Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  “How’s she supposed to be conscious if she’s all doped up?”

  The nurse stiffened. “She’s in a lot of pain.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” Caroline pushed her hair out of her eyes and set her face.

  “You really should talk to the doctor about this.”

  Caroline turned back and took her mother’s hand. Her bottom lip curled over her teeth. Her skin was bunched up beneath her eyes, dark and dry, leathery, the skin of a woman seventy-eight, not fifty-eight. Caroline tried to remember her mother at the small kitchen table, wry and lean and tough, the ever-present cup of coffee in her hand, legs folded in front of her, like someone waiting for the world to play itself out chiefly for her amusement.

  But maybe that woman was gone and all that was left was this husk, these bedsores, this pain. All Caroline wanted to do was talk about her day with her mother, tell her about the bust and the bridge. What she wouldn’t give for one more conversation, one more reassurance in that easy kitchen-table voice that her mother used. “Baby, all you can do is the best you can do.”

  Caroline spoke to the nurse without looking up. “It’s going to be soon, isn’t it?”

  The nurse didn’t say anything.

  “Her hands are so cold.”

  The nurse said, “I wish you’d talk to Dr. Beldick.”

  “Please.”

  The nurse shifted her weight. “Her bowels have stopped working. Sometimes, the body has its own order of shutting down…”

  Caroline nodded, soaked up this bit of information as she always did, feeling it diffuse inside her, dispersed along rivers of blood, and could almost feel it tingling in her arms and legs until she felt the rawness of it dissipating, until she believed the information could do no more harm. “Thank you,” she said.

  She waited for the nurse to leave, then sat down and took her mother’s cool hand, pressed it to her mouth, and whispered, “I’m here.”

  5

  After witnessing a couple of them firsthand, Alan Dupree had come to recognize a kind of season, a certain dark streak that a city endures—when every knife fight seems to end with someone bleeding to death and every domestic violence call carries a comic threat of disaster, when all the really bad guys seem to finish their probation and start work again all at once. Some guys on the job made themselves feel better by blaming full moons or hot weather or the disbursement of government checks. The guys in crime analysis studied changing patterns of crime like weather charts. The brass looked for the evil in funding deficiencies. Patrol cops became religious. Detectives became cynics.

  But Alan Dupree had seen his share of these bleak seasons and they seemed to him almost organic, at least self-sustaining, capable of creating their own energy and spinning off into endless replication. The only thing he could equate it with was sports—a hitting streak or a series of errors or missed baskets. A streak. A slump. A run in which cause becomes effect which becomes cause and then effect again, bad fortune causing more bad fortune, until the thing just plays itself out, until the ill wind dies down. From a distance, such periods could look like simple statistical spikes and valleys, evening out the averages so you got four murders in one month and none the next and still hit Spokane’s monthly average of two. But try telling a baseball player that he’s not on a streak, or a basketball player, or a guy at a craps table. Try telling him some unseen force isn’t at work against (or for) him, that one botched grounder doesn’t lead to another, that one murder doesn’t spawn another, that it’s just the numbers evening out.

  The distinction occurred to Dupree at 11 P.M., as he was climbing into the car with Spivey, preparing to drive to the third apparent homicide of the day. For a mid-sized city like Spokane, which might get twenty murders in a bad year, three bodies in one day was incredible, something like a 150-pound shortstop belting three homers in one game. Although, to be accurate, the hooker they’d found that afternoon along the riverbank had been murdered at least two weeks earlier.

  Dupree thought about talking to Spivey about his theory of streaks; it was the kind of thing he used to share with Caroline. He loved sharing his vast criminal epistemology. And if the other detectives mocked him when they called him “Officer Philosopher,” well, Dupree thought it was important not only to train but also to educate rookies like Spivey.

  “Any questions?” Dupree asked.

  “Yeah. Do I ever get to drive?”

