Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  * * *

  Turning on the phone I am greeted by a home-screen picture of Kyle Littlejohn, Peter Zell’s nephew, in action on the ice, giant hockey mask covering his face, elbows jutted out to either side.

  Kid must be terrified, I think, and I close my eyes to the thought, blink it away. Stay on target. Stay focused.

  My first observation is that, within the three-month period covered by the list of “recent calls,” there have been two calls placed to the number listed as Sophia Littlejohn’s. One was last Sunday at 9:45 a.m., and it was twelve seconds long: just long enough for him to have gotten her voicemail or, say, for her to have answered, recognized his voice, and hung up. The second call, thirteen seconds, was on Monday, the day of his death, at 11:30 a.m.

  I’ve got my blue book out and I’m writing down these observations and reflections, the pencil scritching rapidly, in the background the burbling of my second pot of coffee.

  My second observation is that there have been seven conversations within that same three-month period, with the contact listed as “JTT.” Most were on Mondays, in the afternoon, perhaps making arrangements to go see that night’s Distant Pale Glimmers. The final call, incoming, lasting a minute and forty seconds, this past Monday at 1:15.

  Interesting—interesting—very interesting. Thank you again, Officer McConnell.

  It’s my third observation that really gets my heart pumping, that’s got me sitting here at the table with the phone in my hand, ignoring the eager beeping of the coffeemaker, staring at the screen, my mind rolling and gunning. Because there’s a number with no name assigned to it, to which Peter Zell had placed a twenty-two-second telephone call at ten o’clock on the night of his death.

  And a forty-two-second call at exactly ten o’clock the night before that.

  I scroll through the list again, my fingers dancing across the screen, faster and faster. Every night, the same number. Ten o’clock. Outgoing call. Call less than a minute long. Every single night.

  Peter Zell’s phone is getting service in my house, two bars, the same as me. I call the mystery number and it is picked up after two rings.

  “Hello?”

  The voice answers as if from within a haze, whispering, confused—which is totally understandable. You don’t get calls every day from a dead man’s cell phone.

  But I recognize her right away.

  “Ms. Eddes? It’s Detective Henry Palace, from the Concord Police Department. I’m afraid we’re going to need to chat again.”

  * * *

  She’s early, but I’m even earlier, and Ms. Eddes sees me waiting and comes right over. I half rise, the ghost of my father in the small ritual gesture of politeness, and she slides into her side of the booth. And then, before I am fully back in my seat, I tell her I appreciate her coming, and she’s got to tell me everything she knows about Peter Zell and the circumstances surrounding his death.

  “My goodness, Detective,” she says mildly, lifting up the thick glossy menu. “You don’t mess around.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  And I give it to her again, my whole tough-guy deadpan speech about how she’s got to tell me everything she knows. She lied to me before, left things out, and I’m trying to make it clear that such omissions will not be tolerated. Naomi Eddes looks back at me with raised eyebrows. She’s wearing dark red lipstick, her eyes are dark and wide. The white curve of her scalp.

  “And what if I don’t?” she says, looking down at her menu, untroubled. “If I don’t tell you everything, I mean.”

  “The thing is, you’re a material witness, Ms. Eddes.” I practiced this speech several times this morning, hoping I wouldn’t have to deliver it. “Given the information I now have, I mean the fact that your number is all over the victim’s phone …”

  I should have practiced more; this sort of tough-as-nails posturing is a lot easier with Victor France. “And given that you chose, last time we spoke, to keep that information to yourself. The fact is, I have cause to take you in.”

  “Take me in?”

  “Have you held. Under state statutes. Federal, also. Revised New Hampshire criminal code, section—” I pluck a sugar packet from the caddy in the center of the table. “I’d have to look up the section.”

  “Okay.” She nods solemnly. “Understood.” She smiles, and I exhale, but she’s not done. “Held for how long?”

  “For the …” I look down, look away. I give the bad news to the sugar packet. “Held for the rest of it.”

