The Devil and the Detective (8 page)

16

I
woke up before dawn and drank a glass of water while staring out the window. A torrential downpour – rain bouncing off the street. The window was open and the black curtains were filled with wind, swelling, and I looked at my reflection in the top section of the windowpane between the wind-parted curtains and thought of Elaine staring at my reflection in the windowpane at her house in the room where she'd found Gerald's dead body, lying on the couch, with a knife in his chest. She was with her lover somewhere, and they were both in on the murder. What else could've happened? It was the only explanation that made any sense, I thought, staring at my own weak reflection. I knew she fled because of her involvement in the murder but I couldn't help but think she'd disappeared under the impossible pressure of my desire. Somehow, even though I hadn't said anything, she knew I loved her – so she fled, I thought. Temporarily, time and space made sense because I was in love. Or, rather, I thought I was in love, I thought. But she's gone now, I thought, and I'll never find her. The rain was loud like loud static and I tried to ignore the ghost of my image and concentrate on the water bouncing off the street, instead of my transparent reflection. I'm a huge sucker, I thought, an irremediable sucker.

I knew there was no way I was going to sleep so I worked on my notes. The insoluble is what keeps me going, I thought, it's what keeps detectives going, knowing our work is never done, never good enough. I decided I'd go see Bouvert and Adamson in the morning and find out if I could get anything on the supposed quote unquote Adam and see if anyone, anyone at all, involved with Gerald had killed themselves in the last year or so. Also, I'd stop by the flower shop and check in on Darren. He said he had to work in the a.m. I'd bring him a Gatorade or something, I thought. I worked on my notes and drank tea till the break of dawn, then I drank black coffee and showered and shaved and put on a jacket and tie.

17

B
efore walking to Chez Marine I drank another cup of black coffee and stopped at the corner store and bought Darren a blue Gatorade so he could hydrate. The boutique de fleurs takes only about ten minutes to get to on foot from my place. The streets were sunny and bright but I was wearing sunglasses. I was hungover but wired. I walked with the cold blue Gatorade in my hand and debated opening it and taking a sip but didn't. It was for Darren, I thought. I approached the boutique and saw myself in the glass storefront, holding the cold blue drink, and sunlight reflected back. I walked in and a small bell rang, quietly, and a woman with dark straight long hair looked up from cutting flowers and smiled.

‘
Bonjour
,' she said, and I said ‘
Bonjour
' back.

Darren was in the back and spotted me and said, ‘
Julie, c'est mon ami Bob! Bob James!
'

‘Nice to meet you, Bob,' she said, extending a small hand.

I shook it and nodded. ‘
Enchanté
.'

Darren came up to the counter from the back and said: ‘Good to see you, man! How're you feeling?'

‘Good, good. I brought you something,' I said, and threw him the blue Gatorade.

He caught it and said, ‘Thanks, man! I really need to rehydrate,' and turning to Julie, ‘
On était un peu chaud, mais pas trop!
'

She smiled and nodded. Darren had started gulping down the Gatorade and Julie said, ‘Do you need any flowers today, Bob?'

‘I think I'm good today, for the moment at least.'

‘They give him headaches,' said Darren, taking a break from his drink.

‘I'm sure they don't all give him headaches.'

‘What are those ones called?' I said, pointing to the ones she'd been cutting, the ones she'd been cutting when I walked into the store and she'd looked up from her task at the sound of the small bell.

‘
Lis
. Don't you know
lis
?'

‘Lilies, yes,' I said. ‘Clearly not always by sight but I know them. I bought some from you the other day, over the phone – I ordered some. That's how I met Darren.'

‘You asked for a ride with Darren. I recognize your voice from the phone.'

‘I recognize yours, too. Anyway, sorry, I'm not good with the names of flowers. I couldn't tell a mallow from a hollyhock.'

She smiled and said, ‘You have a very distinct voice. Have people told you that?'

‘Yes, it's stupid sounding, right?'

‘
Non, juste distincte, une voix distincte
.'

‘You're making him self-conscious,' said Darren.

‘No she's not,' I said, but she was. I stopped talking completely and just looked around at the flowers. It was a nice shop. I wished I could list off the different types of flowers but the only ones I could name by sight were the typical ones, roses and tulips and I thought lilies (
lis
) but I guess not. The smell was wonderful but did slightly hurt my head, but then again I was hungover and over-caffeinated and sleep-deprived.

