by Otto Penzler
“Is that a good thing?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Amy sat for a moment, contemplating the slowly turning tape in her recorder.
“Do you trust him?” she said.
“Absolutely.”
Again Amy thought for a while.
Finally she said, “I guess I don’t entirely understand.”
I shrugged.
“Best I can do,” I said.
“Susan?” Amy said.
“He admires people who can do things.” She smiled. “Hawk can do things.”
Amy nodded. It was moving on toward supper time. I looked around at the now crowded and lively courtyard. Even though we were right in the heart of Cambridge, there was a heartening absence of Birkenstocks.
“Okay,” Amy said. “Let’s talk about you and Susan again.”
“What is this?” I said. “Men and Women Who Dare?”
Amy smiled.
“I think maybe I can’t understand you without understanding you in her context,” Amy said.
“Probably,” I said.
“How did you meet?”
“I was working on a case, missing teenage boy, up in Smithfield. She was the school guidance counselor. I questioned her about the boy, and she was immediately taken with me.”
Susan rolled her eyes.
“What’s your version?” Amy asked Susan.
“He was working on a case, missing teenage boy, up in Smithfield,” Susan said. “I was the school guidance counselor. He questioned me about the boy and was immediately taken with me.”
“There seems a disparity here,” Amy said.
“Just say we were taken with each other,” Susan said.
“And you’ve been together ever since?”
“Except for when we weren’t,” I said.
“Can you talk about that?” Amy said.
“Nope.”
Amy looked at Susan. Susan shook her head.
“We aren’t who we were,” Susan said. “We’d be talking about people who no longer exist.”
I could see Amy thinking about how to go further with this. I could see her decide to give it up.
“You were married before,” she said to Susan.
“Yes.”
“And divorced.”
“Yes.”
“How do you feel about that?” Amy asked me.
“I don’t,” I said.
“Don’t feel anything about it?”
“Correct.”
“No jealousy, anything?” Amy said.
I shook my head.
“A famous shrink,” I said, “once remarked, ‘We aren’t who we were.’”
“You can put the past aside that easily?” Amy said.
I think she disapproved.
“Not easily,” I said.
Susan said, “It’s quite effortful.”
“But you do it?”
Susan and I said yes at the same time.
“Earlier,” Amy said to me, “you said something like I don’t refuse to care; I refuse to let it control me. Now you say that with effort you can put the past behind you. You, actually both of you, seem to place a premium on, what, will?”
“Yes,” I said.
“First you need to understand why you do things that aren’t in your best interest,” Susan said. “Then, armed with that understanding, you have to stop doing them.”
“And that would be a matter of will,” Amy said.
“Yes. Given a reasonable level of acumen,” Susan said, “most people can be brought to understand their behavior. The hard thing is getting them to change it.”
“But some people can change?”
“Yes.”
“And you changed?”
“Both of us,” Susan said.
“Obviously,” Amy said. “Susan, you’ve had psychotherapy.”
“Of course,” Susan said.
Amy looked at me.
“Have you ever had psychotherapy?” she asked.
I looked at Susan.
“Every day,” I said.
“Any formal therapy?”
“No.”
“What would be unacceptable behavior?” Amy said. “A, ah, deal-breaker, so to speak.”
“An ongoing intimate relationship with someone else,” I said.
“Susan?” Amy said.
“That,” Susan said.
“What about a brief and casual dalliance?” Amy said.
“What did you have in mind?” I said.
I think she blushed, though it may have been the angle of the late-afternoon sun. She studied her notebook for a moment, made a little mark in it, and put it down. Then she stopped the recorder, took out the tape, put in a new tape, and started it.
“How about hopes and dreams?” Amy said.
“I’m in favor of them,” I said.
Amy shook her head in a faint gesture of annoyance, as if she were shaking off a fly.
“Is there,” she said, “anything you wanted to accomplish that you haven’t?”
“No,” I said. “I am everything I wanted to be. I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do.”
“Nothing else left to do?” Amy said.
“Let no fate misunderstand me and snatch me away too soon,” I said.
“Another poem,” Amy said.
“Frost,” I said. “More or less. I would be pleased to live this life and do what I do and be with her forever. But I have no need to improve on it.”
“My god,” Amy said, “a happy man.”
“Love and work,” I said. “Love and work.”
“Freud,” Amy said. “Right?”
“I believe so,” I said. “Though he didn’t say it to me personally.”
Amy looked at her notebook again and made another small mark. While she was doing that I managed to snag the waitress for another beer. Susan declined a refill, and I don’t think Amy even noticed the opportunity. Probably just so much iced tea you can drink.
Amy looked up from her notebook.
“What would you do if you couldn’t do this?” Amy said, and smiled. “Whatever this might be exactly.”
“I would think about international superstar, or maybe retiring to stud,” I said. “But if those answers didn’t satisfy you, I guess I’d say I could be a carpenter. I like to make things. I know how to do it. I could be pretty much self-directed if I took the right job.”
“And if you took the wrong job?”
“I’d quit.”
“Like you did the police?”
“Yes.”
“Yet you have friends who are policemen.”
