by Ed Gorman
I suggested a seat near the window at a diner down the street, where we could watch the lazy snowflakes fall, the size of quarters that day. Erin’s eyes showed her delight in it. She informed me that snowflakes fall at about the rate of a mile an hour, unless icy droplets form on them to increase their weight. How’d she know that, I asked. “Before I joined the Bureau of Liquor Enforcement, I thought of teaching biology. I’m a science junkie. Then I got out of BLE because the captain, a micromanager anyway, insisted on messing with a restaurant owner who allowed a singer to come in two nights a week.”
“Say again?”
“The owner was licensed to sell liquor, could even allow people to dance in the aisles to jukebox or to live music if he wanted. His mistake? He paid a band that had a vocalist. That heinous deed made him in violation of Liquor Law Section four-Nine-Three-Point-Ten, ‘Entertainment on a licensed premise without an Amusement Permit’.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “Still, if it’s on the books …”
“It’s a stupid law.”
“We’re not paid to write the laws.”
“Ah, but there was something else. The restaurant owner was an old high-school enemy of the captain. So it was personal. It’s not the only reason I left, just the last one. And, unfortunately, my judgment may have faltered when I wrote a letter to the editor about police harassment of small businesses. I disguised my identity, of course. But they were suspicious because of the way I’d been fuming about it. I got congratulations from the guys and glares from the brass.”
“Ouch.”
“Well, you learn to pick your battles. A lesson.”
“I thought you were happy about the change.”
“I am. But now I have to start over again.”
She didn’t get much of a chance to do that. Some evil character hit the delete key on her life.
Forget about the old days when people said tough guys don’t eat quiche. Tough guys don’t ever say the word depressed. I’ll say it here so that maybe my actions could be understood, if ever they can.
After Erin died, on duty I’d sit off Interstate 80 and watch violators speed by. And one day, while off the rolls, I spotted a shoplifter out back of Sears in Stroudsburg look three ways and then languidly wheel a barbecue away and load it in the back of his SUV. Yesterday I saw that Gress guy, the computer jock, fudge his time card, look at me, drop it in the bin and walk away like saying, Challenge me, Muskrat, what you got in your den? And how did I know he stole time? The look. If he hadn’t been smug, I wouldn’t have gone to the bin and picked up the card. But he was right: I didn’t challenge him. Something else was on my mind.
A few days after the coffee with Erin, I asked her out again, for a Saturday afternoon movie. We went to see Jarhead. Arrived in different cars. Paid our own tickets in. “You understand this is not a real date,” she said. “You understand this is not real popcorn,” I said. “It’s packing foam.” Afterward, we stood on the sidewalk outside the mall, discussing the movie. She saw stuff in it I didn’t. In the chilly sunlight, talking about things outside of cop-dom, she was flat-out beautiful.
In the walk to our cars I finally couldn’t keep the question away. “Want to make it official sometime? A genuine date?”
“Probably not a good idea.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Peace.”
“Peace.”
We went our separate ways.
I consider myself a balanced man, don’t go off half-cocked. What my nature allows, my training reinforces. So I do not tell the rest of this lightly. It’s not that hard to understand the primitives who believe in demons entering a person’s skin. I say this because I don’t know what came over me in the case of Trooper Erin Flannery and Paul Ooten: I became a spy. I felt righteous, principled, and therefore gave myself permissions I would never give someone else. It was the mystery of her drawing power I couldn’t get out of my head, that force that makes a man like Commander Ooten forsake his marriage vows and teeter on the verge of disgracing his profession.
I took to rolling through Nazareth some weekends to see if I could spot her. I knew that’s where she lived, but not precisely. Nazareth isn’t that big a town: six thousand people. It’s about ten miles from troop headquarters and under nine from where I live in Bethlehem — Steel City, a name that fit before the Bethlehem Steel mill and its support businesses fell victim to the Japanese business onslaught.
