Back on Murder

by Mark J. Bertrand

  “The wife,” I say.

  He draws his hand back. “Ah. We better get the notification taken care of.”

  “You want to come along?”

  From the way he recoiled from the ringing phone, I already know the answer. But Bascombe surprises me by saying yes. He notifies the captain, then motions to my car. “You drive.”

  Stephanie Thomson comes to the door with dried mascara on her cheeks, wearing an oversized men’s button-up shirt and a pair of loose-fitting cotton shorts. She’s younger than I expected, more Cavallo’s generation than mine and Thomson’s, pretty but with the lined, hollow-cheeked look that comes from hard drinking. Her nose and the rim of her eyes shine pink. In her tight-packed fist, a puff of damp Kleenex juts from between the knuckles. Bascombe shows his badge and makes the introductions, setting off more tears.

  “It’s all right,” I say, putting an arm over her shoulders, guiding her to a brown recliner in the apartment’s open living room. Of course it’s not all right. It’s terrible and will only get worse. But I speak the words out of reflex, prompted by emotional muscle memory. When people cry, you tell them not to. The first impulse is to take the pain away, because if you don’t, how can you give any comfort?

  Bascombe crouches wide-legged at the edge of the sofa, leaning toward her with his hands intensely clasped. He looks like he’s about to break the news, but no words come out of his mouth. I kneel beside the recliner, taking her hand.

  “I have something to tell you, Stephanie – ”

  “Is it Joe?” she asks, nodding her head over and over. “It’s Joe, isn’t it? I’ve been trying to call him all night, and he never answers. I knew something was wrong, I just knew. Is he . . . ?”

  “He’s dead,” I say. No use in dragging it out. “His body was discovered earlier this morning. He was sitting behind the wheel of his vehicle, pulled over on the side of the road. He had his pistol in his hand, and a gunshot wound to the head.”

  Her tear ducts open up, expelling a river of glistening salt, an impossible current pulsing out in silence. Shaking from the shoulders down through to the knees, an involuntary tremor, reminding me of a marble column under earthquake pressure, the dusty cracking that presages impending collapse.

  “He shot himself,” she says, nodding violently, so certain. “He did that to himself.”

  “We’re still conducting our investigation, but – ”

  “How could he . . . ?” Her mouth widens, like she’s trying to swallow something too large. “He did that to himself ?”

  Suddenly she’s slamming her fists against the armrests, kicking her legs, screaming in unintelligible, angry spasms. Bascombe springs forward, pinning her arms like he thinks she’s having a seizure. I stand back and let him do it. After a few moments she goes limp in his arms and starts crying again. I go into the kitchen and look for a glass, pouring water I found in the refrigerator door. When I return, putting the glass on the table beside her, she’s clotting her tears with a fistful of tissue. Bascombe is back on the couch, looking ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.

  “I know this is hard, but I do need to ask some questions. And we’d like to take a look around, too, if that’s all right. It’s standard in a case like this.”

  “Did he leave a note?” she asks, her voice weak.

  “Not that we know of. I was thinking he might have left you a voicemail message?”

  She shakes her head. “I’ve been checking my cell and the home number, thinking maybe . . . but there’s nothing.”

  I hand her the water glass, which she examines with a bleak stare. Instead of hammering her with questions right away, I ask permission to take a look around. She consents with a flick of the hand. The lieutenant sticks to the couch, motioning me to go ahead. As I walk down the hallway toward the bedroom, I can hear him speaking softly to her.

  The apartment is small but quite nice, recent construction with a hardwood entry, slate-colored tile on the kitchen floor, granite counters and stainless sinks, completely at odds with the couple’s furniture, which I’m guessing is a mix of family hand-me-downs and big-box economy buys selected with an eye to comfort, not looks. The kind of place Charlotte would turn her nose up at, but exactly what I’d expect, given what I know about the Thomsons’ history. I’m guessing this is where Stephanie landed after the divorce, and Joe moved some of his things in when they remarried.

