by J. Bertrand
And the man who killed her—maybe it was Young, maybe it wasn’t—what he did to her was worst of all. He used her, too. As nothing more than a backstop. A convenient surface. A warm body inserted into the nightmare he’d been nurturing for his own excitement. So it’s only right that when I find him, when I can prove his guilt conclusively, at least to myself if no one else, that I make sure of one thing: that he too suffers the indignity of being used.
Call this revenge if you want.
But to me, it’s only a question of balancing the scales.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 7 — 5:58 A.M.
I know this place. I’ve been here. With a few changes I might have grown up on this street. The sidewalk breaks under my feet, new fissures pushing toward the storm drains on one side and the sun-browned grass on the other. I stretch my hands and no matter how far they reach, the rolling chain-link fence is a little bit farther, barely restraining the Aranda dog as it jumps and barks at me, making no sound.
I remember when that dog was run over, the summer of the bicentennial.
Strange that I can’t hear it, strange that the roiling ground makes no noise and neither do the trees swaying in the empty park across the road.
The one thing I can hear, coming from somewhere behind me that remains invisible when I turn to look, is the clicking of a bicycle chain, the hum of tires coasting over concrete. But the bike isn’t here, I know that. It’s somewhere safe, wedged in the gap between two corrugated storage sheds, blocks and blocks away, out past the school.
It’s the car making that sound, a gleaming green Ford circling the block. I follow the flash of sunlight on the glass, the heads silhouetted inside, three or four of them. Only the driver’s window is down, a brown and thin-wristed forearm jutting out with a hand-rolled cigarette clutched in the fingers. The sidewalk moves under my feet, but I get no farther. It’s like a swaying, fragmented treadmill keeping pace with my every move.
—You can go here and you can go there, but you can’t go away.
There’s another sound, a metallic pop, and slowly the fact dawns on me that it’s the thumb break on my old duty rig. My old pistol slides up into my hand, the one I carried as a rookie and only fired once in anger. I look at my arm and it’s blue. All of me is. My old uniform fits again, like a suit of polyester-blend armor.
The ground settles and up through my legs a sense of calm takes hold, the rootedness of an ancient tree. More heads appear in the car, too many to count, all pressing against the glass as the Ford bears down. Chrome glistens and blinds me, then my pistol answers it—one, two, three. Four, five, six. The air moves, and my rounds carve tracer arcs around the fast-approaching green car. The misses baffle me.
—Come to me, kid. Don’t be scared.
Brass tumbles at my feet while the Aranda dog silently wails. One, two, three. A cigarette bursts on the curb. Four, five, six. The brown hand tapping on the Ford’s green door. The car sails past me, gliding over air, the driver’s eyes behind gold-rimmed sunglasses. Under the long trunk, a thumping sound. And the metal quivers in circuits like rippling water.
“Roland, stop.”
A cold touch sinks through my forehead.
“You’re burning up.”
I find her wrist in the dark and pull the hand away. “It’s nothing.”
“You were kicking me.”
“Sorry.” I throw the covers back, swing my legs onto the hardwood floor. “Just another bad dream.”
Her laughter is soft and kind. “You and your dreams. You should see somebody.”
“Go back to sleep.”
A minute or two under the shower and I can’t remember the details anymore. Just a handful of surreal and disconnected puzzle pieces from a moviemaker’s idea of an acid trip. I run my uncle’s old double-edged safety razor under the tap, shaving in the usual sleepy, imprecise way, then go to the closet. From bed, Charlotte’s voice echoes.
“Wear one of your new outfits.”
They’re not new and I hate that word outfits. But I pick through the zippered bags anyway, still reluctant to admit that my father-in-law of all people had more style in his little finger than I’ll ever possess. Or care to. I don’t come from a world where clothes are chosen for how they look. Though we have a few peacocks in Homicide, a jacket’s main function is to keep your side arm from showing.
My old partner Stephen Wilcox saw it differently, always dressing like a cut-rate English gentleman to the extent the weather allowed. If he knew, he’d burn with envy over this hand-tailored wardrobe and have no qualms about wearing a dead man’s clothes. He doesn’t know, however, because despite our recent truce we are not really on speaking terms.
“I like the brown checks,” Charlotte calls.
The most old-geezer-looking option of the bunch, a tweedy sort of jacket with brown horn buttons. I put it on over a blue shirt and a pair of khakis, checking in the mirror to make sure the grip of my SIG Sauer doesn’t poke out through the side vent.
It’s just past six when I head down the stairs, leaving Charlotte to sleep awhile longer. The stairs out back leading up to the apartment over the garage are wet with dew, and the window next to the door glows gold, meaning our tenants are already up. Unlike Dr. Hill, we don’t rent the apartment out from necessity. The original idea was that we’d live there while having the house updated, only that project never quite came to fruition. Once the apartment existed, Charlotte wouldn’t let it go to waste.
As I gaze toward the door, Gina Robb comes out. She teaches at a private school out in Spring, commuting back and forth every day against the flow of traffic, while her husband, Carter, works at something called an outreach center in the Montrose area, where people hang out over coffee to talk about books and watch movies and have old-time religion subtly forced on them. Carter was a youth pastor at a suburban megachurch last year, a standard-bearer for the fanatics Sheila Green mentioned yesterday. Now he’s in a kind of free fall, a feeling I can easily relate to.
