It turned out that I missed the fireworks, but when I got back to the office after working the suicides I found the stack of Wagger reports on my desk. There was a note from the lieutenant: Need to close this one out.
I was scheduled to be off for the next two days, but had nothing planned. I stayed late, well past eleven, fiddling with paperwork until the office was deserted. When everyone was gone, I dictated the report on Todd Williams’s suicide, wondering as I did so if the Black Cats, Roman candles, and cherry bombs exploding all over Pasadena would be audible on the tape. I was labeling the cassettes when the phone rang.
I could hear when I picked up that someone was on the line, but there was no response when I answered.
“Detective Cates,” I said again. Still no answer. I listened for a moment longer, and was about to hang up when Jim’s voice came over the line.
“What are you up to?”
“Paperwork,” I said.
“No really,” he said, “what’s happening?”
“Two suicides and a mess of indecent exposures. Thrilling stuff.”
“You should come down.”
“You making any cases?”
“A few. Nothing major yet. It’s beautiful down here. You’d like it.”
“You’re inviting me?”
“I miss you.”
“I’m off tomorrow,” I said. “See you then.”
We hung up and I finished labeling the cassettes and left them on the secretary’s desk. And then I did something I had never before even considered. I went to Coy’s office and pulled a handful of pot out of the brown paper bag I’d confiscated from Williams’s closet. On my way home, I stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought a packet of rolling papers.
The next day, I caught The Wagger, but not through skill or hard work. I had planned to be on the road to Beaumont by nine, but the dispatcher called just after seven to say that Patrol had a peeping tom in custody, and that he fit the description given by the schoolgirls. She connected me to book-in and I asked Coy to get a good picture of the guy before they released him on bond.
“I’ll have it for you this afternoon,” he said.
I called Jim, trying to keep disappointment from my voice, and told him I couldn’t make it until the following week. He sounded as though I’d woken him.
By four o’clock, I had positive I.D. from four different victims. I had selected seven photos of men who resembled The Wagger from the big box of shots that Coy kept in his office. Each witness pointed immediately, with absolute certainty, to the peeping tom, who turned out to be a peeping Albert Ashbey, computer consultant.
I did the required paperwork, went to the city magistrate and got the warrant. I went to pick up Mr. Ashbey in an unmarked car, but brought along a harness bull in case there was trouble.
There wasn’t. His wife stood on the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room of their home, weeping quietly while the patrolman handcuffed her bear-sized husband. I read Miranda to him and we ducked out of there before Mrs. Ashbey could comprehend completely what was going on and get vehement. At one point I almost started to believe her. She touched one slender finger to her husband’s cheek and looked at him with tears rolling unashamedly down her face and I began to wonder if, after all, the schoolgirls might be mistaken. It could happen. It happened all the time. My reliable eyewitnesses might have been feeling pressure to identify, might have talked themselves into certainty.
When patrol finished booking Ashbey, for the second time in a single day, they brought him to my office. He sat quietly in front of my desk, in tennis shorts and a sport shirt.
I thumbed the stack of offense reports and offered him coffee. I wondered what Jim was doing.
“No thank you,” he said.
“Mr. Ashbey,” I said, “we’d like to get this cleared up.”
“I didn’t do it,” he said. He ran a hand up his face, chin to eyebrows, and then pushed his mud-brown hair back off his forehead.
“I’ve got positive I.D. from four people already,” I said. “It’s only a matter of bringing the others in to look at the pictures and then I’ll have more.”
He started to cry, a thin puddle of tears appearing at his eye rims, but he pressed his thumbs across them and then blinked several times quickly before folding his hands in his lap.
“Look,” I said, “I know you didn’t mean harm to anyone. You never hurt anyone. But we’ve got a situation here and we’ve got to get it taken care of.”
He leaned forward across the desk and stared at me. Brown eyes. Pocked face. Just like the victims reported. There was something about trying to get him to cop out that made me feel scummy. Always, after soliciting confessions, I felt in need of a long hot shower. It made me itch all over, this interrogation business.
