The True Detective

by Theodore Weesner

  Turning off the soup, she senses herself like another person, walking to their bedroom. Something is attracting her. It is his dresser drawers, spaces between T-shirts, under shelf paper. Within pairs of socks.

  She pauses, considers returning to the kitchen. She makes no move to do so.

  In the closet, crouching—when she has looked through his clothes on the rack and found nothing—she looks inside his old shoes, and inside Eric’s, too. She looks into and between boxes. Standing, returning to the clothes on the rack, she even checks watch pockets, inserting a finger and touching corner to corner.

  Pulling up a chair to stand on, searching under and between sweaters and old clothes on the shelf, at last she removes something which clearly has been hidden. It is on Matt’s side, under his sweaters—a book.

  Taking it down for better light, she can tell with her fingers that things are inserted between the book’s pages. Her pulse and her temples are working. Dear God, she has found something.

  The book, she sees, stepping down from the chair, is a Hardy Boys mystery that she remembers Warren giving to Matt years ago. Opening to the first object between pages, she sees a Christmas gift tag. On a short red string, its message is, “To Matt With Lots Of Love / Dad.”

  She holds a moment. Then she sits down on the chair. Other inserts in the book, she sees, are other tags and small gift cards. There is one from Eric, which says “To Matt / Happy Birthday / Eric.” She recognizes the last one, which is hardly two months old. It says, “Merry Christmas To A Wonderful Son / Mom.” They are the gifts of Matt’s life. A handful of words, all they had ever given him.

  Closing the book, Claire sits still and cannot hold back the hurt welling up in her. She sits and holds her face in one hand, as the universe spins within her.

  CHAPTER 15

  STUDENTS’ CARS are often towed from the Shop ’n Save parking lot during morning and midday hours, but seldom this late in the afternoon. Still, as most students with cars know, spotting them parking in the supermarket lot while they go to classes is one of the favorite activities of the town police. For this and other reasons, turning into the lot with the boy slumped yet in the front seat beside him, only partially covered by the flannel-lined sleeping bag, Vernon drives to the main concentration of cars, to conceal himself there at the same time that he flirts with the risk of someone seeing them or seeing the boy, or having the boy cry out to signal someone.

  Turning off the motor, Vernon sits a moment. The anxiety or nervousness he feels is in his throat. He’s far enough from the supermarket, he thinks, so most people coming and going will not walk past his car, but close enough for the danger of what he is doing to be real.

  He wonders what he is doing. All he can determine is that he doesn’t know. He is drawn to taking this chance, he can see that, but he doesn’t know why. Does he think that someone is going to come up and take the boy away and everything will return to normal? Is he here because this is home to him and he doesn’t know where else to go? Is it in his mind, in his fantasies, that Anthony will walk up any minute and tap on his window, and not be exhausted or muddled, and tell him in his superior way exactly what to do to extricate himself from this otherwise impossible situation?

  Or is he simply here to be caught, to put an end to things?

  He doesn’t lock the car door. Getting out, closing the door, not caring, he turns and starts across the parking lot in the direction of the university, away from the shoulder-to-shoulder stores to whom the parking places belong. Stop me, he thinks. Tow my car. It’s what I want you to do.

  Nothing happens. He reaches the street and crosses.

  IN THE LIBRARY, walking aimlessly, he imagines running into Anthony and begins to look for him. He has no reason to think Anthony would be here at this time, but given the flow of students it isn’t out of the question. He makes his way to the third floor, where he has done much of his studying, and sits and broods for a time at a window overlooking the campus.

  Between the trees, lights are already on in the windows of other buildings, and in his loneliness and exhaustion, Vernon rests his face in his hand and stares away. This is the lonely floor. He has always liked it here. Now he loves it, as if more than any other place this—this carrel beside a window—is where he has been most content. He actually speaks aloud then, saying, “Please somebody—”

  Nothing happens.

  Moments later, in the third floor men’s room, a man exposes himself. Vernon is standing at a urinal, preoccupied with his fears. The man, who does not appear to be a student, is standing two or three urinals away. Glancing, seeing the man lift his eyebrows, but not comprehending a signal, Vernon realizes then that the man is pivoting enough to reveal an erection. Vernon thinks of Uncle Sally, but remains unaffected. In a moment, avoiding any eye contact, he is making his way out and then along the carpeting to the stairway.

  HE SEES A photograph. He is walking back along the small town’s main street and there is a photograph of a boy on the front page of a newspaper. The boy, he realizes, is the boy he left in his car; he realizes, too that something in his bowels has forsaken control and that he is in a state of shock. The paper is in a blue wire rack before a luncheonette.

  He is walking on, he knows.

  BOY, 12, MISSING, the headline said.

  He shifts to the store side of the sidewalk and stops. He feels he could slide to the ground. People are passing in both directions. He stands there.

  Something has him step back to the luncheonette, whose windows are steamed over. He looks again. There is the boy. It is the boy he left in his car. It isn’t a good likeness; you’d have to know him to recognize him, he thinks. His hair looks darker in the picture. His features are not very clear. You’d have to know him to recognize him.

