Over Tumbled Graves (26 page)

“I do miss the girlies, though,” the old man admitted. “Some of ’em were rude and you couldn’t trust ’em, but most of ’em you felt kinda sorry for.” Absentmindedly, Paul touched his middle finger to an age spot where his hairline had once been, running the finger across the lines of his brow beneath his silver, receding hair. “You figure they moved to another neighborhood?”

“For the time being,” Dupree said. He finished buttoning his shirt and checked his watch. Going on three now. “Well,” he said, “it was good talking to you.”

Paul Verloc touched his radio to his temple and tipped it toward Dupree.

In the car, Dupree sat for a moment staring at the blood-streaked sidewalk. He’d been punched or kicked or scraped weekly as a patrol officer, usually breaking up a fight like this one, but this stabbing was the most serious injury he’d ever sustained as a cop. As a young man he’d imagined police work as a series of Walter Mitty daydreams, in which he was stabbed or grazed by a gunshot while protecting some beautiful young woman, solving some master crime. But this was the truth of the job—a paring knife in your shoulder from a drunk woman you were trying to help.

Dupree pulled a small notebook from his pocket and jotted down a few notes to make sure he included them in his incident report. He wrote down exactly what he’d heard the woman yell, the name of the side street, the closest businesses and the distance between the chain-link fence and the sidewalk. He started the car and had begun driving toward the hospital when it occurred to him that he should probably write his report tonight, before he got his stitches. He turned the car and headed for the cop shop.

He drove over the Monroe Street Bridge and pulled his car into a space in front of the Public Safety Building, saving his explanation at the garage for later. He used his ID card to go in through a back door, emerging in the dark hallway outside the detectives’
offices, and was on his way to the front desk when he realized he was standing in front of the door to the task force office. Dupree stood outside it for a moment, listening. It was quiet inside. He pulled out his ID badge, with the dark magnetic strip down the side. By now they should have changed the lock or taken his ID off the list of those that would open the door. But when he swiped his card through the runner, the lock clicked open.

It was dark inside, the entire room lit by two desk lamps left on by detectives. Dupree walked straight to Spivey’s desk, his old desk. The thing that galled him wasn’t that a shit like Spivey was valued more than he was by the police department. He’d been around long enough to know that police brass were as impressed as anyone by the power of youth, the lure of a person who seems to know new things. This was especially true of cops, who fell all over themselves before a cop who could turn on a computer. But even that didn’t really bother Dupree. To be honest, he had been slow to make adjustments. He should have gotten a profiler on the case. He should have gotten the computer database up and running and done a better job with follow-ups. What bothered Dupree was that he hadn’t seen it coming. From a purely political standpoint he’d underestimated Spivey completely, allowed his dislike for the kid to translate into dismissiveness. He could have used the kid’s expertise and it would have helped them both, but instead he shunted Spivey to the side. And for what?

Two spots over, her chair was pushed deep into the well of her desk, a sweater draped over the chairback. Spivey had gotten the job in Major Crimes that Caroline deserved. That’s why he gave the kid such a hard time, why he did so many things.

He walked to Caroline’s desk, picked up the photograph of her mother, then set it down. Absentmindedly he pulled one of the drawers in her desk, but it was locked. He stepped away from her desk and took in the whole room, the room he’d once commanded—without Spivey’s knowledge of science and profiling and computers, surely, but with a certain integrity. Mostly life is an ascension, it seemed to him, and he wondered what happened when you stopped climbing, when your progress began to be measured in the other direction and the best a person had to look for
ward to is retirement, the loss of responsibility and opportunity, the loss of function and friends.