  At the back of the hallway there’s a bedroom and bath on one side and a small home office on the other. I step into the office, noting a dusty-screened computer and a stack of printouts which turn out to be real estate listings annotated in loopy, feminine handwriting. In the corner, a half-open closet door beckons. Behind a series of Men’s Wearhouse suits, mostly black and blue solids, I find several rifle cases. Inside one, a padded plastic case, I find a bolt-action hunting rifle with a scope. The next contains a flat-top AR-15 carbine with a telescoping stock and a nice acog sight on the rail. The third case is a short nylon number with narrow pouches on the side for extra magazines. About the right size for a swat-style 9mm submachine gun, but I can tell from its slack droop that the case is empty. I unzip it anyway just to be sure.

  Across the hall, I note the rumpled bedcovers, the framed wedding and honeymoon photos on the dresser – dating back maybe five years at most, making the original marriage more recent than I’d supposed – and a tangle of dirty clothes on the floor. On Thomson’s nightstand, there’s a stack of paperback books, including a new-looking copy of The Kingwood Killing with a bookmark halfway through. Inside the cover, a receipt from Murder by the Book, a local independent on Bissonnet specializing in all books crime-related, dated last Saturday, the day after I joined the Morales investigation. So Thomson was doing his homework. Inside the nightstand drawer, a loaded .357 Magnum snub nose, one of those weightless titanium numbers that’s easy to carry and excruciating to shoot, fitted with a Crimson Trace laser grip.

  As I close the drawer, Bascombe leans into the bedroom, waving his phone. “Can you sit with her, March? I’ve got to take this outside.”

  He exits the apartment, leaving me alone with Stephanie Thomson. She slumps sideways in the recliner, exhausted, quiet apart from the occasional sniffle. I know from experience she’s not done crying. It’ll come in waves, interrupted by surprising, clearheaded stillness, a constant ebb and flow between mind and heart.

  “Has Joe been depressed recently?” I ask.

  “Not the past couple of days. But before that, yeah. For the past week, it was like living with the old Joe. The bad one. We only got back together a few months ago, and he seemed like a changed man – the one I married, instead of the one I divorced.”

  “He’d taken up art, I hear.”

  She gives me a long look. “He’d taken up something, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Please,” I say. “The more information I have about his state of mind, the better.”

  She wipes her eyes, gives her nose a hard rub, sitting up straight in the recliner. “Then here’s the story, for better or worse. Just recently something changed, and the old Joe was back. He said he wasn’t drinking, but I knew better. He has this duffel bag he carries his gear in, and I looked inside and found something.”

  “What was that?”

  “A soft white cellophane-wrapped package. I don’t know what it was, but it looked like drugs to me. Cocaine, whatever. I don’t have any firsthand experience of that stuff. But I figured he was using again.”

  “Did you confront him?”

  “Not about that.”

  “But you did confront him about something?”

  She nods, then coughs back a fresh flow of tears. “You mentioned the art. Well, it was a therapist who put him up to that, before we got back together, and he really took it seriously. Rented a studio at this place over in Montrose, and he’d spend hours over there, sometimes all night, working on his sculpture.” Her
mouth wrinkles at the corner. “I know nothing about art of course, but it wasn’t anything I’d call artistic, just globs of clay and all these faces that looked like they could’ve been made by a kid. I mean, the man can’t draw a picture to save his life, so I don’t know what kind of artist he could really be.” She pauses, thinking over the words. “But it made him happy, so . . .”

  “You were saying you’d confronted him?”

  Again with the nods. “Like I said, he reverted back to his old self, and the way he was when I left him, and that first time the problem wasn’t just the substance abuse. It was the other women. Don’t get me wrong, when I married him I already knew he was a bit of a stray dog, you know? But that was then. I expected him to put that stuff behind him, and when he didn’t, that was it for me. I couldn’t trust him. So my first thought when all this happened was, he’s seeing somebody. And there’s this cute little thing down at the studio, the girl who rented the space across from his.”

  “You thought they were having an affair?”