‘Bob's a private detective. He's on a murder case.'

‘
Mon Dieu!
' said Julie.

‘It's true. A man was stabbed to death.'

‘That's horrible!'

‘It is,' I said. ‘And it's possible that the wife did it, or might be involved somehow, but she's disappeared.'

‘So now you're looking for her?'

‘Yes.'

‘Any leads? Clues?'

‘Clues, yes. Leads, no. Not really, no.'

‘Why would she want to kill her husband?'

‘He was rich. She was much younger. The murderer could be a business associate. The murderer could be her –
sa femme
– but I'm not sure at the moment.'

‘It was her,' said Darren. ‘It's the wife.'

‘
Pourquoi?
' said Julie.

‘
J'ai mes raisons
.'

‘
Quelles raisons?
'

‘She fucked over Bob! She gave him the slip! She totally used him!'

‘Darren!' I said, embarrassed.

‘Well she did!'

‘We don't know that.'

‘We're pretty sure.'

‘I'm not sure about anything,' I said.

‘In this case, maybe you should be.' His forehead tightened and I became aware of the skull beneath the skin.

We said
au revoir
to Julie and went to make Darren's deliveries, before going to see Bouvert and Adamson. Darren looked rough and didn't say much. ‘You holding in there?' I asked, as he coughed and weaved through traffic, looking dazed and possibly stoned. He looked skinny, I thought, even though I always thought of him as skinny, from the first time I met him, a couple of strange days ago. He was sweaty, too, as he zigzagged between cars. He didn't answer so I said, ‘Are you okay, Darren?'

‘Yeah,' he said, removing his hands from the wheel, rubbing his eyes, pressing his palms into his sockets, then heavily returning his hands to the wheel. ‘I'm just hungover and tired. I'll be fine.'

‘Do you want me to drive?'

‘I thought you didn't know how to drive.'

‘I know how, sort of, I just don't.'

‘It's okay,' he said. ‘I'm fine to drive.'

We pulled up to an office building, where Darren was delivering a bouquet to a secretary, he told me. ‘The guy who ordered it sends bouquets to women all over town. Obviously women he's fucking,' said Darren. ‘They're always attractive.'

He flicked on the hazards and got out and grabbed the bouquet from the back seat. ‘I'll be fast,' he said.

‘I'll wait here.'

I watched him enter the building and explain himself to a security guard and stand by the elevator bank, waiting for an elevator. I turned around and stared at the bouquets in the back seat. The colours were wonderful: the pinks and yellows, the greens and purples; red, dark stigmas and velvety stamens; bright filaments; and petals, thick and rubbery and thin and delicate. The diurnal morning glory and crocus, I thought, though I ­couldn't identify either species, and there probably weren't any in the back seat. On the floor sat Darren's red and blue knapsack. There was a small black notebook sticking out. I looked toward the lobby to see if he was coming out and then picked up the notebook and opened it up. Inside were random notes, jottings, doodles and poems. I read one and quickly copied it out in my own small notebook, though it slightly confused me. I read and then wrote:

A brindled bull named Trucker.

Mien.

Anticlimactic, really, when you think about it.

He used to be my friend,

though not anymore:

things got too competitive.

It's too similar.

Dreams of God,

ineluctable and ineliminable.

I kept reading, periodically looking up toward the office building, toward the lobby, the elevator bank. The kid might have promise as a poet, I thought; I really had no idea but thought some of his notes and thoughts were funny, at least. There were some haikus, too, but I had time to copy out only one before Darren got off the elevator. I read and wrote:

Love vanishes fast

For some it never comes back

That's where I am at

I quickly returned the notebook to the knapsack, making sure it was slightly sticking out, as Darren exited the building, approaching the hatchback. I wondered if Darren had recently had his heart broken. I wondered why he wrote that haiku – why he wrote haikus in general. Maybe he was just messing around in his notebook, I thought. Perhaps it had no great significance and it was simply silly, like lots of haikus. I wasn't sure. Darren got into the car and fell into his seat, heavily, I thought, for such a skinny guy, and he seemed exhausted and beleaguered. Darren possessed a sadness that I hadn't initially detected. Obviously, I thought, I hadn't been paying enough attention.

