Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  The chief clears his throat, and Paul leans back, happy to let him take over. “Son, listen. There is not a person in this building who does not want you here. We were proud to welcome you to the patrol division, and were it not for the present unusual circumstances—”

  “Sir, I was first in my class at the academy,” I say, aware that I am talking loudly and that I have interrupted Chief Ordler, but I can’t stop, I keep going. “I have a perfect attendance record, zero violations, zero citizen complaints pre- and post-Maia.”

  “Henry,” says the chief gently.

  “I am trusted implicitly, I believe, by Watch Command.”

  “Young man,” says Lieutenant Paul sharply, and holds up her hand. “I think you misunderstand the situation.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You’re not being fired, Palace. You’re being promoted.”

  Chief Ordler steps forward into a slant of sunlight from the small window. “We think that, given the circumstances and your particular talents, you’d be better off in a seat upstairs.”

  I gape at him. I scramble for and then recover the power of speech. “But department regulation says that an officer must put in two years and six months on patrol before becoming eligible for service in the detective unit.”

  “We’re going to waive that requirement,” Paul explains, folding up the incident report and dropping it in the trash. “I think we’ll also not bother with reclassifying your 401(k), just for the time being.”

  This is a joke, but I don’t laugh; it’s all I can do to stay upright. I’m trying to get oriented, trying to form words, thinking new times and thinking a seat upstairs and thinking this is not how it happens, in the dream.

  “Okay, Henry,” says Chief Ordler mildly. “That’s the end of the meeting.”

  * * *

  I learn later on that it’s Detective Harvey Telson whose spot I’m filling, Telson having taken an early retirement, gone “Bucket List” like many others were doing by this point, by December, heading off to do the things they’ve always wanted to do: speed around in race cars, experiment with long-suppressed romantic or sexual inclinations, track down the old bully and punch him in the face. Detective Telson, as it turns out, always wanted to race yachts. America’s Cup kind of stuff. A lucky break for me.

  Twenty-six days after the meeting in her office, two days after the asteroid emerged from conjunction with the Sun, Lieutenant Paul quit the force and moved to Las Vegas to be with her grown children.

  I don’t have the dream anymore, the one where Ordler lays my hand on the Bible and makes me a detective. There’s another dream that I’ve been having a lot instead.

  * * *

  Like Dotseth says, the cellular phones are getting dicey. You dial, you wait, sometimes you get through and sometimes not. A lot of people are convinced that Maia is bending Earth’s gravitational field, our magnets or ions, or something, but of course the asteroid, still 450 million kilometers away, is having no more effect on cellphone service than on the weather. Officer Wilentz, our tech guy, he explained it to me once: cellular service is chopped up into sectors—cells—and basically the sectors are dropping out, the cells are dying, one by one. The telecom companies are losing service people because they can’t pay them, because no one is paying their bill; they’re losing their executives to the Bucket List; they’re losing telephone poles to unrepaired storm damage, and they’re losing long stretches of wire to vandals and thieves. So the cells are dying. As for all the other stuff, the smartphone stuff, the apps and the gizmos, forget it.

  One of the five major carriers announced last week that it’s begun winding down its business, describing this fact in a newspaper advertisement as an act of generosity, a “gift of time” to the company’s 355,000 employees and their families, and warning customers to expect total suspension of service within the next two months. Three days ago, Culverson’s New York Times had the Department of Commerce predicting total collapse of telephony by late spring, with the administration supposedly crafting a plan to nationalize the industry.

  “Meaning,” McGully noted, chortling, “total collapse by early spring.”

  Sometimes, when I notice that I have a strong signal, I’ll make a call real quick, so as not to waste it.

  “Oh, man. Man oh man, what in hell do you want?”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. France. This is Detective Henry Palace, from the Concord Police Department.”

  “I know who it is, okay? I know who it is.”

  Victor France sounds riled, agitated; he always sounds like that. I’m sitting in the Impala outside Rollins Park now, a couple blocks from where Peter Zell used to live.

