Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 8

When his wife threw him out after he’d shot the second black guy, Ray Tate had poked at the rental section of the newspaper, then went to the nearest police station and leaned on the duty sergeant’s table. The duty sergeant, an old Irish squarehead with rockers on his stripes, knew everything about his kingdom: the smokehouses, the homes with domestic violence, what was a rental and what was owned. He knew every neighbour dispute, every squat, every house infested with mental patients who only came out after dark, shy of the light, fearful of eyes.

The duty sergeant shook Tate’s hand across the table. “Fuck ’em, Ray. You go forth and smite thine enemies and, well, fuck what they’re trying to do to you.” He took the slip with the apartment building’s address, turned to a civilian operator, and said with polite command, “Run it.” To Ray Tate he said: “I know it. Old man Lilly’s place. It’s okay. Parking kinda sucks. Where they got you working? You got a company car?”

Ray Tate had told the squarehead he was relaxing on paid leave until they sorted out the latest shooting. No gun, no badge, no car.

“No problem, then.” The CO handed the duty a printout. “Okay. We got a domestic, we got a domestic, we got a B&E, we got another domestic, another B&E, noise, noise, noise. A suicide by blade. What the fuck?” He read through the page. “Oh, hang on. Okay. You’re going into three-o-five, right? That’s the domestics and the noise complaints, and the suicide. That’s why it went vacant, the guy killed himself. Cutting. A mess.” He’d dropped the sheet on the desk. “Make sure old man Lilly gives you a new carpet.”

The apartment was one big room with a partial partitioned-off kitchenette with a fragrant gas stove, a half-fridge, and a table that snapped down off the wall, landing on a folding leg. The bathroom was compact but had a tub. Ray Tate had spent many after-shifts sitting on the edge of a bathtub, soaking his feet in salts and soaps after walking his many posts. Calluses on his feet were buttery and rife and as familiar as his thumbs. There was no furniture and no carpet. The floor was scuffed but solid and an attempt had been made to sand it. There was no seepage onto the wood from the suicide. Ray Tate wasn’t worried about being haunted by a suicide: he had two black guys who sometimes came around late at night and stirred up his sleep.

The windows faced glorious, indirect north and Ray Tate had instinctively thought about painting. He’d used a butter knife to chip the encrusted paint on the windowsills until he was able to force the windows open all the way.

Old man Lilly liked having a cop in the building and gave Ray Tate a key to the storage area in the basement. “Go on down, take what you like. When you move out, just leave it.”

There was no bed in the basement but a serviceable wooden table and chair were stacked in a corner, upside down on a sprung-out couch. There were two mismatched lamps, a set of cups, saucers, dishes, and some odd pots. He’d never lived alone in his life. Every place he’d ever lived was already someone else’s home: first the State homes, then the foster homes, the rooming house with two other recruits near the academy, and finally with his wife. He went to an art store and bought bags of paints and brushes and an easel and set it up at a forty-five degree angle to the window.

While he was on paid off he’d stood at his easel and looked at the canvas. He squeezed paint and stared at it, his thumb poked through the hole in the pallet. His paycheques were automatically deposited and he had little reason to go outside. Until his beard and hair grew out, and he became unrecognizable from the media photos, he crept to the supermarket in a baseball hat and sunglasses. He started smoking again. He drank, each day starting in earlier until he found himself leaning asleep on his easel in the middle of the day. When he awoke his hands shook as he poured his breakfast.

One night he’d borrowed Mr. Lilly’s old Chevrolet and drove out to the western suburbs to see his ex and his daughter. His wife had been perfunctory and went to the basement to do laundry and watch television. His daughter, graduating high school, sat with him on the deck he’d built with the firefighter next door, and they talked about her photography and her plan to spend a year in Asia. She looked at him funny and then went inside, returning with a handful of photographs and a sleek Nikon. She stuttered it at him a few times and previewed the pictures on the LCD screen.

“Look, Dad,” she’d said. She handed him a photo taken of him before the first of the shootings. The difference was stunning: his face had become lined, his eyes were sunken into his head, his mouth was grim and clamped as though protecting himself from a confession.

“You look afraid,” his daughter said with alarm. “Are you afraid, Dad?”

He’d gone home and poured the half bottles of alcohol into the sink. He took to four sugars in his coffee to keep his blood in balance. The squareheaded duty sergeant from the local station came by one after-shift, looked around and said, “Jesus fuck, Ray. C’mon, man.”

