Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  Someone was banging around downstairs, and a minute later, he heard Teague’s voice. “Sarge? You up there?”

  Dupree walked out of the bedroom and paused at the top of the curved staircase. Teague stood in the entryway, his hands on his sizable hips. Dupree was glad to see Teague. After thinking about the cranky old-timers he’d broken in with, this doughy black kid with his Elvis Costello glasses might be the only cop down there who measured up to those old guys.

  “Hey, Teague. How’s it going?”

  “I’ve been calling you on the radio, Sarge. Why’d you go all dark on me?”

  Dupree looked down at the small microphone on his shoulder. “Yeah, the radio is too noisy. I can’t concentrate when it’s on.”

  Teague smiled. “You’d have busted me to Boy Scout for walking alone into a house with my radio off. On a prowler call? Shit.”

  “Yeah,” Dupree said, “it’s not a good idea.”

  Teague just stared at him. “If you’re building a case to get emotional disability payments, you can stop now. I’ll testify.”

  Dupree smiled. “That’d be open and shut, huh?”

  Teague looked around the house. “Nice digs. What’ve we got?”

  “A burglar with attention deficit disorder? He breaks in like a pro, then leaves without stealing anything. Woman’s got a couple of diamond earrings up there bigger than my nuts.”

  “That’s amazing,” Teague said. “You must have some tiny little nuts.”

  “Yeah, but I got six of ’em.”

  Dupree came down the stairs and grabbed some mail from a table in the foyer. He flipped through the letters. They were addressed to John and Edith Landers. One was addressed to Landers’ Cove. Dupree stared at the letter, his mind scrambling to cover the distance between what should have been two unrelated points, but which seemed to have some fine connection, a filament that you would never even see until it began to burn.

  “What is it?”

  Dupree looked up at Teague, who had the same look of concern that was on his face when he first arrived at the house. “Nothing. I’m just…” He looked down at the letter in his hand. Landers’ Cove. “Did you bring your phone?”

  “In the car.”

  “I need you to call Chris Spivey at the task force. Tell him to get up here. Don’t fuck with the dispatcher either, just call him.”

  Teague looked excited. “Why, what is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Dupree said. “But tell him it’s urgent.”

  When he didn’t elaborate further, Teague trudged out to his car to make the phone call. Dupree set the mail back on the table and walked through the living room, one of those pristine living rooms in which no actual living appears to have taken place, filled with hard-backed furniture and no TV. It was surprising there was no red velvet rope across the doorway. Beyond that room was an oak door, left standing open, that he hadn’t noticed before. Dupree walked into the doorway of a small office, the walls covered with books and file cabinets, and in the center an oak desk that matched the door. This room had been turned upside down, and Dupree felt the same way he had when he’d come across the murdered hooker—that he should back away and wait for the evidence techs to tell him what he’d found. But the desk drew him in.

  On top of it was an architect’s model of Landers’ Cove and the faux ski mountain they were building. Dupree crouched so that his eyes were at the same level as the Styrofoam model. He looked down at the tiny reproduction of Sprague Avenue and reached out with his forefinger to touch a miniature snowmobile in the lot of Landers’ Mountain. The model covered the entire surface of the desk and represented a six-block section of the East Sprague neighborhood. Dupree couldn’t believe the businesses that were represented on this model. Where the hourly-rate motel now stood on the real Sprague Avenue, this model had an upscale grocery store. The new electronics store across the street from Landers’ Cove was flanked on either side by an Old Navy store and a restaurant whose sign read, “BIG RESTAURANT, tba.” According to the architect, the Happy Stork, Dupree’s favorite dive bar, was slated to become a parking garage.

  “Huh,” he said, and straightened up, rubbing the back of his head. He moved away from the model to consider the desk. The locks on the drawers had all been broken and files were strewn across the floor. Dupree bent over and began reading the files without touching them. There were deeds and legal papers and contracts and contractors’ estimates, and the idea that some of this might mean something filled Dupree with the unmistakable adrenaline of the job, the naive belief that the world could be known.

