Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  “Okay. Let’s—let’s just chat,” I say, and then my body is wracked by a long shiver, shaking off the last of the adrenaline high, the rush of the gunshots, of hurtling forward, charging through the muddy snow.

  Calm, Palace. Easy.

  “Mr. Toussaint, it seems as if the last time we spoke, you omitted a few details about your relationship with Peter Zell.”

  “Yeah,” says McGully curtly, shifting so that his full weight digs into the small of Toussaint’s back. “Asshole.”

  “Detective?” I murmur, trying to suggest take it easy without saying it in front of the suspect. He rolls his eyes at me.

  “So we were getting high,” says Toussaint. “Okay? We were getting fucked up. Me and Petey, we got high a few times.”

  “A few times,” I say.

  “Yeah. Okay?”

  I nod, slowly. “And why did you lie to me, J. T.?”

  “Why did he lie to you?” McGully asks, staring at me. “Because you’re a policeman, you dodo.”

  Culverson makes an amused noise from his place over by the mantel. I wish I were alone with J. T., in a room, just he and I, and he could tell me the story. Just two people talking.

  Toussaint looks up at me, his body immobile under McGully’s weight. “You come around here, you think the guy got killed.”

  “I said he was a suicide.”

  “Yeah, well, that was you lying,” he says. “No one is investigating suicides. Not now they’re not.”

  Culverson makes his amused noise again, and I look at him, at his wry face: it’s a good point. McGully taps out a fat turd of cigar ash on the suspect’s rug.

  Toussaint ignores them both, keeps his eyes on me, keeps talking. “You come here looking for a killer, and I tell you that Pete and me were taking fucking pain pills, you’re going to conclude that I’m the guy who killed him. Right?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  I’m thinking, pills. Popping pills. Small colorful capsules, waxy coating coming off in a sweaty palm. Trying to imagine it, my insurance man, the squalid details of abuse and addiction.

  “J. T.,” I start.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’m dead now either way. I’m done.”

  “Yup,” says McGully mirthfully, and I will him to shut up.

  Because I believe Toussaint. I do. There’s a part of me that really does believe him. He lied to me for the same reason that Victor France spent his precious hours snooping around Manchester Road to get me the information I needed—because nowadays every charge is serious. Every sentence is a death sentence. If he had explained his real relationship with Peter Zell, he would have gone to prison and not come out. But there’s still no reason to assume that he killed him.

  “McGully. Let him up.”

  “What?” says McGully sharply. “Absolutely not.”

  We both look to Culverson instinctively; we’re all the same rank, but he’s the grown-up in the room. Culverson nods minutely. McGully glowers, comes up out of his squat like a gorilla rising from the jungle floor, and steps pointedly on Toussaint’s fingers on his way to the ratty sofa. Toussaint struggles to his knees, and Culverson murmurs, “That’s far enough,” so I get down on my knees, too, so I can look into his eyes, and I give my voice a coaxing, sweet gentleness, somewhere in the vocal range of my mother.

  “Tell me what else.”

  Long silence. “He’s—” starts McGully, and I hold up one hand, eyes still on the suspect, and McGully shuts up.

  “Please, sir,” I say softly. “I just want to know the truth, Mr. Toussaint.

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “I know that,” and I mean it. In this instant, looking into his eyes, I don’t believe that he did kill him. “I just want to know the truth. You said pills. Where did you get the pills?”

  “I didn’t get them.” Toussaint looks at me, bewildered. “Peter brought ’em over.”

  “What?”

  “God’s truth,” he says, for he can see my skepticism. We’re down there on the floor, kneeling across from each other like two religious fanatics, a pair of penitents.

  “Dead serious,” says Toussaint. “Guy shows up on my doorstep with two pill bottles, MS Contins, sixty milligrams a pill, a hundred pills in each bottle. He says he’d like to ingest the drugs in a safe and effective manner.”

  “That’s what he said?” snorts McGully, settled in the easy chair, his sidearm trained on Toussaint.

  “Yes.”

