Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  At last I call it quits and get off in the basement and find Dr. Fenton in her office, down a short hallway from the morgue, a small and immaculate office decorated with fresh flowers and family pictures and a print of Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Bolshoi Ballet, 1973.

  Fenton looks surprised and not pleased to see me, like I’m a garden pest, a raccoon maybe, she thought she was rid of.

  “What?”

  I tell her what I need done and ask her how long that takes, typically. She scowls, and says, “Typically?” like the word no longer has meaning, but I say, “Yes, typically.”

  “Typically, between ten days and three weeks,” she says. “Although, the Hazen Drive staff being what it is, at present, I imagine it would be more like four to six weeks.”

  “Okay—well—can you do it by the morning?” I ask, and I’m waiting for the scornful bray of laughter, bracing myself, thinking how I’m going to beg for it.

  But she takes off her glasses, gets up from her chair, and looks at me carefully. “Why are you trying so hard to solve this murder?”

  “I mean—” I hold up my hands. “Because it’s unsolved.”

  “Okay,” she says, and tells me she’ll do it, as long as I promise never to call her or seek her out again, for any reason, forever.

  And then, on my way back to the elevator, I find it, the place I was looking for, and I gasp, my jaw drops open and I literally gasp, and I say, “Oh, my God,” my voice echoing down the concrete basement hallway, and then I turn and run back to ask Fenton for one more thing.

  * * *

  My cell phone isn’t working. No bars. No service. It’s getting worse.

  I can picture them in my mind: untended cell towers tilting over slowly and then falling, connecting cables drooping, dead.

  I drive back to the library, put quarters in the meter. I wait in line for the phone booth, and when it’s my turn I reach Officer McConnell at home.

  “Oh, hey, Palace,” she says. “You work upstairs. You want to tell me what on earth is going on over there? With the chiefs?”

  “I don’t know.” Mysterious men in sunglasses. McGully, something’s fucked. “I need your help with something, Officer. Do you have any clothes that aren’t pants?”

  “What?”

  McConnell writes down where she’s supposed to go and when, where Dr. Fenton will meet her in the morning. There’s a line forming outside the phone booth. The old lady with the wire cart from the hardware store is back, waving her arms at me, like, hello, and behind her is a businessman type in a brown suit, with a briefcase, and a mom with twin girls. I flash my badge through the glass of the phone booth and duck down, trying to arrange myself comfortably in this tiny wooden room.

  I raise Detective Culverson on the CB and I tell him that I solved the case.

  “You mean, your hanger?”

  “Yeah. And your case, too. Eddes.”

  “What?”

  “Your case, too,” I say. “Same killer.”

  I run over the whole thing for him, and then there’s a long pause, radio crackling in the silence, and he says that’s quite a lot of police work I’ve been doing.

  “Yeah.”

  He says the same thing I said to McConnell last week: “You’re going to be a great detective one day.”

  “Yep,” I say. “Right.”

  “Are you coming back to headquarters?”

  “No,” I say. “Not today.”

  “Good,” he says. “Don’t.”

  4.

  Even in the most quiescent policing environments, there is that occasional violent and random incident, where someone is murdered for no good reason in broad daylight on a busy street or in a parking lot.

  The entire Concord Police Department was on hand for my mother’s funeral, and they all rose and stood at attention as the coffin was carried in—fourteen staff members and eighty-six officers in their uniform blues, stiff as statues, saluting. Rebecca Forman, the force’s certified public accountant, a sturdy middle-aged lady with salt-and-pepper hair, seventy-four years old, dissolved into sobs and had to be escorted out. The only person who remained seated was Professor Temple Palace, my father; he sat slackly in his pew throughout the short service, dull-eyed, eyes staring straight ahead, like a man waiting for a bus, his twelve-year-old son and six-year-old daughter standing wide-eyed on either side of him. He sat there, just sort of slumped against my hip, looking more perplexed than grief-stricken, and you could tell right there—I could tell—he wasn’t going to make it.

