prison for two months when the cops stopped his car and found almost a half-kilo of coke in the backseat. Claimed he 'found' the drugs outside his apartment. Hard to imagine how that story didn't fly.
Caroline writes down the address that Pete has on file with his probation officer. She finds herself hoping that Pete Decker
She jots down Decker's last known and sends the report to the printer. At her desk she grabs another blank legal pad, and continues on to the interview room. She unlocks the door and sticks her head in. The Loon is still bent over the legal pad, mouthing words as he writes them. He looks up, already in midapology.
'I'm sorry, Caroline. I know this is taking too long, but I'm really…'
She tosses the new legal pad before he can finish the sentence.
He catches the pad and smiles. 'Thanks,' he says. 'I'm getting close. Really.'
'It's almost six,' Caroline tells him. 'I'm gonna go out for some breakfast. You want something?'
'Some more coffee would be great. Maybe a cinnamon roll.' He rubs his mouth. 'I… uh… I wanted to tell you…'
Caroline steps inside and waits.
He looks embarrassed. 'That name I gave you?'
'Pete Decker?'
'Right. That's not it. That's not the person…'
'So who is he?'
'Nobody,' the Loon says. He's lying. 'I just wanted to give you a name. I need to get through this and then I'll tell you everything… I promise. You have to believe me.'
'You want black coffee again?'
'Sure. Thank you.'
'I'm going to have someone from patrol check in on you. And… I'm gonna need your belt and your shoes.'
'My belt and my shoes?'
'I can't leave you in here with anything you might use…'
'Use for what?' She doesn't answer, and it takes a few seconds to register on his face. 'You think I'm going to hang myself.' He makes it sound like a decent idea.
She just holds out her hand. He removes his belt and shoes and slides them across the table. She looks at the shoes but sees no blood on them. When she looks up he is smiling and she sees it again, that nagging familiarity.
'Are you sure we haven't met?' she asks.
'I'm sure.'
'You just… seem familiar.'
'Trust me,' he says. 'I would remember meeting you.'
She is embarrassed and slightly confused by how good this makes her feel.
'My name is Clark.' He says it with great meaning, perhaps as amends for giving her a phony name for the victim earlier. She has been thinking of him as the Loon, as her Loon, for so long, she has to repeat the name to herself. Clark sticks out his hand and she shakes it. Although Clark isn't the name that seemed to be on the tip of her tongue, she sees right away that he's telling the truth and she decides she's been mistaking him for someone else, that he just has one of those faces.
'Nice to meet you, Clark.'
'I wish it were under different circumstances,' he says.
She thinks, not half as much as I do.
3
Pete Decker's apartment is on the fourth floor of a seedy building that Caroline knows only because it's across the street from the coffee shop where she and some of the other detectives used to go in the mornings for tea. It is a squat, squalid building at the end of downtown, an old railroad hotel remodeled into flop apartments that house more than their share of criminals and addicts, people in the throes of recovery and teen pregnancy and AIDS, the chronically troubled and luckless. She parks in front of the building and opens the door, climbs the stairs three levels and finds herself in a dark, dank hallway, lit by a single bulb. There are six doors on the fourth floor, profanities scratched into the wood. She reads the graffiti and finds that Tina gives good head, that Joe B. is a motherfucker. None of the doors has a number or a letter. Caroline looks down at her notebook. Pete Decker lives in 4B. It could be any of the six. She checks her watch. Not quite 7:00 A.M. She doesn't have to worry about Pete – if he's even here – skipping out in the morning. As a group, criminals are not early risers.
She leaves the building, happy for the fresh air, crosses three lanes of theoretical traffic, and opens a door into the warm smell of her old coffee shop. She stopped coming in after the barrista – a young bundle of stomach muscles and dreadlocks everyone calls Goose – asked her out one morning.
She walks across the dark floor and smiles at two of the coffee shop regulars, a youngish father and his round, blond, agreeable son, who is torturing a cinnamon roll for information.
'Hey,' says the father, who hasn't bothered to learn her name, as she hasn't bothered to learn his; the beauty of coffee shop culture is its sustained surface cordiality, like an office without that irritating work.
'Hey,' she says back.
'Haven't seen you here in a while.'
'No,' she says, and continues to the counter. Luckily, Goose isn't working; the pierced girl behind the counter gives her a warm smile.
'Can I get a twenty-ounce chai tea?' Caroline asks.
'Certainly,' the pierced girl says, and the snappiness of this exchange, this entire morning, makes her feel as if something has changed. This is what her life felt like before – normal exchanges with people one step removed from strangers: driving, walking, talking, sitting in a dark coffee shop and indulging in a cup of tea.
She picks out a day-old pastry, pays, and sits at the window, watching Pete Decker's apartment building. No one comes or goes, and she thinks maybe she's missed something – misread his record and the down-and-out address. Ah, but it's early for heavy drug traffic anyway. She's a little groggy, having stayed up all night while Clark the Loon worked on his opus. The tea warms her throat.
She watches the fourth-floor windows, but no lights come on. Just then a car, an old beat-up Honda Civic, pulls up to the curb in front of the building. Caroline grabs her tea and stands.
'See you,' says the father as he wipes frosting from his boy's mouth.
'Okay,' says Caroline, and she pulls on her gloves and leaves the coffee shop. She jogs across the street just as a young woman steps out of the car. From first glance Caroline sees that the woman is a meth addict, one of those forty-year-old twenty-year-olds that the drug produces, eyes red and deep-socketed, skin sallow and puckered.
The girl sees her coming and her fried nerves go off scattershot; her arm cocks and her lip twitches. 'What? What?'
'You live here?' Caroline is friendly, firm, and holds out her badge. 'In this building?'
'I didn't do nothing.'
'I'm sure you didn't. It's okay. I need to talk to your neighbor.'
'Who?'
'Pete.'
The girl answers reflexively. 'Don't know him.'
'Sure you do,' Caroline says. 'Look, I just need to see if he's okay. Have you seen him in the last few days?'