The following day, three off-dutys and a uniformed female officer appeared carrying a folded futon, pillows, some banal framed pictures of Japanese mountaintops, a set of silverware, a television set, and a stack of bedding meant for a queen-sized bed. Each left a police business card with their cell numbers scrawled on the back. The last one, preparing to leave, a trim blond policewoman with a hurricane of freckles and a wide sad smile, said: “You need, you call, sergeant. You got it?”

Ray Tate nodded.

“You want, I’ll stay, sergeant.”

Numbly, he’d nodded and she helped him assemble and make up the futon. She stripped off her uniform. She wore men’s underwear and socks that sagged to her ankles.

Afterwards, as she slept, he turned on a lamp and tilted the shade away from her. He mixed blues and purples and blacks and painted her sleeping, her muscular arm hanging off the side of the futon, her gun belt curled on the floor, her boots neatly aligned beside the futon. He looked at the long tubes of yellows and oranges and bright reds and could think of nothing to do with them.

Then the sun was coming up and spilling thin, perfect north light into the apartment. He lay down beside her. He felt loved for what seemed the first time in his life, although he couldn’t recall her name.

* * *

After leaving the satellite and the skipper’s greasy brotherhood, Ray Tate stopped at a coffee shop and wrote from memory the names and phone numbers from the duty roster in the Chemical Squad’s office into his notebook. Aside from the notorious Djuna Brown he recognized none of them, except for one: Walter Brodski, a stumblebum ex-hero who let the pressures grind him into a bottle.

In his jacket and union sweatshirt, Tate hiked up the hill outside the satellite, past the swank midtown shops and sushi bars, and strode into the gully at the cemetery. At the north end he stopped again for a coffee to warm up, sitting in a window and looking at the streets as though he’d been away a long time. Back on the sidewalk he legged it energetically north, veering off to walk slowly by the local station, keeping half an eye out for the freckled, blond policewoman.

There were framed photographs of his daughter’s work on the walls of his apartment and some faced-in canvases he’d played with, to little result, leaning near his easel. With his lack of enthusiasm or real talent it was getting expensive to buy the stretched canvas so he’d bought a case of thick paper pads. There was a teak, elephant-footed coffee table his daughter had found at an antique shop. Little else had changed in the apartment in the months since the charity run by the local division guys and the mercy of the freckled policewoman. She’d never come back. He’d seen her once, doing up her notebook behind an office building when he cut through one afternoon in his shabby alley rat attire. He passed, he thought, unnoticed. In the days since she’d stayed the night he’d thought about her a lot.

There was no mail. He’d been away in the weeds for days and the apartment smelled of cooped up linseed oil, dirty laundry, and the faint scent of gas from the stove. He reefed open the windows. Old Mr. Lilly had mown the lawn and the earthy fragrance stirred something in him. He reached for his brushes and tubes, hooked his thumb through his pallet, and flipped open a spiral pad of thick paper. He squeezed green.

Ray Tate was no fan of Zen but his daughter’s photographs of calm gardens and forests made him shut his eyes. He slashed vertical; he swooped in curves. Resisting the urge to open his eyes to examine the result, he instead moistened the tip of the brush with his tongue to thin out the colour and slashed and swooped and let his mind flow like water over unfamiliar stones.

The psychiatrist had told him one of her clients, a small-town policeman from a burg across the state line, had cut off his gun hand with a table saw after shooting a teenager dead during an off-duty traffic stop on the Interstate. Another, she said, quit the job and became a bricklayer, even on his off-days building walls around walls at his cottage on the river. All of it, she said, to protect the world from himself. They all suffered, she said, sooner or later. They became quickly grey and their faces lined, their mouths turned into upside down Us. They became impotent and violent in direct proportion to their libido level prior to their killings. They beat themselves. They beat their wives. They beat their children. Some, she said, just vanished, either dead or gone into a void world where they could become something else, usually with the fragrance of alcohol or smoke.

“What did you do, Ray, after the first incident?”

He didn’t like her. She was beautiful and had big brunette hair and perfect legs beneath a business suit with a sexy cut. She looked at him as though he was a specimen. He said: “I answered all the questions, then I went home and …” He looked down at his hands.

She leaned forward. Her breasts were creamy. She was predatory. “And? And then … What?”

“I ate a bacon sandwich.” His face was bland enough that he knew she could tell he was lying. He didn’t tell her his wife, the daughter of a cop, looked at him differently after the second shoot. “Canadian bacon.”

“My dad,” his wife had said, “was thirty years on and he never shot anyone. Ray, how come you shot two people?”

He didn’t answer.