  Dupree stared at him for a moment before starting the car. They drove in silence until Dupree turned onto Monroe Street and crossed the bridge above the dam where the drug dealer had gone over earlier in the day. What would he have done in Caroline’s position? Try to help the kid who got pushed in the river, or keep his gun on the guy who pushed him? He wondered if it would have been possible to shoot the older guy in the leg or something. That’s what a TV cop would do. But in twenty-six years he’d only had to pull his gun maybe thirty times and he’d never had to fire it, let alone been confronted with the kind of situation where he had to shoot someone in the leg. How would you go about shooting someone in the leg? First of all, it was against policy to shoot a guy in the leg. For better or worse, if you shot someone, it was to “stop” him, to fire until he no longer posed a threat, which was, of course, when the subject was dead. Still, he wished the decision had been his and not Caroline’s, because whatever he would have done, he could live with the wrong choice. He wasn’t as sure about her.

  He got on the Interstate heading east, flashed his grille lights at a car in his way, and quickly had the car up to ninety, Spivey fidgeting like a dog in the passenger seat. Dupree got off at the second exit and wound his way into a familiar neighborhood; they were all familiar if you’d been on the job any time at all. He’d imagined starting a guided tour with retired cops, with starred maps of murder, theft, and perversion. His own map was no different from any other cop’s: a rape in that house, a two-car fatal accident in front of that convenience store, a house where a biker had fenced stolen auto parts.

  The house that was about to be added to his own tour was a simple one-story, surrounded by shrubs that needed trimming, a flower pot at each corner of the driveway, and a tidy, kidney-shaped flower garden carved into the yard. Uniforms stretched police tape around the block while the public information officer kept the news trucks at bay.

  Dupree parked, crossed the street, and climbed the steps, bumping a macramé pot on the porch of the small house. The smell of cigarette smoke hit him like a slap, and he was reminded of the power of dormant urges.

  “Long day, huh?” asked a patrol cop on the porch. He wrote Dupree’s and Spivey’s names on the crime scene log and stepped out of the way so they could enter.

  Inside, Dupree and Spivey found the other detectives and evidence technicians, who stretched white rubber gloves onto their hands and talked and pointed and gestured in the cool, detached way that almost hid the fact that bodies were the best part of the job: a completed story with no secrets, all the evidence right there for them to read, blood spatters and puncture wounds and the darkening of flesh that told where the blood left first, very important when you’ve got a guy who has given up the best of three quarts, when what little blood he has left has settled in his back.

  Best of all, dead ones didn’t lie or forget or protect the people who beat them. They cooperated, in their way. With carpet fibers, DNA testing, and computerized fingerprint databases, you could make the argument that a guy like this was more helpful dead than alive. This particular guy in front of Dupree, for instance—a guy in his sixties with a criminal record—how could they know if he was telling the truth? What kind of witness would this old shit make, with his felony record and his alcoholism? But if they got prints, DNA from the dead guy’s fingernails, footprints in the carpet, they might as well have videotape and a confession from the guy who did it.

  There were two other detectives, two evidence techs, and a deputy coroner in the house, and they all smiled the minute Dupree entered t
he room.

  “Guy gives this much blood,” he said to no one in particular, “he should at least get a donut and a glass of juice.”

  Dupree bent down and looked at the body. He was in his sixties, with a ring of wild graying hair. He was fat, wearing cover-alls, lying in a pond of thickening blood. “You’re gonna need a lot of club soda to get the blood out of this rug.”

  Polaroid flashes lit the house as evidence techs pulled small brown paper sacks down over the victim’s hands in case he got a scratch in before being killed. This turned out to be especially helpful for hookers, like the one Dupree had found earlier, who often got scratches in, and who seemed to become dead as easily as other people get caught in traffic. Dupree flicked one of the paper bags. “Jesus. Bastards even took his hands.”

  Small, orange, numbered evidence flags—eighteen of them so far—were laid out on the coffee table and the floor around the body, each one marking a potential piece of evidence for the corporal taking photographs: a blood spatter, a deep indentation in the carpet, a bloody fingerprint on the coffee table, a pipe wrench.

