When I got home I studied French for a few hours. It was almost nine when the sun was gone, and then it was ten and time once more to buckle myself into uniform and head to the station.
The shift was dead, the radio quiet. The moonlight reflecting off the pale cement streets and beige lawns turned everything gray-white, the color of caliche rock. I drove down alleys with my headlights out, searching for burglars and conjugating French verbs.
Midway down one alley, I passed an unfenced back yard strewn with sleeping bags. A group of teenage girls sat wearing nightgowns at a picnic table on the patio, their hands fluttering about their faces as they talked and giggled in the April night. One of them saw my squad and pointed, and the others turned to stare. I waved and rolled by, letting the car idle slowly down the alley.
I was sleepy, and felt decades away from slumber parties and teenage romance. I wanted to be home in bed. I thought it might be nice to smoke a joint. Just one. Just this once. Hit the streets and score just for the fun of it. My belt was cutting into my back and my face was getting that 3 a.m. numb feeling that meant wake up or start hitting curbs.
I requested a 10-10 and drove to my apartment. I was thinking about a can of ravioli and a twenty-minute nap, but when I walked into my room there was Jim, sitting on the bed, leaning against the wall, a half-empty bottle of vodka resting against his thigh. I noticed a screwdriver shining on the carpet next to the bedroom window.
“Good evening, Officer,” he slurred. “That uniform looks damn good on you. Wanna frisk me? I feel like being frisked.” He let out a sad breath and his head fell forward. He was a mess: his hair frizzed and dank, one shirttail hanging out, his gun stuffed down the front of his jeans. I pulled it out and put it on the nightstand and eased him away from the wall until he was lying on his side. He opened his eyes suddenly and reached up to touch my badge.
“You haven’t heard,” he whispered loudly.
“I don’t hear much from your direction these days,” I said.
“No,” he moaned quietly. “I wanted to see you. I wanted to talk to you. Do you know?”
“What I know is that you seem to come strolling in whenever you want. And then you disappear. I mean, when did we last talk? At the Smith trial? You were concerned about Sergeant Quill, I recall. How’re things with Quill?”
“He didn’t prove shit. Nothing to prove.” Jim struggled to sit up. “But I resigned today. Quit. Had enough of this bullshit department.”
I didn’t know what to say. I unbuckled my gun belt and put it on top of the dresser.
“It must be really easy for you, huh? Everything just easy. A matter of taking a hike.”
“Hey,” he said sharply, “don’t tell me about easy.”
“Then what should I tell you about? What do you want to hear?”
“That you’re with me. That you understand why I’m going. I have to. I know a few things, girl. Maybe my daddy wasn’t always around, but I respected him. And one thing he did teach me was about taking care of my name.”
He offered me the bottle and I sat down and took a swallow, enjoying the burn.
“Yeah,” he drawled drunkenly. “My old man. Worked his ass off throwing chain on the rigs, until one day he missed his timing.” Jim dragged a hand across his mouth. “Lost it. Chain broke, flew loose like a bat out of hell and just flat killed his best buddy.”
“What does that have to do with you quitting?”
“Big Spring’s a small town, people started speculating, saying he was drunk and that’s why it happened. He couldn’t live with it. So he split.”
I passed the bottle back to him and he took a long swallow.
“Said he was going someplace where his name wasn’t muddied.”
“You’re telling me you’re leaving because some lard-ass sergeant is on your case? You expect me to believe this?”
“I’m getting the hell out of Pasadena,” he said.
“Letting Quill chase you off.”
“Listen. Rob tells me they’re hiring in Beaumont. He spoke to the chief over there, a guy named Nettle. Looking for somebody to put under. Long-term investigation. Wants to interview me.”
“So shoot straight, Jim. You’re going because it’s a chance to work undercover. Don’t come at me with this muddied-name garbage.”
“It’s ninety miles east. You could be there in an hour and a half.”
I didn’t answer.
