by Lee Lamothe
For a full half-hour Comartin didn’t say a word. She spoke. He listened and tried to realize what his eyes were seeing across from him under the yellow light above the table that smudged sockets under her eyes. He’d had a wife a long time ago, a time of angry yells or depressive silence that had collapsed his marriage. He’d been uptight, frustrated, and only later realized he bore the blame because he never listened. Right out of high school he’d become a cop for the regularity of it, the constant paycheque, the protection of the union, early retirement. Not one day, he realized, had he actually liked being a cop. In spite of his square Irish body and red hair, his big freckled hands and his measured, lumbering cop walk, he’d felt there might be something else inside him. It was almost as though he became a cop because he looked like one.
His wife couldn’t successfully contain a baby to term and he didn’t want to adopt. She deteriorated under his autocratic decision-making, under his constant depriving her of the life she wanted. Unlike the poet, or at least the poetry lover he later detected faintly within himself, he’d become a violent, loud bully and not slow to shove her around when he couldn’t articulate why his life was a failure. One day he went too far, and she filed from her hospital bed. On his divorce retreat, the trip to Europe where he’d gone to drink and unsuccessfully make love to slim young women, he discovered something hidden in himself when he found a book of poetry in English by Denise Levertov in the lobby of the Hotel Blu in Marseille. It was that easy. Picking up a book.
It spoke something to him, and he took it to his room and read it slowly and was so amazed that he almost phoned his wife. Instead, he sat on the lumpy bed and stared at the staggered lines of words in the book his hands. Words weren’t only for threatening and browbeating and haranguing. He’d go home and remain a cop but he’d find a duty where he’d never have to put his angry hands on anyone. Administration. He’d learn to listen to both his own rhythms and the rhythms of others. Maybe, he thought, he’d find a poem of staggered lines inside himself.
In the duplex kitchen, Martinique Frost said she wanted just to talk, and it was going to take a while. He listened, and understood the human value of that.
She tried to keep her face as flat as her words. “You ever work Tin Town? Used to be there wasn’t a cop down there that hadn’t been battered or stabbed or shot. Not one. They’d send you out to direct traffic, you go with a partner, you both strap on the vest. You go for coffee fifty feet from the station, you strap on the vest, take a buddy. Guys down there carried shotguns, day or night. Everybody carried a bounce because when you get confronted you don’t worry about escalating to lethal force, you just went straight to it and threw down your bounce on the ground beside the guy. Self-defence. Every cop that came out of there was either a super-cop or a mindless behemoth.
“Shitty people, shitty neighbourhood, but with some gentrification, which means tear them down, or burn them down, you could have nice condo towers, nice views of the river. So, in go the developers, the realtors. Buying land, buying up leases, out with old in with the profitable. Where there was a bail bondsman, now there’s a real estate office. The cheque-cashing place? A café. Antique shops where the laundromat was, and then bistros and high-end designer food. A wine shop. A cooking school.”
Brian Comartin felt like he had to say something, to show he was paying attention. “Like, a new Stonetown?”
She gave him that, but the Traffic man, she thought, didn’t know the interrogative values of silence. “Exactly. So, straw men secretly representing developers start buying up the houses. Tin Town had great houses. Tin roofs, old stained-glass windows above the doors. But what they didn’t have were firewalls. If one row house caught fire, well, up they all went. And they did. The bulldozers go in and some skyscrapers go up. Condos, mostly. A few rental buildings. Aimed at the downtown workers in their twenties who want to bicycle or hike to work, sit on their balconies over the quaint streets and the river, sip cappuccino after a hard day at the bank or the brokerage, whatever.
“So, I’m working Tin through a lot of this. Detective in the Sector office. There are still a lot of shitheads, so I’m busy, but there’s an influx of yuppies into the condos. They form a neighbourhood coalition. When there’s a bunch of bicycle thefts, they’re down to the Sector, complaining. When a flasher jumps out at the women doing yoga in the new park, they’re down to the Sector, complaining. They’re paying all this tax money for an expensive apartment, they want the policing they’re paying for.