  Dupree grabbed an orange-flagged pylon. “It’s clear to me now, Mrs. Stanhouse.” He held it up. “Your husband was killed by a very tiny slalom skier.”

  It was too much for Spivey, who had been fighting every one of Dupree’s inappropriate jokes and now laughed so hard his gum fell out. Dupree liked it when someone finally laughed. It seemed to let the air out of the room, and he usually found himself getting quiet after that. The young detective pushed his way to the door, covering his mouth and nose as if he were about to vomit. He squeezed past the lead on the case, Pollard, dark-rimmed glasses beneath slick, black hair, like some early 1960s hipster. As he edged past the gagging Spivey into the crowded house, Pollard looked up at Dupree for an explanation. Dupree shrugged.

  Dupree and Pollard stood next to each other, staring at the body like two men admiring a car, speaking without looking away from it.

  “Hear about that shit at the dam?” Pollard asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I wonder how Caroline’s doin’ with that?”

  “I tried calling her. Boyfriend said she was sleeping.”

  “That same guy she was seeing at Christmas?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How old is that guy?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty-two. Nine. Somewhere in there.”

  “Good for her. If I was a woman, that’s what I’d do.”

  Dupree looked away from the body to Pollard.

  “No,” he said, “I just mean, if I was attracted to guys, that’s what I’d do…Men do it all the time, you know, go out with someone a lot younger. You know what I mean.”

  “You’re attracted to younger guys?”

  “No, I mean…” He shifted his weight and looked to change the subject. “That’s a tough call she had to make. Poor kid.”

  “She’ll be all right. She had good training.”

  “Oh, that’s right. She worked for you. As if that wasn’t enough bad luck for one lifetime.”

  Dupree nudged the dead man’s foot with his own. “Neighbors know anything?”

  “Yeah. The guy’s nephew stops by earlier today for a visit. Some screaming. About nine P.M., neighbor sees the nephew leave in the victim’s car.”

  “Get a plate on the car?”

  “Yep. Plate, make, model. I got it all. The reason I called you was that one of the neighbors said the nephew was wearing khaki pants.”

  “No shit?” Dupree looked more closely at the dead body on the rug.

  “Don’t know if it’s Caroline’s guy from the park, but the description’s close.”

  “What about the rest of Uncle Stiffy’s family? Any of ’em know the nephew?”

  “We’re lookin’. Wife’s got Alzheimer’s, lives in a home. I guess he’s got a sister in the Bay Area we’re trying to track down.”

  Dupree picked up a photo album and began leafing through it. “I forgot to ask, who won the pool?”

  Pollard motioned to the huge pipe wrench lying in a corner, marked with one of the small evidence flags. A technician crouched to dust it.

  Dupree shook his head. “You’re kidding. A pipe wrench? Goddamn Spivey.”

  Every December at their Christmas party, the Major Crimes detectives picked a weapon—everything from a baseball bat to a .38 to an Uzi to different kinds of knives—and whenever there was a murder the next year, each of the eight detectives tossed in twenty bucks. The guy with the right weapon won the pot. Some guys bought two or three weapons and so the pot was usually more than two hundred dollars.

  They went by seniority, the newest detective choosing last each time, and since all the likely weapons were chosen by the time Spivey came aboard, he stared at the list and then said, in perfect Efrem Zimbalist Jr. inflection, “miscellaneous blunt objects.” Now, here it was only the end of April, and already they had a murder committed with a shovel and now this—a pipe wrench. Unbelievable. Nine murders this year and already Spivey wins two.

  “So, what do we do? Arrest Spivey?”

  “No shit,” Pollard said.

  The assistant chief, James Tucker, came in then. With the chief a year away from retirement, at the most two, Tucker showed up at every crime scene where there might be reporters. It was taken for granted that he was in line for the job, even though many of the older cops didn’t like him because he had come from San Diego instead of the insular world of Spokane cops.

