The True Detective

by Theodore Weesner

  Too soon, going up the hill, Dulac’s legs go heavy on him, and he is using his hands, too, to dig and pull as he presses on. Don’t give up now, he says to himself. Make him do it. Don’t give up.

  Face down, he stays after him. Face up, he glimpses him, sees him, and returning face down, for the greater ease of climbing it gives him, he presses on. He digs, claws his hands, his fingers and fingernails, into weeds, shards of dirt and pebbles, scraps of glass, and cries to himself deeply within, I’m going to get you, you sonofabitch, I’m going to get you, even as he knows, perhaps more deeply within, that he isn’t entirely certain now, which knowledge is already sending through him a new disappointment and a new urgency, as he keeps gasping, keeps clawing and pushing up with the sides of his feet, keeps crying to himself to believe, to persevere.

  CHAPTER 25

  MATT IS IN THE KITCHEN. HE HAS JUST WALKED IN, IS IN HIS jacket still, and is simply standing there. His odd frame of mind is more or less on school, of all places. On Mr. Kazur, who is renowned for always talking politics, current affairs, criticizing the President. Matt doesn’t altogether understand the left or right of the man’s position, but his notion is that what he is thinking now would anger the teacher. Being poor. He could write a report and present it in Mr. Kazur’s face on the consequences of being poor, as he realizes the telephone is ringing.

  It isn’t his father, though, and his heart sinks. Rather it is a woman calling—from the police department—a woman who seems to know him, to know everything, even to know without asking that his mother is not at home.

  “Your father asked me to call,” she says. “He wanted you to know that he’s spoken to us here, and that he will be flying into Portland this evening, and that he’ll be in touch with you tomorrow sometime.”

  “He’s flying to Portland?” Matt says, as if talking long-distance again and missing words and phrases.

  “That’s right, this evening,” the woman says. “Now the problem is, if there is a problem—I’m not sure he quite understands this. It isn’t necessarily in our jurisdiction to decide what to do about his being in arrears. Do you understand? If he does call there, could you pass that on to him?”

  “He’s not going to call?” Matt says. In his disappointment, he is confused by what the woman is saying.

  A pause follows. More gently then the woman says, “You don’t understand, do you?”

  Matt doesn’t say; he doesn’t know what to say.

  “Oh, my,” the woman says.

  Arrears . . . arrested, Matt is thinking.

  “Matt, listen,” the woman says. “Let me try again. He asked, your father asked, if we’d have him arrested. I said no, we wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean someone else might not arrest him. Because the case was never in our jurisdiction. So, if he calls—”

  “I understand,” Matt says.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure. But if he’s not going to call, what difference does it make?”

  Now it is the woman who is silent. At last, she says, “Matt, I just wanted you to know.”

  Off the phone, Matt stands there. Well, his father isn’t going to call, he thinks. But he did ask that woman to call and tell him he was coming. That was something, wasn’t it? Why waste money on another long-distance call? At least he asked that woman to call and tell him that he was coming.

  CHAPTER 26

  VERNON’S MIND WILL NOT COME DOWN TO HIM. HE IS running; he knows that he is running, that he is digging, pulling, crying to get away from that man, that his hands and feet are grabbing into dirt and weeds, yet his mind is apart, is running a distance above his madly working throat and lungs. Nor does it seem his mind at all, as he climbs and pulls, but his mother’s mind. Her mind and eyes are within his own as he climbs, slides and climbs up the ragged path, letting him know that he has really done it this time, that she doesn’t know if she can help him this time, and as he struggles on, it seems that neither of them will leave him alone, will let him think for a second.

  He slides to his belly, to his chin, and grabs weeds again, gains footholds, to push on. He keeps slipping and falling, bruising his fingers and palms, his knees and shins, his feet sliding, his left ankle paining and throbbing from jamming against something hard. She clings, allowing him no way to duck under her; the big detective stays at his back, too, stays there and stays there so he keeps feeling like he is going to explode, is going to pop like a balloon if they won’t leave him alone.

