The True Detective

by Theodore Weesner

  “Got blasted with a baseball bat,” the boy says, although it is clear this reading of his nose is something new.

  “Well, I guess you paid a price,” Vernon says. “It looks special, though. You could grow up to be a movie star.”

  The boy laughs. “It sure hurt when it happened. I had two black eyes.”

  “Really?”

  “And—” he begins, but stops.

  “And what?”

  “I got teased a lot.”

  “That must’ve hurt, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your brother teased you, I bet.”

  “Yeah. Other kids, too. It was my brother who blasted me. But it was an accident.”

  “It’s too bad people are mean like that,” Vernon says. “The teasing, I mean.”

  The boy makes no reply; Vernon has to take in a breath all at once, to conceal his emotional feeling. This is so wonderful, he thinks. Driving like this. This fullness of life in his car at day’s end where always before there had been emptiness. “Do you have many friends?” he says.

  “Sure, a few,” the boy says.

  “Not many?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Some people have just one friend,” Vernon says. “And some people have a lot of friends. I didn’t have many friends when I was your age. Well, that’s not true. I didn’t have any friends, really. I met people sometimes that I wanted for friends. I think just having one good friend is what I would have liked. You wouldn’t be lonely then, you know, maybe like having a brother.”

  The boy says nothing; skylight is visible now only on the horizon. Cars have headlights on. “Your brother isn’t your friend?” Vernon says. “Or your parents?”

  “I only live with my mother,” the boy says. “My father’s gone somewhere.”

  “I always dreamed,” Vernon says, “of having a brother. Who was my friend.” When the boy says nothing to this, he says, “I guess it doesn’t always work that way though, does it?”

  “Hm,” the boy remarks, as if not knowing how else to respond.

  “My father,” Vernon says. “I never really had a father either. I mean I never knew him. He died in Vietnam. I’m not even certain my mother was married like that, although she says she was.”

  As he keeps the car on its line, it occurs to Vernon how childlike he is sounding, and he reminds himself to be careful. “You don’t have a stepfather?” he says.

  “No.”

  “Maybe that’s better,” Vernon says. “I mean, if your mother’s your friend. Well, my mother hasn’t ever been my friend, but I think she wanted to be. What about girlfriends? You have girlfriends?”

  The boy laughs. “No,” he says.

  “Sit over here closer where I can hear you,” Vernon says, patting the seat. To his amazement, the boy shifts some, and he experiences a new wave of affection over the boy’s innocence. He blinks as if in the presence of something he has not known before. “You know,” he says cautiously, “I could be your friend.”

  The boy seems to hunch his shoulders. He doesn’t say anything.

  Vernon looks ahead, continues driving.

  “How far is this place?” the boy says.

  “Not far.”

  “It better be pretty soon or I have to go home,” the boy says. “I didn’t know it was this far.”

  “We’ll be there in just a few minutes,” Vernon says.

  They continue rolling along under the darkening sky.

  Against sudden nervousness, aware the boy is growing frightened, Vernon starts talking again. “I’ve always had this dream,” he says. “I could spend a whole summer with my friend. Just to have a friend like that. We could be together. We could spend the whole summer at a lake, you know. Do anything we wanted.”

  “Well, what does that mean?” the boy says.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Vernon says. “Just what I said.” And he adds, “Another dream I’ve had, just recently, though—well, it would be to adopt someone, you know, a boy who would be a friend like a little brother, someone who was like myself. Who didn’t have a father to grow up with, you know, or very many friends, either. I’d take real good care of this friend—buy him a bicycle, and toys, things like that. Take him to the movies.”

  The boy doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he says, “That sure isn’t me.”

  “Well, I didn’t say it was,” Vernon says. “I just said it was a dream. What’s wrong with that?”

  The boy doesn’t answer.

  “I didn’t mean to say that it was you, necessarily,” Vernon says.

  The boy remains silent; Vernon looks to the road ahead.

  “I think I have to go home now,” the boy says.

