by Jess Walter
“The ideal,” he says.
“Yeah, yeah.” She tries to remember what it was that she wanted to ask him, something about motivation and justification, but it slips away and all she can do is stare, trace him with her eyes, his sharp jawline, the tangle of dark hair, and the strap from his eye patch that drifts in and out of that hair like a boat swamped by waves. “What happened to your eye?”
He says, between bites of sandwich, “BB gun fight. When I was a kid.”
She’s disappointed, somehow. She’d imagined some great story, the horn of a bull in Pamplona, a spear in New Zealand, but that’s the truth of a thing like this. Parents warn you about sticks and BB guns, and when a person loses an eye it’s generally because of a stick or a BB gun. Things are entirely what they appear to be, and behind them—
“Can I see it?” she asks.
He hesitates and then lifts the patch. The eyelid leans heavily down on the socket, but she can’t see anything else. He lets the patch fall back.
She watches him chew the sandwich and she feels tired all of a sudden, wonders if he’d mind if she laid her head down on the table and surrendered. The afternoon air is thick; it’s difficult to hold her head up in it.
“The guy you shot?” he asks finally. “That’s the only person you ever killed?”
“Yeah.”
“But it’s still with you? You still see it.”
“Yes. But there are things I feel worse about.” She pictures Rae-Lynn, the one she couldn’t save, who spent her last six weeks fucking and doping and falling. Caroline bought Rae-Lynn a sandwich like this once; she can still see the tiny girl wolfing it down.
Clark nods. “There aren’t even names for some of the crimes we commit.”
It hits her like a kick to the side and she wonders for a moment if he can see right through her, to the bone. He is staring at her across the table, that one eye imploring. She would like to dismiss him, to let this whole thing go, pass it on to Sergeant Spivey to deal with Monday morning, and get some sleep. Sleep. But he says things like that and…Jesus. She puts her head down on the table and laughs bitterly.
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
“I’m tired, Clark.”
Then she feels his hand on the back of her neck, rubbing it, just underneath her hair. His hand is big and warm; the fingers find strands of tension in her neck and shoulders and he pushes, his hand constricting around the back of her neck. Caroline hears herself sigh. Then she pulls away, snaps upright, and stands.
He looks at his own hand, as if it has acted without his knowledge.
She’s surprised to hear what’s on her mind come out of her mouth. “Did you really kill someone, Clark?”
The question catches him. He looks down at the legal pads and runs his fingers along the pages, as if ordering the words, tidying them up. But sometimes there’s nothing you can do. He gives up and his hands go back to his lap. He looks up at her and laughs. “If I hadn’t, and if we had met some other way, do you think—?”
She sees the sandwich, the table, the legal pads, the pen, and his hands—a random collection, an idiot’s still life.
“Yeah, probably,” she says, without a trace of either flattery or flirtation. And when he doesn’t say anything else, she turns and leaves.
3 | ALONE IS EASY
Alone is easy on the weekends. Usually by this time on Saturday afternoons Caroline Mabry has forgotten that other people even exist, and has settled in front of the television or the computer screen, finally at ease with herself after a week of awkwardness at the office. And so it comes as something of a surprise to see all of these people out on a sunny Saturday, hurrying in and out of their cars, into restaurants and shops. Everything seems so compact and tied down for these people: skis racked on top of their cars, children strapped into safety seats in the back. They all seem to be going someplace, the same place—some active, lively, family place—where everything is buckled down and safe. Compared with these people she feels untethered, flapping all over the place as she wanders through downtown Spokane, the melting snow puddled up on the streets beneath her.
Clark Mason’s apartment is in Browne’s Addition, a 130-year-old neighborhood of decaying mansions and grand family homes, most of them converted into apartments. She parks in front of Clark’s building, an old two-story square, split into four apartments. There are four mailboxes on the paint-chipped front porch; she reads that C. Mason lives in A, on the first floor. One of the other mailboxes is covered with skateboarding stickers and another belongs to a girl named Lisa Miller, who has dotted the i’s in both her first and last names with crescent moons.