  He stepped back and made a mental note of which files appeared to have interested the burglar. Most were just tossed aside but a couple of folders were open on a short cabinet. In one folder, labeled “Security Expenses,” Dupree found a pile of receipts from Kevin Verloc’s All-Safe Security Company. Dupree pulled out the most recent receipts: two thousand dollars for new fencing in February; a four-thousand-dollar video surveillance system in March; and just last month a bill marked “Miscellaneous” in the amount of two hundred and forty dollars.

  The other open file contained a contract of some kind. Dupree pulled his gloves on and flipped the contract to its first page. The contract was between Landers’ Cove Inc. and the All-Safe Security Company. He flipped back to the page left open by the burglar.

  8. Neighborhood Improvement Bonus

  The agreed-upon fee schedule shall include quarterly bonus payments of $2,000 for each of the following ancillary results or circumstances due to the increase in security over the two-year period of the contract, upon meeting such requirements as described and recorded in Appendix A:

  (1) A 20% increase in per-square-foot property values in the 1300 block of East Sprague, those values to be determined by an independent property appraiser.

  (2) Elimination of prostitution and other criminal activity from Landers’ Cove and surrounding properties. (See definitions in Appendix A.)

  Dupree flipped to the back of the contract. Appendix A had further definitions and explanations of words like “property values” and “elimination.”

  “Jesus,” Teague said from the doorway. “I leave you alone for a minute and you go all Waco on the poor guy’s office.”

  Dupree set the contract back in the file marked “Security.” “Any luck?” he asked.

  “No. The task force office was empty so I called Spivey’s cell. They’re down at the river with a TV crew. I told him you thought this burglary might relate to their case and he said to tell you to go to hell.”

  “Guy really holds a grudge.”

  “I told him it was urgent. He said to lock the place up and get hold of the owners and he’d send someone over when they were done. Or else tomorrow morning.”

  “Got your phone?”

  Teague handed it over and Dupree hit redial. Spivey answered on the first ring.

  “This is Spivey.” There were voices in the background.

  “Hey, it’s Dupree. I really think—”

  “I heard. We’ll clear here in an hour and I’ll send someone.” And then the phone went dead. Dupree tried the number again and this time it went straight to Spivey’s voice mail. Fuck him. Dupree wasn’t going to do the guy’s job for him. He tossed the phone back to Teague, who caught it with two hands.

  “Told you,” Teague said.

  Tomorrow. He’d just be Alan Dupree, private citizen and eligible bachelor. It was funny. He’d dreamed so long of being an easygoing bachelor again, letting go of his twenty-five-year sulk, and the only person he could imagine being impressed by the new, old Dupree was Debbie, who had fallen in love with the easygoing bachelor. He wished she could see who he wanted to be, how carefree he planned to become, how the edges would be smooth again and his jokes would only be funny.

  “So,” Teague asked, “what do we do now?”

  “Now?” Dupree shrugged and looked back at the open files. “Now I go down to the office and file a report. You put some tape up aroun
d the house and then you sit here until someone comes by to dust it.”

  Teague nodded. “Okay. Then what?”

  “Then? Then we get a pizza.”

  Teague just stared at him.

  “Hey, Spivey says it isn’t urgent. I guess it isn’t urgent.”

  47

  “Please, get up,” Caroline said, looking down the long hall outside the task force office and the other detectives’ offices, hoping that no one was seeing this.

  From his knee, Joel looked up at her, pleading. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said, “that I love you?”

  “It doesn’t mean what you think it means,” Caroline said. “Does it strike you at all strange that you didn’t realize you loved me until after you slept with someone else?”

  “I told you, that was a mistake.”

  “You thought it was me?”

