by Leif Wright
“You could run down the street and shoot the mayor in the balls and still get re-elected,” Judge Alson had told him once. “And I kind of wish you would do it.”
They had laughed about it, had another few beers, and called it a night, but it was easy for the judge to be confident. He was a life appointee. Even weak opposition was enough for Humphrey to worry about, and he wasn’t the kind of guy to take unnecessary risks. Especially quicksand cases like this one.
He sighed and picked up his iPhone and called Chief Dreadfulwater at the police department. Dreadfulwater was a fellow Mason. He’d understand.
Maybe.
The two had shared a few laughs over Dreadfulwater’s Indian name and the fact that, as the top officer of the police force, people called him Chief, many of them without realizing the racial stereotype of the name until much later.
“Me got-em big police department run,” Dreadfulwater once joked after a few. “Heap big bad guys to catch.”
It didn’t help that he lived on Lotawata Road, which ran beside Lake Lotawata.
“Hm,” Humphrey had joked in his best movie-Indian voice as they drove over the lake with his fishing boat in tow a few years back and the sign had passed them on the right. “Lot a wata.”
Dreadfulwater had smiled and punched him in the arm.
Today, he’d probably feel like punching Humphrey in the face after he dropped this case on him.
“It’s good to hear from a traveling man,” Dreadfulwater said cheerfully as he answered the phone. “Where you heading?”
“To the east,” Humphrey said tiredly, responding to Dreadfulwater’s Masonic code—part of the ritual they could share in front of anyone, not just fellow Masons. “Always to the east.”
“How’s it been going?”
“Any day on this side of the dirt. Which brings me to why I’m calling. You got anyone begging for murder cases over there?”
“Aw, hell,” Dreadfulwater said, the joy dropping out of his voice. “You gonna lay that old teacher on me?”
“Well, technically it is in your jurisdiction.”
“Fuck my jurisdiction,” Dreadfulwater said. It was always tough to tell if he was actually angry or joke-angry. “And fuck you, too. Sideways. You really gonna bail on this one? I need a murder case like I need a gay goddamn dog. And I already have one of those.”
“You know I got an election, Fred. Hell, if you can’t get this thing solved before then, I’ll take it back. I just can’t have it bogging down my campaign.”
Dreadfulwater sighed. He did, in fact, have someone begging for cases. But he wasn’t sure she was ready to work a murder yet. She was greener than a cow’s tongue and half as tough. But Humphrey needed help, it sounded like, and part of his Masonic obligation was to help a brother in need.
“Are you asking me as a brother?” Dreadfulwater said, closing his eyes because he knew the answer already.
“I will if I have to. But I’d prefer to ask you as a friend.”
“Fine,” he said after a long pause. “But you fucking owe me. Bring the case files and evidence over and I’ll assign it to our newest detective. She’s a pain in my ass, and I bet she’ll be a pain in yours, too.”
“She’s a woman, right? They’re all pains in my ass. I really appreciate this, Fred. I really will owe you one.”
“I know.”
7
SHERIFF JOHN HUMPHREY LOVED NOTHING MORE THAN A GOOD JOKE, so today, while two men from the Council on Law Enforcement were sitting in his office waiting for the undersheriff to join them for lunch, Humphrey was entertaining them.
“Kid sees his grandpa, who he’s always known to be the only adult to give him straight answers about everything—I mean, he’s old; he couldn’t give a shit about what people think. So, the kid says, ‘Grandpa, what’s the difference between a pussy and a cunt?’ Grandpa doesn’t miss a beat. He grabs a Penthouse because he can’t figure out the Internet, and he flips it to the centerfold. He grabs a Sharpie and draws a circle around the area and tells the kid, ‘See inside that circle? Everything inside that circle is the pussy …’”
“‘And everything outside the circle is the cunt,’” Bain finished the joke from the doorway.
The law enforcement men laughed. Humphrey didn’t know if he should join in. He wasn’t used to his jokes being finished by someone else, especially an off-color joke being finished by a woman. Humphrey had never met Bain, so he was further taken aback.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
Bain smiled.
