Deviant Behavior

by Mike Sager

  34

  Metcalfe led Salem toward an alcove on the far side of the crystal chamber. En route they passed the westernmost pedestal, on which was sitting the skull crafted of rose quartz, known as the Templar. As she went by, Salem felt the way you feel when you’re stopped at a traffic light and you look up and someone in another car is staring at you—a cold tingle crept along her spine.

  The alcove harbored a facing pair of chrome and leather loveseats, the space between occupied by a fifties-era boomerang coffee table, smoked-glass with an ebony base. Salem chose one of the loveseats. Metcalfe sat opposite.

  “So,” he said, “here we are.”

  Noncommittal: “Mmm-hum.”

  “You like the sofas?” He patted a cushion with his palm. “They’re French. Le Corbusier.”

  “I like leather.”

  “I can see. That’s a nice coat.”

  She gathered the soft lapels beneath her neck. “Lambskin.”

  He dabbed his forehead with the towel. She smiled thinly.

  “I guess I’ll just start,” he said.

  “It’s yo money.”

  He cleared his throat. “What do you know about your father?”

  Salem recrossed her legs. “My real name is Jennifer. I was molested by my uncle when I was seven. When I was ten, I was sent to a Catholic orphanage. The mother superior—”

  He gave her a look.

  “Wha?”

  “The truth, perhaps? And you can drop the white-girl-talkin-black routine. I know you grew up in south Florida.”

  She studied her nails.

  “I think I’ve more than paid for the privilege, don’t you?”

  The envelope was resting in her lap. It had an appealing heft. She supposed he had a point. “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with your biological father. What information do you have about him?”

  “Not much.”

  “What did your mother tell you?”

  “What’s to tell? He knocked up my mother with me. She claims he died in a car accident before I was born.”

  “She claims?”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “But you don’t believe it.”

  “I think my mother was trying to do me a favor. Or maybe she was trying to rewrite history. Or maybe she was delusional.

  I don’t know exactly. I was trying to be a kid at the time.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think she made a lot of bad choices in her life.”

  “About your father, I mean. What do you think about him?”

  “I think that men leave. They’re irresponsible. They’re cowards who act like bullies to cover up.”

  “My, my …”

  “You asked.”

  “So I did. What else?”

  “I think that men are only interested in women for one thing. I think our whole society is based on it.”

  “On what?”

  “On men being in control. On men lording over women. Making sure they always have women available to service their needs.”

  “That seems an unusual point of view for a prostitute.”

  “If you ask me, I have a good vantage point.”

  “Flat on your back?”

  If looks could kill …

  He raised a hand in peace. “Sorry. That was out of line.”

  She shrugged, cut her eyes to the floor.

  “Have you ever given any thought,” he asked, “to the reasons why relations between the sexes may have developed the way they have?”

  “Because men will put their dicks in any hole they can find?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know: all men are jerks. We’re critical and controlling. We’re intimidating, unyielding, exploitative, and unreasonable. We’re the source of all the world’s problems.”

  “And?” She looked up at the glass roof. The sky over this town was always gray. It made her feel heavy. She missed the blue.

  Metcalfe leaned forward in his seat, allowing his feet to touch the floor. “What do you know about the origins of our species?”

  She looked at him as if a tree was growing out of his head.

  “You mean, like, Adam and Eve?”

  “More like preagriculture, when our ancestors were living in caves and trees.”

  “What about it?”

  “At that point of our development, according to anthropologists, people lived in matriarchal societies. That means the women were in charge. Society revolved around them.”

  “Sounds like paradise.”

  “Let me ask you this: have you ever found it difficult to get along with other women?”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that men are jerks.”

  “Maybe men are the way they are because women are the way they are.”

  Crossing her arms: “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Put it like this,” he said. “In the early years of human evolution, females were the dominant sex. Women’s evolutionary function was to make babies. Naturally, society revolved around them. Women took multiple male partners in order to insure the continuation of the species. They had sex with anyone who appealed to them; fertilization was their uppermost goal, their biological imperative. Men brought them food, fought one another for mating privileges. Women called the shots. They had the power.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Women invented agriculture.”

  “Agriculture?”

  “One of a series of laborsaving innovations developed through the ages which had the unintended consequence of tying women down rather than freeing them up. With the rise of agriculture, the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle came to an end; people started living in villages. Men’s crucial role as the provider was no longer central to survival. In fact, men had no crucial role at all.”

  “Besides sperm donor.”

  “Exactly. Women did the farming, the cooking, the child rearing—the survival of the species rested solely with them. The home and hearth became the center of the universe, a territory presided over by women. Men came home for meals and sleep and sex during the estrus—you know how that goes: women really are receptive to men for only what? About four days a month? When they’re ovulating? The rest of the time they could care less.”

  The corners of her mouth turned up into a smirk. “More like: could do without.”

  “But those four days are powerful. I read somewhere that something like nine out of every ten young women who lose their virginity with unprotected sex end up becoming pregnant. Most of them say, when surveyed, that they didn’t have any intention of having sex, they were just carried away by the moment. What that means, generally, is that their good sense was overcome by their hormones—they couldn’t help themselves. It’s chemical, don’t you see? Women are driven by an engine they can’t control.”

