Simple (3 page)

“I feel like I died,” she said.

“No. You are just beginning to live.” He kissed her cheek.

“This is not who I am.”

“Turned on, you mean? Unfortunately it is.”

“I have to talk to him.”

He thought for a long time. Finally he said, “If you behave, if you really behave, I'll get you home safe and I'll set up a meeting with him and I'll call you.”

“You don't have to set up a meeting. I'll see him at work tomorrow.”

“Wouldn't it be better if he could come away from Harrisburg tonight or early tomorrow before work? To your little house. So you could really have some time with him—to talk, to cry, to work it out.”

“You said he had a breakfast meeting.”

“Maybe I can get him to can it, cut out of Harrisburg at midnight.”

“He's never come to my house … I have a house.”

“I know, I know, he told me. Wouldn't that be better? A little time in your place? I'll tell him you're
not
overemotional. I'll promise him you won't go into work looking like a basket case. Everything you said to me, you can say it all again. You can ask him questions. Work it out.”

She appeared to rehearse all she would say. Was it absently—she took another swallow of her drink.

“You have values,” he said. “You've persuaded me.”

“Not stupid values. Real ones. I look around. I watch people. I know what's what even though you don't think I do.”

“And what do you make of me, then?”

“Only half of what you say is true.”

“Fifty percent?”

“If that,” she said firmly.

Top of her class, a rising star, and stupid, stupid, stupid.

“I'll make sure you get home okay,” he said. “You need a shower and a nap. You want to look good tonight in case I can get him over there. In any case you want to look good tomorrow at the office, right?”

She nodded. She had a hard time walking a straight line, coming out of the bar. She weaved a bit driving home. He stayed two or three cars behind the Ford Focus.
Buy American,
he said to himself. He saw her house up ahead, which he'd scoped out a couple of days ago, but she didn't park in front as he assumed she would. She went around the block to the back, and he followed. He watched her park there. He slowed down enough to see her walk to the back door, and in his rearview mirror he saw her talk to a guy who was working on her porch, sawing something or other. They seemed friendly with each other. He didn't want to linger. He kept going.

He called his bosses and made his report and took an order that came at him in cryptic terms and that he made them repeat even though he wasn't surprised by it. Still, even though he expected what he heard, it hit him in the gut, and he threw up everything that was in his stomach, Scotch and all. His face felt funny—his eyebrows descending like a Neanderthal's over his eyes. He brewed a pot of coffee, strong.

He was supposed to use a guy named Frank Santini. But who was this guy? Todd had thought it through a million ways. He was prepared for exigencies. He didn't trust anybody else. He trusted himself. Simon flicked his television on and off a few times. Pregame this and that. He couldn't concentrate on the news. After a few cups of coffee, he went out to a payphone and called Santini. He didn't like the way the guy sounded, so he said, “I'll call you back if I need you.” It was only seven thirty-five. He made a decision. He called a woman he saw sometimes and made a dinner plan. He paced for a bit and then he called Cassie to tell her the little date with Mike was set up. He said Michael would come to see her when he got out of the meeting in Harrisburg. He warned again, “The meeting might go until twelve, one. Will you hear if Mike taps at the door? He wants to come in the back door, okay?”

“I'll hear. I'll sleep on the couch,” she said.

He pictured Mick being photographed all this time, smiling at the camera, arm around his wife's waist. A good dinner. A drive to Harrisburg. Smiling and easy.

He called Haigh in Harrisburg and asked, “Connolly's staying overnight, right?”

THREE

FRIDAY, AUGUST 14

COLESON AND
McGranahan had had a run of junkies and bums and drive-bys and not much of anything else for a good four years, which rendered them second class in the homicide squad. Coleson was more philosophical about it than McGranahan, who tended toward bitterness. They were eating their lunches at their adjoining cubicles and talking about the latest shootout (Artie Dolan was the principal on that one; drugs and gangs and whatnot in Homewood) when they got a call. They fully expected their victim to be a junkie or maybe the barrel-end of a holdup, especially when dispatch said they were needed in lower Oakland.