“The lieutenant, when the first complainants come in, yawns and nods, uh huh, uh huh. They don’t like that, those coalition people, it isn’t articulate enough for them, and a week later there’s a new lieutenant. This guy listens. He forms a police-public coalition and they hold meetings in the party room at one of the condos. He calms them down.”
For something to say, Brian Comartin said, “Community-based policing.”
She let it go. “And one night after a meeting a twenty-year-old secretary is walking home and she gets jumped, beaten, and raped. We don’t know about it at the time. And two weeks later, same thing, this time a twenty-two-year-old who came to look at a vacancy, she’s jumped, beaten, and raped. She reports it, but a day later, at the Sector station where she was living then, up in Sector Two. And then another gets it. Some genius points out there might be a trend. We form a crew to work this guy. We don’t say anything out loud, we don’t want to spook him. We’ve got a lot of suspects, a lot of suspects, local area guys who are capable of this, and if they didn’t do it, it was only because someone else thought of it first. We work through them. While we’re working, bang, he goes off again. Nineteen-year-old student. We later learned there were three more unreported victims, they came forward much later, but hadn’t reported it at the time of occurrence.
“By now we’re down to one of two guys. We’ve eliminated just about everyone else. They’re alibied. We’ve got two guys and one of them is named Adam Baxter Campbell. We like Campbell a lot. The other guy, well, maybe, but Addie Campbell is our first choice. He didn’t leave much behind, when he was doing the women. He wore a condom. He was smart enough not to bite or smooch them, no saliva on the neck or ears. He wore a watch cap, so no hairs left for us. Just, bang. A blitz. And he liked his work. He beat some of them after he was done raping them. Like he was wasting time before moving on to someplace else he had to be. He had a history. This was him, ninety-nine percent.
“Word gets around. It always does. A woman in the coalition comes in to see the lieutenant. Hey, did we know there might be a serial rapist out there, operating in the condos? She wants to hold a community meeting, poster the area, alert everybody, start night patrols, self-defence classes, escort women from the bus stops to their front doors.
“The lieutenant sends me down to cool her out. Addie Campbell is due to go off, soon. We’ve got surveillance on him and he’s getting wound up, scoping out women on the streets, following a few, making notes in a little book. A matter of time, and not much time, he’s going. In the act is best. We’ve just tightened surveillance. ‘Tell her we’re close, we’re dropping him in a day or two, the lieutenant tells me. Go cool her out.’
“So, I say I will, but I didn’t feel right about it, I’d already said we should do a public notification and this might be the time. So, I’m gonna tell her, without actually telling her, to go public, scream her head off to the media. But just before I went to talk to her, one of the spin teams calls in. Addie Campbell just followed a woman from a coffee shop to an apartment building. So, the spinner snaps a photo of the woman. Then after she goes in, Addie goes up the stairs and watches through the lobby windows to see what floor she went to. He watches the elevator numbers and leaves and the spin team leaves with him. He goes to the factory he works at, goes in, comes out. One of the spinners goes in. Addie, the foreman said, came in and said he had a hot date, can’t work the night shift.”
Brian Comartin realized he had nothing to say, and the best thing
was to not say anything.
“I go downstairs,” she said, “and I tell the woman from the coalition that we’re an inch from pinching this guy. I tell her we need him in the act, or close to being in the act. There’s no way he’ll beat it in court, if we catch him in the act. Easier on the victims, I said, if we get him dead to rights and he pleads out. She’s okay with it. Not happy, but okay. She trusts me, I’m a woman.
“The spin team takes the photo of the woman Addie was working up to the superintendent of the building. The super looks at it and says, Molly Green, five-oh-two, back of the building. Single, a cat, a rental. Home most evenings, goes out Thursday after work to a Tai Chi class.