“I’m Detective Bain from the PD,” she said. “Chief tells me you have a case for me.”
“Oh, hi,” he said, face reddening. “Sorry about the joke.”
“I’ve heard worse,” she replied. “It’s no big deal.”
And it wasn’t. If she fell apart at every dirty joke she heard men telling each other, she would have washed out as a cop before she ever got started. Men were dumb, and they told dumb jokes to entertain each other. It was a fact of life, especially in the most classic boys’ club—police work.
“How about this one,” she said gamely. “Guy has been married for fifteen years and he says, ‘my wife looks just like she did the day I met her.’ His friend isn’t really interested in hearing the story, but he wants to be polite, so he asks where the guy met his wife. ‘Oh,’ the guy says, ‘we met at a Halloween party, where she was dressed as a disgusting old hag.’”
The law enforcement guys chuckled, Humphrey joining in after a second.
When the laughter died down, Humphrey cleared his throat.
“Why don’t you guys go to lunch without me? I’ll let the detective look at all the evidence from this case and I’ll catch up with you. Order me a baker with pork.”
Humphrey left his office to retrieve the case while Bain waited. Six minutes later, the sheriff walked back into his office carrying a box full of evidence and reports.
“Here’s the case,” he told Bain, setting the box down in front of her. “We sent DNA off to the lab; it should be back sometime this week. I’ll tell them to get it to you.”
“What’s the overview?”
“Little old lady goes to take a shit, then someone breaks in, beats her to death, and leaves. Old lady took a bite out of him first, which is where we got the DNA.”
Bain was trying her best to contain her excitement at getting the details of her first murder case. In her mind, whether she solved the case or not, this meant she was the real deal—a real detective. A homicide detective. It didn’t matter that the case was somebody else’s handoff. It was a murder case, and it was hers.
It was everything she could do to not dig through the papers and photos right here in the sheriff’s office.
“There isn’t much there,” Humphrey said, nodding his head toward the box. “We’re kind of resting all our hopes on the DNA giving us a suspect, because as far as we can tell, nobody saw anything.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Well, Chief Dreadfulwater says you’re smart—and a monumental pain in his oversize ass. Maybe you can dig deep enough to find something. You did hear about the case we had last year on the old lady’s attempted suicide, right?”
Bain thought back, but the case didn’t ring any bells. “No. I’m drawing a blank.”
“Well, her husband of like five hundred years had just died of prostate cancer and she was dying of something or other, so she decided to kill herself rather than linger and suffer. You know Dr. Cole over at the hospital?”
Bain nodded that she did. Cole was a prominent doctor who specialized in oncology, but still managed a healthy family practice.
“Well, the old lady went to him and told him she was going to kill herself and he wouldn’t be able to talk her out of it; she just wanted him to tell her the best way to do it. She didn’t want to try and just injure herself or turn herself into a vegetable. So after about half an hour, Dr. Cole gives in and says, ‘Okay, but if you tell anyone, I will deny I gave you thi
s advice. The most certain way to kill yourself is to shoot yourself in the heart.’
“You would have thought he had told her a sure fire way to get a million dollars. The old lady practically did a cartwheel. Then she asked him exactly where her heart was, because she didn’t want to miss. He told her the heart is about an inch below the left nipple.
“So she blew her kneecap off.”
Bain blinked.
A joke. The entire story was a joke. And she couldn’t help herself; laughter forced itself out of her mouth like a Mongol storming a castle gate.
Coming over here, she had been a bit worried, because she heard Humphrey could be difficult to work with, but finishing his joke for him apparently marked her as one of the guys and he had thrown out a pretty good joke. In five minutes, she was more accepted by the sheriff than she had been by all the cops at the police department in five years. Those who weren’t trying to get in her pants just ignored her.
She laughed. “You totally sucked me into that one,” she said, miming casting a fishing line and reeling a fish in.