When my thirty minutes were gone, I picked up my radio and checked back on duty while sitting on the bed with Jim’s head in my lap. He didn’t say he loved me, or would miss me, or anything. Maybe he thought I didn’t need to hear it. Maybe he thought I knew. I stroked his hair and rubbed his back until he began to snore softly, and then I walked back out to my car to drive the deserted streets and rattle shopping center doors until dawn.
3
In a darkened classroom in Austin, I sat watching colorful slides as they flashed onto a large screen.
A round yellow tablet, speckled golden, an autumn kind of yellow against a warm orange background.
“Oxycodone,” the lecturer drawled from the back of the room. “Brand name Percodan. Used as a painkiller. On the streets, a downer. No illicit manufacture that we know of; most dealers get it by walking scripts, but there’s probably cartons of the things being sold out the back door at the factory.”
On the screen, large round, white tablets spilled out of a brown pharmaceutical bottle onto a field of blue.
“Methaqualone. A sleeper. Very popular, goes for as much as twelve bucks a tablet on the street. Might be called Ludes, or Quays. Supposed to knock you on your ass.” Muffled laughter filled the room.
A mound of shiny pink tablets scattered on a white table, briefly, then a close-up of a lone bright pill, Day-glo pink against a yellow background.
I shifted in my chair and saw a line of male faces glowing in the pink light, staring at the screen from the row of desks behind me.
“Phenmetrazine hydrochloride,” the lecturer said. “Preludin. This one can bring fifteen, sometimes twenty on the streets. Supposed to be an aphrodisiac. Used intravenously after a very elaborate process to extract the ingredients into liquid. Only connoisseur junkies know how.”
Two hours of this stuff. Alton had been right. With one investigation under my belt and a scant ten months in patrol, I was headed for detective. And this time they were actually giving me some in-service training before I took on my new job.
A pile of yellow powder, small wax-paper packets, a syringe, red plastic cap off, needle shining against a green background.
“Diamorphine hydrochloride. Heroin. Sold by weight. We’ll be devoting an entire class session to this one later on in the week.”
Slides and lectures. I knew these drugs, had bought some of them. But that first investigation had been, except for the cocaine buys on Hayden, mostly pot cases, embarrassments. I’d made a couple of acid buys, and some Valium and diet pills. The one heroin buy I’d managed didn’t involve using the stuff. I’d sat in a kitchen until the connection showed with the dope and then I paid the city’s money and ran. I’d been scared of it.
White powder on a triple beam scale. Behind it, plastic baggies full, powder spilling out of one torn baggie onto a smooth black surface. Stark. Clean. This I knew.
“Benzoylmethyl ecognine, a white crystalline alkaloid used by such luminaries as Pope Leo XIII, Massenet, Gounod, Herman Goering, and Sigmund Freud.”
Someone behind me whispered, “What’s a luminary?” A voice answered, “Fuck if I know.”
“Cocaine. Fast becoming the drug of choice. Some folks mix it with heroin and shoot the blend. It’s called speedballing. A regular chemical roller coaster.”
The lights came on.
The captain said, “Let’s take a break, get some coffee. We’ll start again in fifteen minutes.”
We stood blinking and squinting from the sudden fluorescent brightness, then filed slowly out toward the vending machines in the cafeteri
a.
“I wouldn’t mind trying some of that Preludin shit,” someone said, laughing nervously.
* * *
In the late afternoon, after a lecture on the illicit manufacture of methamphetamine (Mix phenyl-2-propanone, hydroxylamine, methanol, hydrogen, sodium acetate, palladium black, potassium hydroxide, ether, sulfuric acid, lithium aluminum hydride, and formaldehyde, shake well, hope it doesn’t explode, and come out with a pound or two of crank, crystal meth, yellow dog: one tenth of a gram will wire you up for a good 24, and you can sell it for two grand an ounce when the market’s up) I sat in the dayroom at the north end of the dorm.
It was a semi-military setup, the Department of Public Safety Academy, where the State of Texas trained its Highway Patrol recruits and conducted special seminars for city police officers and sheriffs’ deputies from throughout the country. Visiting officers were assigned two to a room, each room furnished with a pair of army bunks and a small writing table. Because I was the only woman in the class, I had a room of my own.
