Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  For the deeds he had to go to the county courthouse, right in front of the police station and the jail. He even passed a cop in uniform, nodding and saying hello as he walked through the metal detectors and into the old courthouse. An hour later, he had everything—deeds and transfers and the paperwork from the city. He’d even requested some court documents on a civil suit and slipped a guy twenty dollars to mail them to him. But none of it added up to anything. What had he expected? A mention of Shelly? He had a few drinks, drove around, and found himself outside the lady cop’s house, and that’s when the shit exploded.

  He checked his watch again. Forty minutes and still nothing. They weren’t coming. That was the only explanation. He thought back to the alley, how she had followed him and didn’t even call for backup until after she’d found the body. The lady was just plain nuts.

  Lenny rolled out from under the van and made his way back to Angela’s car. He started it and left Division on residential streets, turning whenever he saw a pair of headlights in front of him. He had made it a couple of miles north and east—thinking about how much work this had all turned out to be—when he stopped the car, beat his thumbs against the steering wheel for a minute, then turned to go back to her house again.

  He made his way west on side streets past her neighborhood, then cut down Maple until he was at the bottom of the North Hill. He cut back east on more residential streets and alleys, crossed Monroe and found himself across from Corbin Park. He cruised through the lady cop’s neighborhood, and tried to be nonchalant as he drove past her house. It didn’t matter, anyway. Her car was gone. The house was dark. And Lenny was suddenly tired, like he’d been straining against something for a long time.

  With the dog, after they finally got fed up with its whimpering and took to leaving it outside on its leash all night, an angry neighbor cut the leash and the dog ran three blocks, right down the middle of the street, and got hit by the first car it saw. His dad said that was okay, the dog was “out of its misery.” No animal that Lenny’s family owned ever just died. They all got put out of one misery or another, and if that made Lenny feel better about the animals, it didn’t do much for his opinion of life.

  He drove around the block again and parked across from her house, right where he’d been when she came out before. He idled in front of her house and thought about switching the car off, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes. If he did that, it would be all over. The lady cop would come home, find him asleep, and have him arrested. That might be okay. The truth was, he’d never minded being locked up at night. It was quiet and at least he was never tired inside, not the way he was out here. He knew most guys saw it the opposite way and couldn’t hack it at night, the dead-heavy loneliness, but it was the endless days that got to Lenny, the grind of time in the dayroom, the sad shuffle of guys waiting for the pay phone, the collective weight of threats on the yard.

  He couldn’t do any more days and he certainly couldn’t handle hanging. So the idea of waiting for her to arrest him faded away and he shifted into gear and started back for Angela’s house. But even as he left, Lenny knew that he would show up here again, confront her with what he’d been doing and force something to happen, even if that meant that one of them killed the other.

  When he imagined that, it was in a kind of daydream, the way kids daydream about war—as valiant and painless. His vision was even more specific: him slipping easily over the dam, the lady cop reaching out and taking his hands, the two of them drawn over the edge together and drifting away, out of their misery and into sleep.

  40

  Her first thought was to turn herself in, call Internal Affairs in the morning, admit what had happened, and hope there wouldn’t be much fanfare when they fired her. She even felt a kind of relief about it. Forget Lenny Ryan. Forget Spivey and McDaniel and Curtis Blanton. But there was still one person she couldn’t forget. Caroline slumped into a chair. “Alan,” she said, and then nothing else. He stood in front of her, still.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  If she turned herself in it would end his career. Simple as that. Once the investigation was over, she might survive in a less vital job, on the DARE team or teaching at the academy or working on some community program. After all, knife or no knife, the wife beater had been within the kill zone of twenty-four feet, that area police officers were taught is close enough that your life is in danger, even from an unarmed subject. Any threat within that area created a judgment call about whether to respond with deadly violence. The shooting would take some explaining, but it would hold up. But Dupree had tampered with evidence. He would go to jail for trying to help her.

  He leaned across the desk and tried to make eye contact. “I’m really sorry, Caroline. I don’t know why I told you that.”

  But she figured they both knew. Henderson knew, Dupree’s wife knew, and more than likely the whole department knew. That’s because what happened in bed between two people was less significant than what the world saw, the sum of all the smiles and stares, the eye contacts that last a bit too long.

  The promise of a thing was in many ways worse than the thing itself. She could pretend to everyone else that Dupree’s leaving his wife had nothing to do with her. She could tell herself that they hadn’t slept together. She could wait a respectable amount of time before they got together, but had there ever been any doubt, either in her mind or in Dupree’s—or in Henderson’s, for that matter—that they would end up with each other? A bitterness rose in her throat, and she thought that self-deception was a thousand flavors that all tasted the same.

  “I didn’t expect anything from you,” she said. “I didn’t ask…” She didn’t finish the thought, that she hadn’t asked him to leave his wife.

  “I know,” he said and looked at his shoes.

