by Tim Cockey
Gil was fiddling absently with his malted-milk straw. He squinted into the footlights, attempting to conjure up the vision.
“Willkommen,” he said, tentatively first, and then a second time with zest. “Willkommen! I’m seeing it. Yes! We can try that out.” Then he frowned. “But what about the pith helmet? Are you still an anthropologist?”
God help me, I wasn’t about to lose my lectern.
“Absolutely. This is just a facet of the Stage Manager. The guy needs a facet, let’s face it.”
“So we keep the pith helmet and the wire-rimmed glasses and we add the diabolical mustache. Is that it?”
“You’ve got a hell of a show here, Gil,” I said, donning the helmet and giving it a jaunty tap on the top.
Gil turned to Michael. “What do you think, Michael?”
I thought the young man’s answer displayed an impressive sense of timing.
“Well… you know … I was going to talk to you about my yarmulke.”
Gil blinked. “What about it?”
“I want to wear it during the show.”
Gil was no dummy. He couldn’t very well give me the wax mustache and not let Michael Goldfarb have his yarmulke. “Of course. Of course you can wear it.” Libby Maslin had just stepped onto the stage. She planted her feet firmly and addressed Gil with uncommon passion.
“If he wears one, I wear one.”
“But… but, Libby, you’re not even Jewish,” Gil said weakly.
“Doesn’t matter. He’s my son. How would it look?”
How it would look is ridiculous. Women don’t even wear yarmulkes. Even I knew that. So did Michael Goldfarb, but he was keeping his mouth shut. Gil looked as if he was about to get sick. He shaded his eyes and called out into the dark, “Betty! Please locate two yarmulkes.”
“I have one,” Michael said dryly. “And I can get one for Miss Maslin.”
Libby Maslin looked as if she was about to take the boy into her spinster breast.
“Call me Libby.”
This damned rehearsal hadn’t even begun and the thing was slipping out of Gil’s trembling hands. I couldn’t wait to tell Julia. I wondered where she was.
The message on my phone machine said, “I’m here.” This was followed by a familiar set of sounds, voices, tinny music, some clicks and clacks, a familiar female laugh …
I found Kate sitting at the bar talking to Sally.
“I hope you two are talking about me,” I said, sliding onto a barstool.
Sally answered, “You would be …?”
Kate was drinking cranberry juice. I pointed at her glass. “I’ll have one of those.”
Kate reached out and touched Sally on the arm. “What does he usually have?”
“Turkey.”
“Give him that.”
Sally gave me my drink. Kate and I retreated to a table in the back.
As soon as we sat down, Kate spoke up. “One thing, Hitch. Please don’t patronize me. About the liquor. I’ve got a little thing with liquor right now. You don’t. I appreciate it, but it’s the wrong way to be nice.”
I tapped my whiskey glass against her cranberry glass. “Deal.”
Kate asked me if I had read the clippings that she had given me. Hero Widow Kills Husband’s Killer. I told her that I had.
“What did you think of all that?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure where to start. “I think something very bizarre went down, but I don’t know what. All I kept thinking was, why would Alan Stuart do all that. It was him, right? Who got that story going?”
Kate nodded. “It was him all right. He was already there at the hospital when they brought Charley in. Charley was… he was announced dead on arrival.”
“Kate, I’m so sorry.”
“I appreciate that, but look. I can’t go back to the ‘sorry’ place. I really can’t.” She gave a big sigh. “Alan requisitioned an office at the hospital. He took me in there. You can imagine, I was in shock. Nothing was real. I knew that Charley was dead. I knew that I had killed him. But I wasn’t feeling it. That’s pretty standard.”
“Shock.”
“Exactly.” She took a sip of her cranberry juice. “Alan did a very mean thing then. The first of many, as it turned out. He badgered me out of my shock. I figured it out later, what he was doing. He needed to get me out of that insulated place as quickly as he could. I wasn’t really going to take in any of what he was saying so long as I was in shock. So he leaned into me. ‘Charley’s dead. We can’t undo that. It comes with the job. You’ve always known that. He’s dead. I’m sorry. But now you’ve got to listen to me. Do you understand? You have to listen closely.’ Over and over. He did a real number on me, Hitch.”
