by Lee Lamothe
Brian Comartin stared, captivated. She looked real and beautiful and thoughtful.
She said, “What? I’m old, okay?” She gave him a sad smile. “Brian, you’re not getting some twenty-year-old cadet, okay? Deal with it, amigo”
His heart soared a little.
She said, “Here we go. NARC-W. The National Anti-Racist Coordinating Workshop. ‘Beware of these agent provocateurs.’ Look at them all.” She shook her head, “Oh, I like this one, this is a great site. I wouldn’t trust any of them.” Then she laughed. “I bet this is one of Sally Greaves’s operations. She runs pictures of actual revolutionaries as cops, gets the black marble thrown on them, puts ’em out of commission. Diabolical.”
There was nothing on any of the sites. A lot of the men had the shaven head and tattoos, but none were Ansel Partridge.
Billy Stiles, in civvies, was in the parking lot at Sector Four doing start of shift. He was yanking his duty bag out of the trunk of his personal car when Ray Tate creeped the Mercury up off his bumper. “Hey, Stiles. Billy Stiles, right? Ray Tate. We met at the Chinatown fires.”
Billy Stiles dropped the bag and put out his hand. “My brother, Jimmy, told me about some fucking hippie cop that helped him out. The kid said he froze, you woke him up.”
“A good kid. He did the job. How’s he doing?” Ray Tate got out of the Mercury. “He saw some shit that night.”
“Good, good. I ’preciate you looking out for him.”
“Not a problem. He’ll do good.”
Djuna Brown got out of the car and Billy Stiles looked her over. Ray Tate introduced them. “We’re following up on those three bozos you guys took in from the fires? Joe Carr, Peter van Meister, Ansel Partridge?”
“Well, we separated them right away, took their shirts, or in the case of the tattooed guy, a piece of it. And boy, did we have to negotiate with both hands and a stick. A scrapper. We called for transport but we only got a car for van Meister. Too bad for him it was a couple of Chinese chargers, and they were some pissed. I can tell you about Joe Carr; I took him in. He cried all the way. Oh, what did we do, oh, what did we do? The Chinese guys took van Meister. Gerry Martin took the tattooed guy. That would be this Partridge, I guess?”
“I guess. Where can I find Gerry Martin? He on shift?”
“Naw. He hit the jackpot. Transferred out yesterday to Admin Fraud. Straight days, Monday to Friday. I didn’t even know he’d applied. His wife just dropped a frog and I guess he wants to be around for her and the kid.” He shrugged. “Some guys aren’t made for the street.”
“Okay, we’ll find him down at the Jank.”
“Not this month. They don’t need him on shift until next month so he’s taking his time-in now, now that the plague’s let up a little and guys are coming back. He’s got a place down in Delray Beach. Next time we see him he’ll be tanned and happy, chewing on a pencil, wearing a suit from Bummy’s.”
“Did he say anything? About Partridge, about the transport?”
“Nope.” Billy Stiles slung his duty bag over his shoulder. “I want to say again, thanks for that with Jimmy. You ever get caught drunk driving in Sector Four, have ’em call me.” He nodded to Djuna Brown. “You’re the girl that got her ear shot off by the cop, right?”
“Yep, I be that very girl.” She made a dreamy smile. “Magical stuff. Woo.”
“You see the bullet curve, it was coming at you? Did you go, ‘Fuck, how did it miss me?’”
She was startled and gave him a suspicious look. “How’d you know that?”
“I had a guy throw down on me, open up. Five feet away. Bang bang bang bang. I saw it too. One bullet came spinning right at my fucking eye, then at the last minute veered and got me here.” He pulled his polo shirt collar down and showed a shallow groove like a burn mark. “Nothing. Took out a bit of flesh is all. I don’t remember moving. I’m sure I didn’t.”
“It took my earring off. Amazing, huh?”
“Not so much. I wasn’t wearing my earrings that night, but I’d just met my wife the night before and knew we were going to get married. Love makes you lucky, she says, I’m lucky for you.” He stared at her, looking a little embarrassed. “I, ah, think about that a lot.”
“Thanks for that.” Djuna Brown put her little hand on his thick arm. “I needed that.”
