The Exiled

by Christopher Charles

  “What was that?”

  “She advertised a kind of fellowship or grant—I’m not even sure what to call it. She had this loft above her store in a small town in the New Mexico mountains. Whoever she chose could live there with free rent and a small allowance. In exchange, they’d give a few classes in the community and look after the store now and again. You had to submit a letter of interest and some slides. Mavis never said it, but I think I’m the only one who applied. It was supposed to be for the summer—June through August. That was three years ago.”

  “Sounds like fate.”

  “It was what I needed at the time. A clean break.”

  “From?”

  “My own drama. And Daniel’s. Really, Mavis gave me what she wanted for herself. She had fantasies of starting over—selling the store, dumping Jack, moving to Buenos Aires.”

  “She said that?”

  “More than once.”

  “Why Buenos Aires?”

  “It’s beautiful and cheap. And she spoke enough Spanish to get by.”

  Raney made a mental note.

  “What about the community service?”

  “It was something she would have loved to do herself. She wanted to teach, work with children. But she had horrible stage fright. The thought of getting up in front of a group of people, even a group of toddlers, made her sick to her stomach. That might have been the saddest fact of her life.”

  Raney tried to sound casual:

  “She never had children of her own?”

  “No. Jack couldn’t. And he refused to see a doctor.”

  No, Raney thought. He saw hookers instead. Mavis parsed out her secrets. She told her lover about her husband’s penchant for whores, told Clara about the dreams she hadn’t realized. Had she told anyone about her son?

  “So she had you teaching classes at the store?”

  “No—that was my idea. I did it to bring in a little extra money. Very little. Saturdays I teach kids up at the reservation, at the community center they built alongside the casino.”

  “Do you enjoy it?”

  “Now I love it. At first it made me uncomfortable. I felt like a missionary, like a white girl putting a face on history. But Mavis kept saying: ‘No, you’re sharing a skill with fellow human beings. That’s all.’ She donated thousands of dollars’ worth of supplies to the center.”

  Mavis was compensatory all the way around: desert a son, take in a grown daughter; make money trafficking, funnel some of it to the reservation.

  “What about her mood? Any changes in the last few weeks?”

  “I don’t really know. She kept to herself more than usual. I hardly saw her. When she was at the store she spent most of the time in her office. And then there were those trips.”

  “Trips?”

  “She started going away overnight. Two, sometimes three times a week. Sometimes she was gone a couple of days.”

  “Had that ever happened before?”

  “No, never. She said she wanted to turn part of the store into a gallery. She told me she was scouting for talent.”

  “What did you think of the idea?”

  “Not much, to be honest. For a gallery to thrive, there has to be more than one. There has to be a scene. This is a place people come to when they want to escape a scene. But if anyone could have made it work, it’s Mavis. And I’m not just saying that. She had to be a good businesswoman just to keep this place going.”

  She found a way to subsidize, Raney thought.

  A guttural scream reverberated from the back of the apartment.

  “Shit,” Clara said.

  She ran down the hall, shut Daniel’s door behind her. The sound swelled, then subsided. After a while, Raney heard Clara singing, a nursery rhyme he didn’t recognize or couldn’t remember. He stood, thought maybe he should leave, decided to wait. He drifted over to Clara’s paintings, ran his eyes across them, felt somehow comforted by the abrupt changes in color, the way she’d reduced the desert to its most essential hues. A mahogany storage unit sat beside the easel, a single horizontal drawer atop a long vertical cabinet. The cabinet door had been removed, the interior stocked with brushes, rags, tubes of paint, palette knives, cans of linseed oil. The top drawer was partially open. Raney peered inside, found a well-used rolling tray and a dwindling bag of weed. He glanced over his shoulder, slid the drawer all the way out. Pushed to the back was a .32 H&R revolver with a Crimson Trace grip. Raney palmed the drawer shut, then, remembering, tugged it partway open again. He felt certain the gun was a present from Mavis. Why? Why would Clara need a firearm in a town that until recently had no crime to speak of?

  Clara returned, bouncing Daniel in her arms. The boy rubbed his eyes, seemed confused, as though he felt the aftertremors but couldn’t recall the event that caused them.

  “See?” Clara said. “The man with the badge is here to keep you safe.”

  Daniel glanced at Raney, signed something to his mother.

  “He wants you to read him a story,” Clara said.

  “Me?”

  “He’s smitten.”

  She handed her son over. The boy radiated warmth through his one-piece pajamas.

  “I set a book on his pillow,” Clara said. “Last door on the right.”

  She nodded at Raney’s gun. Raney, supporting Daniel with one arm, unclipped his holster, set it on the coffee table.

  “Thank you,” Clara said.

  The bedroom was small and makeshift, the partition walls coming up shy of the ceiling. Mavis, it seemed, had converted the loft specifically for Clara and Daniel. A column of awkwardly installed shelves housed action figures from movies or television shows Raney couldn’t place; the glow-in-the dark constellation stickers on the ceiling were no different from the ones Raney had gazed at as a child. He tucked Daniel under a handwoven cotton blanket, remembered the loom in Mavis’s study. Mavis had adopted Clara and Daniel as her own. Clara saw no ulterior motive; Raney saw nothing else. Mavis was building a surrogate family. She was distancing herself from Jack, making him disposable.