“It’s Thursday. Nighttime comes. Molly Green comes out in workout clothes and heads to the community centre at the foot of Harrison Hill. We’re on her. We’re on Addie’s house. Addie likes the ten o’clock hour, thereabouts, home in time for the midnight movie. Addie stays home until nine-thirty, then he’s out, he’s in dark clothing, he’s prowling toward Harrison Hill. We’re up on him. We’re up on her. Night scopes, multi-spin teams, the works. Because we’ve got a fix on his next target, the guys get a little sloppy, they play him loose. Too loose, but I mean, hey, we’re on him. We’re up on the victim. No way we’re going to lose this guy. But of course, we do because he doesn’t head to the community centre that Molly Green was going to.
“What we don’t know is that Addie thinks ahead, likes to have a couple of treats in the freezer for when the hunger comes over him and porn on TV doesn’t do it for him. Molly Green is for down the road, later, when something might not work out and he needs a quickie. She’s a frozen pizza for when he doesn’t feel like shopping.
“That night, that Thursday, he’s got his eye on a Pilates instructor ten blocks away. And, because we think he’s going to the community centre where the Tai Chi classes are and where he can bag Molly Green on her way home and we can bag him, we’re sloppy, we play him loose because we’re such smart guys. And of course we lose him. The next morning the Pilates instructor is found wandering naked out of a parking lot off Hedge Way. They get Addie when he shows up to work, smiling.
“There’s a hat in this thing, and they need a head to put it on. The lieutenant shrugs and says he interviewed the coalition woman and attended to her concerns and sent her up to Sector detectives, and that’s me.
“There’s lawsuits. Big lawsuits. There’s headlines like you wouldn’t believe. These are yuppie folk, these are people who have access to the media and they’re willing to use it. The city settled with all the victims. The Pilates instructor also practised some kind of martial art and got some skin evidence off Addie. He takes a plea, gets life. I get shunted to kiddie crime. The Pilates instructor needs a new face. The other women need counselling.”
She saw Brian Comartin was trying to parse and process all the information, looking for something to say. But there was nothing that he needed to say. His role, in her life at that time, was to simply be there. Martinique Frost was amazed at how few people knew what they should bring. There was a lot more she wanted to say, but she felt she’d said enough.
“And I end up in my kitchen in the middle of the night with a red-headed Traffic man who writes poetry and tries the boob in the champagne glass line on me.” Martinique Frost looked up at his wide sad Irish mug. “You can stay over, no point in heading out, it’s late. But do you mind sleeping on the couch? If you’ve really got a need, I can deal with it. I think I like you, Brian, but tonight I’d rather not.”
Comartin got up and rounded the table. He put his arm gently across her shoulders and touched his lips to the greying corn rows on her head. She’d spent something here, for him, he knew. In his chest he felt a swelling, the same swelling as when he’d discovered the Levertov book in the lobby at the Hotel Blu.
He thought of the perfect and flawed Levertov. The beauty of deep lines dug into your cheeks …
Sirens sounded in the distance and slowly grew closer.
Ambulances whooped past outside Marty Frost’s duplex.
Her cellphone rang.
Chapter 11
Djuna Brown didn’t have a raid jacket, so Ray Tate gave her his. She struggled into it as he drove. It hung like a long dress down over her knees and she had to fold the sleeves back several times to free her hands. With her baggy batik trousers and sparkly slippers, she looked like a girl dressed up in a genie’s clothes. Ray Tate looped his badge on the bead chain around his neck, activated the strobing Hello light on the dash, and swerved the Taurus up California Street. From there he sailed through the glowing gates of East Chinatown, keeping tight to the curb so that if ambulances and fire vehicles came up behind him they could get through. He parked half on the sidewalk.
It was bedlam. The smoke was a ghostly grey. The ground floors of a row of four buildings, two restaurants and two cheapo gift shops, were ablaze. Smoke rolled out of the two floors of flophouses above them. Pumpers were farther up ahead in East Chinatown, working on fires burning two blocks away. Break-in alarms were blaring in rising and falling whoops. Wood crackled, windows blew out onto the road. People unseen were screaming for help. On the second floor over one of the shops, bleeding bare arms waved through jagged windows above the flames. Emergency lights strobed and throbbed, blue and red. The air smelled like searing meat and burning gasoline.
