Land of the Blind (2 page)

S
he likes snow. At least that’s what Caroline has begun telling people who ask why she stays in Spokane instead of going west to Seattle or south to California. The very fact that people continue to ask why she stays in Spokane must mean
something,
although she doesn’t know exactly what. Foolishly or vainly, or both, she had imagined that the question implied she had so much on the ball—that she was so tall and attractive and ambitious—that Spokane was too small and slow a city for someone of her talents. For years she talked about going to law school or trying to get a job with the FBI, but the timing never seemed right; she got caught up in being a police officer, in the romantic idea of it, and briefly in the romantic idea of her old, married patrol sergeant.

But now, at thirty-seven, the question of why she stays has taken on other meanings. Caroline has never married, and she feels the accelerated pace of female aging and worries that features that were once sharp have begun to look severe. She has noticed that older women have one of two kinds of necks: big, bullfrog jowls or tent poles under stretched skin. And while she still draws looks from men, she’s not sure whether that proves something good about her or something bad about men. And each morning she stands in front of the mirror to see which neck she is growing. She’s just finished her fifteenth and hardest year as a police officer, a year in which her mother passed away from cancer. Her two-year relationship with her bartender boyfriend died of less natural causes, and she found herself buried in a long and painful and personal case—the murders of several prostitutes. Now, the old question carries with it an unbearable weight—and an unspoken
still:
Why are you (still) in Spokane? Then, standing in line one morning at a coffee shop, she heard a couple of telemark skiers defend Spokane, and soon she was giving the answer she heard one of them give: I like the snow. And it says something about her life and her lack of friendships and meaningful relationships that no one has ever said, “But Caroline, you hate snow.”

It’s snowing now, light flakes coming in at an angle and temperature of thirty-three degrees, hitting the ground and dissolving right away. Standing in line for a coffee, Caroline watches the windblown flakes and thinks of their precariousness, the conspiracy of temperature and airspeed that created them, and their frailty, making it all the way to earth only to disappear. She pays for her tea and a black coffee for the Loon and walks across the small courtyard to the empty Public Safety Building. She checks her watch: 9:00
P.M
. The Loon has been stewing twenty minutes. Her old married mentor, Alan Dupree, used to say that bad guys are meat: the tougher they are, the longer you cook ’em. This guy is soft, loose at the bone. Twenty minutes ought to be plenty of time for the Loon to give up whatever he’s got to give.

She opens the door and steps inside, removes her jacket and sets it on the chair behind her. The good-looking Loon looks up, reaches for his eye patch, and smooths it absentmindedly, the way a person might pat down a cowlick.

Well, she thinks, here we go. “I’m Caroline Mabry,” she says. “Sergeant Burroughs said you want to talk to a detective.”

Up close he is jittery, and his cheeks are hard and sunken beneath a week’s growth of whiskers. But he doesn’t stink like a derelict. His features are less sharp than she first thought, and he is more familiar. “Are you—?” he begins.

“A detective?” Caroline nods. “I am.”

“Good,” he says. “Okay. Right. Okay. Before we start, is it possible to…can we…is there any sort of
off-the-record
? I mean…can we set some ground rules?”

“Sure.” Caroline smiles and lies with a practiced nonchalance that worries her. “We go off the record all the time.”

“Okay.” He closes his eye and nods. “Well, then…I want to confess.”

“That’s what I hear. And this has something to do with a homicide?” She makes a wager with herself. Robert Kennedy. No, John Lennon. No, wait. He’s the Son of Sam.

The Loon nods. “Yes,” he says. “A homicide.”

“A recent case?”

“I don’t want to talk specifically.”

“Oh, sure,” Caroline says. “Let’s talk generally about homicide. Generally I’m against it. How about you, Mr.—”

He ignores her attempt to get his name. “Please. This is hard enough. I don’t quite know how to start.”

“Well,” she says, “it is customary with this sort of thing to start with a body.”

“No,” he says. “I can’t. It’s not…it’s not like that.”

“No body?” Of course, she thinks. He’s committed his crime on some astral plane. He’s murdered someone’s soul.