  Sliding to his belly, he frantically unhooks his foot from something, shoots a glance back, sees the form of that man, a form like that of a bear, on all fours, climbing after him. He cries within, in his anger and disappointment. Still he pushes on, keeps himself moving through the weeds and brush, at no greater speed than that of a turtle, as it comes to him that he knows more than she does now, that is why she can’t help him, because he knows more than she, knows of peace of mind, of salvation, of death, and that no one can help him now.

  He continues, as if alone. Losing momentary strength and conviction, he collapses for several seconds, gasping and crying, praying to be left alone by the man, and pushing himself up, returns to crawling and clawing, until he collapses to his face and belly yet again. But he returns to crawling and clawing still again, even as he has little sense of what it is that is making him go on.

  Nor, in the next moment, does he seem to know who he is, or where he is, or what he is doing or why. He feels terribly hot, as if he has entered the mouth of a furnace, and he sees that he is opposite the highway railing, is coming opposite the highway surface, where cars are roaring by one after another, two by two, by three, where ground and highway and bridge all merge. On something of a new charge, he gets himself over the ground and over crushed rock and gets a hand on the steel railing, but cannot pull himself higher and clings a moment with knees and one side in the crushed rock. The railing would be less than waist-high if he were standing on the other side, in the breakdown lane, but he has to give up his handgrip on the cold metal and crawl and pull along another six feet, or eight feet, before he can make headway and gain the footing he needs to pull himself up to the lip of the pavement and slide his belly and his legs over the railing, into a collapsed crouch on the pavement, within the immediate zing-zing of passing cars, facing uphill yet again, looking up yet another long and gradual hill, but this one altogether over pavement and in the direction of the State of Maine, a mile or so away.

  Thus, not even looking to see if the grizzly bear is still after him, Vernon begins moving his feet one after another over the pavement, bending at the waist, looking to the pavement, in the flow of air here, gasping, dragging one foot forward and then the other, upon the skyward angle and curve of the bridge, and feeling some glimmer of hope, a new toss of the dice, until, suddenly, there is a horn blast from one of the passing cars, and all seems dashed, all seems lost yet again as his heart cries out to the unseen driver, Why did you do that? Oh God, why did you do that?

  He has to look then, has to take a glimpse back to see if he has been seen, and all his worst fears come home to him, for there is the grizzly bear of a man, draped over the railing, lying over the railing and looking after him, sliding over the railing, he sees then, sliding into a pile on the pavement of the breakdown lane and beginning at once to strive to get himself upright again, sending the shock of death directly into his weary heart this time even as he is staggering on, eyes front again more or less, eyes on his knees and on the pavement between them more or less, as the nightmare of his life seems close enough to be flapping its wings not far at all above his back and shoulders and just when he thought he might be getting away.

  CHAPTER 27

  DULAC STAGGERS, WALKS ON SEA LEGS HEAD-DOWN INTO THE wall of air. There are posts here, square steel columns beside him every twenty-five or thirty feet, aimed upward into the sky. And there is the constant song, the whoom! whoom! of cars passing within a dozen feet of him, a sense of being in a massive room, a precarious swaying room
in the sky, far above the railroad tracks, above the deep, ocean green river, so high, so precarious that walking here makes it seem foolhardy to proceed with anything as sizeable as an automobile, although a dangerous journey of that kind, at fifty miles an hour, gets over much more quickly than staggering and weaving along one footfall at a time.

  Head down into the air, he keeps going. One yard, and another yard. With more strength in his arms than in his legs, he reaches literally, every third or fourth step, to help his thighs along with his hands, to sustain movement, not to give up, not to be beaten, at least not yet. Don’t think about it, he tells himself. Move. Don’t think. Move.

  As he lifts his face once more into the wind, however, he cannot believe what he sees. Nothing. He sees nothing. There is no suspect. The suspect is no longer ahead of him as he has been all along—out there sixty or eighty yards ahead, struggling and staggering at an equal pace. Nor is he, so far as Dulac can tell, in a pile on the pavement, in exhaustion or surrender. And the cars continue to whip past him; there has been no break in their rhythm; there’s no way he could have been picked up.

