Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  “Sure.”

  “You know? Have a normal conversation. Eat dinner without talking about death.”

  “Sure,” I say again.

  “To the extent that this activity is still possible, I would like to try it.”

  “Sure.

  She lifts her wrist, slim and pale, undoes the little silver buckle of her watch, and places it on the table between us. “One hour of normalcy. Deal?”

  I reach out and let my hand rest for one moment, over hers.

  “Deal.”

  * * *

  And so we do, we sit there and we eat what is really pretty mediocre Chinese food and we speak about normal things.

  We talk about the world we grew up in, the strange old world from before, about music and movies and television shows from ten and fifteen years ago, ’N Sync and Beverly Hills, 90210 and The Real World and Titanic.

  Naomi Eddes, at it turns out, was born and raised in a suburb called Gaithersburg, in Maryland, what she calls America’s Least Remarkable State. Then she went to community college for a couple of semesters, dropped out to be the lead singer in a “terrible but well-meaning” punk-rock band, and then, when she figured out what she really wanted to do, she moved to New York City to finish her bachelor’s and get a master’s degree. I like hearing her talk when she gets going, there’s music in it.

  “What was it? What you really wanted to do?

  “Poetry.” She sips her tea. “I wanted to write poems, and not just in my little journal in my room. I wanted to write good poems, and publish them. Still do, in fact.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yes, sir. So, I got into school, went to New York, I waited tables, I saved my pennies. Ate ramen noodles. All the things you do. And I know what you’re thinking.

  “What’s that?”

  “All this, and now she works in insurance.”

  “Nope. Not what I’m thinking at all.”

  What I’m actually thinking, as I organize a tangle of thick noodles onto my chopsticks, is that this is the sort of person I’ve always admired: the person with a difficult goal who takes the necessary steps to achieve it. I mean, sure, it’s easy to do what you’ve always wanted to do, now.

  The little hand on Naomi’s watch makes its way around to the hour, and slips past it, and the lazy Susan gets empty, stray noodles and empty soy-sauce packets littering our plates like shed snakeskins, and now I’m telling her my whole story: my father the professor, my mother who worked at the police station, the whole bit, how they were killed when I was twelve years old.

  “They were both killed?” asks Naomi.

  “Yeah. Yep. Yeah.”

  She puts down her chopsticks, and I think, oh hell.

  I don’t know why I told the story. I lift the teapot, dribble out the dregs, Naomi is silent, and I cast about the room for our waitress, motioning with my hands at the empty pot.

  You tell a story like that, about your parents being killed, and people end up looking at you really closely, right in the eyes, advertising their empathy, when really what they’re doing is trying to peer into your soul, see what kind of marks and stains have been left on there. So I haven’t mentioned it to a new person in years—don’t mention it as a rule—I am not a fan of people having opinions about the whole thing—not a fan, generally, of people having opinions about me at all.

  Naomi Eddes, however, to her credit, when she speaks she just says, “Whoa.” There is no glimmer of scandalized fascination in her eyes, no attempt at “understanding.” Just that breathy and honest little syllable, whoa.

  “So, your parents are murdered, and you dedicate your life to fighting crime. Like Batman.”

  “Yep,” I say, and I smile at her, dip my last dumpling into a row-boat of ginger-scallion sauce. “Like Batman.”

  They come and clear away the lazy Susan and we go on talking, the neon flashing and flashing and finally flickering off, the ancient married couple who run Mr. Chow’s coming around with the long push brooms, just like in the movies, and then, at last, they lift the chairs around us onto the tables, and we go.

  * * *

  “Okay, Detective Palace. Do you know what a contestability clause is?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Well, it’s kind of interesting. Maybe not. You tell me.”

  Naomi adjusts herself in her folding beach chair, trying to get comfortable. I would apologize again for the fact that my living room has no proper furniture, just a set of beach chairs in a semicircle around a milk carton, except that I’ve already apologized repeatedly, and Naomi told me to stop.

  “The contestability clause in a life-insurance policy means that if a policy is taken out and the subject dies within two years, for any reason, the company gets to investigate the circumstances of death before paying out.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Do a lot of life-insurance policies have these clauses?”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Naomi. “They all do.”

  I refill her wine.

  “And are they being enforced?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Huh,” I say, scratching my mustache.

  “Tell you the truth, people with Merrimack policies are lucky,” says Naomi, “because a lot of the bigger companies are totally frozen shut; they’re not paying out at all. What Merrimack is saying is, yes, you can get your money, because we issued the policy and that was the deal, asteroid or no asteroid, basically. The big boss, in Omaha, has a Jesus thing, I believe.”

  “Right,” I say. “Right, right.” Houdini comes in, sniffs the floor, stares suspiciously at Naomi, and darts out again. I’ve made a bed for him in the bathroom, just an old sleeping bag I cut open, a bowl for water.

  “But the company line is, we’re going to make absolutely sure that we’re not being bilked, because a lot of people are cheating. I mean, what an easy way to get squared away until the end, right? Fake Mom’s death, big payday, off to the Bahamas. So that’s the policy, right now.”

  “What is?”

  “Investigate every claim. Every contestable claim, we’re contesting.”