“No problem.” He stepped away, then turned back to Ray Tate. “You know, on Gerry Martin? That took the tattooed guy in? Last thing he said to me when he cleared out his locker, was, ‘I never thought I’d want to blow a guy with that many tattoos unless I was in Craddock, starved for love.’ Funny, huh?”
Ray Tate made a thin smile. “Not so much, maybe.”
They went inside Sector Four to the intake desk and gave the body snatcher the date and approximate time the three Volunteers were brought in from Chinatown. “Three guys,” Ray Tate said, “Carr, Joseph; van Meister, Peter; and Partridge, Ansel. Came in by Stiles, Martin, and two Chinese chargers.”
The body snatcher was a hump who looked for every reason not to do something. He sat like a lump, vacant, vapid. He was expert. “You got their badge numbers? I can’t do a search without badge numbers.”
“Just go over the chronology of intake that night.” Ray Tate smiled, trying to reach into the guy, who looked vaguely familiar. “Three Anglo guys you got that came in that night together, that don’t have Chinese names. They’ll do.”
“We took a lot of people through that night. That’s a lot of names. If you have a badge number?”
Ray Tate stared at him. “One second.” He went to the sergeant’s table and asked for Billy Stiles’s badge number. The young sergeant tapped at his computer and wrote it on a piece of paper. “You get any duty out of that old hump motherfucker over there, let me know. I’ll get you a combat citation.”
Ray Tate gave the number to the body snatcher. The hump stared at the piece of paper for a few minutes, as if the five digits were a code he needed to break, but not too quickly. “Is that a five or an eight? It looks like it could be either.”
Ray Tate looked at the paper. “Eight. That’s an eight.”
“Okay, if you say so. But you better be right. I don’t like to do things twice. It lowers my overall productivity and could jeopardize my chance for advancement. And if it turns out to be a five ’stead’a a eight, you’re going to get a whole different guy’s name popping up. I don’t know if I’ll have the time to do it over again.”
While the hump figured out which keys to press on his keyboard, Ray Tate looked at Djuna Brown and shook his head, smiling in appreciation of a master. It took a while for the hump to coordinate his fingers. He warmed them up like a pianist, readied himself, sighed deeply, and began the ordeal of tapping in the five digits. Ray Tate looked around. He loved the sameness of Sector stations. The smell, the noise, the lighting. Even humps like the body snatcher, they were good for stories. They were artists, masters of the do-dick. Ray Tate remained patiently good-natured about it. It was a process. It had to be endured.
“Okay. You’re right. That’s Stiles’s number. William F. Stiles. That would be Billy, right? Short for William, I guess. It was an eight. I was sure it was a five. But you’re right. It’s an eight. You look at it a certain way, it’s a crapshoot, five or eight. But, when you’re right, you’re right.” The hump waited.
“Terrific.” Ray Tate resisted laughing, “And what did we find?”
“You were right again. He brought in a guy named Carp.”
“Carr.”
“If you say so.” He signed out of the screen. “Anything else I can do for you today?”
“Yeah, we already know about Carr. We want one of the other guys that was booked in with him.”
“You got a badge number?” He sat back, triumphant, and folded his hands over his belly. “We took in a lot of people that night, you know.”
Ray Tate was dizzy. Djuna Brown laughed. They stood in the smoking area on the side of Sector Four, sharing a cigarette, trying to dec
ide what to do next. The hump had eventually said there was no third arrest. Just Joe Carr and Peter van Meister. When they left he was examining the mid-air between the ceiling and the floor as if looking for clues to the miracle of existence.
“We know, Ray, he came in. You saw him, right? In the interview room?”
“Well, they say not. Someone, I think, is scrubbing him. Gerry Martin going to Admin Fraud is a fix. Sally Greaves. The Graveyard.”
“We should head to the hotel, Bongo, and talk about it. In the bathtub.”
