Penance

by David Housewright

  “Orange juice? Root beer?”

  “Juice would be nice.”

  Ogilvy had finished his carrot, so Cynthia rose to follow me into the kitchen. Ogilvy butted her ankle with his head.

  “Huh?”

  “He wants you to keep petting him,” I told her. “Just rub his nose. He likes that.” Cynthia obliged and Ogilvy started grinding his teeth. She jumped back. “It’s okay. That means he’s happy.”

  “Obviously a male,” Cynthia allowed.

  I opened a carton of juice and poured two glasses; remarkably, my headache had disappeared. When I bent to hand Cynthia one of the glasses, she pulled me down and kissed me. It was a soft kiss, but it sucked the air out of my lungs.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Why not?”

  I sat in a chair and considered my reply.

  “Have you been lonely, since your wife died?” she asked me, like we were friends. She was still petting Ogilvy.

  “A little, for a while. Now … I like living alone. Come and go as you please, no one to answer to. How about you?”

  “I live alone, too.”

  “Great, isn’t it?”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said.

  I drank my juice, drank it like it was Gatorade and I had just finished a marathon. Then, to change the subject, I asked her if she wanted a tour of my house.

  We started on the ground floor. I showed her the fireplace, the beamed ceilings, the hardwood floors, the arched doorway leading to the dining room, the two corner china cabinets, the French doors leading to a three-season porch, the completely modern kitchen, the wood-paneled family room where I kept Ogilvy’s kennel, all the while regretting how little of the house I actually used.

  “This is amazing,” Cynthia said.

  “The house?”

  “No, how neat it is. I thought men were sloppy.”

  “I like to clean when I’m bored.”

  “You must be bored a lot.”

  “Ha, ha, ha.”

  I took her upstairs and showed her my bedroom. We did not linger there. I showed her my library. I have about three thousand titles, everything from Richard Adams to Virginia Woolf.

  “You do read,” Cynthia announced, surprised. “Why didn’t you want me to know you read?”

  I had to shrug at that.

  “Have you read all these books?” she asked, waving at them with both hands.

  “Of course not. Why would anyone want a library filled only with books they’ve already read?”

  The tour ended at the guest room, where I stored all of Laura’s antique dolls. Cynthia admired them silently, wanting to touch them, to fondle them, but holding back. One doll in particular held her attention: the queen of Laura’s collection, a Simon-Halbig worth eight thousand dollars that Laura had discovered at an estate sale and bought for three hundred and fifty—an acquisition that still astounds the members of her doll club.

  Laura had loved collecting, loved investigating antiques shops armed with her reference catalogues, magnifying glass and flashlight, loved haggling with the owners. She was a dandy negotiator, always played by the rules; the proprietors of the antiques stores in the Minneapolis warehouse district and along Grand Avenue in St. Paul seemed to genuinely enjoy doing business with her. About a half dozen of them sent cards after she was killed and only one was tasteless enough to suggest liquidating her collection. If I ever decide to do that, he’s the last person I am going to call.

  “Tell me about her, your wife,” Cynthia said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Too painful?”

  “No, I just don’t have the words.”

  Cynthia shook her head sadly. “I’ve never loved anyone that much.”

  “It’s either that or a poor vocabulary,” I joked. Cynthia seemed shocked by my callousness. “I don’t want to talk about Laura,” I added. “I don’t want to get all gloomy and depressed. I’ve had enough of that.”

  “When she died?”

  “When she was killed,” I corrected her.

  “Is that why you quit the police? Because she was killed?”

  “Something like that.” I didn’t want to tell that story, either; how I fell apart after Laura and Jennifer were taken from me. People would talk to me and I couldn’t make out what they were saying; my brain translated their words into gibberish. I went to a grocery store and in the middle of the condiment aisle I lost it; all those brand names, the different colored packages, they overwhelmed me—I couldn’t even remember my own name much less what I wanted to buy. I couldn’t cope so I crawled into a bottle, which only added to my problems. It took three, four months before the shock wore off and by then I wasn’t the same person. I had changed. My values had changed. I was a helluva cop; the Ranking Officers’ Association had once named me Officer of the Year. Before Laura and Jennifer were killed, I loved what I was doing. Afterward I couldn’t tell you what I was doing it for.

