The Disposable Man (6 page)

The air was hot and muggy, even late in the afternoon, so it was with some relief that I dropped off my bag at the motel and immediately sought refuge in the Metro’s air-conditioned depths, bound for Judiciary Square station.

On my way to pay homage to a few specific dead, I pondered once more the man whose death had stimulated this trip.

The mystery surrounding most killings, of course, is not in discovering who did it. By and large, that’s as challenging as following a trail of blood from one room to the next, where some distraught friend or family member is found holding the weapon. The mystery is in the why—why this person? Why now? Why this sudden rage?

If we actually do have a situation where the culprit is not in the immediate vicinity, then we’re usually faced with two alternatives: a series of leads that takes us to someone we can then present to the State’s Attorney, or—on very rare occasions—a dead end that grows more hopeless by the day.

The investigation I was facing, however, followed neither of those norms. While apparently a dead end, it also seemed to be growing in scope. Invited to a city renowned for its lack of clarity, I had no illusions that the CIA would lift the veil from my eyes. Which left me wondering what I was being drawn into—and why.

Although quiet, smooth, and remarkably clean—attributes for which the Washington Metro was justifiably famous—the subway ride to Judiciary Square was long and predictable, and by the time I arrived, my mind had been dulled by the blurred succession of trains, stations, and thousands of blank faces sealed behind glass. The familiar discomfort of being in close quarters with so many withdrawn people had begun to envelop me.

I half fled for the exit, toward fresh air and open space, climbing flight after flight of stairs, dogged by the memory that Washington’s subway system had supposedly been designed to double as a bomb shelter. When I finally reached the foot of the last steep escalator and looked up the sun-bleached exit shaft, I saw the sweltering swatch of flame-blue sky with the same relief I’d felt upon entering the Metro’s air-conditioning earlier.

The illusion of returning to the land of the living was just that, however, since the escalator delivered me to the heart of my destination—the broiling hot, dazzlingly bright National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. From a cool, muted subterranean world of stone-faced commuters, I’d ascended into a three-acre, oval frying pan made of white-hot marble, in which, at the moment, I was the only human being.

The memorial, with an imposing bronze plaque at its center depicting an officer’s shield superimposed by a single rose, extends out in a series of widening topographical parentheses, made variably of colonnades, trees, and shaded walkways, and finally, at its outermost edges, of two pathways banked by a continuous, curved, knee-high marble wall, inscribed with the names of over fourteen thousand law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.

Only a few years old, the memorial reflects several standard monument styles—from archways to statuary to a shallow pool of running water. But the most effective is an homage to the style of the Vietnam Memorial, wherein a seemingly endless list of names is arranged as randomly as the ways in which those officers were slain.

Sweat already trickling down my sides, I crossed to a softbound directory housed in a weatherproof case and squinted against the sun to look up three names: Frank Murphy, John Woll, and Dennis DeFlorio.

All had been members of my department—Murphy, the man I’d replaced as chief of detectives; Woll, a young patrolman; and DeFlorio, one of my own squad. But contrary to the implied heroism of this formal, austere setting, none of these friends had died catching bullets intended for the civilians they’d served. Murphy had been killed in a mundane car crash, Woll’s murder had been staged to resemble a suicide, which by that time his own miseries had made all too believable, and DeFlorio had been blown apart by a car bomb.

I collected the reference numbers for each of them and entered the tree-canopied pathway to find their names, grateful for the shade, reminded of the dense, multihued woods of Vermont. As I sat on the rounded stone bench facing the inscribed wall, exchanging silent greetings with my three friends, my chagrin became less for their loss and—typical of most mourners, I think—turned back onto myself. I began recalling all that had brought me up to this point—the daily exposure to despair, deception, and misconduct—and wondered why I’d made some of the choices I had.

Law enforcement had never entered my mind as a youth on the farm, any more, I guessed, than it had those of most of the people now etched on this wall. But somehow that’s where we’d all ended up, perhaps wanting to be of use to others, or seeking shelter against the vagaries of a capricious upbringing, maybe hoping to find some measure of elusive self-confidence. There are those who believe police officers become so merely to compensate for personal inadequacies. But by and large, I’d found that most cops just sort of end up in the job, after which the good ones do their best to make it count, despite the airless niche in which society has placed them.