  On his knee before her, Joel bowed his head forward, as if he were waiting to be knighted. “I know. I was an asshole. But I’m willing to do whatever I can to keep you.”

  “Please. Get up.” After a moment, he stood. She took his hand. “You can’t keep me, Joel. You never had me. Both of us, we were just…there.”

  “How can you say that?” he said. “Is that all it meant to you?”

  “I don’t really know what it meant to me,” she said quietly. “But I know what it meant the night you went home with someone else.”

  He rubbed his jaw. “Caroline, this might sound idiotic, but before that night I didn’t touch another woman the whole time we were together.”

  “You know that doesn’t matter,” she said. “We were just holding a place for each other, like bookmarks. And the truth?” She looked over his shoulder and, thankfully, the long hallway was still empty. “I’ve been waiting for someone else, anyway.” Caroline felt as if she were confessing to herself.

  “I mean, it’s nice that you didn’t sleep with anyone while we were together,” she said. “But you’ve wanted to. And you should.”

  “No, I don’t want to—” he started.

  “Sure you do,” she interrupted. “I know you’re trying to be a good guy, Joel. But you’re really not. Not yet.”

  “What if I look back five years from now and realize what a big mistake I made letting you go?” he asked.

  She just smiled. “In five years, I’ll be seventy-six.”

  They were still holding hands, her left in his right. With the other hand, Caroline handed him the small engagement ring, nestled in its box.

  She heard footsteps over her shoulder. “Caroline! There you are!” She turned to see Dupree at the other end of the long hall; as he realized who she was talking to, his eyes went from Caroline to Joel and then back. Caroline dropped Joel’s hand.

  “Oh,” Dupree said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Alan,” she said over her shoulder. “Just give me a second.”

  “No, it can wait,” Dupree said. “I’ll…uh…I’ll call you later.” He stood for moment as if unsure which way to go, then turned and walked toward the front entrance of the cop shop.

  When she turned back Joel had pulled away and was slumped against the wall, staring at the engagement ring in his hand. “I suppose this is the part where you tell me I’m going to make some woman very happy someday.”

  She smiled. “Maybe when you can afford a bigger ring.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him away from the wall.

  “I think I did love you,” he said.

  She hugged him. “I hope so.”

  He squeezed tight in the middle of her back and she felt her eyes clench as she fought the familiar comfort of his arms.

  “You know,” he whispered in her ear, “maybe for old times’ sake, we could…”

  “That’s my old Joel,” she said and pulled away from him. She kissed him. “Take care.” As she walked down the hall, Caroline had to fight the urge to turn back, because she knew he would be leaning against the wall watching her, the white T-shirt stretched across the ridge of his chest, hands in the pockets of his faded jeans, looking as good as a guy could, perfect in his way, but in no way real or permanent—like a vacation in Mexico, like the test-drive of a car you can’t afford.

  The task force office was empty, all the detectives home for the night except Spivey and the profilers, who were on the south bank of the river with the Dateline crew. She checked her watch. Seven-thirty. She plopped down at her desk and hit the button for her voice mail. Four messages. The first was from Blanton, calling on his cell phone from the river. Caroline put the message on speakerphone as she looked through an old stack of interview cards.

  “Ms. Mabry,” Blanton said, “are you familiar with the megalithic statues of Easter Island? Their most striking feature, other than their size, is the fact that the statues have no eyes. Just two cruel, open sockets. It’s such a chilling sight—particularly on an island of cannibals—that the first European sailors to encounter the massive heads saw them as figures of great dread, the blind, implacable cruelty of the sea. The statues seem to be crying out that to seek to understand the sea—which, to the Oceanic people, was God—was the same as gouging out one’s own eyes. The entire mythology of the statues’ meaning and origin focused on that one fact: The Easter Island statues have no eyes.”

  The voice mail ran out and Blanton was forced to resume his story on the next message.