She peers through the window of Clark’s apartment. There is no body. No blood. That’s good. Or not. She recognizes the style of furniture as early college—ragged couch, bookshelves made from planks and cement blocks. There are books everywhere, and she feels a twinge, remembers his big hand on the back of her neck, and thinks, Great, I finally meet a guy who actually reads and he’s either crazy or a murderer. Or both.
She walks around the side of the house and looks in the windows—a small bathroom with a soap-on-a-rope hanging from the shower, a bedroom with an open futon and a row of suits in a small closet—and then negotiates weeds and old lumber to make her way around to the back, where the porch is clear except for a bowl-shaped barbecue grill and a red picnic table. No blood, no feet sticking out of closets. If Clark Mason did kill someone, he didn’t do it here.
When she comes back around to the front of the house, there is a man climbing the porch two steps at a time, an older man in slacks and a polo shirt, maybe sixty, dignified looking, with short gray hair and a day’s gray beard. Caroline thinks about the skateboard stickers and the crescent moons and guesses the man isn’t here to see those tenants. Sure enough, he walks to Clark’s door and pounds on it. “Clark!” he yells. “You in there?”
The man turns around and sees her. He has sharp, washed-out blue eyes and that easy quality that attractive older men have. He also has the most drastically cleft chin that she has ever seen, like someone has taken one shot at splitting his head with a maul.
“Excuse me,” she says. “Are you looking for Clark Mason?”
“Yes.” The man eyes her suspiciously.
Caroline offers her badge. It takes a second to register with him, and when it does, he reaches out and grabs her forearm. “Oh, my God. Is he okay?”
“He’s fine.”
“Oh, good.” He lets go of her arm. “He left a message on my machine yesterday. He sounded horrible. I was worried.”
“Are you his father?”
“No.” The man regains his dignified air. “I’m…” But he seems unable to tell her exactly what he is. “I was his campaign manager. Are you sure he’s okay?”
“He’s fine,” Caroline says. “He’s down at the station.”
“Thank God,” he says. “I’ve been calling him the last two days. Finally I just decided to drive over.”
“Over?”
“From Seattle. I live in Seattle. Clark tried to reach me yesterday. He sounded so desperate. I was worried that…I don’t know…he would commit suicide or something.”
“Actually,” Caroline says, “he says he killed someone.”
The man’s jaw drops.
“We found him in an abandoned building, and when we tried to ask him some questions he said he wanted to confess to a homicide.”
“Who?”
“He won’t say.”
“No,” he says. “That’s not possible. Clark wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
Caroline extends her hand. “I’m Caroline Mabry. I’m a homicide detective.”
“Richard Stanton.”
It takes a moment for the name to register, for Caroline to remember Susan Diehl’s reticence about the name of the man she was sleeping with when she and Clark were married. When Caroline had asked Susan if Clark knew the man, what had Susan said? Yeah. He knows him. Clark’s campaign manager. That is
cold.
“Can I talk to him?” Richard Stanton asks.
“He’s down at the station, giving his statement. When he’s finished, I’ll let him know you asked about him.”
“Look, there must be some mistake. It’s inconceivable that Clark could hurt anyone, let alone kill someone.”
“He said he was ‘responsible for someone’s death.’”
Stanton looks at the ground, concentrating, and then he slaps his head. “Oh, wait. I know what he’s talking about. Jesus. That stupid, sweet kid.”
Caroline waits.
“I’m sure it’s not what you think.”
She smiles. “How do you know what I think?”
“He’s not a criminal.”
“That may be,” she says. “But if he is, and if you know something about it and you withhold information from me, then you might be in as much trouble as he is.”
Stanton chews his lip, thinks about it. “Let me talk to him. I can straighten all this out in twenty minutes.”
