by Lee Lamothe
Martinique Frost made a cynical smile. “Gee, wonder where he could’ve got to. Sure you want to stick to that attitude? I’ve locked guys up who went with that. And I haven’t seen a hickey in a long time.”
“Well,” Djuna Brown said, caught but fighting it out, her hand going to the light red mark on her throat, “probably he went home from headquarters to get a jacket or something? Caught in traffic. He lives up past the cemetery.” She added, “I think he said.”
“Traffic man here is telling me they modelled a champagne glass on a woman’s boob. You ever had a guy hit on you like that? The boob in the glass shot?”
Comartin, carefully dribbling Cliquot into a glass for Djuna Brown, murmured, “If he was going directly from the Jank to up past the cemetery he’d been here by now. Twelve lighted intersections. Even with the signals timed against him, rush hour, the traffic off the Eight runs to about two hundred cars per twenty minute cycle, average, north and south. I figure, conservative, twenty-two minutes, unless he went to siren and lights.”
“Yep,” Martinique Frost said, nodding at Comartin. “A shower, ten minutes. Dry off, maybe five or six. Dress up for the dining room, five, maybe ten minutes. Drive back, the Eight is thin downtown-bound by then, well, I figure he’d’ve been here long time before us, ordering the champagne when we walked in. So, maybe not? Maybe he got into something else, didn’t go home at all, lost track of the time, until late?”
Djuna Brown sipped the champagne, the bubbles tickling her nose. Happily, she looked from Martinique Frost to Brian Comartin. “Boy,” she said, “I have a feeling that these guys dropping the women have no fucking idea what they’re up against.”
But she was pleased that her glow showed.
Ray Tate crossed the dining room, tucking in his shirt under his jacket, and dropped into a chair. “Sorry ’bout that. Traffic.”
Martinique Frost nodded. “Djuna here told us you had to run back to headquarters.”
“Ah, yeah, I forgot some stuff.”
She looked at Djuna Brown. “Amateur.”
Throughout dinner they talked about the city and the job, getting to know about one another without making declarative statements about who they were. You couldn’t tell a story in which you were heroic or victimized.
Martinique Frost told about receiving a birthday card that morning, even though it wasn’t her birthday. A sad tale of a man who killed his abusive girlfriend and, when he confessed, had wept and said he wished he’d had her for a girlfriend instead, but it was worth killing his girlfriend just so he’d meet her. So she didn’t die in, like, vain, right? It had been six years earlier and she’d broken him down by saying she was going to miss her birthday dinner; her kids were waiting for her. But I’ll stay with you, she told him as he cracked, because I know you’re a good person who made a mistake. That did him and he rushed his confession so she’d get home for the dinner birthday party. He still sent Marty Frost handmade birthday cards from the craft shop up at Craddock.
Brian Comartin savaged the mayor for snarling traffic, ordering projections guaranteed to put more people on bicycles. When another guy in Comartin’s office suggested the city issue bicycle licences, the mayor had him shipped off to the morning court run. It was a weak story and Marty Frost gave a small shrug to Ray Tate.
Ray Tate smiled and told about the cop ophidiophobia with who was able to respond to the py-py-pythons call because he’d overcome his arachnophobia.
Djuna Brown told a sweet story about when she and one of her troopers were chasing a drunken but very fast Native burglar across an ice field one night. The trooper jumped in the cruiser and drove around the ice field to head off the fugitive. While Djuna Brown, awkward in her mukluks, was in pursuit, she slipped on the ice and fell hard with a grunt. The Native dropped his loot, skidded to a stop and ran back to help her up, apologizing, make sure she was all right. I’m sorry, Miss, he said, please. Djuna Brown was smiling, fondly remembering. “We gave him the charge but we didn’t beat him.”
“Nice one, Djuna.” Martinique Frost recognized the sweet sadness on her face, that she was, by her choice of story, letting everyone know who and what she was about. That she loved policing and she loved the people she policed. “I thought that was a bad posting up there, Indian country. Where the State Police sent you, get you to quit. What do they call it? The Spout?”
