Somebody's Fool, page 29
Taking out his phone, Delgado flipped it open and commenced tapping, then put it to his ear. “Bobby,” he said a moment later, his voice louder now. “It’s me. I need a favor.” A brief pause, then, “That’s great. I appreciate it. Don’t you want to know what the favor is?” Glancing over at Miller, he covered the phone with his hand. “He doesn’t give a shit. Says just tell him what it is.” Then he went back to the phone. “Nah, it’s just that I’m writing up this arrest report. Yeah, the parking lot one. What I just remembered is, you were there, right? I ask because Miller and I are remembering things a little differently. We might need a third memory, and you got a good one.” He glanced at Miller again, gave him a grinning thumbs-up. “Yeah, I’ll do that. Later, then. First round’s on me.”
Flipping the phone shut, he set it on top of the report. “Jeez,” he said, studying Miller again. “All of a sudden you look kind of bummed. Reality bites, does it not? But you know what? The good news is you’ll get over it. Quicker than you think, because actually it’s like Santa Claus. The only reason kids believe in Santa is because their parents say it’s true, and they wouldn’t lie to you, right? Until one day you ask the question, and guess what? They admit it. They fuckin’ lied. But about two seconds after that, you think, Hey, this isn’t so terrible. No Santa Claus? You can live with that. It’s not like you have to give back all the toys. You get to keep those, so really, who gives a shit where they came from? Also, you get to feel smart, because now at least you know the score. An hour later, tops, you’re completely over it. Santa Claus, you think. What a fucking joke.”
“Chief Bond—” Miller began again.
Delgado threw up his hands in mock surrender. “No, you’re right,” he admitted. “You’re right. This whole deal could go down like you’re hoping. Maybe Char-Easy will side with you. It’s possible, because that twat’s no more a real cop than you are. But whether she believes you or she believes me and Bobby doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t matter. You think she’s your boss, but guess what? She’s only your boss as long as she’s your boss, and here’s the problem. She’s got a boss, too, and her boss—the mayor? I have it on excellent authority that his patience is wearing pretty fucking thin. Trust me, he’s thinking to himself, What the ever-loving fuck was I thinking when I gave that job to a mulignan? The timing’s tricky, I admit. It’s possible she lasts long enough to shit-can me, or maybe me and Bobby both. But you know what happens next? We just get hired in some other department, and our rank and pension follow us there. Know why? Because we’re real cops and there aren’t enough of us to go around. We’re like priests, except we don’t diddle altar boys. For us, it’s not a job, is what I’m saying. It’s a calling. You either hear the call, or you don’t. And speaking of hearing the call? You want proof of just how pathetic you are?”
Miller didn’t. It was the one thing he didn’t require proof of.
“You actually believed it, didn’t you?” the lieutenant chuckled.
Miller knew better than to ask, but he couldn’t help himself. “Believed what?”
“That phone call I made just now? Nothing about that seemed weird to you?”
Miller thought back on it, and yes, now that the lieutenant mentioned it, something had been odd about it. “Your partner,” Miller said. “He picked up right away.”
“Go on,” Delgado encouraged him. “And?”
“He was waiting for the call. The two of you planned the whole conversation in advance.”
Delgado continued to study him expectantly, like you would a toaster when the bread’s about to pop up any second. “Jesus,” he said finally when the bread stayed in the toaster. “I don’t even know what to say, except that if anybody ever needed to belong to a fucking tribe it’s you. No, Miller, you shit-for-brains, we didn’t plan the phone call in advance. There was no call.”
Miller blinked, opened his mouth to say that of course there was. He’d sat right there and listened to it.
Lieutenant Delgado picked up the phone again, flipped it open and started tapping, but this time each tap was followed by a tiny, barely audible beep. After the seventh beep came the distant ring of the call going through. A moment later a tinny female voice said, “Hattie’s.”
“Hey,” said the lieutenant, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Miller. “It’s me. I’m demonstrating what a real phone call sounds like to the dumbest cop I ever met. You wanna do something later?”
“How about I call you after I close up?”
He winked at Miller now. “I may have another date by then.”
“Who else would go out with you?”
A shadow crossed his features. “Be careful that mouth of yours isn’t the death of you,” he said, flipping the phone shut again. “Another one who thinks she doesn’t need a tribe,” he remarked before turning his attention back to Miller. “I was wrong about Santa Claus, wasn’t I,” he said, again tapping the signature line of the report. “You were one of those kids who didn’t want to know the score. You cried your little eyes out, didn’t you.”
