Land Of The Blind

Caroline waits.

'I'm sure it's not what you think.'

She smiles. 'How do you know what I think?'

'He's not a criminal.'

'That may be,' she says. 'But if he is, and if you know something about it and you withhold information from me, then you might be in as much trouble as he is.'

Stanton chews his lip, thinks about it. 'Let me talk to him. I can straighten all this out in twenty minutes.'

'Tell me what this is about and I'll let you talk to him.'

They are at an impasse. He regards her, as if measuring her resolve. 'I can't. I'm sorry.' Stanton looks away. 'Can you take him a note?'

'Sure,' she says, and offers a page of her notebook and a pen. 'Put your phone number on there too.'

He writes something, tears the sheet out and folds it, gives it to her.

'I'll have him call as soon as he's finished with his statement.'

'Thank you,' he says.

'So what happened?' Caroline points to the small apartment. 'Guy runs for Congress and ends up in a shithole like this?' She tries to sound conversational. 'That's a little weird, isn't it? Did somebody steal all his money?'

But Richard Stanton is spooked and doesn't want to talk anymore. 'Look, my loyalty lies with Clark. I don't want to say anything until I talk to him or to his lawyer.'

'Sure,' Caroline says. 'I understand.' But something about the word 'loyalty' doesn't sit right with her. She says, 'I talked to Susan.'

He flinches and looks up at her. Caroline keeps her face still, inscrutable.

Stanton doesn't look away, gives her a practiced smile. 'How is Susan?'

'She's great,' Caroline says. 'Frisky as a colt.'

Finally, Stanton has to look down. Caroline waves the piece of paper with the note on it. 'I'll make sure Clark gets this. I'm sure he'll appreciate your loyalty.'

'Thank you,' Stanton mumbles. He starts to leave, hesitates, then walks quickly toward a car parked across the street: a BMW 700 series. He presses the keyless entry and the door chimes for him. It strikes Caroline that the candidate's wife seems to be doing pretty well and the candidate's campaign manager seems be doing pretty well. But the candidate himself is living like a freshman. The BMW pulls away.

In her own car, she opens the note. 'He was sick. Nothing you could have done,' Stanton has written. 'Call me. – Richard.'

She wads up the note and throws it to the floorboard of her car. Then she pulls out her cell phone and calls the front desk. The sergeant says he just checked on the Loon in Interview Two. 'He's still at it.'

'Thanks. I'll be back in a little while.'

'So what's this about?' the sergeant asks. 'What's he writing in there?'

'My resignation,' Caroline says.

She hangs up the call and is about to drive back to the cop shop when she looks up and sees the sun at the horizon, maybe twenty minutes from setting. She's been at work now for twenty-eight straight hours. She looks down at the phone in her hand and taps out a number that she knows by heart but hasn't dialed in months.

'Hey,' she says when a man answers. 'Is this a bad time?'

When he says it isn't, she feels herself slump forward. 'Look,' she says, 'I really need to talk. Is there any way you could meet me for coffee?'

4

DUPREE IS WAITING

Dupree is waiting at the coffee shop, the same place she visited this morning. It feels like a week since she's been here, since she came downtown to see if Pete Decker was dead. The pierced girl is bringing Dupree a cup of coffee. She smiles when she sees Caroline: 'Another chai?'

Alan Dupree stands up. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt beneath a denim jacket. 'Hey there.' He's a little shorter than she is, and a lot balder. He has softened a bit around the middle since he took retirement from the police department six months ago. Even so, the blue eyes and the easy movement are the same as they've always been, the same as the day she met him thirteen years ago. And when he sits down she feels the old stuff, the sharp attraction in her throat, the desire to forget things she knows to be true.

She clears her throat. 'Thanks for coming.'

'My pleasure. You saved me from pinochle with the in-laws.'

'How's Debbie?' Caroline asks. Dupree and his wife split up for a short time last year, just before Alan retired, and Caroline imagines their resuscitated marriage as tentative in some way, incomplete. Or maybe that's just what she likes to imagine.

'She's good. We're doing fine. She likes me better retired.'

'And the kids?'

'They like me too. Staci asked me today what boys use their wieners for.'

'Yeah, I've been wondering that myself.'

'I told her nobody knows for sure.'

'And how's the dark side?' Caroline asks. Since retiring, Dupree has worked as an investigator for a couple of defense lawyers, applying the same knowledge and energy to freeing bad guys that he once used to catch them.

'Great,' he says. 'The evil one gives great bennies.'

Caroline has known other cops who retired and went to work immediately for defense lawyers, splitting from themselves, revolting against the framework that held them in place. She thinks about her own recent crisis and wonders if she could ever work for the other side like that. She doesn't think so.

'I don't think you called me down here to ask what boys do with their wieners.'

'Actually…' Caroline tries to smile at his joke, but her eyes are drawn down to the table and her cup of tea.

Dupree reaches out and squeezes her hand. 'Are you okay?'

'I don't know,' she says. 'There's this…' And she starts to call it a case, but she catches herself and suddenly it's all so ridiculous, so unlikely, she has the urge to simply drop it, go home and forget the whole thing. Perhaps she's known all along she was being obsessive and irrational, but it seemed harmless until now, when she can imagine the look of concern on Dupree's face.

'Tell me,' he says.

And though she doesn't want to, she's too tired to not talk. She starts slowly, Friday at nine, and she can hear herself pronouncing the right words – Davenport, eye patch, homicide, confession, legal pads, twenty- one hours – but she can tell by the look on Dupree's face that the story is not translating, that he's not getting it – why she'd spend the whole weekend running down the people this guy knows, making sure they're still alive (she thinks it must sound like a normal murder investigation in reverse, starting with the killer and looking for the body). 'I know it sounds crazy, Alan, but you can see how I got caught up in this, right?'

He doesn't say anything.

'You think I'm losing it,' she says.

'When was the last time you slept, Caroline?'

'I know what you're thinking-'

'When?'

'Night before last.'

'Two days without sleep. Are you drinking? Taking something?'

'No.' She laughs, or makes that sound anyway; it feels like a cramp in her chest.

'You call Spivey at some point during all of this?'

'Yes,' she says. 'He told me he wouldn't authorize overtime.'