  Another paper in the wire rack—a more local paper, Vernon realizes—shows artists’ sketches of two men, both bearded, under a headline saying, “POLICE SEEKING 2 MEN.” Looking closer, Vernon reads, “Police today issued a warning to area residents concerning two separate incidents of sexual harassment that occurred within the past week.”

  Two other papers in the rack are The Boston Globe and The New York Times. Each of the out-of-state papers, Vernon notices, has a front-page story starting with the phrase “Post-Vietnam . . .” Vernon looks over the papers, trying to think that nothing matters, that in the newspaper or not, it will go unread, unnoticed. Or will it? Time seems for the moment to tumble through his chest and stomach like a video game.

  Inside, at a glass counter, he places a dollar on the surface and says, “Portsmouth Herald.” It is a paper he has never bought before; his thought is that if he asks the price, everyone will turn to him and they will know he is the one. He takes up coins in change.

  Outside, folding over the copy without looking at it, he carries it in his hand. Realizing he still has his change in his left hand, and that his palm is sticky in spite of the cool air, he releases the coins into his pocket. As he walks, he glances to the sky. It is heavily gray now. Perhaps it will rain, he thinks.

  Reentering the small shopping center, he looks down over the rows of parked cars. People are walking back and forth here, too, and he doesn’t see anything unusual. Still, he walks along before the rows of stores, trying to spot his car—he cannot seem to locate it—and turns into the supermarket.

  On his way out, he goes through a checkout line to pay for a single purchase. The store is busy now—dinner hour is here, students are buying food—and even in the express aisle there are four or five people ahead of him. The boxed pastry he has picked up is expensive—$1.98—but remembering how little the boy ate of the soup, his thought is to tempt him with something special. And to drop him off at a hospital emergency room, he thinks. Or do something else with him, get rid of him, he thinks in this moment, allowing this forbidden thought at last, going along in the line of customers.

  “You get the paper here?” a young woman says, ready to poke a key.

  Vernon is looking
at her but doesn’t know what is being asked.

  “Our newspaper or yours?” she says.

  “Mine,” he says.

  She places some coins in his hand and sacks his single purchase. You don’t have any idea what I am thinking, he is thinking as he takes the bag from the woman’s hands. It seems he could tell her, too, could tell her something in this moment, as he has been able to tell himself, of the enormity of his thought, but she has already shifted her attention to the next customer, and he is left to go on his way.

  Everyone is so busy, he thinks, walking along. Oh, God, he wants to cry out.

  Through the pneumatic door, into the cool air, he strolls along the curbed pedestrian walkway before the stores until he can spot the front of his car. A van is parked next to it, blocking most of it from view.

  He pauses before the window of a hardware store. Could it be the police hiding in the van? he wonders. Ha, he thinks. They wouldn’t be so clever.

  Nor, he thinks, if they found the boy would they leave him there as bait. They’d take him away, he thinks. They’d take him away and there’d be six police cars pulled up by now, surrounding his car with lights flashing.

  Carrying the newspaper and grocery sack, he walks in an adjacent aisle past his own car. When he is opposite, he glances over to see if the boy is still in the front seat.

  He sees in a glance that he is.

  Circling, he comes into the aisle behind his car. Nothing appears unusual. On a burst of nerve, he turns in between the van and his car, opens the door without rushing, slides in behind the wheel, and closes the door.

  He takes a breath.

  “Got you something to eat,” he says.

  The boy actually stirs, makes a sound, in response to his voice.

  “Pastry,” Vernon says. “Apple something. Pastry.”

  The boy seems to breathe audibly and move in response to this, although he doesn’t make any other sounds.

  Vernon reaches the sack to the floor behind the passenger seat but holds on to the newspaper. He had had no feeling to read the story when he first saw it, nor as he carried it through the store; here, all at once, he is anxious to see what it says. As if to glimpse life’s meaning.

  Holding the paper for light from the fading sky, he reads:

  Police say they have no clues in the disappearance of a 12-year-old Portsmouth youth who’s been missing since Saturday. The boy is Eric Wells, who is in the sixth grade at Little Harbor Elementary School.

  “This is not looking like a routine missing case,” said Detective Lt. Gilbert Dulac of Portsmouth. “The boy had no money or wallet on him and this may be a giveaway.”

  Mrs. Claire Wells, the boy’s mother, said he left the Legion Hall on Islington Street at about 6:45 p.m. Saturday. Mrs. Wells, a divorcée, works as a barmaid there on weekends.

  Police said school officials describe Eric as an average student with a good attendance record.

  He is 4 feet 10, weighs about 100 pounds, has medium-length dark blond hair and blue eyes.

  Persons with any information that could help police locate Eric are asked to call Portsmouth Police Department at 421-3859.

  Vernon sits still then and knows that he is again in shock of a kind. There is something in the paper that makes things more real than they seem to be here where he can actually touch them.

  Moments later he is driving out of the small university town on a two-lane paved road. He has the car’s headlights on; carefully, he passes a jogger, then another jogger, then someone on a bicycle. He will be careful not to break any laws, he thinks. Only greater laws, he thinks. Darkness falling so rapidly, light leaving the sky, seems both the end of the world to him and a promise of cover.

