Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  “What?”

  “To get Derek out of there—”

  “What?”

  “Nico says her brother has this plan, he gets her a car—”

  “Slow down—wait—”

  The rain is pounding.

  “And then Derek gets shot dead, and I barely get out of there, and when I get out she’s nowhere.”

  “I don’t know about any of this.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  A cold metal snap as he clicks off the safety. I yelp twice and clap my hands, and Mustache Man says, “Hey—” and then there’s a ferocious bark from the street side of the square, and he turns his head toward it, and I raise my hands and shove him hard in the face, and he stumbles backward and lands on his rear end. “Shit,” he says from the ground, and I draw my sidearm and aim, right down at his thick torso, but the sudden motion has thrown off my balance, and it’s dark and my face is soaked, I’m seeing double again, and I must be pointing the gun at the wrong man, because the kick comes out of nowhere—he swipes out with his feet and catches me in the heel, and I topple like a statue being pulled down with ropes. I roll over, look wildly around the plaza. Nothing. Silence. Rain.

  “Shoot,” I say, sitting up and drawing out my handkerchief and holding it up to my lip. Houdini comes over and stands in front of me, bouncing back and forth, growling tenderly, and I hold out my hand, let him sniff it.

  “He’s lying,” I tell the dog. Why would Nico have told some story about me having a prison-break plan? Where would Nico get a vehicle?

  The problem is, a person like this guy doesn’t have the brains to lie. A person who really thinks that the United States government somehow, over the last half decade, secretly constructed a warren of habitable bases on the dark side of the Moon, that we would have dedicated that level of resources toward mitigating the risk of a 1-in-250-million event.

  It’s weird, I think, struggling to my feet. My sister is too smart for this nonsense.

  I wipe my mouth on the back of my sleeve and start to lope back to the car.

  The thing is, she really is. She really is too smart for this nonsense.

  “Huh,” I say. “Huh.”

  * * *

  An hour later I’m down in Cambridge, in the sunken plaza across from Harvard Yard, where there’s a group of ragged college-age homeless kids in a drum circle, and a couple of hippies dancing, and a man selling paperback books from a shopping cart, and a woman in a halter top on a uni cycle, jugging bowling pins, singing “Que Sera Sera.” A very old woman in a silver pantsuit is smoking a marijuana cigarette, trading it back and forth with a black man in thrift-store fatigues. A drunk snores loudly, sprawled across the steps, his lower half soaked with urine. A Massachusetts state trooper keeps a wary eye on the scene, his big mirrored sunglasses propped atop his ranger-style hat. I nod at him, a fellow policeman’s nod, but he doesn’t nod back.

  I cross Mt. Auburn Street and find the little green kiosk with the boarded-up windows. I still have no idea where Alison Koechner works, and there is no one answering the phone at the old number, so this is all I’ve got: one place I know she goes a lot

  “Well, well,” says the Coffee Doctor in his hat and beard. “If it isn’t my old nemesis.”

  “I’m sorry?” I say, narrowing my eyes, looking around at the dark room, empty but for me and the kid. He puts his hands up, grins. “Just kidding, man. Just something I say.” He points at me with both hands, a big boisterous two-finger point. “You look like you could use a latte, friend.”

  “No, thank you. I need information.”

  “I don’t sell that. I sell coffee.”

  He bustles around behind his counter, swiftly and efficiently, inserting the conical base of the portable filter into the espresso machine and pulling it out again, a light ka-chunk. He levels off the ground beans, tamps them down.

  “I was in here a couple days ago.”

  “Okay,” he says, eyes on his machine. “If you say so.”

  The paper cups are still lined up along the counter, one for each continent, step right up and place your bets. North America has only one or two beans in there—Asia a handful—Africa a handful. Antarctica remains in the lead, overspilling with beans. Wishful thinking. As if the thing would just plow into the snow, snuff out like a candle.

  “I was here with a woman. About this tall, short red hair. Pretty.”

  He nods, pours milk from a carton into a metal jug. “Sure.” He sticks a wand into the jug, flicks a switch, it begins to foam. “Coffee Doctor remembers all.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “I don’t know her, but I see her a lot.”