  I am sure that in retrospect what was hard for my father the English professor was not just the simple fact of her death, but the irony: that his wife, who sat from nine to five Monday through Friday behind bulletproof glass in a police station, should be shot through the heart by a thief in the T.J. Maxx parking lot on a Saturday afternoon.

  Just to give you a sense of how low the crime rate was in Concord at that time: in the year in question, 1997, according to FBI records, my mother was the only person killed. Which means that, retrospectively, my mother’s odds of falling victim to a murderer in Concord, in that year, came in at one in forty thousand.

  But that’s how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point, or it wouldn’t be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.

  After the wake, my father looked at the kitchen, his glasses sitting on his nose, his eyes large and confused, and said to his children, “Well, now, what are we going to do for dinner?” and he meant not just tonight but forever. I smiled uneasily at Nico. The clock was ticking. He wasn’t going to make it.

  Professor Palace slept on the sofa, unable to go up there and deal with the fact of my mother’s absence from the bed, with going through her closet full of things. I did all that. I packed up her dresses.

  The other thing I did was hang around the police station a lot, asked the young detective leading the investigation to please let me know how it was going, and Culverson did: he called me when they had analyzed the footprints lifted from the gravel of the T.J. Maxx parking lot; he called when they located the vehicle identified by witnesses, a silver Toyota Tercel subsequently abandoned in Montpelier. When the suspect was in custody, Detective Culverson stopped by the house, laid out the files for me on the kitchen table and walked me through the case, the chain of evidence. He let me see everything except the photographs of the corpse.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said to Culverson, my father leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, pale, tired, mumbling “thank you” also. In my memory Culverson says, “Just doing my job,” but I have my doubts whether he really would have said something so cliché. My memory is cloudy—it was a difficult time.

  On June 10 of that same year they found my father’s body in his office at St. Anselm’s, where he had hung himself with the window cord.

  I should have told Naomi the whole story, about my parents, the truth of it, but I didn’t, and now she’s dead and I never will.

  5.

  It’s a beautiful morning, and there’s something galling about it, how suddenly, just like that, the winter ends and springtime begins—rivulets of snowmelt and twists of green grass pushing up from under the rapidly thinning layer of snow in the farmland outside my kitchen window. This is going to be trouble, just in terms of law enforcement. It will work like black magic on the public spirit, this new season, the dawn of the last springtime we’re going to get. We can expect a ratcheting up of desperation, fresh waves of anxiety and terror and anticipatory grief.

  Fenton said that if she could pull it off, she would call me at nine o’clock with her report. It’s 8:54.

  I don’t really need Fenton’s report. Don’t need the confirmation, I mean. I’m right, and I know I’m right. I know that I’ve got it. It’ll help though. It’ll be necessary in court.

  I watch one perfect white cloud drift across the blue of the morning, and then, thank God, the phone rings, and I snatch it up and say hello.

 
; No answer. “Fenton?”

  There’s a long silence, a rumbling of deep breathing, and I hold my breath. It’s him. It’s the killer. He knows. He’s toying with me. Holy moly.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “I hope you’re happy, Officer—excuse me, Detective.” There’s a noisy cough, a tinkling noise, ice in a glass of gin, and I look up at the ceiling and exhale.

  “Mr. Gompers. This is not a good time.”

  “I found the claims,” he says, as if he hadn’t heard me. “The mysterious missing claims you wanted me to find. I found them.”

  “Sir.” But he’s not going to stop, and anyway I did tell him he had twenty-four hours, and here he is, reporting in, the poor bastard. I can’t just hang up. “Right,” I say.

  “I went to the overnight cabinet, and I pulled that stretch of case numbers. There’s only one in the bunch with Zell’s name on it. That’s what you wanted to know, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  His voice sloshes with drunken sarcasm. “Hope so. Because it’s all going to happen, just like I said it was. Just like I said.”