Djuna Brown nodded. “The Spout. Where they drop you in and they pour you out.” She gave them all a gay grin. “They think sending you someplace to police folks who really need help, that that’s punishment. That the work is punishment. You guys, when we get this thing down, with those poor dead women, you’re all coming up there. My treat. We’ll go fishing.”
Marty Frost said, “Speaking of the poor dead ladies? I talked to a guy at Homicide.” She took a leather-bound police notebook from her purse, then dug out a pair of half-frame bifocals and set them over her flat ears and on her perfect nose and began reading. She glanced up over them at Comartin staring at her. “What?”
Brian Comartin thought he was going to go into cardiac seizure.
She recited: “Belinda Clarke was killed first but her body was found second. She was a prostitute. Five-foot-two, one ten, slender, crack addict, single mother, soliciting, soliciting, soliciting, unarmed robbery against person, possession, possession, and possession. Found fully clothed and pulverized on the riverbank where she trolled for lonely men living on the boats moored offshore. Cause of death, massive trauma to left side of body, massive head injuries. Body found partially covered in shallow depression ten feet from the river’s edge. A crack pipe and some rock and a hundred and forty bucks in small bills found in a hollow tree five feet from death site.” Martinique Frost looked up. “This is a good lady. Eight men living on boats, three of them still married, all kicked in for her funeral. All attended. One of them opened a bank account for her two children. All were cleared as suspects. This lady never pissed off anybody, not for this. She was just dealt the low cards when she was born. Everyone used the same two terms: gentle and conflicted. One guy said she had a sweet soul.” Martinique Frost kept her face in decided neutral. She didn’t know them well enough to expose any emotional substratum. “If it hadn’t been from the location and circumstances she was found in, the Homicide guy said it could’ve been a truck-on-pedestrian accident. She was punished.”
It was work, now, no fun and games about breasts in coupe glasses or quirky little cop stories. They all gave Martinique Frost their attention. She demanded it. She was doing the good work.
“Ms. Clarke died overnight June 9th and was found June 12th, after victim number two was found on the 11th. There was a lot of rain and there was nobody on the riverbank to find her. The Volunteers hadn’t gone public yet, that we knew of, they hadn’t started their patrols and shit. So, number one, Ms. Clarke, was found after number two, Ms. Smith, was killed.
“Number two killed second, but found first, was Mariam Smith. June 11. Female, black, thirty, no criminal, no police interaction. Receptionist here at the Whistler, eight years. Married common-law to a hotel handyman, no kids. Ms. Smith is found in the alleyway between the rear of this hotel and that new complex of antique shops on Superior. Same COD. Massive left-hand body trauma, head injuries. No sex, no robbery. Her left-side torso bones had been pretty much powdered and her head jellied. Because victim one hadn’t been found yet, and number three hadn’t been killed yet, the hammers from Homicide went after the husband, your basic yawn theory. They work him up, sweat him a little, and then number one is found, Ms. Clarke, prostitute, cracker. And things get steered off that way.”
Brian Comartin could tell there was more to what Martinique Frost was saying than a mere recitation of facts. She was spending something. He wished they were still alone in the dining room so he could ask, but all he could do was sit there and hope to understand it later.
“Now, after Ms. Clarke and Ms. Smith, they’re thinking they’ve maybe got someone out there starting a ru
n. And when number three, June Flowers, is found, June 19, they start to put them all together. Ms. Flowers, female black, single, twenty-two, waitress at the Stoney on Erie, night student in veterinary sciences at the university. She’s found off Harrison Hill, in a vacant lot she cut through to get to the rear entrance of her apartment building. Cause, injuries, circumstances, all the same as the first two, powdered and jellied. But then the bug hits and right off three hammers are off the Homicide roster. An analysis guy is recruited to put the three into a frame, but he gets the bug and becomes the first known non-Asian fatality.” She paused and tried to make a little smile. “Vagaries of life, right?”
Ray Tate knew what was going on, where she was going. “Marty, we can finish this later, you know?” He knew her story. “Don’t go so hard.”