  “So, in other words, if I don’t start spilling everything right this second,” she says, “then you’ll throw me in a deep, dark dungeon and leave me there until Maia makes landfall and all the world is consumed in darkness. Is that it, Detective Palace?”

  I nod without speaking, look up and find her smiling still.

  “Well, Detective, I do not think you would do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think you have a little bit of a crush on me.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, I really don’t, but my hands are really doing a number on the crimped paper border of this sugar packet. Ruth-Ann comes over, fills my coffee, and takes Ms. Eddes’s order for an unsweetened iced tea. Ruth-Ann scowls at the little mound of sugar I’ve left on her table and heads back to the kitchen.

  “Ms. Eddes, on Monday morning you told me you weren’t that close to Peter Zell. It turns out this is not true.”

  She purses her lips, exhales.

  “Can we start with something else, please?” she says. “Aren’t you wondering why I’m bald?”

  “No.” I turn a page in my blue book and begin to recite. “ ‘Detective Palace: You’re Mr. Gompers’s executive assistant?’ ‘Ms. Eddes: Please. Secretary.’ ”

  “You wrote all that down?” She’s unwrapping her cutlery bundle, idly playing with her fork.

  “ ‘Detective Palace: Did you know the victim well?’ ‘Ms. Eddes: To be totally honest, I’m not sure I would have noticed him not being here. Like I said, we weren’t that close.’ ”

  I set down my book and lean forward across the table, lift the cutlery from her hands like a gentle parent. “If you weren’t that close, why did he call you every night, Ms. Eddes?”

  She takes her fork back. “Why don’t you need to ask me why I’m bald? Do you think I have cancer?”

  “No, ma’am.” I scratch my mustache. “I think, based on the length and curve of your eyelashes, that you have very long, thick hair. I think you decided that, with the world ending, it was no longer worth the time and trouble to deal with it. Style it and comb it and all that woman-type stuff.”

  She looks at me, rubs a palm across her scalp. “That’s very clever, Detective Palace.”

  “Thanks.” I nod. “Tell me about Peter Zell.”

  “Let’s order first.”

  “Ms. Eddes.”

  She raises her hands, palms up, imploring. “Please?”

  “All right. We’ll order first.”

  Because I know, now, that she’s going to talk. Whatever she’s holding back, she’s going to give it to me, I can feel it, it’s only a matter of time, and I’m starting to get this kind of powerful nervousness, a sweet humming anticipation against my ribs, like when you’re on a date and you know that there will be a goodnight kiss—maybe more than a kiss—and it’s just a matter of time.

  Eddes orders the BLT, and Ruth-Ann says, “Good choice, dear.” I get the three-egg omelet with whole wheat toast, and Ruth-Ann notes dryly that there are other kinds of food besides eggs.

  “So,” I say. “We’ve ordered.”

  “One more minute. Let’s talk about you. Who’s your favorite singer?”

  “Bob Dylan.”

  “Favorite book?”

  I take a sip of coffee. “Right now I’m reading Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

  “Yeah,” says Eddes. “But what’s your favorite?”

  “The Watchmen. It’s a graphic novel, from the eighties.
”

  “I know what it is.”

  “Why did Peter Zell call you every night at exactly ten p.m.?”

  “To make sure his watch was working.”

  “Ms. Eddes.”

  “He was a morphine addict.”

  “What?”

  I’m staring at the side of her face, she’s turned to look out the window, and I’m flabbergasted. It’s like she just said that Peter Zell was an Indian chief or a general in the Soviet army.

  “A morphine addict?”

  “Yeah. I think morphine. Some kind of opiate, for sure. But not now—not anymore—I mean, obviously, he’s dead now—but I mean—” She pauses, her fluency has deserted her, and she shakes her head, slows down. “For a period, last year, he was addicted to something, and then he quit.”

  She keeps talking, and I keep listening, writing down every word she says, even as some hungry part of my mind flies off into a corner, huddles with this new information—a morphine addict, some kind of opiate, for a period—and begins to chew on it, taste its marrow, decide how it might be digested. Decide if it’s true.