  I’m looking at the clock. 8:59. What Gompers is telling me doesn’t matter anymore. It never mattered in the first place. This case was never about insurance fraud.

  “I’m in the conference room in Boston, digging through the overnights, and who sidles in but Marvin Kessel. Do you know who that is?”

  “No, sir. I appreciate your help, Mr. Gompers.”

  It was never about insurance fraud. Not even for one second.

  “Marvin Kessel, for your information, is the assistant regional manager for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, and he was awfully interested in what the heck is going on up in Concord. And so now he knows, and now Omaha knows, we’ve got missing files, we’ve got suicides. We’ve got it all!” He sounds like my dad: Because it’s Concord!

  “And so now I am going to lose my job, and everybody in this branch, they’re going to lose their jobs, too. And we’ll all be out on the street. So, I hope you have a pen handy, Detective, because I’ve got the information.”

  I do have a pen, and Gompers gives me the information. The claim that Peter was working on when he died was filed in mid-November by a Ms. V. R. Jones, a director of the Open Vista Institute, a nonprofit corporation registered in the state of New Hampshire. Its headquarters are in New Castle, which is on the coast, near Portsmouth. It was a comprehensive life-insurance policy on the executive director, Mr. Bernard Talley, and Mr. Talley committed suicide in March, and Merrimack Life and Fire was exercising its right to investigate.

  I write it all down, old habit, but it doesn’t matter and it never mattered, not even for a second.

  Gompers is done and I say, “Thanks,” looking at the clock, it’s 9:02—any minute Fenton will call, she’ll give me the confirmation I need, and I’ll get in the car and go get the killer.

  “Mr. Gompers, I recognize that you have made a sacrifice. But this is a murder investigation. It’s important.”

  “You have no idea, young man,” he says morosely, “You have no idea what’s important.”

  He hangs up, and I almost call him back. I swear to God, with all that’s going on, I almost get up and go over there. Because he’s not—he’s not going to make it.

  But then the landline rings again, and I snatch it up again, and now it is Fenton, and she says, “Well, detective, how did you know?”

  I take a breath, close my eyes, and listen to my heart pounding for a second, two seconds.

  “Palace? Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” I say, slowly. “Please tell me exactly what you’ve found.”

  “Why certainly. I’d be happy to. And then at some point you are going to buy me a steak dinner.”

  “Yep.” I say, opening my eyes now, peering at the crisp blue sky just beyond the kitchen window. “Just tell me what you’ve found.”

  “You’re a lunatic,” she says. “MassSpec on the blood of Naomi Eddes confirms presence of morphine sulfate.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “This does not come as a surprise to you.”

  “No, ma’am,” I say. No, it does not.

  “Cause of death is unchanged. Massive craniocerebral trauma from gunshot wound in mid-forehead. But the victim of this gunshot had ingested a morphine derivative within the six- to eight-hour period prior to her death.”

  It does not surprise me at all.

  I close my eyes again, and I can picture Naomi leaving my house in her red dress in the middle of the night and going home to get high as a satellite. She must have been getting toward the end of her stash, too, must have been getting anxious about that, because now her dealer was dead. McGully had shot him. My fault.

  Oh, Naomi. You could have told me.

  I pull out my SIG Sauer from its holster and lay it on the kitchen table, open the magazine, empty out and count the dozen .357 bullets.

  In the Somerset Diner, a week before, Naomi eating French fries, telling me that she had to help Peter Zell when she saw that he was suffering, that he was in withdrawal. She had to help him, she said, looked down, looked away.

  I could have known it right then, had I wanted to know.

  “I wish I could tell you more,” Fenton says. “If the girl had some hair on her head, I could tell you if she’s been using morphine for a long time.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  I’m not really listening. Here’s a girl who felt compelled to help this random coworker, this man she barely knew, when she saw that he was suffering. Here’s a girl with her own long experience of drug addiction, who’s put her parents through hell, so much so that her father hangs up the phone as soon as he hears her name, hears the word policeman.