  “Look at me,” I say. “Tell me what happened then.”

  “I said, sure, but let me split ’em with you.” He looks up, looks around, his narrowed eyes flashing with nervousness, defiance, pride. “Well, what the hell was I supposed to do? I worked my whole life—every day, since I got out of high school I worked. For the specific reason that my old man was a piece of shit, and I didn’t want to be my old man.”

  J. T. Toussaint’s massive frame is shaking with the force of expressing all this.

  “And then, out of the clear blue sky, this bullshit? An asteroid is coming, no one’s building anything, the quarry shuts down, and just like that I got no job, no prospects, nothing to do but wait to die. Two days later Peter Zell comes to my house with a handful of opiates? What would you do?”

  I look at him, his kneeling trembling frame, his giant head cast down at the rug. I look to Culverson, at the mantel, who shakes his head sadly. I become aware of a light high-pitching hum and look over at McGully on the sofa, his gun in his lap, pretending to play a little violin.

  “Okay, J. T.,” I say. “Then what happened?”

  It wasn’t hard for J. T. Toussaint to help Peter ingest morphine sulfate in a safe and effective manner, to circumvent the time-release mechanism and measure out the dosage to ration the share and minimize the risk of accidental overdose. He’d watched his father do it a million times with a million different kinds of pills: scrub off the wax, crush the tablet, measure it out, and place it under the tongue. When they were done, Peter got more.

  “He never told you where it came from?”

  “Nope.” A pause—a half-second hesitation—I stare into his eyes. “Really, man. This went on till, like, October. Wherever he was getting the shit, he ran out of it.” After October, says Toussaint, they’d still hang out, started going to see Distant Pale Glimmers together when that started up, grab a beer now and then after work. I’m thinking about all this, considering the raft of new details, trying to see what might be true.

  “And last Monday night?”

  “What?”

  “What happened on Monday night?”

  “Just like I told you, man. We went to the movie, we had a bunch of beer, and I left him there.”

  “And you’re sure?” I say gently, almost tenderly. “Sure that’s the whole story?”

  Silence. He looks at me, and he’s about to say something, I can see his mind working behind the rock-wall hardness of his face, he wants to tell me one thing more.

  “McGully,” I say. “What’s the mandatory on the waste-vehicle violation?”

  “Death,” says McGully, and Toussaint’s eyes go wide, and I shake my head.

  “Come on, Detective,” I say. “Seriously.”

  Culverson says, “Discretion.”

  “Okay,” I say, eyes back on Toussaint. “Okay. So, look, we’re going to bring you in. We have to. But I’ll make it so you do two weeks on the car.” I stand up, hands out to him, to pull him up. “A month maybe. Easy time.”

  And then McGully says, “Or we could shoot him right now.”

  “McGully—” I turn away from J. T. Toussaint for one second, to Culverson, trying to get him to get McGully to knock it off, and by the time I turn back to J. T. he’s in motion, launching himself up like a rocket and ramming his head into my chest, the massive weight of him like a sledge. I’m down, backward, and McGully is up and Culverson is in motion, guns drawn. Toussaint’s big hand has got that model of the New Hampshire state house, and now Culverson has hi
s gun out, too, but he’s not firing, and McGully isn’t either, because Toussaint is on top of me, and he comes right at my eye with that thing, its wicked golden steeple pointed down, and everything goes black.

  “Son of a bitch,” says McGully. Toussaint lets me go and I hear him thunder toward the door, and I shout, “Don’t,” blood gushing from my face, my hands up over my eyes. I shout, “Don’t shoot!” but it’s too late, everybody’s shooting, the bullets a series of hot rushes in the corner of my blindness, and I hear Toussaint scream and fall down.

  Houdini barking like crazy from the door by the kitchen, howling and woofing in grief and astonishment.

  * * *

  “Uh, yes, Detective? Excuse me? How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim?”

  These are the words ringing bitterly in the hollowed-out corners of my brain, as I’m lying here in the hospital, in pain. McGully’s sarcastic question back at headquarters, before we went over there.