In the dayroom, an oblong lounge with a ceiling-mounted color television and four or five couches scattered about, I sat below a sepia-tone picture of Lone Wolf Gonzaulles, who made a glorious portrait in his battered brown Stetson, wearing ammunition criss-crossed on his chest. On a brass plaque, bolted to the bottom of the wormwood frame, were the words one riot, one ranger.
The man who sat next to me in class, a blue-jeaned sheriff’s deputy from Midland, walked in and saw me staring at the portrait.
“Good old Lone Wolf,” he drawled. “Those were the days, now, weren’t they?”
“When men were men,” I said. “Shoot first and ask questions later.”
He shook his head and chuckled. “A few of us are going over to the Chase for a beer or two. Wanna come?”
“No thanks, “ I said. “Have fun.”
I listened as their voices faded down the corridor. Then I went to my room and wrote a letter to Jim, telling him of my promotion and how I hoped soon to be working narcotics again. I told him how I missed him, that I wanted him to come back. And when I had told him everything, I sat staring at the letter for a long time. He wouldn’t want to hear it. He was in Beaumont, on the streets, doing what he loved to do. I ripped the letter into the smallest pieces possible and tossed the whole mess into the wastebasket.
I grabbed my keys and drove to Memorial Stadium at U.T. The track was crowded with joggers, most of them wearing some combination of orange and white, trotting easily in the June evening. I took off my tennis shoes and walked slowly around lane eight. The springy, nubbed rubber surface was still in perfect condition, as it had been at the state meet near the end of my senior year in high school. I’d never been on a rubber track before, and it had been like running on a giant pencil eraser. If the rules hadn’t forbidden it, I’d have run my event barefoot. I used to imagine, when I was doing the distances in training, that I was a Native American, a woman warrior clad in animal skins and running without effort across the plains of Texas, carrying a message to the chief of a distant tribe, a warning that would give him time to prepare for the attack of the white man.
* * *
They were killing themselves that summer in Pasadena, the working men, the ones who earned livings by laying bricks, unloading ships, pouring pavement that would become highway number something to somewhere. They were swallowing pills, shooting themselves, dangling from rough-hewn nooses in their garages. I was learning that suicide, like the common cold, is highly contagious. Somebody gets a bright idea and suddenly everybody’s doing it. Suicides always seem to come in bunches.
One electrician even rigged up a contraption that zapped him into a state of heavenly bliss via 220 volts. There were nine of them in the space of six and a half weeks, and all but one had been white males, ages forty to fifty-six, all but one of them lived in the north part of town. Around the office we started calling it Lemmingsville.
The incident reports listed each and every one as a suicide. I was not so sure, although I had followed up some of the cases myself. I didn’t think anyone was murdered, but I wasn’t convinced that they were all victims of intentional self-slaughter. My third day in CID, I had worked what appeared to be a suicide, but the detective who was training me had explained that the victim was one of that special breed of autoerotic: folks who choose to enhance their sexual pleasure by shutting off their oxygen supply while jerking off. In that case, the slip knot had failed. But because this guy still had his trousers on, I had to assume I was looking at a straight suicide, not a sexual accident.
The Fourth of July was the final big bang for two of our good citizens. That was the day the electrician strapped a couple of copper panels to his bare skin, just about kidney level, connected the wires to a plug, sat down on his living room floor and pushed the plug into a 220 volt wall socket. This was no sloppy job. His electrical work would have borne the UL stamp of approval.
With victim number two there was no question of intent. He stood in front of his refrigerator and bit down on the barrel of a .357, spattering a large portion of his parietal lobe onto the kitchen wall.