“Sweet man.”
“Charming.”
“So what was his game?”
“Simple. He wanted to get into my brain and start to rearrange things. I swear, Hitch, he was like a hypnotist. And I was taking it in. I mean, I was empty. For Christ’s sake, I wanted to be dead. I had just shot my husband. Alan instructed me not to say a word to anyone about what had happened. No one. Then he started talking about the man on the walkway. The one who Lou killed.”
“Lou. Wait a minute. Is that Lottery Lou?”
Kate was surprised. “How’d you know that?”
I told her about dropping by the station and seeing this guy getting the homecoming queen routine.
“Kruk called him ‘Lottery Lou.’ ”
“That’s him. Lou Bowman. He was the detective on the stakeout. He’s the one who shot the guy up on the walkway.”
“For which you were given credit.”
Kate grimaced at this. “Credit. Right.” She sighed. “So anyway. This guy that Lou picked off, Alan kept telling me how much I hated that man. ‘You hate him, Kate. You hate him, you hate his guts. He’s responsible for this. You hate him … ‘ Like that. And then at some point I heard him saying, ‘You killed him, you killed that man.’ I said no, I killed Charley. But Alan was shaking his head. ‘Listen. You killed that man, Kate. You shot him. That man killed Charley. It’s better that way. He’s scum. That’s the way it happened. Listen to me. You tried to save Charley.’ He said all of this over and over again. I just sat there. In shock, out of shock. I don’t even know. Alan flipped open my head and poured it all in. I mean, he wasn’t trying to actually convince me of all this. He couldn’t do that. But he got the new version running in my head. That’s what he was after. Alan is a powerful man. I respected the hell out of him. And he just stood there in that hospital office and he put me in his pocket. ‘Keep this in the family,’ he said.”
Kate pulled a cigarette from her bag then tossed it onto the table. “Oh Jesus, Hitch, he ran a blah blah blah on me you wouldn’t believe. He said that he had talked to Lou already, that Lou was on board, and that I just had to listen to what he was saying. ‘This is for your own good, Kate,’ he kept saying. On and on and on.
“Somehow he got me out of that hospital without anyone seeing me or talking to me. He brought me to his house. It was surreal. I woke up in one of the guest bedrooms to find that my husband was dead, gunned down in the line of duty. And I was the reluctant hero. I had killed the guy who supposedly shot Charley. Not Lou. Me. The story was out there. It was a done deal at that point. Alan played me perfectly. I swear it was as if he had watched me growing up and knew just which buttons to push. Hide the truth. Live the lie. Suck up the shame. That ‘keep it in the family’ garbage. That was the right thing to say to me. He put his finger on that big button and he pushed it and he pushed it and he didn’t let up. I can’t even tell you anything about the next several days, Hitch. Alan insisted that I stay with him and his wife until the funeral. I can barely remember any of it. I see that picture in the paper of me at the funeral getting that flag from Alan and I can’t even remember it happening. I do remember burning every condolence card and letter and flower that I received. I remember that. As far as I was concerned they weren’t condolences, they were ac
cusations. They were the punishment that I wasn’t even allowed to have. I had killed my husband and I wasn’t even going to suffer for it. That was what Alan Stuart did to me.”
Kate reached across the table and tapped on my glass with her fingernail. “I kind of lost my grip when all this happened.” Her voice was just above a whisper. “Actually … I lost it big-time.”
She picked up my hand and brought it up to her lips and held it there for several seconds, holding me with her eyes.
“I need to get out of here,” Kate said abruptly. She stood up. She was halfway to the door before I even found my feet. I saw Sally out of the corner of my eye registering her disappointment. I guess it looked like a fight.
