The True Detective (52 page)

Dulac’s jaw is tight and he is squinting some as he pulls around the corner before the police station. He waits for a car to pass “before turning in—he glimpses a young man standing on the sidewalk across the street; they are everywhere, he thinks—and makes his turn, thinking then of the packet of death photos in his shirt pocket. Polaroid shots, they include pictures of Eric Wells’s face, his sunken eyes, the bluish dehydrated pallor over his skin, the wound in his skull, the faint tie marks on his wrists and ankles, his ruptured rectum. He calls into effect his personal mechanism for controlling anger and outrage. For what he’d like to do is show the pictures to the press. Have them played on television. Here you have a dead child. Notice the faint bluish color of his skin. Notice how it blends into that yellowish tint. These are the colors of death. They are the colors we tolerate.

The white laundry truck. Where in the hell can you get to in a white laundry truck? It has to be spotted soon and either cleared or implicated. Could more than one person be involved? Was it
really
this Vernon asshole? Was he working alone? What if the reporters turn on him now? What if they charge him with being ineffective?

There is Shirley, intercepting him on his way to the squad room. She takes him aside. It’s the first time he’s seen her since he dropped her off early that morning; she is a little worn, not as pretty as she used to be. “Gil, several things are happening,”
she says, “The father, Warren Wells, called from New Orleans. Someone has been keeping him up on the news. He wants to come up here for the funeral and wants to know if charges will be brought against him.”

“Jesus, is it our jurisdiction?” Dulac says. “I don’t think it is. He should ask his ex-wife. Or talk to a lawyer. I think it might be up to Claire Wells. Did he give a number?”

“No, he wouldn’t do that. He’s going to call back. He sounds like a guy with a lot of problems. Money. Booze. Claire Wells called too, by the way, but I did not tell her about her former husband calling. She’s got some kind of problem, too. She won’t say what it is. The only person she will talk to is you. I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling there was no insurance on the little boy. And of course she doesn’t have any money at all. I think the world may be crashing on her.”

“Oh, God, okay,” Dulac is saying. “Call her back, will you? Tell her I’ll call her as soon as I can.”

“She’s distraught. She’s at her friend’s; she won’t even talk to her friend about whatever it is.”

“Well, tell her not to worry. Jesus. Tell her not to worry. Are the pictures here? Did the pictures come in?”

“Oh, yes. The pictures are here. It’s a high school graduation picture. In color. Of course, he doesn’t look like a murderer. And,” she adds, lowering her voice, “something else is here. The secret witness. He came in. He confirms the picture, by the way, but that’s not why he’s here. He said, this is what he said: He couldn’t stay away. That’s what he said. He’s a little upset, I think. What happened between you two? He came in, gave me his name, like he’s coming out of the closet or something.”

“He’s where?”

“In your cubicle. But staying secret doesn’t seem to be a big thing to him anymore. Or anything at all.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to him.”

Dulac goes along the hall. He doesn’t know what he is thinking. Nothing seems willing to hold in place long enough for him to learn from it when, without titles or seams, something else is playing on his mind’s screen. Claire Wells. The long-absent father. The white laundry truck. Shirley. Coming around the corner into his cubicle, he sees the secret witness, Martin, sitting in a chair. On a glimpse, Dulac had seen the reporters, photographers, TV camera people filling the squad room. “What’s the deal?” he says. “Is something wrong?”

“Lieutenant, please, listen—”

“You can’t stay away?” Dulac says.

“It’s the truth. I—”

“You’re going to get identified, you know?”

“I don’t care about that. It doesn’t matter. My God, I sell real estate. I know who your wife is.”

“You might care tomorrow.”

“So I’ll cry tomorrow. Sometimes you have to do things. I have to do this. I have to be here. I want to help, it’s more important to me—”

“Okay,” Dulac says, patting his pockets to be sure he has his lighter and cigarettes to take with him into the wolf’s den. “Okay. Anyone asks you anything, say you’re working for me. Tell them to see me.”

