Dust to Dust

by Tami Hoag

  Andy Fallon’s brother owned a motley collection of cabins congregated on a wedge of land between the lake and a crossroads. Fallon’s Bar and Bait Shop squatted nearest the road, a building not much bigger than a three-car garage, with green shingle siding and too-small windows that made the place look as if it were squinting. The windows were glowing with neon advertising Miller’s and Coors and live bait.

  The thought of a late lunch shriveled and died in Kovac’s empty belly.

  He wheeled the piece-of-shit Chevy Caprice into the small, frozen parking lot, turned off the engine, and listened to it rattle on. He’d been driving the same car out of the department fleet for more than a year. In that time, no mechanic had been able to cure its hiccups or make the heater give more than a token effort. He had requested a different vehicle, but the paperwork had gone into a bureaucratic black hole, and no one on that end would return his phone calls. His driving record might have had something to do with it, but he preferred to think he was getting fucked over. Gave him an excuse to be pissed off.

  A pool table dominated much of the floor space in the bar. Walls paneled with old barn wood were hung with dozens of photographs of people—presumably customers—holding up fish. The television over the tiny bar was showing a soap. A lumpy woman with thin brown hair and a cigarette hanging from her mouth stood inside the horseshoe-shaped bar drying a beer mug with a dingy cloth. Mental note to Kovac: Drink out of the bottle. On the consumer side of the bar, an old lake rat with half his teeth sat on a stool, a filthy red ball cap at a jaunty angle on his head.

  “Hope would never do that to Bo,” the woman scoffed. “He’s the love of her goddamned life.”

  “Was,” the lake rat corrected. “Ain’t you been paying attention, Maureen? Stephano planted a microchip in her brain makes her fucking evil. Evil Gina, that’s what they call her now.”

  “That’s crap,” Maureen proclaimed, half an inch of ash glowing red on the end of her cigarette.

  Kovac cleared his throat. “Neil Fallon?”

  The woman gave him the head-to-toe. “What are you selling?”

  “Bad news.”

  “He’s out back.”

  Some friend.

  She nodded him toward the kitchen door.

  The kitchen was as cramped as a carnival concession stand and stank of rancid grease and sour washrags. Or maybe that damp scent came from dead minnows. Kovac kept his hands in the pockets of his topcoat and the coat pulled tightly around him. He tried not to wonder where Neil kept the live bait.

  Fallon stood in the open mouth of a big storage shed. He looked like old Mike twenty-some years previous: built like a bull with a meaty, ruddy face and a bit of a downward hook to his mouth. He looked at Kovac coming across the yard, pulled a welder’s mask down over his face, and went back to work on the runner of a snowmobile. Sparks arced away from the torch like a tiny fireworks display, bright against the gloom of the shed.

  “Neil Fallon?” Kovac called above the roar. He pulled his shield out of his pocket and held it up, staying out of range of the sparks. “Kovac. Minneapolis PD.”

  Fallon stepped back, turned the torch off, and raised the mask. His face was blank. “He’s dead.”

  Kovac stopped a yard from the snowmobile. “Someone called you?”

  “No. I just always knew they’d send a cop to tell me, that’s all. You were more his family than I ever was.” He pulled a red bandanna out of his coveralls pocket and wiped sweat from his face, despite the fact that the afternoon temperature was in the low twenties. “So what was it? His heart? Or did he get drunk and fall out of the goddamn chair?”

  “I’m not here about your father,” Kovac said.

  Neil looked at him as if he’d started speaking Greek.

  “I’m here about Andy. He’s dead. I’m sorry.”

  “Andy.”

  “Your brother.”

  “Jesus Christ, I know he’s my brother,” Fallon snapped.

  He set the welding torch aside on a workbench, hands fumbling at the task, then at the thick, grimy welder’s gloves. He jerked the mask off his head and threw it as if it burned him. It landed with a crash amid a stack of old gas cans.

  “He’s dead?” he said, short of breath. “How is he dead? How can he be dead? He can’t be.”

  “It looks like suicide. Or an accident.”

