Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  “No shit, sister.”

  “Couple of the usual.”

  “Your wish, my command,” he says, and works fast, lining up two dainty ceramic demitasses, dunking a steamer wand in a stainless-steel jug of milk and flicking it on.

  “Best coffee in the world,” notes Alison.

  “What’s the five percent chance?” I ask, as the espresso machine rattles and hisses.

  Alison smiles faintly. “I knew you were going to say that.”

  “I’m just wondering.”

  “Henry,” says Alison, as the kid presents us with our two short cups of coffee. “Can I tell you something? You can follow this case forever, and you can discover all its secrets, you can build this man’s timeline all the way back to his birth, and the birth of his father and his father’s father. The world is still going to end.”

  “Yep. Yeah, I know.” We’ve settled in a corner of the ersatz coffee shop now, huddled at an old plastic card table the Coffee Doctor has set up. “But what’s the five percent chance, though, in your analysis?”

  She sighs, gives it to me again, that small gentle sarcastic eye roll.

  “The five percent is this: for this man Toussaint to attack you with the ashtray like that, to try and run for it? With three armed detectives in the room. That’s a Hail Mary. That’s a desperation play.”

  “McGully threatened to have him executed.”

  “In jest.”

  “He’s scared. He doesn’t know that.”

  “Sure, sure.” She tilts her head this way and that, considering. “But you’re threatening, at the same moment, to arrest him on a minor violation.”

  “For two weeks. Engine fraud. A token bid.”

  “Yes,” she says. “But even for a token bid, you’re going to search the house, right?”

  Alison pauses to sip her espresso. I leave mine alone, for now, staring at her. Oh, Palace, I’m thinking. Oh, Palace. Holy moly. Someone else comes into the cafe, a college-age girl; the Coffee Doctor says, “Greetings, human,” fires up his machine, and the girl tosses a bean into the cup marked EUROPE.

  “Still, five percent chance,” says Alison. “But you know what they say about odds.”

  “Yep.” I sip my espresso, which is, in fact, delicious. “Yep, yep, yep.”

  * * *

  I’m buzzing. I’m feeling it. The coffee, the morning. Five percent chance.

  Ninety-three north, fifty-five miles an hour, eight o’clock in the morning, no other cars on the road.

  Somewhere between Lowell and Lawrence my phone picks up three bars, and I call Nico, I wake her up, I give her the bad news: Derek got involved with something foolish, and he’s not getting out. I go easy on the details. I don’t use the word terrorist. I don’t tell her about the secret organization, I don’t tell her about the Moon. I just tell her what Alison said about the military-justice system right now: he’s got a label that means he’s not going anywhere.

  I’m sympathetic but clear: this is the way it is, and there’s nothing else to be done, and then I brace myself for her tearful or spiteful or furious rebuttal.

  Instead she is silent, and I lift the phone, making sure my bars haven’t disappeared. “Nico?”

  “Yeah. I’m here.”

  “So—do you understand?”

  I’m rolling north, steadily north, over the state line. Welcome to New Hampshire. Live Free or Die.

  “Yeah,” says Nico, a pause for the slow exhale of cigarette smoke. “I understand.”

  “Derek will mostly likely spend the rest of the time in that facility.”

  “Okay, Henry,” she says, like maybe now I’m rubbing it in. “I get it. How was it, seeing Alison?”

  “What?”

  “How does she look?”

  “Uh, good,” I say. “She looks really good.”

  And then somehow the conversation slips into a different key, and she’s telling me how much she always liked Alison, and we’re trading stories from old times: growing up, our first days at Grandfather’s, then later, sneaking around with dates in the basement. I’m rolling past the scenery, and for a while we’re talking like we used to talk, two kids, brother and sister, the real world.

  By the time Nico and I get off the phone, I’m almost home, I’m rolling into the southern part of the Concord metro area, and my cellphone signal is still strong, so I go ahead and put through one more call.

  “Mr. Dotseth?”

  “Hey, kid. I heard about Detective Andreas. Christ.”

  “I know. I know. Listen, I’m going to take another peek around.”

  “Peek around where?”