  “An affair?” She smiles at the quaint term. “You could say that, I guess. But when I brought it up, he denied everything. He said it was just trouble at work. And I . . . it sounds crazy, but I wanted to believe him. I wanted more than anything to be wrong because what we had, I didn’t want to lose it again. You can’t possibly understand how special he was to me, all the plans we had, the way we could be together.”

  She doesn’t cry or convulse with grief. She’s talking about him now like he’s ancient history, like the news of his death came to her years before.

  “You said the past couple of days, things were back to normal?”

  “Yeah,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself. She looks down, noticing the shirt she’s wearing, pulling the fabric up for inspection. She sniffs the sleeve, then lets out a small but terrible sigh, smelling his scent and realizing how soon it will fade.

  The conventional wisdom is, when a suicide makes his final decision, a sense of peace follows. He loses interest in the everyday world, and as a result becomes capable of beautiful gestures. Taciturn men suddenly confess to acquaintances how much their casual encounters have really meant over the years. Treasured objects are given away as the suicide divests himself of things which now mean nothing.

  Stephanie Thomson’s description of her husband’s rebound doesn’t quite fit the pattern. After a dry spell, they’d been “intimate” again – her word – and he’d apologized for being distant. Things would be better from now on, he said. They were even looking for a house.

  “But I knew it couldn’t last.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “I got a phone call,” she says. “A really strange one, out of the blue. Some guy acting all friendly, asking questions about Joe, saying he wanted to get in touch with him. It was trouble, I could feel it. There was something creepy about him.”

  “Did he give you a name?”

  She shrugs. “If he did, I don’t remember. I got scared, though, thinking maybe it was connected to the drugs in his bag or something.”

  The truth dawns on me. “This call, did you tell Joe about it?”

  “No,” she says. “I called Tony and he said he would take care of everything. He told me not to worry.”

  “Tony?” My pulse races. “You mean Antonio Salazar?”

  She nods calmly, the most natural thing in the world. “They work together on the same squad. They’ve been friends for years. Tony’s always looked after Joe. Even in the bad days, he tried to get me to stick it out for Joe’s sake, that’s the kind of friend he is. This . . . this is going to just devastate him.”

  I sit back on the couch, suddenly weary. So the day after I visit Salazar’s office, hoping to touch base with Thomson, Stephanie calls Salazar, telling him about my conversation with her. The next day, some random Latino banger dangling information on my case tries to punch holes in me. And early the next morning, Joe Thomson is dead, apparently by his own hand.

  She sits there glumly in her chair, shaking her head at the pain her husband’s death will cause Tony Salazar, and I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. I want to slap the frown off her face. You did this. It was you. He’s dead because of you. But I might as well slap myself. It’s not Stephanie Thomson’s fault. What she did made perfect sense, just trying to protect her man against himself. I’m the idiot. Yet again. If I’d just been patient, everything would have turned out right. If I’d let Thomson come to me, given him time to be discreet. Instead, desperate to make something happen, I’d blundered into the lair of Keller and Salazar, fatally tipping my hand.

  I hadn’t just missed my last chance. I’d gotten him killed.

  Stephanie hands over the keys to Thomson’s studio, along with the address and a hand-drawn map, just as her sister arrives, prompting a new outpouring of grief. I find Bascombe outside on the landing, sheltering from a percussive bout of rain.

  “Give me sunshine any day,” he says.

  In the car, I can tell he’s got something on his mind, but asking what would be the equivalent of sticking my finger in a trap. No thanks. I’d like to go straight over to the studio – given how clean the apartment was, I can’t help thinking the studio is where Thomson kept his personal files, and maybe that duffel bag his wife mentioned – only the first order of business is unloading the lieutenant. I don’t want him over my shoulder for every step of the investigation.

  At this point, Thomson’s suicide looks perfectly straightforward. If I suggest otherwise to Bascombe or anyone else before I can actually prove it, the only thing I can be sure of is my removal from the case. Once I’m alone, the first order of business will be a call to Wilcox. The longer I can keep him quiet, the more likely it’ll be to make headway.