“Ray?”

“Your dad was a crime scene geek, Karen. He shot pictures, not people. When he got there the bad guys were dead on the floor. When I get there, they’re not so co-operative.”

They’d sat in stiff silence and ate their dinner off TV trays. When the news came on and showed the riots starting up downtown she picked up her plate and went into the kitchen.

He’d become a cop because her dad had talked him into it. Being a doorstep baby of the State he’d had no dad of his own, but had been raised in a series of good but indifferent foster homes where one man taught him to shave, another to defend himself and to how to swing on an inside curve ball, another to play chess, another to fashion a half-Windsor knot in his tie. All good men, he believed. A bit of the duty sergeant in each of them.

Karen’s dad, Harry, had extolled the job for the wrong reasons. Good pay, good benefits, a great pension. You can keep my daughter in a good life on that stuff, old Harry had said. Retire early enough to start another career, bank the pension. There was no talk of duty, of public service, of justice or protection. It was to please her dad that he’d applied. The old man’s connections had got him in and moved him along, not in rank but in assignments. After the first shooting the old man and his cronies had come to the house and drank him into the floor. It was as though they’d never seen a real cop before, a working cop, a cop who’d done the job. They thought he was the spawn of some old eastside ground pounder who’d bumped up against a loose lady while patrolling an alley. When he got his stripes they’d come by and exuberantly pounded his biceps, to engrave them into his flesh.

After the second shooting, there was only a brief phone call and a message to hang in there. He sat at home and grew his hair and beard in the silence.

One night his daughter, Alexis, had come down to the basement where he’d taken to sleeping. She cuddled up to him on the sofa. “We’re okay, dad.” Her hair was blond like Karen’s. She had his thin features and he wondered often if he was looking at the features of the mother he’d never met.

He sat with his arm around her. “Anything you want to ask me, Ax?”

“Nope.” She wouldn’t say anything else except, “We’re cool.”

The next day, in the middle of a fight, Karen flat out asked if it was true, if he was a racist. He packed what possessions would fit into the backseat of a taxi.

At the Swamp his second shooting was cleared reluctantly and they sent him marching orders. He found himself in the alleys, feasted upon by insect life, festooned with bleeding bites and blemishes.

Forgotten, someone joked, but not gone.

* * *

Somehow he’d made a painting of the slashing looping greens. A forest, maybe, or a view of a jungle from a long distance away. There was a suggestion of things hidden, verdant things ready to pounce or reveal themselves. Ray Tate carefully detached the page from the spiral book and put it to dry on the kitchen counter.

His first telephone call was to an inspector at the Swamp. Ray Tate didn’t really trust anyone above duty sergeant. Duty sergeant was the ultimate, he believed, a mentor to the troops, a guy who never heard a joke he hadn’t already heard before. A duty sergeant was the master of his domain, a leader of his tribe. Only good dutys could create good cops. Get above duty sergeant and people feared your career arc instead of respecting your words and deeds. But the inspector he called was a good, young guy whose old man had died early on the job and he’d been raised by a legion of blue uncles who never left him abandoned or confused, who crammed his summer evenings with ball games and winter dawns with hockey practise.

The inspector listened to the list of names from the Chemical Squad roster. Most of the city guys were slobs, he said, duffed-out guys with habits. He warned Ray Tate to beware of the skipper up there. “Gordo’s very … sharp,” he said. “Fifteen to the dozen.”

“This Statie they got me with. Brown? The dyke? What about her?”

“Not a lot of back story,” the inspector said. “She went straight from the State Police training college to the Spout. You know the Spout? Up in Indian country, where they put you when they want you to volunteer to quit, cheap. ‘Up to the Spout, where they pour you out.’ She’s up there, oh, six, seven months with a detachment full of farm boys who never saw a black chick, never mind a dyke. There’s something happens and her partner shows up at the local hospital with his face all beat in. He says some Indians jumped him but it gets around that she went after him with her stick. He quits and she hangs in for a month or so but the farm boys and their wives complain. She’s down to the Capitol, shuffling paperwork. Then the Feds start up Gordo’s task force and next thing, she’s seconded down here, driving him nuts.”

Ray Tate thought a moment. “I’m partnering with her. They want me to put her down. Could be that she’s out to get me? Get out from under her own stuff?”

The inspector hummed. “The word down here, Ray, is that the mayor wants you out. You and all the other city guys working chemicals. You want to be careful, in word and deed. You know? There’s a lot of opportunity to fuck up, a lot of loose cash floating around you can stub your toe on.”

