Deviations

by Mike Markel

  A woman my age. I’d never busted her, but ten-to-one she’s got a long string of convictions for possession. Just recreational, not with intent to sell. Some of the guys who’d crashed in her doublewide, they might’ve been dealers, but she had no idea, honest. Ratty sweatshirt and gym-gray K-Mart stretch pants that weren’t doing much to hide that volleyball in front. A screaming red dye job with a good two inches of gray roots. Blotchy skin, couple teeth gone. She was giving me the tough-love look, like we were sisters. Saying you might’ve started out a little better, but here we are, together in the senior-center basement. We’re just the same, her eyes are saying. Hell no, we’re not.

  The older ones were showing a little less attitude. A Vietnam-era guy, his scalp a checkerboard of liver spots, a silver fringe tied back in a puny ponytail, a big gold hoop ring in his left ear. The USMC on his bicep was pale now, but the purple dragon with blood-dripping teeth on his forearm was recent. All in all, a pitiful package, but his eyes were kind. They said it’s good that you’re here. You’ll start where you have to start.

  Next to him, a sixty-year-old woman in wool slacks, cable-knit sweater, professional hair. Looked like she works for United Way in fundraising, has a place in the California desert for when we start our seven-month winter. She smiled at me—not a hostile smile like she’s figured me out and I’m wasting everybody’s time. More like she’s been where I am. It will come when it’s ready. You’re welcome here anyway.

  A guy wearing a three-piece suit, pinstripe, five-hundred bucks, easy. Silk tie, blue and reds, maybe a little short of a hundred. Oxblood loafers. With tassels, for God’s sake. Where did he even buy those things? He looked mid-fifties, dark brown hair, thick, going gray. Long, strong face leading down to a tough-guy jaw. Thing that stood out was his blue eyes, not Paul Newman but even lighter. Icy. He looked like the kind of dad you’d love if he wanted to teach you how to fish but hate if he wanted to teach you a lesson.

  He held a steady gaze at me after I said my name. I almost recognized his face. I knew I’d seen him before, but I’ve seen a lot of men in their fifties. His expression said, Can’t you do anything right?

  No, sir, I guess I can’t. If I could, I wouldn’t be here now, would I?

  Everyone was looking at me. Asses fidgeted in chairs; throats cleared; eyebrows lifted. I realized I hadn’t said anything in a while. I didn’t know how long: a few seconds, a couple of minutes, an hour and a half. Apparently, “Hi, my name is Karen”—with or without the next four words—wasn’t good enough for this group. They could cut me some slack; this was my first puke party.

  The words started coming. “I was thinking about what I was going to say. Earlier today. But I didn’t come up with much. It’s not that nothing’s happened to me. I mean, if you’re forty-two, something must’ve happened. But I couldn’t pinpoint anything that would help you understand what happened. That would, you know, explain how I … how I created this opportunity to talk with you today.

  “My life was pretty nice for a long time. When I was a kid, I mean. My parents—I’ll call them Mom and Dad—were fine. I mean, they were my parents, so I didn’t always like them, you know? Mom was a housewife. These days she’d be called a homemaker. She made our home.

  “I didn’t give her much trouble. I was a good student, didn’t get in trouble too often. My sister, Kathy, she was a different story. This was when kids like Kathy were called inattentive. I remember once a teacher wrote that she was unruly. Really, what she was, we later found out, was some kind of autistic. Lots of fighting, screaming, pissing everybody off. Bad in school, bad at home, bad at relationships. Bad at everything. She kinda disappeared during her junior year in high school. Well, not exactly ‘kinda disappeared.’ She officially disappeared. As in, hasn’t been seen since.

  “Then, Dad disappeared. That one was your typical Dad Disappearance. Mom had fallen apart—she had a right, I can see that now—so Dad packed up one day and left. He’s in Virginia now, in some kind of facility, where he’s dying of something.

