“You really have forever dispelled your saint image.”
“Good,” she said, still stroking my face. “You know, the first time we met I asked around about you. That’s when I learned that you were the officer that was burned while bringing in the Strangler.”
“That explains why you were nice to me. You felt sorry for Quasimodo.”
“You mean I heard bells ringing?”
I used the pretense of stretching to move my face away from her hand. I don’t like being self-conscious, but I am.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said, changing the light tone of our conversation to something more serious.
Lisbet took a read of my eyes and then a more pointed read of my scarred face. “I hope you’re not implying that this is some kind of mercy date. Yes, the first time we met I couldn’t help but notice the scarring on your face, but I stopped seeing it after that.”
“You’re doing better than me, then. Sometimes I’m still startled when I see myself in the mirror.”
“Sounds like me when I have a bad hair day.”
I didn’t have to force my smile. “I’m getting used to the new me, but I was really self-conscious when I first started going out in public and noticed all the surreptitious staring directed my way.”
“I’ll bet not as many people were staring at your scars as you thought.”
“You’d lose that bet.”
“I’m not saying that people weren’t staring, but not all of them were looking at your scars. They were staring at a hero. Your capturing the Strangler was a huge story. I still remember all those breaking news reports on how you and Sirius were doing.”
“I guess I missed all the hoopla being in the burn unit. Everything was sort of a blur the first few days. There was a TV in my room, but I couldn’t watch it because the fire had burned my eyelids and corneas, and my face was swaddled in bandages.”
“That must have been awful.”
Her sympathetic voice kept me talking. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so isolated. What made it even worse was that my doctors told me I might lose my sight. So there I was in my personal darkness with nothing to do but worry, except on those too frequent occasions when I was being tortured.”
Thinking that I’d offered up too much poor, poor, pitiful me, I finished with, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you enjoy the play?”
Lisbet had the good sense to groan.
I said, “You’d think all of that would put a few scars in perspective, wouldn’t you?”
“Didn’t it?”
I shrugged. “I wasn’t only worried about my life or my sight. I was afraid that without a full recovery I wouldn’t have a job on the force.”
“If I was fighting for my life, the last thing I’d think about was my work.”
“When Jen died, work took on a new importance for me. It gave me a reason to keep going. So even when the doctors told me I was out of the woods, I kept worrying about the department finding some medical reason that would prevent me from returning to the force. That’s why I memorized eye charts and prepared for how to best answer questions about my physical and mental health. To tell the truth, I’m still paranoid.”
“Is there a reason to be?”
Instead of answering, I did a De Niro parody straight out of
Her smile afforded me the opportunity to echo the same bad impersonation, and the second time around it even got a laugh. That spared me from having to provide Lisbet with a real answer.
We made our way back downstairs and settled on her sofa. I asked Lisbet about her work, and afterward she asked me about mine, and I told her a little bit about the Special Cases Unit.
“I am glad the LAPD considered Moses and Rose special cases,” she said. “It wasn’t that way in the past.”
I didn’t tell her the department hadn’t had a change of heart. “I guess Moses and Rose are a little more personal to me than they would be to most other cops.”
She waited for me to elaborate. Anyone but Lisbet would have had to wait for a long time.
“I was abandoned as a newborn. It’s likely my mother was a druggie, but I don’t know for sure. The police never found out who she was, but it’s not like they looked very hard either for her or for answers.”
“I am sorry.”
“Don’t be. I had two great adoptive parents. And I’ve found some unexpected bonuses to not knowing my background.”
“And what might those be?”
“I get to celebrate every ethnic and religious holiday like it’s my very own. On Saint Patrick’s Day I’m an Irishman, on Cinco de Mayo I’m Mexican, and on Chinese New Year’s I’m Chinese.”
Lisbet looked at me skeptically. “Chinese?”
“
“I’m a mongrel. I’m part English, French, German, and Italian.”
“That’s perfect. The two of us can celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day, Oktoberfest, and Ferragosto.”
“What? No Druid holiday?”
“It’s not December twenty-first without a winter solstice pagan ritual.”
“Do you sacrifice a virgin?”
“Druids don’t appreciate that stereotype. Solstice Day finds me and my brethren imbibing in potent Druid fluid and dancing around oak trees.”
“It sounds like you have a full dance card. Is there any holiday you don’t celebrate?”
“I haven’t celebrated Valentine’s Day in a long time.”
My announcement made for a prelude to a kiss. It was a long time before we came up for air.
“Valentine’s Day is still three weeks off,” Lisbet said.
“I believe in precelebrations.” We kissed again.
“That’s why I never did one of those DNA ancestry searches,” I said. “I prefer being an international man of mystery.”
“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Lisbet said. She raised her wine glass and said, “
We clinked and drank.
“Were you really considering doing one of those DNA tests?” she asked.
I nodded. “I think what stopped me is that I was afraid of opening Pandora’s box.”
“It’s better to not know some things?”
“Something like that.”
“Did you ever consider trying to track down your birth mother?”
I was already shaking my head halfway into her question. “In my book my birth mother is guilty of a lot more than child abandonment. It was only by luck that I didn’t end up like Rose. Even if she is still alive, why would I want to establish a relationship with a woman that discarded me and left me to die?”
“You have good reason to be angry with her, but you don’t know the circumstances of her life.”
“And I don’t want to know. There are some crimes that aren’t forgivable.”
“You are sounding like judge, jury, and executioner.”
“I wouldn’t mind being all three.”
“Have you considered there might have been extenuating conditions? What if your mother was mentally ill, like Moses’s mother?”
“Being sick in the head doesn’t give you a free pass to kill your child. Moses’s mother went off her meds. That was her choice, and her son died because of it.”
“So you think she should have gone to jail?”
“Damned right,” I said. Because of her schizophrenia, Moses’s mother had skated on any jail time, and that