  He fears the suspect has jumped; the fear laces through him with the same sensation he felt earlier when he realized, alas, that he was the one on the sidewalk opposite the station. He fears he has stepped from the bridge, has stepped to his death, has slipped over the railing to win a final round, to deny him the satisfaction he has so yearned for of gripping him by the neck, taking him in, leveling charges.

  Dulac goes on, keeping his eyes up enough now in the wind, however much it slows his progress, to look around, to look before him and to the side. He goes on. He draws another horn toot from a passing car, thinks to say to them, yes, this is all in fun, an afternoon stroll, thinks, too, to give them the finger, believing he has lost the suspect, pressing on with the wind in his eyes, nose, and mouth, the roar in his ears, the sensation of losing running down through him as he sees he is approaching the summit of the bridge.

  Nor does he see the suspect or any sign of him. But then an answer begins to come to him in the face of a child, a passenger in a passing car, a boy of eight or ten. The boy has seen something. His head has jerked to the side to see again whatever it was that startled his attention.

  Dulac cannot spot it. He goes on. It is the summit of the bridge, its crest he is on now; looking to the cars zipping by, he sees other faces startled by something, trying for a second look. A look up. Their quick looks are shooting up.

  He sees him then. He sees the suspect. He has climbed one of the vertical steel posts. The posts are hollow, with large chain link–shaped holes on all sides, holes the size of frying pans; the suspect has used the holes as ladder steps to climb overhead. Dulac can see him through a set of holes eight or ten feet overhead; he can see his arm, reaching around the side of the post to grip where there is another opening, and yet again the pins-andneedles sensation is passing over Dulac. He has him.

  He steps along. He has him. He decides against unholstering his pistol. He steps along, watching the shape of a person clinging overhead there. He has him.

  To his left, at his hand as he steps along, is the railing, a topping layer of steel over a series of cables as big around as his wrist, the cables swaying in the air. Here at the crest of the bridge the wind is the strongest, and Dulac touches a hand to the railing to keep himself from weaving as he takes the last steps to the post that is attracting the car passengers’ eyes.

  Expecting to see the suspect clinging overhead like a cat that has exceeded its range, Dulac, keeping a hand yet on the railing for balance, takes the last steps to the other side and turns his neck to look up. There he is, eight to ten feet overhead. His face, however, is turned into his arm in the way that he is gripping the post and is not in view. Only the hair on the back of his head is visible.

  Did he think he would walk by? Dulac wonders. Did he think if he climbed up there and buried his face under his arm, he would walk by, would walk down into Maine and leave him alone?

  Well, he has him, he thinks. He has him. His neck aching already from looking up, keeping his hand on the railing, Dulac looks out over the countryside, over the tops of trees going upstream, and the tops of houses beneath the trees, and the round tops of oil tanks in the distance. He has him, he thinks, although glancing down to the water, not even directly down but at an angle, glimpsing the faint turning of a whitecap and an outboard the size of his thumb moving away, he experiences a sweep through him of vertigo, a faint awareness that vertigo in itself offers the taste of death.

  He looks up again at the form clinging there, and turns his head back down. Inhaling and exhaling, he is trying to settle his disoriented bearings. Don’t look straight down, he tells himself. At the same time, looking up is not dissimilar to looking down; doing either he seems to lose balance.

  Looking up once more, holding the railing with both hands, he calls out, “Come down. It’s over.”

  Nothing happens; the body clings in the same way; the face does not appear. Beside them, a dozen feet away, cars blast by.

  Squinting his eyes to look up again, however painful the ache in his neck, Dulac calls out, “Goddamit, come down here. It’s all over! Now!”

  Against the pain tightening into his neck, he watches, keeps watching. The suspect’s face, its eyes, appear then, looking over the top of the arm. There seems to be terror in the eyes; through the air, Dulac believes he detects that the suspect has lost control, has soiled his pants.

