Somebodys fool, p.13
Somebody's Fool, page 13
“And then you say you’re sorry.”
“I’m not sorry?”
She was smiling at him now. “No, you’re definitely sorry,” she told him. “I just thought maybe he could help us think all this through.”
“There’s something to think through?”
Because the man, whoever he was, had clearly taken his own life. The only question was why, and they were unlikely to determine that until after they learned his identity, which they would, eventually. Raymer had noticed a rectangular outline in the dead man’s back pocket. He’d figured it was probably a wallet, but instead it was a cell phone, an early model BlackBerry, the kind where the QWERTY keyboard took up half the device. The battery was dead, of course, but as soon as the phone could be recharged, they’d probably know who they’d just spent the afternoon with. Strange, though, that the man’s other pockets had all been empty. No wallet. No keys. Had he wanted to remain unknown to those who discovered him? Had he been embarrassed that it had come to this? When Virgil remarked that some people just couldn’t handle the holidays, he’d been joking, but what if it was true? What if the man had killed himself at the Sans Souci to spare a wife or child from coming home to a spectacle? A picture would emerge, eventually. When the phone got recharged, it would probably be full of heartbreaking voice messages and emails. Dad, where are you? How come you aren’t picking up? Or maybe threats from his credit card company. Your account is three months past due. Call us at your earliest convenience to avoid having your account turned over to a collection agency.
“I need to coax him back into the world,” Charice was saying, still on the subject of her brother. “Get him outside his own head.”
“Actually?” Raymer said. “I was kind of looking forward to a couple hours with just the two of us.”
“Well,” she said, rising from the table, “you’ll probably get your wish. He said he’d think about it, but these days that’s Jerome for no. Anyway, I need to hit the ladies’. Order us some wings?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t eat them all.”
“How long are you going to be gone?”
“I might be a while. I been holding it since I arrived at the Sans Souci.”
In other words she had to call the station, get brought up to speed on what had transpired in her absence. When Birdie returned with his pitcher of beer and Charice’s Coke and set them down in the center of the table, she wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?” she said.
There were times when Raymer wished his old nemesis Dougie were still around. Dougie would’ve told her, Eau de cadaver.
* * *
WHILE CHARICE WAS in the ladies’, Raymer scrolled through the pictures he’d taken with his phone back at the Sans Souci. The investigation’s official photos were taken by a police photographer, but lately Raymer had gotten into the habit of snapping a few of his own. He’d come to think of them as context photos, an attempt to capture a more macro experience. He found that the more pictures he took, the less he had to rely on written notes. Later, after the investigation concluded, he would delete most of the photos, though he always kept one or two. What had struck him most forcefully today, what he didn’t want to forget, was how surreal it had all felt, like something out of a mostly forgotten dream. Bert Franklin, the city manager, had arranged with the utility company for the electricity to be turned on throughout the building, but for some reason that hadn’t happened. The power was on in the lobby, but only a few lamps were lit, leaving much of the space in semidarkness. The room had been full of draped furniture, as were several other rooms they’d passed through. The cavernous ballroom, however, was lit only from the outside, pale, wintry light streaming in from the dirty second- and third-story windows. It had put Raymer in mind of a cathedral from which the altar and pews had been removed, leaving an architectural husk that was simultaneously sanctified and unholy. Unlike the other rooms they’d come through, this one was completely empty. Had the furniture and accessories all been sold off? Or had its contents for some reason been removed and stored elsewhere? Whatever the explanation, the resulting emptiness made the man hanging from the second-floor balcony appear that much more lonely, as if he’d been left behind by whoever had removed everything of value. A rickety card table had been set up near the entry, on top of which sat a Phillips-head screwdriver and a half-used roll of packing tape. The walls were pockmarked where the lighting fixtures had been removed, the dusty floor bare except for a small pile of broken-down cardboard boxes, a broom with a broken handle, a plastic dustpan and, inexplicably, a telephone handset minus its cord.
The most disturbing of today’s photos was the one he’d taken from the balcony. What had possessed Raymer to go up there in the first place? Had he been trying to stay out of Charice’s way? Letting her do her job? Whatever. As he peered over the railing, it had taken him a moment to grasp what he was looking at. From above, the hanged man seemed to be wearing a rust-colored skullcap. How, Raymer wondered, had it managed to stay on the top of his head when he leaped? Except it wasn’t a skullcap. Something—a rodent?—had scrabbled down the rope and chewed its hungry way into the man’s skull.
Sitting comfortably in a warm booth and drinking cold beer, Raymer wondered if maybe the time had come to walk away from such grizzly details. At what point did their cumulative effect become trauma and do permanent injury to the psyche? Was there such a thing as violence porn, and was this photo an example? If so, maybe he should take that desk job in Albany. Preserve what was left of his sanity. If his old friend Dougie were still around, he would no doubt advise Raymer to man up, to quit being such a wimp. Compared with big-city cops, who witnessed human depravity and unspeakable violence on an almost daily basis, his own life in North Bath law enforcement had been relatively benign. He’d glimpsed true evil on one or two occasions, most recently in the form of a grinning, sleepy-eyed young man who’d trafficked in poisonous reptiles, an encounter that had nearly cost Raymer his life. But mostly the job had required him to bear witness to a seemingly endless parade of baroque, small-town folly—barroom brawls with cue sticks for weapons and dim-witted erotic experiments that ended in visits to the emergency room, but not the morgue. All things considered, he’d been pretty fortunate.