He put his hands on top of the stack of reports, as though the papers were sacred, and looked at me. He looked at me for a long moment and then whispered, “Do you know God’s name?”
I did know, having more than once opened the front door of my parents’ calm, suburban Houston home to find a dark-suited Jehovah’s Witness standing on the front porch. But I’d have said yes whether I knew or not, in the hope it would help him to confess.
“I do,” I said.
“Then we can pray together.”
“Mr Ashbey,” I said, “I’m here to help you.” He would believe me; the moment was right. Like almost everyone, he was ready to unburden himself. He merely wanted to do it in a way that wouldn’t paint him as Satan.
He clasped his hands over the reports and closed his thick-lidded eyes. After a moment, he opened them and said, “If you’ll pray with me we can find the answers.”
I didn’t know if that meant he would cop, and I wasn’t sure exactly how we wound up with Mr. Ashbey sitting in my chair and me kneeling next to him, my left hand clasped between his sweaty palms while I listened to him pray and wondered if he had been standing in an alley a few hours earlier, holding his dick. Midway through the prayer I heard a noise in the hallway just outside the office door, and when I edged my eyes open I saw W.I. with his Houston Oilers coffee cup, rolling his head in circles and smirking.
When Mr. Ashby finished praying, I got up off my knees and brought him a cup of water.
“Let’s see if we can get rid of this paperwork,” I said.
“I’m ready,” he said, but even with all his calm and bulk he looked like a lost two-year-old.
By the time we finished, around midnight, I had a signed confession to twenty-five of the cases. That was my fault. If I had done the job right, he would have taken every last one, whether he’d done them or not. I had practiced carefully the fine art of interrogation and had come up short.
* * *
I walked him over to the holding cells where he would spend the night unless a judge could be found who would come out at this late hour to set his bond. After I turned him over to the jailer I went back to my office and taped the clearance report. I kept losing track of what I was saying and had to backtrack the recorder several times to straighten things out. I couldn’t help thinking that in spite of Mr. Ashbey’s religious fervor, I had no sense that he was in any way malicious. He had secured a pretty good chunk of the dream: a family, a nice house, some children, a decent job. But I had the strong feeling that all in the world Mr. Ashbey truly wanted was for someone, somewhere, to pay him just a little bit of attention. Maybe say a prayer with him.
* * *
Sergeant Quill had taped a sign on the front of his desk: cows may come and cows may go, but the bull in this place stays on forever. W.I. referred to it as agri-humor.
“He took twenty-five of them,” I said.
Quill kicked his putty-colored sea turtle boots onto the desktop and leaned back, his belly listing to the left as he shifted his massive bottom in the chair.
“What about the other three?”
“He didn’t do them.”
“Damn,” he said. “And you couldn’t convince him to take three more lousy cas
es? Looking at twenty-five, three more won’t make no difference at all.”
“Sergeant,” I said, “he is a religious man.”
“Yeah, old W.I. told me about you in there on your knees last night.” He let out something that was half snort and half laugh. “Damn, I wish I could’ve seen that.”
It was all over the station in a matter of hours. I didn’t mind. It helped me, in a way, to start trying to forget the waxen bodies and the blood smell.
It was that suicide note I couldn’t forget. It was with me whenever I saw one of the city’s spotless sanitation trucks mumbling down some manicured alley.
Sometimes, during those summer afternoons when the heat would bubble up the thin strips of tar that lay between the concrete sections of the streets, I could picture Mr. Ashbey standing in the scorching afternoon sun at the end of a paved smooth driveway, sweating next to a section of six-foot cedar. Standing there in his tennis shorts, with his fly open and the horse out of the barn, his flaccid penis in the palm of one hand. There under the brilliant yellow sunshine in those kitchen-clean alleys, ducking the garbage trucks. Waiting for schoolgirls and whispering God’s name.
4
I sat next to Jim, on a beaten green couch in a south Beaumont apartment, a dumpy one-bedroom with a kitchen full of dirty dishes and a living room stuffed with laundry-strewn furniture. Across from us sat Willy Red, dealer in stolen merchandise and drugs.