I smelled the blood as soon as I walked in the front door. All of the lights were on, and someone in the back part of the house was whistling “Good-night Irene.” The strong scent of blood does something to your body. It is nothing you can control, it just happens. And no matter how hard you try to convince yourself to stay calm, the physical reactions come. I walked toward the whistling, trying to prepare myself for what I would see, and even though I knew there was no danger I could feel the hairs on my scalp rising, I could hear my own pulse above the whistling noise, I swear I could feel the air pressing against my skin and I couldn’t swallow fast enough to keep up with my own salivary glands. The smell of blood doesn’t burn the nose, it invades your entire body, takes it to a separate level of mortal awareness.
Coy Mason, the Crime Scene man, was doing the whistling. He was standing on the kitchen counter, leaning on the top of the refrigerator with a pair of tweezers in his hand, plucking a single black hair from the acoustical tile of the kitchen ceiling.
“Amazing,” he said, and scratched his balding head. “It is just amazing what a .357 can do.”
The body was slumped against the refrigerator in a puddle of blood that almost covered the white linoleum kitchen floor. Most of the back of the guy’s head was gone. He was wearing jungle fatigue pants and a green T-shirt.
“How’d you get here so fast,” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” Coy said, “heard it on the radio.”
I was certain that Coy spent every waking moment clutching his radio, praying for deaths to investigate. He was never happier than when he was in a room with a dead body.
The ambulance crew arrived a few minutes later and loaded the victim onto a spotless white stretcher. When they had gone, I walked through the house. There was an empty bottle of Seconal on the nightstand, prescribed to Todd Williams. Next to that was a picture of the body in the kitchen, presumably Todd, taken at some moment in the past when he was posing with three other guys in fatigues in front of a thatch-roofed hut. On the floor of the closet I found a grocery sack half full of dirt brown marijuana. Other than that, everything looked as it should. His toothbrush and razor were on the counter in the bathroom, a bottle of shampoo sat open on the edge of the bathtub. There were wrinkled clothes folded on a chair in the corner of the bedroom, some ironing maybe. A recent Playboy was tossed on the floor next to the bed, opened to Miss June. It was a lived-in room. I walked back to the kitchen.
“There’s a note,” Coy said. “Next to that package of Mr. Chips on the counter there. The cookies are stale.”
I picked up the note.
Sorry about the mess, but you cops are nothing but glorified garbage collectors anyway.
Todd Williams, if he was in fact victim number two, was a keen observer. A real poet. I hadn’t quite been able to tap into it until that moment, hadn’t understood what it was about w
hat I did for a living that left me feeling like a highway trash-picker, stumbling around bar ditches stabbing at gum wrappers with a nail-on-a-stick while happy motorists whizzed by emptying their litter bags onto the road. I found tracking burglars and rapists fascinating, but Todd was exactly right. I was a garbage collector, scraping waste off the streets and dumping it into a system that prospered on trash.
I was part of it, and suddenly it all seemed very small.
Apart from the suicides, which involved little or no investigation, the hottest case going lately was The West Side Weenie Wagger, a white male, mid-thirties, who got his kicks displaying his penis to sixth-grade girls on their way home from summer vacation Bible school. This guy was waiting around at just the right times and in just the right places to catch the kiddies as they skipped home, Bibles in hand. He never said anything, at least nothing the young witnesses could remember, and the truth is it wouldn’t have mattered much if they’d been able to quote him. The detective working the case didn’t care if he ever caught The Wagger. “Investigator” W.I. Whilaby, as he preferred to be called, was the man who sat at his desk with an i’d rather be farming bumper sticker stuck on the wall behind him while he listened to C&W and shuffled papers from one pile to another. There were twenty-eight cases of indecent exposure fitting the M.O. of The Wagger, and W.I. kept them in a neat stack on the left side of his desk. He said it was harmless. No one got hurt, and the schoolgirls seemed able to laugh it off. It was their parents who wanted something done, and a nice Saturday afternoon lynching would have suited them just fine.
I wasn’t on the case. Sergeant Quill was using his authority to keep the bane of the office, his only female detective, tracing stolen hubcaps and writing suicide reports. But I knew that sooner or later the lieutenant would step in and tell W.I. to get off his duff and do something. He might even call him by his given name, Welcome Israel, the mention of which in W.I.’s presence was good for a least a minor scuffle.
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