The True Detective

by Theodore Weesner

  “He saw the body between these two cars?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He stepped between the cars to look?”

  “Right, that’s what he said.”

  Dulac steps over, to look again. He still has not seen the boy’s face, and even as he knows it is so, knows it is Eric Wells, he is not entirely convinced, not yet. He is, and he isn’t.

  He returns toward Mizener.

  “Any pictures taken yet?” he asks him.

  “Just Polaroids,” Mizener says.

  Dulac steps back. He circles the four cars then, to take a closer look from the other side. He approaches carefully and stops at the yellow tape where it is strung on an angle to the corner of the building.

  There is the small boy, lying on the ground, less than a dozen feet away. On his side; the boy could be asleep. A boy would use his arm as a pillow, though, Dulac thinks. And he thinks how simple death is in its way. A mechanism, full of thoughts and feelings, fears and hopes. Walking. Seeing things. Then a mechanism full of nothing. Life gone, carried away on a breeze.

  The killer is here, he thinks and feels.

  Crouching, he gazes on the body from under the tape. He touches some fingers to the ground, to feel the damp cold there. He’s been here all along, he thinks.

  Straightening, he calls back to Mizener, “Neil, whose footprint is that?”

  Mizener steps closer. “The guy who discovered the body says it’s not his,” he says. “He’s absolutely certain he didn’t leave the pavement.”

  “Listen, remind me to have the state police do a helicopter shot,” Dulac says. “We’ll see what kind of trails and paths there are around here.”

  “You think he walked in?” Mizener says.

  “Oh, I think he drove in. But the car thing is bothering me. Why in the hell hasn’t his car been spotted? Maybe he’s driving another car. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “You think he’s around?”

  “He sure was; all the time everybody said he was in Canada, he was here.”

  “I guess so,” Mizener says.

  “It looks like he just placed the body, more or less in the open, so it would be found quickly. We get the owners of these two cars, we should be able to narrow down the time.”

  Mizener stays in place but doesn’t respond.

  Dulac is looking once more at the boy. He lights a cigarette. We lost it, he is thinking. There’s something in the air for him, as he looks, of a game of childhood. Hiding. Chasing. Raiding a fort and playing dead. He thinks to ask Mizener if anyone has put forth an idea of how long ago the boy died and decides not to.

  For the moment, he doesn’t want to know.

  “Lieutenant, there are a lot of reporters and TV people gathering down there,” someone says to him.

  Dulac looks over. “Tell them I’ll give a statement as soon as I can. No one’s coming in here until the body’s removed, and that won’t happen until the lab people have done what they have to do. Tell them that. That it’ll be a while.”

  “They want to know if we know when the body was dropped, or if we know the time of death,” the officer says to him.

  “Not yet,” Dulac says. “We’re working on it. Tell them that. It’s exactly what we’re working on.”

  Dulac looks back over the ground and over the young boy lying there. The young boy hasn’t moved. It isn’t a game of childhood. Dulac looks again. He has to go back around the cars and stand with the others, he realizes, not to appear attached to anything. He has no wish to stand with the others, to hear what they have to say. Yet he does so. He has always done so. As if to show his strength, he returns around the cars, while at his back the child’s death keeps talking to him.

  CHAPTER 11

  HER TIME TO MEET BETTY IS HERE—IT’S NEARLY ELEVEN thirty—and the lieutenant still isn’t back. Thinking she will return after lunch, Claire approaches a cadet on duty at the front desk, near where she has been waiting almost an hour now. She can be back about one o’clock, she tries to explain. She’s supposed to meet a friend for lunch. The cadet says he will pass on the message.

  Claire starts away, fixing her coat and scarf. She is just a step from the door when not a cadet but a police officer near the gate calls, “Mrs. Wells.”

  As she looks back, the man says, “I guess the chief wants to see you.”

  “I have this friend waiting,” Claire says.

  “Maybe it’ll only take a minute,” the officer says, swinging the gate open.