Outside, I asked Kate if she wanted to go home. “Alone, I mean. Or not.” This was her call. I knew I was circling a wounded animal.
“I need to finish this,” she said.
I knew just the place.
The idle factories across the harbor broke the night’s horizon like silent blue mountains. Off to the southwest was Federal Hill, where just a few nights ago Kate and I had sealed our now very quaint-seeming date with a couple of kisses while overlooking the harbor. Now we sat without touching on the end of the pier. The inky darkness made it easier, I’m sure, for Kate to get the rest of her story out. She told it to the water below her feet. Or maybe she was directing herself to my black reflection. Either way, I listened.
Less than a week after the funeral of Charley Russell, Alan Stuart had summoned Kate into his office. He reminded her again what a brave thing she was doing. The department didn’t need the ugliness of one of its own cops killing another, even if it was a terrible accident, etc., etc. Nor did Stuart himself need it, politically. He certainly didn’t need a cop killing a cop under his watch. He reminded her—again—how a bad thing, a truly tragic event, had been spun into something positive. The good will was pouring in. The newspapers—and they were spread all over Stuart’s desk—were suddenly the police department’s new best pal. This was good, he reminded Kate. This was all very, very good.
There was, however, something that they needed to discuss. And this, he said, was something quite delicate. It certainly could not leave this room. Stuart surprised Kate then, by acknowledging the position he had put her in. He told her that he well understood how reluctant she must be to be receiving all of this attention and adulation for having avenged her husband when of course she was the one who had gunned him down. He acknowledged the irony and he apologized for the burden.
In other words, he was setting her up for more.
There was something he felt that she had to be told. It was something, he said, that Kate wouldn’t particularly want to hear. He intimated that in a very, very small way it might take a fraction of the sting off of what had transpired—the real story—in that warehouse just a week before. Kate recalled thinking that this was an awfully ballsy claim. But by then she was already quite aware—and soon to become even more so—that Alan Stuart was one awfully ballsy bastard.
Charley was sour. This is what Stuart told her. A bad cop. Charley had turned. It is the biggest risk of undercover assignments, especially when large sums of money are floating around. Kate listened in silence as Alan Stuart sketched out the details. She couldn’t sort through them. She saw Alan Stuart’s mouth moving, and like an out-of-synch movie, she was hearing the words floating somewhere in the vicinity of his lips. Illegal dumping. Secret deposits. Chemical waste … Stuart was showing her some papers. The words in the air were saying “Charley” and “money”; they might as well have been saying “cheese” and “snowman.” She just wasn’t hearing.
Charley was a bad cop. This is what Alan Stuart was telling Kate and what he was telling her to leave behind when she left his office. He told her that the department had suspected it, had in fact been about to launch an internal investigation. They had been planning to pull Charley off of his assignment as soon as it was logistically feasible to do so. Ironically—tragically—they had been planning to pull him in in just a few more days. He would have been safe and alive and in very hot water.
Alan Stuart had then pulled up a chair and taken hold of Kate’s hands. He made her look him in his eyes as he started twisting the knife. He told her that the department had reason to believe that Charley’s cover had already been blown, that the people he was investigating and profiting from had been onto him. Stuart also believed that Charley knew that the internal investigation of his own actions had been instituted. He was tainted on both sides. No good place to turn.
This is when Stuart squeezed her hands. Squeezed them hard. And this is when his fingers—as he squeezed—crawled their way along her hands and up to her wrists, where they pushed gently, even as they remained gripped. It felt creepy. It felt intimate. It felt like she was being handcuffed.
“He said that Charley had cornered himself,” Kate said. “That he had stepped on a bear trap and that it was snapping closed on him. He said the jaws were just about to get him when I shot him.”
Kate stared down at the water. Finally, she threw her head back, tossing her hair out of her face, and nailed me with a hard look.
“He kissed me,” she said. “The bastard.”
As if on cue, a tugboat let off a long mournful blast. The bare trace of a smile curled Kate’s lip. It was gone, however, by the time the sound stopped.