  “Okay.”

  For a moment I lose my train of thought, entranced by the frothing of the milk, staring along with the Coffee Doctor into his jug, and then he flicks the thing off with a sharp, birdlike movement, exactly at the moment before it would have foamed over.

  “Ta-da.”

  “I need to leave her a message.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  The Coffee Doctor cocks an eyebrow. I massage my side, where the assailant’s gun barrel has left me with a patch of tenderness, just below the ribs.

  “Tell her that Henry was here.”

  “I can do that.”

  “And let her know that I need to see her.”

  “I can do that, too.” He lifts a white ceramic demitasse off a hook and fills it with espresso, layers in the foamed milk with a long-handled spoon. There’s a kind of genius at work here, a delicate sensibility being applied.

  “You didn’t always do this,” I say. “Coffee, I mean.”

  “No.” He keeps his eyes on his work, he’s got the demitasse cradled in his palm and he’s delicately jostling it, conjuring a pattern of dark coffee and cloudy foam. “I was a student of applied mathematics,” he says, and very lightly inclines his head to indicate Harvard, across the street. He looks up, beaming. “But you know what they say,” he concludes and presents me my latte, which bears a perfect and symmetrical oak leaf in milk foam. “There’s no future in it.”

  He’s smiling, and I’m supposed to laugh, but I don’t. My eye hurts. My lip is throbbing where I got punched.

  “So, you’ll let her know? That Henry was here?”

  “Yes, dude. I’ll tell her.”

  “And please tell her—” You know what? At this point, why not? “Tell her Palace needs to know what all this Jules Verne moon-shot hokum is covering up. Tell her I know there’s more to this, and I want to know who these people are, and what it is they want.”

  “Wow. See, now, that’s a message.”

  I’m pulling my wallet out of my pocket, and the Coffee Doctor reaches up and stills my hand.

  “No, no,” he says. “On the house. I gotta be honest, friend. You don’t look so good.”

  3.

  Detectives must consider all possibilities, consider and weigh each conceivable set of events that might have led to a crime, to determine which are most likely, which might prove to be true.

  When she was murdered, Naomi was looking for Peter’s insurable-interest files because she knew I was intrigued by them, and she was helping me in my investigation.

  When she was murdered, Naomi was looking for the files to hide them before I could find them.

  Someone shot her. A stranger? An accomplice? A friend?

  For one hour I’m driving back from Cambridge to Concord, an hour of dead highway and vandalized exit signs and deer standing tremulously along the lip of 93 North. I’m thinking about Naomi in the doorway of my bedroom, Monday night. The more I think of that moment, the more certain I become that whatever she had to tell me—whatever she started to say and then stopped—it was not merely sentimental or interpersonal. It was relevant to the mechanics of my ongoing investigation.

  But do you stand in the moonlight half-dressed and tell somebody one more thing about contestability clauses and insurable interest?

  It was something else, and I’ll never k
now what it was. But I want to.

  Normally, when I arrive at CPD headquarters on School Street, I park in the lot and enter through the back door that leads to the garage. This afternoon for some reason I go around to the front and use the main door, the public entrance, which I first walked through when I was four, maybe five years old. I say hey to Miriam, who works at the desk where my mother used to work, and I go upstairs to call Naomi Eddes’s family.

  Only thing is, now I’m up here, and the landline’s not working.

  No dial tone, no nothing. Dead plastic. I lift the cord, trace it back to the jack and then back to the desk, click the switch hook a few times. I look around the room, bite my lip. Everything is the same: the desks are in place, the piles of papers, filing cabinets, sandwich wrappers, soda cans, the wan winter light tilting in through the window. I travel around the room to Culverson’s desk, lift up his receiver. It’s the same: no dial tone, no life. I place the receiver back gently in the cradle.

  “Something’s fucked,” says Detective McGully, appearing in the doorway with his arms crossed, sleeves of his sweatshirt pushed up, cigar jabbing out of the side of his face. “Right?”