  “I’m going to take you home,” Vernon says. “Just as soon as we get this car started. I sure wouldn’t bring you all this way for five dollars for nothing.”

  “I don’t want to do that anymore,” the boy says.

  “Oh, now,” Vernon says, “why are you being like that? Just because I offered to be friends?”

  The boy is silent.

  “We’ll be there in just one minute,” Vernon says. “Then I’ll take you back home, just like I said I would.”

  Again, in silence, they roll along. But Vernon cannot put aside his growing tension, and he says, “I was only trying to tell you some things that would help you for the rest of your life. No one ever told me anything like that, when I was your age.”

  Nor is there any response to this; the boy holds in place.

  “If you were my friend,” Vernon says. “If you were my friend now, you’d know there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. I could help you in all kinds of ways. By showing you things. Telling you things. I was your age, too, you know.”

  Still the boy doesn’t say anything, and Vernon doesn’t know if he should feel anger with him or cry out in disappointment and frustration. Turning from the highway at last, headlights showing the way under the cover of trees and branches, they follow a two-lane pavement. The turnoff to the back road to the cottage—a narrow gravel road—isn’t far now, and Vernon slows down. For the first time, he is visited by fear over what he is doing. This is illegal, he thinks. What if someone sees him? At the same time an urge is in him to hold the boy, to touch his face to his hair.

  “I want to go home,” the boy says; there is trembling in his slight voice for the first time.

  “I’ll take you home,” Vernon says. “In just a few minutes.”

  Engaging the car’s turn signal well ahead of time, Vernon hopes that the green light flashing from the dashboard will reassure the boy. Turning onto the gravel road, close then within tree branches, he maintains some speed, thinking the boy might try to jump from the car and get away. As they bounce along at perhaps thirty, he says, “We’ll be there in a minute. It’s right up here.”

  There is no response, and glancing, Vernon perceives the boy’s face, the forehead wisp of his hair, in the dashboard’s glow of light.

  Through the darkness around them, between trees, occasional orange and yellow lights of other cottages around the pond pass in and out of view. If someone is at the cottage, Vernon is thinking, if lights are on, he will drive out the other way and take the boy back to Portsmouth and drop him off.

  No one will be there. He knows this, even as knowing it makes him nervous. Gone on a drinking outing of some kind, he has never seen his housemates return before the middle of the night. They don’t stay around the cottage on Saturday’s lonely hours. Only he has done that. Here and elsewhere. Everywhere.

  He rolls along. “I just want to be with you,” he says, on a rush through him of pins and needles.

  The boys gives no response.

  At the Y-intersection he follows the winding dirt road down toward the pond’s surface. Under and between tree branches he glimpses a silver reflection of sky on the thawing ice, and he sees, through fir trees—where lights would appear in the cabin—that only darkness comes from the windows. All
things come to this, he is thinking. All work. All ambition, imagination. This feeling. His urge is to embrace the boy, to adore him with passion. “I just want to be with you,” he cries to him. “It’s all I want.”

  “What does that mean?” the boy says.

  Letting up on the gas, turning away from the pond to approach the cabin, Vernon realizes he is sinking into surprising, unexplainable sadness. “Everything,” he says. “It means everything.”

  Parking, switching off ignition and lights as always, he doesn’t touch the boy. Nor does the boy move or speak. “Just driving like that,” Vernon utters. “Being with someone. It’s new to me; it’s everything. That’s what I meant when I said it was all I wanted. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Vernon can see little. There is the boy in silhouette, but Vernon doesn’t know if his head is facing to the front or to the side. His urge is to touch his hair with his fingers, to lift it over his forehead as gently as a mother. His urge is to thrill him as he believes he may thrill him.

  He has the boy’s wrist in his hand, reaching and taking it, and there is pressure in the boy’s small arm to pull away, as he cries, “Leave me alone! Stop it!”

  Vernon’s eyes have filmed; he holds the boy’s wrist more tightly. He reaches his other arm and hand to the boy’s shoulders, to pull him closer. “I want to hold you,” he cries to him. “It’s all I want.”