“No, I mean…it just…this isn’t an unsolved case from the newspaper or something. It’s nothing that you know about.” And he adds, “Yet.”

“Okay. You tell me. Where should we start?”

“I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to do here,” he says.

“I’m trying to understand, Mr.—”

He catches her gaze. His one eye goes back and forth between hers, as if trying to choose the friendlier of the two. “Are you religious, Caroline?”

She is surprised he has remembered her first name, but she lets it go and thinks about the question, the angle. If she says yes, she is religious, does the Loon experience a moment of epiphany and give up the whole thing? Or does he shy away, thinking she’ll be judgmental? If she says no, does he close up because she is a heathen? Or does he feel liberated, able to talk freely? She decides to go with God.

“I have my faith,” she says, and has to look away because that’s an even bigger lie than the one about going off the record.

“I wish I did,” says the Loon, and rubs his face.

Caroline leans across the table and puts her hands out, palms up, and thinks of the last car she bought and the salesman who struck this pose: What’s it going to take for you to drive this car off the lot today? “There’s something you want to get off your chest.”

“Yes,” the Loon says.

“You told the sergeant you wanted to confess.”

“Yes.”

“Then you need to tell me what you did. And who you did it to.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because that’s what a confession is.”

“I don’t think so,” he says, and cocks his head. “Isn’t the confession separate from the thing being confessed? There’s the crime, the action, which is crude and violent and without context. And then there is the confession of the crime, which is
all
context,
all
motivation and—” He looks at the ceiling. “I don’t know. Cleansing.

“I mean, there must be millions of crimes every day. But a confession? A real confession? I’d guess those are pretty rare.”

She stares at him, drawn in by his extravagant Loon logic and that nagging familiarity. Who is he? She mentally shaves him, trims the hair. Who does she know with an eye patch? “Look,” she says, “you can’t confess without naming a crime and a victim.”

For the first time, he is engaged. “Of course you can,” he says. “The victim is just a shadow, an expression of the idea of a specific crime. The crime is the real thing, the actual, the ideal, the light behind the shadow.”

“Are we still talking about a confession?” Caroline asks.

“Yes,” says the Loon. “A priest doesn’t want to know whom you lusted after or what you stole; he wants to know whether you are sorry. God doesn’t want names.”

“Then maybe you should’ve turned yourself in to a priest,” she says. “Maybe you should confess to God.”

“I don’t believe in God,” he says. “I believe in the police.”

This whole thing is getting away from her. They stare across the small table at each other and she thinks of college, of sitting up late at night after bottles of wine, in conversations just like this one, usually involving some horny sophomore poet or philosopher, just before he changed his major to business and got engaged to someone else. A couple of times, she found herself seduced by a young man’s boozy rationalization of the shortness of life and the subjective nature of morality. She’s always had three weaknesses when it comes to men: dark eyes, big pecs, faulty logic.

She considers the Loon and loses herself in his one dark eye, which seems to compensate for its missing partner by exuding twice the emotion. The eye floats in its socket like a deep blue Life Saver. “I’m just not sure what I can do with a confession that doesn’t admit to a crime,” she says quietly.

“I’m not asking you to do anything, Caroline. Just listen.”

She checks her watch: 9:40
P.M
. Maybe the desk sergeant is right. Cut this nut loose and she’s home in an hour and twenty minutes watching TV. Still, this could keep her from filling the last of her shift with paperwork.

Apparently he sees her indecision. “Look,” he says, “you probably get people admitting crimes all the time. But what are you getting, really? You know what the guy did or you wouldn’t have brought him in. And he knows you know. He’s not confessing. He weighs his options and tells you only as
much as you already know, as much as he can get away with. You trick him into telling more, but you both know the rules. It’s a formality…confirmation of what everyone already knows.

“But this thing”—he scratches at the table—“this thing I want to tell you…nobody knows about it. Nobody knows what I’ve done.”

The quiet in the room is different from normal quiet between cop and suspect or even cop and loon, and Caroline shifts uncomfortably.