“Thanks.”

“Ah, Ray? Is it interesting that they’re partnering you up with a black without breaking your trigger finger first?”

Ray Tate called a half dozen sergeants and duty sergeants. The Chemical Squad, they all agreed, was a shooting gallery where cracked city guys were always in season and you could take your limit. There were warnings about Gordo the skipper and commiseration about being partnered with a psycho Statie dyke.

He called a sniper on the Statie tactical shooters he’d done some training with and listened to a lot of funny stories about Indian country.

* * *

Djuna Brown took a photocopy of the skipper’s memo home with her. She filed it in a folder stuffed with other sheets of paper. A dated and signed trail of slights, of conflicting orders, of her mileage and hours worked down to the minute. There were the scrawled notes she’d found on her desk, many of them calling her a dyke, a rug muncher, and an all around generic bitch. There were racist cartoons. There were flyers advertising gay revues in the Rainbow Valley. There was a computer-enhanced picture of her face printed over a girl going down on a grossly fat black woman, her tongue a foot long. There were digital pictures she’d taken of used condoms left on her office chair, glued to her desk drawer. There were licence numbers of cars she’d found suspiciously parked near her apartment.

Another folder, much slimmer, contained commendations, atta boy memos, and newspaper clippings: high profile arrests up in Indian country, saving a Native baby from a burning trailer, running a self-defence class for at-risk children, a sex-ed class for teenage girls.

Her duplex was within walking distance of the satellite. She kept her head down as her slippers trudged the same hills Ray Tate had gone up and down a few hours earlier, past the same cemetery. She didn’t stop for a cup of leisurely coffee, she didn’t look at the streets as though she were meeting old friends. She bought some yogurt at a convenience store, allowed herself to buy a pack of Marlies.

In her living room she ate the yogurt without interest and waited until six o’clock to pour a gin and tonic. By seven o’clock she was smoking continuously and weaving a little through the duplex, straightening up, avoiding looking at herself in the mirror.

The Gay-Glo association after-hours hotline was picked up on the first ring. “Dee-joon,” the woman, a perpetually bitter former patroller, sang, “you gonna join up with the folks who love you? Make your voice heard?”

“Soon, I think, Haze. I’m okay,” she said softly, making her voice wistful. “So far.”

The Glo wanted Djuna Brown with a vengeance. She hit all the right notes: female, dyke, black, some Chinese, and a Statie. It was widely known that she’d been harassed, both physically and sexually, and had fought back. There were no Staties in the Glo, they were barracked across the rural portions of the state.

“So, what can I do for you, sister?”

“You know this city guy, Ray Tate?”

“The gunner? Sure, he shot a black guy back, oh, before you came down here. He got away with it. So then he shot another one about a year ago. Got away with that one, too. They’re protecting him, keeping him out of sight until they can bring him back.” Hazel was tapping into her computer. The Gay-Glo had its own little intelligence network. It collected slights and troop movements, helped its members avoid traps, to step around the machinations of the homophobic thugs at the Swamp. “What’s up with Ray Tate? You hear something on him?”

“They put me with him today. Any chance he’s a rat? Or should I just be worried that he’ll put one in my queer black ass?”

“Whew. That guy, anything’s possible. You want to write everything down, like you write the other stuff. Tape what you can. It would be nice to be the ones that put the hat on him, drag him before the governor’s review board. But be careful, okay?” She paused, revealing the tap of typing. “Look, I’m going to put this stuff into a file, okay? If something happens to you, we want it documented that they put you with a racist killer, in an at-risk situation.”

“Sure.”

“Perfect. You, ah, seeing anybody? We’re having a meeting tomorrow night, why don’t we have dinner first? Go out after, have a drink. Strategize. Girl talk.”

“Let me see how tomorrow goes, Haze. I might just take you up on it.” Djuna Brown hung up and shuddered. Before she could take her hand off the receiver the phone rang.

A man’s voice asked if she was Trooper Brown.

She said she was and reached to flick on the tape recorder.

“Did you ever, like, want to be a cop?”

She didn’t ask who it was. “I am a cop.”

“You’re a problem. You’re a target. If you want out, just get them to cut you a deal, take the package and move to San Francisco or something. Open a rainbow bookstore. Quit fucking around.”

She didn’t recognize the voice. There was no attempt to deepen it or disguise it. She played light. “I don’t run.”

“Do you drink?”

“Who is this? What do you want?”

“Well,” the voice said, “I’m Ray Tate. I’m the guy hired to spike you into the ground.”