by Tyler Dilts
“No,” Lee said. “It’s okay.”
“Thank you,” the man said. “I won’t be too long.”
Lee watched as he went to the machine closest to the window and loaded his laundry inside. The man carefully counted out his quarters and checked the prices posted on both the washer and the dryer before he began feeding them into the machine. Once the load was in progress, the man went back out to his cart, took a book out of the top of the cart, and sat down on the concrete to read.
It was a slow morning and only two other customers were doing their laundry. Lee went through the unmarked door in back that led to his small office. He tried to go through some paperwork but instead decided to read the Press-Telegram. There was a two-way mirror that looked out into the other room, and Lee would frequently look out to see the progress of the homeless man’s wash. If he sat up straight, he could just make out the top of the man’s head and the handle of his shopping cart through the front window. After several minutes, the washer he was using buzzed to signal the end of the cycle. Lee looked out. It didn’t seem as if the man had heard it, so he got up and went outside.
“Excuse me, sir?” Lee said.
The man didn’t answer, so Lee stepped closer to him and repeated himself. “Sir?”
The man looked up. “Oh,” he said, standing up. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long time since anybody called me ‘sir.’”
Lee said quietly, “Your wash is over. Time for the dryer.”
“Thank you,” the man said.
Later, when the tall man was folding his still-warm clothes, Lee approached him again. The man looked up and smiled kindly at him.
Lee said, “You can come here anytime you want.”
“I appreciate that,” the man said. “I’ll be back as soon as I get some more money.”
“No,” Lee said. “That’s not what I mean. Anytime you need to do washing, come in. From now on, it’s on the house for you.” Lee extended his hand. “My name is Lee. What’s yours?”
“Everybody just calls me Bishop,” he said.
“He came in almost every week after that.” There was a palpable sadness in Lee’s voice. “Every time, before he came in, he would pick up all the trash in the parking lot. I told him he didn’t have to. He said, ‘I want to.’”
“How long ago did that happen?” I asked.
“Maybe a year and a half, almost two?”
“And he’d been coming here ever since?”
Lee nodded.
Bishop was becoming less and less of a mystery to me.
When I told Jen about my conversation with Mr. Lee, she said, “That explains a lot about how he kept his cart. He worked hard at keeping himself together. Maintaining what little sense of order he could. You’re getting solid background. Did you get anything else?”
“No, nothing that connects directly to the murder.”
“But you’re putting a face on him. That’s good.”
Jen was almost surely correct about Julia Rice. I knew that. And if I could have been certain of it, I would have ignored her message and not returned her call. Kind of dickish, I know, but the idea of a date with anyone at all filled me with trepidation. But really, if I was being honest with myself, some part of me refused to believe she could be interested in any way other than professionally. I was a morose insomniac with chronic pain who was obsessed with dead people and who was trying to learn to play the banjo. That couldn’t have been on anybody’s Match.com wish list. No. The only reason any woman could possibly want to talk to me was because I was good at my job. Whatever Julia wanted to talk about had to be related to the case.
So I called her back.
“Hey,” I said when she answered. “It’s Danny.” As soon as I spoke, I realized I’d done two things I never did on a work-related phone call. I never used the word “hey” as a greeting, and I never used my first name. Why had Jen said what she did? There would be no way I could continue the call without wallowing in self-consciousness.
Shit.
“I got your message,” I said. “What can I help you with?” Seriously? What can I help you with? Had I actually said that?
“Hi,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d call back.”
“Of course I’d call back. Why would you think I wouldn’t?”
“Well,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate.”
“Oh.” Jen was right. Of course Jen was right.
I’m not sure how long I was silent, but it was long enough for her to say, “Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.”
“Would you like to get a cup of coffee?”
No, I thought. No, I wouldn’t. “Yes, I’d like that.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “Are you free after work tonight?”
“Sure.”
Shit. Shit shit shit.
19
CHARMIN BASIC TOILET PAPER, ONE PARTIAL ROLL.
I told Julia I’d text her when I left the station, and I planned to walk over and meet her outside of her building. The day had been as hot as every other for the last two weeks, and I lost count of the times I felt myself sweating through my shirt. For the last two hours I’d been at my desk in the air-conditioning. When I smelled my armpits, the body odor had faded into a stale trace smell of perspiration and deodorant. I didn’t have time for a shower, so I went into the men’s room and tried to clean my underarms with paper towels and hand soap. Fortunately, I kept a spare deodorant in my desk. I put too much on and then washed my face and looked at myself in the mirror. There were bags under my eyes and I needed a shave and a haircut.
Great.
It was still over ninety at a quarter to seven when I walked out onto Broadway toward Julia’s apartment. Fifty feet later, I took off my tie, folded it, and put it in the side pocket of my suit jacket. My Glock was in its shoulder holster under the coat, so I couldn’t go much further in removing layers. Opening the collar button of my white dress shirt was all the relief I was going to get. If I hadn’t already texted her, I would have gone back to the locker room and changed into jeans and a T-shirt.