He put his hands palms-down on her desk. For twelve years this was the only relationship he could have with Caroline, that of sergeant and officer, of mentor and student, and so he approached it with the heat and passion of an affair. He taught and inspired and cajoled her. He worked behind the scenes on her behalf, praising her in reports, whispering her name for promotions and big cases, coaxing her career with an honest zeal. He did more than that, of course, more than he should have, and more than she knew. It was ironic: To this woman, he had been faithful. And now that she was finally on the inside—everyone he cared about was inside now, it seemed, the curtains drawn on every house he drove past—Dupree was stuck on the outside. He ran his hand along the sweater on her chair, ashamed of the tactile thrill of her clothing, and his life suddenly seemed to him like a ship that had gone off course somewhere—although that wasn’t quite right, because he knew exactly where and when. He wondered how many times he’d replayed that night in his head, how many times he heard her frightened voice on the radio, still two blocks away. Yelling at her to wait, he was almost there, her saying there wasn’t time and then the terrible clap of a gunshot. Stumbling out of his car and down the driveway, finding her in the backyard beneath the sizzling bug lamp, pointing the gun at the drunk wife beater, who lay still at her feet. The mess at the crime scene and the interviews, the crush and bustle, then back at her apartment, the night stretching until dawn and seeming heavier than the collective weight of every night since, so that Dupree found himself believing that if they had just made love, it wouldn’t be such a vivid and haunting possibility, would be just a memory: simple, sweet, and gone.

Shaking, Caroline backed into her house, grabbed her cell phone off the dining room table, and unholstered her gun from the shoulder strap hanging over a chair. She punched 911 on the phone, but already her mind was telling her that maybe she hadn’t really seen Lenny Ryan, so she didn’t hit the send button right away. She pressed herself against the wall to keep from being silhouetted by the lights in the house. She edged across the room to the wall, turned off the lights, and then crouched in front of the front window. The red car was gone, and immediately she wondered if it had ever been there. She grabbed her car keys from the entryway desk, dropped to her stomach, and crawled to the open front door. Nothing. She looked both ways, then came outside slowly and stood in a crouch, keeping the gun pointed to the ground as she came down the porch steps and climbed into her car. Her tires chirped as she backed out of the driveway.

She lived only a few blocks from Division, the main north-south street in the city, so she went that way, her head swinging from side to side as she looked down residential streets for some sign of the
red car. She tried to be calm, to second-guess herself the way she would question an unreliable witness. She had just interviewed the exotic dancer who was approached by Ryan in a red car. So maybe she had just seen a red car slow down in front of her house (it happened all the time; she lived at the corner of an uncontrolled intersection) and imagined the man inside to be Ryan in a beard and baseball cap. Had the car even been red? It had happened too quickly for her to get a license plate number or a make and model, and colors at night were tough to see. But it was a small sedan, she knew that. Four doors. Maybe a GM product but more likely Japanese, a Nissan or a Mazda, she thought. Yes, Nissan. A Sentra, maybe. And yes, she was sure it was red.

If patrol got out now, they might have a chance of finding him—again, her mind cautioning, if it was him. And if it wasn’t? Who knew what Spivey would make of this. She turned on her radio, but the dispatcher was on something else right now, two drunks fighting on East Sprague and some patrol officers who apparently had gotten into it with the drunks. Then, as she was fiddling with the radio, six blocks ahead Caroline saw what looked like a red car pass under a streetlight and turn right onto a side street. She stepped on the gas and flicked the switch to turn on her grille lights, veering past the cars until she reached the side street.

Her fingers clenched the wheel. The gun was a dead weight in her lap—a dumb place to carry a gun when you’re speeding around like this. She carefully put it on the floor of the passenger side. When she reached the side street that the red car had turned down, Caroline cornered hard and saw it only three blocks ahead now, its driver as calm and even as someone on his way to work.

Within two blocks she caught him and he pulled over slowly, then seemed to reconsider, veering out toward the street, then settling back on the shoulder, in front of a clapboard house. The driver turned to the side and she could see the silhouette of a baseball cap; he turned forward again and sat still.

She should call for backup. She should have called for backup the minute she saw the car, but this second-guessing, this inability to trust herself, made her decisions slow and muddy. Without looking away from the figure in the driver’s seat, Caroline reached with her right hand, patting the floor in front of the pas
senger seat until she found the butt of her handgun. She climbed out of the car carefully, using her door as a shield. She pointed the gun toward the red car and edged out from the car door to her left, sliding, staying low. The driver’s side window on the red car came down slowly.

“Both hands out the window!” Caroline yelled. She steadied the gun.

He did and right away she knew by the skinny, shaking arms that this wasn’t Lenny Ryan. Caroline edged closer until she could see that it was a boy in this car, maybe eighteen, nervously waiting for a ticket. She allowed the gun to slip to her side as she approached the red Nissan Sentra. A boy in a baseball cap looked up at her.

“Did you just drive past Corbin Park?” Caroline asked breathlessly.

“No, I swear,” said the boy too quickly and more than a little defensively, as if driving by Corbin Park was illegal.