  Yet I worked at it harder than ever. I went in early, came home late, never took days off. And when I wasn’t working, I was hitting the bars with my fellow officers, chasing CBs with water until I was numb. I told myself it was the stress. I was drinking because that day I’d busted a twelve-year-old for beating an elderly woman to death for the change in her purse. But it wasn’t stress. I was drinking because when I wasn’t working, I had nothing else to do.

  Then George Meade blew his brains out. I had broken in with Meade. He was a twenty-year man when I rode with him and all he did was complain about the job. When he hit thirty years the department threw him out; gave him a gold watch and one helluva party. I was never so drunk in my life. Six months later he swallowed his service revolver because the job was all he’d had, too.

  The idea that I would end up like Meade terrified me. So, I drank even more heavily. Finally I was stopped one night by a Roseville cop who didn’t like the way I was driving Highway 280, using two lanes. I was wearing my drinking jacket—my police windbreaker—and we cops, we stick together, so he didn’t bother with a breath analyzer even though we both knew I was way over the limit. Instead, he followed me home and poured me into bed. I had become a drunk, just like the sonuvabitch who killed Laura and Jenny. The next day I resigned. I vowed to quit drinking and to find something I could care about besides my job. I beat the booze. But the job … I guess I had been a cop too long.

  “Why did you become a private investigator?” Cynthia asked.

  “It’s something to care about.”

  “I can relate to that.”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes,” she told me. “I never knew …” she hesitated in mid-sentence, regarding me from across the room, then continued.

  “I never knew my father, and my mother dumped me on my grandparents and took off when I was six. When I was twelve my grandparents died. I spent the next four years being shuttled from one foster home to another until I ran away and started living on my own and dancing …”

  “At places like Le Chateau?” I interrupted.

  “And doing other things,” she added without elaboration. “I had no self-esteem, no self-worth; I hated myself. So I popped a fistful of pills. That didn’t work, so I tried again by swallowing furniture polish. That didn’t kill me, either; it only sent me to the hospital. I told them I was suicidal, I told them I needed help. But I had no medical insurance, so instead of treating me, they put me in a ward with these people who had profound emotional and mental problems, some of them untreatable. That was an education, I’m here to tell you. I learned my troubles were nothing. After I was discharged from the hospital I promised I’d never feel sorry for myself again and mostly I haven’t. I managed to earn a high school general equivalence diploma, worked my way through the U, finished tenth in my class at law school and here I am.”

  “Here you are, ‘lifting your lamp beside the golden door,’” I quoted. “‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your te
eming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.’”

  “It’s something to care about,” she said, not offended at all.

  I led her down the staircase and into the living room where Ogilvy was waiting for us. We stood about two feet apart and appraised each other for what seemed like a long time. Finally, Cynthia said, “I should leave.”

  “Should you?”

  “I don’t know. Should I?”

  I touched her cheek. Her eyes were wide and moist. My hand trembled just so. I leaned toward her … and the sound of a gunshot followed by splintering glass filled the room. I pulled Cynthia to the floor and rolled to the light switch. Damn. Every light in the house was on. “Stay down!” I warned her and crawled to the front door on hands and knees. I instinctively reached for the gun on my hip that was not there—if this kept up I was going to start carrying it again.