“Don’t give me no bullshit,” Willy said. “Man, you said you want brown, here it is. I want to relax, you know, like, I don’t know you. I want to relax.”
He was huge and coffee-skinned, with pale red hair shaved close along his scalp. As he spoke, he pulled a nickel-plated .38 from a stack of newspapers on the floor next to his Stratolounger. He held the gun loosely, clicking his thumbnail across the ridges on the hammer.
“Now you be showing me you ain’t the man,” he said, shaking his hand back and forth, shaking the gun first at Jim, then at me. I was scared, but psyched. I was with Jim; I was Jim’s partner, and we had a real street scum, ready to make a sale.
I wasn’t yet sure even what I was doing there.
I had driven to Beaumont for the first time the same morning I delivered the Wagger confession to Sergeant Quill. Jim and I spent that afternoon in Tyrrell Park, wandering from bridle trails to the edge of the golf course, watching citizens at play. That evening, we’d gone to his apartment, his crib, empty but for a twin bed punched into one corner of the bedroom and a Mr. Coffee on the kitchen counter.
He’d waited until I was tossing clothes into my overnight bag before saying, “Come back next week,” and it had gone like that for most of the summer.
I would finish my last shift of the week at eleven, grab a thermos of coffee and put the top down on the 442, plug Robin Trower or the Doobie Brothers into the tape deck and move, flying through the wide circles of gray-white luminescence that dotted the freeway during the first part of the trip, where there were still streetlights. Later, the sky took over, the deep-ocean blue-black Texas night sky, sliced by the cones of my headlights. And Jim would be in Beaumont, waiting.
Two days later, at the last possible minute, I would get back in the car and head for Pasadena, the bull in this place stays on forever, to slog through another five days’ worth of trash.
When Jim finally asked, on an August afternoon that was so hot and sticky even the trees seemed to sweat, I didn’t give myself time to blink. I had told myself I wouldn’t, that I would not let myself cross over again, that I had no need. And until that afternoon, I had believed it. But I drove straight back to Pasadena, told Quill I’d see him in the next life, shoved my furniture into a U-Haul and headed back toward Beaumont.
I didn’t think. It was what I wanted, this unwieldy something that was between Jim and me, pulling like rampant gravity, this thing that I fought against and struggled with and tried so hard to crush but couldn’t. I wanted it to bury me. I wanted him whispering my name at midnight. I didn’t care where he was living or what he was doing; I wanted to roll my cheek into the warm place on his pillow when he left the bed in the morning time. I didn’t stop to think.
Jim reached slowly toward his ankle. Willy Red tightened his grip on the pistol.
“Easy dude, just my works,” Jim said, and pulled a syringe from his sock. He looked straight at Willy Red, who was smiling at us, showing long yellow teeth.
Jim took out his pocket knife and scooped a small amount of powder from the packet on the table, delicately tapping it into the spoon Willy Red had provided. He carefully drew ten cc of water into the syringe from a half-empty glass on the table and squirted it into the spoon, and then struck a match. While he was cooking the dope, I removed my belt and draped it over his thigh.
“Yeah,” Willy Red said, smacking his lips once loudly and sucking his teeth repeatedly.
Jim put the needle in smoothly, expertly, and left the syringe resting on his arm while he loosened the belt from his biceps. He drew back the plunger and watched as his own blood mingled with the fluid in the syringe.
“Oh yeah,” Willy Red said. “Sweet heaven, here we come.”
Jim pushed the plunger slightly, slowly, then pulled it back out, them pushed again, repeating this until he had gradually put all the heroin into his arm.
“Oh shit yeah,” Willy Red moaned, edging forward in his chair. “Jack it off, man, shit. Shit yeah.”
Jim pulled the needle from his arm and sat back on the couch, his eyelids fluttering. I watched. I remembered the lesson: a junkie is when it gets real.
“Damn,” Jim whispered. “Good shit, Willy Red. Good fucking stuff.”