  J. T. Toussaint is dead. McGully shot him three times, and Culverson shot him once, and he was dead by the time he arrived at Concord Hospital.

  My face hurts. I’m in a lot of pain. Maybe Toussaint went after me with the ashtray and tried to bolt because he murdered his friend Peter, but I don’t think so.

  I think he attacked me simply because he was afraid. There were too many cops in the room, and McGully was cracking wise and I tried to tell him otherwise, but he was afraid that if we took him in for the stupid engine violation, he would rot in prison until October 3. He took a calculated risk, just like Peter did, and he lost.

  McGully shot him three times, and Culverson shot him once, and now he’s dead.

  “A quarter of an inch higher and your eyeball would have exploded,” says the doctor, a young woman with a high blonde ponytail and sneakers and the cuffs of her white doctor’s coat rolled up.

  “Okay,” I say.

  She secures a thick pad of gauze over my right eyeball with surgical tape.

  “It’s called an orbital floor fracture,” she says, “and it’s going to cause some numbing of the cheek.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “As well as mild to severe diplopia.”

  “Okay.”

  “Diplopia means double vision.”

  “Oh.”

  Through all of this, the question is still rolling around in my head: How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim?

  Unfortunately, I think I know the answer. I wish I didn’t, but I do.

  My doctor keeps apologizing, for her lack of experience, for the lightbulbs that have burned out and not been replaced in this emergency room, for the overall shortage of palliative resources. She looks about nine years old, and she has not technically finished her residency. I tell her it’s okay, I understand. Her name is Susan Wilton.

  “Dr. Wilton,” I say while she’s drawing the silken thread in and out of my cheek, wincing with each pull, as if she’s stitching her own face, not mine. “Dr. Wilton, would you ever kill yourself?”

  “No,” she says. “Well—maybe. If I knew I was going to be miserable the whole rest of the time. But I’m not. I like my life, you know? If I was someone who was really miserable already—you know?—then it would be like, why sit around and wait for it?”

  “Right,” I say. “Right.” I keep my face steady while Dr. Wilton sews me up.

  There’s only one mystery left. If Toussaint was telling the truth, and I think he was, and Peter was the one who supplied the pills, where did he get them?

  That’s the last part of the mystery, and I think I know the solution to that, too.

  * * *

  Sophia Littlejohn looks uncannily like her brother, even peering through the crack between the door and the doorjamb, staring at me under the chain. She’s got the same small chin and large nose and wide forehead, even the same unfashionable style of eyeglasses. Her hair is cut short, too, boyish, sticking out here and there, just like his.

  “Yes?” she says. She’s staring at me just like I’m staring at her, and I remember that we’ve never met, and what I must look like: the fat wad of gauze that Dr. Wilton has taped over my eye, the bruise radiating out around it, brown and pink and puffy.

  “It’s Detective Henry Palace, ma’am, from the Concord Police Department,” I say. “I’m afraid that we—” but the door is already closing, and then there’s the quiet tinkle of the chain unlatching, and then the door opens again.

  “All right,” she says, nodding stoically, as though this day has been coming, she knew it was coming. “Okay.”

  She takes my coat and gestures me into the same overstuffed blue easy chair I sat in during my last visit, and I’m getting out my notebook and she’s explaining that her husband isn’t home, he’s working late, one of them is always working late these days. Erik Littlejohn’s semioccasional nondenominational worship service is now happening every night, and so many hospital staff are attending that he closed the little chapel in the basement and took over an auditorium upstairs. Sophia is talking just to talk, that’s clear, one last goal-line effort to avoid this conversation, and what I’m thinking is that these are what Peter’s eyes must have looked like, when he was alive: careful, analytical, calculating, a little sad.

  I smile, I shift in the chair, I let her trail off, and then I can ask my question, which is really more of a declarative statement than a question. “You gave him your prescription pad.”

  She looks down at the rug, an endless row of small delicate paisleys, then up at me again. “He stole it.”