Driving down Center Street one day, I saw Trooper Flannery coming out of a drycleaners with her bagged uniforms. I am ashamed to say I followed her to see the apartment complex in which she lived.
And later, on occasion I would go off my route to drift down her street and see if I could catch sight of the commander’s car, see it in the apartment parking lot. Sneering at my own bad behavior, I called it “volunteer surveillance.” I hated what I was doing yet could not keep from the patrol. We were on extra alert because of a terroristic threat. Watch for violations on small refrigerator vehicles, the bulletin said. Stop and search if indicted. Drive by Erin Flannery’s residence to see if Paul Ooten’s car was there. Other guys were out at bars, cracking wise and watching games. I was stuck on one note and it was sour. Tomorrow I would shed this thing.
Don’t ask me how a reporter for the Allentown Morning Call got it, but it happens sometimes. His piece told the basics of Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Erin Anne Flannery’s demise. The state police spokesman was reserving comment on manner of death. I should think the public reader would conclude, as would any cop, that homicide was on the minds of investigators. I spent a restless night. The next day State Commissioner Corporal Robert Metcalfe announced before TV cameramen that Trooper Flannery’s case was under investigation as murder, and he was sorry but he could not release any details.
“Honor, service, integrity, respect, trust, courage, and duty.” Our motto. I am familiar with courage as it pertains to rescue, or in the midst of violent disputes, even in the frequent chaos of felony arrests. I’ve not only witnessed it but, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, performed within its lighted shaft. But could it be that those were times not of action but reaction, mindless as a ball springing off the floor of a gym? Moral courage, there’s the mark, and a harder one to hit.
It’s clear that lying violates integrity. But does silence? We’re not talking the silence of the citizens of Germany in World War II. Not that kind. In Erin’s case, nothing will pull her up from the endless recycle machine, not even if I told I was there at the time of her death.
It broke. Mrs. Paul Ooten, given name Mallory, was a person of interest in Homicide Incident Number Ml-645-whatever. Mrs. Paul Ooten! Our troop was on fire with speculation, with rethinking impressions of her. And then, of course, there were the terrible distance, disappointment, and suspicion toward the commander himself. I must admit I was halfway pleased there was no gloating, as I might have expected.
The commander was put on administrative leave. It wasn’t the first scandal or the first capital case to stain the state police. But it was here, now, among us at Troop M, a mortal wound, it seemed to me. My fellow troopers talked themselves raw. Then, steel bands slowly tightened on our hearts. We grew silent, more involved in what we were trained to do: to be soldiers of the law. We got back to business.
There was a message slip on my desk when I came in one morning two weeks later. It called me to a meeting at Bethlehem headquarters. I brought along my personal write-up detailing my performance accomplishments this year, as we are told to do at review time. I wondered who would be giving my review now that Ooten was out.
Whatever I can say about him, I’ll say I have no doubt the commander would have given me a good one. The only thing he ever admonished me about was failure to properly orient a diagram sketch of an accident scene. For all my driving about, I’d put down north for a street that actually ran northeast, and he caught it.
As I approached the conference room, I saw an officer’s winter coat draped on a chair. Two rank rings decora
ted the coat sleeve, signifying the coat belonged to a major. When I entered the room, there sat the major at the end of the table, Commander Ooten to his right. I looked from one to the other until Ooten spoke. “Good morning, Justin.” Motioning, he introduced Major Bryan Manning.
“Have a seat, Trooper Eberhardt,” the major said.
My heart was pounding. What kind of promotion could I be in for?
The major began by apologizing for not making it out to Troop M barracks before. “Been busy as a bartender on payday,” he said. Intended to put me at ease. I’m afraid I didn’t laugh. After more chat about nothing, he said, “Tell me, Trooper, what do you recall about your CPR training?”
Confused, I stumbled through a reply, first repeating “Two hands, two inches, three compressions in two seconds. Fifteen pushes, then two ventilation breaths.”
“And what is the distance of travel for compressions, Trooper?”
“Two inches, as I said, sir.”