Caroline stood next to his car, breathing heavily. She looked in every direction, then back at the car and the nervous boy. She could see a bottle peeking out from just beneath his car seat. He moved his foot to cover it. “Hand me that,” she said.

He reached down and handed her a bottle of Mickey’s Wide Mouth beer.

“Is this any good?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Uh, it’s not mine.”

She laughed, releasing tension, then dumped the beer on the ground near her feet and tossed the empty bottle in the backseat.

“Recycle that,” Caroline said. “And”—she tried to think of something—“signal when you turn, okay?”

Caroline walked back to her car and climbed in. She opened the glove box and put her gun inside, then closed it. Her cell phone flashed at her from the passenger seat—the numbers 9, 1, and 1 still on its face. She picked up the phone and turned it off.

When had she lost confidence in her senses? In New Orleans, when she’d been so certain she’d seen a girl being molested on a balcony? Or earlier, when she’d failed to stop Ryan from pushing Burn over the bridge? Or had the erosion begun six years ago?

Caroline started her car and drove back through her neighbor
hood, cutting up a side street along Corbin Park, a slim crust of pleasant homes around the park, fading quickly to apartment buildings and run-down houses with backyard sheds and cars on the lawns, to her neighborhood of small brick homes and remodeled bungalows.

She was surprised to find her house completely dark, then remembered turning off all the lights when she hid—apparently from some kid in a red Nissan with his first beer.

She hated going into a dark house, and anyway, this felt like one of those nights when it wouldn’t be worth the effort of trying to sleep, when her mother’s insomnia would get the best of her. She drove south on Monroe, a street of fifty-year-old, three-story brownstones mixed in with newer burger joints and appliance shops and convenience stores. Every third car she passed seemed to be red.

She parked at a meter in front of the Public Safety Building. At the turnout in front of the building Dale Henderson, the graveyard patrol sergeant, was climbing out of his car. He’d been Caroline’s sergeant for a while, after Dupree had transferred out of patrol. Henderson waited for her and they walked toward the building together.

“What are you doing here so late?” he asked.

She smiled. “The fellas like it when I come in early and make coffee. What about you? Sounds like you guys fell into the shit tonight.”

“How’d you hear about that?”

“Radio.”

Henderson nodded and held the front door for her. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Caroline said.

“Well. You’re still close with Dupree, right?”

“Ye-e-e-ah,” she said cautiously, wondering at the way he said “close,” at the meaning of “still.” “Why, what happened?”

“Well, for one, he showed up two hours after his shift was over, without calling in. And he jumped into a street fight and got stabbed in the shoulder for his effort.”

Caroline felt her neck muscles tighten. “Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. Couple of stitches. But when I asked him why he
didn’t call in, he got all bent out of shape and finally said he was asleep in his car in front of his wife’s house.”

They stopped and faced each other in the large open foyer of the Public Safety Building. Directly ahead was the police sergeant’s desk and behind that, the door to the detectives’ offices.

Caroline had a bad feeling. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

Henderson glanced at his shoes. “Well, maybe this isn’t my place, but having gone through a divorce myself, well, sometimes”—he struggled to find the words—“the other party doesn’t understand how much is at stake for the one leaving his family.”

Other party? Caroline’s hands balled up into fists. “I don’t know what you think, Dale, but—”

He interrupted her. “A single person like yourself just goes…with the flow, so to speak. But for a guy like Alan…well, his decisions have an impact on other people.”

Caroline turned and walked away.

He followed her. “I know it isn’t my business—”

She said over her shoulder, “There is no
business
, Dale.”

“I’m not being judgmental—”

She stopped and spun back to face him. “No, that’s exactly what you’re being. And you’re full of shit.” She stalked off, and this time he let her go. She punched in the code on the door to the detectives’ offices and found herself in the long, bright hallway in front of the Special Investigations Unit, her anger bleeding away into worry about Dupree. She shouldn’t be surprised by Henderson. There were no bigger gossips in the world than cops; you can’t ask people who traffic in the flow of information in the community to turn it off when they return to the office.

Caroline swept her card and entered the SIU office and was immediately struck by the differences between her old office and her new digs. In the task force office, there were pictures on the walls of dead women, maps of where their bodies had been found or where they had disappeared, and, of course, Spivey’s ubiquitous timeline.

