The Last Policeman (11 page)

I write it all down. Toussaint finishes his beer and tosses the empty into the pile in the fireplace. There are small gaps in the joinings of the house’s wooden sides, or there must be, because in the pauses in our conversation there’s a howling whistle, the wind whipping around out there, intensified as it tries to slide in through the cracks.

“Then he calls me up, man. Jack-blue sky. Says, let’s have lunch.”

I click my pen open and closed three times.

“Why?”

“Don’t know.”

“When?”

“Don’t know. July? No. It was right after I got shit-canned.
June. Says he’s been thinking about me, since all this bullcrap got started.”

He extends one forefinger and aims it out the window, up at the sky.
All this bullcrap
. My phone rings, and I glance down at it. Nico. I thumb it off.

“And so, what exactly did you and Mr. Zell do together, the two of you?”

“Same stuff, man.”

“You played Dungeons & Dragons?”

He looks at me, snorts, shifts in his chair. “Okay, man. Different stuff. We drank beers. We drove around. Did some shooting.”

I pause, the wind whipping. Toussaint lights another butt, guesses what I’m going to say next. “Three Winchester rifles, officer. In a cabinet. Unloaded. They’re mine and I can prove they’re mine.”

“Locked up tight, I hope.”

Gun theft is a problem. People are stealing them and hoarding them, and other people are stealing them to sell, for astronomical sums, to the first kind of people.

“Nobody’s going to take my fucking guns,” he says quickly, harshly, and levels a hard look at me, like I was considering it.

I move on. I ask Toussaint about Monday night, the last night of Peter Zell’s life, and he shrugs.

“Picked him up after work.”

“What time?

“I don’t know,” he says, and I can feel it, he’s liking me less and less, he’s ready for me to go, and maybe this man killed Peter and maybe he didn’t, but there is no avoiding the impression that he could pound me to death if he wanted to, just like that, three or four blows,
like a caveman destroying a deer. “After-work time.”

Toussaint says they cruised around for a bit, then went to see the new episode of
Distant Pale Glimmers
, the science-fiction serial, at the Red River. They had some beers, they watched the movie, and then they split up, Peter saying he wanted to walk home.

“Did you see anyone at the theater?”

“Just the people who work there and stuff.”

He sucks the last life out of his second cigarette, crushes out the butt in the state house. Houdini pads over unevenly, darting pink tongue finding the last bites of biscuit at the corners of his mouth, and rubs his thin head against the broad expanse of his master’s leg.

“I’m gonna have to shoot this dog,” Toussaint says, suddenly, absently, matter-of-fact, and stands up. “At the end, I mean.”

“What?”

“He’s a little scaredy cat, this one.” Toussaint is looking down at the dog, his head tilted, as if evaluating, trying to imagine how it’s going to feel. “Can’t think of him dying like that, fire or cold or drowning. Probably I’m gonna go ahead and shoot him.”

I’m ready to get out of here. I’m ready to go.

“Last thing, Mr. Toussaint. Did you happen to notice the bruising? Under Mr. Zell’s right eye?”

“He said he fell down some stairs.”

“Did you believe him?”

He chuckles, scratches the dog’s thin head. “If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t. I’d figure he whistled at the wrong dude’s girlfriend. But Pete, who knows? I bet he fell down some stairs.”

“Right,” I say, thinking,
I bet he didn’t
.

Toussaint cradles Houdini’s head in his hands, and they’re
gazing at each other, and I can see into the future to the terrible and agonized moment, the raised .270, the trusting animal, the blast, the end.

He looks away from his dog, back up at me, and the spell is broken.

“Anything else? Mr. Policeman?”

* * *

One of my father’s favorite jokes was when people asked him what he did for a living, he would say he was a philosopher king. He would make this claim with perfect seriousness, and the thing about Temple Palace was that he wouldn’t let go of it. Inevitably, he would get that blank look from whoever had asked—the barber, say, or someone at a cocktail party, or one of my friends’ parents, and there I am looking at the ground in rank embarrassment—and he’d just say, “What?” opening his palms, imploring, “What? I’m
serious
.”