  “You’ve got a lot of cool stuff here, buddy,” Raney said.

  Daniel nodded, his eyes still red around the rims. A strand of Clara’s hair clung to the boy’s shoulder. Raney lifted it away, sat on the edge of the bed, began reading. Another desert-themed book. This one cast an armadillo as the pariah of a sagebrush community, shunned because he was ugly and difficult to eat. Daniel fell asleep before Raney could discover the happy resolution. He shut the book, lay a hand across Daniel’s forehead, felt a rush of guilt when he realized he’d been imagining Ella as his audience.

  Clara was sitting on the couch, drinking a glass of white wine. There was a second glass on the coffee table.

  “If you don’t want it, I’m thirsty enough for us both,” she said.

  He sat beside her, leaving one cushion between them, and took up the glass.

  “I’m sorry about that, by the way,” she said.

  “Does it happen often?”

  “It used to. This is the first in a while. It’s my fault. He saw me crying today. That probably set him back another year.”

  Raney stopped himself from asking what had set Daniel back in the first place. What did the gun in her drawer have to do with Daniel’s silence? Who was it that might return?

  “I should be going, Clara,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything. Anytime.”

  He set his glass on the table. Clara stood with him, blocked his path.

  “Who?” she said. “Tell me who did this.”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “That’s bullshit,” she said. “You know, or you have a damn good idea. Tell me.”

  “I don’t know anything for sure. But it looks like you were right: Jack put Mavis in danger.”

  She let her forehead drop against his chest, grabbed his blazer in her fists. He felt her shaking against him. He started to put his arms around her, then held back, resolved to stand there until the storm passed.


  Queens, May 1984

  13

  He did a line in stalled traffic on the Verrazano, felt himself come alert, felt his body moving though the car was still. Sophia would get there before him now; her father would set the tone. Raney played out the conversation in his head:

  Father: A cop can’t afford this city anymore. Not an honest one.

  Sophia: Who says he’s honest?

  Father: Don’t joke. Better men have succumbed.

  Sophia: Then I might as well stick with Wes. Besides, I have a career of my own.

  Father: Social work? You’ll burn out, Sophia. Those people will burn you out.

  Sophia: Those people? It’s strange how you’re so full of one kind of courage but completely lack another.

  Father: Meaning?

  Sophia: You’d rather have a man point a gun at you than talk to you.

  Father: Because I know what the guy with the gun wants. Take the gun out of his hand, and he becomes a salesman.

  Sophia: Why do you say things you don’t mean?

  Father: You tell me. You’re the shrink.

  Sophia: Social worker. And admit you like Wes.

  Father: I do like him. I never said I didn’t. But he’s not the man you need.

  Sophia: I don’t need a man at all.

  The dialogue would run much the same with Raney sitting there. Former police captain Ed Ferguson was blunt, sometimes brutal. It was how he’d made cases—cases that led to promotions he’d never asked for but accepted, in his mind, for the sake of his daughter’s future. Sophia’s theory: longer hours and greater pay made parenting a question of project management. A staff swelled around the policeman’s little girl—nanny, housekeeper, piano teacher, tutors—even a shrink to tease out any lingering trauma caused by her mother’s death, though Sophia had been less than a year old at the time. It takes good opportunities to prevent bad ones: Captain Ferguson’s credo.

  Traffic picked up, then stalled again on the BQE. He was forty minutes late by the time he parked in front of the retired captain’s house: a solid upper-middle-class home in Kew Gardens, with shutters on the windows and a grapevine out back. The home Sophia had grown up in. The home her mother had died in. The house you’ll inherit someday, Ferguson was fond of saying. Worth fifty times what I paid for it.

  He was greeted at the door by Sophia and Jake, the Irish setter. Of the two, Jake seemed happier to see him.

  “Well, you have his attention,” Sophia said. Then, catching the red in his eyes:

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She stepped out onto the small porch, pushed Jake back behind the door.

  “I’m worried about you. You never call.”

  “This guy’s got me close.”

  “What guy?”

  “I can’t say.”

  She glared.

  She’d come straight from work. Her red dress brought out the pink in her skin—skin that held an impression at the slightest touch. She raised up on tiptoes, stood balanced with her blue-gray eyes inches from his.

  “Well?” she said.

  Her father’s voice shot through the cracked door:

  “Let the man in. Dinner isn’t getting any younger, and neither am I.”

  Ferguson ran the place like a manor, with a cook and a maid he claimed was a physical therapist. He’d hired a contractor, installed antique ceiling fans, swapped out linoleum for bamboo, laminate for granite. The walls were thick with art from places he’d never visited: Thailand, Mexico, Nigeria. Jake had a bed in every room, all of them red, to match his coat. Ferguson sat at the head of the table, holding court, his face flushed with alcohol, his full crop of gray hair looking a little less tame in retirement.