  “The house on Bow Bog Road? Where we tried to arrest a suspect yesterday in the hanger case?”

  “Yeah, good collar. Except where you shot the guy to death.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hey, did you hear about these goofballs in Henniker? Couple of kids riding one of those two-person bikes, trailing a rolling suitcase on a bungee cord. State police pull ’em over, the suitcase is full of escopetas—those little Mexican shotguns. We’re talking fifty thousand dollars’ worth of firearms these kids are biking around with.”

  “Huh.”

  “Today’s prices, anyway.”

  “Huh. So, Denny, I’m going to head back to that house now, give it another look.”

  “Which house is that?”

  * * *

  The crime-scene taping job that’s been done at J. T. Toussaint’s ugly little house is clumsy and haphazard. One thin strip of yellow cellophane, run in a series of slack fluttering U’s, from porch post to porch post, then to one of the sagging branches of the oak tree, then across the lawn to the flag of the mailbox. Tied loosely at each station, half slipping, wind teased, like it doesn’t matter, like it’s birthday party decoration.

  Supposedly, subsequent to yesterday’s gunplay, this house was secured and searched by a team of patrol officers, per procedure, but I have my doubts, based firstly on the lackluster nature of the crime-scene taping, secondly on the fact that, inside, nothing appears to have been moved. All of Toussaint’s battered and stained living-room furniture rests exactly where it did yesterday. It’s easy to imagine, say, Officer Michelson, enjoying an egg-and-sausage sandwich, strolling through the house’s four small rooms, lifting and dropping sofa cushions, peering in the refrigerator, yawning, calling it a day.

  Six thick patches of blood form a black and rust red archipelago across the carpeted floor of the living room and the hardwood of the front hallway. My blood, from my eye; Toussaint’s, from the cut on his forehead, from the multiple gunshot wounds that killed him.

  I step carefully over and around the blood, and then I stand at the center of the living room, turning in a slow circle, mentally dividing the house into quadrants, as Farley and Leonard recommend, and then I launch into a real search. I go through the house inch by inch, crawling on my belly when necessary, awkwardly shoehorning my body all the way under Toussaint’s bed. I dig a stepladder out of the cluttered closet and climb up to punch through the flimsy tiles of the ceiling, find nothing in the crawlspace but insulation fiber and ancient secret stockpiles of dust. I go through Toussaint’s bedroom closet carefully—looking for what, exactly? A rack of fancy leather belts, with one missing? A blueprint of the men’s room of the Main Street McDonald’s? I don’t know.

  Anyway—pants, shirts, overalls. Two pairs of boots. Nothing.

  A five percent chance is what Alison reckoned. Five percent.

  A small door beside the pantry opens onto a short flight of concrete stairs, no railing, a grim basement, a single lightbulb with a length of twine as a pull-cord. Opposite a massive dead boiler is the lair of the dog: a pillow bed, a collection of chewed-up rubber toys, a food bowl licked clean, another bowl with a quarter-inch puddle of dirty water.

  “Poor thing,” I say aloud, and then he appears, Houdini, as if conjured, standing at the top of the steps, a tiny scruffy mop-head of a dog, yellow teeth bared, eyes wide, white fu
r mottled gray.

  What am I supposed to do? I find some bacon and I cook it up, and then, while Houdini is eating, I sit at the kitchen table and I imagine Peter Zell sitting across from me, glasses off and set down beside him, eyes intent on his small delicate task, carefully sniffing up the crushed white interiors of a pain pill.

  And then there’s the loud bang of the front door slamming closed, and when I leap up my chair tips backward and hits the floor, a second bang, and Houdini looks up and barks and I’m running as fast as I can, through the house, flinging open the door and shouting, “Police!”

  Nothing, silence, white lawn, gray clouds.

  I sprint down to the road, lose and then gain my balance, sliding the last three feet as if on skis. “Police!” again, one way down the road, and then the other, breathing hard. Whoever it was is gone. They were here, in here with me this whole time, or they’ve slipped in and out again, looking for whatever it was I’m looking for, and now they’re gone.