  “I’m telling you about the statues of Easter Island, Ms. Mabry, as I sit alongside your beautiful river, watching McDaniel explain the peculiar psychosis of your man Lenny Ryan to this walking mound of hair spray that the crew of this television program mockingly refers to as the talent. Mr. McDaniel has just informed the talent, as well as the people out there in TV land, that Lenny Ryan must have surely moved out of the area; otherwise, we would have heard from him by now. We would have found another body. Listening to Mr. McDaniel, who I have begun to think of as our talent, I’m disheartened. I’m also reminded that, as with the mysteries of Easter Island, sometimes the most obvious detail is the most obvious because it is wrong.”

  The voice mail cut Blanton off again and Caroline hit a button to hear him on the third message.

  “After a hard century in which the natives of Easter Island were all but wiped out by disease and oppression, a sailor finally asked a holy man why his people built the statues without eyes. There being no past tense in Polynesian dialects, the old islander answered yes, the statues have no eyes. Finally though, he understood and patiently explained that an earlier people had built the statues, and that many grandfathers past, his people arrived by dugout canoe and destroyed the statue people. Then, to the sailor’s astonishment, the old holy man reached into a basket and produced a beautifully polished, round piece of dark obsidian with a tiny white shell at its center, a stunning artifact, a single Easter Island eye. The old toothless man smiled. ‘We took the eyes,’ he said. The sailor remembered that these islanders were ritualistic cannibals and asked if they took the eyes as a final defeat of the earlier people of Easter Island.”

  Again, the voice mail cut Blanton off. Caroline listened to the fourth message.

  “The tribesman laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We took the eyes out because we were afraid you would steal them.’”

  Caroline sat at her desk, staring at Spivey’s timeline, which curled around half the office. Finally she smiled and tapped out Blanton’s number.

  When he picked up she asked, “Was that story true?”

  “No idea,” he said. “I get drunk and watch Nova and the next day I never know.”

  “How’s it going there?” she asked.

  “They put makeup on me. It’s like putting cologne on a hog. Please come down here and shoot me between the eyes.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Anyways,” he said, and she started a bit at his acquired Spokane colloquialism, “this would almost be bearable if you were here. I have no one to roll my eyes to when McDaniel speaks. The cameraman thinks I’m epileptic.”

  Carolin
e rubbed her brow. “Will you tell Spivey I’m on my way down there?”

  “If I can extricate him from the talent’s sculpted ass.” She could hear Blanton talking to someone and then he got back on the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Spivey got on the phone. “Caroline. Where have you been? You’re part of this investigation too.”

  “I got tied up,” she said. “But I’m about to come down there.”

  “Great,” he said. “One thing. Do you think you could swing by a grocery store and get some snacks? It looks like this could take a while still.”

  After a moment, Caroline heard herself say, “Sure.”

  “Some chips and something baked—maybe a Danish or two, if they’re fresh.”

  “If they’re fresh,” Caroline repeated. Then she hung up.

  The phone rang almost as soon as she’d turned it off. She slapped at the speaker button again and spoke with her head still in her hands. “You want bagels too?”

  “What?” Dupree asked from the other end of the phone.

  “Huh?” Caroline asked.

  “What did you say?”

  Caroline picked up the receiver. “Alan? Is that you?”

  “Yeah. Hey, Caroline.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  “What did you ask me?” he asked after a moment.

  Caroline stammered. “I guess…I asked if you wanted a bagel.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Not really.”

  She felt numb having Dupree on the other end of this phone call. It hadn’t been as easy as it should have been to tell Joel that she wouldn’t marry him. There was some kind of every-girl fantasy in marrying the best-looking guy you knew, a line of thinking that went something like this: He would look great in a tux. But for any temptation that his idiotic proposal might have presented, Caroline had known from the beginning exactly what she should tell Joel. She knew the right answer. But she felt incapable of speaking to Dupree right now, and if he asked her to be with him tonight she had no idea what her answer should be. For the first time, the only thing keeping them apart was them.