  “Suicide?” Fallon repeated. “Fuck.” Breathing harder, he went to a rusty metal locker beside the workbench, took out a half-empty bottle of Old Crow, and drank two good glugs of it. Then he put the bottle down and bent over with his hands on his knees, muttering a long string of curses. “Andy.” He spat on the ground. “Suicide.” He spat again. “Jesus.” He took two steps out the door and puked in the snow.

  Everyone reacted differently.

  Kovac dug around in his coat pocket and came up with a piece of Nicorette. Shit.

  “Jesus,” Fallon muttered. He came back and sat down on a stool fashioned from a tree trunk. He set the bottle of Old Crow between his feet. “Andy.”

  “Were you close?” Kovac asked, leaning back against the workbench.

  Fallon shook his head and scraped his fingers back through thick hair the color of old rust. “Once, I guess. Or maybe never. He spent a lot of time looking up to me when we were little kids ’cause I was older, tougher. ’Cause I stood up to the old man. But he was always Iron Mike’s favorite. I wasted a lot of time hating him for that.”

  He made it sound as if he had given up the hate long ago, but there was still a trace of bitterness in his voice, Kovac noted. In his experience, family resentments were seldom set aside entirely, if at all. Instead people tossed a cover over them and ignored them, like an ugly old piece of furniture.

  “Looked like he was the all-American kid, all right,” he said, poking at the old wound. “The star athlete. The good student. Followed in the old man’s footsteps.”

  Fallon looked down at the floor, his mouth a tight, hard line. “He was everything the old man wanted in a son. That’s what Mike thought anyway. I was none of it.”

  He reached inside the open zipper of his coveralls and dug a cigarette and a lighter out of his shirt pocket. On the first long exhale he muttered, “Fuck ’em.” Then he huffed a humorless laugh, picked up the Old Crow, and took another swig.

  “Did you see much of each other?” Kovac asked.

  Fallon wagged his head, though Kovac wasn’t certain if he was answering in the negative or still trying to shake off the news.

  “He came by now and then. He liked to fish a little. He keeps his gear here. Stores his boat in the winter. It’s like a token sibling thing, I guess. Like he thinks it’s his duty to patronize my business. Andy’s big on duty.”

  “When did you last speak with him?”

  “He stopped by Sunday, but I didn’t talk to him. I was busy. I had a guy here to buy a snowmobile.”

  “When was the last time you had a serious conversation?”

  “Serious? A month or so ago, I guess.”

  “What about?”

  Fallon’s lips twisted. “He wanted to tell me he was coming out of the closet. That he was a fag. Like I needed to hear that.”

  “You didn’t know he was gay?”

  “Sure I did. I knew it years ago. High school. I just knew it. It wasn’t something he had to tell me.” He took another snort of the Crow, then pulled on the cigarette. “I told the old man so once. Way back when. Just because I was pissed off. Sick of it. Sick of ‘Why can’t you be more like your brother?’”

  He laughed loudly then, as if at a hilarious joke. “Man. He damn near broke my jaw, he hit me so hard. I’d never seen him so mad. I could’ve said the Virgin Mary was a whore and he wouldn’t have been half that mad. I sinned against the golden child. If he hadn’t been in that chair, he’d have kicked my ass blue.”

  “How did Andy seem when he told you?”

  Fallon thought about it for a moment. “Intense,” he said at last. “I guess it was a trauma for h
im. He’d told Mike. That must’ve been a scene and a half. I would’ve gone back to see that. I couldn’t believe the old man didn’t stroke out.”

  He sucked on the cigarette, dropped the butt on the floor, and crushed it out with the toe of his work boot. “It was strange, though, you know? I felt sorry for Andy. I know all about disappointing the old man. He didn’t.”

  “Had you seen him since?”

  “A couple of times. He came out to ice fish. I let him have one of my shacks. We had a drink one other time. I think he wanted us to be like brothers again, but, shit, what did we have in common besides the old man? Nothing.