  Driving along, he says, “So your mother’s a barmaid?”

  Expecting no response and receiving none, he says, “So is mine.”

  CHAPTER 16

  MATT SITS IN THE KITCHEN IN THE LOWERING DARKNESS. His mother is on her way to Portland with the lieutenant. Before he turns on any lights, however dim the apartment has grown, Matt gets himself to telephone Vanessa.

  Answering the phone herself, she says to him, “They talked to me, you know.”

  “The police?”

  “That’s right. Real neat.”

  Matt doesn’t know what to say. At last he says, “What does that mean?”

  “Humiliation city is what it means.”

  “Are your parents there?”

  “They’re not listening.”

  Again Matt doesn’t know what to say. Then he says, “I’m sorry. I had to tell them.”

  “Yeah, forget it,” she says.

  Matt has no idea what to say.

  “I have to go,” she says.

  “Will I see you in school?” he says.

  “Probably.”

  CHAPTER 17

  IT IS CLOSE TO NINE WHEN DULAC HAS RETURNED FROM Portland and from taking Claire Wells home. Her appeal and its taping were fine, he thinks. Something about her image on camera would command viewers’ attention, at the same time that it would not be confrontational. So he believes, or hopes. “Eric,” she said to the camera, “we love you. I do. So does Matt. We miss you. Please come home. Or please call up. If you are with someone, we just want you to come home. We hope that person will let you go. Everyone misses you at school, too.”

  Who knows what is confrontational? Dulac thinks. And what isn’t?

  He butters a roll. Claire Wells’s words keep playing in his mind. Their tone, the implications, the effect on viewers, the effect on someone holding the woman’s twelve-year-old son? Anything could set such a person off, Dulac thinks. Who knows? There are cheesy noodles, broccoli, and pork chops on his plate, and he eats methodically, chews over one thing and another. Unless, of course, the boy is already dead, he thinks. Like the chief said. As others have said. As he doesn’t wish to believe.

  “Thinking about your case?” Bea says, across the table. Unlike other times when he has come in late, when she usually continues watching television, she is sitting with him now.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Everyone at work is talking about it,” she says.

  “Are they?” he says. Talk of this kind is off-limits, of course, according to their old pact. Still he adds, “Just from the radio?”

  “And TV,” she says.

  He nods. Then he says, “The fliers, too, I guess.”

  “A couple people did mention those,” she says.

  “That’s good,” he says. “Wait until tomorrow, with the papers out this evening. And of course, the mother’s appeal tonight on TV. But I think the papers get the biggest response.”

  “You’re not still feeling upset?” she says.

  “No, no, I’m fine,” Dulac says. He continues to eat, to sip from his glass of ice water. She brought it up, he is thinking.

  “What’s she like?” Beatrice says.

  Dulac pauses, as if to finish a mouthful. Then he says, “You sure you want to talk about this?”

  “Well, everyone is asking me questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Well, what does Gil think has happened to him? That kind of thing. What they want to know, of course, is if I know anything, At the same time everyone’s a little afraid, you know. Certainly those who have children.”

  Dulac hunches his shoulders, chews some more. Then he says, “I don’t want you to tell people what I think.”

  “I won’t,” she says.

  He sips more water. “If it’s what it seems to be,” he says, “then it’s probably sexually motivated.”

  “You think so?”

  “Odds would have it, too, that he’s no longer alive.”

  “Oh.”

  “I hope he is. Our assumption is that he is. That’s why we’re trying to be careful.”

  “A twelve-year-old boy. It’s sad.”

  “There’s a risk in what we’re doing. If he is alive and being held, we’re putting pressure on the person ho
lding him.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, put yourself in the place of someone holding him. Here’s all this pressure, a lot of people despising you, looking for you. What would you do?”

  “I’d take off, I guess.”

  “After you did away with the evidence. Buried it. What would you do if no one seemed to be looking for you or seemed to be mad at you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I. But chances are it would be neither of the above. That’s the risk, you see. For me.”

  Bea doesn’t say anything then, as he continues to eat. The reason they banned such dinnertime conversation has entered the air; his own food taste is affected. “Don’t mention that to anyone,” Dulac says.

  “I bet you’re tired,” Bea says after a moment.

  “I am. I know this is just getting started, too.”

  “Do you have any good leads?” she says.

  Dulac looks over at her, surprised again. “Not really,” he says, continuing with his chewing. “The problem now, the chief told me a couple hours ago—with the papers out—could be in keeping the pressure from ourselves.”

  “From yourselves?”

  “From the press and so on. The media. To answer that question you just asked. Do you have any leads? What’s going on? If the press takes it on, the chief says to watch out for the politicians—city, state, and so on—and of course he thinks the press will take it on.”

  “Politicians?”

  “That’s what he says. If it’s action, if it’s carried by the papers, they’re going to want a piece of it.”

  “Does that make sense?”

  “I don’t know. It’s what he says. He says we’ll spend half our time on the case and half justifying ourselves.”

  “You’ve had big cases before,” she says.

  “Not like this, though. It’s almost fashionable.”