“I’m okay, Ray. So, now, nothing happens. We’ve got the gang shooters up in Hauser dropping about one body every two days. We’ve got a run on domestics. We’ve got the contract killing of the State’s ombudsman’s wife. The Volunteers are running riot on the Asians. The bug is everywhere. Everything sucks energy and manpower from the ladies’ murders. And it sits there, until this lady this morning is found. Something off-stage happens, probably because word’s getting out that we’re under white-power siege and these are all black victims, and they put together this task force. Me, I think it has something to do with the election coming up, there’s some political agenda here. But, actually, I don’t care. We’re going to work for the poor ladies and this is going to be the good work.”
Brian Comartin waited a beat. He saw Ray Tate and Djuna Brown glance at each other with sad knowledge. He was affected by the synopsis on some level, but couldn’t identify why. He didn’t have the ear.
After a moment of silence, Martinique Frost looked up, her mood changed up. She cleared her throat, dry. “Traffic man, we need a nightcap.”
Comartin instantly decided against champagne. It didn’t feel right. Champagne is for when we’re happy, he’d been told in Champagne. He felt a lot of things, looking at Martinique Frost, but happy wasn’t any longer one of them. Champagne was out of the question.
Without asking anyone, he subtly flagged a waiter and ordered a round of cognac.
The State paid for three rounds of cognac as well as the food and champagne. Djuna Brown signed the bill with an exaggerated flourish, adding a liberal twenty percent. The smallest of them all in body mass, she teetered a little. They trooped out of the dining room and across the lobby and out the revolving doors. The heat, even late at night, was heavy. Six Volunteers in their red baseball caps swaggered down the opposite sidewalk, looking wound up and deprived of someone to stomp.
Djuna Brown yawned. “Glad I’m already home. You guys okay to drive?”
Comartin said he was okay. “Genetics, I’m Irish. I can run these guys home. I’m Traffic man and anyway none of the guys is into doing road stops in case they inhale the bug.”
Martinique Frost was tipply, but okay. “Traffic man and poet.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “All in one cool package.”
Ray Tate said he could hack it. “We’ll all need cars in the morning anyway for the task force briefing. I’ll swing by, pick up Djuna on the way in. So fuck it. Brian, we’ll go in a convoy to the Eight, then make a run for it. You’ve got the crash car so you go first. Anybody red-lights us, you ram ’em while the rest of us scram. Every man for himself.”
Comartin nodded solemnly. “Sounds like a plan.”
They said goodnights and left Djuna Brown on the steps of the hotel. Ray Tate got into the Taurus, Marty Frost into one of the Chryslers, and Comartin into the traffic crash car. He led the way out of the driveway. Just before they hit the Eight, Ray Tate dropped back and circled back to the hotel, picked up Djuna Brown, and headed to his apartment.
“I can’t believe you still live here, Ray.” She remembered their nights the year before, especially their final night when Ray Tate, freshly shot and recovering with tubes in his body, showed sadness that she was heading back up to Indian country. They’d expected to be fired and had planned to head to Paris with their buyouts, where he’d wear a beret on the Left Bank and lean on an easel while she posed on a duvet and learned to cook cassoulet. “I’d’ve thought you would have moved out of here.”
“Too much hassle. The light’s great and I got a new ceiling, guy upstairs got a new patch of flooring.” In spite of the new paint and plaster the ceiling showed bullet gouges that had been ineptly and cheaply repaired. He wondered why he didn’t move out. But the apartment was the first place he’d ever lived alone. Before that it had been state orphan homes, the police academy dormitory, and the suburban house with his now ex-wife.
Djuna Brown looked at the framed prints on the wall. She could tell it wasn’t Ray Tate’s work. The pictures were almost cartoonish but done with a knowledgeable hand and they all went together in a distinctive kind of way. Ray Tate tended toward a more traditional sad hand, dark in charcoal and grim acrylics and less celebratory of life, kind of 1920s Paris before the Crash sent everybody back to America. These looked cheerful and deep at the same time. “This guy looks like fun.”
“Canadian. A guy named Tony Calzetta. I went up to Canada and over to Toronto, saw an opening. I got a deal, so I got the three of them.” He didn’t say that he’d driven up to Canada through Indian country and couldn’t make himself veer off the interstate to visit her. On the drive up he’d felt a thrill in his chest, tempting himself that he’d stop and see her and maybe never drive back to the city. Passing the feeder roads into Indian country he’d had a chest full of loss, almost of cowardice. But he pressed on, and in Toronto he’d visited a tiny gallery in Little Italy, fell in love with the prints, and dug for his wallet. He’d returned home, crossing at Buffalo, and suffered the cracked, broken highways across the bottom of the lakes, avoiding Indian country, avoiding temptation. He hung the three Calzettas for inspiration, to show different artists had different art, that there were places in life for colours and serious fun, far from the black moodiness of his charcoal.
