Dead of Winter

“You’re married,” he said. “When were you going to tell me that?”

“Tonight. I…Louis, please — ”

“Right.”

She looked away, holding her arms.

“He’s my chief, for crissake!” Louis said.

She shut her eyes, as if trying not to cry, and he turned away in anger. “How could you lie to me?” he demanded.

“I didn’t lie.”

He came forward to stand in front of her. “You lied about him, Zoe. Shit, that isn’t even your name. You lied about who you are, for God’s sake.”

Her eyes glistened up at him. She didn’t say it but he saw it there in her eyes. So did you.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice quavering.

“You know.”

She met his eyes. “I can give you all the cliches, Louis. I can say my marriage was over years ago. I can say he’s changed, I changed. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I don’t know what I want,” he said, shaking his head.

“This isn’t easy,” she said sharply.

Her anger was unexpected. It deflated his own somehow. He moved to the window, not wanting to look at her. “Do you love him?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I did. I don’t know anymore.”

He leaned his forehead against the cold glass.

“I’m not happy. I haven’t been for a long time. Part of it is this place but it’s more, it’s…” Her voice trailed off, breaking slightly.

He didn’t want to hear it. An affair, a neglected wife, it was a damn cliche and he didn’t want to be part of it.

“All right, so the marriage failed,” he said. “Lots of marriages fail. But I don’t get it. The fake name, the cabin. What the hell was that? Do you take other guys there too?

“No. You’re the only one.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He got me the cabin about two years ago. I wanted to have a place to go. He had work and I wanted something of my own. I started painting there, something I hadn’t done in ten years. I found two kittens living in the crawl space so I kept them there, because Brian hates cats.”

Louis thought of the sensual cabin, with its draperies, music, pillows, candles and incense. He couldn’t see Gibralter tolerating any of it.

“What about your name?”

“I read it in a novel once and I always wanted to go to France. I never used it before that night by the lake when I saw you. It just…came out.”

Her voice had trailed off to a whisper. “I always hated the name Jean. I never felt like a Jean.”

Louis came back to stand near the fireplace, looking down at her. “Why didn’t you tell me you were married?” he asked.

“Would it have made a difference?”

“Yes.”

She stared at him. “It must be comforting to have such a reliable moral compass.”

He couldn’t tell if she meant it to be sarcastic. “You could have left him,” he said.

“We’ve been together since I was nineteen. We had…” She paused. “He needed me.”

“I can’t see him needing anyone,” Louis said.

“He wasn’t always like this,” she said. “In the beginning, back in Chicago, it was different.”

Louis looked away. He didn’t want to hear about the joys of Brian Gibralter’s young married life. She saw Louis’s reaction but went on.

“When Brian was a rookie, he used to come home at night so excited about the job, so sure he was doing good,” she said, her eyes going to the fire. “But he got transferred to Englewood and things changed. He started talking about the bad things, the junkies, the thirteen-year-old hookers, the man who pulled a knife on him after he pulled him over for a broken tail light.” She paused. “One night, I found him sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, still in his jacket. I finally got him to tell me what it was. He had arrested a man who had bashed in the head of his girlfriend’s baby with a baseball bat because the baby wet his pants.”

Louis didn’t respond.

“He stopped talking to me about work after that. He said I couldn’t understand,” she said.

Louis thought of the night Ollie died. Even as she had held him while he cried, he had thought the same thing.

“I didn’t fit in with the other wives and I was very lonely,” she said. “I started taking the el downtown for classes at the Art Institute but Brian made me stop. He said I’d get raped or mugged.”

He heard her voice break. Her face was streaked with tears.

“It got worse,” she said. “He yelled at me for not locking the door when I went down to the laundry room. He yelled at me for not ironing the crease sharp enough in his uniform pants.”

“You should have left him,” he said.

She looked at Louis. “I wanted to but I had no way to support myself, no job. I didn’t even have a high school diploma.” She gave a small laugh. “I needed him.”

“I thought you had a sister,” Louis said.

She nodded. “She told me I could come stay with her. I even had a suitcase packed but then something happened and I couldn’t leave.”

“What?”

She looked at him warily.

“What happened?”

“Brian,” she said. “Something happened to him and I couldn’t leave him.”

He could see something in her face, pain, guilt maybe, and he knew she had to be referring to the incident that Gibralter’s department had covered up, the event that Doug Delp had been unable to unearth. He waited, tense. A part of him, the man who had been deceived, didn’t want to hear one more damn word about Brian Gibralter. But the other part of him, the cop part, needed to know.

He sat down next to her. “What happened?”

She pulled in a breath, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.

Louis went to get her a Kleenex. He sat down again, waiting. “What happened?” he repeated.

She was unable to meet his eyes. “I didn’t find out until weeks later. He wouldn’t tell me. He had been to a doctor, someone the department made him see. I think the doctor was the one who told him to tell me.”

Louis waited. The wind picked up outside, sending a low whistle through the windowpanes.

“He was on patrol alone because his partner was out sick. It was March. I remember because it was very cold for March.” Her voice dropped to a soft monotone. “He turned into an alley, thinking he had seen something suspicious. They had been watching the neighborhood because there was a lot of gang violence. He should’ve called for help but he didn’t.”

Louis suddenly knew where this was going. What he didn’t know was how bad it would be.

“They…a gang…they jumped him. He was alone and they jumped him. They took his gun.”

Louis shook his head.

“Then…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “They held his gun on him and made him undress. They stripped him. It was so cold that night. But they left him there, naked.”

It took her almost a full minute before she was able to speak. “They handcuffed him to a fire escape in the alley and beat him. Then they spray painted…things, words, things all over his body.”

She took a breath and the rest rushed out in one long sigh. “He was there for hours before another unit came by and found him.”

“What happened to the kids?” Louis asked.