  I stop, the wine bottle frozen in my hand, and suddenly I’m thinking, Palace, you dunce. You total dunce. Because I’m picturing the boss, pale jowly Gompers, settled in his big chair, telling me that Palace wasn’t doing actuarial work anymore at the time that he died. No one’s buying life insurance, so there’s no data to analyze, no tables of data to draw up. So Zell, like everyone else in that office, was working on clearing suspicious insurance claims.

  “It’s kind of harsh policy, when you think about it,” Naomi is saying, “for all the people who weren’t committing insurance fraud, whose husband or whoever really did kill himself, and now they’re going to wait an extra month, two months, for the cash? Brutal.”

  “Right, right,” I say, mind rolling, thinking about Peter, Peter in the McDonald’s, his eyes bugging out. All along the answer was right there. The first day of my investigation, the first witness I interviewed, it was laid at my feet.

  “What I’m wondering is,” Naomi says, and I’m right there with her, “I’m wondering if maybe Peter found out something, or he was close to finding out something.… I don’t know. It sounds silly. He stumbled into something, and it got him killed?”

  “Doesn’t sound silly at all.”

  Not at all. Motive. It sounds like motive. Palace, you total absolute dunce.

  “Okay,” I say to Naomi, sit down in the chair across from her. “Tell me more.”

  She does; she tells me more about the kinds of cases that Peter was working on, most likely, insurable-interest cases, where a policy isn’t taken out by a person on another person, but by an organization on a person. A company takes out a policy on its executive director, or its CEO, hedging the risk of financial calamity should that key individual die. I sit down to listen, but then it turns out it’s hard to pay attention while sitting down—given the wine, given the late hour, given the redness of Naomi’s lips and the pale lumine
scence of her scalp in the moonlight—so I get up, I’m pacing around the room, from the small television to the door of the kitchen, Naomi with her head craned back, watching me pace with an arch, amused expression.

  “Is this how you stay so thin?”

  “It helps,” I say. “I need to see what he was working on.”

  “Okay.”

  “His office—” I close my eyes, think back. “There was no inbox, no pile of active files.”

  “No,” says Naomi. “No, since we stopped using the computers, and everything was on paper. Gompers came up with this whole annoying system. Or maybe the regional office did, I don’t know. But every day, at the end of the day, what you’re working on goes back in the filing cabinets. You pick it up in the morning.”

  “Is it filed by worker?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would all of Peter’s files be together?”

  “Huh. You know—I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” I say, and I grin, my cheeks flushed, my eyes flashing. “I like this. This is good.”

  “What a funny person you are,” she says, and I sort of can’t believe that she’s real, she’s sitting in my house, on my crappy old beach chair in her red dress with the black buttons.

  “I do, I like this. Maybe I’ll make a midlife career change,” I say. “Try my luck in the insurance biz. I’ve got the rest of my life ahead of me, right?”

  Naomi doesn’t laugh. She stands up. “No. No. Not you. You’re a policeman through and through, Hank,” she says. She looks at me, right up at my face, and I stoop a little and look right back, I’m suddenly thinking to myself, fiercely, painfully, that this is it. I will never fall in love again. This will be the last time.

  “You’ll be standing there when the asteroid comes down, with one hand out, yelling, Stop! Police!”

  I don’t know what to say to that, I really don’t.

  I stoop a little, and she cranes her neck upward, and we kiss very slowly, as if we have all the time in the world. Halfway through the kiss the dog pads in, nuzzles against my leg, and I sort of gently kick him away. Naomi reaches up and puts a hand around my neck, her fingers drifting down beneath the collar of my shirt.

  When we’re done with the kiss, we kiss again, harder, an onrush of urgency, and when we pull apart again Naomi suggests that we go into the bedroom, and I apologize because I don’t have a real bed, just a mattress on the floor. I haven’t gotten around to buying one yet, and she asks how long I’ve been living here and I say five years.

  “You’re probably not ever going to get around to it, then,” she murmurs, pulling me to her, and I whisper, “You’re probably right,” pulling her down.

  * * *

  Much later, in the darkness, sleep starting to seep into our eyelids, I whisper to Naomi, “What kind of poetry?”

  “Villanelles,” she whispers in return, and I say I don’t know what that means.

  “A villanelle is a poem of nineteen lines,” she says, still hushed, murmuring into my neck. “Five tercets, each composed of three rhymed lines. And the first and last lines of the first tercet return over and over again, over the course of the poem, as the last line of each of the subsequent tercets.”

  “Okay,” I say, not really registering all of that, more focused on the soft electric presence of her lips on my neck.

  “It ends with a quatrain, which is four rhymed lines, with the second two lines of the quatrain again repeating the first and last lines of the first tercet.”

  “Oh,” I say, and then, “I’m going to need an example.”

  “There are a lot of really good ones.”

  “Tell me one of the ones you’re writing.”

  Her laugh is a small warm gust into my collarbone. “I’m only writing one, and it’s not done.”

  “You’re only writing one?”

  “One great one. Before October. That’s my plan.”

  “Oh.”

  We’re still and quiet then, for a moment.