  Not at all pleased by the insinuation: “So?”

  “So here you had all these men with nothing to do, no real role to play in society. Not only that, but the women kind of lorded over them, treated them like children—you know how women do. Men felt unnecessary. They felt underfoot and unappreciated.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “That’s when men took to spending their days away from hearth and home, away from the women and the children. They’d collect down by the river, in a clearing in the forest—the ancient equivalent of the corner liquor store, the Moose Lodge, the office. With no pressing duties to perform, men had lots of free time to brood and commiserate about the way the women treated them, about their basic lack of purpose in the grander scheme. While brooding, they needed something to fill the hours. They busied themselves inventing things. They came up with religion, politics, philosophy, and education. They created sports, war, music, literature, and crafts: complex systems and pursuits that existed in a world totally outside of the household. A world designed to supersede the natural authority that women held at home. A world, simply, where men were in charge.”

  She
chewed it over for a few beats. “So you’re saying that our whole way of life is based on men being bored and horny.”

  “More like insecure and pissed off.”

  “Because their women wouldn’t give ’em any pussy?”

  “Because they knew deep down that they were good for only one thing.”

  Salem couldn’t help but laugh.

  35

  The call came crackling through his new custom-fitted polymer earbud, a female voice over the hailing frequency, the staticky techno singsong of central dispatch: “Unit Three-Sixteen Alpha.”

  Officer Perdue Hatfield, Unit 316A, recoiled from the unaccustomed aural assault, the pain evident on his broad face, the Rockwellesque freckles across his cheeks flushing in protest. The earphones had just been issued to all beat cops, amid much fanfare and press (“MPD Cuts Noise Pollution in Neighborhoods,” trumpeted the Herald that morning), the latest innovation in hearing technology, another vital new law enforcement asset, $147 per unit, wholesale.

  He reached for the microphone clipped to the left epaulet of his waterproof, winter-weight uniform coat, beneath which he wore his armored, bulletproof vest. He had the physique of a man who spent the bulk of his free time lifting heavy weights in the basement gym at the precinct house, shopping for vitamins and protein supplements, and reading bodybuilder magazines. His thick fingers poked out luridly from fingerless gloves. He pressed the button on the microphone. “This is Three-Sixteen Alpha. Go ahead.”

  “Check the welfare: 1304 T Street Northwest.”

  “Copy that,” Hatfield said. “Thirteen zero four, T-Tango.”

  “Roger, Three-Sixteen Alpha. RP reports baby crying.”

  Puzzled, he adjusted his hat. “Repeat?”

  “Baby … crying,” the dispatcher said. “See the resident manager. There are no further details at this time.”

  Hatfield pursed his lips and spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into the gutter. Check the welfare: he hated those calls. They always sounded innocuous, but you never knew what you’d get. Old man on garage floor all night, too proud to call for help. Teenager giving birth in restroom at Popeye’s. Woman holding iron skillet; boyfriend’s brain splattered across kitchen. Originally, when he went into police work, Hatfield’s motivations had been pretty straightforward. Like it said on his badge: to protect and serve. Most cops will tell you the same thing—they always wanted to be a cop. As a boy Perdie Hatfield refused to go anywhere without his twin Hasbro six-shooters, the faux leather holsters secured around his chubby thighs with strips of rawhide, an innovation he jerry-rigged himself. (Back home, they’d have said nigger-rigged.) In neighborhood games he always cast himself as the hero, saving his girl cousins from pretend villains: to this day he could recall the sweet and powdery scent of his favorite cousin, Bonita—blonde and beautiful, one year older, mature for her age—as he untied the ropes from her hands and feet and carried her pretend-limp body to safety. Later, when he joined the marines, literally to see the world, he learned something more about himself: he enjoyed living by the rules, specific rules you could memorize and observe. Rules created precision. Rules gave you a standard to live by. Rules made your purpose clear. He hated when things were out of sync, when standards were violated. It was a visceral reaction, a physical discomfort that he felt when, say, one hanger was facing inward when all the others were facing outward, or when he saw someone throwing litter out a car window on a highway, or when someone acted like a bully. To Perdue Hatfield, there were right ways and wrong ways in this world, absolute values, lines in the sand. Shades of gray made him uncomfortable.

  Unfortunately, in real life everything was a shade of gray. No crime was ever clear-cut, no two witnesses ever told the same story. More often than not, at a crime scene, Hatfield didn’t know who to believe—five years into his career, it sounded to him like everyone was lying.

  “Three-Sixteen Alpha responding,” Hatfield said into his microphone. The tone of his voice was grim.

  Flicking on his mental array of sirens and lights, Hatfield turned north onto Fourteenth Street, his powerful body canted slightly forward, his pace steady and rhythmic, his pumping arms cocked akimbo to accommodate his gear: a black leather utility belt with its many ingenious pouches and loops; a 9mm Glock sidearm; extra clips of hollow point ammo; a can of Mace brand pepper spray; a steel and leather blackjack, known in the training manual as a “personal self-defense fighting tool”; an ebonized hardwood, military-style nightstick—a model made popular by the Los Angeles police, as featured in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney Glenn King.