  “Well,” I say. “I can’t get a line.”

  “Tip of the fucking iceberg,” he growls, digging in the pockets of his sweatpants for a matchbox. “Something’s up, New Guy.”

  “Huh,” I say, but he is serious, dead serious—in all the time I’ve known him I’ve never seen an expression like this one on McGully’s face. I go over and take Andreas’s chair down off his desk, give his phone a try. Nothing. I can hear the Brush Cuts in the little coffee room two doors down, loud voices, someone guffawing, someone going, “So I say—I say—listen, wait.” Somewhere a door slams; footsteps are rushing this way and that way outside.

  “I ran into the chief when I came in this morning,” McGully says, wandering into the room, leaning against the wall by the radiator, “and I said, ‘hey, asshole,’ like I always do, and he just walked right past me. Like I was a ghost.”

  “Huh.”

  “Now there’s some kind of meeting going on in there. Ordler’s office. The chief, the DCO, the DCA. Plus a bunch of jerks I don’t recognize.” He puffs on the cigar. “In wraparound sunglasses.”

  “Sunglasses?”

  “Yeah,” he says, “sunglasses,” like it signifies something, but whatever the drift is I’m not catching it, and I’m only half listening, anyway. There’s a small tender swelling on the back of my head, where it slammed against the brick wall in Eagle Square this morning.

  “You mark my words, kid.” He points at me with his unlit cigar, gestures with it all around the room, like the Ghost of Christmas Future. “Something is going the fuck on.”

  * * *

  In the lobby of the main branch of the Concord Public Library is a neat display of classics, the greatest hits of the Western canon arranged in a tidy pyramid: The Odyssey, The Iliad, Aeschylus and Virgil providing the foundation, Shakespeare and Chaucer the second row, upward and forward in time all the way through The Sun also Rises at the capstone. No one has felt it necessary to provide a title for the display, although the theme is clearly things to read before you die. Somebody, maybe the same joker who put the R.E.M. song on heavy rotation on the Penuche’s jukebox, has slipped a paperback copy of On the Beach into this display, shoehorned between Middlemarch and Oliver Twist. I take it out and carry it over to Fiction and refile it before going down to the basement to find the reference section.

  This is what it must have meant to be a policeman in a predigital age, I’m thinking, enjoying the experience in a visceral way, digging out the fat phonebook for suburban Maryland, thumping it open along the spine, running my forefinger along the tiny columns of type, flipping through the tissue-thin pages for a name. Will there be policemen afterward, I do not know. No—there won’t—eventually, maybe—but not for a while.

  There are three listings for Eddes in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I carefully copy the numbers into my blue book and go back up to the lobby, past the Shakespeare and John Milton, to where they have an old-fashioned phone booth by the front entrance. There’s a line, and I wait for about ten minutes, gazing out the tall deco windows, my eyes resting on the skinny branches of a little gray musclewood tree outside the library entrance. I get in there, take a breath, and start dialing.

  Ron and Emily Eddes, on Maryland Avenue. No answer, no machine.

  Maria Eddes, Autumn Hill Place. She answers, but first of all she sounds very young and second she speaks only Spanish. I manage to ask her if she knows a Naomi Eddes, and she manages to reply no, she does not. I apologize and hang up.

  It’s drizzling out there again. I dial the last number and while it rings I watch a single lonesome ovular leaf, alone on the farthest reach of a twisting branch, get pelted by the raindrops.

  “Hello?”

  “William Eddes?”

  “Bill. Who’s this?”

  My teeth clench. I clutch my forehead with my palm. My stomach is a tight black knot.

  “Sir, are you related to a woman named Naomi Eddes?”

  The pause that follows is long and painful. This is her father.

  “Sir?” I say at last.

  “Who is this?” he says, his voice tight and cold and formal.

  “My name is Detective Henry Palace,” I say. “I’m a policeman, in Concord, New Hampshire.”

  He hangs up.

  The musclewood leaf, the one I was watching, is gone. I look and I think I can see where it landed, a black smear in the slush of the lawn. I call Bill Eddes back and I do not get an answer.