  “How’d Mike take this?” Fallon asked quietly, staring at the floor. “Andy being dead.” He blew out a breath of smoke through flared nostrils. “He sent you out here? He couldn’t call me to tell me himself. Couldn’t bring himself to admit the perfect son didn’t turn out to be so fucking perfect after all. That’s Mike. If he can’t be right, he’ll be an asshole.”

  Taking the bottle of Old Crow by the throat, he pushed to his feet and headed out the door. “Fuck ’em.”

  Kovac followed, hunching into his coat. It was getting colder, a damp kind of cold that bit to the bone. His head hurt and his nose was throbbing.

  Fallon stepped around the corner of the shed and stopped, staring between the shitty little fishing cabins he rented out in the summer. The buildings squatted near the shore of Minnetonka, but there was no shore to speak of this time of year. Snow drifted across land and ice, making one nearly indistinguishable from the other. The landscape was a sea of white stretching out toward an orange horizon.

  “How’d he do it?”

  “Hung himself.”

  “Huh.”

  Just that: Huh. Then he stood there some more while the wind blew a fine mist of white from one side of the lake to the other. No denial or disbelief. Perhaps he hadn’t known his brother as well as Steve Pierce had. Or maybe he’d wished his brother dead in the past and so had less trouble accepting his death by any means.

  “When we were kids, we played cowboys,” he said. “I was always the one that got strung up. I was always the bad guy. Andy always played the sheriff. Funny how things turn out.”

  They said nothing for another few moments. Kovac imagined Fallon was seeing those old memories play out before him. Two little boys, their whole lives ahead of them, in two-dollar cowboy hats, riding on broomsticks. Bright futures stained dark by the jealousies and strains and disappointments of growing up.

  The images of childhood faded into the memory of Andy Fallon hanging naked from a rafter.

  “Mind if I have a belt of that?” he asked, nodding toward the bottle.

  Fallon handed it over. “Aren’t you on duty?”

  “I’m always on duty. It’s all I’ve got,” Kovac admitted. “I won’t tell the brass if you don’t.”

  Fallon turned back toward the lake. “Hey, fuck ’em.”

  THE NEIGHBOR WAS in his yard harvesting burned-out Christmas bulbs when Kovac pulled up. Kovac stopped halfway up the walk to watch him as he unscrewed a light from the Virgin Mary’s halo and stuffed it into a garbage bag.

  “Half of them could burn out and it’d still be like living next door to the sun,” Kovac said.

  The neighbor stared at him with a mix of offense and apprehension, clutching the garbage bag to his chest. He was a small man of about seventy with a hard-boiled look and small mean eyes. He wore a red plaid bomber cap with the flaps hanging down like hound’s ears.

  “Where’s your Christmas spirit?” he demanded.

  “I lost it about the fourth night I didn’t get any sleep on account of your fucking lights. Can’t you put that shit on a timer?”

  “Shows what you know,” the neighbor huffed.

  “I know you’re a lunatic.”

  “You want me to cause a power surge? That’s what would happen turning these lights on and off. Power surge. Could black out the whole block.”

  “We should be so lucky,” Kovac said, and went up the sidewalk and into his house.

  He turned the television on for company, radiated some leftover lasagna, sat on the couch, and picked at dinner. He wondered if Mike Fallon was sitting in front of his big-screen television tonight, trying to eat, trying to temporarily hide from his grief in the ruts of routine.

  During the course of his career in homicide, Kovac had watched a lot of people straddle that awkward line between normalcy and the surreal reality of having violent crime disrupt their lives. He never thought much about it, as a rule. He wasn’t a social worker. His job was to solve the crime and move on. But he thought about it tonight because Mike was a cop. And maybe for a few other reasons.

  Abandoning the lasagna and Dateline, he went to his desk and rummaged around in a drawer, digging out an address book that hadn’t seen the light of day in half a decade. His ex-wife was listed under her first name. He dialed the number and waited, then hung up when an answering machine picked up. A man’s voice. The second husband.

  What would he have said anyway? I had a dead body today and it reminded me I have a kid.

  No. It reminded him he didn’t have anyone.

