Cop Town (34 page)

“All those degrees and I get a fortune cookie.”

He stacked the cards together. “That policewoman you were with
will never see out of her eye again. She was very lucky.” He touched his ear. “As were you.”

Kate looked away.

“You’ve nothing to add? Not even a fortune cookie?”

“I didn’t want you to worry about me.”

“I’m only worried because you’re not telling the truth.”

Kate stared longingly at the bottle of scotch.

Her father stacked the card deck neatly in the center of the table. He took off his glasses. When Kate was little, he’d taught her how to play gin rummy. He beat her all the time until Kate figured out that she could see the reflection of his cards in his eyeglasses. Kate had never told him her trick. Obviously, Oma had never told him, either. She liked winning too much. For Jacob’s part, she imagined he liked letting them win.

Kate asked, “Should I tell you the truth, Daddy?”

“You should tell yourself the truth. I don’t matter so much now. You’re a grown woman. I can’t send you to your room.”

Kate seldom sought his advice, but she really wanted it now. “What would you have me do?”

He leaned his elbows on the table. He smiled at Kate. “You are more precious to me than rubies. Do you know that?”

She nodded. If there was one thing of which she was certain, it was her family’s love.

“There is no such thing as one city.” He sat back in his chair again. “You’ve seen that for yourself these last two days.”

Kate thought he was addressing her earlier question. “Are you saying people are like cities?”

“I’m saying that your life is very different from the lives that other people live—the girls you went to school with, your fellow officers, the people you help, the people you arrest. For each of them, Atlanta is a different thing. Yet they all take pride in ownership. They all feel that this city belongs to them, and that their idea of the city is what the city should be. And, further, they feel the need to defend it. To protect it.” His smile indicated he knew he was being obtuse, but that Kate should bear with him. “Your violent asshole, I assume he thinks Atlanta belongs
to the violent assholes. Your horrible woman—maybe she thinks it belongs to horrible women. They both feel very strongly, I’m sure. But which Atlanta is the real Atlanta? Is it ours? Is it the one Patrick knew? Does it belong to the blacks now? Did it ever belong to anybody?”

“Daddy, I’m sorry. I still don’t understand.”

“Even with my volunteer work at Grady, I will never see the Atlanta that you are seeing. I will never know the people you know. I will never see the places you will see.”

Kate finally got it. Her father was articulating the thoughts she had been having since she first walked into the station house. “I’m no longer in my insulated world.”

“Yes,” he answered, and she detected an unfamiliar sadness in his tone. “I will never understand humanity the way you will if you continue to work this job.”

“If?” Kate asked.

“You know my grandfather fought for the Confederacy?”

Kate nodded.

“And my father and I marched in a rally for Dr. King.”

She nodded again.

“I remember when we returned home after the rally. We had a drink. Such progress! We toasted each other. We patted ourselves on the backs. We did that all right here.” He meant this house, this mansion on a tree-lined street with its chauffeured cars and maids and gardeners. “Did we know what it was like for Dr. King to return to his home on the other side of town? Did we know what his life was like living in this city, in
his
Atlanta, which was
our
Atlanta, too?”

“You help people,” Kate said. She had always thought of her father as a man of the people. “You heal their minds.”

“I talk to wealthy men who are afraid of losing their money. I prescribe Valium to housewives who would be better served volunteering at their church.”

Kate didn’t like this picture he was painting. “You saved Mama and Oma. You brought them here.”

“No, Kaitlin. When I got to Amsterdam, the first time I saw with my
own eyes what the war was really about—” His voice had turned gruff. He cleared his throat. “Your mother saved me. I assure you, it was not the other way around.”

Kate clutched at straws. “You have your charity cases at Grady.”

“By the time I see a patient at Grady, he’s been cleaned up, he’s been medicated, he’s been strapped down.” Jacob smiled sadly. “What was his life like two, three hours before? I only have his patient chart to go by, sometimes the police report. I’ve never been to his home. I have no idea how he really lives. And I never before gave one thought to the police officer who brought him to the hospital. Who took away the razor before he cut his wrists. Who tackled him to the ground. Who kept him from harming himself and others.”

