The 37th Hour

by Jodi Compton

  A lot of people would have frowned, I suppose, but cop humor is frequently dark. It doesn’t affect the way you do your job.

  “You just wait,” Genevieve said. She was smiling, but she pointed a didactic, warning finger at me. “You wait until you’ve got a kid of your own. Then you’ll understand. You’ll want to go out to Edina and apologize on your hands and knees to that guy.”

  We worked awhile in silence. When I heard her roll open her desk drawer, I knew we were done for the day: she was taking out her purse. “You about ready?” she said. We didn’t always leave at the same time, but today, of course, I was driving her home.

  “Yeah,” I said, shifting and stretching in my chair.

  She closed her desk drawer with the heel of her hand. “As long as you’re driving me home, you want to stay for dinner?” she asked.

  “That sounds good,” I said, watching her stand and arrange her bright-red muffler over the nape of her neck, pulling the ends of her short, dark hair out over it. “I end up eating alone a lot these days. Shiloh’s been working late almost every day.” I stood, too.

  “That’s no good. Vincent was the same way when he was studying for the bar exam. I never saw him. Sometimes I was afraid Kam was going to start calling any tall black man she saw on the street ‘Daddy,’ ” said Genevieve, pulling her jacket on over the red scarf. “Anyway, let’s pick up Shiloh on the way.”

  “He won’t come,” I said as we headed for the elevators. “He’s working on the Eliot thing.”

  “Let me handle him,” Genevieve said.

  “Oh, right. Amaze me with your Shiloh-handling skills. No”- I took her arm-“we’re not going to the precinct.”

  Genevieve looked at me questioningly.

  “At this hour, I’ll bet you five bucks he’s up in the law library,” I told her.

  And he was, by himself, deep in his work. He looked up at both of us when we came to stand at his side.

  “Hey,” I said, laying one hand on the table.

  “Hey,” Shiloh said in return. He touched the back of my fingers with his, a gesture no one else in the library could have seen unless they were looking right at table level. “I’ll be home in about an hour and a half,” he said quietly. “Hey, Genevieve, how have you been?”

  “I’m good,” she said. “Sarah and I are taking you to St. Paul for dinner at my house.”

  “Can’t,” Shiloh said, not elaborating.

  “I already lost five dollars to your girlfriend, who bet me you’d be up here,” Genevieve said, even though my offhand remark hadn’t in any way been an actual wager. “So make it worth my while.”

  Shiloh glanced up at her, then took out his billfold and laid a five-dollar bill on the table. “Quit while you’re even,” he said, looking back down at his work, as if he expected her to go away.

  “Kamareia has something she wants to give to you guys,” Genevieve persisted.

  “What?” he asked her.

  “A photo, from the Christmas party, of the two of you,” she said.

  “Well, I’d hate for you to have to carry that in to work,” Shiloh said. “I know how heavy a Polaroid is.”

  Genevieve was silent.

  “This is important,” Shiloh said. “And you know I can’t work on it on my own time.”

  Genevieve sat on her heels so she could look up at him. “You’re working too hard,” she said softly. “You need to learn to throttle back, Shiloh.”

  When he still didn’t respond, she said, “We miss you.”

  Shiloh ran a hand through his hair. Then he said, “Who’s cooking, you or Kamareia?”

  “Kamareia. It’s your lucky night,” Genevieve said. She knew she’d won.

  It was around six-thirty when we pulled into her driveway. Downstairs, the interior of Gen’s house was dim, although a little bit of electric light was falling down the staircase from upstairs, along with the sound of a radio playing.

  Genevieve flipped on the lights, illuminating the empty, clean kitchen. Kamareia was nowhere to be seen. Genevieve frowned. “That’s odd, she told me she was going to start dinner around six.” She looked toward the staircase and the sound of the radio. “It sounds like she’s here.”

  Her perplexity was understandable: Kamareia was responsible, and she genuinely liked to cook. “It’s okay,” I reassured Genevieve. “We’re not starving. We’ll live.”

  Genevieve was looking up the staircase. “Let me see what’s going on,” she said.