  He wandered back into the living room with the empty fish tank and Stone Phillips on the TV. Too much like old Iron Mike sitting in his massage chair in front of the big screen, alone in the world with nothing but bitter memories and soured hopes. And a dead son.

  Most of the time Kovac believed he was happier without a real life. The job was a safe place. He knew what to expect. He knew who he was. He knew where he fit in. He knew what to do. He’d never been good at any of that without the badge.

  There were worse fates than being a career cop. Most of the time he loved the work, if not the politics that went with it. He was good at it. Not fancy, not flashy. Not in the flamboyant way Ace Wyatt had been, grabbing headlines and sticking out his granite jaw for any passing camera. But good in the way that counted.

  “Stick with what you do best,” he muttered, then turned his back on his dinner, grabbed his coat, and left.

  STEVE PIERCE LIVED in a brick duplex on a drab street too close to the freeway in Lowry Hill. The neighborhood was full of yuppies and artsy types with money to renovate the old brownstones. But this portion had been chopped up into odd little angles when the major traffic arteries of Hennepin and Lyndale had been widened years ago, and it remained fragmented not only physically but psychologically as well.

  Steve Pierce’s neighbors had no gaudy Christmas displays draining the Northern States Power supply. Everything was tasteful and moderate. A wreath here. A swag there. As much as Kovac hated his neighbor, he thought he liked this even less. The street had the feel of a place where the inhabitants were not connected in any way, not even by animosity.

  He fit right in tonight.

  He sat in his car, parked across and down the street from Pierce’s, waiting, thinking. Thinking Andy Fallon probably didn’t leave his doors unlocked. Thinking Steve Pierce seemed to know a lot and yet nothing about his old buddy. Thinking there was more to that story and Steve Pierce didn’t want to tell it.

  People lied to the cops all the time. Not just bad guys or the guilty. Lying was an equal opportunity activity. Innocent people lied. Mothers of small children lied. Pencil-neck paper pushers lied. Blue-haired grannies lied. Everyone lied to the cops. It seemed to be embedded in the human genetic code.

  Steve Pierce was lying. Kovac had no doubt about that. He just had to narrow the field of possible lies and decide if any of them were significant to Andy Fallon’s death.

  He pulled a pack of Salems out from under the passenger’s seat, held it under his nose, and breathed deeply, then put the cigarettes back and got out of the car.

  Pierce answered the door in sweatpants and a U of M hockey jersey, the smell of good scotch hovering around him like cologne, and a cigarette dangling from his lip. In the hours since his discovery of Andy Fallon’s corpse, his physical appearance had degraded to the look of a ma
n who had been battling a terminal illness for a very long time. Gaunt, ashen, red-eyed. One corner of his mouth curled up in a sneer as he pulled the cigarette and exhaled.

  “Oh, look. It’s the Ghost of Christmas Present. Did you bring your rubber truncheon this time? ’Cause, you know, I don’t feel like I’ve been abused enough for one day. I find my best friend dead, get in a fight with Hulk Hogan in a cop uniform, and get harassed by a dickhead detective. The list just doesn’t go on long enough. I could go for a little torture.”

  He made his eyes and mouth round with feigned shock. “Oops! My secret is out now! S and M. Shit!”

  “Look,” Kovac said. “This hasn’t been my favorite day either. I got to go tell a man I used to look up to that his son probably killed himself.”

  “Did he even listen?” Pierce asked.

  “What?”

  “Mike Fallon. Did he even listen when you told him about Andy?”

  Kovac’s brow creased. “He didn’t have much choice.”

  Pierce stared past him at the dark street, as if some part of him still clung to a tattered scrap of fantasy that Andy Fallon would materialize from the gloom and come up the walk. The weight of reality defeated him. He flicked the cigarette butt out the door.

  “I need a drink,” he said, and he turned and walked away from the open door.

  Kovac followed him, taking the place in with a glance. Dramatic colors and oak furniture of some retro style he couldn’t have named on a bet. What he knew about decorating wouldn’t dot an i, but he recognized quality and big price tags. The walls of the hall were a patchwork of artsy photographs in white mats and thin black frames.