In the final analysis, it was the pure normalcy of the people on this wall, and that they’d died doing something few people understood, that saddened me most.

I stayed there until the sun had dipped low enough on the horizon that I no longer needed the trees for protection, and then I headed off on foot to complete the second half of my pilgrimage.

The Korean War Memorial, located near the base of the Lincoln Memorial, was so new it didn’t appear on most tourist maps. Almost a half century old, with casualties rivaling Vietnam—although lasting a mere fraction of that struggle’s length—Korea’s conflict remained a footnote war, treated almost as a post-World War Two afterthought—a fact the memorial’s too recent appearance served more to highlight than to dispel.

Returning to the United States after my stint in it, I’d been struck by the lack of fanfare greeting us, especially given what vets had encountered a mere seven years earlier. At the time, I’d been deeply offended, feeling my teenage sacrifices had been cavalierly dismissed. Now, I knew such reserve probably had more to do with the nation’s emotional numbness. The Nazi/Japanese Axis had bathed the globe in blood, and the Soviets were threatening to do the same using nuclear weapons. What chance was there for a local boundary squabble, so equivocally viewed by our own leaders that they avoided calling it a war? It would be fifteen more years before the country took a deep breath and voiced its outrage over Vietnam. And by then Korea, never resolved in any case, had been all but forgotten.

Brought low by the long drive, the listless subway ride, the blistering barrenness of the law officers memorial, and my own ruminations about a case without issue, I worked to clear my head by walking all the way, even though it was almost a mile and a half distant. I stopped to eat a sandwich at a neighborhood deli and saw my first sustained human interaction since leaving home. The counter people were loud and gregarious and treated their customers with the casual irreverence of long-standing friends. It was an easy, open exchange, as restorative as the food I ate, and sent me on my way in a much better mood, as I rationalized that much of what had been plaguing me was no more than a provincial prejudice against a huge urban environment.

It was dark by the time I reached the reflecting pool but not much cooler. The tradeoff for walking had been a reminder of just how tenacious southern heat can be. It radiated off the sidewalk, as from a wood stove in the middle of winter, and filled the air—in a startling paradox—with the familiar parched odor of warm silage, the acres of cropped grass around me substituting for the farm fields of memory. The jacket I’d been wearing had gone from being slung over my shoulder to being held uncomfortably in one sweaty hand.

But I had no complaints. This part of Washington, especially at night, subdued most petty complaints with its sheer wide-open majesty. The pale-lit Washington Monument, a red beacon at its apex, looked otherworldly in the surrounding darkness, its daytime absurdity replaced by the mysterious murmurings of its Egyptian forebears. And its aura spread outward like a thin mist, snagging on the spotlit architectural oddities that belted the Mall like an ancient ring of mountains. I took it all in, from the Capitol to the museums to the gargantuan, recumbent federal buildings, with the happy acceptance of a willing tourist. I walked the length of the quarter-mile pool—Lincoln’s tomb-like tribute reflecting in the water like a ghost—and yielded utterly to the theater of it all, using the countless historical cues to carry me back to my past.

Finally, thus summoned, a pale scattering of distant shadows caught my eye through the trees to the left and brought my journey to an end. I stood stock still in the darkness, in the here and now, and saw the defining image of myself as a nervous, isolated teenager on the threshold of self-discovery.

Scattered across a gently stepped slope, only barely illuminated by concealed, muted spotlights, a company of soldiers silently hovered in the gloom, as if frozen in mid-step by the distant, dying flash of a random artillery flare.