The hump came out the door, lighting a cigarette. He was rotund and had a skin condition on the back of his neck that he rubbed at absent-mindedly. He saw them, then wandered over to the garbage receptacle and tossed in a rumpled paper bag. “You handled that pretty good. Most guys I can make pig-biting mad in about thirty seconds. You’re Ray Tate, right? The gunner.” He held out his hand. “George Meyers. Hump and do-dick extraordinaire.” He nodded pleasantly at Djuna Brown. He was an entirely different person. The look of vapid, mean stupidity was gone from his face and he almost beamed upon Djuna Brown. “Don’t know you, Miss.” They shook hands.
Ray Tate knew who he was. Everybody knew who George Meyers was. George Meyers was a legend. “Meyers. I met you with my father-in-law, ex-father-in-law, anyway, Harry Cane, back when I came on. He took me to a retirement whip-around. For, ah, a Road that pulled the pin. You came out of a cake in garters and fishnets.”
“Well,” George Meyers said, simpering, “I was a lot slimmer then.” He ran his hands over his hips and addressed Djuna Brown confidentially. “I eventually had to accept the fact that I inherited my mother’s thighs.”
“Sorry, man,” Ray Tate said. “I didn’t recognize you.”
“’S’ah’ri’. Most days I don’t recognize me.” He glanced at the door to the Sector. “So, what you want: They came in, some college kids from SPA. Evaporate Ansel Partridge, they said, he was never part of your life, they said. Or your pension’ll be gone like he’s gonna be, if he isn’t, they said.” He shrugged. “What do I give a fuck? One less hump.”
“But he was here, right? And Sally Greaves’s crew came and disappeared him?” Ray Tate bit his lip “Nothing left lying around, notes, meal slips, anything? Scrap of T-shirt?”
“Nope. And Gerry Martin, well he’s on the way to a white shirt at the Jank. Good luck finding his notebook for that night. I’m no swami but I predict he’s going to have a garage fire, where he keeps his notebooks. I thought there was more to that kid. Billy Stiles was bringing him along.” He looked over their heads where surveillance cameras panned the parking lot. “I bet they’re watching us right now. The cameras see everything. The hallways, most of the garage, interview rooms, the booking table. If someone wanted to vanish someone, they’d have to get all the tapes, well, the disks, they use now, I guess. Just like those SPA kids did. Not just the tapes up there and in the interview room and the booking tapes. They’d probably get them, too. Then they’d have to get the tapes of the cars entering the property at the gate. The brass installed them for the summer because off-duty guys were going to the pumps out back, loading up on free city gas on their way for a weekend in the country. Those tapes, probably, the kiddie cops from SPA didn’t know about, didn’t ask for when they went up to a decorated officer and treated him like a fucking douchebag.”
Ray Tate put it together. “I guess I should look in the garbage bin?”
“I would. And you oughta know, after you left, the guy on the desk with the big mouth made a call on his cellphone. He said, ‘They’re here,’ and hung up. But this isn’t a freebie. I need you to do something for me.”
“Name it, George. It’s done.”
“When you get this guy, find out where he was on September nine, nineteen ninety-four.”
Chapter 22
Djuna Brown called Marty Frost and arranged for a meeting at the Whistler in two hours. Ray Tate said, “Tell her to make sure they didn’t do a records or motor vehicles on Partridge. We’re not ready yet.”
Djuna Brown passed it on, glanced at Ray Tate and shook her head. “Okay, Marty, in a couple of hours have the front desk buzz up that you’re there. We’ll do in that mini-bar.”
After she clicked off, Ray Tate said two hours was a long time. “How we gonna fill it? You got pay-per-view?”
She smiled. “Asshole.” She read the streets and spoke without looking at him. “You notice, Ray, almost nobody’s wearing the mask? Plague alert is winding down. That means they’re gonna send me home. How are we going to handle that?” She put her hand on his thigh. “I can’t handle another year, like this last one. I …” She looked out the windshield. “I see why you love these streets, Ray. I can’t ask you to leave them. But I think I’m afraid of them. You know? What happened to me, what I did?”
“Maybe we should find something down here, something to keep us both working but off the streets for a while until we sort us out, get another year of pensionable time. You could get assigned to the State headquarters, down in the capital. Hour and a half commute.” He cruised in the direction of the Whistler and picked up speed. “Maybe we need a vacation. But where to go? Disneyland? You down with the Mouse?”