They carried their lunches to the fleet car and got moving as McGranahan continued to get information by phone from a patrol car cop who was already there at the crime scene.

Coleson drove.

McGranahan listened and let out a surprised grunt.

“What? Clue me in, for God's sake,” his partner said.

McGranahan ended the call, tucked his phone in his breast pocket where he liked it. “Guy who works there called it in. Found the body. Said the woman is a student—law school.”

“Anything else?”

“Cop says she's gorgeous.”

They both paused to think about the goodie that had come their way: Christie was not back from vacation, Dolan was working the Homewood shootout, Greer and Potocki were off on some cold case for the afternoon, and here it was, finally, luck.

“Parkview. Not a bad street,” McGranahan said. “Sometimes students do live there, though, mostly undergrads I thought. This one was going to start law school. She had a job, too, apparently. She was supposed to be at work today.”

“Patrol knew to hold on to the guy who called it in?”

“Oh, yeah. We'll be talking to him, all right.”

When the phone rang again and McGranahan answered it, he was hardly surprised that his rotten luck had so quickly made a reappearance. It was Christie, his boss. What kind of vacation was the guy on? What kind of radar did he have? They'd only got the case minutes ago.

“Commander! Good to hear from you,” McGranahan said.

Coleson hit the heel of his right hand to his forehead, hard.

“I just happened to call in to the office,” Christie said. “Heard there was something doing.”

“Seems that way so far. Are you in town, then?”

“We're on the road. It's storming up at the Cape, so we left early—is it raining there, too?”

“Not today.”

“Well, anyway, we were vacationed out, or I was, Marina and the kids not so much, but it was raining, so we cut it short by a day. I'll be back late tonight. If you need me, feel free to call. Anytime.”

“Sure. Thanks, Boss. We're just getting to the scene now. We'll be thorough.”

“I know you will.”

He hung up. “Cripes. Let's be miracle boys. We have about three hours to enjoy ourselves.”

“Three?”

“Well, maybe six, seven.”

McGranahan called for a Forensics team even as they spotted the small brick house.

Two patrol cars were in front. Neighbors gathered in groups, talking.

The patrol cop met them halfway up the sidewalk. “She's in the living room. The back door was open when the guy found her—he said. Her car's parked out back.”

They went inside.

It was the cleanest murder they'd ever seen. Orderly living room, newly painted. Perfectly clean kitchen. No blood. Young woman in a white nightgown on the living room floor. Marks on her neck, and her hands up as if she'd been fighting it, and a tear in her nightgown at the sleeve. That was about it. Otherwise you'd think aneurism, some freak thing.

Coleson said, “Call in the others. We're going to want Dolan and Greer and Potocki at the very least.” He listed, using his fingers: “People she worked with. Neighbors. People at the law school. The guy who found her. You said thorough. Let's be thorough. Oh. And I choose Greer to tell the parents. I understand she hates doing it.”

“Okay by me.”

“The vic has a computer upstairs,” the patrol cop said.

“Those are useful. You touch it?”

“No.”

“I'll go look,” Coleson said.

“I'm coming, too,” McGranahan said.

Before they got away, the patrol cop hurried to add, “Nothing is messed up, but the purse it looked like she used? It doesn't have a wallet.”

Clearly the kid hoped to move up to detective in record time. “Thanks.” The two middle-aged detectives tromped up together to look at whatever there was to see—still life with computer. Then Coleson said, “Let's peel Potocki away from Greer and put him on the computer.”

McGranahan assented. “Probably what Boss would do.”

They went back downstairs, studied the body, walked around. Coleson said—and he was aware of channeling Christie—“I don't like it. This was one anal robber. Door isn't bashed, no windows broken. Of course she might have been careless, left the door open, heard something, then she came down, found somebody … That would fit, but I don't think so. Somebody with a key would also fit.”

