The Devil She Knows

by Bill Loehfelm

  “You’re a good soldier,” Waters said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  This was a good person, Maureen thought, a good man. They existed; she knew they did. She wanted to believe. She thought of Waters’s lost sons, how tiny their hands must’ve been in his. A good soldier. The words, coming from a man she hardly knew, moved her more than they should have. She could be a soldier, a warrior who stood her own ground. She took a deep breath, puffing out her chest. She wanted to believe, she really did. But there was one thing she needed to know.

  “You all right?” Waters asked. “You having heartburn or something?”

  “Why did you lie to John?” Maureen asked. “About the Black Garter.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I know you’re a detective,” Maureen said, “but I’ve been watching men lie—to each other, to women, to themselves, for a long time. Back at Molly’s, you acted like you knew nothing about the place. Why?”

  Waters shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets. “It’s not important.”

  “Then why lie?”

  “It’s not important. To you or your case.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Maureen said.

  “Suddenly you don’t trust me?”

  “And whose fault is that?” Maureen said. “You’ve been good to me so far, don’t blow it now.” Waters squinted at something in the sky over Maureen’s head and behind her. She turned to look, but couldn’t find what he was watching. She tucked loose strands of hair behind her ears, letting Waters see her face. “Listen, if we’ve hit a point you don’t wanna go past, I understand. But maybe I need to know that.”

  Waters sniffed hard, then let loose a long sigh—the sound of a man confident he was making a mistake. Maureen had heard it before. Hands jammed deep in his coat pockets, Waters spoke while focused on that invisible object over her shoulder. “Back when I was working on the vice squad with Sebastian, after a big night—a big arrest, say—the Garter was where we went afterward to wind down. The place was outside Brooklyn and virtually twenty-four hours back then, especially for cops.”

  Big deal, Maureen thought. News flash: cowboy cops hit the late-night titty bars, film at eleven. Not enough, she thought, for Waters to lie about in a room full of people. Something else was up. “The owner must’ve loved you guys.”

  “He did, actually,” Waters said. “He loved the fact that ten cops might walk through the door at any moment, as long as it was us. Helped keep sort of a lid on other things. Kept other, maybe less tolerant cops from getting too interested in the place. We looked the other way on a few things. The owner did, too.”

  Maureen sucked in her cheeks, her eyes narrowing. She felt a lightness opening inside her, a slow-growing surprise, as if she were filling with helium. She closed her coat over her chest. “Detective, are you trying to tell me you were a crooked cop?”

  Waters rubbed his fingers into his chin. His eyes remained evasive. “At least you had the decency to use the past tense.”

  “Like you mentioned so kindly before,” Maureen said, “I’m not naïve, so let’s not act like it. I’m not exactly walking on gilded splinters over here. I know that. I try not to judge. And I don’t tell other people’s secrets—most of the time. But I think I have a right to know how lamed up you are, really, when it comes to helping me.”

  Waters waited a long time to respond. Maureen thought for a moment he might get in the car and drive away, pull the car right out from under her and leave her standing there in a cloud of white exhaust in the cold parking lot. Might that be best?

  “Crooked is a powerful word,” Waters finally said, “when it comes to cops. Once you get it on you, it doesn’t come off. People put the barrel in their mouth over it. It’s a word to be careful with. I’m not proud of some of the things that we—that I—did back then. I don’t like thinking back on those times if I can help it. But crooked is not a word I’d use for what I did, for what I was.”

  Leaning against the car, Maureen raised one foot against the bumper, wedging her boot heel between the bumper’s edge and the trunk. She believed, if not in Waters’s innocence, then at least in his lack of complete crookedness.

  Which, at the end of the day, wasn’t much to believe in, was it?

