The Last Policeman (3 page)

“If we must die,” Culverson concludes, “let us first collect a few bucks from our brothers and sisters in the patrol division.”

“Sure, but,” Andreas looks around uneasily, “how are we supposed to predict?”

“Predict?” McGully whacks Andreas with the folded-up
Monitor
. “How are we supposed to collect, goofus?”

“I’ll go first,” says Culverson. “I’m taking the Atlantic Ocean for an even hundred.”

“Forty bucks on France,” says McGully, rifling through his wallet. “Serve ’em right, the pricks.”

Culverson walks his chart to my corner of the room, slides it on the desk. “What about you, Ichabod Crane? What do you think?”

“Gee,” I say absently, thinking about those angry lesions beneath the dead man’s eye. Someone punched Peter Zell in the face, hard, in the recent-but-not-too-recent past. Two weeks ago, maybe? Three weeks? Dr. Fenton will tell me for sure.

Culverson is waiting, eyebrows raised expectantly. “Detective Palace?”

“Hard to say, you know? Hey, where do you guys buy your belts?”

“Our belts?” Andreas looks down at his waist, then up, as if it’s a trick question. “I wear suspenders.”

“Place called Humphrey’s,” says Culverson. “In Manchester.”

“Angela buys my belts,” says McGully, who’s moved on to the sports section, leaned way back, feet propped up. “The hell are you talking about, Palace?”

“I’m working on this case,” I explain, all of them looking back at me now. “This body we found this morning, at the McDonald’s.”

“That was a hanger, I thought,” says McGully.

“We’re calling it a suspicious death, for now.”

“We?” says Culverson, smiles at me appraisingly. Andreas is still at McGully’s desk, still staring at the front section of the paper, one hand clapped to his forehead.

“The ligature in this case was a black belt. Fancy. Buckle said ‘B&R.’ ”

“Belknap and Rose,” says Culverson. “Wait now, you’re working this as a murder? Awfully public place for a murder.”

“Belknap and Rose, exactly,” I say. “See, because everything else the victim was wearing was nothing to write home about: plain tan suit, off the rack, an old dress shirt with stains at the pits, mismatched socks. And he was
wearing
a belt, too, a cheap brown belt. But the ligature: real leather, hand stitching.”

“Okay,” says Culverson. “So he went to B&R and bought himself a fancy belt for the purposes of killing himself.”

“There you go,” puts in McGully, turns the page.

“Really?” I stand up. “It just seems like, I’m going to hang myself, and I’m a regular guy, I wear suits to work, I probably own a number of belts. Why do I drive the twenty minutes to Manch, to an upscale men’s clothing store, to buy a special suicide belt?”

I’m pacing a little bit now, hunched forward, back and forth in front of the desk, stroking my mustache. “Why not, you know, just use one of my many existing belts?”

“Who knows?” says Culverson.

“And more important,” adds McGully, yawning, “who cares?”

“Right,” I say, and settle back into my seat, pick up the blue book again. “Of course.”

“You’re like an alien, Palace. You know that?” says McGully. In one swift motion, he balls up his sports section and bounces it off my head. “You’re like from another planet or something.”

There is a very old man behind the security desk at the Water West Building, and he blinks at me slowly, like he just woke up from a nap, or the grave.

“You got an appointment with someone here in the building?”

“No, sir. I’m a policeman.”

The guard is in a severely rumpled dress shirt, and his security-guard cap is misshapen, dented at the peak. It’s late morning, but the gray lobby has a gloaming quality, motes drifting listlessly in the half light.

“My name is Detective Henry Palace.” I display my badge—he doesn’t look, doesn’t care—I tuck it carefully away again. “I’m with the Criminal Investigations Division of the Concord Police Department, and I’m looking into a suspicious death. I need to visit the offices of Merrimack Life and Fire.”

He coughs. “What are you, anyway, son? Like, six foot four?”

“Something like that.”