The SIU office seemed almost quaint by comparison, pictures of busted drug houses here and there, photographs of cocaine
and methamphetamine in its most common forms, charts of ecstasy and other designer stuff. It could be a high school science lab. Caroline went to her old desk and opened it, pulled out the thick file on Burn, with copies from all his court cases, adult and juvenile, and newspaper clippings after his death. The headline on the biggest story, a month after Burn washed away: “Family Still Waiting for Drowned Drug Dealer.” That story was accompanied by a photograph of a young-looking black woman, Burn’s mother, holding a picture of him in his sixth grade football uniform, his helmet proudly in the crook of his armpit.

Caroline picked up the thick file and backed out of the SIU office into the hallway, made sure the door lock clicked, and started for the task force office. She thought about Henderson, the way he implied that she was to blame for Dupree’s situation, and although it made her mad, she felt the tug of guilt nonetheless.

She slid her ID card, entered the room, and there was Dupree, as if he’d just popped out of her thoughts. His back was to her, and he was standing at her desk holding her sweater. When the door closed, he jumped, dropped the sweater back on her chair, and turned.

There were only two lights on in the room, dim desk lamps turned downward. Seeing him there in his uniform reminded her of their time on patrol together, and she realized, maybe for the first time, just how long they had been wrapped up in each other like this and how much it had taken out of both of them.

“You scared me,” Dupree said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. He looked around, realizing that she must wonder why he was in the task force office. He waved his ID card. “I didn’t think my key still worked but it does. They probably ought to get that fixed.”

“What are you doing here?” Caroline asked.

“I was on my way to write a report about how I went to a concert, fell asleep in my car, and got stabbed by a couple of drunks. How about you?”

There was a time—when she used to see him in that uniform regularly—when Caroline would’ve called Dupree the minute she saw that red car in front of her house, but everything felt dif
ferent now, and she couldn’t get Henderson out of her mind.
The other party
. “Catching up on some work.”

He noted the dismissiveness in her voice, and he felt suddenly like a swing-shift patrol sergeant snooping around in the office of a top-priority task force.

She moved around to the worktable in the middle of the room, so that the table and her desk were now between her and Dupree. “Where’d you get stabbed?” she asked, as if she were asking where he’d gone for the weekend.

“Shoulder,” he said.

“Oh.” She put her files down on the table and began leafing through them, avoiding Dupree’s eyes. “Did you get stitches?”

“I’m on my way.” He was baffled by her matter-of-fact, condescending tone. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“You can’t talk about it? What, I’m a security breach now?”

“No. It’s nothing like that. I just needed to look something up. You know how that is, one of those details that you can’t shake.”

“Yeah,” Dupree said, “I know about things you can’t shake.” Her cold reserve ran across him like sandpaper, and it struck him as ironic that the woman he thought about most had pulled the furthest away. “Well,” Dupree said, “I should go file my report. I don’t want to hold up my firing.”

Caroline smiled sadly as Dupree backed out of the office and let the door close.

He stood in the hallway, trying to comprehend what had just happened. He could handle it if Caroline didn’t want to be with him; lately, he didn’t want to be with himself. But that pitying tone was unbearable, and he thought again about Debbie drawing the curtains, about being outside, and suddenly he had the urge to just lay it out there for Caroline, his feelings and the blame and everything. Everything he had done was for her, to be with her, to take care of her. She could ignore him, but she couldn’t ignore that.

This time he slammed his key card into the runner. It flashed green and he pushed the door and found Caroline staring at the floor in front of him, as if he hadn’t just walked out of the room, but melted into the carpet. She looked up at Dupree and he won
dered if he could swallow the words that were rising in his throat or if there was some reason to say them—
I have loved you for so long
—because as soon as he thought the words he knew they would sound trite and empty and beside the point. She knew that he loved her. And that wasn’t the point, anyway. Love is easy; the drunks on the street tonight loved each other. What he had given her was what he couldn’t even give his wife: six years of loyalty, fidelity, and sacrifice. He stood before her now, playing the years in a split second and believing right then that the job and the marriage and every assorted unhappiness was just a symptom of her, and he felt the need to explain himself, to show that he had fallen because of her. His shoulder ached, and even that seemed to be her fault, as he racked his memory for words more powerful and revealing than “I love you,” something that would show all he had done for her.