* * *
LATER, after the lieutenant left, Miller wouldn’t be able to say exactly how long he remained in the cafeteria, staring at the Formica tabletop and listening to the sound of distant sirens. What he couldn’t get over was how cannily the other man had read his innermost secrets. He’d not only peered deeply into Miller’s soul but held up what he found there for Miller’s inspection, forcing him to recognize the ridiculous reflection in the mirror as himself. He’d even intuited his long crush on Chief Bond, the one that even marriage hadn’t cured him of, as Miller had hoped it might. How silly he’d sounded invoking her name over and over. How shameful that he hadn’t defended her when the lieutenant had referred to her as “Char-Easy.” No wonder his imagination failed him whenever he attempted to dream up a scenario where a woman like her would look twice at a man like him. For that to happen, he would have to be a different man altogether, and this, he realized bitterly, was the reason he’d wanted to become a police officer to begin with, in the hopes of becoming that other man. Yesterday, in the ballroom of the Sans Souci, staring up at the decomposing corpse, he’d asked himself what would bring a man to do such a terrible thing to himself. Despite being tormented by self-doubt his entire life, Miller still couldn’t imagine any event ever bringing him to such a place. What he understood now, sitting alone in the cafeteria, listening to those distant sirens, was that it wasn’t doubt that leads a man to give up on life and tie a rope around his neck. It was certainty.
Businesses and Hobbies
IT WAS STILL SNOWING when Janey finally shooed the last of her Sunday breakfast crowd out the door and closed up the restaurant. By then the plow had been by and according to the radio the storm was supposed to taper off later that afternoon, which meant she could do something or go somewhere, if only she could think of what to do or where to go. She’d told Del she would call him after she closed up, but he’d been kind of a dick on the phone, warning her that her big mouth might just be the death of her, which she didn’t want to hear because, well, it was true, but also because coming from him it also sounded vaguely threatening. Though he’d never raised his hand to her, she couldn’t entirely banish from her mind the possibility that he might. Her mother was right. What she needed in her life was a different sort of man altogether, someone more like…but no. No, no, no. She was emphatically not looking for a man like Sully.
And yet. What if the terrible thing she’d said to her mother last night—that she was jealous because Janey was still young and had a man in her life, while Ruth was old and alone—was not just cruel but due south of the truth? What if she, Janey, was the jealous one? Jealous because by the time she was Janey’s age Ruth had already been in a decade-long relationship with a man who might at times have been his own worst enemy but didn’t have it in him to be hers. Growing up, Janey had done her level best to hate the man for wrecking her parents’ marriage and making them into a family that other people gossiped about, but she had to admit that Sully had been better for her mother than any of the men in Janey’s life had been for her, including the present one.
What particularly troubled her about Del was that she didn’t like waking up next to him, as she’d done this morning. Her entire life she’d enjoyed waking up with a man in her bed, even if it was one she didn’t particularly like, even if it was Roy Purdy, the worst of the lot. Asleep, Roy looked downright innocent, as if whatever possessed him when he was awake vacated his body when he slept. In the first few drowsy moments of wakefulness, he could be gentle, even playful, causing Janey to wonder if maybe the demon that made him ball up his fist could be exorcised. Fat chance. Before long, she’d either do or say the wrong thing, or Roy would recall something she did or said yesterday or last week, and then his fist would ball up and she’d feel like a fool for imagining it would ever be different, because, basically, Roy was a balled-up fist.
Not Del. At least not yet. Awake, he was usually relaxed and in control, even easygoing. Nor was he jealous, like Roy. Asleep, though, his features would clench into something like a grimace, and he ground his teeth audibly, which made Janey wonder if he might be beating her in his dreams. Which was ridiculous, really. He was probably dreaming of something else entirely, some situation he couldn’t control, like arriving at the scene of an armed robbery, only to discover that his holster was empty. His teeth grinding probably had nothing to do with women. And even if he was dreaming of beating up a woman, it was probably one of his ex-wives, or Charice Bond, who was making his life miserable. Still, Del’s first few moments of wakefulness, like Roy’s, were clearly transitional. You could see him regaining control over whatever had caused his facial muscles to clench. Rolling over and seeing her in bed with him, he’d smile, or try to. It was disconcerting, though, how that smile arrived in stages. To Janey, it looked like he was putting on a mask, which in turn made her wonder if he might one day take it off.