“They’re good at their work, and they probably don’t have an extreme pathology,” I said. “They can work in a context where I can’t.”
“A man needs to know his limitations,” Amy said.
“He does.”
The waitress brought me my beer, and I asked her for the check.
“Oh, no,” Amy said. “This is on me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Bring her the check.”
The waitress produced it on the spot and put it facedown on the table.
“I have a sense that the interview is winding down,” Amy said.
“Me too,” I said.
“Just indulge me on one more subject.”
“Sure.”
Amy took out a credit card and put it on top of the check. Then she turned back to me.
“Does anything frighten you?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“What?”
“Same things that frighten most people,” I said. “Death, loss, pain, failure.”
“And how do you overcome those fears?”
“Same way most people do.”
“Willpower?”
“I suppose.”
“But you voluntarily chose to do things that involve the danger of death, pain, failure, and loss,” Amy said.
“True.”
“What’s up with that?”
I
smiled.
“I figure those are part of the deal,” I said. “If I’m going to do what I do, I have to get around those fears.”
Amy waited. I didn’t have anything else to say. So I didn’t say anything. After an appropriate wait, Amy looked at Susan.
“One of the things you have to keep in mind is that he doesn’t expect to fail. And that diminishes the other dangers,” Susan said. “He knows intellectually he could be killed. But I think, deep down, he doesn’t think anyone can do it.”
Amy looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
“You’re that confident?” she said.
“So far, so good.”
“So,” Amy said. “Let’s say you are facing a man with a gun. Do you feel fear?”
“Yes.”
“What do you do about it?”
“Ignore it.”
“And you are able to?”
“Yes,” I said. “Otherwise I couldn’t do what I do.”
“How much does confidence enable you to do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I know I can shoot. I know I’m quick. And like anybody who used to fight, I’m pretty sure I can win one in the street.”
“And that’s what gives you confidence?”
“Some,” I said.
“I think,” Susan said, “that what gives him the most confidence is that he knows he can overcome his fear.”
“He has confidence in his confidence, sort of,” Amy said.
“He is convinced,” Susan said, “that he can do what he has to do.”
“And you believe that about him too?” Amy said.
Susan looked at me and smiled.
“So far, so good,” Susan said.
RIDLEY PEARSON
Born in Glen Cove, New York, and raised in Riverside, Connecticut, Ridley Pearson was educated at the University of Kansas and at Brown. He was the first American to receive the Raymond Chandler–Fulbright Fellowship at Oxford University in 1991.
He has written nine novels set in and around Seattle featuring police detective Lou Boldt and forensic psychologist Daphne Matthews, and three about Sun Valley sheriff Walt Fleming. He has also written several stand-alone thrillers, including Never Look Back (1985), Blood of the Albatross (1986), and The Seizing of Yankee Green Mall (1987). Under the pseudonym Wendell McCall, he wrote three novels about Chris Klick: Dead Aim (1988), Concerto in Dead Flat (1999), and Aim for the Heart (1990). As Joyce Reardon, PhD, he wrote The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2003).
With humorist Dave Barry, he has written two very successful children’s series, one about Peter Pan, including Peter and the Starcatchers and Peter and the Shadow Thieves, and the other set in Never Land, beginning with Escape from the Carnivale (2006).
Pearson also plays bass guitar and sings with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band made up of such successful authors as Amy Tan, Stephen King, and Dave Barry—a band that, according to Barry, “plays music as well as Metallica writes novels.”
Pearson divides his time between the Northern Rockies and Saint Louis.
LOU BOLDT
BY RIDLEY PEARSON
Boldt: First, for the record, I want to say emphatically that I’ve not committed any crime. I’ve agreed to talk without counsel. Anyone who knows any detective knows he would never speak without an attorney present, not to his own mother if she were accusing him of eating an extra piece of pie. But your accusation is a bit more serious than that, isn’t it? And for the record: my mother is dead. So’s my father. I have a sister, lives in central Washington. That’s what’s left of that part of my life. But anyway, I’m innocent of the charges.
Define your relationship with Captain Philip Shoswitz, as well as with Detective John LaMoia.
Boldt: Define it? Have you got a few hours?
We have all the time you need, Lieutenant.
Boldt: First, can I make some observations, Sergeant Feldman? You and Dr. Hainer. I’m guessing you’re what, Sergeant? Forty-two? Dr. Hainer’s thirty-five, thirty-six? I imagine you slogged your way through beer and coeds and managed a bachelor’s degree in pub crawling. Same as any red-blooded kid. Dr. Hainer didn’t fare so well. He never left the bottle behind.
Let’s keep this to the investigation, shall we?
Boldt: If you don’t mind, it’s important to the people reviewing this interview that they understand the mind-set of those doing the interview. Very important to me. I’m trained in detection, Sergeant, same as you. And it’s important that we know each other. Dr. Hainer looks like a man born for graduate school. Probably lived off the parents’ checkbook for as long as possible. Maybe a few years too many. See his clothes? He’s worn that jacket a long time. There are stitch marks where he removed an emblem—a college or fraternity emblem, I’m guessing. The bloodshot eyes tell me the good doctor had a very late night last night, or was into something more destructive. The jaundice in those eyes suggests coke or alcohol. The gut he’s wearing tells me it’s booze. Coke would have left him a rail. And if I’m right, this destructive tendency is the result of marital problems. Note the tan line suggesting a missing wedding band. That’s recent, so I’m pretty sure it explains the pain behind the jaundice. I’ve been there, you see.
