“Course not. Just have to let it cool down, same as always.”
“I figured. You say hi to Karl for me, now.”
“I’ll say it. What he hears…”
A mile or so further along, the sheriff said, “Back in Memphis you had the highest clearance rate on homicides of anyone on the force.”
“You’ve done your homework.”
“I’m not in a habit of drafting help. Tend to be cautious about it.”
“Then you know it wasn’t me, it was us. What part wasn’t plain luck owes mostly to my partner. I’d be jumping hoops of intuition, flying high. Meanwhile he was back down there on the ground thinking things methodically through.”
“That would be Randy-right?”
I nodded.
“Like I said, I’m in over my head. Expertise, luck, intuition-we’ll take whatever you’ve got.”
We came in from the north, onto deserted streets. Pop. 1280, a sign said. Passed Jay’s Diner with its scatter of cars and trucks outside, drugstore and hardware store gone dark, A amp;P, Dollar Store, Baptist church, Gulf station. Pulled in behind city hall. One-story prefab painted gray. Probably took them all of a week to put it up, and it’d be there forever, long as the glue held. The paint job was recent and hurried, with a light frosting of gray on bushes alongside. A single black-and-white sat nosed in close outside. Inside, a rangy man in polyester doing its best to look like khaki sat nosed close to the desk. On it were a radio, a ten-year-old Apple computer and a stack of magazines, one of which he was paging through. He looked up as we came in. Wet brown eyes that reminded me of spaniels, ruddy face narrow and shallow like a shovel, thin hair. Something electric about him, though. Sparks and small connections jumping around in there unremarked.
“Anything going on?” Bates said.
“‘Bout what you’d expect. Couple of minor accidents at getting-off time. Old Lady Siler reported her purse stolen, then remembered she’d locked it in the trunk of her car. I ran the spare key out, as usual. Jimmy Allen showed up at his wife’s house around dark and started pounding on the door. Then he tried to steal the car. When I got there, he had two wires pulled down out of the radio, trying to hotwire them.”
“Been at it for an hour or more, if I know Jimmy.”
“Prob’ly so.”
“He in back?”
“Out flat.”
“This goes on, Jimmy might as well just start having his mail delivered here.”
Bates walked over and closed three of the four light switches on the panel by the door. Much of the room fell gray, leaving us and desk in a pool of dim light outside which shadows jumped and slid.
“Don Lee, this’s Mr. Turner.”
The deputy held out a hard, lean hand and I took it. A good handshake, no show to it, just what it was. Like the man, I suspected.
“Pleased to have you, Detective.”
“Just Turner. I haven’t been a detective for a long time.”
“Hope you’re not telling us you forget how,” Bates said.
“No. What happens is, you stop believing it matters.”
“And does it?” This from Don Lee.
“Does it matter, or does it stop?”
“There’s a difference?”
In that instant I knew I liked him. Liked them both. All I’d wanted was to be left alone, and I’d taken giant steps to ensure that. Rarely strayed far from the cabin, had goods delivered monthly. The last thing I’d wanted was ever again to be part of an investigation, to have to go rummaging through other people’s lives, messes and misdemeanors, other people’s madnesses, other people’s minds.
“Why don’t you fill me in?” I said.
“You’n go on home,” Bates told his deputy. “Appreciate your holding down the fort. Dinner must be getting colder by the minute.”
“All the same to you, I’d as soon stay,” Don Lee said.
Chapter Four
Nabors made it, survived the shooting that is, but he never came back on active duty. Mondays, my day off, I visited him at the rehab facility out in Whitehaven. Sculptured, impossibly green lawns with sprinklers that went off like miniature Old Faithfuls, squat ugly buildings. Never did figure what those were made of, but they put me in mind of Legos. Soft-handed young doctors and platoons of coiffured, elegantly eyelashed young nurses manning the pressure locks, all of them with mouthfuls of comfort like mush for both visitors and patients, couldn’t spit out those lumps of good advice fast enough.
Suddenly around the station house everyone knew who I was. Older cops who’d pointedly ignored me before, smelling as they often did of sweat socks, stale bourbon or beer, aftershave and last night’s whore, now nodded to me in the locker room. Two shifts in a row I got put in a squad that didn’t haul hard left or need new tires and assigned uptown. Really knew I was some kind of made man the day Fishbelly Joe, the blind albino who’d run a hot dog stand outside the station house as long as anyone could remember, refused my money.
Then one Monday afternoon as I reported for the 3-11, word surfaced from the Captain. Come see him.
“I think it’s a mistake, Turner,” he said. “You’re not ready for it. But you’re bumped to detective.”
I’d been a cop, what, two or three months at that point? Most of the men I worked with were ten, twenty years older, and most of them had packed their lives into the work. Little wonder they’d been reluctant to accept me, and only began to do so, haltingly, now.
Did I for even a moment recognize this as a repeat of what happened in the service? No. (But how could I not have?) There I’d passed from basic training to special forces in a matter of weeks, as in one of those TV shows where events stumble over one another trying to get past. I’m a quick study, have a quirky mind that gets on to things instantly. While others are still floundering and doing belly flops, I’m walking around, looking good-but my understanding never extends far beneath the surface.
At that time, remember, I had little enough training to speak of, and almost no experience. And the fact that Nabors and I had violated procedure was something I just couldn’t get my head around. That went on every moment of every shift of every day, sure. No one did things by the book. You cut corners, jury-rigged, improvised, faked it, got by. But few of those shortcuts ended up with a fatal shooting and a seasoned officer going down. I kept ticking off the mistakes in my head.
We were supposed to stay together at all times. We should both have responded.
When I began to suspect that something had gone badly south, I’d started in without calling for backup.
I’d failed to follow my senior partner’s orders.
Then, failing also to identify myself or fire a warning shot (which back then, before Garner v. Tennessee, remained policy), I’d shot a man dead.
Interestingly enough, few questions got asked outside my own head, and none of this ever came up for any sort of review. But right after gypsies and sailors, cops are the most superstitious folk alive, and while I was newly on the list of good guys, looked up to in some weird, abstract fashion, the whole thing stayed weird: no one wanted to partner with me.
So for a time, in direct violation of department policy, I rode by myself in the best cars the department had to offer. Ranked detective, I still spent most of my shift on routine calls.
What happened next I’m still not clear on, but somewhere (arbitrarily, I assume, from my experience with bureaucracies pre and post) a decision was made, and I started finding myself beside guys no one else would put up with. Likes attracting? Or maybe they were there as department brass’s last, desperate effort to shake them out of the tree. We’re talking rookies too dumb for Gilligan’s island here, lawmen Andy wouldn’t let have one bullet, bullies fresh off the schoolyard, lumbering southern gentlemen who stood when ladies and elders entered the room