What he really did was teach English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne, down at St. Anselm’s. At home he was always coming out with quotes and allusions, murmuring literary lessons from the side of his mouth, responding to the random events and mundane conversations of our household with dollops of abstract commentary.

The substance of most of these asides I have long since forgotten, but one stays with me.

I’d come home whimpering, tearful, because this kid Burt Phipps had shoved me off a swing. My mother, Peg, pretty and practical and efficient, wrapped three pieces of ice in a sandwich bag and held them to my injury, while my father leaned against the
green linoleum counter, wondering why this Burt character would do such a thing.

And I, sniffling, go, “Well, because he’s a jerk.”

“Ah, but no!” pronounces my father, holding his glasses up to the kitchen light, polishing them with a dinner napkin. “One thing we can learn from Shakespeare, Hen, is that every action has a motive.”

I’m looking at him, holding this drooping sandwich bag full of ice to my bruised forehead.

“Do you see it, son? Anybody does anything, I don’t care what it is, there’s a reason for it. No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life.”

“For heaven’s sake, dear,” says my mother, squatting before me, peering into my pupils to eliminate the possibility of concussion. “A bully is a bully.”

“Ah, yes,” Father says, pats me on the head, wanders out of the kitchen. “But, wherefore doth he
become
a bully?”

My mother rolls her eyes at him and kisses me on my wounded head, gets up. Nico’s in the corner, age five, building a multistory palace of Legos, lowering into place the carefully cantilevered roof.

Professor Temple Palace did not live to see the advent of our present unfortunate circumstance; neither, unfortunately, did my mother.

In a little more than six months, according to the most reliable scientific predictions, at least half the planet’s population will die in a series of interlocking cataclysms. A ten-megaton explosion, roughly equaling the blast force of a thousand Hiroshimas, will scorch a massive crater into the ground, touching off a series of Richter-defying earthquakes, sending towering tsunamis ricocheting across the oceans.

And then will come the ash cloud, the darkness, the twenty-degree dip in global temperatures. No crops, no cattle, no light. The slow cold fate of those who remain.

Answer this, in your blue books, Professor Palace: what effect does it have on motive, all this information,
all this unbearable immanence
?

Consider J. T. Toussaint, a laid-off quarryman with no previous criminal history.

No verifiable alibi for the time of death. He was at home, he says, reading.

Under normal circumstances, then, we would next turn our attention to the question of motive. We would wonder about those hours they spent together, that final evening: they went to
Distant Pale Glimmers
, they got loaded on movie-theater beer. They fought over a woman, perhaps, or some silly old half-remembered elementary-school insult, and tempers flared.

The first problem with such a hypothesis is that’s just not how Peter Zell got killed. A murder resulting from a long night of drinking, a murder about a woman or a pissing contest, is a murder committed with a bat, or a knife, or a .270 Winchester rifle. Here instead we have a man who is strangled, his body moved, a suicide scene deliberately and carefully constructed.

But the second and much larger problem is that the very idea of motive must be reexamined in the context of the looming catastrophe.

Because people are doing all sorts of things, for motives that can be difficult or impossible to divine clearly. In recent months the world has seen episodes of cannibalism, of ecstatic orgies; outpourings of charity and good works; attempted socialist revolutions and
attempted religious revolutions; mass psychoses including the second coming of Jesus; of the return of Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali, the Commander of the Faithful; of the constellation Orion with sword and belt, climbing down from the sky.

People are building rocket ships, people are building tree houses, people are taking multiple wives, people are shooting indiscriminately in public places, people are setting fire to themselves, people are studying to be doctors while doctors quit work and build huts in the desert and sit in them and pray.

None of these things, so far as I know, has happened in Concord. Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.

* * *

I’m at Albin Road just past Blevens when the car catches a patch of bad ice and heaves itself violently to the right, and I try to jerk it back to the left and nothing happens. The steering wheel spins uselessly under my hands, I’m rolling it this way and that, and I can hear the snow chains ricocheting against the rims with a series of vicious clangs.