  “Shoot,” I say quietly. I turn around and stare at the ground, trying to tell the intruder’s footprints in the snow and slush from my own. Big snowflakes are tumbling down, one at a time, as if they’ve agreed in advance to take turns. My heart slowly decelerates.

  Houdini is on the doorstep, licking his chops. Wants more food.

  Wait, now. I tilt my head, study the house and the tree and the lawn.

  “Wait.”

  If Houdini lives down there with the boiler, what’s in the doghouse?

  * * *

  The answer is simple: it’s pills. Pills and a whole lot of other stuff.

  Manila mailing envelopes crammed full with pill bottles, each bottle containing several dozen thirty- or sixty-milligram tablets, each tablet stamped with the name of the medication or the manufacturer. Most of the pills are MS Contin, but there are others: Oxycontin, Dilaudid, Lidocaine. Six of the thick mailing envelopes in total, hundreds of pills in each. There’s a small carton filled with small white wax papers; a pill crusher, the kind you get at the drug store; in another box, wrapped in a baggie, inside a paper bag from Market Basket, a snub-nose automatic pistol, which in today’s environment must be worth several thousand dollars. There are vials of dark-colored liquid and several dozen syringes wrapped individually in crinkly plastic packaging. In another Market Basket bag is cash, fat bricks of hundred-dollar bills.

  Two thousand. Three thousand.

  I stop counting after five thousand. My hands are trembling, so I can’t count it all, but it’s a lot.

  Then I limp back to the car again for a roll of crime-scene tape, and I wind it all the way around, secure it properly, tight and taut. Houdini trots along with me around the perimeter, and then stands next to me, panting, and I don’t invite him into the Impala, but I don’t stop him from getting in, either.

  * * *

  “Stretch. My brother. You’re never going to believe this.” McGully is at the window, it’s slightly cracked, there’s a sweet and heavy smell in the room. “So these jokers up in Henniker are on ten-speeds, they’re towing a rolling suitcase—”

  “I heard.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Ruin it.”

  “Are you smoking marijuana?”

  “A little bit, yeah, I am. It’s been a hard week. I shot a guy, remember? You want?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I tell him about my haul from Toussaint’s house, tell him how I’ve discovered that there’s more to the story, much more. He listens with glazed eyes, and occasionally he takes a deep pull from the tiny rolled-up twist of paper, blowing smoke out the crack in the window. Culverson is nowhere to be seen, Andreas’s desk is empty, computer monitor turned to face the wall, phone unplugged. It feels like it’s been empty for years.

  “So the scumbag was lying,” is McGully’s conclusion. “I could have told you that. He’s a drug dealer, he got his buddy hooked, and then his buddy killed himself.”

  “Well, except it’s true that Zell was the one who brought Toussaint drugs in the first place. He stole his sister’s prescription pad.”

  “Oh. Huh.” He grins, scratches his chin. “Oh, wait—you know what? Who gives a shit.”

  “Yep,” I say. “Good point.”

  “Whoa. Is that the fucking dog from the crime scene?”

  “Maybe …” I say, and McGully says, “Maybe what?” and now I’m pacing vigorously, the dog is pacing, too, in my footsteps. “Maybe what happens is, Peter brings Toussaint pills in June. They hang out, they get high, and then after Peter gets caught and quits, J. T. keeps it going. Maybe at some point he started selling the overflow, and now he’s gotten used to the cash, he’s put a customer base together. So he finds himself a new source.”

  “Yes!” says McGully exuberantly, and pounds his fist on the table. “Probably the same person who tried to murder you with your snow chains.”

  I look at him and he’s clearly making fun of me. I sit back down in my chair.

  No use telling McGully about the slamming front door back at the house on Bow Bog Road, because he will say I’m imagining things, or that it was a ghost, and I know that I am not, and it was not. Someone tried to stop me from finding those drugs, and it wasn’t J. T. Toussaint, because Toussaint is lying dead in the morgue in the basement of Concord Hospital.

  Houdini sniffs around under Andreas’s desk, settles in for a nap. My cell phone rings.

  “Hello? Detective Palace?”

  It’s Naomi Eddes, and she sounds nervous, and at the sound of her voice I feel nervous, too, like a kid.