  “I’ve always been a meat-and-potatoes man, but now the meat has a French name and the potatoes come with parsley. Invest your money, Detective Raney. I don’t care if it’s ten dollars to start. You think when you’re my age you’ll be too old to enjoy life. Let me tell you, you’re not. Your joints may not bend so easy, but that’s just Mother Nature saying it’s time to slow down and reap the fruits of your labor.”

  He talked to Raney as though Sophia weren’t there, or as though she had brought Raney to him for the purpose of some obscure interrogation. Ferguson was playing nice now, gaining trust, but there would be a postprandial accusation, an authoritative lecture on the pitfalls Raney was already failing to dodge.

  “I hear you’re undercover,” Ferguson said.

  “Dad, no talking shop at dinner.”

  “You’re marrying a policeman, but you don’t want me to talk police work with him? That’s mean-spirited.”

  Raney heard the exchange as though through a haze of distortion.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m undercover now.”

  “No wonder you look so tired.”

  “Dad!”

  “What? I’m empathizing with the man. There’s no tougher assignment.”

  “All the more reason to give him a night off.”

  Raney reached for the bottle of wine, started to fill his own glass, then, remembering where he was, made the rounds first. The bottle came back empty. Ferguson’s smile went on a beat too long.

  The rest of the conversation was a monologue that Raney caught in bits and pieces. Ferguson was upset with a longtime friend for cashing in his pension and moving to Idaho; he found the panic surrounding the sanitation strike amusing. Or maybe he was upset by the strike and found his friend’s departure amusing. His patriarchal drone competed with the recollection of scenes from Raney’s first month as Dunham’s sidekick: ringside seats for a Hagler fight; strip club after strip club; blow and benzos; hours at the bar watching coked-out jazz musicians blaze through whatever tune Dunham called. In between, midnight collections, payoffs, a score of evacuations, the riot act read to the lowest earners. Meno’s name never mentioned. The uneasy feeling that Dunham was grooming him for some unsanctioned side business that would get them both killed.

  After dinner, Armagnac in the living room, followed by a predictable request:

  “Sophia, would you mind taking Jake around the block for me?”

  “I should go with you,” Raney said.

  “Jake’s all the chaperone she needs. There hasn’t been a violent crime in this zip code for a decade. Unless you count domestics.”

  “Before I go,” Sophia said, “tell me exactly how you’re going to scare him off.”

  “Nonsense. I just want to ply him for gossip. It would bore you.”

  “I won’t be long,” Sophia said.

  She left them alone, seated a few feet apart in matching armchairs, faint classical music coming from speakers Raney couldn’t locate.

  Ferguson leaned in, rounded his shoulders, seemed suddenly primitive—a man who was about to fight instead of flee.

  “You stupid ass,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. My daughter is trained to spot the signs. She won’t be able to fool herself much longer.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “It’s exactly what I think. What on earth possessed you? Did you believe you could cozy up to a man like Dunham without losing your soul?”

  “You still have your sources.”

  “You’re damned right I do. And I’ll be keeping a close watch. When I was commander, I wouldn’t let a married man go undercover, not for an afternoon. And now you’re marrying my daughter. Tell me the truth: Are you hooked?”

  “It’s nothing I can’t beat.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Captain, I’m close. I’m really fucking close.”

  “You’re even picking up the cadence of a junkie.”

  “I’m no junkie.”

  Ferguson emptied his glass, poured another.

  “No, that was unfair. You’re young. You’re ambitious. You have a hard-on for adventure, and you want to save the world. But there are little Dunhams incubating by the thousands. Ston
e knows this. He also knows the glory will be his. If you make the case, he runs for mayor. You get a small pay bump and a stint at Betty Ford. I’m telling you, walk away. The reward doesn’t measure up to the risk. This is years of experience talking. If you want a thrill, try skydiving.”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “And an honest one, from what I hear. But there are better ways to serve and protect. Safer, more lucrative ways.”

  “Like what?”

  “How about the mayor’s detail? I could get you reassigned tomorrow.”

  “I want to work cases.”

  “The private sector, then. You’d be making more on day one than I made my first twenty years on the job.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That means no. You think you have your hooks in him, but it’s the other way around. I’m going to tell you something it took me my whole career to accept. Some people are broken. They just are. They can’t be saved or redeemed. They’ll cause immeasurable pain for as long as they walk the earth, and they should be put down. If you see an opportunity, take it. You’ll sleep better with this psychopath dead and buried. The badge will protect you. Chances are you’ll get a medal for it. And Stone can find some other case to pin his candidacy on.”

  She walked him to his car. They held hands, took slow steps across Ferguson’s lawn. Lights were on in the houses, but the street was empty, quiet: just the sound of automatic sprinklers and an occasional plane flying overhead.

  Sophia nibbled at his shoulder.

  “I miss you, Detective,” she said. “I mean a lot.”

  “It won’t be much longer.”

  He leaned back against the passenger-side door. Sophia pressed her body to his. He locked his arms around her waist, felt her hair brushing his skin as he kissed her neck. He lingered there, almost sober.

  “It’s like we’re teenagers,” she said.

  “Did you kiss a lot of teenage boys out here?”