In the course of that single week she was recounting, Kate had detached from the world she once thought she understood. In those seven days, she had murdered her husband, borne the ill-guided sympathy of the people of the city of Baltimore, discovered that her husband was not who she had taken him to be, and begun an affair with her boss. She had returned the kiss.
“I had no sense of the ground,” Kate said to me, swinging her feet out of tandem. “I had no sense of the meaning of conversations I was having. When nothing seems real, then nothing really matters. It didn’t seem to matter, somehow, that my husband was suddenly gone from this earth and that I was going to bed with another man. The only real thought I had of Charley … two thoughts really. One was that had he lived maybe he would have aged and matured into someone as powerful and protecting as Alan Stuart. Maybe he would have made me insanely happy and secure. And the other thought was that I hated him. He had let me down. He had lied to me. He had lied to all of us. Then rather than face up to it like a man he had let me murder him.
“But the fact is, I was hating myself even more. Every time I let Alan Stuart into my bed over those next months I was hating myself. I was taking the punishment that I deserved. The price you pay for killing your husband and getting away with it, sexual doormat for your goddamn boss. And the better Alan made me feel in bed, the more I hated myself. That’s how it works. It’s pathetic, but that’s how it works. You always hate the wrong person. Always. And the wrong person is usually yourself.”
The affair went on for several months. Kate went back to work, but she was a robot. It wasn’t right.
“I was no good as a cop. Not like that. On the nights when Alan wasn’t using me … that’s when my little relationship with booze started to get out of hand. It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it. My relationship with my boss and my relationship with the bottle. But at least with the one you can stick it up on a high shelf where it’s harder to reach. The other just walks through the door and takes you.”
Kate leaned back on her arms and looked up at the sky. It was a cloudless night with about a dozen stars. Not much to look at, really.
“Alan finally suggested that I take a paid leave of absence. He had seen the brochures that Charley and I had collected for our postponed honeymoon. He suggested that I take a trip to Mexico. Sure. Mexico sounds okay. What’s the difference? So I went to Mexico. I sat on the beach. I looked at the water. I looked at some Mayan ruins. I cursed at the moon every night. I was there for three weeks. I had a two-night stand with a waiter, for Christ’s sake. This sweet Mexican boy. It was horrible. I had no idea who I was or what I was doin
g. Which was fine. All I wanted to do was forget. Forget everything. Then Alan came down, after the second week. He came down and he did his thing with me for several days and then before he left he told me that we had to end it. He was very firm and businesslike. He ordered me to sober up and to get back to work. He said that he would always be there for me but that we had to drop the relationship then and there. He was so smug. I made some smartass comment about how sweet it had been for him to spend three days screwing me before telling me we were over. He hit me for that one, and then he left.”
Kate looked out over the water. Her gaze was in the direction of the Domino sugar sign. I suspected she wasn’t even seeing it.
“It was the hit that sobered me up. Though I never want him to know that. Never. I refuse to owe him that. I swam and I sat in the sun and I walked along the beach for the rest of the week. I had my goddamned honeymoon alone. Then I flew back to Baltimore and started my new life. I was made detective. Lou had just inherited his little fortune and left the force, so there was an opening and Alan gave it to me. It was the most shameless promotion in the history of the department, but I grabbed it. I didn’t care. Everyone assumed it was a sympathy move on Alan’s part. I was sick of sympathy. And I knew better. It wasn’t sympathy at all. I went into Alan’s office when the word came down and asked him point-blank. ‘Is this because you were screwing me for three months? Is this some sort of payoff for your taking advantage of me like that?’ And listen to what he said, Hitch. I memorized it, word for word. I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘Do you know where you would be right now if it weren’t for me? You’d be off the force and in a prison cell. Now you’re a goddamn detective. I’ll take my thank-you in the form of good solid work, Detective. Now get the hell out of my office and get the hell to work.’ ”
Kate looked over at me. “As you can see, he is a lovely man.”
“He killed Guy Fellows, didn’t he?”