Humphrey smiled. “I’m sorry to dump this case on you. It seems destined to become a cold case.”
“Are you kidding? This is the best case I’ve ever had. I’m looking forward to digging in.”
“Well, more power to you. If I can help, give me a shout. Call my cell directly, though, or they’ll never put you through to me.”
Humphrey wrote his cell number on the corner of an official-looking piece of paper and then ripped the corner off, handing it to her.
“Don’t give that to anyone. Especially not to anyone at the PD.”
“I’ll eat it after I program it into my phone,” she said, only half kidding.
“Good enough,” he said and shook her hand. “Hope you find whoever did this.”
8
CHRIS JACKSON LOVED AND HATED HIS APARTMENT, WHICH BOTH protected and comforted him while at the same time reminded him of his greatest shame and his isolation.
The apartment was terribly lonely and dark, stolen mementoes of a life and love lost scattered everywhere—a picture of Debbie and the kids here, a dusty plastic truck there, kindergarten drawings still pinned to the refrigerator by food-shaped magnets six years after they were drawn, the paper askew and warped, wrinkled, but still there.
Six years later, and Debbie and the kids still filled every millisecond of his solitary life, every crevice of his home, every tear cried on his pillow, every wall-punching fit of rage—well, at least until a broken knuckle taught him to find other ways to vent his anger. She was happy. She got what she wanted. She had moved on, with a younger, richer man who didn’t care whether they got married or not. A younger, richer man who was raising his kids, teaching Chris Junior how to play catch, watching Ariel’s dance recital. Meanwhile, Chris still had to send a check every month, yet his time with the kids never seemed to materialize. Oh, we’ve got a thing, she would say over the phone, doubtlessly smiling that dazzling smile on the other end. We’ll try again next month.
But next month became the month after that. And the one after that, too. She knew Chris would never do anything about it, just as he had never done anything about her spending while it was digging him into a hole he was still in the bottom of, trying to claw his way up and never seeming to make any progress. There was a funeral for the parent of a friend, so Debbie had needed a new dress and shoes to match. Last year’s car was so gauche; she needed this year’s model, and oh, could we also get GPS and satellite radio in this one? Nevermind that Chris, an accountant, explained to her in great detail how their expenditures would have to slow down or they couldn’t sustain their lifestyle. Debbie had known a variable Chris hadn’t put into that particular equation: as soon as the lifestyle became unsustainable, she’d move on to New Guy, with his trust fund and job at the family factory bossing around people who worked hard all their lives just to obey orders from a snot-faced dipshit who was their boss because Daddy owned the company. Worse, when New Guy took Debbie away from him, he had the audacity to call Chris into the office—a home improvement store paneling-encrusted cube on the outside wall of the second floor—and tell him that they were terminating his employment because the company thought there might be conflict between Chris and management over the breakup of his marriage.
Stole his wife, then in the next breath, New Guy took Chris’s job, where he had worked since college. Might as well kick me in the balls, too, Chris thought, but never said. Instead, he uttered a meek “Okay,” and calmly walked to his desk, collecting the detritus of twenty years of sitting in the same place—family pictures, service awards, a tiny fan, cup holder, a coffee cup with a cartoon guy wearing glasses and the caption “Accountants do it spread on the sheets”, which he thought at the time was terribly clever. And then, belongings in hand in an old printer paper box, he had calmly walked out the door, calmly placed the box into the back of his five-year-old Volvo—Debbie took the new Lexus with her to New Guy’s house—and calmly driven home to his then-new apartment, where he calmly cried himself to sleep on the couch while watching Deal or No Deal.
