A fitting choice of words if only his father knew it. Garreth hung up in abject misery.
“I take it the news didn’t go down well at home,” Nat said when Garreth walked into the station that night.
It showed that much? “Not exactly.”
As usual Maggie Lebekov remained after her shift typing reports. She looked up. “I can see why it’s hard to understand you giving up a being a detective in a city like San Francisco.” Though the frost had been melting since that first meeting, her attitude remained: what was he doing here. “It’s a job most cops would die for. What!” she said as Nat choked.
“He did die for it.”
She frowned. “What?”
Garreth sighed. Some general details were bound to leak out. “After being assaulted by a suspect I was mistakenly declared dead.” She wondered why he wanted this job. Let her consider this. “There’s nothing like waking up in cold storage to make you examine your life and priorities.”
Her eyes widened. “You were actually in the morgue?”
“Ewwww!” Sue Ann waved her hands in front of her face like someone shooing flies. “That would freak me out!”
A statement hardly touching the horror of it. Garreth clamped down on the memory and gave them a shrug. “Sometimes it’s enough to realize you’re still alive.”
He followed Nat out, with Maggie staring thoughtfully after him.
In the car, Nat made a right turn out of the parking lot instead of the usual left toward Kansas Avenue. “I have one piece of good news for you. You know how you’ve been wanting a place of your own?”
Oh yes…somewhere with privacy, without Violet, friendly as she was, watching his coming and going. Even at local prices, a house was out of his range, and the closest Baumen came to apartments were duplexes…currently all occupied. “You know of something?”
“Helen Schoning, cousin to Doris’s husband, has an apartment over her garage. The widower renting it before married a woman in Russell and moved there. It’s just three blocks from the station when you want to walk to work. Helen invited us to come look at it this evening.”
Garreth liked the house…two stories, built of the native sandstone with a driveway running under a portico on the side. He liked the woman who appeared in answer to Nat’s push of the doorbell, too…an attractive, slender woman in her late forties with only a trace of grey in short chestnut hair.
She extended a hand to Garreth. “So you’re the Frisco Kid. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Call me Helen, please. I’m Miss Schoning only when we meet while I’m on duty as clerk of the municipal court. The garage is this way.”
Out a side door into the portico and back along the drive to a large two-car garage.
She led the way up a set of steps on the side to the second floor and after unlocking the door, stood back to let them enter first. “This used to be my father’s den.”
It looked like a man’s place, wood-paneled with built-in bookcases and a large leather chair and a leather couch that opened out into a bed. A rear corner had been partitioned for the bathroom. Between that and a set of french doors leading out onto a deck above the garage doors stretched the cabinets and small appliances of an apartment kitchen. Including a small refrigerator! No more need for the ice chest. Too bad it could not be a basement apartment but with the French doors blocked by heavy curtains, which he would buy tomorrow, it ought to serve his needs. It only remained to buy a few non-perishable food items and some cooking utensils and tableware at the thrift store so, in case of visitors, his kitchen did not look as oddly bare as Lane’s.
Helen said, “I can provide sheets and blankets until you buy your own. The phone is an extension from the house. You can use that and pay part of the bill or put in a private line. Half the garage is yours to use, too.”
She took them downstairs and raised one of the garage doors.
“This is your side. If you want to work on your car, feel free to use my tools. Just ask first and put them back afterward.”
Garreth stared around the garage. With these tools, Helen Schoning could open her own auto repair shop. “You use these?”
Nat grinned in his peripheral vision.
She smiled and went over to stroke the fender of the car in the other half of the garage. “Someone has to keep this baby running.”
A gleaming old Rolls Royce. He felt his jaw drop.
“My father bought this in 1955 when his first oil wells came in. He was so proud of it. It was the only car like it in Bellamy County. Still is.” She paused, chin down, looking at him through her lashes. “Mr. Mikaelian, I do have one favor to ask.” She pulled him to the other side of the Rolls and dropped her voice. “If you should come home some night and find a car in your side, will you please park on my side of the drive so the other car can get out? And say nothing about it to anyone?”
He felt himself staring again and closed his mouth with a snap. “No problem.”
She smiled. “I hoped you’d understand. I enjoy being single but I also like companionship from time to time. Discretely, of course. This is a small town and some of my friends are married.”
Garreth regarded her with amazement. She was not what he expected to find here. “You don’t miss the stability of a long-term relationship?”
She smiled. “What stability? Nothing ever says the same. People, either. Each of my relationships has suited my needs at the time. There’s a quote by Henry Ellis I like: ‘All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.’ It seems to me you’re practicing some of that yourself.”
Except his mingling felt more desperate than fine.
9
On Monday the job became official. Having been duly sworn, uniformed, and equipped, Garreth started six months of probation and re-acclimation to the bulk of body armor and weight of the gear belt. The sun setting before the shift started made it a comfortable patrol — no need for his glasses — but it felt odd riding alone. Yes he wanted this and it gave him freedom to pursue his own agenda, but he also missed Nat. Whom from here on he would likely see only when he came on duty and Nat briefed him about the day’s activity and wants and warrants.
Solo worked well, though, when he went looking for three minors who managed to steal a bottle of peach brandy from Hartzfeldt’s Liquor. Luckily the clerk recognized two, not by name but as boys he had seen skate- boarding on south Beach. Reasoning the boys wanted to hide but remain close to home where they felt safe and comfortable, Garreth slipped on foot around the Hammond greenhouses, which sat behind houses on the east side of Beach’s 200 block. No need for a flashlight with his night vision, and soon he just followed his nose, tracking the mixed brandy and blood scents to the trio squatting between bushes and the rear wall of one greenhouse.
Twenty minutes later their parents met him at the station. With the brandy paid for, the store owner declined, against Garreth’s advice, to press charges. Watching the boys being dragged away by parents apparently less outraged by the theft and drinking than by the lies that let each think the boys were studying at another’s house, Garreth wondered if juvenile proceedings might not be more humane than the verbal flaying and grounding for life that awaited them at home. If those parents were anything like his father and Grandma Doyle.
As the shift wore on, he found himself welcoming passing contact with Duncan…pulling up window to window with him a couple of time to pass on information…or just listen to Duncan complain about the “little Dreiling shit” flipping him off again, or reveal he was switching shifts with Maggie on Friday in order to watch his nephew play in the big Homecoming game against arch rival the Bellamy Cougars.
Maggie working at night? “Danzig’s allowing the switch?”
Duncan nodded. “Yeah, since she won’t be working alone. And he understands why I want to be there since he knows I’ve been like a father to my sister’s kids…and his son is playing, too.”
The switch ought to make Maggie happy and make her feel she was finally being given a chance to play with