  I leaned against the railing of the staircase, waiting, as Genevieve went up. I heard her knock on the door frame of her daughter’s room and not find her inside. Her voice, as she went through the other upstairs rooms, took on an increasingly questioning sound, but not quite worried.

  “Sarah.” Shiloh’s mild voice caught my attention. I turned to look at him, and he nodded toward the back of the house and the sliding glass door. The door was closed, but beyond that I saw footprints in the fresh snow.

  Genevieve’s house shared a kind of open backyard with the neighbors to the south, the Myers. There was no fence, so I could see straight across to the back of their house. And although I couldn’t see their front driveway, the bushes that lined it to the side were visible. Red lights flickered on them in a familiar pattern.

  Kamareia, I thought, and knew something was terribly wrong. It never occurred to me that it could have been one of the Myers who had been injured somehow, and Kam had gone over there to give assistance and call 911.

  The Myers weren’t at home. As in Genevieve’s house, the entire first floor was darkened, and all the noise and light was coming from the top of the stairs. I went up two steps at a time. On the landing was a two-foot-long section of pipe, splashed with blood. Streaks of blood on the floor, footprints of blood.

  Unlike the rest of the house, the bedroom was brightly lit. Electric light immersed the two EMTs, the phone that was tangled on the floor, and Kamareia, naked from the waist down, her thighs and lower legs smeared with red. There was a lot of blood on the floor. Too much. I thought of the pipe outside and knew she’d been beaten with it.

  I reversed so fast I nearly skidded on the hardwood floors and plunged back through the doorway. Genevieve was halfway up the stairs with Shiloh behind her. I met Shiloh’s eyes and shook my head quickly, just once, no. He took my meaning right away and caught Genevieve from behind, stopping her.

  I went back into the bedroom and knelt next to Kamareia. Her eyes, when I could bear to look at her face, were open, but I don’t know how well she saw me.

  “Stay back, please.” The paramedic’s voice was as clipped as her southern accent could allow.

  “I’m a friend of the family. Her mother’s here,” I told her. “If you can, get her covered up a little.”

  Outside, I heard Genevieve screaming at Shiloh to let her go. She’d seen the pipe and the bloodstains.

  “Maybe you should go take care of the mother,” the other EMT, a young man, suggested.

  Shiloh was having a hard time with her, to be sure. “Kamareia’s been hurt. I don’t know how bad,” I said sharply from the top of the stairs. “She can hear you. If you want to help, shut up and stay calm.”

  Gen kept trying to look past me, through the doorway, but she stopped yelling at Shiloh. He kept his grip on her shoulders anyway.

  “That’s good,” I told Genevieve. “You’ve got to be tough for her like you would for anyone else on the job.”

  “What happened to her?” Genevieve’s voice was high, foreign to me.

  That was when they brought Kamareia out. She was covered with a blanket, but her face said it all anyway. Her nose and mouth, under the oxygen mask, was a delta of drying blood; she’d obviously been hit several times in the face. Her blood was visible on the clothes of the EMTs and it made bright streaks on the pale latex gloves on their hands.

  Genevieve broke free of Shiloh’s grasp and touched her daughter’s face, then she put her hand to her own face like she was ready to pass out. Shilo
h pulled her back and eased her down to the floor.

  “Can you stay and take care of her?” I asked him.

  Shiloh had a bit more medical training than I did, from his days in Montana where the small-town cops did all kinds of emergency work, and he nodded. His eyes weren’t on me; they were on Kamareia, being carried away from us.

  I caught up with the paramedics outside. “I’ll go with you,” I said abruptly. The young man was in the back with Kamareia already; the woman was just about to close the doors.

  She gave me a sharp glance. Under her teased ash-blond hair and plucked eyebrows she had eyes as level and unshakable as any doctor’s. She was entirely in charge here, and no one likes to be told how to do their job.

  “I mean, I’d like to go with you,” I amended. “Her mother’s not functioning well enough to do it, but Kam needs someone with her.” I stepped a little closer. “And if you didn’t radio for a crime-scene unit already, you should do it on the way. We’ll need one here.”