  The large oak door stood ajar but the screen door was shut. I hit it hard with my shoulder, happy I hadn’t thought to put the storms up yet, and dove off the stoop onto the wet grass, rolling until I was in the shadow of the giant willow. I waited. No more shots. No noise at all. I have good night vision and it wasn’t long before my eyes adjusted to the lack of illumination. Fear pumped adrenaline through me, masking the achiness in my head and limbs; my mind reached a rare kind of clarity—I was cured, praise the Lord. I sprinted to the lilac bushes. I crashed through the hedge and rolled onto the boulevard. No sign of our nocturnal assailant. I circled the house. Still nothing. Eventually I made my way back to the willow. I squatted under it, daring something to move. Nothing did. My mind covered a dozen scenarios as I waited. Freddie, Sherman, C. C., Marion, Louise, Sheehan, even Heather Schrotenboer: Everything fit and nothing fit. As I squatted in the darkness, the throbbing returned to my head and then sought out previously unaffected parts of my body—the base of my neck, the small of my back, the inside of my knees. The pain rekindled a recent memory of a hospital room, the gagging odor of antiseptic, the harsh whisper of Anne Scalasi warning me not to die if I knew what was good for me.

  I went back inside. Cynthia was sitting on the floor, her back to the wall, Ogilvy in her lap. She was trembling as she gently stroked the rabbit’s fur. I put my arms around her, held her, told her it was all right, told her that whoever fired the shot was long gone. She didn’t seem to need much comfort, but I held her anyway.

  “Do you know who it was? Did they shoot to kill or to frighten us? Will they try again?” she asked. Decent questions all. Too bad I couldn’t give her decent answers. And then she surprised me. She smiled. She smiled and nodded toward the small hole head-high in the stucco wall.

  “This is some kind of technique you’ve developed, Taylor. Scare a girl to death and then take her to bed.”

  It had been a long time for both of us and it was awkward, like we were kids experimenting in the back seat of a Dodge. The zipper of her skirt stuck, I pulled her hair, we kept getting tangled in the sheets; it wasn’t at all like the movies, like Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. I preferred it that way, however. Unrehearsed. I think she liked it, too. But I did not ask, “Was it good for you?” I didn’t want to be one of those people.

  Cynthia fell asleep holding my hand, her leg casually draped over mine. When she rolled away something made her reach out to touch me, to make sure, even in deep sleep, that I was still there.

  I waited until she was snoring, a soft purr like a kitten’s, before I rolled silently out of bed, grabbed a robe and tiptoed out of the room. I made my way downstairs and turned on a small lamp in the living room. I found a penknife in the junk drawer in the kitchen and used it to carefully pry the bullet out of the wall, taking my time, making sure I didn’t damage it. The bullet was big with plenty of heft. Sure looked like a .9mm to me.

  TWENTY

  “HEY.”

  “What?” I answered the voice that was shaking me out of deep slumber.

  “I have to go. Hey.”

  “Hey, yourself,” I mumbled. The sun was thinking about rising and gray light illuminated the room. It nearly matched the gray of the sweatshirt Cynthia was wearing—my sweatshirt—with COLLEGE OF ST. THOMAS printed across the chest in purple letters. I had to admit, it looked a helluva lot better on her than it ever did on me.

  “I have to go. Do you need a ride to your car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will you hurry?”

  “Yeah. Ten minutes. What’s the rush?”

  “I need to go home and change,” Cynthia said.

  “Why don’t you wear what you had on yesterday?”

  “People will talk.”

  “What will they say?”

  “They’ll say I have a fella.”

  “Do you have a fella?”

  “I don’t know. Do I?”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Cynthia glanced at her watch. “Will it take long? I have to go to my office and then I have to get over to Federal Bankruptcy Court.”

  Despite her brusque manner, I had a sense that Cynthia was searching for some kind of assurance. So was I.

  “I was happy you were here last night,” I told her. “I’m happy you’re here now. I’ll be unhappy when you leave. But I’ll understand if you don’t come back.”

  “Do you want me to come back?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  She thought about it and said, “I don’t go to bed with men. I mean, I have, you know … I told you something about my … misspent youth. But I never cared before, really cared, not just pretended to care to make it seem all right. It was always somebody, never someone.”