  “So what did she have to say?” Bascombe asks.

  I give him a rundown, omitting my call and the note now residing in my pocket. I also downplay the studio, omitting reference to the keys now in my possession.

  “He had cocaine in his bag?”

  “It might have been coke. She couldn’t be sure.”

  “How much?”

  “One package, she said.”

  The news makes him restless. He shifts in the seat, fiddles with the air-conditioning vents, raps his knuckles in rhythm against the window. Whatever information he’s holding, it’s clearly dying to get out.

  “What?” I ask, knowing I’ll regret it.

  He jumps on the question. “That call I just took? That was from a friend of mine over in IAD. You know what he told me?”

  My heart takes a break, leaving the blood to settle in my veins. Yes, I know what he told you. He said I’d been wrangling for a deal, using my ex-partner as a go-between, trying to get a blanket immunity to open Thomson’s lips. He said whatever was going on here, I’m hip-deep in it and the first thing for the lieutenant to do is pull me off the case.

  But Bascombe volunteers nothing. He wants me to earn it.

  “What did he tell you, sir?”

  “That our victim has been the subject of a number of internal investigations, including an incident a couple of years ago when some evidence went missing from a drug bust. He was dirty, in other words. And when I told the captain, he called up Thomson’s boss, Big Reg Keller, and you know what he said?”

  “Tell me.”

  “He said the other officers in the unit had been concerned about Thomson. He was a loose cannon apparently, and was suspected of having a substance problem.”

  Sure he was. Keller is wasting no time insulating himself, doing the necessary damage control, just as Salazar had done when he called me after my own shooting, making sure I couldn’t connect the dots between my request for help and the subsequent attack.

  “Does that sit right with you?” Bascombe asks.

  “Sit right? In what sense?”

  “In the sense that when a brother officer eats his gun, you don’t trash his memory.”

  “The blue wall of silence, you mean?” />
  “Common decency. What good does it do anybody for them to say he had a drug problem, or was a dirty cop or whatever? Whether it’s true or not, the man’s dead. He shot himself, right? So if he deserves anything, it’s pity. Instead, his own people are throwing him under the bus, when they ought to be sticking up for him.”

  This isn’t what I expected from Bascombe, not by a long shot. The problem is, when you’ve singled someone out as a nemesis, it’s hard to get an accurate read on character. The lieutenant, since I know he’s never much cared for me, has always lacked psychological depth. He’s a one-note, a foot soldier in the anti-March crusade, without any nuance necessary. Suddenly I find myself agreeing with his instinct, if not his reasoning. Like Wilcox, whose move to Internal Affairs simply externalized a cherished principle, I think the dirty cops should go down. But then I know firsthand what it’s like to suffer for their benefit. If a cop snorts white lady from the evidence locker, plants a drop piece on an unarmed suspect, or takes money on the side for looking the other way, I don’t think a self-inflicted bullet to the brain should whitewash the record.

  Call me naive, but I still subscribe to the “few bad apples” theory. We might be cut from the same cloth as the people we lock up, we might have a tendency to jackknife our relationships or channel the violent impulses that go hand in hand with what we witness into unprofitable avenues, but for the most part, we’re clean. Not squeaky clean, because no one is, but relatively unspotted. Because we didn’t get into this for the cheap thrill of packing a gun, or to work out our inferiority complexes, or because we couldn’t find a better line of work. Carter Robb has it right, in a way. We could have kept things safe, chosen decent occupations that make for polite dinner conversation, better pay and better hours and a far reduced probability of being shot or beat down. But we didn’t choose to be the safe guys. We chose to be the good guys, hard as that is when the world is bad.

  And maybe Thomson was bad; maybe he was the sort like Wilcox said who should have been screened out by the personality tests. Even so, the man had changed. He’d changed enough to get his wife back. Enough to turn on his former friends. He’d changed enough that they had to put a bullet in him, which in my book made him one of us, not them.