  It was true; she hadn’t asked him to leave his wife. But in some ways what she had done was worse. By not asking him, she had strapped them both to the potential of this thing. If they’d just gone ahead and had sex that night, any night, if they began to make demands of each other, they could have begun the long process of letting each other down, of disappointing and betraying each other; instead they allowed this to become the worst thing an attraction could be: pure. They trapped the moment of first infatuation and had selfishly kept it pristine.

  No wife or husband or twenty-four-year-old bartender could live up to the person you were trying not to sleep with. Daydreams never have bad breath or forget important dates. Add up Dupree’s sacrifices for her, the small ones she’d known and the big one she’d discovered, and it made a thin lie of every stare and smile, of every hard swallow during six years of working together and avoiding each other and imagining each other. But now, Caroline felt as guilty as if they’d been caught in bed together.

  “I wanted to help you,” he said.

  “Should I thank you?” she asked coldly.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “You had no right to make that decision for me, Alan. If I screwed up, then—”

  “You didn’t screw up,” he said. “You did the right thing. You didn’t know that he didn’t have the knife anymore. What if he’d grabbed your gun?”

  “Jesus, he was stone drunk!”

  “No! It was a good shoot, Caroline.”

  She had been on the way to forgiving him, to understanding him, but his condescension boiled her blood. “Listen to yourself, Alan? Who the hell plants a knife on a good shoot?”

  He raised his hands. “You were upset. I was trying to make it easier for you.”

  “But now you want me to be upset. Now you want it to be hard.”

  Dupree rubbed his temples. “No. The reason I told you now…”

  “You should leave,” Caroline interrupted.

  “The reason I told you was so you’d see how much I—”

  She leaped up and interrupted again, shaking in front of him. “How much! How much!” She took a breath. “Goddamn it, Alan! You
think I don’t know how much? I’ve been here the last six years too. And most of that time I’ve spent alone!” Her voice quavered and she set her jaw. “I want you to leave, now.” She stood and opened the Burn files, pretending to work, even though she couldn’t read the type through her bleary eyes.

  When she looked up, he was holding his hands out to the side, either a sign of surrender or a plea for understanding, but she was accepting neither right now, and so his arms fell and he nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  He took a few steps toward the door, then turned back, but decided not to say whatever it was that had stopped him. He left the room and the door hissed closed behind him. Caroline held her breath until the lock clicked into place. She waited for another minute, then walked to her desk and dropped the Burn file on it. Then she picked up her phone and threw it halfheartedly across the room. It clanged harmlessly against the side of a desk and to the floor.

  That night six years ago, Dupree held her, stroked her hair, and told her she’d done the right thing, all the time knowing what she knew, that she had panicked. Later, her mother had done her best to console Caroline with her expertise in the field of television police. “So you shot someone. Isn’t that why they gave you a gun?” Caroline knew only one other cop who had killed someone, and yet her mother was right in a way. In the way she was always right. They had given her a gun for just such occasions. And that was the thing she had allowed herself to forget. It wasn’t the shooting that had shaken her. It was pretending she hadn’t screwed up the shooting. She hadn’t known about Dupree planting the knife, but she engaged in her own deception by ignoring the voice that told her the shoot was bad. Instead, she’d said nothing and allowed an official lie to replace her own intuition.

  That night, she’d had another second or two before she needed to fire and maybe she didn’t need to fire at all. And yet the other cops had always been supportive. She had shot a man from twenty feet away, a drunk, enraged man closing fast, a man coming at her after nearly killing his wife. After her senses returned, after Dupree apparently worked over the scene, Caroline had been relieved to see the knife lying next to the wife beater’s body; but in truth, that was the first time she remembered seeing it. That was the disconcerting part, feeling like a fraud, hearing her colleagues say she’d done the right thing, even that she was courageous—courageous!—all the while knowing she had only been afraid.

  Glenn Ritter. That was his name. She hardly ever thought of him by name, just as “the wife beater” or “the guy.” After the funeral, Caroline had stepped up and introduced herself to Ritter’s wife, a bruised and bandaged woman leaning between two crutches. Mrs. Ritter said that when they were first married, her husband’s drinking seemed random and the violence merely a threat, but soon the threat was replaced by casts and purple bruises and the sounds of his boots in the hallway. Over the years he began to get drunk every weekend, and some weeknights too, and the violence developed a pattern, with some connection between the frequency and the severity. With all seriousness Mrs. Ritter told Caroline that if she had paid better attention she might even have charted it, like the tides.

  But then Mrs. Ritter got quiet, matter-of-factly thanked Caroline for saving her life, and turned away. What Caroline had gone there expecting, of course, was some kind of forgiveness, a release from her guilt, but that was probably too much to ask from a woman who had endured tidal beatings from a man she loved.

  While Caroline imagined that her colleagues doubted her ability, all along the doubt had come from herself. She’d shot an unarmed man. This wasn’t about the procedural validity of the shooting or whether the man deserved it or even whether Caroline might have been in danger. These things were as arguable as they were beside the point. What was inarguable was whether Caroline believed she had exhausted every other way out of the situation. She hadn’t. Six years hiding behind the idea of a police kill zone dulled her intuition and her faith in herself. She could live with her own fallibility more easily than she could live beneath so many layers of deceit.