  “So, anyway, with Kathy gone, then my mom losing it, then my father gone, well, this really noisy house got awful quiet. Even before that, I’d learned to stay in my room whenever I could. My mother was drinking all the time, and she didn’t mind if I had some, too. Didn’t mind or didn’t know, maybe some of both.

  “Between blackouts she had it together enough to see that our house wasn’t exactly providing the kind of nurturing environment, blah blah. Anyway, she wanted me to get out of there, so off I went to the state university, which was fine and all. I was drinking every day, so, from what I remember, I fit in fine there.

  “My mom’s not doing too good these days. I don’t feel guilty about getting out of there. It was important to her, the most important thing, she said. I don’t feel guilty about it. She lives a long way from here. We talk on the phone when I get a chance.

  “Anyway, got through college, fell in love with this guy named Bruce, married him. We had this wonderful boy, Tommy, he’s fifteen. Bruce split. Nothing traumatic—nothing even interesting about it. I just got a little older, which apparently wasn’t part of the deal. Tommy lives with Bruce and his current girlfriend. She’s fine, good to Tommy. A little young for my taste, but just right for Bruce. I could tell her about what might happen if she gets old, but for some reason she doesn’t come around for advice.

  “About why I was fired. I was a detective here in Rawlings, and I kind of messed up a case. It was a murder, and I—my partner and me—we had the killer, but I sort of let him go. Not let him go like he’s coming over to your place tonight in a hockey mask. But I let him kill himself. He was all busted up. His daughter had just died, which was why he’d flipped out and killed the guy. Anyway, it wasn’t my call to let him kill himself. I see that. I saw that then, too. I fucked up the case. It was right to fire me. That’s what I would have done to me.

  “That’s about it. My story. Actually, there’s one other thing. I got in a car accident a few months ago and hurt a little girl. She’s out of the hospital now, goes to therapy couple times a week. They think she’s gonna be okay. You can’t really say for sure about the long-term … the long-term outcome. That’s the word they use: ‘outcome.’ It was a severe head trauma. I think I had been drinking.

  “So, like I say, I’m going through kind of a rough patch here. And that might explain … I don’t know, it’s just the normal kind of shit that happens, and maybe I’m not handling it as well as I could. Anyway, that’s about all I have to say at the moment.”

  My legs went rubber and I sagged into my chair. The guy running the meeting said, “Thank you, Karen. We appreciate you sharing like that.” The hardasses were leaning back in their chairs, arms crossed, with looks that said they’d throw me the hell out of there if they could. Some of the others sort of smiled at me, some nodding their heads. My glance caught the guy with the suit and the loafers, but his blue eyes were cold.

  I wanted to jump up and run the hell out of there, but my legs weren’t on-board. I sat there, looking down at the floor. My face was all hot. It felt like my whole body was throbbing, which I had never experienced before, even when I was about to pass out or just coming to.

  The guy running the meeting started to talk, but he was under water so I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then other people started to talk. I just wanted to get smaller and smaller until I was the size of a marble rolling around on the seat of my cheap orange plastic chair. I could tell they weren’t talking to me or about me, so I was real happy about it. Happy being a relative term, you understand. Their words pushed me back and forth, like I was a cork on a wave. The sound was indistinct, like the rumble of surf, and therefore somewhat comforting.

  A pair of dirty old bedroom slippers entered my field of vision. My eyes traveled up the gym-gray stretch pants. I recognized the volleyball belly and the red hair with the gray roots. “What the hell was that?” she said, hands on her hips, a snarl on her face.

  I just
looked at her, not saying anything. I was thinking a few things, such as, What the fuck are you talking about? Who the fuck are you? Mind getting the fuck out of my face? But I was so wrung out, I didn’t have the energy for a chat.

  “I’m talking to you,” she said, like that meant I owed her an answer.

  I wanted to signal that I wasn’t interested in small talk at the moment. “Go fuck yourself.”

  She came at me, her big belly getting right up in my face. I started to push her back, but she kept coming at me, like she was going to lift me to my feet so she could start beating on me.