  “Zell was not inclined to outsize living, as you may have discovered,” says Eddes. “No booze. No dope. No cigarettes, even. Nothing.”

  “Right.”

  Peter played Dungeons & Dragons. Peter alphabetized his breakfast cereal. He arranged actuarial data into tables, analyzed it.

  “And then, last summer, with everything, I guess he felt like making a change.” She smiles grimly. “A new lifestyle choice. He’s telling me all this later, by the way. I wasn’t privy to his decision-making process when he started.”

  I write down last summer and lifestyle choice. Questions are bubbling up on my lips, but I force myself to stay silent, sit still, let her keep talking, now that at last she’s begun.

  “So, you know, apparently this dalliance in illicit substances, it didn’t go that well for him. Or, it went really well at first, and then really poorly. As it happens, you know?”

  I nod like I do know, but everything I know is from law-enforcement training materials and cop movies. Personally, I’m like Peter: a beer now and again, maybe. No pot, no smokes, no booze. My whole life. The skinny policeman-to-be at sixteen waiting in the restaurant with a paperback copy of Ender’s Game, his friends in the parking lot pulling hits off a purple ceramic head-shop bong and then sliding, giggling, back into the booth—this very booth. Not sure why. Just never been all that interested.

  Our food comes, and Eddes pauses to deconstruct her sandwich, making three small piles on her plate: vegetables over here, bread over there, bacon at the farthest edge of the plate. Inside I’m quivering, thinking about these new pieces of the puzzle that are falling from the sky, trying to grasp them and slide each falling brick into the place where it fits, like in that old video game.

  The asteroid. The shoebox.

  Morphine.

  J. T. Toussaint.

  12.375. Twelve point three seven five what?

  Pay attention, Henry, I tell myself. Listen. Follow where it goes. “Sometime in October, Peter stopped using.” Eddes is talking with her big eyes shut, her head tilted back.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay.”

  “But he was suffering.”

  “Withdrawing.”

  “Yeah. And trying to cover it up. And failing.”

  I’m writing, trying to piece together the timeline on all this. Old Gompers, his voice soaked in gin and stentorian malaise, explaining how Peter had flipped out at work, screamed at the girl. The asteroid costume. Halloween night.

  Eddes keeps talking. “Kicking morphine is not easy, is nearly impossible, in fact. So I volunteered to help the guy out. Told him he had to go home for a little bit, and I would help him.”

  “Okay …”

  A week? Gompers had said. Two weeks? I thought he was gone, but then he turned up again, no explanation, and he’s been the same as ever.

  “All I did was, I checked in with him on my way to work each day. Lunch, sometimes. Make sure he had everything he needed, bring him a fresh blanket, soup, whatever. He didn’t have any family. No friends.”

  By the week before Thanksgiving, she says, Peter was up and around, shaky on his feet but ready to go back to work, to insurance data.

  “And the phone calls every night?”

  “Well, nighttime’s the hard part, and he was alone. Each night he would call me to check in. So I knew he was okay, and so he knew there was someone waiting to hear his voice.”

  “Every night?”

  “I used to have a dog,” she says. “That was a lot more burdensome.”

  I’m thinking this over, wishing it rang entirely true.

  “Why did you say you weren’t that close?”

  “We weren’t. Before last fall, before all of this, we’d never actually spoken.”

  “So, why go to all this trouble for the guy?

  “I had to.” She looks down, looks away. “He was suffering.”

  “Yeah, but that’s an awful lot of time and effort. Especially now.”

  “Well, exactly.” Now she stops looking away; she stares at me, her eyes flashing, as if daring me to reject the possibility of such a far-fetched motive as simple human kindness. “Especially now.”

  “What about the bruises?”

  “Below his eye? I don’t know. Showed up two weeks ago, said he had fallen down some stairs.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  She shrugs. “Like I said …”

  “You weren’t that close.”

  “Yeah.”