“I’ve hardly acted so valiantly, Daddy. I ran into a wall on my first day. I knocked myself out this afternoon.”

He winced, and though she gathered he knew the highlights, she appreciated that her father did not want the details. “My point is that you see these people in a way that I will never see them. Your experiences are no longer my experiences. I can’t guide you any longer because I don’t know where you’re going.”

Kate thought about the putrid smell of the projects. The pimp who licked his lips as he leered at her. The dry cleaner who let her use his bathroom. The two dead men lying in the upstairs bedroom of the Portuguese lady’s boardinghouse.

She told her father, “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Isn’t it?”

Kate couldn’t answer him, because she couldn’t make sense of it. The job was soul-killing and humiliating and terrifying but on some strange level, it was challenging and, most surprising of all, fun.

She settled on banalities. “I will always be your daughter.”

“I know that, sweetheart.” He gently cupped his hand to her face. “Your mother was worried that this job would turn you into somebody you’re not. I worried it would turn you into the person you really are.”

Kate wondered why his honesty didn’t wound more. “Is that such a bad thing?”

“I don’t know, Katie. People in these high-stress jobs tend to split in two. Part of you will stay the same girl that we know. Another part will break off into a woman we’ll never meet who sees these horrible things.”

Kate felt defensive. “Like Oma? Like Mother?”

“Clever girl. I’ll end my suppositions.” The moment was over. His voice took on a lighter tone. “It is not within a father’s purview to find fault with his daughter.”

“Freud?”

“Herschel.”

“That guy,” Kate teased. “I hear he’s fantastic.”

He smiled again. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Good night, Daddy.” Kate kissed her father’s head by way of goodbye.

She left through the front door. Her fingertips brushed the mezuzah. She unpinned her hair as she walked down the steps and across the driveway. She had parked in the turnaround down from the garage. Kate leaned her hand on her car and took off her left shoe, then her right. Next, she pulled down her pantyhose and threw everything into the car.

Instead of getting in, she walked down the driveway. Her feet howled with every step. There were blisters on her blisters. Her heels looked like they’d been put through a Waring blender.

Kate took a left at the end of the driveway. There were no cars on the road. No glowing tip of a cigarette. No phantom stranger’s eyes following her every move. She looked up at the moon, which offered barely a crescent of light. The path was so familiar that she needed no guide. The first twenty-five years of Kate’s life had been defined by this street. Her best friend had lived two doors down before she moved to New York. Her elementary school was six blocks over, her high school seven and a half. The Temple was four streets away. The mall was a ten-minute drive. This was where she learned to ride a bike. This was where the school bus dropped her. This was where she made out with Patrick in the car before she took him up to meet her family for the first time.

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—they were all within one square mile of the exact spot where she stood.

Her father’s Atlanta.

No longer Kate’s.

She passed Janice Saddler’s house. Both her parents were gone now. Car accident. Janice and her brother had sold the house to a young lawyer and his wife.

The Kleinmans’. The Baumgartens’. The Pruetts’.

Their children were grown, but the parents still lived in the grand old houses that had been passed down through the generations. Kate had played on their swing sets, swam in their pools, flirted with their sons, sneaked through their backyards.

She turned left again. The driveway wasn’t paved. Pea gravel stuck to the soles of her bare feet. She could barely feel anything now, which she supposed was the best way to describe the current state of her life. When the pain got to be too great, Kate simply blocked it out.

The front porch light was off at the main house. All the windows were dark. Kate traced her hand along a black Cadillac Fleetwood. She walked past the kitchen, the sunken den, the swimming pool, the tennis court.

The guesthouse was originally meant for the help, but those times were gone thanks to civil rights and vacuums and washing machines and clothes dryers and all the other modern conveniences that made it possible to run a large estate without a large staff. There was a small sports car parked in front of the one-story house. The top was down. Kate stroked her hand along the soft leather of the driver’s seat.