The other thing she found puzzling was why, after a night out with Del and his cop friends, she so often woke up feeling ashamed. Because, really, why should she? All she’d done was kick up her heels and have a few laughs. Okay, she’d probably drunk too much, but so what? She was entitled to a little fun, wasn’t she? Hard as she worked the rest of the week? Why, then, when she recollected the previous night’s high spirits and raucous laughter, did she struggle to remember what had been so funny? Part of it was that while Del liked to have fun, that fun always seemed to come at somebody else’s expense, like the guy from the drunk tank in the lie detector story. Del had dozens of yarns like that one—war stories, he called them—every cop had them. How could you not, in that line of work? He seemed not just to enjoy the stories for their own sake but also for his ability to get his listeners to see the world his way, which they invariably did. Still, did she even like these people? There were certain things about them that she admired, in particular their confidence. No matter how bizarre the circumstance, they always seemed to know what to do. Del especially.
Take last night. After leaving the Hand with the drunk who’d fallen off his barstool in the trunk of Del’s car, they’d driven straight to the police station, where Del had hauled the guy out, sat him up against the rear bumper and kicked his boot in the hopes of waking him up. Unfortunately, the guy was out cold, his shirt glistening with vomit. “Okay, wait here,” Del instructed, handing her a tire iron. “If he wakes up and causes trouble, hit him with it. I’ll be right back.”
Janey assumed he’d gone in search of someone to help, but instead he returned wheeling a platform trolley, the sort used in self-storage facilities. “Here,” he said, handing Janey a long bungee cord. Then, hoisting the comatose man onto the trolley, Del had folded him into a sitting position so that his forehead was resting against his upraised knees. Running the bungee cord under the man’s knees and armpits, he then attached the hooked ends between the guy’s shoulder blades and gave the cord a good loud snap to make sure it was secure.
Okay, it was kind of a comical sight—Del wheeling the guy into the police station, his knuckles dragging along the pavement. But was it really all that funny? Was any of it funny? Maybe not, but that’s what it was destined to become. Like that long-ago night in Philly when the old Black man failed the lie detector test, last night’s festivities at the Hand would live on in story form: how that bumpkin from West Virginia had leaned back on his barstool and just kept going; how, when he landed, everyone had ducked for cover, thinking they’d heard a gunshot; how they’d agreed not to call an ambulance but instead to just toss the guy into the trunk of Del’s car and drop him off at the police station; how she and Del had been warned not to forget the asshole was in there, lest they open the trunk in the morning and discover him frozen to death. No doubt about it, last night at the Hand was destined to become another of Del’s war stories, their point always the same—that in addition to constant danger and endless sacrifice, a cop’s life was also a never-ending parade of fools who were seemingly put on earth for the sole purpose of entertaining them. It wasn’t their job to worry about whether tonight’s lunatic might be concussed after falling off his barstool or that he might choke to death on his vomit while locked in an airless trunk, any more than it was their job to imagine the humiliation of the man who’d failed the lie detector test, because, well, how would that be funny?
What also occurred to Janey through the haze of her still-not-completely-vanquished hangover, was that despite the fact that Del and his cop friends were never troubled by self-doubt, maybe they weren’t as clever and competent as both she and they imagined. Didn’t she, in fact, recognize them from eighth grade? Hadn’t their junior-high-school iterations been placed in the same vocational classes she’d been relegated to, their relentless B-minus/C-plus grades evidence that they were not college material? Law enforcement suited them because it provided a perch from which to look down on those even less fortunate and tell stories at their expense in bars like the Green Hand, where the booze was cheap and the music loud.
Did Janey belong with these people? If not, then where on earth did she belong?
* * *
NOT AT GRANDPA ZACK’S TREASURES, that was for sure, though that was where she was headed. What made the idea of going there palatable, Janey suspected, was the likelihood that the trip would be in vain. If the long, steep driveway wasn’t plowed, there was no way her Jetta would make the climb. But so much the better if this should be the case, because then she could give herself credit for trying to do the right thing—to look in on her daughter and make sure she was okay—without actually having to do it. Who knew if Tina would even be there? Janey could’ve phoned ahead to find out, of course, but then she would’ve known and she preferred the satisfaction of driving all the way out there for nothing. “What do you mean she’s not home?” she would demand of her mother, propelled by a full, righteous head of steam. “We’re in the middle of a fucking blizzard.”