  Looking away from Waters, Maureen watched a dishwasher bounce trash cans down the diner’s back stairs. He stopped to light a cigarette then dragged the cans toward the Dumpster, the dirty strings of his apron pulled taut against his lower back, the hard muscles in his arms bulging at the cuffs of his filthy white T-shirt. He puffed smoke over his head like a locomotive. Twin trickles of brown liquid leaked behind the cans, running over the asphalt like dirty rivers winding across the face of a map. She was torn. She didn’t see much point in ditching Waters, but she didn’t see many reasons to stick with him, other than that they’d gotten this far. Which was where, exactly? She realized her legs were aching. She was so fucking tired. Tired of being afraid, of thinking, of waiting. She was so sick of giving up and running away.

  “Sebastian’s gonna call you again,” Waters said, “and try to reel you in. We need to talk about what you’re going to do when that happens.”

  “I got no problem with that. We’ll set our own trap this time.”

  “No,” Waters said. “I’m not using you as bait. No way. As soon as you know it’s him, you hang up and call me with the number.”

  “Like he’d be dumb enough to use a number you could track.”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  “You gonna talk some sense into him?” Maureen asked. “Frighten him with your shiny new resources?”

  “Maureen.”

  “No, I’m sick of this shit. Now I can’t even answer my phone? This prick has ruined my life. He kills people. I wanna do something. And you? You keep stopping me. Why is that?”

  “How about staying alive?” Waters said. “Is that doing something enough for you?”

  “No. Duck-and-run is not enough. Surviving is not enough.”

  “I’m gonna get him,” Waters said. “I can get a couple other detectives on the case. I got friends, too. We work backward from Tanya’s death. I’ll guide things where they need to go. I’ll get him, I promise you.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “It’s gonna have to be.”

  Maureen set her feet. She squared her shoulders. She knew what was coming. Bigger and stronger, Waters would use that advantage to get what he wanted. He’d try to back her down. Try to make her give in, to make her calm down and be reasonable. She’d heard it before. Her boyfriends, her bosses, they always did it and she always caved in.

  Not this time. Not to Waters, not to Sebastian.

  “I’m gonna answer when he calls,” Maureen said. “And I’m gonna arrange a meeting, and then you better hope you get him first.”

  Waters sucked in a deep breath, nostrils flaring. Maureen could feel his temper rising. Too bad.

  “Don’t even try to tell me,” she said, “I’m not allowed.”

  Waters rose off the car trunk and walked a few steps away, struggling for control of his temper. Maureen watched him roll his head from side to side, stretching his neck, trying to stay calm, trying to hold, Maureen could tell, something back. He turned. “You don’t get it, do you? You cannot fuck with this guy.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Maureen said. “He’s a major player. He’s got juice. I fucking get it. And here I still am. Seriously, half the time you sound more like you’re protecting him than me.”

  “If Sebastian gets you before you get him, or before I get him, you know what’s gonna happen. We’ve both seen it. You wanna go back to the morgue, get a better look at what you’re gambling with? You wanna be carried around in little tins like the one that cracked you up in the elevator?” Waters strode back to her. Maureen thought he might run her over. He stopped when they were toe-to-toe, looming over her, this time bringing the full weight of his size to bea
r. “You know what your problem is, Maureen? You’re not as smart as you think you are. You think you know what you’re dealing with, but you don’t.”

  Maureen trembled, bile kicking up her throat. Fighting back, holding her ground, was harder than she thought. She turned her head and spat onto the pavement. She looked up at Waters. “So educate me.”

  Waters backed away, staring at Maureen for a long time, thinking. She could see the secrets pulsing behind his eyes. She wanted to back off. She couldn’t. “What don’t I know that’s so fucking important?”

  “You only know half the truth,” Waters said. “About everything.”

  “Then stop bullshitting me and tell me all of it,” Maureen said, “or leave me alone.” She’d gotten to Sebastian once, she thought, without any help, without guns and badges. “Or leave me alone permanent. I mean it.”

  “You think you know why Sebastian left the NYPD.”

  She could get to him again, hurt him much worse than a scratch on the cheek. “He got shot. Twice.”

