Absolute Zero

purple, overwritten copy. I held his hand when he was insecure. And then, as soon as he made some money, he left me for a hot little bitch.” Reflex smile. “I’m not bitter, Mr. Broker; but sometimes I cannot help but feel the comfort of a certain justice.”

Broker thought, but did not voice, another cliche that would never die: Hell hath no fury. .

As quickly as it came, the ice storm passed on Dorothy’s face.

“Of course,” she said, “Jolene was very much in need of rescue. Very much in need of someone to take care of her,” she delivered these words with the deliberate cadence of a woman who could clearly take care of herself.

“Are you saying he put himself in jeopardy marrying her?”

“Oh, premeditated jeopardy. Have you been to the house since they brought him home, AMA-against medical advice?”

“Yes.”

Dorothy pursed her lips. “I visited once. I thought the baby monitors were a nice touch. Did you notice a big, buff lout lurking in the basement named Earl Garf?”

Broker cleared his throat. “Perhaps she observes a shorter decent interval than the rest of us,” he said, stealing Amy’s line, which went over big because Dorothy’s voice swelled rich with malice.

“Oh, that was very good for. .”

“A resort owner?” Broker smiled. Dorothy smiled. And their eyes rattled together briefly like crossed foils.

Enjoying herself, she lowered her eyes, and when she looked up she had leaned forward across the table and tilted her head slightly so her eyes revolved. One hand drifted up and touched her hair.

“Have you ever heard of the old badger game?” she asked.

“Young woman hustles old guy. Young boyfriend in the wings. It crossed my mind.”

“Because it’s the truth. Hank knew it from the start. It’s what attracted him, don’t you see?” Dorothy smiled. “Mr. Broker, do you believe people can change?”

For an ex-cop it was a no-brainer. “No way.”

“Me either. But Hank believed people could change. He thought Jolene could change. So that was his lion- in-winter delusion-that he could help her change before she took him to the cleaners.”

Broker rotated his coffee cup in his fingers. “So the accident up north just accelerated things.”

Dorothy raised her eyebrows. “And tremendously upped the odds. Now she will reap a huge malpractice settlement. She won the lottery.”

“You seem to have accepted all this?” Broker wondered.

“He was guilty. He gave me a very generous divorce settlement. And, despite everything, I knew how unhappy he was. He wanted to be a writer, you see.”

“I thought he was?”

“War Wolf? My God, he did that as a joke. A satire,” she rolled her eyes. “The fact was, he just couldn’t tell a story that wasn’t totally encrusted in bullshit. Then this bizarre windfall of Hollywood money fell on him. He left me. Bought the river house, found a new group of friends, started drinking again, and went back to AA where he discovered Jolene. Don’t you see. . “

She leaned forward. “He couldn’t write a decent story so he bought one to live in. And now Jolene Smith-who never graduated high school, by the way-is writing the ending.”

Broker looked Dorothy straight in the eye. “In the plane, coming out after the storm, he was raving. But he distinctly said to me, these exact words, ‘Tell Cliff Stovall to move the money.’ ”

Dorothy shrugged. “I know Cliff’s wife. She told me Cliff was restructuring Hank’s finances off-limits to Jolene. She was already writing checks to Garf, the boyfriend.”

Broker leaned forward. “But Stovall is dead in some weird scenario in the woods. The same week as Hank?”

Dorothy apparently accepted Stovall’s death with equanimity. “Have you spent much time around drunks, Mr. Broker?”

“No.” Only as much time as he had to. He’d gone through the treatment-therapy motions with some cops when they tanked. But no.

“Do you subscribe to the disease theory of alcoholism?”

Again he balked. And she finished for him.

“No, of course, you’re old school. You might pay lip service to the fashionable babble but underneath you think it’s a moral weakness, don’t you?”

“I think that if you’ve got a drinking problem and you don’t have good health insurance to pay for inpatient treatment you’re shit out of luck in the enlightened state of Minnesota.”

“But is it a moral weakness?”

“Yeah,” Broker said. “If you’re sick all you can do is get well. If you’re bad you can redeem yourself and be good.”

Dorothy laughed. “You and Hank would have gotten along just fine. But whether you believe it’s a disease or a stigma, in the end, it kills people in very ugly ways. Hank, Cliff, and Jolene Smith met in an AA group. They were drunks. You know what they tell alcoholics in treatment? They tell them that one out of three will make it clean and sober. One will struggle back and forth between relapse and recovery. And one will die a pretty horrible death. And that’s exactly what Cliff Stovall did.”

Broker nodded. It was a familiar description. “The guy on either side is going to get it.”

Dorothy raised her cup in a salute and said, “Well, Mr. Broker; it certainly looks like Jolene Smith was the guy in the middle.” After a moment, she sniffed, “Probably not the first time she was in between two men with her ass and her mouth on the same axis.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Broker drove east on I-94 and tried to see Jolene as a lush who was one drink away from insanity and death. Dorothy was right; he didn’t have a lot of insight into conditions like chronic drinking. He’d been one of life’s shock troops. He’d met problems fast, in your face, on the street. He knew how to cuff them and collar them; how to stop the bleeding, clear the airway, and treat for shock. Other people toiled over the long haul, behind closed doors, to mend the collateral human damage.

Dorothy’s barbed comment about men who marry younger women still quivered-right next to J.T.’s Peter Pan Principle remark-and he found himself wondering what happened to old shock troops.

He turned off the freeway, drove aimlessly for a few minutes, and wound up on a desolate country road. The steering wheel jerked and the Jeep bounced around like a steel tray full of rocks, and the rusty suspension found every bump and pothole in the stiff gravel road, and each jolt was a shot of gravity reminding him that-although he’d lived an interesting life-right now he was on his way to turning into a statistic. He was joining the forty-five percent of American couples whose marriages would end in divorce.

Broker ran head-on into Doubt on a lonely country road between two chilly, whispering cornfields.

He couldn’t make the pieces fit for Sommer. Was he on a tangent, trying to relive an exciting part of his life?

So maybe it was time to play the cards in his hand, which did not include a wife and a child or any particular detective brilliance. He’d chop some wood and stack it neatly. He’d look at Sommer one last time and make his gesture and bid farewell. He’d go home and wait for the phone to ring.

There was Amy. Well, she had to live with it. There would be no closure on Sommer; there’d always be a place that hurt when you touched it. Like a dead child.

Onward.

Broker drove east toward the only landmark he could see, the tall NSP smokestack south of Stillwater, and found his way back to the main roads.