“Lieutenant, thank you. You have to know how much respect—”

“Okay, okay,” Dulac says, again holding up his stop sign, as Shirley appears in his doorway. “White truck’s been found and cleared,” she says. “Hampton Beach. It’s a delivery van, not a laundry truck; driver had legitimate business there.”

“Who checked it?”

“DeMarcus. He’s still checking it, but he says it checks out.”

“So it was the gray car,” Dulac says. “He’s driving his own car.”

“It looks that way,” Shirley says.

“I can’t understand why no one is coming in with that car. Could he be cagey enough to be using
another
gray car?”

“I’ve got the pictures,” Shirley says. “You want me to pass them out in there?”

“Yeah, good idea. Let me have one.” Dulac is on his way then, taking from Shirley, as she removes it from a manila envelope, one of the five-by-seven color photographs of the face of a graduating high school senior. Turning into the squad room, his presence creating a response followed almost immediately by the beginning of a hush, Dulac keeps looking down at the face in the picture, seeing something there, trying to see something there, trying to understand what it is he is seeing, as he makes his way along the side to the head of the room, still thinking as he looks back at them, as he starts climbing up on a table, what is it? What in the world is it? Is it really some kind of new pathology?

V
ERNON IS STANDING ON THE SIDEWALK
. H
E WALKS A FEW
steps, stands awkwardly again in the middle of the sidewalk. A woman pedestrian steps around him, goes on her way. For
something to do then, he walks to the corner. He pauses and looks around. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know if he wants to go or stay, or if he wishes to sing or cry or step into the street in front of a car. Whatever it is that is within him, he wants it not to go on. If it is a snake family within him in place of his intestines, he wants them to be still. If there is a small monkey there reaching to squeeze his heart, to make it shrill with tidal currents and messages like his testicles being squeezed, he wants it to stop. They refuse to do so. And they sing into his ears. He walks, and stands, and needs or seeks or desires resolution, or confrontation, or conclusion.

Pausing a moment at the corner, looking in all directions, he turns to walk back. It was that big detective he saw driving in, he thinks. He’s certain it was, and in another moment, he tells himself—he’s building up to it, be knows, and when it takes over in him, be will be doing it—he is going to walk across the street and enter through a door, following the arrow to the side as indicated, and ask if he can speak to the detective in charge of the Eric Wells case—the little boy they found earlier, in that parking lot, he will explain.

And who knows? After a talk with the big detective, after a full explanation and a promise never to do anything like that again, who knows how things might work out? He probably wouldn’t make his afternoon class, but he’d sleep tonight, at last, somewhere, and who knew what would happen tomorrow?

Yes, he’d explain everything to the detective, and he imagines the big detective smiling at him, warmly, understanding, as they sit on opposite sides of an official desk and he promises, he assures the man, who watches him closely with his eyes to be sure of his candor and conviction, that he will never, ever, not ever in his life do anything like that again. Never. He will dedicate the rest of his life to making a contribution—

T
HE TELEPHONE IS RINGING AS
M
ATT ENTERS THE OUTSIDE
door. It keeps ringing as he goes up the stairs and as he enters. No one is home, he realizes. His mother isn’t here—Eric isn’t here—as he steps into the kitchen and lifts the receiver from the hook, places it to his ear, and says, “Hullo?”

There is static on the line, and the hollowness of distance, into which a voice says, “Matt?”

He doesn’t say anything. He knows who it is and his heart is racing. His thoughts are jumbled at once with confusion.

“Is that you, Matt?” the voice says. “It sounds like you.”

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Who’s this?” His eyes are filling; he is trying yet again not to cry.

“It’s your father, Matt.”

Matt has the phone to his ear. He doesn’t say anything to this. He looks over the kitchen to the window, sees where they live. Even as he has waited all these years for such a call, a nervous wish is in him to have it over.

“Matt, I heard what happened to little Eric,” the voice says.

Matt still doesn’t know what to say.

“Matt, are you there?”

“Where are you?” Matt says.

“Well, I’m down here in New Orleans,” the man says. “Someone called me.”