“Good morning, Mr. March.”
Gina’s always so formal with me, despite the closeness that’s grown between us all since the Robbs moved in. She dresses formal, too, in a high-necked, round-collared overcoat that looks too warm even for our cold snap, and a velvet thrift-store beret, just in case the French Resistance needs some backup. When she comes down the stairs, her eyes light up in a way that makes me cringe with anticipation.
“I like your blazer,” she says. She would like it. “Is that what you call it, a blazer?”
“You got me,” I say. “It’s one of the ones Charlotte brought back from her father’s. She’s trying to make me look more distinguished.”
“She’s doing a good job.”
“Thanks.”
When I first met her, I didn’t see the appeal of this rather plain and eccentric girl, and certainly couldn’t understand what it was Carter, with his more athletic, unreflective cast of mind, would find appealing. Now I do. She’s constant and bright, an optimist grounded in reality, an eccentric with breathtaking disregard for how other people perceive her.
“Your husband’s a lucky man, you know that?”
She bunches her lips the way she always does when I say something silly. “I’m sorry we missed you yesterday, but I know they work you so hard.”
“I guess we’re both the early risers in our families.”
“Carter’s up,” she says quickly, almost defensively. “I can get him if you want to—”
“No, no. I’m just on my way out, like you.”
“He does want to talk to you about something, Mr. March. It wouldn’t take long.”
“Right now, you mean?”
“We just weren’t sure when we’d see you, and here you are.” She pleads with her whole body hunched forward, hands together in a prayerful gesture. “Let me go get him real fast, okay? It’ll take, like, two minutes.”
Set loose by my nod, she bounds halfway up the stairs before stopping herself, ascending the rest of the way at a ca
lmer pace. When she returns, Carter is with her, his hair still matted from sleep, looking ridiculous in shorts and an unzipped hoodie.
“I do have to go,” Gina says, getting on tiptoes to kiss his stubbly cheek.
Once she’s reversing down the driveway, leaving us alone together, Carter wipes the traces of a sheepish grin from his lips, signaling that whatever he wants to tell me must be important. In his mid-twenties and no stranger to tragedy, he still has a boyish way of steeling himself for serious talk, like he’s afraid of not being taken as an adult.
“Roland,” he says. “There was something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“So I gathered.”
“It’s . . . really, I don’t know if it’s awkward or not. But we thought we should say something to you first—in case it might be, you know?”
The hoodie falls open. I scan the words on his wrinkled T-shirt. MY SAVIOR CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT.
Nice.
“Gina,” he says. “We just found out that she’s pregnant.”
My chest tightens, like somebody just inflated a balloon under the ribs.
“You’re having a kid?” The words sound hollow in my ears. “That’s great, Carter. Congratulations. That’s . . . wonderful news.”
“It’s just . . .” His shoulders rise and his head starts shaking, physically disowning his own thoughts. “We were worried, you know? About how to tell Charlotte.” Not able to look me in the eyes. “You know,” he says. “Because of Jessica.”
“Oh.”
I’m not prepared to hear her name on his lips, not ready to talk like this about something I hold deep inside, cherishing it like a cancer. My mouth twists and I feel my whole body tensing up, which Carter sees and goes wide-eyed over, the way he would if he’d inadvertently knocked over a vase.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says. “I know we’ve never really talked about it. Theresa Cavallo said something, and then . . .” His voice trails off. “I wouldn’t bring it up at all except that Charlotte said something about her in church. About Jessica.”
“Let’s . . .” I begin, but my throat tightens. “She said something at church?”
“During prayer time, she shared how she still struggles with what happened. How God could let it happen, you know—and also the way she misses her daughter, misses just having a daughter. It was really honest of her . . . and it just made us worry that maybe we shouldn’t say anything yet.”
I’m moving my head. I’m clamping my hand over my mouth. Trying to look thoughtful while buying time. Trying to get control of what’s happening in my head.
She talked. She told these people. She shared.
The way she misses her daughter.
Even having a daughter.
Words I couldn’t bring myself to think, let alone broadcast, words I couldn’t whisper to Charlotte in the dark. She shared them. She was really honest.
“Tell her,” I say. “She’ll be fine. Or if you want, I’ll do it. But I know it would mean more coming from you two. Congratulations again—”
“I know you’ve gotta go.” He reaches for my arm but stops short of contact. “But I thought we should talk about this other thing, too. Charlotte and church, I mean. We’d really like to see you there, too, but I’m sensing that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. Is it a problem for you, her coming with us?”
I throw my briefcase into the car and slump behind the wheel. “Carter, it’s a free country. She can do whatever she wants—” Pulling the door shut. “Obviously. She does what she wants already.”
He has more to say, but the engine drowns him out. I reverse down the driveway, smiling my heartfelt and skin-deep good wishes, leaving behind a household I’ve increasingly lost the ability to understand.
