By the time we popped the tabs on our third or fourth beers, a bunch of us were leaning up against the counters in the alleyway of a kitchen, and the rest crowded around the door.
“You did good, boy,” Boudreaux said, slapping Richard on the back hard enough to make beer flip up out of the can he held. Richard grinned, his whole body relaxed in a way we’d never seen.
“That was something, you up there waving that damn shotgun around like John fuckin’ Wayne.”
“Goddamn Rambo, he was,” someone said.
“Motherfuckin’ Godzilla.”
“You’re lucky I don’t write up your ass for not obeying an order,” Akers said in a mock growl. Richard winked, raised his can toward Akers.
“Ah hell, you’d of done the same,” Boudreaux said.
“Hell, yes,” Akers said.
“You sweet goddamn cowboy,” Katherine said, and leaned over and kissed Richard on the cheek.
Richard’s face flushed; he tipped an imaginary hat at her without directly meeting her eyes. “Anytime, ma’am.”
“Oh freaking Jesus.” Katherine laughed, looked at Boudreaux. “They’re all out to make me an old woman, Joe.”
“Never, Katie,” Boudreaux said.
“No ma’am,” came from several officers.
We don’t know when Richard and Katherine slipped out. One moment they were there with us, sprawled out on the floor, and the next they were gone. No one mentioned it, really, although we cadets talked about it plenty among ourselves in the days to come.
But after they’d gone, on about the eighth rehashing of our adventure earlier that morning, we lingered again over Katherine’s moment on the porch.
“That woman,” Akers said, a beer balanced on his considerable chest. His tone conveyed both admiration and reservation.
“Wasn’t one of her wiser moves,” said another officer. “Still, hell of a thing to do.”
“That’s Katherine,” said an older, gray-haired officer.
“No one else like her,” Boudreaux said. He sat against a wall, his legs stretched out in front of him.
“Seems she’d know better,” Denux muttered, his words slurring slightly.
Boudreaux lifted his index finger and shook it at Denux. “Don’t go where you don’t understand, boy. She’s a damn fine cop.”
Separating the truth from myth, the reality from wishful thinking, the facts from the fabricated is a delicate undertaking, sometimes impossible. Over time stories take on their own life as details are discovered and carefully added to the whole or discarded when the evidence doesn’t match up; any first-year cop can tell you that after working a few crime scenes. But who’s to say which details are the truth? Everyone has his own perspective. What’s been blurred and forgotten? What is highlighted and exaggerated?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter what the exact truth is, if the skeleton is fact, the emotional core is real.
It took us years to piece together what happened between Richard and Katherine before we came up with what we considered the whole story, or as close to the whole story as we were going to get: snippets of information from Richard, seemingly indifferent questioning of cadets who came after us, observation among those of us who worked the same shifts as Katherine and Richard, casual asides from veteran officers, sifting through the rumors about personal lives that inhabit every precinct.
But the story we pieced together, the one we consider true, is one we keep mostly to ourselves. Even now we protect the story of Katherine, as so many officers have before and after us, smiling when we hear the tale of her and Johnny, knowing there is more but reluctant to share it. Protecting Katherine. Protecting Richard. Mostly, though, protecting ourselves, the selves we were so long ago: eager, optimistic, naïve.
There was another empty apartment in the complex to which Katherine, along with some of the other officers, had keys. She took Richard there, his brain softened by more beer than he was accustomed to. A place, she would have told Richard, where just the two of them could talk in peace and quiet. He carried a six-pack of beer in one hand and his cadet uniform shirt crumpled up in the other. Katherine rested her hand on Richard’s shoulder as they walked, hips bumping up against each other on the narrow walkway, her gun belt, bulletproof vest, and uniform shirt slung over the other arm.
And they did talk for a while in low, thoughtful voices, mostly about their childhoods, about other cops, about the call at Starling and 12th. And there was silence as well, a comfortable silence, although Richard felt his heart beat more rapidly each time she leaned in close to him, each time she laughed. And he would have still tasted the aftereffects of the adrenaline rush from earlier, that need to feel again how alive he could be.