  The eyes look down. More of the face appears, a face rippled in the wind. “I want to die,” the face cries down to him.

  Dulac has to turn his neck down again, against the accumulating pain. Looking back up, where the eyes keep staring down, he calls up, “Did you do it?” Guilt seems to Dulac in this moment to be the key question to be ascertained, as if to settle things.

  “Did you do it?” he calls again.

  “It was an accident,” the face calls down to him.

  Dulac only looks up at the suspect, in spite of the pain in his neck. The answer is amazingly disappointing to him, although he doesn’t know why. He keeps looking at the eyes, at the amount of face visible up there, to see if he can see another answer.

  “What kind of accident?” he calls back.

  There is no reply.

  Dulac stares back. Then he can stand the neck pain no more and looks out over the countryside, to relieve his neck, perhaps to think. Looking up again, he calls out, “That’s a lie.”

  There is no response; the face just looks down at him.

  “You’re a liar!” Dulac shouts up at him. “You’re a liar!”

  The face only looks down at him now, seems to simply stare at him in unanswered question.

  Dulac keeps looking up at him, as the pain points into his neck, then he turns his head down again. Looking back up in a moment, be calls, “Come on down.”

  The suspect starts down. The holes in the hollow steel posts are three to four feet apart, and stepping, moving from one and reaching to another means he has to extend the full length of his body. In his fear, though, he doesn’t quite want to release his hand- or his footholds, and he tries in a way to both cling to the post and to inch or shimmy down, and as he does this, above him, an image comes up in Dulac’s mind of seeing him fall to his death.

  Dulac doesn’t seem to actually think in these moments, as the suspect is trying to make his way down. Dulac’s mind seems to be chilled in the grip of the image which has come to him and seems not to reach or to move elsewhere. Yet he will know always that other thoughts and images did pass through his mind, not of the boy or of the suspect there with his apple-colored cheeks, in his terror, but of himself, of his life, of his years growing up in Canada, an image of his father, his time in the U.S. Navy, his years on the police force.

  Still holding the railing with one hand, he frees his other hand and extends it overhead to the suspect, where he is clinging to the last hole in the column before coming within reach. Dulac keeps h
is hand extended. He doesn’t know what he is going to do.

  Shifting one hand from the post, the suspect reaches with it to grip—both hands are sticky—Dulac’s extended hand. Dulac grips the suspect’s hand within his own.

  Steadying himself, the suspect removes a foot from its perch then, to reach it downward, and as it touches the railing, settles its toe there, on a breath, he removes his other hand to reach it down to Dulac’s offered hand, like a child climbing out of a tree.

  Dulac may not know that he is going to do anything. Perhaps he doesn’t do anything. Before the suspect’s second hand arrives to take hold, however, his hand is losing its grip on the sticky hand he has been grasping, and he looks to see the open-eyed expression on the suspect’s face as there is nothing holding him but his feet and he knows, they both know, that he is going to fall, that only his toes on the railing and his other toes raised to the edge of one of the holes are holding him, and Dulac is reaching to him as he is sitting backwards, as there is an expression in his eyes—flapping his arms as one does attempting to maintain balance, flapping and lurching to grip air again as Dulac is leaning to reach to him, and cannot reach him, as he folds at the waist in a last attempt to reach his toes, to reach his toe perch, and drops away, on a gasp, into the space behind him.

  Dulac doesn’t look out or down to see him fall, not yet at least. He is returning his free hand to the railing, to brace himself from toppling sideways, as he hears the merest cry of disappearance, the slightest whimper.

  Looking into the wind at last, he sees nothing. There is a distance to the water, the air, the vertigo within him. He sees something then. A small white splash occurs, more to one side than he would have guessed, and he looks up once more, looks upstream against an elevator-dropping sensation rushing through him in this moment, through his brain, down through his life, as he holds tightly, as he braces himself in the ceaseless wind.