On the other hand, not many big-city cops had been struck by lightning in a cemetery and, as a result, woken up with a chatty malignant sprite in their heads, one who, for all Raymer knew, might still be in his head somewhere, waiting for Raymer to scuff across a thick carpet in his socks and touch the refrigerator door’s metal handle, thereby completing the circuit of static electricity required for his reappearance—Zzzzzzt! Here’s Dougie! Maybe the best way to prevent that eventuality was to find a new line of work, leave policing to those who were temperamentally cut out for it, who could look at a photo like this one and not be haunted. Why not put this part of his life behind him before it was too late? Unless, of course, it already was. Was this what Charice was having such a hard time conveying to him—that he was already a borderline wacko? He didn’t think he was, at least not yet, but if your head was messed up, you yourself wouldn’t necessarily be the best judge, right? Your brain was what you used to identify and fix things that were broken. If it was broken, weren’t you fresh out of tools?
When he looked up from his screen and saw Charice returning, he quickly switched off the phone so she wouldn’t see the grizzly photo he couldn’t quit staring at.
“I didn’t say you had to wait,” Charice said, indicating the steaming plate of wings that had magically appeared in the center of the table while his mind was back at the Sans Souci. “I just wanted you to save me some.”
Five minutes earlier he’d been hungry, but when he saw that the sauce the wings were slathered in was the exact same rust color as the dead man’s skullcap, Raymer’s stomach lurched. “You may have to eat them all,” he told her.
If she heard this, she gave no sign. “Jerome will not be joining us,” she said, and the violence with which she stabbed the wings on the big plate onto her own smaller one suggested that she might be imagining stabbing her brother. Good, Raymer thought. Excellent, in fact. If she was mad at Jerome, then she wasn’t mad at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, an outright lie.
“Probably just as well,” she said. “Have you ever watched Jerome eat a chicken wing?”
“I haven’t, no.”
“He uses a knife and fork.”
Seeing this in his mind’s eye, Raymer couldn’t help smiling.
“It’s not funny,” she insisted, still fuming.
“No,” Raymer agreed. It was hilarious. Also pathetic. And very, very Jerome.
“I’ve never been as angry with him as I am right now,” she said, which buoyed Raymer’s spirits even further. “I actually hung up on him.”
“I’m sorry,” Raymer repeated giddily.
If she was really listening to him, she gave no sign. “Promise not to repeat this?” she said, pointing a half-gnawed wing at him. “Awful as that was at the Sans Souci? It was a relief to have something besides him to think about.”
“He’s really that bad?” Tell me all about it.
“He barely leaves his room. Remember his meltdown after Becka died?”
As if he would ever forget. Drunk on a toxic cocktail of grief and guilt, Jerome had become convinced that Raymer had known all along about his affair with Becka, that he was only pretending innocence. At one point he’d become so untethered from reality that he actually believed Raymer was sneaking into his condo when he was away so that he could torment Jerome by subtly moving his things—the TV remote on the coffee table, his shampoo in the shower, the creamer in the fridge. That Raymer would exact this sort of revenge actually made sense to him. Still, if Jerome had been losing his mind, he’d had company. Raymer, too, had been drinking liberally from the same goblet of guilt and remorse. In Dr. Qadry’s professional opinion, it had been the anguish over Becka’s loss, not the lightning strike, that had caused asshole Dougie to take up residence in his head and wreak havoc there. And when a scratch on Raymer’s palm became infected, the resulting fever had caused him to hallucinate so vividly that he feared he, too, might be cracking up. He and Jerome had both ended up in the same hospital, where, until the antibiotics Raymer was given finally kicked in, it was impossible, according to Charice, to tell which of them was more bonkers.
It was clear which of them she’d been more concerned about, however, and this had caused Dougie to do a celebratory victory lap around the inside of Raymer’s skull. What have I been telling you? he crowed. Who did you think she’d choose? You?
“Jerome is her brother,” Raymer had foolishly attempted to explain. “Her twin. It’s natural.”
Natural? Dougie hooted. There’s nothing natural about those two. You should come right out and ask her sometime. See what she says.
Raymer knew better than to follow up on this oblique reference, but he couldn’t help himself. “Ask her what?”
Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, Dougie had replied with a nasty chuckle.
“Ask her what?” he insisted, though God help him he did suspect what Dougie was about to say.
If she and her brother ever did the nasty.
Thank God, Raymer thought now, he’d had the good sense not to share Dougie’s revolting suspicion with Dr. Qadry, because that would’ve been one more thing she’d have recommended that he own. (Though apparently he’d done exactly that, because here he was remembering it.)
