The True Detective

by Theodore Weesner

  They have yet to locate a photograph. In the suspect’s bedroom, using the blunt end of a ballpoint, Dulac has picked briefly through his possessions, has discovered a hard-core porn magazine depicting prepubescent boys but nothing which appears otherwise revealing or incriminating, and no photograph.

  At last, they are ready to leave. Mizener will be transporting the three roommates to places in town, where they have agreed to stay with friends, leaving their cars in place as part of the decoy and Dulac will be returning to the station in Portsmouth, to check in, to send Shirley home if she is still there, and to be sure that the task force night shift is on top of all that is happening.

  “Just a couple more questions,” Dulac says then, as the roommates have laundry bags and books and are ready to leave, drawing an expression from Mizener.

  “Where do you think he is?” Dulac says. “What’s your gut feeling? Your immediate reaction?”

  “Gone,” the larger boy, Leon, says at once. “Boston. The Combat Zone. There’s where I see him.”

  “I have a feeling he’s on his way to Miami, Florida,” the boy named Wayne says as Dulac turns to him. “That’s what I think,” the boy adds, as if to apologize.

  “I don’t know,” Duncan says in his turn. “I just don’t know. He’s an idealistic person, in spite of this. I see him huddled up somewhere. I could see him in the woods, both of them, in a cave, making shelter, something like that.”

  “Weaving baskets?” Mizener says.

  “No, no, let them talk,” Dulac snaps at him.

  Turning to the three, Dulac says, “Okay, tell me this. Do you think he would hurt the boy?”

  “No way,” Duncan says. “No way. He may be messed up sexually and so on, but I don’t see him doing something violent.”

  “And so on,” Dulac says. “What do you mean by that? Did he make advances to you, any of you, or disclosures?”

  “No,” Duncan says. “He didn’t—”

  “Come on, Dunc, you can tell us,” the bigger student says, drawing a brief snicker from a couple of those present.

  “Nothing like that,” Duncan says. “Not to me anyway.”

  To the other two then, Dulac says, “Do you think he would hurt the boy?”

  Only the larger one answers. “I have no idea,” he says.

  “You don’t know anyone named Tony?” Dulac says, drawing nothing but stares from the three, for it is a question he has already put to them, separately and jointly, half a dozen times.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he says then, giving a nod.

  An hour later, when it is close to four a.m. and Shirley is still there, in the squad room with the night shift crew of three, Dulac is on the telephone in his cubicle speaking to the state police lieutenant in Concord. The suspect’s mother did not return home until one ten, the man has told him, as she remained at the restaurant after going off duty and imbibed two mixed drinks. She was up then for twenty-two minutes before turning off the lights. In turn, Dulac has reported the stakeout to be in place at the cottage and has said that he probably will be asking for the state police lab people to check over the cottage tomorrow afternoon, to see if there are any hairs or fibers which might tie things even more positively to the boy.

  “I’ll tell you what my guess is,” the state police lieutenant says. “My guess is this Vernon Fischer is trying to slip into Canada right now, if he’s half as smart as his roommates seem to think he is. Or he’s up in Montreal already, speaking French for all he’s worth.”

  “You think he’d get in?” Dulac says. “With all the alerts we have out?”

  “Not in, but around. If he’s desperate,”

  “What about the boy?” Dulac says.

  “I’d say a shallow grave,” the state police lieutenant says. “Close by. Which may or may not be easy to find. Listen, these things are happening from one end of the country to the other. It used to be drugs. Now it’s children. Don’t ask me why.”

  “It’s a new pathology,” Dulac says.

  “Is it?” the man says.

  “So I’m told,” Dulac says. “Everyone said it was okay and it turns out it isn’t.”

  The state police lieutenant’s response is silence; it is a response.

  Dulac wishes he had not opened the door he just opened. “We are going to need a photograph,” he says.

  “Right,” the other man says.

  “If nothing breaks in the meantime, could your people enter the house there in Laconia? In the early morning, say, at daybreak.”

  “Of course,” the man says.

  “Use an unmarked car, say whatever has to be said.”

  “Of course,” the state police lieutenant says.

  Moments later, pausing over the replaced receiver to gather his thoughts, and walking out into the squad room, Dulac sees Shirley working at the nearest table with what appear to be tip sheets, and he says to her, “Shirley, what are you doing? You don’t have to be here.”

  “Just checking these tip sheets, to see if anything else might have been a true sighting.”

  “You don’t trust the computer?”

  “It’s fed by people.”

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “I want you to go home,” he says. “It’s okay if I’m dead around here tomorrow—not you. Good lord, you want everything to go to hell?”

  “I need a ride,” she says.

  “A ride?”

  “I’m not going to call Bill at four o’clock in the morning, but that’s not the reason.”

  “What reason?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she says. “It has to do with something called a flywheel.”

  “I’ll drop you off,” Dulac says, holding up a hand to say no, he has no interest in the flywheel. “I’m leaving right away. Six thirty’s going to come early.”