  The guy with the pinstripe suit and the loafers stepped between us, his arm coming down like a gate. He pushed her away from me. Not so hard she would fall, but with a kind of authority that said, This isn’t going to happen here. “Ma’am, I need you to back off, please.” Not asking. Telling.

  She looked at him, a head taller than her. She took in his suit, and that seemed to do it for her, like if a suit that nice is telling you to back off, you better do it. She walked away, shaking her head like the world’s gone to hell when a bitch like me can tell her to go fuck herself and she doesn’t even get to kick my ass, which I fully deserve.

  I focused my eyes on the guy in the suit. He was standing a few feet away from me. The suit jacket was open. The shirt was so white it almost hurt. Like snow before it hits the dirt. Clean and cold.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fine.” I looked at him. He was handsome. Clear skin stretched tight over a good set of bones. But I couldn’t read it. Like it had been drawn by a really good artist, just a few quick pencil strokes on a napkin that added up to an unmistakably human face, but one that didn’t tell you anything going on behind it, if that makes any sense. The brows were perfectly symmetrical black arcs. The squint lines that radiated out from his eyes, paler than the skin on the rest of his face, pointed in toward the black circles that were his pupils and the icy blue part of his eyes. Between his brows, two sharp vertical lines led down to the long nose, a couple vertical strokes, then the age lines flaring out farther until they intersected the lip slashes.

  “My name is Robert Murtaugh,” he said.

  “Then you’re supposed to say, ‘And I’m an alcoholic.’”

  He waited a beat. “And I’m the Chief of Police.”

  It came like a little orgasm in my head. That’s who he was. Doctorate in criminal justice from City University of New York. Twenty-five years in five different cities in California and Washington, climbing each rung from uniform to detective to Assistant to the Chief in Sacramento, then the big job here in little Rawlings. His photo was in the paper when he arrived last month to bring law and order to Dodge. He was wearing a dress uniform, so many ribbons for meritorious service, some were half-hidden behind the lapels.

  “My office. Tomorrow, nine am.”

  “You want to ream me out, get in line.”

  He nodded, like I had just shown him something he was expecting. “My office, tomorrow at nine.” He turned and walked out of the room, not even giving me a chance to tell him to go fuck himself.

  Chapter 3

  Couple minutes before nine, I pulled into the lot at police headquarters, the first time I’d been there in over five months. By habit, I headed toward the row along the west side, where the detectives park. But I caught myself and steered over toward the five spots marked Visitors. That’s what I was: a visitor.

  The building was two stories, with a basement. A big, flat-roofed rectangle, with the personality of a plain cardboard box. Forty-thousand square feet of office space, evidence rooms, holding cells, labs, a morgue, a five-lane shooting range, and a workout room, all wrapped up in dirt-colored brick. When the building was put up right after I joined the force fifteen years ago, the idea was to make it ugly. The architect succeeded: it announced, in a robot voice with no inflection and no accent, “Responsible Use of Taxpayer Funds.” One good thing about a building designed to be uninspired: it didn’t look significantly worse than it did the day it was built.

  The main entrance was the same one you’d see on any quickie municipal building: two wide glass doors centered below the generic foot-tall brown letters identifying the building as Rawlings Police Department. I walked into the foyer. Utilitarian beige patterned industrial floor tiles, beige drywall with framed color photographs of all eleven chiefs of police.

  I was a few minutes early, which I never was when I worked there. I didn’t want to go over to Reception just yet, so I walked over to the portraits. There, at the end of the row, was Robert Murtaugh. Just to his left was Howard Arnold, his bloated, lazy, publicity-hungry, penny-ante corrupt predecessor, the one who fired me. I looked at the photo of his fat face. Some Photoshopper had changed the busted blood vessels on his enormous nose from fire engine to a gentler Hello Kitty pink, which puzzled me. Either leave the nose alone, so he can guide our sleigh tonight, or take out all the red. What’s the point of making him look just halfway to liver cirrhosis?