  “Come on, Mr. France. Take it easy, now.”

  “I don’t want to take it easy, okay? I hate your guts. I hate it when you call me, okay?” I hold the phone an inch or two away from my ear as France’s scattershot snarl pours from the earpiece. “I’m trying to live my life here, man. Is that such an awful and terrible thing, just to live my life?”

  I can picture him, the thug resplendent: loops of chain drooping from black jeans, skull-and-crossbones pinky ring, scrawny wrists and forearms crawling with several species of tattoo snakes. The rat-eyed face twisted with melodramatic outrage, having to answer the phone, take orders from a stuck-up egghead policeman like myself. But look, I mean, that’s what you get for being a drug dealer, and moreover for getting caught, at this juncture in American history. Victor may not know by heart the full text of the Impact Preparation Security and Stabilization Act, but he’s got the gist.

  “I don’t need much help today, Mr. France. A little research project, is all.”

  France blows out one last exasperated “oh man oh man,” and then he comes around, just like I knew he would. “All right, okay. All right, what is it?”

  “You know a little bit about cars, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Sure. I mean, what, Detective, what, you calling me to fill your tires?”

  “No, thank you. The last few weeks, people have started converting their cars to vegetable-oil engines.”

  “No shit. You seen gas prices lately?” He clears his throat noisily, spits.

  “I’m trying to find out who did one such conversion. It’s a midsize red pickup, a Ford. American flag painted on the side. You think you can handle that?”

  “Maybe. And what if I can’t?”

  I don’t answer. I don’t have to. France knows the answer.

  One of the most striking effects of the asteroid, from a law-enforcement perspective, has been the resulting spike in drug use and drug-related crime, with skyrocketing demand for every category of narcotic, for opiates, for Ecstasy, for methamphetamine, for cocaine in all its varieties. In small towns, in docile suburbs, farming communities, everywhere—even midsize cities like Concord, which had never experienced serious narcotics crime in the past. The federal government, after some tacking back and forth in the summer and fall, late last year resolved on a firm and uncompromising law-and-order stance. The IPSS Act incorporated provisions stripping the right of habeas corpus and other due-process protections from anyone accused of importing, processing, growing, or distributing controlled substances of all kinds.

  These measures were deemed necessary “in the interest of controlling violence, promoting stability, and encouraging productive economic activity in the time remaining before impact.”

  Personally, I do know the full text of the legislation.

  The car is off and the wipers are still, and I’m watching as gray blobs of snow build up in uneven slopes on the windshield.

  “All right, man, all right,” he says. “I’ll figure out who juiced the truck. Give me a week.”

  “I wish I could, Victor. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” He heaves an extravagant sigh. “Asshole.”

  The irony is, pot is the one exception. The use of marijuana has been decriminalized, in a so-far-unsuccessful effort to dampen demand for the harder and more societally des
tabilizing drugs. And the amount of marijuana I found on Victor France’s person was five grams, small enough that it could easily have been for his personal use, except that the way I discovered it was that he tried to sell it to me as I was walking home from the Somerset Diner on a Saturday afternoon. Whether to make an arrest, under those ambiguous circumstances, is at the discretion of the officer, and I have decided in France’s case not to exercise that discretion—conditionally.

  I could lock Victor France up for six months on Title VI, and he knows it, and so at last he emits a long, agitated noise, a sigh filled with gravel.

  Six months is hard time, when it’s all the time you’ve got left.

  “You know, a lot of cops are quitting,” says France. “Moving to Jamaica and so forth. Did you ever think about that, Palace?”

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  I hang up and put the phone in the glove box and start the car.

  No one is really sure—even those of us who have read the eight-hundred-page law from beginning to end, scored it and underlined it, done our best to keep current with the various amendments and codicils—not a hundred percent sure what the “Preparation” parts of IPSS are supposed to be, exactly. McGully likes to say that sometime around late September they’ll start handing out umbrellas.

