Betters. Was it ’99? Maybe ’98? He opened to the first page-the summary. Alfonzo Betters, resident Orleans Place, NE, DOA Hospital Center, 25 July 1995. Frank got a vague feeling of unease. Couldn’t have been almost six years ago. Seems like ’99,’98 at most. He looked through the rest of the folder-reports, interviews, neighborhood canvassing notes. He looked across the desk to Jose.
“We get some music?” he asked.
Jose got up. The CD player was on a file cabinet behind him. Over on his side, Frank had the coffeemaker. They had a rule. Whoever complained about the coffee got the job of making it. The last switch had been seven years before, when Frank had muttered something about the coffee needing to be stronger.
“What you want?”
“Gould?”
Jose found the CD, and moments later, Glenn Gould’s rendition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations filled the small office.
Whenever he heard the Variations, Frank imagined Bach, maybe with a glass or two under his belt after dinner, sitting down to amuse himself, composing music that didn’t have a beginning or an end. The musical equivalent of playing solitaire. Like Monet doodling or Rodin whittling. He looked at the Betters folder. It seemed to have gotten thicker.
“Know what I’m going to do when we retire?” he asked Jose.
“When we retire” was a game they played. They hadn’t played it at the start, twenty-six years earlier, when they’d gotten out of the academy. They began eleven years later. After the hostage thing that had gone so badly wrong. In their game, they had ridden motorcycles through Mexico, taken flying lessons, run a deep-sea fishing charter out of Key Largo.
“What this time?” Jose asked, obviously not enthusiastic about digging through the papers.
Frank motioned toward the CD player. “There’s what, thirty-some of those?”
Jose looked at the CD label on the jewel box. “Thirty-two.”
“Well, I’m gonna memorize them. Get so I can say, ‘That’s number twenty-four.’ ”
“Sure. That’ll win us a lotta bar bets.”
Frank thought about it.
“Now, the Platters,” Jose went on, “or Armstrong… if you could name everything they did…”
Frank nodded. “Yeah. In sequence.”
Simultaneously both men knew the game was over. Their eyes met, then went to the folders in front of them.
Alfonzo Betters’s folder lay opened to the first page, the Form 120. In the file cabinet, folders for Michael Darnal. Louis Fleming.
The names went on: Frederick Hankins. Ambrose Murray. Joseph Jameson. Deshawn Simkins. James Rivers. Eight cases. Eight out of the fifteen hundred in Eleanor’s printout.
From his desk drawer, Frank took a wire-bound steno pad, the narrow kind used by reporters. He turned it lengthwise, opened it, and penciled a horizontal line from left to right across two pages.
He worked until ten, slogging through the Betters folder. Photographs, canvass questionnaires, sketches, phone records, the initial report, media clip files, the autopsy report, and investigator notes, notes, and more notes. Making sense out of other people’s words-brutal going.
As he worked, he marked the line in the steno pad, ticking off events in Betters’s life and in the investigation after his death. On pages following the timeline, Frank compiled a list of witnesses and others interviewed. Just after ten, he closed the folder and stretched to ease his tightened neck and back. He stared at the closed folder. Not quite seeing it as much as looking beyond it.
Picturing the killing of Alfonzo Betters. Imagining how the people, places, and times-like so many jigsaw pieces-fit together. He’d opened the folder and Betters was just another name.
Now Betters-Alfonzo David Betters-had shape and substance. It was as if he, Frank, had run time backward, like a reversed videotape.
He’d reassembled the disconnected body splayed out on the autopsy table. Reversed the trajectories of the four nine-millimeter slugs that had demolished heart and lungs. Ridden with Alfonzo as he drove his silver ’93 Lexus along the Strip on Tuesday night, July 25, 1995.
Already weary, he turned to a fresh page in the steno pad and reached for Michael Darnal’s folder.
Late-afternoon sun slanted through the window and onto the cork bulletin board with its yellowed clippings and curling Wanted posters. Paper plates and sandwich wrappings filled a deli carry-out box on the bookcase behind Frank.
He was opening his seventh folder. James Charles Rivers… DOB 14 May 1973… Resident Barry Farms… DOA 17 Sept 1996… multiple gunshot wounds…
He paused to leaf through the steno pad, reviewing the timelines. Frustration inside him was a voice screaming down an endless corridor of interwoven dates, places, names. The review board-Chief Noah Day’s review board-had the authority to close cases administratively. Department Directive 304.1 spelled out the requirements.
And 304.1 let you close cases on stuff you’d never get into court-suppositions, conjectures, hearsay. Frank hated 304.1. You close a case that way, you feel greasy. You want to take a shower. He and Jose served once on the board. They’d balked so hard and so often and raised so much hell that Day had never picked them to serve again. And here Emerson had thrown them into this goddamn pit, and no matter how they got out, they were going to get dirty.
“I’ll get it.” Jose spoke before Frank even realized the phone had been ringing. Jose listened, then hung up.
“R.C.,” he said.
Frank shook his head, trying to clear the brain-numbing fog of names, dates, and deadly dull bureaucratic police prose.
“Says he’s got something.” Relief lightened Jose’s voice.
Frank shut the Rivers file with a prayer of thanksgiving. You went when Renfro Calkins called. You did what Calkins said do. And in return, Calkins, the department’s forensics magician, would make fibers, dust, blood spatters, and a thousand other minute things tell stories about where they’d been and what they’d seen.
Frank got up and followed Jose. He was at the door when he stopped. He returned to his desk and rummaged through the center drawer till he found a small cardboard box, then slipped it into his jacket pocket.
Here.” Renfro Calkins, a wiry man in a white lab jacket, stood at a counter, a clipboard with an aluminum cover under one arm.
In front of Calkins was a comparison microscope-actually two microscopes, side by side and joined at the hip with a single set of stereo eyepieces. Calkins motioned to the instrument and moved aside to make room.
Jose stepped to the microscope and began adjusting the eyepieces.
Frank reached into his pocket and pulled out the cardboard box. He handed it to Calkins.
“What’s this?”
“Found it at the flea market yesterday,” Frank explained.
Calkins thumbed open a flap and shook a thimble into his palm. The overhead fluorescent flashed bars across the lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses. He turned the thimble to see the delicate carving around its base, and smiled in delight.
“Early-nineteenth-century scrimshaw,” he declared, eyes still on the thimble. He rotated it once more, then focused on Frank.
“I thought it might have been plastic,” Frank said.
Calkins grinned and shook his head. “Ivory, Frank, ivory.” His eyes returned to the thimble. “Beautiful, beautiful,” he whispered, half to himself, half to the thimble.
“It’s yours,” Frank said.
Calkins rewarded Frank with a kid’s smile of surprise. He reached for his wallet. “How much…?”
Frank shook his head. “Nothing. It was in with some marbles I bought.”
“But…”
Frank waved him off. “Next time you buy a box of thimbles and find a marble…”
Calkins gave the thimble another once-over, put it back in the box, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