At some point she would have reached out a hand, slid it along his cheek and up into the hair above his ear, her fingers gently raking his scalp; then she’d have smiled that liquid smile and pulled his face toward hers, told him, “Don’t think, cowboy, just kiss me.”
And who among us could have said no, her body pressed up against ours, hands traveling down our back pulling us closer, the sweet intoxication of her tongue deep inside our mouth, the feel of her breasts, her hands fumbling with the buckle, then the snap, then the zipper on our pants, that quick shucking of clothing, the headiness of flesh wedded to flesh, slow and fast and again and again.
Who knows how long they stayed there, talking and kissing and touching, Katherine playing with the hair on his chest, her head resting on his shoulder, his hands stroking the skin on her waist and hip, how very white her skin was under that uniform. And no one knows what he said to Ellen, his fiancée, when he returned to their apartment later that day—or even if he did return.
We do know Richard arrived at the precinct that night looking tired, subdued, his eyes tracking every move Katherine made. She sparkled, laughed loudly and frequently, said, “Come on, cowboy” to him when roll call ended.
“Jesus H. Christ, Katherine,” Sanderson said as we walked to the back lot, a large bandage covering the hollow of her cheek. “Keep a lid on it.”
“Oh, Beth,” Katherine said, her voice light and playful, “go home and kiss your kids.” And she handed Richard the keys, brushing up against his shoulder as she told him to do the unit check before they left the lot. He smiled at her, a slow smile both tender and defeated.
Later that night, after another impromptu shift gathering in an abandoned gas station parking lot that Katherine and Richard attended only briefly, Katherine seemed so soft and giddy that Boudreaux told Denux after they left, “She’s something when she’s happy, isn’t she?”
“Even when she’s not,” Denux said. “Seems a little wired at times.”
“That’s Katie. Comes and it goes.” Boudreaux shrugged. “You won’t find a better cop, though. She killed a man once, didn’t blink an eye about it. Tough gal. Damn good training officer too. She used to train only rookies, but a couple years back, she started working with cadets.” He gave a short laugh, shifted in his seat. “That woman was a cop from day one, even as a cadet. Johnny and I knew.”
“Her husband Johnny?”
“Yep, he and I were partners out of Broadmoor. Katie rode with him during thirteenth week when she was in the academy. You didn’t know? That’s how they met. She was so sweet and so fierce at the same time. She adored him. He trained her when she came out of the academy too. Hell of a cop, Johnny was. Never should have died.” Boudreaux flicked his cigarette out the window. “Let that be a lesson to you, boy. It can happen to any of us, no matter how good you are. And he was one of the best.”
Denux was tempted to ask more, but he resisted. As he told us later, “It was just all too frigging weird.”
The following week we returned to the academy, feeling even more constrained by the classroom after our time on the streets, bursting with the desire to be done with this. The next ten weeks dragged on in some ways—hour after hour in our seats, taking notes, trying to listen, the sky so blue and promising outside the
high, small windows. But it also became more intense and focused as our goal grew closer. Richard mingled with us more frequently, despite seeming distracted. He came alone to some of our parties and drank heavily; we didn’t ask about his fiancée, Ellen. His grades dropped some, but he pushed himself hard in the gym and out on the firing range. We never mentioned Katherine, although we saw her on occasion, slipping in during lunch to sit with Richard for a few minutes out in the breezeway. The cadets who hadn’t been on our shift tended to find excuses to walk down the breezeway past them for a soda or a cigarette. Richard and Katherine always nodded hello, but that was all.
With only three weeks left until graduation, Hawkins washed out as expected, unable to avoid the reality any longer of less-than-passing grades and poor evaluations from his thirteenth-week ride-along. He’d never been particularly impressive on the firing range either. And he truly was a dipshit. Still, we all patted him on the back, said we were sorry to see him go, suggested he try again.