“Who?” Matt says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“Just someone I know. An old friend. How are you holding up?”

“You’re where?” Matt says then. It is his father on the phone; still, he wishes the call would end.

“New Orleans,” the man says. “Matt, I’m so sorry about little Eric. I just can’t believe it.”

Matt holds the phone, having no response to this, as if it is beside the point.

“It just breaks my heart,” the man says.

Matt doesn’t respond.

“Matt, is your mother there?”

“She’s not here,” Matt says.

“She’s not there?”

“No, she’s not here. I guess she’s at Betty and John’s. I just came in.”

“Where were you, Matt?”

“Oh, nowhere. I was just out. They told me in school.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Matt, I remember your voice. It’s good—hearing your voice.”

“Oh,” Matt says.

“Can you—I want you to do something for me, Matt, if you can. I’m in pretty bad shape, Matt. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what I mean, Matt? I’m not in the best of shape. I’m trying to get things together so I can come up there. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Matt says, even as his answer seems more a question.

“Matt, do this. Ask your mother, will you, if she’ll have me charged if I come back up there. Arrested. I need to come back up there, Matt. Do you know what I mean? I want to go to the
funeral. But I won’t be able to if I get arrested. Would you tell your mother that—ask her that for me, Matt?”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know what else to say, Matt. I feel so bad. What kind of world do we live in?”

Matt holds the phone; he has no reply to this.

“Tell her, Matt, that I’ll call again in a while. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” Matt says.

“Okay. That’s what I’ll do. Then you can tell me.”

“Okay,” Matt says.

“Matt, I’d really like to see you,” his father says.

A moment later, the telephone hung up, Matt catches himself standing in the silent mid-afternoon kitchen as if uncertain again of what has happened, of why he is so filled with nervousness.

Should he go over to Betty’s or call her? he wonders. All at once, now that the call is over, he wishes they were talking again. He doesn’t know what he’d say, but he wishes it were so. His mother will go ape, he thinks, on another rush to his eyes. She will go absolutely ape, and all at once he can’t wait to tell her. New Orleans, he thinks. New Orleans, Louisiana.

S
TANDING YET ON THE TABLE IN THE SQUAD ROOM
, D
ULAC
is answering questions about the suspect and the photographs
of the suspect which Shirley has passed out. In casual groups, people stare at the face in the photograph and look up and listen to Dulac’s account of things. They want more photographs; Dulac, promising more for later in the day, has looked to Shirley and received her nod. He hasn’t said anything of the death photos in his shirt pocket and wonders again if he should, if he should pass some of them around to validate what he has said about the condition of the body, to let them see as well the innocent size and shape of a twelve-year-old boy lying lifeless on a stainless steel table. He decides no, of course not. They were perceptions for him to absorb, for him to carry; how could he think such a thing?

He says instead, “Are there any questions? I have other things to do.”

So many hands and voices come up that he lifts his hand once more and says, “I can take only a few.”

“Who are the witnesses? We’re told you have eyewitnesses. Who are they? When can we talk to them?”

“Who discovered the body, Lieutenant?”

“One at a time,” Dulac says. “As for the witnesses, their identities will not be disclosed at this time, for obvious reasons.”

“What obvious reasons?”

“So they won’t be harassed by you,” Dulac says. “So they won’t be compromised if and when we go to trial.”

“Do you think their lives would be in danger?”

“No, I don’t,” Dulac says. “Still, we do have a murderer. An alleged murderer. Who is at large. So we aren’t going to identify witnesses at this time. That’s not a very smart question. I have—”

“Who discovered the body, Lieutenant?”

“I said, before, it was a man who had business there. He has been cleared.”

“Was he a suspect?”

“No, he was not a suspect. We have a suspect. Nonetheless he was checked out.”

“What about the time of death, Lieutenant? How was that determined?”

“It was determined by the pathologist, whose name I gave you five minutes ago.”

“How was it—”

“You can ask him the question. I’m not a pathologist.”

“Twelve to twenty-four hours, Lieutenant—is that as close as it can be called?”