  “Yep. This is me. Hi.”

  I can feel McGully looking at me, so I stand up from my desk, step over to the window.

  “What’s up?”

  “I just—” The phone crackles for a second, and my heart leaps in terror against the possibility that I’ve lost the connection.

  “Ms. Eddes?”

  “I’m here. I just—I thought of something that might be helpful to you, in your case.”

  2.

  “Good evening,” she says, and I say, “Good evening,” and then we spend a second or two looking at each other. Naomi Eddes is in a bright red dress with black buttons running down the center of it. I look terrible, I’m sure. I’m wishing now I had stopped to change from my day-at-the-office, my gray jacket and blue tie, to something more appropriate for dinner with a lady. Truth is, all my jackets are gray, all my ties are blue.

  Eddes lives in a neighborhood in Concord Heights, south of Airport Road, a new development where all the streets are named for fruits, and where the asteroid recession took hold halfway through construction. She’s on Pineapple, and everything from Kiwi moving westward is half finished: bare wooden frames like dug-up dinosaur bones, half-tiled roofs, vandalized interiors, never-used kitchens stripped for copper and brass.

  “You can’t come in,” she says, and steps out onto the front stoop, her peacoat draped over her arm, tugging a hat down over her bald head. It’s a kind of hat I’ve never seen before, a kind of girl-style trilby hat. “Place is a mess. Where are we going?”

  “You said—” she’s walking to my car, I follow her, slipping a little on a patch of black ice on the driveway, “—you said you might have information relevant to my case. To Peter’s death.”

  “I do,” she says. “I mean, I think I do. Not information. Just, like, an idea. What happened to your face?”

  “Long story.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good.”

  It’s true, my wounded eye has been fine all day, but as I’m saying the word no an intense pulse of pain seizes the right side of my face, radiating outward from the eyehole, as if the injury is punishing me for lying. I blink the good eye, endure a wave of nausea, and find Naomi standing at the shotgun door in an old-fashioned way, waiting for me to open it for her, and I do, and by the time I come around to my side and slide in, she’s reaching for the dashboard computer with fascination, almost but not quite touching the scree
n.

  “So, what is your idea?”

  “How does this work?”

  “It’s just a computer. You can keep track of where every other member of the force is, at any given time.”

  “What does WC stand for?”

  “Watch Commander. What’s the idea you had, about the case?”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Okay.”

  She’s looking out the window, or at her own ghostly reflection in the window glass. “Why don’t we talk about it at dinner?”

  Eddes vetoes the Somerset Diner out of hand, and basically what’s left are the bars and the pirated fast-food joints and the Panera. I’ve heard of a fine-dining place still open in Boston where the owners have bribed their way out of price controls, where you can get the whole white-tablecloth experience, but from what people say, it would cost all the money I’ve got left.

  Naomi and I end up at Mr. Chow’s, looking at each other over a pot of steaming jasmine tea across a grease-stained linoleum table.

  “So how’s it going?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, how would you say it, in cop language?” A small teasing smile. “What is the status of the case?”

  “Well, we did, actually, apprehend a suspect.”

  “You did? And how did that go?”

  “Fine.”

  I could tell her more, but I don’t. The suspect attacked me with a scale model of the New Hampshire state house. The suspect was a drug dealer, and either was supplying or was supplied by the victim. The suspect is dead. Ms. Eddes seems satisfied not to know, and anyway our food comes quickly, a massive lazy Susan laden with dumplings, soups, and cashew chicken. The words Chow! Chow! flash in pink neon on the window just past our table.

  “What was your idea about the case?”

  “You know what?

  “What?”

  I knew she was going to do this. Put it off, delay, elide. I feel oddly as if I know her so well.

  “Let’s have an hour.”

  “An hour?”

  “Henry, please, I really …”

  She looks at me with clear-eyed sincerity, her face washed of all her teasing swagger. I like it intensely, that clear-eyed face, her pale cheeks, the symmetry of her shaved head. “I know I called because I said I had something to tell you. But to tell you the truth, I was also thinking how much I would love to just, you know, just eat dinner with a human being.”