“Mmmhmmm. You get the best from Red. Only the best.”
Jim leaned back on the couch.
“So,” Willie Red said, “what about you, sister, you want a taste? Huh?”
“No man,” Jim mumbled, head nodding gently, eyes half closed. “She don’t fix. The lady don’t fix.”
“Oh, man,” Willy Red moaned, “she be missing the good thing in life. Shit.” He sat staring at me through narrowed eyes. “I think she fix,” he said. “I think she fix or she don’t walk out of here.”
“Hey man, you wanted me to get down, I got down,” Jim mumbled. “Don’t be hassling a lady, she don’t fix.”
“Man, I ain’t talking hassle. I be talking bullets in about half a minute if she don’t wanna get down. Like I said, man, I don’t be knowing you.”
Jim struggled to stand up, gave up, fell back into the couch.
I leaned forward and looked at Willy Red’s eyes.
“You think Durrell sent the heat in on you, man? He told us everything was cool, he told us you said come on by, everything was all right.”
“Durrell cool as the other side of my pillow, honey, but you ain’t showed shit. Durrell say he know some folks want to get down, want some good brown. Now what you come here for, you don’t wanna get down? You tell me that.”
I picked up the syringe. The water I drew into it turned milky red, residue from Jim’s shot. I squirted the liquid onto the wall to his right. It made a scribbly pinkish line: bloodwater on dirty yellow plasterboard.
“Then fuck Durrell,” I said, and copied what I’d seen Jim do to prepare the shot. I was shaking, trying to control my hands and not let Willy Red see just how scared I really was, and I wanted to do it, that’s the truth of the matter, I wanted to. I wanted to know what it felt like out there on the edge and I wanted Jim to be able to say that I was standup, that I handled it. He opened his eyes when I took the belt from his lap. I didn’t know how I was going to get that needle through my skin and into my vein, and I didn’t know whether or not it would kill me. I knew it could, but I knew it only in the way a kid knows: not me, never me.
“Here man, wait man, wait, let me do you,” Jim said. He took the syringe from me and leaned in close over my arm. He eased the needle in so gently I didn’t feel it, pulled the belt loose, and slowly pushed down the plunger, straight in this time,
slowly, evenly, no back-and-forth.
I sat motionless, waiting, trying to feel it inside me, flowing, and then my body was melting and my eyes were closing. If things were happening around me, I was not a part of any of it. I was only a tiny shimmering existence, a glowing, softball-sized globe of being, located somewhere inside this body that was so warm and delicious and so far far away. Pieces of talk floated around me. This was nice. This was very very nice.
“Yeah,” Willy Red falsetto-drawled. “Yeah. The bitch caught a rush. Dreamland. Yeah. I taste it myself, man, sitting right here watching. Just watching. Yeah.”
I was silent on the couch. I watched, from far away, Willie Red fixing a shot. Everything was soft, wonderfully soft. He had the needle in his arm, playing with the plunger, in and out, slowly, a little less out and a little more in each time.
“Jack it off,” he whispered, absorbed, intent.
I pulled myself forward, looked slowly around the room, wondered at the distant discomfort swelling in my stomach. Everything was so far away. I watched my hand reaching toward an aloe vera plant next to the couch, watched my hand pull the plant out of its pot and hold it, root ball dangling, dirt on the floor. I heard myself vomit, effortlessly, into the green plastic pot.
“Shit’s sure enough good, ain’t it?” Willy Red said, still smiling, running one finger gently over the puncture wound just below the bend of his elbow. He turned to Jim. “You pretty stout. You the first white boy I seen didn’t puke after doing this stuff.”
Jim opened one eye and smiled at Willie Red.
“I’ll be wanting more of this,” he said.
Willy Red bent forward toward Jim, chest almost on his knees, face thrust upward.
“Mañana,” he said. “See me at three.”
Back in my car, Jim leaned close to the steering wheel and stared hard at the solid white stripe along the outer lane of Interstate 10.
“You all right?”
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