  “If you’ve got a long enough piece of hair, you can cut it into quarter-inch sections, break them down and test them one by one,” Fenton says, “figure out what substances were metabolized, month by month. Pretty fascinating stuff, actually.”

  “I’ll see you over there,” I say. “And I will. I’ll buy you that dinner.”

  “Sure you will, Palace,” she says. “Around Christmas, right?”

  I know what the hair test would have revealed. Naomi had been using, this time, for three months. I don’t know about her past usage, her periods of addiction and recovery and relapse, but this time she was using for almost three months exactly. Since Tuesday, January 3, when Professor Leonard Tolkin of the Jet Propulsion Lab went on television and gave her the same bad news he gave everybody else. My guess is, if she didn’t renew her active use of controlled substances that night, it was the day after, or the day after that.

  I reload the magazine, snap it into place, depress the safety, and return my sidearm to the holster. I’ve already done this exercise in its entirety—open the magazine, check the bullets, close it up—several times since waking this morning at seven thirty.

  Peter Zell had made his risk assessment and taken his plunge months before, gone through his whole cycle of attraction, experimentation, addiction, and withdrawal as the odds climbed steadily through the months. But Naomi, along with a lot of other people, took her own plunge only when it was official, when the odds of impact jumped all the way to one hundred percent. Millions of people all around the world deciding to get high as satellites and stay that way, scrambling for whatever they could—dope or junk or NyQuil or whippets or stolen bottles of hospital painkillers—and slip into pure pleasure mode, tune out the terror and the dread, in a world where the idea of long-term consequences had magically disappeared.

  I will myself back in time, back to the Somerset Diner, reach across the table and take Naomi’s hands in my own, and I tell her to go ahead and tell me the truth, tell me about her weakness, and I’d tell her I don’t care and I’m going to fall for her anyway. I would have understood.

  Would I have understood?

  My father taught me about irony, and the irony here is that in October, when it was still fifty-fifty, when there was still
hope, it was Naomi Eddes who had helped Peter Zell kick his stupid habit—helped him so well that when the end of the world was officially announced he fought through it, stayed clean. But Naomi, whose own addiction was deeper bred, whose habit was lifelong, not the result of a cold calculation of the odds … Naomi wasn’t that strong.

  Another irony: it wasn’t so easy, in early January, to get ahold of drugs, especially the kind Naomi needed. New laws, new cops, demand spiking wildly, new choke points on supply, all the way up and down the line. But Naomi had known just where to go. She knew from her nightly conversations with Peter about his ongoing temptation: his old pal J. T. was still dealing, still getting morphine, in some form, from somewhere.

  So that’s where she went, to the squat dirty house on Bow Bog Road, started buying, started using, never told Peter, never told anyone, and the only people who knew were Toussaint and the person who was his new supplier.

  And that person—that person is the killer.

  In the dark, at my house, frozen in the doorway, she almost told me the whole truth. Not only the truth about her addiction, but the truth about insurable interest, fraud claims, I thought of something that might be helpful to you, in your case. If I’d gotten out of bed, taken her wrists, kissed her and pulled her back into bed, she’d still be alive.

  If she’d never met me, she’d still be alive.

  I feel the weight of the gun in the holster, but I don’t take it out, not again. It’s ready, it’s loaded. I’m ready.

  * * *

  My Impala rolls through the gigantic parking lot, the asphalt painted black and wet with runoff. It’s 9:23.

  There is only one thing left that I don’t understand, and that’s why. Why would someone do something like this—why would this person do these things?

  I get out of the car and walk into the hospital.

  I have to apprehend the suspect. And even more so, I have to know the answer.

  In the crowded lobby I loiter behind a column, hunched over to minimize my height, my bandaged face hidden behind the Monitor like a spy. After a few minutes I see the murderer coming, striding purposefully down the hall, right on time. It’s urgent, important, work to be done in the basement.