Julia was waiting on the corner of Broadway and the Promenade. I spotted her a block away, and I’m reasonably sure that she saw me but pretended not to until I was only about ten yards down the street. Then she looked at me and smiled.
The day had been easier on her. She was wearing a pair of jeans under a white cotton blouse and a pale-blue tank top. Her hair was pulled back, and I was guessing that it had taken her a while to look like she had no makeup on at all.
As I got closer, I saw a hint of happiness in her eyes that made me nervous.
“Hi,” I said. “How are you?”
“Good.” She raised her eyebrows. “What about you? Long day?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Just that it’s almost seven. What time did you get to work this morning?”
“I’m not sure.” I didn’t want to tell her that it was still dark when I had first sat down at my desk, so I changed the subject. “Where were you thinking of going? There’s Starbucks right around the corner.”
“How about the GreenHouse? It’s just a few blocks down the street. I thought we might walk.”
“Oh, okay.”
“It’s a bit warm,” she said. “You don’t need to keep your jacket on, not on my account.”
“Well, uh . . .” I lifted my lapel just enough to show her the Glock hanging in its holster.
“Oh,” she said with a little laugh. “I didn’t think of that.”
For a moment, the awkwardness was more uncomfortable than the heat. “The GreenHouse? That’s the place that used to be Sipology, right?”
“Yes. It’s a lot better now.”
“Oh, okay. Good.” I didn’t feel like walking that far, but she seemed enthusiastic about it, so I went along. As we walked, I asked how the preparations for her show were going, and she humored me by going into detail about all the a
rrangements that had to be made with the studio to get everything set up properly and how tough it was to get the word out.
“It’s a good city for art, though, isn’t it?” I didn’t really know anything about the art scene other than that small galleries were always springing up downtown and around the East Village. There was even an organization that put on shows in vacant storefronts. And there had been a lot of those since the recession bottomed out a few years earlier. The businesses were coming back slowly, but it seemed like there was always another show popping up somewhere.
“It is,” she said. “Sometimes a little too good. Most weekends have more than one opening, so the core group of art aficionados gets split up.”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“You just used ‘aficionados’ unironically in a sentence.”
She smiled at me. I think I smiled back.
“It hurts all the time?” she asked.
We were sitting at a table on the second floor by the window looking out over Linden Avenue. I had just finished a chicken panini and was working on an iced mocha. She’d ordered a salad that she hardly touched because, I suspected, she’d already eaten and was too thoughtful to admit it and let me eat alone.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s always there. Sometimes it’s worse and sometimes it’s better, but it never really goes away completely. You get used to it. Learn to manage it, ignore it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be awful.”
It was. “You deal with it. I see people every day who deal with harder things.” I wondered if she knew about Megan. Had I mentioned that to her? No, I hadn’t. At what point in the date do you tell the woman you’re with about your dead wife? I hadn’t thought twice about revealing it to a rookie at a murder scene. But I wanted something then—I wanted Lauren to trust me and to open up. She did. What did I want from Julia?
“I know.” I thought she was referring to Megan. But then I remembered my last statement. Of course she knew about people dealing with difficulties. Maybe even more than me. As a homicide detective, I studied the wreckage of human misfortune. Social workers actually have to put it back together.
She took a sip of her green tea, put her cup down, and wiped a finger at the corner of her mouth. I thought about asking her something about her time on the job, but decided against it. Looking at her, I knew we shared an understanding, not unlike the unspoken shared knowledge that many cops have with one another, that there’s a darkness in the world, and that sometimes we know that our only real purpose is just to bear witness to it so that no one else has to.
I thought I understood something about her in that moment, something about her art. Raising awareness wasn’t the point, as the food-bank administrator had suggested. The point, I thought, was to make people really see the things those of us who gaze into the abyss always try to shield them from. At least that’s what I wanted to think.
“Tell me about your art,” I said.
The conversation fell into an easy rhythm. We talked about our jobs, about movies, about music, about a bunch of things. I’m never entirely comfortable in a conversation with someone I don’t know well unless it’s an interview or an interrogation. In a social situation that requires me to talk to normal people, I’m always hyperconscious of my exchanges. So I fought the urge to analyze each statement either of us made, to try to figure out the angles, to determine who wanted what. And surprisingly, little by little, my self-awareness began to fade and I found myself relaxing and maybe even enjoying the conversation.
And then Julia asked me if I’d ever been married. It was a fair question—she’d worked her divorce into the conversation so smoothly I’d barely even noticed it.
“I was,” I said. “She died in a car accident a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay.” Immediately I regretted my choice of words. “I don’t mean that it’s okay that she died like that, just that—”
“I know what you meant.” She reached out across the small table and touched my hand.