  “Until now?”

  She thought about it again. “Until now,” she said and then she leaned over and kissed me. I took her in my arms and pulled her down onto the bed. I held her and kissed her and held her some more.

  “Call your office. Tell them you’ll be late.”

  “I can’t,” she said, her voice heavy with regret.

  “Cindy, Cindy, Cindy …” I repeated.

  “I’ll meet you for lunch if you promise me something.”

  “Anything.”

  “Don’t ever call me Cindy.”

  Detective Martin McGaney was drinking coffee from a blue and gold mug with the inscription THOU SHALT NOT KILL, THE LORD SAITH. AND WE WORK FOR HIM. Everyone who works Homicide in St. Paul gets an identical mug. Mine is tucked away on the top shelf of the cabinet above my kitchen sink.

  “I was wondering when we would hear from you,” McGaney told me as I stood in front of his desk. He looked tired. So did Anne Scalasi, who’d just happened to discover a crucial piece of paper McGaney needed when she saw me enter the squad room. I wasn’t surprised by their fatigue. The first few days of a murder investigation are critical; you work it into the ground. And these guys had three murders.

  “Ask the citizen what he wants,” Anne told McGaney.

  “What do you want, Citizen?”

  “Nothing much, just dropped by to watch my tax dollars at work.”

  “Tell the citizen to go away,” Anne said.

  “Go away, Citizen.”

  “After all the trouble I went to find the perfect gift?” I set the spent bullet on the ink blotter in front of McGaney. “Simple, understated. I was going to wrap it, but …”

  “What is it?” Anne asked. This time she was addressing me.

  “I’ll bet you fifty bucks that’s a nine-millimeter slug,” I told her.

  Anne rolled the bullet in her fingers, then felt the weight in the palm of her hand. She flipped it to McGaney.

  “I’ll bet you another fifty bucks it matches the slugs taken from Thoreau, Brown and Amy Lamb.”

  “Where did you get it?” Anne asked.

  “I dug it out of my living room wall. It was deposited there late last night by someone who took a sudden dislike to me.”

  “As opposed to those of us who have learned to dislike you over time,” Anne said. “I don’t suppose you can identify the shooter.”

&
nbsp; “Person or persons unknown.”

  “That’s informative.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve found Joseph Sherman yet,” I asked.

  “We expect to make an arrest at any time,” McGaney assured me.

  “Why would Sherman want to shoot you?” Anne asked.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I have time.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t.”

  “Officer McGaney, inform the citizen that he is obstructing justice.”

  “Officer McGaney, inform the lieutenant that I am not the only one.”

  “Tell him that when this is over I’m going to kick his ass.”

  “Was that kick or kiss?” I asked.

  Anne Scalasi was angry. “Don’t push me too far, Taylor,” she hissed.

  “I’ll tell you what I know when I know it,” I hissed back, then thought better of it and, determined to keep it light, said, “There’s no pleasing some people. Give a woman a bullet and she doesn’t even say thank you.”

  “It’s a thankless job,” Anne told me.

  “Isn’t this sweet,” McGaney remarked. “I’m touched, I really am. Two old friends getting together, it brings a tear to my eye. Let’s all hug each other.”

  “Shut up, Martin,” Anne said. And then she added one word. “Mankamyer.” She was behind her desk before McGaney could get to his feet.

  “You two remind me of an old married couple,” McGaney told me as I followed him out of the squad room.

  “Sure,” I agreed. “An old married couple on the verge of a divorce.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around,” McGaney said.

  “Are Anne and her husband really getting a divorce?” I asked; I’d been wanting to ask someone.

  “Looks that way,” McGaney said, confirming my fears.

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah,” McGaney said. “You know, my wife and I are celebrating our second anniversary next week. Considering what this business does to marriages … You were married.”

  “I was.”

  “Did you have troubles?”

  “No.”