‘If statements – ideas in general – couldn't be simultaneously both true and false, then communication – ideas in general – would be severely hampered.' Darren made this argument and I saw no reason to disagree. In fact, I was happy he was talking, for he hadn't uttered a word for at least fifteen minutes, while we were driving toward his next stop for delivery, a hospital. The bouquet was for a patient, not surprisingly, a patient who'd gotten in a head-on collision. ‘Supposedly he's pretty banged up but going to be okay,' said Darren. He had no idea how the other driver was doing, he said. ‘Ideas of an afterlife,' Darren was saying, ‘are true as ideas, of course we have these ideas, but they're not true – we don't live on in these ideas.'

‘You live on in other people's minds,' I offered lamely, and Darren said, ‘Sure, yes, for other people, not for you. Mere imitations. You're dead. Your conscious mind is dead, your heart no longer beats and your lungs collapse.'

Perhaps, I thought, consciousness is ideology; perhaps it's that simple and that inescapable. I tried to express that to Darren but couldn't find the words.

‘It's not that surprising that humankind's obsessed with apocalypse,' said Darren. ‘You head toward death from the day you're born. Of course thoughts lead to destruction.' I had a coughing fit. ‘Here we are,' Darren said, pulling up to the hospital, parking curbside: ‘Death's Waiting Room.'

I told him not to be so morbid. ‘The guy who got in the head-on collision's going to be okay, eventually,' I said, and Darren said that we still had no idea what happened to the other guy, then he flicked on the hazards and got out and grabbed the bouquet from the back seat.

‘It's true,' he said, ‘however,' leaning his head into the car, ‘death isn't a one-time eventuality, of course.'

All day long the detective carries on this work, I thought, observing, weighing, comparing values of which he nor his client may know the significance. Somehow, this work does lead to solutions, outcomes, I thought, sometimes. Like looking through binoculars backward, what I was focusing on seemed vague and faraway, I thought, confused and distorted by false distance. Her thoughts were so far from mine, I thought. ‘Where is Elaine?' I said and bounced my fist off the dashboard. I wanted a cigarette. I thought – erroneously, as it turns out – that there was something between her and me. Now I needed to track her down, I thought, as I stared at the hospital, where Darren was delivering flowers to a man who'd gotten in a head-on collision, survived, and was now convalescing, banged up but going to live. I kept thinking about smoking, nonstop. Some shamus I've turned out to be. Losing my only client and the woman I love in one fell swoop, I thought, staring at the hospital where Darren was giving flowers to a man most likely in traction. The thing about smoking that makes it so tempting, I thought, is that for generations cigarettes have been requested by countless numbers of people before they've been executed. Overhead I heard the thudding propellers of a helicopter, though I couldn't see it. I got out of the car and looked up at the greying sky, with purple cloudbanks in the distance, and saw the orange chopper heading toward the hospital's rooftop helipad. My head tilted skyward, I watched the chopper make its descent and disappear somewhere on the rooftop where I could no longer see it but could still hear the all-consuming propeller. The grey sky pulsed and throbbed under its hard beating of the air.

Darren returned in a much more chipper mood. He told me that the man, the man he was delivering flowers to, the one who'd gotten into the head-on collision, was in a full-body cast, with his left leg and right arm elevated. Regardless, he seemed like a great guy, Darren said, and he was high and happy to be alive.

‘He said that. He said, “I'm high and happy to be alive.” And he laughed. Cool guy,' said Darren. ‘It turns out that the other driver's 100 percent fine, too,' Darren told me the man in the cast said. The man in the cast went on and on listing the things in life he's grateful for, said Darren, including waxing on about the breeze from the open window and about how said breeze made him think of when he was a kid, when he was around eleven or twelve years old, and he was sitting by an open window wearing shorts and talking to his then-babysitter, Marlene, and he felt the wind lightly blow up his shorts along his inner thigh and he realized that he had a hard-on, he said, and Marlene was laughing at something he'd said and she looked beautiful in the late-afternoon light and the breeze gently caressed his dick. He told Darren he's never felt so in love in his life and he's now married – not to Marlene – with three kids. He was really fucked up, said Darren, and they'd given him a shitload of morphine. And then Darren went on about how lucky we are to live in a world with drugs. I listened but was starting to doze off, dreaming of the mummified man in the hospital, who lay in traction dreaming of his former babysitter, past breezes and past erections. But then my dreams shifted. I thought of Elaine and hated the fact that I'd been used and duped by her. I felt cuckolded but she was never my wife and I've never been married. We needed to make one more delivery, then we'd go see the lawyers.