That was around the time Richard turned morose and short-tempered; circles appeared under his eyes, and he often sat blankly during class, staring at the far wall above the instructor’s head. Sergeant Jackson gave him twenty push-ups one day at roll call for an unacceptable uniform. Katherine no longer visited at lunchtime.
Who knows at what point she started to withdraw, or when she actually ended it, but we know it was before graduation. We learned over the years that her pattern was consistent: she selected one male from the academy class and always ended it before graduation. She would have let Richard down calmly, matter-of-factly, just before she’d handed him his graduation present, the graduation present she always gave.
“Early, I know,” she might have said. “But this is it, cowboy, between you and me, and I want you to have this before I go.”
Did he say anything as she took the tiny St. Michael’s medallion out of its box, slipped the silver chain around his neck? Or did he just stare at her, stunned and bewildered, his heart skittering hard against bone?
“There,” she said, adjusting the medallion on his chest, her fingers lightly brushing his skin. “You know who St. Michael is, don’t you? The patron saint of police officers. You don’t have to be Catholic. He’ll keep you safe if you do the rest.” And she reached down and kissed him, a soft lingering kiss, before she stepped back and began to dress.
“Nice while it lasted, cowboy, but it’s over and no harm done. Go back to your fiancée. Go be a good cop.”
Did Richard plead, cajole? Or was he more stoic, laying out a rational argument? Did he explode in frustration, tell her he loved her, wanted to be with her? Whatever his approach, he would not have accepted her dismissal. He would not have walked away; he would have laid himself even more bare. Of this we are convinced.
And why would her reply to him be any different than the reply she gave all the cadets who came before and after him?
“So you fucked the legend, Marcus. Congratulations. Now let it go.”
And so we graduated and hit the streets. It seems long ago. And it was, nearly twenty years now. Over half our original class has left the force—quit, fired, disabled. Two are dead, but not from the job. The rest of us are sergeants, some even lieutenants, working in departments as varied as Homicide, Auto Theft, Criminal Records, the Chief’s Office. Some of us still work uniform patrol, but we’re supervisors and rarely go out on the streets. Richard’s in Planning and Research, down at Headquarters, after a long stint in Armed Robbery. He’s married, but not to Ellen, and has two sons.
Katherine died seven years after we graduated. The last the dispatcher heard from her, she was out with a Signal 34, a prowler, on St. Ferdinand Street. It was a busy night, full moon Friday, and when another unit finally arrived ten minutes later to back her up, it was clear she’d put up a fight: slashes and cuts, some of them deep, covered her arms and face and legs; blood gushed from her femoral artery. The perp lay partway on top of her, the barrel of her gun resting against his cheek; Katherine had managed to blow his head off, even as he stabbed her repeatedly, hepped up on PCP. She was barely conscious when the officers got there, whispering something they couldn’t understand. They threw her in the backseat of their unit and hauled ass down North Boulevard to the BRG, but her heart had stopped and she’d lost too much blood.
Her funeral was something to see; the line of police cars stretched over a mile on the way to the cemetery; the department bugler played taps. We all saluted her casket.
Her picture is up on the wall at Headquarters when you first walk in, behind a glass case. The Wall of Honor, we call it: all the Baton Rouge city cops who’ve died in the line of duty. Far too many of them. After you walk in and out of there day after day, you tend to pass by it without really seeing their faces; the wall becomes more of a twitch deep beneath your skin that can’t quite be ignored as you turn down the hallway to the evidence room or crime scene division, or wherever your business may take you.
Still, sometimes we do stop and linger, needing to study the too-long parade of faces—good cops we knew like Carl D’Abadie, Chuck Stegall, Warren Broussard, Betty Smothers, and Vickie Wax.
Does Richard occasionally pause here as well, we wonder. Is his eye caught by Katherine’s face, more serious and far younger than we ever remember? Does he look at her, and look at Johnny, the two Cippoines up there on the wall? Does he stand here, like we do, and remember when the world seemed good and bright and we were all so alive and full of possibility.
LIZ
“Who speaks for the dead? Nobody. As a rule, nobody speaks for the dead, unless we do.”