  There’s someone outside the phone booth, an agitated-looking old lady, bent over a small wire-frame shopping cart, the kind you get from the hardware store. I hold up one finger, smile apologetically, and I call Bill Eddes a third time, and I’m not surprised at all when there’s no answer, and that the phone abruptly stops ringing entirely. Naomi’s father, in his living room or kitchen, has yanked the phone from the wall. He’s slowly winding the slim gray cord around the phone, placing the phone on the shelf of a closet, like you put away something not to be thought of again.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” I say, holding open the door for the old lady with the cart, and she asks, “What happened to your face?” but I don’t answer. I’m leaving the library, I’m chewing on an end of my mustache, holding one hand over my heart, palming it, feeling it beat—holy moly—this is it—holy moly—hurrying, running now, through the sodden lawn and back to the car.

  * * *

  It’s such a small town, Concord, sixty square miles taking in all the outskirts, and to drive just from downtown to the hospital with no other cars on the road? Ten minutes, which is not time enough to figure it all out, but is time enough to be sure that I will figure it out, that I’ve got it, that I will solve this murder—these murders—two murders, one murderer.

  Here I am already, at the intersection of Langley Parkway and Route 9, looking up at Concord Hospital, where it sits like a child’s model of a castle on a hill, surrounded by its outbuildings and sprawling parking lots and office suites and clinics. The new wing, unfinished and never-to-be finished, piles of timber, panes of glass, frames of scaffolding hidden under tarps.

  I pull in, sit in the parking lot, drum my fingers on the wheel.

  Bill Eddes reacted how he did for a reason, and I know what the reason is.

  That fact implies a second fact, which leads me on to a third.

  It’s like you walk into a dark room, and there’s a sliver of pale light under a doorway on the opposite side. You open that door and it leads on to a second room, slightly brighter than the last, and there’s another door on the other side, with light under that one. And you keep going forward, one room after the other, more and more rooms, more and more light.

  There’s a bank of spherical lights over the main doors, and all were lit the last time I was here, and now two are out, and that’s just it. The world is decaying bit by bit, ever
y piece degrading at its own erratic rate, everything trembling and crumbling in advance, the terror of the coming devastation a devastation of its own, and each minor degradation has its consequences.

  There’s no volunteer behind the horseshoe desk in the lobby today, just a family sitting on the couches in a small anxious knot, a mom and a dad and a kid, and they look up as I walk past, as if I might have the bad news they’re waiting for. I nod apologetically and then I stand there, turning in all directions, trying to orient myself, looking for Elevator B.

  A nurse in scrubs rushes past me, stops at a doorway, mutters, “Oh, shoot,” and turns back the other way.

  I think I’ve figured out which way I’m going, and I take two steps and experience a pulse of intense pain from my bandaged eye. I gasp, raise my hand to it, shake it off, no time just now.

  The pain, because—what was it that Dr. Wilton told me while winding gauze around my head? The hospital is experiencing a shortage of palliative resources.

  Facts are connecting themselves, glowing to life in my memory and then connecting themselves, one to the other, forming pictures like constellations. But there is no joy, I feel no pleasure at all, because my face hurts, and my side where the gun barrel dug into it, the back of my head where it banged against the wall, and I’m thinking, Palace, you dunce. Because if I could just go back in time and see things clearer, see them correctly quicker, I would have solved the Zell case—and there would be no Eddes case. Naomi would not be dead at all.

  The elevator door slides open and I step inside.

  No one else gets on; it’s just me, the tall quiet policeman with one eye, running his fingers up and down the sign, like a blind man reading Braille, trying to read the answers off the sign.

  I ride it for a while, a few times up, a few times down. “Where,” I mutter to myself, “where could you be keeping it?” Because somewhere in this building is a place analogous to the doghouse at J. T. Toussaint’s, where presale product and ill-gotten gains are being hoarded. But a hospital is a place full of places—storerooms and surgeries, office suites and hallways—especially a hospital like this one, chaotic, chopped up, frozen midrenovation, it’s a place full of places.