  And here I’m feeling this strange and strong impulse to reach across the table, to take her hands in my own, to tell her it’s okay, that it’s all going to be okay. But I can’t do that, can I? It’s not okay. I can’t tell her it’s okay, because it’s not okay, and because I have one more question.

  “Naomi,” I say, and her eyes flicker in quick teasing recognition that I’ve never used her first name before. “What were you doing there that morning?”

  The spark dies in her eyes; her face tightens, pales. I wish I hadn’t asked. I wish we could just be sitting here, two people, order some dessert.

  “He used to talk about it. On the phone, at night, especially around December. He was done with the drugs, I really think he was, but he was still—he was not entirely happy. On the other hand, no one is. Entirely happy. How can we be?”

  “Yeah. So, but, he would talk about the McDonald’s?”

  She nods. “Yeah. He’d say, you know that place? If I was going to kill myself, that would be the place to do it. Just look at that place.” I don’t say anything. From elsewhere in the restaurant, spoons clinking of coffee cups. Other people’s melancholy conversation. “Anyway. As soon as he didn’t show up for work, I came over to that McDonald’s. I knew it. I knew he would be over there.”

  From Maurice’s radio in the kitchen come the opening chords of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

  “Hey,” says Naomi. “This is Dylan, isn’t it? You like this one?”

  “No. I only like the seventies Dylan and the post-1990s Dylan.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  I shrug. We listen for a minute. The song plays. She takes a bite of tomato.

  “My eyelashes, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  * * *

  It’s probably not true.

  Almost certainly, this woman is gulling me, misdirecting me for reasons still to be discovered.

  From all that I have learned, the idea of Peter Zell having experimented with hard drugs—not to mention having sought out and purchased drugs, given their current scarcity and extreme expense, and the severity of the penalties for such purchases under the post-Maia criminal codes—it all seems like a one-in-a-million chance. On the other hand, isn’t it so that even the one-in-a-million chance must be true one time, or there would be no chance at all? Everybody’s been saying that. Statisticians on television tal
k shows, scientists testifying before Congress, everyone trying to explain, everyone desperate for all of this to make some kind of sense. Yes, the odds were extremely unlikely. A statistical unlikelihood approaching zero. But the strong unlikelihood of a given event is moot once that event has nevertheless transpired.

  Anyway, I just don’t think she was lying. I don’t know why. I close my eyes and I can picture her telling me, her big dark eyes are steady and sad, she’s casting them down at her hands, her mouth is still and set, and I think for some insane reason that she was telling it straight.

  The question of Peter Zell and morphine rotates in a slow ellipse in my mind, drifting past the other new fact spinning around up there: Zell’s preoccupation with the McDonald’s as a site of suicide. So what, Detective? So he got murdered, and the murderer left him to be found, by coincidence, in the very same spot? What are the odds of that?

  It’s a different kind of snow right now, big fat drops falling slowly, almost one at a time, each adding its weight to the drifts in the parking lot.

  “You all right, Hank?” says Ruth-Ann, slipping the hundreds I’ve left on the table into her apron pocket without looking at them.

  “I don’t know.” I shake my head slowly, look out the window at the parking lot, lift my cup of coffee for one final sip. “I feel like I wasn’t made for these times.”

  “I don’t know, kid,” she says. “I think maybe you’re the only person who was.”

  * * *

  I wake up at four o’clock in the morning, wake from some abstract dream of clocks and hourglasses and gambling wheels, and I can’t fall back asleep, because suddenly I’ve got it, I’ve got one piece of it, I’ve got something.

  I get dressed, blazer and slacks, I put on coffee, I slide my department-issued semiautomatic pistol in its holster.

  The words are turning around in my head, in a long slow circle: what are the odds?

  There’s a lot to do when the day begins.

  I’ve got to call Wilentz. I’ve got to get over to Hazen Drive.

  I look at the moon, fat and bright and cold, and wait for daybreak.

  5.

  “Excuse me? Good morning. Hi. I need you to run a sample for me.”