  “Ah,” I say. “Okay.”

  I was in the hospital with my injured face, thinking about this question for an hour before the possibility had occurred to me, and I still wasn’t sure. I had to ask my friend Dr. Wilton, who had to look it up: can midwives prescribe?

  Turns out, they can.

  “I should have told you sooner, and I’m sorry,” she says quietly.

  Outside the French door connecting the living room to the outdoors, I can see Kyle with another kid, both of them in snow suits and boots, goofing around with a telescope in the otherworldly brightness of the backyard floodlights. Last spring, with odds of impact in the single digits, there was a vogue for astronomy, everyone suddenly interested in the names of the planets, their orbits, their distances from one another. Like how, after September 11, everybody learned the provinces of Afghanistan, the difference between Shiite and Sunni. Kyle and his buddy have repurposed the telescope as a sword, are taking turns knighting each other, kneeling, giggling in the early-evening moonlight.

  “It was June. Early June,” begins Sophia, and I turn back to her. “Peter called me out of the blue, said he’d like to have lunch. I said that sounded nice.”

  “You ate in your office.”

  “Yes,” she says. “That’s right.”

  They ate and caught up and had a wonderful conversation, brother and sister. Talked about movies they’d seen as kids, about their parents, about growing up.

  “Just, you know, stuff. Family stuff.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It all felt really nice. That’s probably what hurt me the most, Detective, when I figured it out, what he had really been up to. We were never very close, Peter and I. Him calling me that way, just out of nowhere? I remember thinking, when this craziness is over, maybe we’ll be friends. Like brothers and sisters are supposed to be.”

  She reaches up and dabs a tear from her eye.

  “The odds were still really low then. You could still think like that, when this is all over.”

  I wait patiently. My blue book is open, balanced on my lap.

  “Anyway,” she says. “I write prescriptions only rarely. Our practice is largely holistic, and any drugs that do come into play, it’s during labor and delivery, not by prescription during the course of pregnancy.”

  So it was many weeks before Sophia Littlejohn realized that one of her prescription pads had gone missing from the stack in the top-right draw
er of her office desk. And more weeks before she pieced it together that her timid brother had stolen it during their pleasant reunion lunch. She pauses during this portion of the story, looks up at the ceiling, shakes her head with self-recrimination; and I am picturing Peter the mild-mannered insurance man in his moment of bravado—he’s made his fateful decision—Maia having crossed the 12.375 threshold—summoning the nerve, his sister gone momentarily from her office, to the bathroom or on some small errand—nervous, a bead of sweat slipping down from his forehead under his glasses—lifting himself from his chair, sliding open the top drawer of the desk—

  Kyle and the friend scream with laughter outside. I keep my eyes on Sophia.

  “So then, in October, you figured it out.”

  “Right,” she says, glances up briefly but doesn’t bother to wonder how I know. “And I was furious. I mean, Jesus Christ, we’re still human beings, aren’t we? We can’t just behave like human beings until it’s over?” There’s real anger in her voice. She shakes her head bitterly. “It sounds ridiculous, I know.”

  “No, ma’am,” I say. “Not ridiculous at all.”

  “I confronted Peter, and he admitted to taking them, and that was that. I haven’t—I’m sorry to say, I haven’t spoken to him since.”

  I’m nodding. I was right. Bully for me. Time to go. But I have to know it all. I have to.

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this before, why didn’t you return my calls—”

  “Well, it was a … I made a practical decision. I just—decided—” she begins, and then Erik Littlejohn says, “Sweetheart,” from the doorway.

  He’s standing on the threshold, has been standing there who knows how long, snow falling gently all around him. “No.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. Hello, again, Detective.” He steps in, snowflakes melting to water on the leather shoulders of his coat. “I told her to lie. And if there are consequences, they should fall on me.”

  “I don’t think there have to be any consequences. I just want to know the truth.”

  “Okay. Well, the truth is, I saw no reason to tell you about Peter’s theft and drug abuse, and I told Sophia that.”

  “We made the decision together.”