  “But what you don’t know,” Waters said, “is that I shot him.”

  Maureen steadied herself against the car. The helium balloon inside her had popped. “What?” She blinked at Waters, maybe more shocked at this revelation than she’d been walking out of the office at the Narrows, and she was desperate to hide her surprise. She crossed and un-crossed her arms, settling her hands on her hips. She frowned in false skepticism. “But that doesn’t make any sense. You guys were partners.”

  “I worked in his squad,” Waters said. “Not as partners. He was my superior.”

  Maureen caught herself laughing. “That makes it better?” These things Waters was saying made no sense to her. But what possible reason could he have for lying, for telling her he’d shot Sebastian if he hadn’t? Was this some bizarre effort to impress her, to make up for losing Tanya? She concentrated on leveling out her breath, trying to get her head together. “It said in the papers that some pimp shot him. Every article I found had that same story.”

  “Because that was the story he and I cooked up while we were waiting for the ambulance.” Waters smoothed his tie with the flat of his hand. He tilted his head sharply to one side. Maureen heard the compressed vertebrae crack like dry sticks. She wasn’t happy that he had a reasonable explanation ready every time she argued with him. Waters let out a long sigh. “There was no one else around at the time to contradict us.”

  Why did that sound to her like a threat? Couldn’t be. She was spooked out by Waters’s temper, by the news of the shooting on the back of the trip to the morgue. Waters was looking out for her. That was the reason he was around. Maureen dropped her foot off the bumper. She moved away, arcing around him like a cat wise to the limit of a dog’s leash. “On the crooked scale,” she said, “where do you rank shooting another cop? And then conspiring with him and covering it up? Christ Almighty.”

  “See, there it is again. You think you know things.”

  “I know what you told me just now,” Maureen said. “That’s what I know. Don’t talk like I’m making things up.” She recalled Sebastian’s admonishments about Waters from outside Dennis’s house, from the phone outside the library. “This whole thing really is about Sebastian for you, isn’t it? I’m just the excuse, the random connection. He was right. Sick as he is, he was right about you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Waters said, his voice loud enough to turn a few heads yards away on the sidewalk. Red blotches colored his throat. “You think I need you to find him? He’s hardly been hiding out since his retirement. If I wanted him, I could’ve had him.” Waters, breathing slow and deep, leaned hard on his palms on the trunk of his car, his weight enough to dip the Crown Vic’s back end, his elbows locked as if something were inside the trunk and fighting to get out. But Waters’s face wasn’t that of a fighter’s or a kidnapper’s or a bully’s. He looked sad and defeated and for a moment, to Maureen, like a suspect waiting for a pat-down. A suspect with a knife in his pocket and a gram in his shoe who was wondering why it took so long for him to end up pawing the trunk of a cop car.

  “I shot Sebastian,” Waters said, his voice low enough that Maureen had to lean in to hear, “to save a girl’s life. It wasn’t about him or me. It was about her.”

  Maureen moved closer to him. Arms crossed, she leaned her hip on the quarter panel of the car, a foot or two beyond Waters’s reach. She straightened her back and dug her nails into the thick wool of her coat sleeves. She wasn’t running away this time. No scampering off to the bus stop or the bathroom like she’d done at the Narrows. “Who was she?”

  “You need to understand the circumstances,” Waters said, cringing at his own words. Maureen could tell what he was thinking from the embarrassment rippling across his face: Excuses, excuses. Could I sound any more like a two-bit criminal?

  “You may as well tell it,” Maureen said. “Maybe I’ll believe you. And maybe I won’t go blabbing what I’ve heard so far all over creation. I want to know who this girl was.”

  Waters frowned at his knuckles, like he was fascinated at their turning white under the pressure of his weight. “Like the other guys, I had informants. Kids, most of them. Junkies, prostitutes, low-level dealers.” He turned to Maureen, looking right into her face now, challenging her, she felt, with the intimated direction of his story. “They were younger than you by ten years, at least,” he said. “And older than you by a hundred.”