  “Here,” she says. “I’ll tell you a famous one.”

  “I don’t want the famous one. I want yours.”

  “It’s by Dylan Thomas. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s been in the newspaper a lot lately.”

  I’m shaking my head. “I try not to read the papers too much.”

  “You’re a strange man, Detective Palace.”

  “People tell me that.”

  * * *

  At some point late, late at night, I drift awake and there’s Naomi standing in the doorframe, in only her underwear, slipping the red dress on over her head. She sees me watching and pauses, smiles, unembarrassed, and finishes dressing. I can see, even in the pale light from the hallway, that the lipstick is scrubbed from her lips. She looks shorn and lovely, like something newborn.

  “Naomi?”

  “Hey, Henry.” She closes her eyes. “Something.” Opens her eyes. “One more thing.”

  I make my hand a visor against the moonlight, trying to see her clearly. The bedsheets are scrunched up against my chest, my legs are spilling slightly over the edge of the mattress.

  She sits on the bed, down by my feet with her back to me.

  “Naomi?”

  “Forget it.”

  She shakes her head rapidly, stands again, speaks, a rush of words in the near darkness. “Henry, just know that no matter what else—no matter how this ends—this was all real and good and right.”

  “Well, sure,” I say. “Yeah. Yes.”

  “Real and good and right, and I won’t forget it,” she says. “Okay? No matter how it ends.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  She leans over me and kisses me hard on the lips, and she goes.

  3.

  “Palace.”

  “What?” I say, sitting up, looking around. “Hello?”

  I’m so used to being woken from a dream by the telephone that it takes me a moment to realize that I was dreaming not of Alison Koechner but of Naomi Eddes, and then it’s the next moment that I figure out that it was not a dream, not this time—Naomi was real, is real, and then I look around for her, and she’s gone. My shades are open, the winter sun is sending wavering yellow rectangles across the crumpled sheets on my old mattress, and there is a woman on my phone yelling at me.

  “Are you familiar with the current statutory penalties for impersonating a state official?”

  Oh, God. Oh, no. Fenton.

  “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

  The blood, the vial of blood. Hazen Road.

  “Well, I’ll quote them for you.”

  “Dr. Fenton.”

  “Impersonating a state official carries a sentence of ten to twenty-five years and is prosecuted under Title VI, meaning automatic imprisonment pending trial, which will never occur.”

  “I know that.”

  “The same penalty pertains for impeding a criminal investigation.”

  “Can I explain?”

  “No, thanks. But if you’re not at the morgue in twenty minutes, you’re going to jail.”

  I take two minutes to get dressed and two minutes to remove and replace the wad of paper towels over my eye. Before I close my front door, I take a look around: the beach chairs, the empty bottle of wine. No sign of Naomi’s clothes, of her pocketbook, her coat, no traces of her boot heels on the rug. No trace of her scent.

  It happened, though. Close my eyes and I can feel it, the trace of her finger tickling the back of my neck, drawing me in. No dream.

  Twenty minutes, Fenton said, and she was not kidding. I push the speed limit all the way to Concord Hospital.

  * * *

  Fenton is precisely as she was when I saw her last, alone with her rolling cart of medical equipment in the stark cold brightness of the morgue. The steel drawers with their gray handles, the strange sad locker room of the damned.

  I walk in and she looks at her watch. “Eighteen minutes and forty-five seconds.”

  “Dr. Fenton, I hope that you—I hope—listen—” There are te
ars in my voice, somehow, for some reason. I clear my throat. I am trying to formulate an explanation that will satisfy, trying to explain how I could have stolen blood and had it tested under false pretenses—how sure I was that this was a drugs case, how imperative it was to prove or disprove that Peter Zell was an addict—and of course now it doesn’t matter, turns out never to have mattered, it was about insurance claims, about insurance all along—and I am meanwhile melting under the combined effect of her glare and the brightness of the lights—and there, too, is Peter, she’s taken his body out of its drawer and laid it on the cold slab of the mortuary table, stone dead and staring straight up into the lights.

  “I’m sorry,” is all I can muster, at last. “I’m really sorry, Dr. Fenton.”

  “Yes.” Her face is neutral, impassive, behind the perfect O’s of her glasses. “Me, too.”

  “What?”

  “I said that I am also sorry, and if you think I’m going to say it a third time, you are deeply mistaken.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Fenton turns to her cart to pick up a single sheet of paper. “These are the results of the serology tests, and as you will see they have caused me to revise my understanding of the case.”

  “In what way?” I ask, trembling a little bit.

  “This man was murdered.”

  My mouth drops open, and I can’t help it, I am thinking the words and then I am saying them aloud. “I knew it. Oh, my God, I knew it all along.”

  Fenton pushes up her glasses slightly where they have slipped down the bridge of her nose and reads from the paper. “First. The bloodwork reveals not only a high blood-alcohol level but also alcohol in the stomach itself, which means he had done some heavy drinking in the hours before he died.”

  “I knew that,” I say. J. T. Toussaint, in our first interview: they went to see Distant Pale Glimmers. They had a bunch of beers.

  “Also present in the blood,” Fenton continues, “were significant traces of a controlled substance.”