condom in the boy’s pocket. Wadding leaked from the mattress like guts from a road kill. There were yellow stains on the ticking.

  “There’s a murderer loose around here. He probably killed two kids already. We know he killed their mother. And you kids are out sniffing laughing gas?”

  They made incoherent sounds of apology.

  “Y’all go home. Y’all just go on home. But I’ll be watching you. Remember that.”

  The kids filed past. DeWitt’s hand closed on Eddie’s arm.

  “Wittie,” Bo warned. “Let him go.”

  DeWitt caught the front of the boy’s jacket and jerked him up until they were face-to-face. The boy went rigid. DeWitt remembered the low-tide stench of sex in Billy’s hideaway; he thought he could smell it here, too, like a haunting.

  Bo’s horrified cry of, “Wittie! No!”

  DeWitt’s blow was quick and hard; his fist went deep into Eddie’s belly, and the force of it lifted the boy to his toes.

  Something pulled on his shoulder. DeWitt reacted faster than thought. His hand snapped to the side, and hit with a wet, firm smack.

  Tammy stumbled backward.

  Bo caught her and turned, placing his own body between Tammy and DeWitt.

  DeWitt stared at his knuckles, wondering how his arm had moved without his willing it, wondering where the blood had come from. Suddenly he was aware of the boy retching at his feet, of the dust motes in the streaks of dirty sunshine from the windows. He saw Bo with his arms around Tammy, and saw the new bright red on her lips.

  Eddie scurried out of the Dairy Queen.

  “Honey?” DeWitt reached for his daughter. She cowered.

  Bo took a hankerchief out of his pocket and daubed at her mouth. “It’s okay. It’s all over. It’s all over now.”

  DeWitt watched his daughter cry. It had been easier when she was young, when she came home with no more than a skinned knee, a stubbed toe. When comfort was measured in Band-aids and ice cream.

  Now his hands weren’t clean enough to touch her. “Honey, daddy didn’t mean it. Baby? I didn’t mean to do that. Would you like some ice cream, punkin? Would you?”