“Come on, come on,” I say, but it’s like the wheel has lost communication with the steering column, spinning and spinning, and meanwhile the whole car is hurtling to the right, a giant hockey puck that someone whaled at, sliding furiously toward the ditch at the side of the road.

“Come on,” I say again, “come on,” my stomach lurching. I’m pumping the brake, nothing is happening, and now the back of the car is rolling up and pulling even with the front, the nose of the Impala nearly perpendicular to the roadway, and I feel the back wheels lift up while the front goes sailing forward, bounces over the ditch and into the wide sturdy trunk of an evergreen, and my head slams back against the headrest.

And then all is still. The silence sudden and complete. My breath. A winter bird sounding, way off somewhere. A small defeated hiss from the engine.

Slowly, I become aware of a clicking noise and it takes me a second to discover that the sound is my teeth, chattering. My hands are trembling, too, and my knees are clacking like marionette legs.

My collision with the tree shook loose a lot of snow, and some of it is still drifting down, a gentle powdery false storm, a dusting of accumulation on the cracked windshield.

I shift, breathe, pat myself down like I’m frisking a suspect, but I’m fine. I’m fine.

The front of the car is bent in, just one big dent, dead center, like a giant reeled back and kicked it once, hard.

My snow chains have come off. All four of them. They lay splayed out in crazy directions like fishermen’s nets, in jumbled heaps around the tires.

“Holy moly,” I say aloud.

I don’t think he killed him. Toussaint. I gather up the snow chains and lay them in the trunk in a loose pile.

I don’t think he’s the killer. I don’t think it’s right.

* * *

There are a total of five staircases at police headquarters but only two that go down to the basement. One is a set of rough concrete steps that descends from the garage, so when the units pull in with cuffed suspects in the backseat, they can be led right down to processing, to the part of the basement with the mug-shot camera and the fingerprint ink and the regular holding cell and the drunk tank. The drunk tank is always full these days. To access the other part of the basement you use the front northwest stairwell: you wave your ID badge at the keypad, wait for the door to click open, and go down to the cramped domain of Officer Frank Wilentz.

“Why, Detective Sky-high,” says Wilentz, and he throws me a friendly mock-salute. “You look a little pale.”

“I hit a tree. I’m fine.”

“How’s the tree?”

“Can you run a name for me?”

“Do you like my hat?”

“Wilentz, come on.”

The administrative technician of the CPD records unit works in a four-foot-square caged-off pen, a former evidence enclosure, at a desk littered with comic books and bags of candy. A row of hooks along the chain mesh of his cage is hung with major-league ball caps, one of which, a bright red souvenir Phillies cap, sits on Wilentz’s head at a rakish angle.

“Answer me, Palace.”

“I like your hat very much, Officer Wilentz.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“So, I need you to run a name for me.”

“I got one hat for every team in the league. D’ja know that?”

“I think you’ve mentioned it, yes.”

The problem is that at this point Wilentz has the only consistently functional high-speed Internet connection in the building; for all I know, it’s the only consistently functional high-speed Internet connection in the county. Something to do with the CPD being allowed one machine that connects with some kind of gold-plated Department of Justice law-enforcement router. It just means that if I want to connect to the FBI’s servers to perform a nationwide criminal-background check, I first need to admire Frank’s hat collection.

“I used to be collecting these bastards to give ’em to my children one day, but since now it seems clear that I shall not be having any children, I’m just enjoying ’em myself.” His deadpan gives way to a big, gap-toothed grin. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, myself. Did you need something?”

“Yep. I need you to run a name for me.”

“Oh, right, you said that.”

Wilentz types in the name and the address on Bow Bog, checks off boxes on a DOJ login screen, and I’m standing at his desk, watching while he types, tapping my own fingers thoughtfully on the side of his cage.

“Wilentz?”

“Yes?”

“Would you ever kill yourself?”

“No,” he says immediately, still typing, clicking on a link. “But I will confess that I have considered it. The Romans, you know, they thought it was, like, the bravest thing you could do. In the face of
tyranny. Cicero. Seneca. All those guys.” He slowly draws a finger across his neck, slash.