  She walks to the opening, where the policeman, who has several powder-blue stripes on the sleeves of his shirt, adds, following her, “It’s right along here.”

  Claire feels self-conscious here again about her clothes, as she has since she cleaned up to come into town. She’s forgotten how to dress—if she ever knew—and her clothes, her light beige gloves, the scarf she is wearing, the couple of combs in her hair, seem old-fashioned in comparison with the way other women in town are dressed. She has a fear, in fact, that Betty will laugh at her, and this thought is on her mind as she is directed into the chief’s waiting room. The first clue she has of anything—although it hardly registers—occurs when the secretary gets to her feet at once and comes around her desk to meet her, even to touch her. There is the chief in his doorway, saying, “Mrs. Wells, come on in here. There’s been a call about something.”

  Perhaps she knows by now, although following into his office, she says, “A call about what?”

  “Here, Claire, why don’t you sit down,” the man is saying to her.

  The secretary has followed at her side. “A call about what?” Claire says.

  “Claire, please have a seat,” the chief says.

  “A call about what?” she says.

  “Now, Claire, I don’t want you to get upset,” the chief is saying. “A little boy has been found. Near Islington Street. He looks about twelve. Well, I have to tell you, he’s not alive.”

  Claire sits there; a flash lifts from her scalp.

  “Are you okay?” the chief says.

  There is the secretary at her side; Claire feels numb. She says, almost foolishly, “Eric is twelve.”

  “Claire, it may be Eric,” the chief says. “The clothing matches.”

  Claire doesn’t say anything to this. Then she says, “He’s not alive?”

  “No, he’s not,” the chief says. “We’re not entirely certain it’s him, Claire. It doesn’t look good. We need positive identification. I’m terribly sorry.

  Claire is trying, too, to be uncertain; it isn’t working.

  “Is there someone we can call? To make identification? Would you want your older son to do it?”

  Claire only looks at him; she isn’t ready for this conversation.

  “Is he home?” the chief says. “We need to notify him, too.”

  “Matt’s at school,” she says. And then she says, “You think it’s Eric?”

  “Well, there aren’t any other young boys missing,” the man says.

  Claire sits there, and over a distance, across the span of her life, a thought comes to her that Betty is waiting and that all things in life are blown around by the wind.

  “I wouldn’t want Matt to do that,” her voice is saying.

  “What’s that, Claire?”

  “To identify his brother,” she says.

  They are there, about her, waiting.

  She is not looking at them. She is looking between them. Eric? she thinks then, as the information seems to come home to her. Is it Eric they’re talking about, out there where it’s so cold and damp?

  CHAPTER 12

  VERNON IS ACROSS THE STREET, ALONG THE SIDEWALK. HE’S fifty yards away. He’d like to be closer, to see better, at the same time that he is reluctant to be too close. He doesn’t know what to do or what matters.

  As an initial move in the direction of things, he crosses the street between the slow-moving cars and stands on a raised sidewalk surrounding Mister Donut. People are standin
g and moving everywhere, trying for a better view; the thickness of the crowd, however, close to the roped-off event, holds more or less steady. “They found that little boy,” someone says.

  Vernon keeps walking, circling, to see if he can get closer. There is a tall woman draped with photography gear, keeping a camera in both hands raised above her head, like someone on television. There, too, are two men, a dozen feet apart, with television cameras mounted on their shoulders. “They found that little boy,” someone says. The eggbeater sound of a helicopter is in the air, but the clatter is there for some time before Vernon—like most others, he keeps shifting and tiptoeing and trying to see something of the heart of the matter—realizes what it is or glances to see it.

  “These people will sure scatter if that thing lands,” someone says.

  “You think that’s why it’s here?” someone says.

  “Maybe they want to evacuate him to Boston,” someone says.

  Vernon keeps shifting and trying to slip between people to move closer. Boston? he thinks. Will they take him to Boston? The idea appeals to him, as if everything would be taken out of town. And taken care of. In Boston, medical things were made okay, as they all knew.