  * * *

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh—I’m sorry. Is this—is this Belknap and Rose?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I have a request for you.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. Not a lot left in here. We been looted twice, and our wholesalers are basically AWOL. Want to come in and see what’s left, I’m here most days.”

  “No, excuse me, my name is Detective Henry Palace, with the Concord Police Department. Do you have copies of your register receipts from the last three months?”

  “What?”

  “If you do, I wonder if I could come down there and see them. I’m looking for the purchaser of one house-label belt, in black, size XXL.”

  “Is this a joke?

  “No, sir.”

  “I mean, are you joking?”

  “No, sir.”

  “All right, buddy.”

  “I’m investigating a suspicious death, and the information might be material.”

  “Alllll right, buddy.”

  “Hello?”

  * * *

  Peter Zell’s townhouse, 14 Matthew Street Extension, is a new building, cheap construction, with just four small rooms: living room and kitchen on the first floor, bedroom and bathroom upstairs. I linger on the threshold, recalling the relevant text from Criminal Investigation advising me to work slowly, divide the house into a grid, take each quadrant in its turn. Then the thought of the Farley and Leonard—my reflexive reliance on it—reminds me of Naomi Eddes: it sounds like you’re quoting from a textbook or something. I shake that off, run a hand over my mustache, and step inside.

  “Okay, Mr. Zell,” I say to the empty house. “Let’s have a look.”

  The first quadrant gives me precious little to work with. A thin beige carpet, an old coffee table with ring-shaped stains. A small but serviceable flat-screen TV, wires snaking up from a DVD player, a vase of chrysanthemums that turn out, on close inspection, to be made of fabric and wire.

  Most of Zell’s bookshelf space is given over to his professional interests: math, advanced math, ratios and probabilities, a thick history of actuarial accounting, binders from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Institutes of Health. Then he’s got one shelf where all the personal stuff sits, as if quarantined, all the nerdy sci-fi and fantasy stuff, Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series, vintage D&D rule-books, a book on the mythological and philosophical underpinnings of Star Wars. A small armada of spaceship miniatures is suspended from wires in the doorway to the kitchen, and I duck to avoid them.

  In the pantry are nine boxes of cereal, carefully alphabetized: Alpha-Bits, Cap’n Crunch, Cheerios, and so on. There is one empty slot in the neat row, like a missing tooth between the Frosted Flakes and the Golden Grahams, and my mind automatically fills in the missing box: Fruity Pebbles. A stray candy-pink grain confirms my hypothesis.

  “I like you, Peter Zell,” I say, carefully closing the pantry door. “You, I like.”

  Also in the kitchen, in an otherwise empty drawer beside the sink, is a pad of plain white paper, with writing on the top sheet that says, Dear Sophia.

  My heart catches on a beat, and I breathe and I pick up the pad, flip it over, rifle through the pages, but that’s all there is, one sheet of paper with the two words, Dear Sophia. The handwriting is precise, careful, and you can tell, you can feel that this was not a casual note Zell was writing, but an important document, or was meant to be.

  I tell myself to remain calm, because it could after all be nothing, though my mind is blazing with it, thinking that whether it’s the start of an aborted suicide note or not, it is definitely something.

  I tuck the pad into the pocket of my blazer, walk up the stairs, thinking, who is Sophia?

  The bedroom is like the living room, sterile and unornamented, the bed haphazardly made. A single framed print hangs over the bed, a signed still from the original Planet of the Apes film. In the closet hang three suits, all in dull shades of brown, and two threadbare brown belts. In a small, chipped-wood night table beside the bed, in the second drawer down, is a shoebox, wrapped tightly in duct tape, with the number 12.375 written on the outside in the same precise handwriting.

  “Twelve point three seven five,” I murmur. And then, “What is this?”

  I tuck the shoebox box under my arm and stand up, take a look at the one photograph in the room: it’s a small print in a cheap frame, a school picture of a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, thin yellow flyaway hair, gawky grin. I tug it from the frame and flip it over, find careful handwriting on the back. Kyle, February 10. Last year. Before.