  She understood then that I was a cop. “I will,” she said. “Get in.”

  The Evanses, the neighbors who had Genevieve’s key, were working people. I was fortunate, though: they had a college-age daughter living at home, and she was there when I got to Genevieve’s neighborhood, a peaceful street of tall, narrow homes. “This’ll probably take me fifteen minutes, maybe twenty,” I told the Evans girl.

  I thought I might have to hunt around, if the shoebox wasn’t in the spot Genevieve had suggested, or the photos weren’t in the shoebox.

  I stood for a moment on Genevieve’s front porch, thinking of February, then I slipped the key in and shot the dead bolt back.

  Inside, the house had the kind of clean stillness that greets you when you come home after a long absence. Gen had done a housecleaning before she’d left. I could see vacuum marks on the carpet, and a few fresh footprints. Those would be the tracks of the Evans girl, I thought. There were plants on the windowsill and the shelves, still green and full-leaved, and somebody had to be keeping them watered.

  The room looked bigger and emptier than I remembered. The last occasion on which I’d spent a lot of time here, there’d been a fat, bushy fir tree in the corner laced with colored lights, a happy and slightly drunk crowd of cops and probation officers around, and Kamareia had been taking pictures.

  Upstairs, I flipped on the lights in the room that used to be Kamareia’s. I’d never really been inside, but it was obvious that it was exactly as she’d kept it in life.

  The room was done in light shades: a peach down comforter on the twin bed, a blond wood desk. It was Standard Schoolgirl from Dayton-Hudson, except for Tupac Shakur glow-ering down from the wall.

  Kamareia had loved poetry, and unlike Shiloh she’d put thought into her bookshelf, organizing from the oldest, The Canterbury Tales, to the newest, a collection by poet Rita Dove. One volume, a collection of Maya Angelou’s work, was vaguely familiar to me. Its cover design was a bright patchwork of color, and I had a vivid, isolated memory of seeing it in Shiloh’s hands.

  I sat on my heels and pulled the book off the low bookshelf. Shiloh’s writing was on the inside front cover. TO KAMAREIA THE WORDSMITH, the simple inscription read.

  Her backpack from school sat on the floor next to the desk, looking as if it were ready to be picked up and hauled to class. It wasn’t what I had come for, but I sat on my heels next to it to see what was inside: a spiral notebook, a calculus text, Conversations with Amiri Baraka.

  They were likely the very things she had carried home from school the day she died; the backpack’s undisturbed contents testified to the abruptness with which Genevieve had closed the door on this room.

  Genevieve had known her daughter well. The shoebox was on the top shelf, and inside were several envelopes from the photomat. Each was dated. I found the one marked 12/27.

  Inside was a parade of candid shots, some of colleagues and friends of mine, some of strangers. Here was one of me, with Shiloh’s arm around my shoulder, his expression uncharacteristically unguarded.

  I took the photo of the two of us, and another of Shiloh standing with Genevieve by the cheerful, squat Christmas tree. It was a good picture, well lit. You could see his face clearly, and almost his whole body; it gave a good impression of his height.

  Replacing the photos, I put the shoebox back on its shelf, where Kamareia had kept it. Or as Genevieve had said, keeps. Keeps.

  Goddammit, I thought.

  I took the stairs two at a time on my way back down. I was ready to be gone.

  Darryl Hawkins, his wife, Virginia, and their 11-year-old daughter, Tamara, were the newest additions to our Northeast neighborhood. Darryl, a mail carrier in his late thirties who looked about ten years younger than that, had come across the street early on to admire the Nova. He owned a Mercury Cougar he was fixing up; we’d talked cars for about twenty minutes.

  Shiloh had noticed something else about our new neighbors: their dog. It looked like a black Lab/Rottweiler mix, and it lived on the end of a chain.

  The Hawkinses’ side gate was made of cyclone fencing. We could easily see through it to the backyard, and no matter what time of day or night, the dog was there at the end of its ten feet of chain. It got food and water and was brought inside in bad weather. But I’d never seen it walked, played with, or exercised.

  It bothered me, but not as much as it did Shiloh.