She left you, am I right? Possibly in part because you’re cheap. You haven’t bought yourself a new pair of shoes in what—two years? Same with the shirt. We’ve already discussed the coat. So I’m sorry for whatever you’re going through, Dr. Hainer, but I’m wondering if you’re fully qualified to judge my state of mind when your own is in question.
[Dr. Hainer excuses himself and leaves the room]
Feldman: That was hardly necessary.
Boldt: Unless you’re sitting where I am. Dr. Hainer’s report is going to play significantly in the review of this interview. His state of mind is critical to that review. I question his ability to assess me fairly. That’s all. I mean no disrespect.
For the sake of the tape, Dr. Hainer has left the room at… 10:37 a.m. Subject remains.
Boldt: For the sake of the tape: he looked a little queasy.
He has a personal matter to attend to. He’ll be back shortly.
Boldt: He’s going to have a smoke and recompose himself. He smokes menthols. Did you smell it? Half a pack a day, I think. And he has a problem with athlete’s foot—uses that spray stuff. It’s my nose. [subject points to nose] Best old-factory around. [subject laughs]
Let’s start with your relationship with Captain Shoswitz.
Boldt: My relationship? You make it sound as if we shower together. If you want to understand my closeness to Captain Shoswitz, then you have to understand my attraction to the job. It started with my father. He was a drunk. Your friend Dr. Hainer, who just beat a hasty retreat, he may find this useful. I’m laboring under some kind of daddy complex, which explains so much about me. We need him. Bring him back.
Your sarcasm is noted, Lieutenant Boldt, though I’m not sure it helps your case any.
Boldt: My case? That’s rich. My father had some brushes with the law. By “the law” I mean my uncle Victor. They called him Lightning. Lightning Boldt—get it? He was a blue, like you and me. Victor, I’m talking about. Not my father. He was a drunk. Plain and simple. The life of a drunk is plain and simple. Simple, and difficult, and tragic—which pretty much sums up dear old Dad. And by “brushes” I mean knock-down-drag-outs, where the two of them went at it like a pair of Irishmen. This typically followed my father getting into trouble, and my uncle Vic getting him out. Dad showed his thanks by offering his fists. Dad liked to hit. [subject makes a sucking noise between his teeth] Dad liked to hit whatever, whoever, was handy at the time. Ah-ha! Dr. Hainer returns. A glass of water to justify his absence. Yes, have a seat—we were just discussing my effed-up childhood and my relationship with my dad. Although he couldn’t relate to anything, so it’s a misnomer. Yes, by all means take a note. Write that down. It could prove incredibly important to my innocence.
You were going to tell us
about you and Captain Shoswitz.
Boldt: It’s all connected. My uncle Vic started on the beat. Yesler Way and south into what used to be mostly the fish trade. Some rough characters.
No one’s questioning your uncle’s integrity.
Boldt: No, but you’re questioning my integrity. You’re accusing me of helping out the captain in a way that violates regs. Twenty-seven years, four months, and this is what it comes down to? You actually think I carried ten grand in cash and put it back into Property? Do you actually think LaMoia was involved as well? And you think I would do all this for Phil Shoswitz, which suggests he took that money out in the first place, which I don’t believe. The implication is that he did it because his son was into some bad real-estate deals. More incredible, you say you can prove all this. Has it occurred to any of you that this goes totally contrary to my career, to LaMoia’s, and to the lieutenant’s—the captain’s? Isn’t it far more likely I’ve been set up?
To what purpose?
Boldt: I have ideas but no proof. If you’d give me time to track some of this down… Instead you’ve got me in here with you two, and all we’re going to do is circle the drain.
You were going to tell us about your relationship with Captain Shoswitz.
Boldt: I was going to tell you that my uncle Vic moved on to form the first SWAT squad this department ever had. Worked with Jerry Fleming from the Bureau. Jerry had run the D. B. Cooper case. Remember that one: guy hijacks a plane and jumps from a jet with eighty grand? Jerry’s the real thing. His son, Walt, too. He’s the sheriff over in Sun Valley. And Uncle Vic and Jerry set up a response squad—special weapons and tactics. That’s when Vic got into the interesting work. Over the next few years, he and his squad saved sixteen lives. Hostages. Attempted suicides. You name it. And he might have left this department with his chin up and a chance at a private-sector job if some TV crew hadn’t scared a jumper off the I-5 bridge back in the ’80s and made it look like Vic had screwed the pooch. It wasn’t Vic that lost that guy—but the video made it look that way. And that was the end of Vic. That’s what you guys are. Do you see that? You’re the TV crew in my career. Twenty-seven years, and you’re going to make it look like I did this thing. And I did not.