  He shifts and moves closer, raises to his toes as do others throughout the crowd. All at once then there is shouting and a surge backward, nearly pushing him from his feet in the crowd. “Move it back now!” a voice is shouting. “Move it back! Move it back!” There is an ambulance with flashing red lights, Vernon sees; the wooden barricades are being lifted around by policemen—the white vehicle with its orange stripe is more like a large pickup truck carrying a hospital container—as the ambulance backs into the parking lot, into the center of secret knowledge to which they are all being denied access. Maybe now they will just leave him alone, Vernon is thinking. They have the boy; they’re all so busy. Duncan didn’t really know, did he? Even if he did, would he tell anyone? He wouldn’t, would he? Duncan? He cannot imagine Duncan telling anyone.

  The barricades are swung nearly closed again, and the crowd surges forward this time. Cigarettes are lighted. Close by, Vernon hears someone say, “What a circus.” And he hears, “Who has the snack concession here? I’m missing lunch.” A thought is in his mind all along to speak to someone, to talk about what is happening, to ask if it is the little blond-haired boy who was missing? He’d like to talk to anyone, but doesn’t. Is it the little blond-haired boy? he thinks to say.

  The helicopter hovers, centers almost directly above them, and people glance up into the whipped air. Vernon doesn’t. He keeps edging between others and in time comes to a place where he is all but in the second row, with a view, over and between shoulders, of the policemen and others on the other side of the barricades and rope. The ambulance lights are in view as he lifts to his toes, and its roof lights continue to flash and circle. Flash bulbs go off in the distance, too, and there are many more policemen and plainclothesmen around the lighted vehicle. There, he sees, yes, there is the same large detective whose picture was in the paper! Seeing the man makes him feel sick in his stomach for an instant, as if he is going to vomit. He doesn’t vomit, though. He thinks of going up to ask the man, as he would ask a professor after class, if the boy’s being taken away in the ambulance meant he was going to the hospital and was going to be all right. Is that why they have an ambulance? Were they taking him to Boston?

  The large man moves, comes several steps his way, then stops. He is lighting a cigarette. He appears to be looking at the mob of people, even at him. The man turns then to speak to two other men, pointing one way and another. He is a flushed and overweight man, Vernon sees. He is jabbing a finger at the pavement then, over and over, as he talks. The man terrifies him, makes him feel another wave of sickness.

  Something is happening, out of view, at the rear of the ambulance; all attention, including Vernon’s own, shifts there. A rear door, which had been standing open, is closed; a man in a white hospital jacket steps past others to the driver’s door of the ambulance. The ambulance is going to leave, as policemen move away from in front of it. Added lights start flashing from the headlight area of the vehicle; the pushing back and shouting comes up again, although less wildly this time. “Move it back, please, here it comes. Move it back now.”

  Vernon sags with the crowd, sees the flashing ambulance slip by, and returns forward with the crowd once more as the barricades are closed. Turning into the street, the ambulance lets out an abbreviated howl as it heads away. In a moment it howls again, again briefly. The sound continues between Vernon’s ears, though, and seems to pose a question of the boy’s being okay or not, being rushed to the hospital or not. Why else would the siren call out like that?

  He lingers still, as do most others. His soul might survive if the boy survives, is what be is thinking, ignoring altogether his lifting of the stiffened body from the trunk and placing it on the ground. His soul might survive. That seems the issue within him now.

  He pushes closer through the crowd; still he cannot win a place in front. As if it is important now, sanctified with this attention, he has no wish to leave this place. There is even an urge in him to identify himself to the crowd and to the police, to have credit paid where credit is due, to explain what happened.

  Going up on his toes, he looks for the big detective. Has he gone home? he wonders. With the boy recovered and taken to the hospital, is his job over? Has he quit?