I know how Simone Walker must have felt, having a spouse turn religious on her. There’s not much chance of Charlotte cutting me open—not literally—but otherwise I can relate. The rules change in the middle of the game, and it’s not enough for you to stand by and let it happen, to pretend you’re okay with it. No, you have to bend with the rules. You have to go along. At first they’ll accept lip service and platitudes, but before long it’s sincerity or nothing. The line will be drawn and if you ignore that line it will be pointed out to you. Cross here, but do it with both feet and never think of crossing back.
As I drive, the memory comes to me, Charlotte apprehensive on the bedroom threshold, saying it was only polite to go to church since they’d asked her. Saying it would be interesting to go back.
“Do it if you want,” I’d said. “If it makes you happy.”
“I think it would make them happy.”
And I’d said: “Some people find comfort in the ritual,” or words to that effect, which earned a quizzical smile from her, like she was amused and surprised all at once that a thing so obvious would be inaccessible to me. We’d once laughed together about the cross-wearing Theresa Cavallo, a missing persons detective I’d worked with and grown to respect, who’d psychoanalyzed my professional faults as the result of my anger toward God.
Only Charlotte wasn’t laughing anymore and isn’t laughing now. Every Sunday she goes with the Robbs to their newfound church just inside the Loop, cloistered in the shell of a defunct electronics superstore. And every Sunday I find a reason not to go with them, excuses of a secondary order to keep me from having to address the real one, the obvious one.
I’ve been telling myself I’m fine with this, that I can live with it. There was a time not too long ago when Charlotte popped pills to sleep at night and we were at each other’s throats, and I am relieved finally to be through it—her low-wattage religiosity seemed like a small price to pay for peace on the home front. And I like Carter and Gina. Having them in our lives has been good for us, and I’d like to think the reverse is true, as well.
The thought of Charlotte opening up like that, though, baring her soul to these people. Not just her soul but ours, throwing out our shared tragedy like it’s nothing more than an issue in scare quotes that needs working out in therapy. That I can’t bear. We were three once and now we’re two, and if there’s anyone she needs to talk to, it should be me, the only person who shares the loss.
Giving it to them, not just Carter and Gina but whoever else was present for the spectacle, handing it over to strangers is like betrayal.
No, it is betrayal.
Everything’s public, of course, and always has been. Every reader of The Kingwood Killing reaches the part of the story where March, the intrepid detective, learns of the car crash that put his wife and daughter in the emergency room, on the very same day the Towers fell and his plane was grounded in New Orleans. Wilcox and March driving the wife-murderer Donald Fauk across the Atchafalaya River, capturing his confession on a handheld recorder.
There’s a reason my copy of the book appears unread. At least I’ve never had to sit there before as someone read the passage, never had to endure the reader’s prurient sympathy.
Fingerprints are old school, a technology I understand completely. I lifted my first set at age thirteen using a kit jury-rigged from instructions found in a library book, then eyeballed a match with the only subject who’d submit to ink, my long-suffering uncle. Without the aid of computer databases or trained crime scene technicians, I can still develop prints from a variety of challenging surfaces, and if push comes to shove make side-by-side comparisons with the aid of an honest-to-goodness magnifying glass.
“Which is why,” I tell Lt. Bascombe, “I cannot understand how the Houston Police Department, which the last time I checked does have computer databases and does have trained crime scene analysts, still can’t tell me after thirty-six hours whether the prints on that table are a match with my suspect or not.”
He glances up from a stack of overtime forms he’s been autographing, acting surprised to find me still in the room.
“What do you want me to do? I’m sure they can tell you if there’s a match. They just haven’t yet.” From a w
ad of newspaper on the credenza behind him, he withdraws a creased copy of the Chronicle from sometime last week. “You realize, don’t you—and I’m quoting here—that ‘a criminal investigation is under way into alleged wrongdoing at HPD’s fingerprinting comparison unit,’ end quote.”
“Yes, I know,” I say, snatching the paper from him. I skim the article and give up halfway through, slumping into a chair. “Can I just say one thing? Throughout all the closings and openings and re-closings of the DNA section, all the inquiries and panels and reshufflings, you know what I did? I did like the poster says: kept calm and carried on.”
Entertained, Bascombe allows himself a faint smile.
“When I had to, I pulled some strings and got my DNA work done through back channels, and when I couldn’t, I’d grin and bear it. Was it frustrating to farm out lab work? Check. Was it humiliating to work for the fourth largest city in America and be reduced to that? You bet. But I told myself this DNA thing was newfangled stuff. I told myself they were overwhelmed, they were still working out the kinks. Hey, listen, I don’t understand how it all works, but then I’m not a scientist. But you know what? I can dust for prints—”
“That’s what you said. Thirteen years old.”
“And I can hold two prints next to each other and tell you if they look the same or not. That at least is not rocket science.” I ball the Chronicle up in my fist. “That’s basic. I mean, Sherlock Holmes could process fingerprints, right? And that was the eighteen hundreds. So why all the sudden can the Houston Police not do it?”
“Amen, man, but you’re complaining to the wrong person.”
Disgusted, I shoot the newspaper off the rim of Bascombe’s trash can.