“Couple of wood shavings,” McGranahan said. “Not much. Almost a token.”

“Somebody's going to know something. Between the neighbors and the people at the office. Right?”

“Oh, yeah.”

McGranahan was already on the phone, calling for some help.

*   *   *

CHRISTIE HAD FELT
his blood spike at the news of the murder, and he had the unmistakable wish to be there, working the case. He tried to talk himself into letting it go to others on the squad who wanted and even needed the credit because after all, he told himself, driving along, he was officially still on vacation; everybody needed a break; Coleson and McGranahan were good, not creaky like Nellins and Hrznak. Marina watched him. He knew she was reading his thoughts.

“Who's the victim?” she asked finally.

“A young woman. A law student.”

“Sad. Hard case, easy case?”

“Can't tell yet. I caught them just as they started for it.”

“Vibrations,” she said.

He told Marina, tipping his head toward the backseat, where his daughter had been staring out the window, slack-jawed, and his son, who wore ear buds, nodded his head to something he was teaching himself to like, “I should go in tonight after I get them to their mother's house.”

She bit her tongue.

“You have to work
tonight
?” Julie asked, coming alert. He wondered what kinds of things she thought about on the long drive. What did she notice, what did she see?

Marina began arranging the things around her seat. She was always good for keeping paper towels, tissues, water, and treats handy. He knew she was thinking about his habit of hovering over the other detectives. It was a fault, yes, but he didn't feel like changing it.

He picked up speed. Somehow he refrained from calling in to the office immediately again and, well, hovering. He counseled himself that it might be all over by the time he arrived.

The rain had stopped.

“It's nice now,” Julie said. “We should have stayed.”

“Only to leave tomorrow morning when it was nice. That would have made us sad.”

*   *   *

MARINA KEPT
changing her position—it was hard being a passenger, not in control,
and
also not being able to move her body. She tried knees up to her chin. She tried crossing her legs. She felt tearful. Her husband hadn't liked Cape Cod and she had. He didn't even understand what a coup it was to get a house for half the usual price in Truro, right on the beach, absolutely fantastic. She'd snagged the house because she knew an actor who had an aunt who only rented to friends or relatives. She'd just spent two weeks in an amazing house and she'd probably never get to go again.

Richard was eager to get home.

He was a good man, a good husband, and an accepting person. He wasn't so much uncomfortable on Cape Cod as bored. When they went into Provincetown, which they did twice, once on a rainy day to join the throngs on the crowded streets, he tolerated the happy gays, the galleries, the tacky shops, the bumped umbrellas, leaking slickers, and thick crowds with as much good humor as he could manage. He said, “I wasn't meant for vacations. I like our backyard.”

They'd laughed companionably about his being a curmudgeon. But still, he wasn't romantic with her. He made love to her only twice in two weeks and distractedly at that. She didn't know how to win him back. Sometimes she wasn't even sure she wanted to. Why couldn't she take off for a glorious place like the one she just left and enjoy it without worrying about him? She loved his kids, but she had more than occasional fantasies of a life without cereal and backpacks.

She looked over at her husband and he said, “What?” and she said, “Nothing.”

He'd warned her at the start that they were different and that she would get bored with him. She was intellectual and an artist—creative on good days, effete on bad days. He always said he was a working-class drudge, more ordinary than dirt. Anxiety seized her heart. Boredom wasn't it. She wanted to be let in. She sighed deeply. Police wives were always second. Work was first.

“Easy?” he said, as if they'd been speaking. “My guess is no. They'll call most everybody in to work on this one because it's newsworthy, high profile.”

*   *   *

ARTIE DOLAN CAME
off the shootout for the rest of the day and took a couple of juniors with him up to the law offices where Cassie Price had worked.

Dolan liked this case lots better than the shootout, a fact that made him feel guilty. The anger and defensiveness and poverty he faced in some of the black neighborhoods wore him down. Yet he knew other blacks looked at him curiously, sometimes bitterly. He was small, but trim and always beautifully dressed.