'I know.'
'I was married,' DeSpain said.
'Grown kids. Wife drank a little, liked a few belts before supper, got out of hand sometimes at parties, but we got along. Then this little broad comes in with a stalker story and I'm working investigations and I catch it.'
DeSpain shook his head. In the shadowy room his eyes seemed simply dark recesses, buried beneath his forehead.
'And.. Jesus Christ. She feels my muscle, she wants to see my gun, she wants to know if I killed somebody, and what was it like, and would I take care of her, and she leaned her little tits on me and looked up at me, and I never had anything like it happen to me in my life. Second night on the case we're in bed and she's a volcano. The old lady did it in her flannel night gown, you know?
With her eyes shut tight.'
'What about the stalker?' I said.
'The case was bullshit,' DeSpain said.
'Guy wasn't stalking her.
She made a pass at him and he turned her down and she made it up.
'That didn't warn you?' I said.
'If she shot me in the belly it wouldn't have warned me,' DeSpain said.
'I couldn't get enough of her.'
'So you ditched the wife.'
'Yeah. Don't even know where she is now. What happened to her. Kids won't talk to me.'
He paused for a moment and leaned back. He pressed his hands together and looked at them as if they were new, and then began to rub them slowly together, leaning back as he spoke, so that all I could see of him now was the hands rubbing slowly together in the lamplight.
'Child-care supervisor, the one she said stalked her, he threatened to sue her for defamation, so I went up and knocked him around a little, you know, to discourage him, and the bastard got a lawyer and went right to the C.O.'
'The bastard,' I said.
'Yeah, well C.O. got him calmed down. Made some sort of settlement that didn't get all over the papers, and I had to go. C.O. liked me, but he had no choice.'
In the darkened room DeSpain's voice sounded as if he were talking through a rusty pipe.
'But you still had jocelyn I said.
'Yeah. Except as soon as I moved in with her…' he shrugged.
'She lost interest. Told me I was just an animal, just after sex like some kind of dirty animal. Came home one day and she was gone.
No note, no thanks-for-the-memories.'
'You weren't forbidden fruit anymore,' I said.
'Sure,' DeSpain said.
'But I still knew how to be a cop. I found her easy enough. So I come up here too. C.O. knew some people here. They needed a chief. C.O. gave me a plug.'
'To be near her.'
DeSpain didn't say anything. In the lamplight his hands were now still. Behind him through the window I saw small lightning shimmer across the sky. It was so far away that I never did hear the thunder.
'And Lonnie Wu?' I said.
'When did you hook up with Lonnie?'
'I never bothered her,' DeSpain said.
He leaned forward now, his face back in the lamplight, his thick hands, still pressed together, resting on the desk top.
'I'd go see her sometimes in one of those asshole fucking plays she was in,' he said.
'She couldn't act for shit. But I never went near her. Just liked knowing where she was, being around, maybe, if she needed help or anything.'
'Lonnie?' I said.
'Fucking gook,' DeSpain said.
'Was smuggling in Chinamen.
Been going on a long time. People on the hill that owned the mills, when the mills folded, moved into fish processing, and needed cheap labor.'
'So most of the smuggled Chinese stayed here?'
'At first, then the fish plant jobs filled up. So Lonnie would smuggle in a few replacements for people who died, or saved up enough to get out, or got killed for not making the trip payments on time. And the rest he would funnel