  Dangling from a braided leather cord was another important tool of modern law enforcement: his summons book. Hatfield’s unofficial quota for parking tickets was ten per shift. A day’s paid leave was quietly awarded each month to the high ticket-writer in the precinct. With every other step, the summons book swung on its cord and knocked against Hatfield’s muscular left thigh, adding a faint, percussive thunk to the symphony of his gear: the purposeful thwap of his black Danner combat boots against the sidewalk, hard rubber on cold cement; the jangle of his key chain; the clink of his handcuffs, stowed inside their own special pouch; the clunk of his nightstick, banging against the blue-black handle of his gun; the swish of the nylon fabric of his overcoat; the rasp of his trouser inseams, a poly-wool blend, custom made to accommodate his size.

  In short order he was standing before the front door of 1304 T Street NW, a dilapidated house with a sagging roofline, white paint peeling from the brick.

  A woman answered. She wore a colorful, African-print scarf around her head. Though she was no taller than five feet, her bosom was monumental. She crossed her arms beneath, lending structural support.

  Hatfield tipped his cap, two fingers to the bill, another antiquated police custom he admired. “Afternoon, ma’am.”

  His years overseas notwithstanding, Hatfield’s accent still carried the woodsy redneck singsong of his upbringing. He knew what it made people think. A few years back, he’d actually taken elocution lessons, hoping to lose his twang, figuring it would help his chances of advancing through the ranks. Then one day, he was walking down Fourteenth Street and this black dude called him a cracker. He didn’t know the guy; they’d never had any dealings. Just a random act of hatred; the level of vitriol knocked him sideways. A lot worse things had been said to Hatfield over time, to be sure. But this one unprovoked act had really got him thinking. People made such a big deal about skin color these days. Why should he be judged for the color of his? Or by his accent—his double modals and lax vowels, his use of y’all as a second person plural? If it was fine for all the so-called minority races to embrace their “roots,” why shouldn’t he be able to embrace his?

  The woman pulled open the door the rest of the way and admitted him into the foyer.

  “Somebody called the police?” he asked.

  “Upstairs, 3B.” She was missing a lower front tooth.

  “What’s the problem?”

  She regarded him blankly, not quite sure how much to say. Cops: they show up to help you, and the next thing you know they’re ransacking your place and taking your man to the lockup.

  “It dat baby upstairs,” she said finally. “Won’t stop cryin.”

  Speaking the native dialect: “Where da momma at?”

  Her eyes were large and black in her puffy face, heavily outlined with mascara, giving her the look of an overfed Cleopatra.

  “She onea dem hos. Ain’t nobody seen her fo a while.”

  He looked around the foyer, rundown but not unclean. “You the resident manager?”

  “That chile always makin a racket.” She shifted a hand to her hip. Deprived of its undercarriage, her bosom shifted, setting in motion a series of epidermal waves, a sloshing effect, like water being carried in a bucket.

  Hatfield tried not to stare. “How old is the baby?”

  “Two and a half, three. Still in diapers.”

  He cocked his head toward the
stairwell and listened. He heard water running, the theme from a soap opera, the clink and clank of pots and pans, the subsonic rumble of a rap song, the din of midafternoon traffic rushing by outside … but no crying baby. He bid her to show him the way.

  Together the two climbed the stairs to apartment 3B. Hatfield removed his hat, pressed his ear to the door.

  An odor was evident, putrid and sulfurous, not uncommon in these ghetto rooming houses—a plumbing failure, perhaps, left too long to fester. The way these people lived floored him sometimes. It’s not like he was raised rich. It’s not like he was no snob; he’d gone to bed hungry many a night when his father was laid off. Some of the people back in the hollow didn’t even have indoor plumbing. But at least they had the self-respect to keep their outhouses clean. He could hear the television, but no crying baby. He knocked, a polite rap with the knuckle of his middle finger—rap rap rap. “Police. Open up.”

  Hearing no response, he replaced his hat, held out his hand to the resident manager. She pulled a key chain from the pocket of her housecoat, setting in motion another series of fleshy aftershocks.

  With his right hand, Hatfield unholstered his Glock. With the left, he inserted the key into the brass depths of the cylinder. Slowly he opened the door.

  The smell nearly knocked him down. “Like the barracks latrine after a bad night in Tijuana,” the medical examiner would later say.

  Though it was thirty-five degrees outside, the room was unbearably hot and stuffy, and very dry, a condition attributable to the old-fashioned radiant heating system in the building; the hissing and knocking gave the scene an otherworldly quality. It appeared that the place had been searched. Drawers open, clothes spilling out. Bed stripped, pillows scattered, chair overturned. Cheerios and half-eaten crackers strewn everywhere. A soiled diaper abandoned on the plank floor. A purple plastic video cassette poking half out of the VCR, wrong side in. And everything sticky with reddish handprints and footprints, child-size, like a nursery school finger painting project run amok.

  On the far side of the bed, in the rounded alcove formed by the bay window, Hatfield discovered the source of the smell.