  The boy resists. He tries to pull free, cries “Stop it!” and “Don’t!” and “Stop it!” and “Don’t!”—

  Vernon holds him. Through his own tears and gasps he is trying to kiss the boy’s hair and neck, his ear and face. As the boy struggles, as he jerks with surprising strength, Vernon holds, contains him, cries to him, cries upon his neck in desperation, “I’m not going to hurt you. I love you. Don’t you understand? This is love. This is love.”

  CHAPTER 20

  THEY ARE NOT IN THE BACK SEAT BUT IN THE FRONT SEAT of the darkened Buick. They are in a darkened garage, under the darkening sky, and one knee and then another has banged the dashboard. The floor gearshift has been in the way, too, but it is too late to consider moving, to tumble into the back seat like children. It is too late for everything.

  Matt holds her. He hears her breathing and hears his own, feels her warmth against him as another minute falls away. He doesn’t know what to do now and seems to be trying to think, to understand. Something like forever has been in his mind, and he is troubled with odd disillusionment, with a wish to go back and be what he had been before.

  Lifting his head from her neck, he opens his eyes. He says to her, “I just opened my eyes, but I can’t see anything.”

  She doesn’t move. Nor does she speak. A faint breath in her throat tells him that she heard what he said, that she knows what he means.

  PART TWO

  ANYONE WITH INFORMATION IS ASKED TO CALL

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1981

  CHAPTER 1

  AT A FEW MINUTES AFTER SEVEN, AS THE MORNING SUN IS just lifting out of the ocean, Dulac is in Lyle’s Lunch to pick up the Sunday Globe. Four or five people are ahead of him in line. At this hour, he remarks to himself. Everyone keeps telling them to be courteous to the newcomers, however, and he determines to take it in stride. Lyle’s Lunch. It’s a nondescript coffee shop, two blocks uphill from the water, and he has been stopping here forever, since he was a newcomer himself, come down from Quebec.

  How, he asks himself yet again, could a run-down dive like this become popular?

  Lyle’s wooden floorboards meander now as they always have, and Dulac wonders again—does he do this every Sunday?—if proximity to the salt water has raised the waves in the boards. At the same time, a row of new booths has been hammered into place down the center of the place—where there used to be Wonder Bread on shelves and packaged pies only schoolchildren seemed to buy—and the booths seem not to lean or sag. Newcomers sit there now, over blueberry pancakes and fat copies of The New York Times. Their imported cars are lined up along the side streets, where for the first time ever parking space has become a problem.

  It’s okay for these people to come with all their money, but when parking space . . .

  Okay, the overweight detective says to himself at last, as some unknown customer ahead is asking Jenny questions. Let’s move it along now, how about it?

  A young woman in a purple jogging suit appears in line behind him. He notices that the check in her hand is the same mint color such checks have always been, and he notices her. He manages a passing glance. He doesn’t stare, for that would be both rude and unprofessional; shifting along with the line, he looks ahead. In his private method of recall, however—another of his pastimes—he files the woman in his mind. His method, one he has yet to take to court, is to call up someone the person resembles. It could be Jackie Gleason or Jane Fonda, a neighbor or a friend. Bert at the Amoco station. Anwar Sadat. Shirley Moss at work. Only the nose was such and such, the hair was this darker color, and he or she came up to here on his shoulder. Add your own details, he has said to young officers. Eh? Lock it in your mind as a variation of your Uncle Phil.

  Jill Clayburgh. Yes, Your Honor, Jill Clayburgh. Pale cheeks, soft lips. Eyes circled with a little color. Eyes a little tired. Light brown hair. Ruffled some near her shoulders, and a smell of sleep about her neck. No, I’d not seen her before, and I assumed she was a newcomer to the area or a visitor.

  The line moves along. On his turn at the counter, aware that it is a foolish thing to do, he orders the Times. As lumpy as a rhino and unshaven this morning, he says, “The New York Times, Jenny,” approximately in the angled presence of the woman in the purple jogging suit.