“You’re an asshole, ma cherie.”
In the suite they resisted the bathtub until they ran the surveillance video through her laptop. There he was, a three-quarter face, a little blurred but recognizable, in the back of a police car, his mouth open, talking.
“Beautiful,” Ray Tate said. “Now we just need a printout.”
“But after, though, Ray, huh? I need a long bath. Why don’t you have a nap while I soak? I’ll wake you up when Marty and Brian get here. You rest, buddy. You had a long day.”
He smiled into her sly cat smile. “Asshole.”
They took their guns into the washroom and dumped them in the sink. They had time to waste while the tub filled and they wasted it. They climbed in and arranged themselves and then got stupid again.
“George Meyers was on Homicide,” Ray Tate told Djuna Brown when they’d calmed down. There was water on the floor. There was water on the walls. She was brown and boneless on top of him. I am, he thought, getting good at this bathtub stuff. He felt dreamy. Could skin possibly be so smooth? She was a cool chick. She made him bigger than his job. He never felt white before, he never felt any colour, not before he put his hand on her skin.
“He was an ace detective. I know people say that about a lot of Homicide guys. Pure cop. Sherlock blood. That kind of bullshit. But George Meyers actually was one. Maybe the only one in my lifetime, the only one I ever met. You know the motto, We Speak for the Dead? With George it wasn’t a motto. He actually felt he did. Out of forty-one homicides, he cleared forty. The twenty-first broke his heart. Broke him. Simple case, really. Four-year-old girl goes missing. Gets found dead. Raped. Little black girl. Fuck, it shames me I can’t remember her name. I was one of the blue suits doing the canvass, doing the dog’s work. He works a suspect list, works it down to one really good viable. This takes him a couple of years. He stays in the rotation, takes fresh cases as they come. Solves them. Moves on. But all the time he’s focused on this one, the little girl, poor little black girl.”
“Sounds like Marty. Obsessive. Her ladies. Obsessive, but good obsessive.”
“Yeah. The cop gene. So, anyway, every time I saw him around the Jank, he was a little smaller. It was like some joker snuck into his house and kept replacing his suits, each time leaving a suit a size larger. He works his viable. He’s married, no kids, and so he rents a room in the neighbourhood where the little girl lived. He moves the case file in there, sets up his own command post. Copies of everything. Photos, reports, arrest reports, suspect files, you name it. Then he starts sleeping in there. Two years he’s got this secret life. The wife leaves him, he’s never home. He doesn’t notice. All he thinks about is the girl. The girl, the girl, the girl. If you picked up a perv, anywhere in the city? Next day there’s George on the phone. ‘See w
hat he was doing on September nine, nineteen ninety-four. See if he’s got an alibi.’ ‘Alibi for what, George? This guy was wagging his wiener at a dog.’ ‘September nine, nineteen ninety-four. Get back to me.’ And if you didn’t get back to him in due time, there he was at your desk when you came in one morning. ‘That pervo, kid, what’s up with him?’ People got so when they saw him coming, they just went, ‘Oh fuuuuuck.’ Relentless.”
“Looking at him, you’d never know. He was really like that? Mr. Go Fuck Yourself?”
“Yep. George Meyers. Hump and do-dick.” Ray Tate asked if it was a smoking room.
“We’re cops, Ray, we go armed. We can smoke anywhere.”
He stood naked and climbed out of the tub. In his jacket he found some stale cigarettes from a Native reserve. Da Rez. The Reservation. He lit two and took them back into the bathroom. He’d always been a little shy about being naked. The personal residue of living in foster homes with no privacy. You slept in your clothes. Not anymore.
He got back into the tub and lay down beside her. “So, he, George, has his good viable. But he can’t move the guy. He harasses him. The guy loses his job. The guy loses his wife. The guy tries to commit suicide, he’s going to jump off a ledge. George shows up at the scene, tells the fire guys to catch him in the pancake, no matter what. ‘I need him alive. Kill him later if you want, but right now, get that fucking mutt down here in one piece. I got questions.’
“This goes on and on. Finally, he breaks. Perfect homicide record, except for one. You know how many guys have that record? Exactly none, ever. Except George.