I abandoned the sidewalk and cut across the warm grass, all discomfort forgotten, transfixed by the nineteen nebulous bronze statues that formed the centerpiece of the Korean War Memorial. As I approached, their details emerged, commingling with memory. Clad in windswept ponchos, their weapons held with the ready casualness of umbrellas or shovels, they were lean with hunger, fatigue, and worry, and their faces, barely caressed by the thoughtfully directed light, were by degrees exhausted, pensive, frightened, and resigned. The closer I got, the more clearly I could see the slightly blurry photographs I’d sent my mother from beyond the ocean, and that reside still in the albums by her side.

It is a beautiful monument, low-key and reflective. A mixed service company of slightly larger-than-life soldiers—sculpted by a fellow Vermonter—ascends a series of shallow, planted terraces reminiscent of rice paddies. Ahead of them is a pool and a flagpole, to their right a low, black polished granite wall, sandblasted with the smoky images of over a thousand people looking out, like half-seen specters, representing the millions who served with the likes of me. The countries that contributed to this ephemeral, poorly remembered effort are etched in stone, along with the numbers of people sacrificed—over fifty-four thousand of them. It is a quiet place, designed for pensiveness and reminiscence, and alone in the night I gave in to just that, slowly pacing the walkway that encircled the site.

That quiet, however, was offset by occasional urban interruptions, the most jarring of which were periodic low-flying jets heading for the nearby airport. I was strolling in an easterly direction when a particularly noisy example made me stop in my tracks and turn around to watch. Instead of focusing on a startlingly close airplane, however, I came face-to-face with a rough-looking, bearded man standing a mere ten feet behind me. He and I, witnessed by nineteen well-armed silent soldiers, were the only ones within sight.

At first, he seemed as surprised as I was, his eyes widening and his body stiffening, and then he whirled around as I had and stared down the empty walkway. He looked back at me, his eyes suspicious.

“Whaddya lookin’ at?” His voice was slurred and thick.

“You,” I admitted.

“What’s wrong with me?”

“I don’t know. What’re you doing here?”

His mouth set in an angry line. “You sayin’ I can’t be here?”

“Not necessarily.”

He considered that, found it acceptable, and loosened his stance, looking almost athletic in the process. He wasn’t old—at most in his mid-thirties—and his clothes, while far from city wear, were more rough than ragged.

He gave me a conspiratorial smile. “You do me a favor?”

He took a couple of paces toward me, which I didn’t like. Only half consciously, I moved my jacket before me, holding it loosely in both hands.

“I need some money,” he continued. “I gotta get enough for bus fare. You give me something?”

I stepped back as he drew nearer, the hairs on my neck tingling. “Isn’t this a pretty strange place to be looking for bus fare?”

His eyes narrowed, and his right hand dipped to his side. There was a metallic click and a flash of reflected light. I surprised him by leaping forward, the jacket held taut between my fists. He came up with the knife, startled by my sudden proximity, and I caught the blade in the folds of the coat, twisting it away and to one side. Inches from his face now, enveloped in his breath, I saw his mouth open in pain as he let out a shout. I then brought my knee up between his legs with all my strength.

The results were mixed. On TV that would’ve been the end of it. In fact, as he crumpled, he grabbed me around the neck with his free arm, rolled with his hips, and sent me staggering toward the nearest soldier. I tripped over the low curb separating the walkway from the terracing and stumbled with a dull clang into the statue, twisting around to keep my eyes on my assailant.

I’d dropped my coat in the process, the knife still within it, and it now lay between us on the ground. Doubled over, one hand clutching his groin, he dove for it the same time I did, just as a clear shout rang out in the night.

“
Police
. Stop where you are.”

I got to the jacket first, but only because my opponent pulled up at the last second, rabbit-punching me in the neck instead of fighting for the knife. As I collapsed onto the cement, the flat switchblade hard against my chest, I saw him run off into the darkness toward Independence Avenue.

Heavy footsteps ran up behind me. “
Don’t move
.”

I twisted around to look up at a young patrolman, standing over me with a gun in his hand. “I’m the
victim
.”

He looked at me nervously and then glanced up to where the other man had vanished.

“I’m also a cop,” I continued, very slowly reaching for my back pocket. “I’m going for my badge.”

I extracted the worn leather folder and flipped it open.