She took off her clamshell holster, put it on top of a bookcase, and found a bottle of gin in the fridge. “We got any mix?” She laughed and turned on the cold water and popped off her batik top, staggering a bit in her little sports bra. She whooped, with a dirty leer, “Party time, sailor.”
They were too excited to sleep much into dawn and just dozed to absorb the minimum rest they needed. At five-thirty, when light only barely thinned the darkness in the corners of the room, he awoke to find her looking at him.
“Ray? What do you think? Marty and her synopsis?”
“How long you been awake?”
“Little while. I was thinking about Marty, what she said. Poor ladies. Ms. this and Ms. that.”
“I made a couple of quick calls. Martinique Frost is a very interesting lady. Comartin, who knows?”
That meant Marty Frost had been worth gossiping about and Comartin not.
“He’s okay, though,” she said. “He’s got a good heart. And I think he might be crazy about Marty.” She rolled onto him, more for convenience on the futon than for the carnality of it, but if it went dirty, what could she do? He was a bigger than her; she’d just have to ride it out. “What’s her story?”
Ray Tate’s apartment was on a lower floor of the old, squat apartment building, but it faced northwest to the distant East Chinatown. There was more light in the sky over there than there should have been, impossibly yellow throbbing and glowing in the northern sky, where the sun never rose. Sirens were raging at a distance. His cellphone, in the pocket of the sports jacket tossed on the floor on top of his ankle holster, began beeping.
Chapter 10
In the rear-view mirror Brian Comartin saw the Taurus peel off and head back toward the Whistler, just before the three-car convoy hit the ramp-on to the Eight. He smiled. He liked Ray Tate and Djuna Brown. Some cops could tell and re-tell their days of combat, how they put down the bad guy in a heroic
blaze of gunfire glory and lived to tell the tale. They were intimidating, challenging in a seemingly bluffing but truly serious kind of way. But Ray Tate never referred to it, never mentioned the shootings or himself getting shot. That Djuna Brown in her batiks and little sparkly slippers had taken out an armed maniac was almost impossible to comprehend. He hadn’t been in company of real cops for most of his career and usually felt a little intimidated. But these two were ditzy, it seemed, with thoughts of marathon banging in Paris. Brian Comartin’s dream was the streets of Barcelona and long thoughts chewing on a poet’s pencil. But it was the same dream.
The black Chrysler was gone from his rear-view and he thought that he’d outrun Martinique Frost. But then she was up beside his driver’s door. She activated her inside light and pointed her finger ahead. He slowed and she pulled in front. They went past his exit at a steady speed. Well in time for the exit onto Huron, she activated her indicator and moved into the right-hand lane and onto the ramp-off. He followed, his mind a jumble of absent condoms, his overweight torso and body issues, and shortness of breath, having sex for the first time with a black woman. For a moment he felt like losing her accidentally on purpose.
But he stayed nailed thirty feet off her bumper. For the first time his life felt like uncharted free-form poetry.
Martinique Frost talked the night away in the kitchen of her duplex on the edge of Bricktown. He didn’t make a move; he didn’t know how and was waiting for an opening he knew he wouldn’t recognize. She didn’t call him poetry man or Traffic man. She was a little drunk and into herself enough to call him Brian. He was falling for her, she could see, and had a right to know, in case he wanted to pull back, give things a little thought. Ray Tate, she knew, would have done a casual workup on her if it looked like they’d be out and about together on the dead ladies case, but Comartin wouldn’t know what to ask and if he did he wouldn’t be able to parse the meaning out of the answers he’d get. Something as innocuous as someone saying, “She works hard; never missed a day off injured,” could sound like a compliment to a non-cop ear. But in reality it meant, Look out, she won’t get down in the blood and the mud and the beer, if it comes to that.