“A third the depth of the chest,” the major said.
“Yes sir.”
“Makes a body tired, right, Trooper?” the major asked with a smile.
Ooten pitched in: “It can be brutal.”
“Sure enough I busted a sweat first time I did it,” Major Manning said. “Was a big guy, close to three hundred pounds. I was drippin’ sweat on him.”
You do the polite thing in a situation like this. Nod, chuckle. But what the hell was this, a grilling on rescue efforts you’d give a cadet? My wooly-pully was on under my uniform shirt. It felt like ninety degrees in there.
Commander Ooten sprung the next question. “You were pretty tight with Trooper Flannery, weren’t you, Justin?”
“Friends. I didn’t know her well. I mean, we didn’t have that much time to get to know each other.” I met his eyes, guessing if the probe was meant to inquire if I had slept with her. Slept with the woman Commander Ooten was cheating with. Her lunch hour went long, people said. Dentist, doctor appointments, flat tire, things like that, she would claim.
“She wasn’t here but three months, sir.” All along I’d considered how quickly she and Ooten hooked up.
How can I describe the look in his eyes? Seeing me, not seeing me. Assessing, reflecting. The oil of the present saturating the rust of the past.
He said, “Carl Carolla observed you tagging after Trooper Flannery, Justin, and not once but twice. Carl thought that was odd. What can you tell us about that?”
“I … I wouldn’t know. He’s mistaken.” I said nothing more. Silence is a tool in interviews. And even in sales. My uncle told me that. When he’d go to close a deal, he put a pencil to his lips to signal he was through talking. “He who speaks first loses,” is what he said. I recognized the tool’s use now with the commander and the major, the three of us soundless while the room temp climbed even as I saw through the slats of the blinds behind the commander snow riding slanted chutes of wind.
At last Major Manning said, “Are you up to date on your CPR certification, Trooper?”
“I’d have to check the date, sir. I think I might be due.”
“You’ve rendered CPR before, right, Justin?” Manning asked.
“No sir.”
Why did I lie? I did start CPR on a victim once. It was part of an action that won me a Commendation Medal, but in the write-up it was not mentioned nor should it have been. Emergency techs had arrived at the scene seconds after I’d started, so I didn’t consider it as actually “performed.”
The major sat back, arms outstretched on the table, and looked at Paul, who asked me, “You usually wear a ring, don’t you, guy?” Friendly, casual.
“A school ring, yes,” I said, and shrugged. I hadn’t put it on that day. I glanced at the commander’s left hand as he toyed with a collector’s pen our troop gave him last Christmas. His wedding ring was still on. I pictured his wife, Mallory, how she must look today, turmoil in her face, heartache visible in her robot motions, her walk, her interactions with her children. Commander Ooten sat there interviewing me about Erin Flannery while his family was torn apart because of his unstoppable urges toward a woman who wound up dead on the floor of her home.
No doubt his wife would be quickly cleared in Erin’s case. Ridiculous, when you think about it, how she got tied to it at all. Who in this world would figure that she and Erin had in common a love of the oboe, I kid you not, a love of the oboe, which found the two of them in weekly classes at community college. Mrs. Ooten had lent Erin an old instrument her father gave her as an eleven-year-old, the name “Mallory Parsons” engraved on a gold plate on the case. The very fact that Mallory Ooten was innocently in the home of her husband’s lover gave me a pang, my sympathy for her as tender as my own scoured nerves.
What I did not tell my superiors is that the night of Erin’s injury she had consumed too much plum wine, and I had been the one to buy it. “I’ve been a little stressed out,” she said. “Things.”
“It can get that way.”
“You know what? You’re way easier to be around than I would’ve guessed.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“It’s just that on the job you’re so serious.”
“Is that bad or good?”
“It is what it is. Could go either way.” Her hair looked like shined copper.