“Tell me this,” he says. “When was the last genuine confession you heard? I don’t mean excuses or plea bargains or justifications or extenuating circumstances or coerced testimony or the half-truths of confidential informants.” His chin rests on the table and his arms are spread out. “When was the last time a man came in and opened himself up, unburdened his soul, when nothing was compelling him to do so? When was the last time someone gave you the truth?”

“I don’t…” She feels flushed. “You want a confession without consequences?”

“If you mean prison, I know that’s a possibility.” He pulls back a bit, smiles sadly, and Caroline begins to think that maybe this Loon really did something, maybe there’s more to this than delusions and skipped meds. “But this thing that happened,” he says carefully, “was the result of a lifetime of harassment. Betrayals and pressures. It will never happen…it
could
never happen again. It was a radiator boiling over.

“Consequences?” He squeezes his eyes shut. “All I have left is consequences.”

It is quiet for a moment. “Okay,” Caroline says. “You want to…confess.” She’s used that word a hundred times and it never sounded like this. “You want to confess without incriminating yourself. And then what? Go home?”

He doesn’t answer, just looks down.

“Well,” she says, “that would certainly speed up the criminal justice system.”

It is Friday night. There are no other detectives in these back offices. It is one of the idiocies of police work: the criminals work nights and weekends, while the detectives are home for the six o’clock news. The office behind her is dark. What harm can there be in indulging this Loon for an hour?

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll do it. I’ll hear your…confession.”

“Thank you.” He looks around the room. “Okay.”

They stare at each other for a few seconds more and he takes a series of deep breaths. Finally, he leans forward. “Do I start or—”

“There are a number of—”

“It’s just, I’ve never…how do you go about this?”

“Well, usually we just talk. We can tape confessions. We can do it on video.”

He looks uncomfortable with all of these options.

“Sometimes we have the suspect write out his version of events and sign it.”

The Loon perks up. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s it. I’d like to write it. Yes. It should be written down. With context and meaning. That’s the only way.”

“I’ll get you a pad and a pen,” she says.

“And some more coffee?”

She grabs his cup and exits the interview room. She leaves the door unlocked; he’s not under arrest. All around her, the Major Crimes office registers its indifference to the semantic games of Caroline and this crank. After all, she thinks, a confession is a confession is…Dark computer screens track her across the room, colleagues’ family pictures watch from their perches on the soft cubicle walls. At her desk—no pictures—Caroline pulls a legal pad from the top drawer and grabs a pen. She walks out front and nods to the sergeant as she fills the Loon’s cup with stale patrol coffee.

“So was I right?” The sergeant looks up from a snowboarding magazine. “He a fuckin’ wack job?”

“A shithouse rat,” she says.

“Yeah, I figured.” He returns to his report. “You gonna cut him loose?”

“In a minute.”

When she comes back the Loon looks uncertain, as if he’s having second thoughts. She sets his coffee down and he takes it gratefully.

“Can I ask you something?” he says.

She waits.

“Have you ever been responsible for someone’s death?”

She notes the timidity of the words. Not
Have you ever killed someone
but
Have you ever been responsible for someone’s death
. “Yes,” she answers, to both questions.

“What was it like? For you?”

“Better than for the dead guy,” she says. But he doesn’t respond to the joke and she remembers the feeling, the smell, the gun in her hand, the man no longer moving toward her, finished. “It was bad,” she says, more quietly.

“Afterward, it was hard…personally?”

She doesn’t answer.

“I just wonder if it’s possible to live with something like that,” he says.

No sleep, shallow breathing, hand vibrating, the flash when she closed her eyes. Caroline looks down.

“I’ve been having these dreams,” he says, “where I did something wrong. Something terrible? But it’s almost like I’ve done it in another world. Like no one around me knows. But when I wake up…” He swallows. “Do you ever have dreams like that?”

She thinks, Fuck you, but says simply, “No,” and slides the legal pad to him.

The Loon picks up the pen and writes across the top of the page:
Confession.
His handwriting is precise and practiced. He considers his one word, then crosses it out and writes
Statement of Fact.
He exhales, as if that were it. Then he shakes his arms, cricks his neck, and looks around the room. “Could I be alone to do this? It won’t take long.”