“Ray?” Djuna Brown came around the front of the Taurus, yelling above the chaotic noise. “Ray. Kids.” She pointed at a woman and two children in the second floor above one of the restaurants. “I’m going in.”
As she stepped away he grabbed her by the back of the yellow raid jacket. “Calm down, Djun’. Chill.”
A high-rise unit with extra manpower hanging on the sides chuffed to a stop in front of the burning restaurant. A taxi screeched to a stop and a fire captain, half-dressed, tumbled from the front passenger seat.
Ray Tate shouted, “Sparky.” He pointed. “Kids up.”
The fire captain casually waved at him and yelled, “Okay, guys, we got kids in the sky, go get ’em.” He started deploying his men into the adjoining building. The high-rise ladder swung out and up; two firefighters jumped aboard and rode it up until it clanged up onto the window ledge where the woman and children were. A pumper backed up to the rear of the high-rise unit and the crew started rhythmically running hose while a big man in fire boots, a T-shirt, and track pants ran with a huge wrench to a hydrant. There were a lot of auxiliaries arriving. In spite of their hale, the buffed-out fire department had suffered to the bug and had put out an all-hands.
Djuna Brown bit her lip, looking up into the smoke at the firefighters plucking the woman and children from the window. “Fuck, Ray, fuck.”
“They’re on it. They got to do their job, we got to do ours. Right now, we’ve got to secure those hats and those bottles.” He pointed at several red baseball caps and intact bottles with scorched rags in their necks discarded on the opposite sidewalk. He took a tire iron from the trunk of the Taurus, crossed to a kitchen supply shop, and, with his left arm protecting his eyes, back-handed it into the window. The glass came down in sheets and an alarm sounded. A black Chrysler ghost car skidded into the curb and before it finished rocking four chargers bailed out, extending collapsible batons, leaving the doors open and moving on him in a wolf pack.
“Job, job, job,” Ray Tate screamed, backing up and dropping the tire iron, putting his right hand in the air and holding out his badge with the left. “Job, job, okay, got it?”
“Okay, I know this guy,” one charger said. “Tate. Tate, right?”
“Yes, I’m cool. I need all those big bowls and pots out of that display and I need one each on top of those baseballs caps, and numbered. Get something too, towels, to cover the bottles. Number everything. This whole fucking block is a crime stage.”
Three of the chargers started a relay of plastic and crock-pots and towels. The red baseball caps and the bottles were covered. The fourth charger took business cards from his
wallet and began writing numbers on them, slipping them under the bowls and pots.
There were no other recognizable ranks on the street. On the corner of California and Pike, three white men in T-shirts stood with their hands in their pockets, in a crowd of babbling, deranged, half-dressed Chinese, some of them running in circles. The three men were doing everything but whistling innocently and studying the fading morning stars overhead. An image came to Ray Tate, one he’d someday attack with charcoal: in the midst of the frantic residents, an elderly woman on her knees on the sidewalk with her head back, her mouth impossibly agape to show her broken teeth, pulling at her hair with her fists, silently screaming while one of the men in the white T-shirts stood behind her, laughing and pointing down at her with a heavily tattooed arm. He put that Edvard Munch image away.
Ray Tate collared one of the chargers. “My stage. Absent rank, this is my stage. What’s your shop?”
“Billy Stiles, patrol, Sector Eight.”
“Okay, Billy, those three white guys, behind me, there off to my left shoulder, T-shirts? They go in. If you can take them hard and make them bleed some DNA on your clothes, perfect. If not, put them in separate cells, let ’em smoke, let ’em drink. But you seize their cigarette butts, cups, and tins, got it? Document each item to the guy. Number one, number one; number two, number two. Don’t lose track of what DNA belongs to who. We’re gonna need a chain of evidence, here.”