‘You’re hurting,’ she says. ‘We’re both hurting. We need to help each other. Nobody else can do it for us.’
He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. She hopes that a whole lot more will follow that breath. Some tears. Some release. Some emotions other than hate.
‘I should finish these shelves,’ he says.
She nods. She closes her eyes and then opens them again, and a tear falls.
She walks over to the shelving. Puts Megan’s trophy on one of them. Turns it slightly so that it is square on. She steps back and lets the metal reflect the light into her eyes.
‘It looks good there,’ she says. ‘Don’t you think?’
He doesn’t answer, and she steps out of the garage and closes the door softly behind her. She waits for a while, then puts her ear to the door. She remains poised there, her fingers on the handle, praying for a cry of anguish or at least a rhythmic gentle sobbing.
Hearing nothing, she walks away.
He’s crazy.
Has to be.
Nobody throws themselves through a panel of glass like that. That only happens in the movies, where they use fake glass. The real stuff is dangerous, man. It can cut you to ribbons. It can slice through your jugular or another artery, or it can take part of your face off, leaving you permanently disfigured. Nobody in their right mind would risk that.
Which is kinda the point, really. Because Proust isn’t in his right mind, is he? Anyone who could do what he did to those girls has to be certifiable.
Or desperate.
What? No, surely not. Nobody could be that desperate. Sure, Proust is afraid of me, but not as shit-scared as he pretends to be. That’s for show. That’s for the likes of LeBlanc and anyone else who’s willing to act as an audience. Proust is clever. He knows what he’s doing. He’s devious and manipulative and crazy. And that makes him dangerous as fuck.
And let’s not forget guilty. Let’s keep that on the list. Because he is. This act of his is all a smokescreen, designed to hide the real story here. Which is that Stanley Proust murdered those two girls. That’s what I need to hang on to. That’s what I need to make others see too.
‘Cal!’
It’s Tommy LeBlanc who interrupts his thoughts. He’s just come into the squadroom, and he’s standing there with his legs apart and his hands twitching at his sides like he’s a gunslinger calling out his sworn enemy.
‘Lemme guess,’ says Doyle. ‘You wanna talk.’
‘Yes, I want to talk. That okay with you?’
Doyle starts to rise from his chair. ‘Lead on, Macduff.’
He follows LeBlanc out of the squadroom and into the interview room along the hallway. LeBlanc closes the door. He marches across to the window, then back again. Then back to the window, all the while refusing to look Doyle in the face.
‘This an exercise class?’ Doyle asks. ‘I forgot to bring my gym shorts.’
LeBlanc halts and turns angrily on Doyle. ‘This is no joke, Cal. What the hell were you thinking? You promised me you would keep away from Proust.’
‘Uh, no I didn’t.
‘Didn’t you even think to keep me in the loop?’
‘You weren’t here when I decided to go see him.’
‘Jesus Christ. I went to the washroom. I was gone for all of five minutes.’
Doyle shrugs. ‘What can I say? I make snap decisions.’
LeBlanc shakes his head. Paces up and down a little more.
Says Doyle, ‘How is he?’
‘Proust, you mean? You really wanna know? He’s dead, Cal. He didn’t make it.’
Doyle tenses. He stares in disbelief at LeBlanc. Proust dead? No. He can’t be. It can’t end like this.
‘What? No. He can’t be dead.’
‘No, he’s not fucking dead, Cal. But isn’t that what you wanted to hear? Don’t you want him taken out? Wouldn’t you love to see him lying on a cold slab in the morgue?’
Doyle feels a stab of irritation. ‘All right, Tommy, that’s enough. I don’t like being told what my thoughts are, and I don’t like little pranks like the one you just pulled on me. You got this all wrong.’
‘Have I? Have I, Cal? Tell me how I should see this. Tell me what I should think when I see you attack Proust, ripping his shirt off like that. Tell me what conclusions I should reach when you come back from seeing Proust with a huge shiner under your eye, and he ends up with broken ribs and missing teeth. Tell me what I should imagine happened when Proust comes flying through a glass door and you’re the only other guy in the room, and then you continue to assault him. What kind of picture should I be seeing here, Cal?’
‘Not the obvious one. I know how it looks, but it’s phony. Proust jumped through that door. He must have seen you outside and then he ran into his apartment so that I would follow. When he heard you come through the front door he started yelling and then he dived through the glass.’
‘Uh-huh. And the bruises? The fractured rib?’
‘I don’t know. He threw himself down some stairs. He picked a fight in a bar. I have no idea. But I didn’t do it. That I do know.’
‘Then how come it looks so much like you did?’
‘Because that’s what he wants you to think. He wants you seeing him as the victim instead of the perp. He wants your sympathy. He wants me off his back.’
‘Pretty extreme way of doing it, don’t you think?’
‘Absolutely. But we’re not talking normal here, Tommy. Proust is a man who gets his kicks from torturing young girls. That makes him not right in the head. But he’s also a fucking genius. You remember that tattoo on his chest?’
‘Yeah. What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Looked pretty real, didn’t it? Proust coming out of his own chest. That’s what he’s good at. Making pictures that look real but aren’t. He makes people see what he wants them to see. You see a helpless victim, in fear of the cops. I see a murdering sonofabitch. Same guy, though, Tommy. Same guy.’
LeBlanc rubs his chin while he considers this. ‘I don’t know, Cal. I want to believe you, I really do. But you’re not making this easy for me.’ He pauses. ‘I heard a lot of things about you when I came to this precinct, Cal.’
‘That’ll be Schneider singing my praises again, huh? That guy loves me.’
‘Him, but others too. They said a lot of bad things. They said you were a dirty cop. They said-’
‘Yeah, well, Schneider and his buddies can go fuck themselves. They can-’
‘See, now that’s what I mean.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘That’s why I can’t understand you, Cal. All of this stuff with Proust, it suggests they’re right, you know? It says to me, Hey, maybe this guy really is a dirty cop after all. And if you’re not dirty, Cal, then you have to be one of the stupidest cops I’ve ever known.’
‘If you’re giving me a choice, I’ll settle for stupid.’
‘I’m serious. It’s like you have a self-destruct button you have to keep pushing. Take your relationship with Schneider, for example. Did you ever try taking him and his pals for a pizza and a beer and just explaining things to them? You haven’t, have you? They say something negative and you react instantaneously. You blow them off, without a thought for the consequences, without even considering that you’ll have to work with these guys for years to come. And then there’s how you are with me, your partner. All this sneaking around behind my back, again not even caring about how it affects me or the case. You’re not a one-man band, Cal. You have a partner. You’re part of a squad. Why do you insist on forgetting that?’
‘You’re beginning to sound like my mother.’
‘Well, maybe you should listen to your mother a little more often. I may be younger than you. I may be a less experienced detective than you. But Christ do I seem to be a whole lot more aware of what’s going on than you are right now.’