Something in my stomach tightened with the contact, and I hoped she hadn’t noticed. Did she think I flinched?
I said, “There hasn’t been anyone serious since then.” The self-consciousness was growing. How would she interpret that statement? Would she think I was difficult? Withdrawn? That I couldn’t let go of the past? Once that last thought reared its evil little head, it was all I could think of. It was a good question. Could I let go of the past? I didn’t know.
At that point, one of the baristas came upstairs and told us they’d be closing soon. “But you don’t need to rush.”
Julia smiled at her and said, “We won’t be long.”
I wondered what she meant. Had she noticed me clenching up and getting uncomfortable? Probably. She’d been a social worker for years. She was likely as comfortable in this context as I was in an interrogation. Surely she could read me as well as I could read a suspect. That must have been what she meant by We won’t be long. She was done.
Honestly, I thought, that was kind of a relief. Of course I was attracted to her. But it wasn’t supposed to be so hard. Was it?
Julia finished her tea and excused herself to go to the bathroom. I watched her walk away and then took out my phone to check for messages. There was a text from Jen that consisted of only a solitary question mark. I sent one back: ???
“Ready?” Julia said, returning to the table.
I slipped my phone back in my jacket pocket and got up.
Outside, it had cooled off a bit, but it was still warm enough that I wondered if I would start sweating again, and of course as soon as I thought that, I felt the first drop of sweat lingering in my hairline above my forehead.
It was a quarter past ten, and the traffic both on the street and on the sidewalk had thinned out considerably from the steady flow that had crowded the street on our way there.
Had it really been three hours? I was struck by the amount of time that had passed. It seemed to me that I’d been uncomfortable most of the evening. But had I? Was it just my own self-involvement that made me feel that way?
At the intersection of Broadway and Long Beach Boulevard, the little white silhouette was still telling us it was safe to cross, and I stepped down off the curb. Julia took my hand and said, “It’s going to change.”
She was right. It did.
“A little more?” Julia held up the bottle of wine. We were sitting on her couch, illuminated more by the city lights shining in the large window than by the single bulb of the lamp lit in the corner.
“Sure,” I said, still surprised to be inside with her. Riding up in the elevator and walking down the hallway toward her door and watching her feel her way to the keys in the bottom of her purse, I’d been rehearsing a goodnight in my head.
She never gave me a chance to use it.
There was no pause in her actions, no lull in the words, no window of opportunity. She took it for granted that I would come inside, and because of that, I did. “Sit down,” she’d said, looking at the couch. As I did, she found a bottle of red in the kitchen and brought it and two glasses with her and sat next to me on the couch. “I’m sorry.” She put her hand on my knee and I felt all of my anxiety coalesce deep in my gut. “I should have asked if you wanted something to drink.”
“Sure.” I tried to remember the last time I’d been less sure of anything than I was at that moment.
She said something and I said something back.
My arm was on the back of the couch behind her shoulders.
She touched my leg and said something else.
I think I answered her.
She looked in my eyes and then leaned in and kissed me. She pulled back just enough to look at me again. I don’t have any idea what she saw, but the corner of her mouth turned up and the outside edges of her eyes wrinkled and she kissed me again and didn’t stop.
I groped clumsily for her breast while she slid her hand alon
g the inside of my thigh. Before it got where it was going, everything let go.
She realized what had happened as soon as I did, and without even pausing to glance at the expression of slack-jawed embarrassment on my face, she pulled my head into her shoulder, held me, and whispered in my ear, “It’s okay,” her voice warm and tender.
If I could have, I would have hid my face in the crook of her neck for the next few hours, waited for her to fall asleep, and tried to sneak out. That wasn’t much of a plan, though.
I lifted my head, looked at her, and saw nothing but pleasant contentment and compassion in her eyes.
“Could you excuse me for a second?”
I fumbled my way into her bathroom, turned on the light, closed the door, and stared at the dark, wet spot in the crotch of my pants, wishing I’d worn my black suit.
After cleaning myself up the best I could, I sat on the toilet and tried to think of something to say to Julia. I thought about calling Jen and asking for advice. I thought about faking a murder callout from the watch commander. I thought about drowning myself in the bathtub. The process of elimination must have taken longer than I realized, because she surprised me by tapping gently on the door and saying, “You okay?”
“Yes,” I answered too quickly. “I’ll be right out.”
I stood up, looked at my withered face in the mirror, ran a hand through my hair trying to make it look a little bit less stupid, and decided what to do. We were both grown-ups. She was a generous and kind woman. We would sit back down on the couch and talk. We would finish our wine and before long we’d be comfortable and laughing and enjoying ourselves. It wouldn’t be awkward or embarrassing at all. It wouldn’t.
She was still standing by the couch, waiting for me to join her, with what might have been the kindest expression I’d ever seen and her hand held out for me.
All I had to do was cross the room and take her hand.