  “Lieutenant,” Officer Benedict says then, holding a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone he is using. “They just had their second false alarm out there. It looks like that one roadway is something of a lover’s lane.”

  Dulac smiles, nods in turn, however faintly. Going on to his cubicle, giving things a last-minute check and seeing from his desk clock that the time is five minutes to four, he takes up his jacket and slips it on, turns out his office light, thinking over the day’s endlessness, and goes on his way along the hall to where Shirley always hangs her coat. She appears, coming from a side office, doing small arrangements with her coat and purse.

  For the first time ever, then, they walk from the police station together. An odd contentment occurs in Dulac as they do this. Contentment, casual happiness, are things you forget, he thinks. Of course he is exhausted and this is all innocent, but a feeling of pleasure, the vaguest tingle, continues in him as they walk to his car in the silence, under a sky reflecting only sparsely now the lights still on throughout the small city.

  As he drives to where she lives, on a residential side street perhaps a mile from the station, their small talk is also sparse and relaxed, given largely to the depletion and exhaustion, the caffeine tension that afflicts them working in such a situation. “I get too exhausted to sleep well,” he says. “Too strung out.” As he pulls up before her house then, pulls over to stop and there is a moment of silence, she says, just as casually, as easily, “Go on down another block,” and he does as he is told as if he had merely pulled over a block before he should have, even as some other new or lost dimension is opening up in him.

  “Why don’t you turn right,” she says.

  He does this, too, turning onto a side street which is smaller and darker than her street, an unlighted street without curbs, and as he follows his headlights to the side without instruction, and parks and turns off the motor and lights, there is depletion in his center, but a falling away, too, of the shutters which have long covered his old heart—for moments of the kind have not been his to know, as a heavy man, which isn’t to say that he has been without response—an
d as she moves in under his arm, and he takes her to him, leans his head to her hair and shoulder and neck, it is with a fondness, with surrender he had forgotten in his life. He does nothing else, however, nor does he speak as they sit and press against each other, and take from the touching what comfort and reassurance and confusion there is to take.

  “Gil, I want you so much,” she says. “My life is so awful.”

  He still doesn’t say anything and at last he lifts away. Perhaps three minutes have passed. He could turn his face and mouth to her hair, but he lifts away. And at last he speaks. “We better go,” he says. Both know—he knows too well—that some patrolman is altogether likely to pull up and shine a flashlight in their faces, and he restarts the car’s motor, turns on the headlights, pulls away.

  He wants her. He desires her. He circles the block, however, and pulls up once more before her house. “Good night,” he says. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Good night, Gil,” she says. She leaves the car, closes the door.

  He waits a moment, to give her time to be safely inside. He wishes that, like a teenaged girl kept out late, she would blink a porch light, but she doesn’t. His life, he can see, was just as limited when he was a teenager as it is now. Here in a world no longer the same. He is, after all, what he is. He had always wanted to change, it seems; now he wishes to remain the same.

  Not much later, into the partial sleep he has managed, a sensation comes into his chest of another Portsmouth child disappearing, of the telephone ringing and ringing, of the entry being made again and again in the log, of all eyes being on him, Shirley’s eyes among them, of charges pending against him—incompetence, dereliction of duty, evasion, duplicity, inattention as a father—of finding himself unable to stand up against the charges, unable to articulate words in his defense, unable to fashion truth or logic, stricken throughout with an awareness of failure, Shirley under his arm, of not being ready, Your Honor, of not being up to it at all when his turn at the plate came around at last.

  Then he is quite awake. The digital clock on the dresser shows five eighteen; hardly an hour has passed since he was sitting in the car with Shirley.

  Beatrice is piled on her side, a mountain range of covers, breathing steadily. He wishes she were awake, so they might through a few words be together, but he gives no thought to waking her.

  All is wrong and it seems he will never sleep again. He lies with his eyes open, thinking how unfair is the night with its unanswerable exaggeration. If he could only sleep, could drift away from himself and from the inflexible night. He isn’t a father, he thinks. He never will be. Nor did he cheat, whatever may be said of his wanting to. He is what he is. His life has been what it has been, neither grand, perhaps, nor frivolous. Things have changed so much, and he has tried to stay apace and alert. And he has done, hasn’t he? all that any good policeman might do, if he held Shirley Moss under his arm or not, knows love for her or not; he has only been what he has been, has only undertaken this modest role of policeman, hasn’t he? Need he be charged, Your Honor, with all failures in life, all misfortunes in the world, if he has only undertaken this modest role, if he has attempted at last merely to be true to what he sees, to what he believes? Is that why sleep eludes him now?

  PART FIVE

  AN AIR THAT KILLS

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1981

  CHAPTER 1

  VERNON IS WALKING AWAY FROM THE HOSPITAL. OVERHEAD, a new day is breaking. He has been unable to sleep. Now and then he drifted. Each time he came around, all things were hopeless.

  He turns onto a side street. There are no sidewalks or curbs here and he walks to the side of the blacktop. The sky is blue-black. Few lights are on in the houses. One here to the rear, one there.