  CHAPTER 13

  IN THE CAFETERIA, MATT IS SITTING AT A BENCH BY HIMSELF when he realizes someone is speaking to him. Looking up, he sees the three-piece suit first and then Mr. McGowan, the assistant principal. Matt had been thinking and feeling how bummed out he is, and seeing the man’s gray suit, he knows, he knows everything, even as he hardly recognizes any of the words being spoken.

  He stands, lifting his legs out from under the table, and he leaves his plastic tray, as instructed, an added clue to everything, to anyone watching, and makes his way between the tables to the center aisle. Here he approximately walks with Mr. McGowan, half a step behind him—like any other student, he thinks in this moment, who doesn’t own geometry—follows the man through the overall din, on their way to the swinging doors ahead.

  Mr. McGowan has said nothing more, nor does he speak again as they walk the endless hallway. It is just as well to Matt that the man doesn’t say any more, for the din of the cafeteria continues in his ears and his thoughts keep flashing here and there. He’ll be famous now, he thinks. She’ll change her tune now. What will Cormac say?

  In the main office, he notices the flash of eyes on him from the women behind the counter as he turns, on faint intuition, to the left, into the principal’s office, as Mr. McGowan opens the door with its upper pane of clouded, rippled glass. The principal is getting to his feet, coming around his desk. It is Mr. Duchaine, who says, “Matthew, it’s about your brother.”

  Matt looks at him, waits for what he knows is there like a curious present.

  “I’ve had to do this before,” the man is saying. “It’s not easy, believe me. Your brother’s body was found a short time ago.”

  Matt only looks back at the man. He doesn’t know what to say.

  “Matthew, I’m so terribly sorry,” the man says. “This kind of thing shouldn’t happen.”

  Matt stands there. He is squeezing his eyes, as they smart some. He is against crying, though, as if the tears would seem to be for the benefit of this small audience. “Where did they find him?” he says.

  “I’m not really sure,” the man says.

  They stand there. Matt doesn’t know what else to say, as his attention seems focused on keeping his eyes from blinking and releasing tears. His brother, Eric, dead, he thinks. Still it isn’t Eric who is dead; it isn’t Eric they are talking about.

  “A police car is coming to take you home. It should be here any second.”

  Again they stand there, until Matt says, “What happened to him?”

  The one man, and the other, looks blankly at hi
m, at his question, until the principal says, “We don’t really know, Matthew. I’m sure they’ll tell you everything.”

  Matt stands there.

  The three of them stand there.

  “I’ll get my coat,” Matt says.

  “Oh, I’ll go with you,” the assistant principal says.

  “That’s okay,” Matt says.

  The principal nods lightly, to agree that it’s okay.

  In the hallway, Matt walks on air. He continues to keep his eyes from blinking into tears. When he blinks once, though, against his wishes, a film is drawn over his eyes, which he strains—retrieving his coat, starting back, saying “Hi” to someone in passing—to have evaporate without being sideswiped by another blink.

  “They should be here any minute,” the principal says, having stepped to the hallway door.

  “I’ll go wait outside,” Matt says.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” the principal says.

  “Yes,” Matt says, for it is true.

  Again, the man nods.

  Outside, as everyone knows, it’s the winter air that makes a person’s eyes water, and this knowledge helps Matt’s efforts not to cry. It’s an effort which is taking on a certain importance, as if it is he and Eric against all odds.

  Nor does he blink in the back seat of a rattling police car as two young uniformed officers in the front return him home, It’s only when the car is on his street and approaching his house that something happens. It is the house where they live, have always lived, the three of them. There it is. The police car is pulling up, and from the rear seat, looking through the side window, he sees the house there beside them. There is their third-floor apartment, their black-and-white TV, their bedroom, their life. Matt tries to hold himself against breaking, and he gasps and holds and gasps again, but his face is going to pieces then and all is lost just as he is opening the door.

  The young officer in the passenger seat has turned to look at him, is saying, “You gonna be okay now?” and gets out on his side then as Matt has started crying and is unable to speak.