“I don’t know how much longer I can be there for him,” Charice was saying, “and also deal with everything at work.”
“Everything, as in…what, exactly?” He was hoping to sound innocent, merely curious, but he saw immediately that this was not how his question landed.
“Okay,” she said, her eyes narrowing at him. “Give. What’ve you heard?”
“Nothing,” he said, not wanting to throw Miller under the bus.
“Bullshit.”
“Charice,” he said. “You know how busy I’ve been closing up the station. And I promised when you took the Schuyler job, I’d keep my nose out of your business there, remember?”
“Which you have,” she admitted, and it pleased him that she sounded at least a bit contrite. “But people gossip.”
“About what? You might as well tell me. I can’t help you if you don’t.”
“Doug,” she said. “Trust me. You can’t help me if I do.”
“Sounds like maybe it’s you who doesn’t trust me.” She wanted to. He could see that much, but something was holding her back. “Look,” he said, “you know I’ll be on your side, right?”
“That,” she said, “is exactly what worries me.”
“Whose side should I be on?”
“Oh, you should definitely be on mine. But being on my side means knowing you can’t fix this problem. That’s up to me. You need to believe that when they hired me, they hired the right person.”
“I told them you were the right person at the time,” he assured her.
“Wait,” she said, her eyes narrowing at him again. “Told who? When?”
“Charice. You thought they’d hire you without asking your former boss what kind of employee you’d been?”
“I knew it,” she said. “They offered you the job first, didn’t they.”
No. Well, sort of. Not exactly. They’d called to see if he was interested and been disappointed when he wasn’t. “Charice,” he said, determined to finesse the matter. “Why would they be interested in an old white guy limping toward retirement?”
“You’re not old.”
“I’m fifty-two.”
“Fifty-two is only old when it’s you.”
“Thanks, but my point is it’s you they were interested in. They liked your administrative experience, the way you made things purr along in North Bath. Hell, you even made me look good.” He waited for her to crack a smile at this, but she didn’t. He continued, “They also liked the fact that none of your fellow officers had a bad word to say about you, despite your being, as Miller would say, an African American–type individual.”
This didn’t get a smile, either. “Uh-huh. Everybody agreed I was heaven-sent. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No,” he admitted, because of course she was right. There had been reservations expressed. However, with Charice in such a stew, he had to be careful how he related these. “They wished you had a bit more street experience, but I assured them that you were my best officer, by no small margin.”
“Go on. What else?”
“They worried you might be stepping too far up in class.” Okay, that hadn’t come out right. “From a small-town department to one that was more…metropolitan.”
“Metropolitan.”
Raymer realized he was beginning to sweat. “Bigger,” he explained. “More moving parts, was how they put it. Serving a population that was more…homogenous.”
“Right,” she said. “Code for African American–type individuals.”
Raymer sighed. “Okay, say you’re right—”
“Oh, I am right,” she assured him.
And she was. Of course, she was. He’d known at the time that the job wouldn’t be easy. Schuyler’s Black residents, quite a few of them recent immigrants, here on seasonal visas, were concentrated in the city’s cramped North Side, and the last several summers there’d been demonstrations over wages and rents. The neighborhood might be predominantly Black, but its landlords and employers were predominantly white. The protests were mostly peaceful, but they’d become increasingly heated. The summer before Charice was hired there’d been a confrontation between police and protesters who had neglected to get a parade permit. In order to disperse the crowd, pepper spray had been used, and several marchers had required medical attention. It being August and racing season, an Albany TV crew had been nearby and caught the whole thing on film, bringing into sharp focus the increasing hostility between North Siders and the city’s mostly white law enforcement. Had Raymer been wrong to encourage her to take such a job? Wrong to recommend her for it?
Rule Number One: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Raymer found he couldn’t. “Look,” he continued. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. But things actually worked to your advantage, right? Sure, they wanted somebody the Black community would trust, but it wasn’t only that. They were looking for somebody who could talk to all sorts of different people—rich and poor, college professors and hotel maids, locals and summer people. I told them that was you in a nutshell. I said we hired you and you had everybody wrapped around your little finger in no time, including me.”
“You said that?”
“No,” he admitted, “but it’s true. You did. Still do, in fact.”
At this, Charice closed her eyes, as if at the advance of a migraine. “I hate it when you do this.”
“Do what?”
“Say things like that. It’s not fair.”
“What’s not?”
“We’re in the middle of an argument—”
“A discussion.”
“A heated discussion. A discussion you can’t win without cheating—”
“How am I cheating?”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “By telling me you love me.”
He lowered his, as well. “I do love you.”
“I know that,” she said, her voice returning to its normal register, “but it’s irrelevant.”
Raymer rubbed his temples. “Charice. You want me to beg? Okay, I’ll beg. Please tell me what’s going on.”
She paused, considering, then finally said, “Put it this way. You were saying before how nobody had a bad word to say about me down at the station? That’s no longer true.”
“Go on,” Raymer said, again recalling what Miller had told him this morning and feeling his blood begin to boil.