Chris now noticed his fists balled into tight, white hammers and he immediately began practicing what Dr. Phil had taught him three years ago on an episode entitled “My Husband’s Rages Have the Entire Family Scared … to Death!” Chris closed his eyes, counted backward to ten from one, breathing deeply, and protractedly between each number, thinking of the ocean—his favorite place in the world, its gentle waves washing over the sand, unearthing crabs and shells, bringing new creatures to land with every ebb and flow. New Guy—who by now was Six Years Guy—wasn’t worth it, he told himself to the gentle drone of the imaginary waves. He would not give New Guy the satisfaction of causing him a heart attack or a stroke. Except that the technique never quite actually worked. Like a pair of cheap earplugs, the counting drowned the pain down to a murky throb, dulled the anger down to demonic instead of full-on fallen angel Satanic. The feelings simmered there, just beneath the surface, all the time. In some ways, they had become his symbiotic parasite—he hated and couldn’t live without them.
The truth was, he knew, New Guy never gave Chris a second thought, and probably couldn’t even remember his name. But Chris remembered him, and one day, New Guy would …
Breathe.
Chris worked to calm himself down again.
Breathe.
He nursed the bruise on his left cheekbone absently with his right hand as he breathed and concentrated on the ocean in his mind. The bandage on his right hand was dirty and would need changing, but first he had to calm down. The fists he had just made had reopened the cut, and now there was a trickle of fresh blood. Nothing significant. In fact, the bandage was overkill. A Band-Aid probably would have been just fine. But you could never be too careful. But that would wait, too, for the ocean’s calming magic.
Initially, he thought he had sprained his left ankle, but it turned out to be just a painful twist. At first, he hadn’t even noticed, as adrenalin had coursed through his body. In fact, he had even forgotten to get the jewelry and the cash. Whether that oversight was caused by adrenalin or terror was hard to say, but whenever he thought about that night, he burst into titters of nervous laughter, and he forgot all about forgetting to grab the loot. The ankle, however, was its own story. When the pain set in, it was all consuming. For a while, he was sure he wouldn’t be able to stand when he got out of the car, much less push the clutch to drive. But the ocean had rescued him again, and after a few minutes of waves, the pain settled back to a nagging throb.
What would Debbie say if she could see him now? Would she look on in horror, or would some deeply buried fantasy in her be piqued as she saw him living life on the edge, being so dangerous? He thought it was probably the latter. Debbie always lived in her own private Hollywood, and something told him she would find herself titillated if she could see her ex-husband now, mild-mannered accountant by day, violent criminal at night.
He smiled.<
br />
“Don’t know what you’re missing, bitch,” he said to her picture, still on the end table beside the couch, still beautiful, still taunting him with those eyes, that neck. He rocked to get himself out of the easy chair that always threatened to swallow him. His round middle didn’t help, but that’s okay, he told himself—nobody ever suspects the pudgy guy. He laughed out loud as a Monty Python voice boomed through his head: “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
Walking gingerly on the twisted ankle, he made his way to the fridge, full of comfort food and things that were easy to prepare.
Garçon, I’ll have the baloney—excuse me, where are my manners? Bologna—sandwich with cheese on white with a side of wavy potato chips and your very best Pepsi. Spare no expense! Chop chop! My compliments to the chef, and all that.
Oh, yes, he thought bemusedly as he slathered mayonnaise on the bread, sucking in his belly so the mayo wouldn’t get on it. Debbie will rue the day she let this catch get away. Rue it! He laughed out loud at that one, too, then finished making his sandwich, grabbing the entire bag of chips for what would, he knew, turn into a gorge-fest in front of the TV. Tonight was Blacklist night, and nothing inspired grazing like watching James Spader turn his criminal cronies over to the cops while outsmarting everyone, including the FBI.
His computer chimed importantly, but it was way over in the corner, and he was already sitting down with his white trash gourmet meal, remote in hand. The computer could wait. The remote being beside his favorite chair, right where it should be, was one of the benefits of Debbie being gone. Therapy helped him realize that, few as they might be, there were upsides to her being gone. Being able to find things was one of them.
Having clothes in the dirty clothes hamper, instead of scattered all over the bathroom, was another. Having one bottle of shampoo and one bar of soap in the shower was yet another. And being able to open a box of cheese crackers and know they’d still be fresh a week later because the person who opened them also closed them—that was enough to make him smile again.