The porch light was on. There was a faint glow of light behind the front curtains. She heard a record playing inside. As she had in front of her parents’ house, Kate rested her hand on the side of the car. This time, she took off her underwear.

She tossed it into the car. She walked up the steps.

Then she knocked three times on Philip Van Zandt’s door.

24

Kate’s knees felt shaky as she walked across the parking garage under the Barbizon Hotel. Every atom in her body was vibrating at a different frequency. Her lips felt swollen from Philip’s kisses. Her breasts were tender from his mouth. If she closed her eyes, she could summon up the sensations of his tongue roaming up and down her body.

She longed to go back to Philip’s warm bed, to let him do all those wonderful things to her over and over again, but there was still some small part of Kate’s brain that held on to a tiny sliver of sanity. She couldn’t wake up next to him in the morning. She couldn’t burn his toast or fix his coffee or ask about his plans for the day. She couldn’t let herself fall into domesticity.

It felt too much like cheating.

How odd that letting Philip do the things he did to her did not feel like betraying Patrick. The two men were nothing alike. Philip’s kisses were more sensual. He had an intimate knowledge of the female anatomy.
He was in no rush. He enjoyed every inch of her. When it was time, he did something extraordinary with his hips—an exquisite movement like a spoon dipping into honey. There were no quickening thrusts that ended too soon so that Kate found herself slipping off to the bathroom to take matters into her own hand.

Kate knew that she had never orgasmed with her husband. At least not like she could on her own. This wasn’t a matter of duration, but one of finesse. Patrick brought her to the precipice, which was nice, but there was no final push that sent her over the edge. Kate was certain this would have changed if they’d had more time together. Time to explore. Time to grow up and appreciate what they could offer one another.

As it was, Patrick’s pleasure had always been the central issue, which had bothered Kate none whatsoever. She felt good with her husband. Her body responded to him. There were tingles in all the right places and her heart leapt and her body arched up in anticipation. That the obvious didn’t follow was something Kate had always assumed was her fault. Not because of Freud, but because she loved Patrick so much that the failure must be her own.

Kate didn’t need Patrick for that anyway. Just lying beside him was enough. Feeling his strong arms around her was enough. Hearing the catch in his breath, seeing the look in his eyes—that was more than enough. They were in love, deeply, deeply in love, and his happiness was more satisfying to Kate than anything that could be done to her in bed.

Kate was certain that she would never feel this way about Philip Van Zandt. She would never iron his shirts. She would never lovingly fold his handkerchiefs into neat little squares. She would never press her face to his pillow just to breathe in the wonderful scent of him.

Her father was wrong. Kate wasn’t splitting into two different people. She had fractured into three.

She pressed the call button for the elevator. Normally, Kate took the stairs up to the lobby, but she didn’t trust her legs to hold her. It was five-thirty in the morning. Bumblebees filled her head. Her body was still pulsing with thoughts of Philip. She needed a shower. She needed a
quick lie-down. And then she would put on her uniform and go into work.

The elevator doors slid open. Kate eyed the red velvet bench in the back of the car, but knew she couldn’t give in. She pressed the lobby button and thought how strange it was that she was still going to work after what had happened yesterday. If anything, the carnage at the Portuguese house made her want to work more. She needed to prove herself. She needed to make things up to Maggie. She needed Gail Patterson to know that her loss was not in vain.

Freud popped into Kate’s head again; the curse of the psychiatrist’s daughter. Undoubtedly, the dead shrink would have diagnosed Kate with masochistic tendencies. Or maybe he’d call it penis envy. Why else would a woman want to do a man’s job? She wanted her father’s attention. She wanted to punish her mother for giving her father things she could not. She was crazy. She was hysterical. Her hormones were imbalanced.

How was it that completely independent of each other, the male cops on the Atlanta police force and an elderly Austrian psychiatrist had reached the exact same conclusions?