  He had retired soon after firing me. It was six months before his twenty years, which makes a big difference in your retirement, but the City Council signed off on his full pension when Robert Murtaugh from Sacramento showed some interest in the job. They knew Murtaugh was an up-and-comer, and they thought having a real chief, rather a big real-estate developer’s dumb-shit brother-in-law, would do the city good. The old chief left on a down note, not because of the case I fucked up—after all, we got the right guy for the murder, and he killed himself, saving the taxpayers some serious money—but because of another case that never materialized.

  That case had to do with the death of James Weston, husband of Dolores Weston, who is a Montana state senator living in Rawlings. Weston, a super-rich dude, died in a parasailing accident at their place in Maui. Turns out a kid who worked on the boat jimmied the line that held the parasail to the harness, and down he came, hitting the crystal-clear water at close to a hundred miles an hour. The old chief was hoping that the kid, who used to work on the Weston ranch in Rawlings, had conspired with Dolores Weston here in town to ice her husband. The case had made the national media because—well, because he was a rich dude and because a tourist’s cell-phone video of his last dive, complete with windmilling arms and scissoring legs, was all over YouTube.

  Unfortunately, there was no connection to Rawlings. The crime was plotted in Maui by one of the local boys who worked on the Weston place. Seems the kid was pissed because Weston was boning his seventeen-year-old sister. Maui boys consider it rude when a sixty-year old billionaire haole slaps a four million-dollar estate on a dozen acres with a couple hundred feet of pink sand. But when he starts diddling the little sister of one of his minimum-wage workers—well, that’s just wrong.

  I walked over to Reception, the U.S. flag to the left, Montana flag to the right. From behind the bulletproof glass, the receptionist, a young guy I didn’t know, slid me a sign-in book and a visitor badge. He said he’d notify the chief. A minute later, an electronic lock clicked and Murtaugh came out through a wood-grained steel door. He said “Detective,” which wasn’t accurate, of course, but sounded better than “Visitor.” He didn’t come over to me, didn’t smile. He waited for me to tap tap the twenty paces over to him. Then he turned and led the way, down the center hall of the main floor, past the evidence rooms, the dispatch center, the interview rooms, the roll-call room, and the detectives’ bullpen. I kept my head down, not wanting to see my old partner, young Ryan. He’d smile and call out to me, rush over and tell me how good it was to see me. Tell me I looked well. I lie, but I don’t like to be lied to.

  In the chief’s outer office, I was glad to see that Helen Glenning, the old chief’s old gatekeeper, was gone, along with her cat photos, her inspirational wall posters, and her completely unearned sense of superiority. In her place was another woman, who looked up briefly and nodded to me as I followed the chief into his office. I liked her already.

  The office had some new furniture—a
small couch and a couple of soft chairs—so the chief could come out from behind his big desk and talk one-on-one with colleagues. He gestured to one of the soft chairs and walked around behind his desk, sitting down in one of those expensive chairs with the mesh. On his desk I saw an open folder with a white legal pad next to it.

  “I see from your file that there was no exit interview conducted when you left in November,” he said.

  Fine, thanks, I thought, and you? Yes, it is good to see some signs of Spring. And congratulations on your new position.

  “Did Chief Arnold indicate why there was no exit interview?”

  “No, sir, he didn’t. He was kinda disgusted with me. Just told me to get the hell out.”

  Chief Murtaugh held his gaze. I couldn’t tell whether he was assessing me, the old chief, or both of us.

  “Our discussion today will function in that capacity, then.”

  “All right,” I said. It wasn’t like I had a lot of other appointments.

  “You and Detective Miner had concluded that Warren Endriss, using Jonathan Ahern as an alias, had killed Arlen Hagerty, is that correct, and you had gone to San Diego to arrest Mr. Endriss and bring him back to Rawlings?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you failed to follow the regulations by cuffing him appropriately when you took him into custody at his daughter’s funeral.” He looked down at the folder. “Then, he requested that you drive him out to Torrey Pines State Park, which he used to visit with his daughter. You complied. Once there, he took his life by jumping off a cliff overlooking the water. Is that correct?”