  Paying the fare, a dollar fifty, he carries the paper out onto the sidewalk, where he is not unaware of the engaging springlike air coming in again today. He goes along slowly. Holding the Times in both hands, he pretends to be reading the front page, to give Miss Clayburgh a chance to catch up, to fall in place beside him with her copy of the Times.

  Behind him, Lyle’s door opens and swings shut. He listens for her footsteps. In these seconds, too, however overweight and solidly married he happens to be, he imagines the women writing to her best friend in New York: I met him in this quaint little mom-and-pop store . . . you know the kind . . . we just fell into conversation . . . he’s a policeman but I knew he was someone special when I saw him buy the Sunday New York Times.

  Nothing happens. Five second pass, perhaps five more. When he glances over his shoulder, he sees Jill Clayburgh going the other way. Turning the corner on a pivot, she is starting uphill, and she carries no newspaper. As if on tiptoe, not rapidly, she begins to lope.

  Hoisting, shifting his bulk into his unmarked four-door Chevrolet, tossing the heavy paper to the passenger seat, Dulac heads into town. He lights a cigarette. That little number, he thinks. Seabrook is probably the closest she’s ever been to New York City. She’s probably down from Skowhegan or Province du Québec; she picked up the jogging suit at a yard sale in Kittery, and she works as a frontline waitress at Valle’s on Route I. And he has that paper to read which will not include a single score from anything more recent than Friday. Yes, Your Honor, I turned fifty-two last July and I know what you’re going to say.

  Half a mile away, at the Porstmouth PD, nosing his car up to his marker—Lt Gilbert Dulac—he begins the reverse process of lifting himself out of his car. He can unload quickly if need be, he always tells himself, but of course it is Sunday and he is both off-duty and the ranking man present. The chief’s and the captain’s parking spaces, the only spaces to the left of his own, stand empty, as they generally do on Sundays.

  On his feet, Dulac shakes out his wool shirt jacket. He leaves the paper where it is. The station house is his unofficial Sunday morning club, where he often stops to talk, to have coffee and cigarettes and read the paper while Beatrice sleeps in until nine or so, and although he can tell from the scant number of cars in the lot—most, he knows, will belong to officers out on patrol—he is not o
f a mind this springlike morning to settle in with the paper. Not quite yet. Not without anything on the Celtics or Bruins from at least yesterday. You’d think Portsmouth was closer to Halifax than Boston, the way the news traveled.

  The station house resembles a small-town stone church or library, and walking around to the side entrance he is taken with the urge, and very nearly turns back, to go ahead and drive to one of the nearby beaches. To take a stroll in this remarkably warm air. Raising a hand to the cadet on duty at the main desk, who buzzes him through a waist-high gate, Dulac moves back through to the squad room, to the coffee station, to see if anyone is around. If so, maybe he’d tell them about Jill Clayburgh in her purple jogging suit and the foolish tub of lard who bought The New York Times to impress her. It wasn’t anything, he thinks, he’d be likely to pass on to Beatrice.

  Styrofoam cup in hand—no one is around—he wanders back out to the main desk, to read over the entries in the log. Checking entries, from the bottom up, is a daily habit as well as one of his responsibilities as Lieutenant of Detectives. It’s a curiosity, too, for nothing crucial would have gone down or he would have heard of it long before reading it in the log.

  He doesn’t quite pause on the report of an armed robbery of a gas station near the air base, or over an entry concerning a twelve-year-old male runaway, but he does note them. He continues, skims various alcohol-and traffic-related calls and complaints entered since he last checked the log at about four yesterday afternoon, before leaving for home. Domestic disturbance, shoplifting, burglary from a garage, domestic disturbance, unlawful driving away of an automobile, domestic disturbance, simple assault. An entry which is unusual is the arrest, and release to custody, of three Portsmouth High students, two male, one female, apprehended while drinking beer in the home ec lab of the high school at 0240 hours.

  “This armed robbery, you notified Sergeant Mizener?” he says to the cadet.