  “Well, at least he’s not beating the damn dog,” I pointed out. “And he doesn’t beat his wife, like the last guy who lived there.”

  “That’s not the way an animal’s supposed to live,” Shiloh said.

  “Sometimes you can’t help what other people do.”

  Shiloh had let it alone for a while. Then one afternoon I’d seen him sitting in the front windowsill, finishing an apple, watching something across the street. I followed his gaze and saw Darryl Hawkins waxing his dark-blue Cougar.

  “You’re thinking about the dog again, aren’t you?” I said.

  “He spends hours taking care of that damn car every weekend. The car’s not even alive.”

  “Let it go,” I advised.

  Instead, Shiloh pitched the apple core into the bushes and swung his legs off the windowsill, jumping down to our front yard.

  He was across the street for about fifteen minutes. Neither of them raised their voices; I would have heard it from where I was. But Darryl Hawkins’s posture became rigid early on, and he came to stand very close to Shiloh, and Shiloh held his ground. I saw anger in the line of his back, too. When he came back his eyes were dark.

  I didn’t ask what the two of them said to each other, but it put a permanent end to warm relations between our two houses. Virginia Hawkins avoided my eyes, embarrassed, when we passed in the market.

  When I returned from St. Paul, the blue Cougar was in the driveway.

  Darryl answered the door, still in his USPS uniform.

  “How have you been?” I asked.

  “All right,” he said. He didn’t smile.

  “I could use your help with something,” I told him.

  He didn’t invite me in, but he opened the screen door between us so that we were face-to-face.

  “You know my husband, Shiloh?” I said.

  “Huh,” Darryl said, almost a laugh, but without humor.

  “Have you seen him in the last few days?”

  “Seen him? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’m looking for him,” I said. “I haven’t seen him or heard from him in four days, and to the best of my knowledge no one else has, either.”

  Darryl raised his eyebrows. “He gone? That’s something. If it was you who wised up and left him, I could understand that.”

  “I didn’t come here to get flattered at Shiloh’s expense,” I said evenly. “And he hasn’t left me, he’s missing. I’m trying to find out when was the last time you saw him, if you saw anything strange going on at our house or in the neighborhood.”

  “I ain’t seen nothing in th
e neighborhood, except the usual.” Darryl leaned against the doorjamb. “Your man? I see him running all the time. I don’t even think about it anymore, so I can’t remember the last time.” He shrugged. “Now that you mention it, I ain’t seen him running in about a week.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Will you ask your wife and Tamara if they saw anything, and if they did, will you come over and let me know?”

  “Yeah, all right.” He half closed the screen door, then he said, “I didn’t know you two was married.”

  “We got married two months ago,” I said.

  “Huh,” he said. “Look, if I think of anything else I’ll let you know. Really.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  The rest of the interviews with our immediate neighbors were as unfruitful. No one could remember specifics, except that they’d seen him running from time to time, and no one had seen him running in the past few days.

  I showed the photograph around: to more neighbors, at businesses near our home, to kids on bikes, to adults walking home from work. “He looks familiar,” a few people said, peering at the photo. But no one could remember having seen him specifically on Saturday or Sunday.

  Ibrahim lifted a hand in greeting when I pushed open the swinging door to the Conoco. I waited for him to finish with a customer before I told him what I needed.

  Ibrahim nodded, eyes narrowing. “Mike was in here a few days ago. Maybe more than a few.” Ibrahim’s English was perfect. Only his accent gave away his childhood home, Alexandria.

  “Was it before last Sunday?” I asked.

  He rubbed his balding head in thought.

  “Try to remember something else that happened the same day, to set it apart,” I suggested.

  Recognition sparked in his eyes. “The fuel delivery was late that day. So it was Saturday.”

  “Did Shiloh come in before or after the delivery?” I asked.

  “Oh, before,” he said. “Maybe noon, one o’clock. I remember it now. He bought two sandwiches, an apple, and a bottle of water.”

  “Did he say anything that stands out to you?”

  Ibrahim shook his head. “He asked how I was, I asked after him. That’s all.”