  “How sadly poetic,” Maureen said. She held his stare, the folds of her coat sleeves tight in her fists. She could feel her pulse throb in her fingers.

  “Anyways,” Waters said, watching his reflection in the dirty back window of his car, “one night one of these informants calls me, this skinny black-haired white kid, he’d blown a basketball scholarship on dope. He had this stupid nickname, some kind of clown, like Beppo or Bozo. He needs to see me, he says. It’s some kind of emergency.” He frowned again at the trunk of the car. “It was always an emergency with them, some fire they needed a ten or a twenty to put out. But I went. You never know. That’s the reason you have people on the streets in the first place, right? Stuff comes up at odd hours. It was legwork I didn’t have to do.”

  Who are you trying to convince? Maureen wanted to ask, but the question that came out was, “You remember him?” She caught herself racking her memory for this basketball player that she could never have known. “You can remember that one informant from twenty years ago? Down to his nickname?”

  Waters raised his huge shoulders. “You want me to forget about you? I’ve tried to remember them all, the snitches, the vics, especially. I feel like I’ve done a good job, but I know there are some people I’ve forgotten. Law of averages, right? I guess maybe I remember him because he was part of that night.” Waters spoke as if he was at the same time trying to concentrate on music playing far away. He raised one hand and wiped it across his chin. His fingers left streaks of dirt from the trunk on his face. He didn’t seem to notice or care. “I get to the alley and the kid is nowhere to be found. I’m aggravated over it, but what am I gonna do? It’s not like junkies are real reliable. It’s part of the job. But then I hear noises from down in the alley. Like a scuffle, maybe someone crying out. Fantastic, I figure, the kid has gone and gotten himself into trouble. Or even worse, he got found out and is getting his ass beat while I’m standing there. Whatever he’s into, I feel halfway responsible; I gotta get him out of it.” Under the influence of his memories, Maureen noticed, Waters looked like Tanya had that night at Cargo, sinking into the warm bath of her pills. She wondered if he’d ever told the story she was hearing now, truthful and intact, to anyone else. She wondered if he even remembered that she was there, listening.

  “So I pull my weapon,” Waters said, “and head into the alley. It’s pitch black so I’m stuck following the sounds. There’s this rhythm now, dull thuds, which I recognize, someone’s getting hit all right, but then there’s this weird ringing like little bells, like a toy tambourine.


  “I hit my flashlight. In one of the corners between the brick wall and the fence, I see a guy, a big guy in a long black coat, hunched over. My light is making shadows and so this guy, he looks huge and shapeless like Dracula in one of those old movies. I move closer. I see he’s wearing a ski mask, black gloves. I step to the side. That’s when I see her.”

  Waters stopped talking and licked his cracked lips, his eyes flitting to Maureen’s, then away again, landing on his reflection in the Crown Vic’s back window. He was hoping, she could tell, that she’d let him off the hook for the story’s end. She had no intention of doing so. Was it her that he hated talking to, Maureen wondered, or was it his own face in the window? Why didn’t he just turn his back on it? After a few more long moments, Waters started again. “Some skinny little girl maybe the size of you if she’s lucky is crumpled and squirming in front of him. He’s holding her up by the hair. Her knees are bloody and scraping the ground. She’s wearing nothing but these torn-up denim shorts and cowboy boots. All of this, it happens in seconds.”

  He paused, making one last effort, Maureen realized, to hold back the rest of the story, like he would somehow spare them both a measure of pain by leaving the ending suspended between them in the air. She’d given up on a happy ending to this story, had never really entertained any hope of one, but what hurt her at that moment was the impression she got that somehow Waters hadn’t lost hope for that girl in the alley, not until this very moment with the two of them standing there, until reaching the end of this story that she had forced him to tell. Where, Maureen wondered, after all those years on the streets, had his armor gone?