“Tell me what this is about and I’ll let you talk to him.”
They are at an impasse. He regards her, as if measuring her resolve. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” Stanton looks away. “Can you take him a note?”
“Sure,” she says, and offers a page of her notebook and a pen. “Put your phone number on there too.”
He writes something, tears the sheet out and folds it, gives it to her.
“I’ll have him call as soon as he’s finished with his statement.”
“Thank you,” he says.
“So what happened?” Caroline points to the small apartment. “Guy runs for Congress and ends up in a shithole like this?” She tries to sound conversational. “That’s a little weird, isn’t it? Did somebody steal all his money?”
But Richard Stanton is spooked and doesn’t want to talk anymore. “Look, my loyalty lies with Clark. I don’t want to say anything until I talk to him or to his lawyer.”
“Sure,” Caroline says. “I understand.” But something about the word “loyalty” doesn’t sit right with her. She says, “I talked to Susan.”
He flinches and looks up at her. Caroline keeps her face still, inscrutable.
Stanton doesn’t look away, gives her a practiced smile. “How is Susan?”
“She’s great,” Caroline says. “Frisky as a colt.”
Finally, Stanton has to look down. Caroline waves the piece of paper with the note on it. “I’ll make sure Clark gets this. I’m sure he’ll appreciate your loyalty.”
“Thank you,” Stanton mumbles. He starts to leave, hesitates, then walks quickly toward a car parked across the street: a BMW 700 series. He presses the keyless entry and the door chimes for him. It strikes Caroline that the candidate’s wife seems to be doing pretty well and the candidate’s campaign manager seems be doing pretty well. But the candidate himself is living like a freshman. The BMW pulls away.
In her own car, she opens the note. “He was sick. Nothing you could have done,” Stanton has written. “Call me.—Richard.”
She wads up the note and throws it to the floorboard of her car. Then she pulls out her cell phone and calls the front desk. The sergeant says he just checked on the Loon in Interview Two. “He’s still at it.”
“Thanks. I’ll be back in a little while.”
“So what’s this about?” the sergeant asks. “What’s he writing in there?”
“My resignation,” Caroline says.
She hangs up the call and is about to drive back to the cop shop when she looks up and sees the sun at the horizon, maybe twenty minutes from setting. She’s been at work now for twenty-eight straight hours. She looks down at the phone in her hand and taps out a number that she knows by heart but hasn’t dialed in months.
“Hey,” she says when a man answers. “Is this a bad time?”
When he says it isn’t, she feels herself slump forward. “Look,” she says, “I really need to talk. Is there any way you could meet me for coffee?”
4 | DUPREE IS WAITING
Dupree is waiting at the coffee shop, the same place she visited this morning. It feels like a week since she’s been here, since she came downtown to see if Pete Decker was dead. The pierced girl is bringing Dupree a cup of coffee. She smiles when she sees Caroline: “Another chai?”
Alan Dupree stands up. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt beneath a denim jacket. “Hey there.” He’s a little shorter than she is, and a lot balder. He has softened a bit around the middle since he took retirement from the police department six months ago. Even so, the blue eyes and the easy movement are the same as they’ve always been, the same as the day she met him thirteen years ago. And when he sits down she feels the old stuff, the sharp attraction in her throat, the desire to forget things she knows to be true.
She clears her throat. “Thanks for coming.”
“My pleasure. You saved me from pinochle with the in-laws.”
“How’s Debbie?” Caroline asks. Dupree and his wife split up for a short time last year, just before Alan retired, and Caroline imagines their resuscitated marriage as tentative in some way, incomplete. Or maybe that’s just what she likes to imagine.
“She’s good. We’re doing fine. She likes me better retired.”
“And the kids?”
“They like me too. Staci asked me today what boys use their wieners for.”
“Yeah, I’ve been wondering that myself.”
“I told her nobody knows for sure.”