  I use the CB to raise Trish McConnell.

  “Hey,” I say, “it’s me. Were you able to locate the victim’s family?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Zell’s mother is dead, as it turns out, buried here in Concord, up at Blossom Hill. The father is living at Pleasant View Retirement, suffering the opening phases of dementia. The person to whom McConnell delivered the bad news is Peter’s older sister, who works as a midwife at a private clinic near Concord Hospital. Married, one child, a son. Her name is Sophia.

  * * *

  On my way out, I stop again on the threshold of Peter Zell’s house, awkwardly carrying the shoebox and the photograph and the white notepad, feeling the weight of the case and balancing it against an ancient memory: a policeman standing in the doorway of my childhood home on Rockland Road, hatless and somber, calling, “Anybody home?” into the morning darkness.

  Me standing at the top of the stairs, in a Red Sox jersey, or it might have been a pajama top, thinking my sister is probably still asleep, hoping so anyway. I’ve already got a pretty good idea what the policeman’s there to say.

  * * *

  “Let me guess, Detective,” says Denny Dotseth, “We’ve got another 10-54S.”

  “Not a new one, actually. I wanted to touch base with you about Peter Zell.”

  I’m easing the Impala down Broadway, hands at ten and two. There’s a New Hampshire state trooper parked at Broadway and Stone, engine on, the blue lights slowly rotating on the roof, a machine gun clutched in his hand. I nod slightly, raise two fingers off the wheel, and he nods back.

  “Who’s Peter Zell?” says Dotseth.

  “The man from this morning, sir.”

  “Oh, right. Hey, you hear they named the big day? When we’ll know where she comes down, I mean. April 9.”

  “Yep. I heard.”

  Dotseth, like McGully, likes to keep up-to-date on every unfolding detail of our global catastrophe. At the last suicide scene, not Zell’s but the one before that, he talked excitedly for ten minutes about the war on the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian army swarmi
ng into Eritrea to avenge ancient grievances in the time remaining.

  “I thought it made sense to present you with what I’ve learned so far,” I say. “I know your impression from this morning, but I think this might be a homicide, I really do.”

  Dotseth murmurs, “Is that a fact?” and I take that as a go-ahead, give him my sense of the case thus far: The incident at Merrimack Life and Fire, on Halloween. The red pickup truck, burning vegetable oil, that took the victim away the night he died. My hunch on the belt from Belknap and Rose.

  All of this the assistant AG receives with a toneless “interesting,” and then he sighs and says, “What about a note?”

  “Uh, no. No note, sir.”

  I decide not to tell him about Dear Sophia, because I feel fairly certain that whatever that is, it is not an aborted suicide note—but Dotseth will think it was, he’ll say, “There you go, young man, you’re barking up the wrong tree.” Which he pretty clearly thinks I’m doing anyway.

  “You got some straws to grasp at there,” is what he says. “You’re not going to refer this case to Fenton, are you?”

  “I am, actually. I already did. Why?”

  There’s a pause, and then a low chuckle. “Oh, no reason.”

  “What?”

  “Hey, listen, kid. If you really think you can build a case, of course I’ll take a look. But don’t forget the context. People are killing themselves right and left, you know? For someone like the fella you’re describing, someone without a lot of friends, with no real support system, there’s a powerful social incentive to join the herd.”

  I keep my mouth shut, keep driving, but this line of reasoning I do not like. He did it because everyone else is doing it? It’s like Dotseth is accusing the victim of something: cowardice, perhaps, or mere faddishness, some color of weakness. Which, if in fact Peter Zell was murdered, murdered and dragged into a McDonald’s and left in that bathroom like meat, only adds insult to injury.

  “I’ll tell you what,” says Dotseth genially. “We’ll call it an attempted murder.”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “It’s a suicide, but you’re attempting to make it a murder. Have a great day, Detective.”