  For all those years, to buy into the necessity of Glenn Ritter’s shooting was to buy into the simplicity of good guys and bad guys, to believe some people didn’t have consciences, which was the defense she saw other cops use, but had refused to allow in herself. It was why she had been so intent on the double major, not just criminal justice, but also poetry, not just investigation, but humanity as well. It wasn’t an issue of compassion as much as it was honesty and effectiveness. You get nowhere investigating bad guys. But if you search for truth, she really believed, it reveals itself as tiny breaks and fissures—cracks through which we can glimpse our own darker natures.

  Again, she heard Blanton: This one’s just broken. That was the easiest thing for cops, to imagine them as broken, and us as whole. But what if our own cracks and fissures differ from theirs only in degree, and if we engage in the same brand of self-deceit? Most cops didn’t like to think of crime in such terms. They saw absolutes like the baby in the back room of Thick Jay’s drug house. And she wasn’t thinking that her shooting of Glenn Ritter was the same as Lenny Ryan pushing Burn into the river.

  But there wasn’t as much distance as she’d like to believe, and if she knew anything about herself, it was the shudder of fear and self-loathing that accompanied those things she regretted. She had to imagine that Lenny Ryan felt the same shudder, that he felt something she would recognize. She’d never met a criminal who thought he was evil. There was always someone worse; even child murderers and rapists could describe those people whose acts had less justification and more brutality. In the end, Caroline believed, we all expect our sins to be forgiven. That was the thing she had forgotten, the thing Dupree had unwittingly returned: The lies we tell the world are nothing compared to those we tell ourselves.

  She looked down at the files in front of her, ran her fingers across the name on the tab. “Hatch, Kevin C. DOB 11-9-81.”

  Blanton said you catch these guys in the aberration—the difference—but that wasn’t quite right. At the slightest provocation from his principal, the custodian confessed to being a serial murderer. Yet he wouldn’t admit killing the fifteen-year-old girl. Somewhere deep beneath the cracks and fissures the custodian clung desperately to the lie that he hadn’t done it. So maybe you find these guys in the same place you find yourself. In the lie.

  Whatever the actual reason Lenny Ryan pushed Burn over the bridge, there was another reason that he clung to, and even if it was bullshit that was the reason Caroline needed to find. Guys like Blanton pretended to want to understand these killers, but they wanted only to exclude them, to separate themselves and their own dark fantasies from these monsters. That was Spivey’s lie and McDaniel’s and Dupree’s too, she supposed. And, of course, Blanton’s. This one’s just broken.

  Caroline felt herself dissolve into the pages of Kevin Hatch’s criminal files. The first entry was from 1986, an order from family court to have custody of the boy granted to the grandmother while the boy’s mother was in a drug rehabilitation program. In 1988 the mother got out of rehab, and Kevin Hatch went back with her. In 1989 the boy’s father died in Seattle and probate court listed the sum of Kevin’s inheritance: “a 1983 Ford Escort, a wristwatch, and assorted personal belongings.” Kevin’s first contact with juvenile court was in 1991, at the age of nine, for theft. The arrests came regularly after that: possession at thirteen, assault at fourteen, auto theft at fifteen. Intelligence reports from SIU and the prosecutor’s office had Burn heavily involved in a gang, running drugs and hookers from an apartment off East Sprague. By the time he was seventeen Burn had been arrested nine times, convicted five. She quickly did the math; from fourteen to seventeen, he had spent more time in juvenile detention than on the street. In the last couple of years of his life Burn was arrested three more times, but convicted just once, of a minor possession charge. She recognized the pattern, not of a young man who was no longer breaking the law, but one who was learning how not to get caught.

>   Caroline had read all of this before, of course, but this time she tried to look beyond the words, for something she might have missed. She was frustrated by how limited police reports were, by their narrow focus, their lack of context and background. Reports like this were written to prove one small point, that “Kevin Hatch was in possession of methamphetamine when he was questioned on 9-11-98” or that “a black male subject identified as Kevin Hatch was observed leaving the scene on 1-4-96.”

  She reached down into her desk and grabbed a pen and notebook, drew a line down the middle of a notebook page and on one side listed every address, every business, and every date in the files. On the other side, she listed every name from the files: “Hatch was observed selling narcotics to Carl M. Higuera…” and on and on. She filled four pages of the notebook with dates, addresses, and incidents, as well as a list of thirty-four names of relatives, associates, lawyers, and witnesses to his crimes, and when she looked up at the clock she was stunned to see that it was almost three in the morning.

  Finally, she turned on the computer. When the database was up and running, Caroline typed in the names from her notebook, one at a time, checking them against other names that came up during the investigation, during interviews with hookers and victim profiles. Another hour passed, the first fifteen names revealing nothing, and then she came to the name “Rae-Lynn Pierce.” She looked back at the file the name had come from, Burn’s 1998 arrest for possession of narcotics—a charge that was later dropped because of some sloppy evidence room procedures. A young woman with no identification, who listed her name as Rae-Lynn Pierce, had been in the car with Burn when he was arrested.