  “What’ve we got?” Tucker asked.

  “Miscellaneous blunt,” Pollard said.

  “Goddamn Spivey,” Tucker said.

  Dupree turned his back and looked through the photo album for a picture of the nephew, knowing it was a long shot. But that was the thing about streaks and runs. If the guy who pushed Caroline’s drug dealer off the bridge also beat this old man to death, then the string was already playing out, each movement taking the thing out a little further, the coincidences piling up, just waiting to be revealed.

  So he wasn’t surprised when he saw, in one picture, the dead guy leaning against a pier in San Francisco with a stump of a woman, her husband, an attractive young girl with black hair, and a guy who looked about thirty-five, a guy with a cocky smirk and the kind of simple, colorless tattoo on his forearm that a person usually acquires in prison. Dupree slid the photo out of the album and put it in his pocket.

  Outside, a spring wind had picked up. Dupree found Spivey talking to a cute television reporter, his foot up on the bumper of Dupree’s car, speaking under his breath.

  “You having a press conference?”

  Spivey brought his foot down and shifted his weight. “We were just talkin’.”

  “You tell her about the neo-Nazis?”

  Spivey tried to smile nonchalantly. “He’s kidding. He always jokes around.”

  “Oh, shoot. You’re right,” Dupree said. “We’re not supposed to talk about that. Thanks for keeping me out of trouble, partner.”

  The TV reporter glanced at her notebook, and Dupree leaned over to read what she’d been writing.

  “I can neither confirm nor deny rumors of castration,” he said. “You’ll have to ask the chief about that.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  “And don’t quote me saying they cut his heart out. I’ll deny having told you that.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Spivey said. “He’s just messing around.”

  Dupree opened the car door and motioned at Spivey, who reluctantly climbed in. They drove quietly for a block before Spivey spoke. “That was mean.”

  “I told you, don’t talk to reporters unless you ask me first,” Dupree said. “And when you ask me, I’ll always say no.”

  Spivey stared out the passenger window as Dupree drove, the car almost moving itself, its driver deep in thought. They crossed the river to the north side of the city.

  He rolled his window down and turned into the quiet neighborhood around Corbin Park, p
orch lights twinkling through front-yard shade trees, sprinklers raining water like shattered glass on the sidewalks. He drove slowly, taking in the smell from the flower beds and lilac bushes. He’d always liked the neighborhood along this park, in part because he’d never been to a serious crime here. It was late and he should just do this in the morning, but he wanted at least to drive by her house to see if she was up. At the end of the park he turned, and his headlights ran across her car in the driveway. He parked in front of the small one-story house. A light was on in the back of the house, where he guessed the bedroom would be. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the photograph he’d taken from the dead guy’s album, held it against the steering wheel, and imagined her behind the dark picture window.

  “Whose house?” Spivey asked.

  Dupree didn’t respond at first. “Hmm? Oh…nobody’s.”

  Inside, Caroline had started when the headlights rolled across the picture window in front of her house. She sat in the dark on the couch. She watched out the window, waiting for the car to leave. She knew who it was. Joel finished his shower and Caroline heard the creak of footsteps behind her and knew again without turning that Joel would be in the doorway, wearing a pair of flannel boxer shorts, drying his hair with a towel.

  She envied the way men could date younger women without any self-consciousness. She’d heard men say stupid things like, “As we get older, we’re getting closer in age.” She longed for that kind of self-deception, but her mind played the opposite game, constantly imagining him as a little boy—six when she graduated from high school; four when she had sex the first time. There was something especially troubling in realizing that she began having her period the year he was born.

  “I really am sorry, Caroline.”

  She turned and smiled. “I told you, it’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have left my phone on.”

  “It was stupid of me to call.”

  She turned back to the window and could still see the sliver of headlight on the curb, could still hear Dupree’s car idling outside.