“And how’s the dark side?” Caroline asks. Since retiring, Dupree has worked as an investigator for a couple of defense lawyers, applying the same knowledge and energy to freeing bad guys that he once used to catch them.
“Great,” he says. “The evil one gives great bennies.”
Caroline has known other cops who retired and went to work immediately for defense lawyers, splitting from themselves, revolting against the framework that held them in place. She thinks about her own recent crisis and wonders if she could ever work for the other side like that. She doesn’t think so.
“I don’t think you called me down here to ask what boys do with their wieners.”
“Actually…” Caroline tries to smile at his joke, but her eyes are drawn down to the table and her cup of tea.
Dupree reaches out and squeezes her hand. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “There’s this…” And she starts to call it a case, but she catches herself and suddenly the whole thing is so ridiculous, so unlikely, she has the urge to simply drop it, go home and forget the whole thing. Perhaps she’s known all along she was being obsessive and irrational, but it seemed harmless until now, when she can imagine the look of concern on Dupree’s face.
“Tell me,” he says.
And though she doesn’t want to, she’s too tired to not talk. She starts slowly, Friday at nine, and she can hear herself pronouncing the right words—Davenport, eye patch, homicide, confession, legal pads, twenty-one hours—but she can tell by the look on Dupree’s face that the story is not translating, that he’s not getting it—why she’d spend the whole weekend running down the people this guy knows, making sure they’re still alive (she thinks it must sound like a normal murder investigation in reverse, starting with the killer and looking for the body). “I know it sounds crazy, Alan, but you can see how I got caught up in this, right?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You think I’m losing it,” she says.
“When was the last time you slept, Caroline?”
“I know what you’re thinking—”
“When?”
“Night before last.”
“Two days without sleep. Are you drinking? Taking something?”
“No.” She laughs, or makes that sound anyway; it feels like a cramp in her chest.
“You call Spivey at some point during all of this?”
“Yes,” she says. “He told me he wouldn’t authorize overtime.”
“So you’re not even
getting paid for your breakdown,” Dupree says. “Nice.”
She laughs in spite of herself. “Look, this guy did something, Alan. I can feel it.”
He is a believer in intuition too, and for the first time, he seems to consider her seriously. Or maybe he’s just being nice. “You check girlfriends? Wife?”
“Ex-wife,” she says.
“She alive?”
“Oh yeah. In fact, when I saw her, she was full of spunk.”
“Who’s with the lunatic now?”
“Nobody.”
“You left him down there?”
“I can’t charge him with anything. But he isn’t going anywhere. I took his shoes and his belt.”
Dupree looks confused. “He a suicide?”
“Probably not. I just knew he wouldn’t go anywhere without his shoes.”
For the first time Dupree smiles, and gets that look of pride, the one that used to sustain her. “Look, just send the guy home, Caroline. Before it gets any weirder. Tell Spivey to pick him up Monday and they can start over.”
“Okay,” she says, to placate him, to drop the subject. “You’re right.”
He takes a drink of his coffee. “You knew I was going to say that. You brought me down here to ask me something you already knew the answer to?”
“No.” The breath catches in her throat.
Dupree just watches her.
“Look,” Caroline says. “How many confessions have you heard? A thousand? We arrest a guy inside a house and he confesses to breaking in. Or he confesses that he killed the girl whose blood he happens to be wearing. We can see that. We call it a confession when some asshole describes for us the world we can see with our own fuckin’ eyes.
“But this guy today…I mean, did it ever occur to you that there is another kind of confession, maybe a more important kind?
“What I’m trying to say is—” She’s frustrated by her inability to communicate to him. “Maybe there’s a whole other world, Alan. And maybe it’s made up of all the intentions and the things we don’t do, the things we don’t say. The things we want. Maybe there’s a place where all of our ideas go, our desires, and it doesn’t matter whether we acted on them or not, in this other world they still have…power.”