—Detective Andy Rosenwieg,
from A Cold Case by Philip Gourevitch
LEMME TELL YOU SOMETHING
Mango-colored sawdust spits and floats, filling the air as George cuts deeper into a stubby limb on the massive, twisted mulberry in my front yard. He has refused my offer of a ladder, and so, as he reaches the chainsaw above his head, his navy sweatshirt hikes up to reveal the gentle swell where back becomes buttocks and dives into a dark inverted Y. I grin and look away.
Although he is only fifty-nine, George resembles an eighty-year-old walrus and moves as if his knees are permanently fused. Every morning and every afternoon, he walks his ebony pug past my house in a slow shuffle. I know he has a wife, though I’ve never seen her. I know he’s retired, but from what I can’t say for sure.
“Lemme tell you something,” he said by way of introduction several weeks after I’d moved into the neighborhood. “I like most cops. You gotta hard job. Most people don’t understand, but I do.”
I’d thanked him politely, agreeing silently that the job was hard, but not in the way he might expect.
“Nice work you’ve done here on this house,” George had continued, barely stopping to take a wheezy breath. “Most people don’t care. They’ll let everything go to hell. I can tell, you’re not that kind of person.” He tucked in his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and nodded, his jowls jiggling, as he took in my newly tilled garden, just washed windows, recently edged grass. I squinted a little at my house, the yard, saw it through his eyes, and relaxed my shoulders, straightened my spine. Yes, I thought, I’m not that kind of person.
I’ve lived here five months now, and I’ve learned that George likes to tell people something, sometimes several somethings, each time he sees them.
Like this morning, for instance.
“I’m gonna tell you something, Liz. Now, I’m not telling you what to do, but that mulberry will rot if you don’t cut those limbs flush and paint ’em. Simple thing, really. But your business is your business.” The last wisps of his hair flip-flopped willy-nilly in the breeze.
I’d nodded, looking at the tree, thinking how Andy would have hated this kind of chore; we’d divorced just before I joined the police department eight months ago. Maybe one of the guys on my shift would lend me a chainsaw, show me how to use it. Or my sister’s husband, a man who seemed born to hold a hammer and pound a nail. A chain
saw, a gun: What’s the difference? They’re both just tools to be mastered. I’d flexed my fingers, imagining the quivering machine clamped between my hands, the crisp, cool cuts I would make, smoothing out the lines of the tree. A task that, when finished, would actually show the effort.
But George had other ideas. Despite my protests, he was back in ten minutes with his chainsaw, his whole body tense with delight.
“At least show me how to do it, George,” I’d begged.
He’d brushed off my request. “No need for that,” he responded, a smile skittering quick as a mouse across his lips. “My contribution to public service. This’ll be done right quick. Won’t take but half an hour.”
I relent, and he is happy.
As he works, George tells me things. Actually he tells me something for fifteen minutes, then cuts for five minutes, then tells me something else for twenty minutes, and so on. I glance at my watch, stifle a yawn. This is not going to be a right quick job. I have to be on shift in less than two hours.
He tells me about the weed eater stolen from his driveway. “Hell, if they’d of asked, I woulda given it to ’em. But stealing. Sheesh.” He shakes his head in disgust. “But I don’t have to tell you, Liz, do I?” And he fires up the chainsaw, cuts another limb.
He stares at the ground or the tree as he talks. He tells me about mowing the lawns of three neighborhood widows, relates the deaths of their husbands: heart attack, pancreatic cancer, Alzheimer’s. “Fine women, a real shame.” About the history of his German chainsaw. “Don’t make ’em like this anymore. Never breaks, not like that stuff they sell you these days, lemme tell you. People think they can save money, buy something on the cheap, then it breaks on them six months later. Ha!” About the property he’s bought outside Baton Rouge in Greenwell Springs. “Thinkin’ of movin’ there. Real soon. City living has gone all to hell. Anybody steals from me, I can shoot ’em, no problem.”
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 6
