little girl.’
Luther seemed no longer interested in the details. ‘Sounds like it’s all over, Ben,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘Listen, did McCorkindale talk to you about the funeral?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s not the greatest assignment,’ Luther added, ‘but I figured you were the one to do it. Kelly wasn’t exactly the most popular officer on the force.’
Ben said nothing.
‘You don’t mind sort of being the department’s representative, do you?’ Luther asked.
‘No,’ Ben said.
‘Good,’ Luther said. He smiled. ‘You know how it is, when a cop goes down, there needs to be a little blue in the boneyard.’ He laughed. ‘No matter who he was.’
Kelly Ryan was buried at three o’clock in the afternoon in a small cemetery not far from his house. A single hearse delivered the body, and no one came with it but an old preacher who’d long ago been designated Police Chaplain and who usually showed up at cop funerals when no private minister was indicated.
‘Did you know Mr Ryan very well?’ the preacher asked as he stepped over to the grave.
‘No.’
‘I didn’t either,’ the preacher said. ‘I just got a call from the Chief’s office. They just said they needed me over here at the cemetery.’ He looked at Ben intently. ‘I don’t suppose there are any relatives?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Ben said. He shrugged. ‘I’m just here to represent the department, I guess.’
The preacher nodded slowly as his eyes fell toward the coffin. ‘I guess he was a good cop.’
Ben thought of Kelly alone behind the battered metal desk of the Property Room or standing by the rows of plain brown file cabinets that lined the walls of the Records Department, of Kelly trudging up the steps with one young girl on either side, taking them to their VD examinations, of Kelly in the bar, soaking up one drink after another: ‘I haven’t had a drink with a cop since I left Bearmatch,’ he’d said, his eyes lolling left and right as if almost unable to look a fellow officer in the eye.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said, ‘I guess he was.’
‘Young man?’
‘Yeah.’
The preacher shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Terrible for a man to die young. Of course, it happens The heart is a tricky thing.’
‘What?’
‘The heart,’ the preacher explained. ‘Sometimes it just gets you, young or not.’
‘Heart attack, you mean?’ Ben asked.
The preacher nodded. ‘That’s the way they say he died. Nobody told you that?’
Ben shook his head. He could see Ryan’s body swinging beneath the lamp, the overturned chair, the black, swollen tongue and round, protruding eyes.
‘No, nobody told me,’ he said.
The preacher smiled politely, then stepped to the head of the grave. A mound of reddish earth stretched out before him, naked as a corpse.
‘Okay to begin?’ he asked Ben.
Ben nodded.
The preacher bowed his head slowly and began to speak, but Ben could hardly hear him over the roar of the diesel trucks that swept loudly up and down the street, groaning under the weight of so much iron and steel. He glanced away from the grave and down the long avenue that led up to it. At the end of it, he could see the high storm fence of the rubber plant, and he realized that if his vision could rise above the line of trees which blocked it, he would be able to see the cold round eye of the storm drain, and then, sweeping to the right, the gray, unpainted goalpost that had briefly marked the grave of Doreen Ballinger. In his mind, they seemed to form a triangle, these three bleak, impoverished graves, but as he continued to consider it, he realized that it was one which was made up of little more than lines drawn over a vast and empty space.
The bar where Kelly had taken Ben the night he died was only a few blocks from the cemetery, and as he sat in the same booth through the evening, Ben tried to imagine the way Kelly had had to live during the long years before he’d finally decided to end it. In his mind, he could see his body hanging grimly at the end of the rope, circling slowly in the small breeze that swept through the bedroom, turning, turning, as if sleeplessly in search of some impossible deliverance. ‘The thing is, I loved her,’ he’d said over the night’s final drink, with his eyes already hooded, his words vaguely slurred. For that, he’d paid a heavy price, living more alone than even Ben could now imagine, alone in a tiny, dilapidated house set down among a raw assortment of clanging factories, without family or friends, mocked by the people he worked with. Death would at last seem lovely after such a life.
Ben took a sip of whiskey and glanced toward the front of the bar. The early evening air had turned bluish- pink, and just over the roof of the rubber plant, he could see the residue of sunset, a spray of purple which rose like a light mist above the city. It might have looked beautiful, setting over a beautiful city, but it looked only dreamy and out of place above the cinderblock and tin-roofed factories which surrounded him. He turned his eyes from the window and glanced about the bar. A few factory workers crouched in a booth a few feet away, while a couple of others leaned against the bar, sipping slowly at their beers while they made idle conversation with the bartender. He wondered if Kelly had known any of the men who trudged into the bar after their shifts, had ever had a single decent talk with even one of them. He could not know for sure, but it struck him that he probably hadn’t. For what would be the use, after all, since the one great experience of his life could not be talked about with any of them. And so Kelly had chosen not to deceive anyone, but to take the isolation instead, the silence, the absolute apartness, and to live with that as long as he could, and when he couldn’t anymore, to go out like a man, asking no one’s pity, apologizing to no one, but simply going out of life in the way he had lived it, utterly and unbreachably alone.
It was almost midnight by the time Ben turned into his own gravel driveway. Across the street, the light in Mr Jeffries’ window was burning brightly, and it was easy for him to imagine the old man tossing sleeplessly on his bed or ambling shakily toward the bathroom. His own father had been like that in the last days, pointlessly moving from one room to the next, dazed, unreachably confused, only half-aware of who or where he was. Ben had gotten up many times in the early morning hours to find him stranded in the hallway, glancing about hopelessly, like a child lost in an unfamiliar city. He had finally died in this state of helpless bafflement. It was as if his mind had simply fallen away, like a body over a ledge, and Ben could still remember their last meal together, the old man mumbling incoherently while he stared expressionlessly at his food. He kept his eyes on Mr Jeffries’ lighted window for a moment longer, as if by watching from a distance, he could somehow help him if he fell, or guide him back to his bed and safely tuck him in as he had his father so many times before.
Suddenly the light went off, and Ben turned up the narrow walkway toward his house, then trudged up the short wooden stairs, unlocked the front door and stepped inside.
He felt the pistol barrel at his ear before he could reach the light switch beside the door, and the very shock of the cold round steel against his head froze him instantly.
‘Don’t move,’ someone said in a tense, trembling voice.
It was a man’s voice, but that was all that Ben could tell.
‘Don’t move,’ the man repeated sternly.
Ben stood motionlessly in the darkness, his right hand still lifted slightly toward the light, his fingers stretched toward it, but halted in midair, stiff, wooden, a puppet’s brittle hand.
‘Just take one step forward,’ the man said.
Ben could feel the barrel as it pressed more deeply into the soft flesh behind his ear.
‘Real slow, now,’ the man said. ‘Just one step.’
Ben took a single step, then stopped immediately. He could feel his eyes burning with an odd fierceness, as if trying to sear away the covering darkness.
‘Keep your hands where they are,’ the man told him. ‘Now take one more step.’
Ben did as he was told.
‘Get on your knees,’ the voice commanded.
‘What?’