This was a couple of weeks after Jarhead. Ooten was out of town at a con-fab in Pittsburgh. Maybe that’s why Erin weakened when I asked her out. I felt low about my reasons and was almost sorry she accepted. Here she was already involved in deceit with Ooten, and now she was deceiving him with me. Of course, it wouldn’t go so far as to be labeled true betrayal, I wouldn’t let it go that far. But even if it did, at least the two of us were single.
We met at a Japanese restaurant, a new place I said I wanted to try near the Bethlehem Brew Works. Erin insisted on separate cars again, saying she had things to do that would put her in the vicinity anyway. We sat at one of the table-sized, stainless steel grills where the food is prepared before our eyes Teppanyaki style. The flames flew high on the volcano of onions the chef built. We marveled at his antics with thrown eggs and knives, and, with others, applauded each performance.
In between I looked for a way to caution Erin about her activities with Commander Ooten. I wanted to ask her what in the world did she think she is doing. Ask in a nice way but one that left no doubt that her new friend, myself, was there to help set her straight.
While waiting for the check, I said, “I’m going to tell you something.”
She tilted her head, a smile on her lips. “Okay.”
“Don’t take this wrong.”
“Oh boy,” she said. She peered into her wine glass, refilled once already, and lifted my sake cup to drain the last few sips. Then she went for the pitcher. “Guess I’ll have to do without,” she said, shaking it as if more would loosen and come free. “How bad is it, what you’re going to tell me?”
“You can handle it.”
“Ah, thank God.”
“You’re a mystery to me, is all.”
“Come again?”
“I can’t quite figure you out.”
She winked at me and reached for her puffy pink jacket from the back of the chair, saying, “Have you figured out I’m a little wasted? If I had any more I couldn’t drive. You’d have to arrest me.” The way she said it, like a flirtation.
We stood in the parking lot by her car, talking, and then she said, “Ugh. You know, I’m really feeling sick. I don’t think I can make it home without urping.” She hunched in, and I stood by her and put my arm around her. This could be the most unusual of come-ons, perhaps the same as she used on the commander to get him to take her home.
“It must be the food. It couldn’t be the wine and sake. A certain person kept me from that,” she said, looking at me sideways, a pixie tease in her smile.
Icy mud sprayed us as a car sped by faster than the driver should have in the lot. The snow was about three inches deep, the woods woven with chalky
fog ahead of us.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you home. In the morning I’ll pick you up at your apartment and we can go get your car.”
When she quickly met my eyes, I realized she hadn’t mentioned whether she lived in an apartment, a house, or a boxcar.
She lived just a few miles away, near a Moravian cemetery. “I go there sometimes and just wander down the lanes. All the headstones lie flat to show that everyone is equal in the sight of God. Rich next to poor, whites next to blacks next to Mohican Indians.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m from Montana. We stuff ‘em and put ‘em in museums.” She gave a soft laugh. Her eyes were closed and her head was back on the seat as I’d instructed. It’s where my own should have been. I could feel the hot drink still in my veins, the sweet burn that beckons so many, the frayed ends strangely comforting.
“All but the women,” Erin said. “The women are buried in their own section. Separate. Inside the church, too.”
Her lips shone pink in the boomeranged light. I wanted to kiss her there, then. Instead, I turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto the road, driving well within the speed limit, sight often flicking to the mirrors. I disdained the fact that Trooper Flannery would let herself get blotto even off duty, but the truth was I also knew in saner times I would not get behind the wheel either. She did it again, that woman. Getting men to tread over boundaries.
She seemed to feel better, once inside. “I guess it was the wine after all,” she said. “I didn’t eat lunch today. Hey, want some ice water? Or coffee? I’ll be glad to make some.” I said yes to the coffee.
That’s when she got up from the couch we were sitting on. Perhaps I was sitting a little too close for comfort. I shifted to be farther away when she returned, but then I stood up and went into the kitchen with her. She faltered as she took a step, galumphing forward off the rug and slapping soles onto the tile. Laughing, she said, “Holy shit. I really am drunk … or something. You know what? I’m sorry, but I think I should just go on up to bed.”
