Good Morning, Killer

“What’re you missing?” asked Mike.

Certain people make you feel uplifted just by asking a question in a certain tone. By telling you with their hazel eyes, however lined and worn, there will always be enough to share: their acceptance of you, but rarer still, the willingness to see you clearly, to pause and sit with you through it, even if it’s small.

“I can’t get the victim statement. She was traumatized to the throat. It’s like he choked her into silence.”

“Was that his ritual?”

I nodded. “We’ve got the same MO on a case in Florida. You know he’s going to do it again. If he hasn’t already a dozen times.” And for a moment we fell silent.

Mike gave me a sad smile.

I smiled back. “Don’t you bozos have a robbery to solve?”

“This is still my favorite,” Mike said, tapping the wall.

Out of two hundred or so photos, he had unswervingly picked the one taken on the robbery where Andrew and I met. It was up there as a joke, and Mike had picked it because it was the most unflattering shot imaginable. As the automatic camera kept clicking away, Andrew and I had been interviewing the managers with our backs to the lens. We looked like a pair of dodoes. He had on the pretentious motorcycle jacket and his legs were awkwardly splayed like he was getting ready for a broad jump; my trousers were wrinkled and my ass looked enormous.

“Can I take this down now?” I asked.

“You can take it down when the case is solved,” admonished Mike as he left. Well, that would never be. Most bank robberies are never cleared.

“Nobody should ever see what their hair looks like from behind,” commented Barbara soothingly.

“Do you remember this?” I tapped the photo again.

It was a devilish question, since Barbara Sullivan, whom we used to call the Human Computer, has total recall of every job on the board. That’s her gift: matching new information with cold cases.

“It was called Mission Impossible,” she rattled off, “because he came through the roof, a two-eleven silent, an early-bird job that came into our office around eight-thirty in the morning, just before the branch was opening. It was in Santa Monica—” “I remember you saying right away, ‘This stinks.’”

“Well, yeah, because it was a new player who was operating. We hadn’t seen anything like it before, and when we looked at the loss, it had all indications of an inside job. Remember? He held the managers in the vault?”

“He ambushed them while they were doing opening procedures. They were toast.”

Then I recalled Andrew had trained those young managers during that bank security course he gave for the police department. When he showed up, they were so relieved to see a familiar face they fell apart in his arms.

“Definitely an inside job,” Barbara was remembering. “They cut the hinges and came down through a hatch in the roof.”

The first thing we did, Andrew and I climbed up there, through a utility room jammed with old files and air- conditioning ducts. We scaled a wooden ladder and stepped out into the fresh air, already slightly giddy from the unexpected height and the profound attraction we were simultaneously feeling.

The avenues below were lined with high spindly palms. Cars filled the dealerships and rooftop garages, cars moved at a reasonable pace through the blacktop town. Walls of high-rises blocked our view of the beach but the glittery swell of the sea rose to the farthest sight line. In the low commercial buildings — salmon, tan, lime and brick — there were tiny enclaves of calm: a hammock on a patio, miniature umbrella tables.

“Had a jumper over there the other day.” Andrew had indicated a shorefront hotel. “A woman takes a room, jumps out the window. Turns out, five years ago to the day, her daughter jumped from that same room.”

Andrew was simply saying it, in a tone that knew burglars who crapped on kitchen tables, grandfathers who molested their granddaughters, suicides who cut off their own testicles, killers who strangled pregnant women with electric cords or murdered their girlfriends with table legs, kerosene or barbecue forks; a tone that comes of shaking the cockroaches out of your clothes before you enter your house at night, that knows there is no such thing as the bottom, knows there is suffering and concedes to all of it.

But doesn’t jump.

That’s what drew me to him. He knew things, and saw things, and had fashioned a way for himself to keep on looking at them, because he wanted to help. On one of our first dates, he took me to an Al-Anon meeting (his adoptive father had been an alcoholic) — not the meeting he regularly attended, because that was private to him, but a different one, in the back room of a deli, so I could see what he was about and the road he had traveled, and when we all held hands at the end and said the Serenity Prayer, it was like an aphrodisiac; I was so moved by the ability of this hard man to close his eyes in a group of people, and give in to it. I only wanted more.

The light up there on top of the bank was splendid and all-encompassing, the sun doing double flips between the pastel rooftops and the glossy blue sky, and an ocean breeze flapped Andrew’s tie and parted and reparted his black hair so I could see his scalp and the dryness of his lips, and then looking became shameful because he was looking at me, too, and I didn’t know what he could or could not see but feared he could see everything — my longing, misdirection, lonesomeness and rage — and tears gathered in the corners of my eyes, but I smiled and blotted them with fingertips as if it were the wind.

“Something new just came up on that caper,” Barbara was saying thoughtfully as she contemplated the Mission Impossible photo.

Some of us can recall that Reggie Jackson hit three home runs on three swings in the final game of the 1977 World Series; Barbara Sullivan can quote the take from every heist on the wall.

“They recovered a ski mask.”

“A ski mask?”

“The guy wore a ski mask, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, they found it — a janitor found it — kicked behind some boxes. About two months ago.”

“That branch was robbed half a dozen times,” I said. “Could belong to anyone.”

“But Mission Impossible went in through a door in the roof.” Barbara had moved to the computer. “Used a Makita drill with a diamond blade, like a knife through butter.”

“You’re amazing.”

“Then,” said Barbara, laughing at the audacity, “he climbs down a ladder to a utility room, goes out to the second-floor employee lounge and sits up there for a couple of hours watching TV until the bank opens. Life is good.” It summoned up the smell of enclosed waxy floors that had greeted Andrew and me when we cautiously entered the lounge — empty except for a TV set on a dusty Art Deco coffee table — and a stench I first made as sweat that turned out to be the dead meat aroma left by the McDonald’s the bandit ate for breakfast.

“The ski mask was found in the utility room where the ladder was, where you go up to the roof.” Barbara nodded toward the information on the screen. “Black nylon, standard-issue army surplus store.”

“You know this same guy, Detective Berringer, caught the Santa Monica kidnapping?” I said tapping the photo insistently. “We’re working together again, how funny is that?”

“How funny is that?” She had instantly picked up on my tone.

That was the devilish part. I had to tell someone. I wanted her to know. This is how we give ourselves away.

“We’re going out.”

“You’re going out with a detective?”

I nodded.

“On a case you’re both working?”

I nodded again.

Barbara, the Irish girl, said, “Oy vey.”

“Thanks for reserving judgment.”

“I’m not passing judgment. He looks pretty cute from the rear.”

“He’s hot.”

“Divorced?”

“Twice.”