  What has come to mind is a happy time in his life. One, he thinks, which became unhappy. He was a child then himself. He was twelve years old. His mother had forced him, had literally dragged him to the car, to go to a summer camp in Massachusetts, and stricken with homesickness one morning, even as the two weeks were nearly over (an irony, he thinks, to have been homesick for a home which wasn’t altogether his), be lay in his upper bunk, in his cabin, as birds were chirping, determined to go the camp office when it opened, and get his mother on the telephone in the presence of the camp director, and to let loose—it would not be calculated—with the avalanche of tears and heartbreak waiting to hear the sound of her voice.

  It did not happen. He had to urinate. Not one to step into the woods, he climbed down from his bunk, slipped outside, and made his way along the dirt path to the toilet, although it was a hundred yards away.

  He was barefoot. He had slipped on his cut-offs and wore a T-shirt with a smile on the front. He could remember the T-shirt because one of the counselors had joked with him about it, how different it was from his own face. That smile was ironic, too, he thinks, because his thought at the time had been that if he could die, if he could kill himself, he could leave something to his mother with which she would have to live forever.

  Of all things, at that hour, steam was coming from under the bathhouse overhang. One side had toilets and a row of sinks; the other side was a walk-in shower room with eight or ten nozzles.

  He nearly turned back, thinking it would be one of the hairy camp counselors who would get after him to cheer up. He entered quietly. Using a urinal on one side, he could not resist taking a look into the shower room. And it wasn’t a counselor there, but a boy his own age and size, maybe a little bigger, standing with his eyes closed, the flush of water washing over his head and face and body.

  The boy rubbed water from his eyes and looked over where he was standing in the doorway. He looked another moment before he said, “What are you doing?”

  Coming to take a shower, Vernon told him, and even as he did not have a towel, he removed his T-shirt and stepped out of his cut-off jeans and underpants and stepped over the wet cement floor to the shower nozzle directly opposite the boy, everything in his mind swimming in a sea of excitement. The boy, opposite, had turned the other way and there were his bony shoulders, his spinal line, his shiny cheeks and smooth legs, and it was as if one of the photographs in his magazine, of the older boy, had come alive there, magically, before his eyes.

  Turning around and looking at Vernon, looking down at him, the boy said, “Are you always like that?”

  Vernon said, “Like what?” although he knew exactly what was being talked about.

  “Like that,” the boy said, and nodded.

  The attention had him even more excited, still he said, “Like what?”

  “What are you thinking about?” the boy asked him.

  When he said he didn’t know—whatever it was he said—the boy said, “You look like you’re thinking about going to a party.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked the boy, and the boy told him that he got like that himself when he thought about going to a party.

  “Let’s see you do that now,” he said to the boy, and his request—as he can see now, wandering along this nearly darkened street—was another stepping across a forbidden line, one which set off in him another blossoming, another capability.

  “It feels good to be like that,” the boy said to him.

  Vernon said to him again, “Why don’t you do it?”

  “I can do it in a second if I want to,” the boy said.

  He proceeded to do so. The deflated inner tube took shape, lifted.

  It may have occurred to Vernon then how much he liked the boy. As a friend. A person. He was so daring, so direct in his way.

  Taking a step toward him, extending his pelvis somewhat, the boy said, “Here.”

  Reaching, Vernon held the boy with his hand.

  The boy told him to use some soap, and when he did this and washed him, the boy told him that what he was doing felt really good. He asked him if he was old enough to get off, and when Vernon said that he was, the boy said, “Make me do it.”

  He masturbated the boy with his so
apy hand, and the feelings within himself were different than they had ever been; as he did this, the boy asked him if he knew how to do other things, and although he knew from his magazine what the boy was talking about, he asked him what he meant.

  They went through a game of neither saying what was being talked about. Throughout this time he continued soaping the boy and masturbating him, and the boy had reached down to do the same to him in turn.

  “Things that are a lot a fun,” the boy said. “If you’re not afraid—are you afraid or not?”

  He wasn’t afraid, he told the boy, but what did he mean?

  What did he think he meant?

  He didn’t know what he meant; why didn’t he say what he meant?

  How did he know he wasn’t chicken?

  He wasn’t chicken.

  How did he know? A lot of kids are.

  Why should he be chicken? He sure wasn’t chicken, that was for sure.

  He just meant if he knew how to do anything else? the boy said. He’d bet he’d never even done anything else, in his whole life, had he?

  What did that matter, if he’d done something or not? Maybe he had.

  Well, had he—what had he ever done?

  Maybe he’d done a lot of things. He sure wasn’t afraid, that was for sure.

  Did he want to do it?

  To do what?

  Something else, that was what. He knew what.

  Yes, he wanted to do it, he said.

  Did he really? He wasn’t afraid?

  No, he wasn’t afraid; he sure wasn’t afraid, that was for sure.

  Had he ever done it before?

  Maybe he’d done it lots of times.

  Do it then, if he wasn’t afraid, the boy told him. Here, do it. Only don’t bite, the boy told him, as he did it. Just do it like that. Only do it harder than that. Yes, like that, do it like that.