Waiting for the elevator I absorb the dark lobby: a giant potted plant, squat and heavy, guarding one corner; a lifeless White Mountains landscape above a row of brass mailboxes; the centenarian security man examining me from his perch. This, then, was my insurance man’s morning vista, where he started his professional existence, day in and day out. As the elevator door creaks open, I take a sniff of the musty air. Nothing arguing against the case for suicide, down here in the lobby.

* * *

Peter Zell’s boss is named Theodore Gompers, a jowly, pallid character in a blue wool suit, who evinces no surprise whatsoever when I tell him the news.

“Zell, huh? Well, that’s too bad. Can I pour you a drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“How about this weather, huh?”

“Yep.”

We’re in his office, and he’s drinking gin from a short square tumbler, absently rubbing his palm along his chin, staring out a big window at the snow tumbling down onto Eagle Square. “A lot of people are blaming it on the asteroid, all the snow. You’ve heard that, right?” Gompers talks quietly, ruminatively, his eyes fixed on the street outside. “It’s not true, though. The thing is still 280 million miles from here at this point. Not close enough to affect our weather patterns, and it won’t be.”

“Yep.”

“Not until afterward, obviously.” He sighs, turns his head to me
slowly, like a cow. “People don’t really understand, you know?”

“I’m sure that’s true,” I say, waiting patiently with my blue book and a pen. “Can you tell me about Peter Zell?”

Gompers takes a sip of his gin. “Not that much to tell, really. Guy was a born actuary, that’s for sure.”

“A born actuary?”

“Yeah. Me, I started out on the actuarial side, degree in statistics and everything. But I switched to sales, and at some point I sort of drifted up to management, and here I have remained.” He opens his hands to take in the office and smiles wanly. “But Peter wasn’t going anywhere. I don’t mean that in a bad way necessarily, but he wasn’t going anywhere.”

I nod, scratching notes in my book, while Gompers continues in his glassy murmur. Zell, it seems, was a kind of wizard at actuarial math, had a nearly supernatural ability to sort through long columns of demographic data and draw precise conclusions about risk and reward. He was also almost pathologically shy, is what it sounds like: walked around with his eyes on the floor, muttered “hello” and “I’m fine” when pressed, sat in the back of the room at staff meetings, looking at his hands.

“And, boy, when those meetings ended he would always be the first guy out the door,” Gompers says. “You got the feeling he was a lot happier at his desk, doing his thing with his calculator and his statistics binders, than he was with the rest of us humans.”

I’m scratching away, nodding encouragingly and empathetically to keep Gompers talking, and I’m thinking how much I’m starting to like this guy, this Peter Anthony Zell. I like a guy who likes to get his work done.

“The thing about him, though, about Zell, is that this craziness never seemed to affect him too much. Even at the beginning, even when it all first started up.”

Gompers inclines his head backward, toward the window, toward the sky, and I’m guessing that when he says “when it all first started up,” he means early summer of last year, when the asteroid entered the public consciousness in a serious way. It had been spotted by scientists as early as April, but for those first couple months, it only appeared in News-of-the-Weird kinds of reports, funny headlines on the Yahoo! homepage. “Death from Above?!” and “The Sky is Falling!”—that sort of stuff. But for most people, early June was when the threat became real; when the odds of impact rose to five percent; when Maia’s circumference was estimated at between 4.5 and 7 kilometers.

“So, you remember: people are going nuts, people are weeping at their desks. But Zell, like I said, he just keeps his head down, does his thing. Like he thought the asteroid was coming for everyone except him.”

“And what about more recently? Any change in that pattern? Depression?”

“Well,” he says. “You know, wait.” He stops abruptly, puts one hand over his mouth, narrows his eyes, as if trying to see something murky and far away.

“Mr. Gompers?”

“Yeah, I just … Sorry, I’m trying to remember something.” His eyes drift shut for a second, then snap open, and I have a moment of concern for the reliability of my witness here, wondering how many glasses of gin he’s already enjoyed this morning. “The thing is, there
was this one incident.”

“Incident?”

“Yeah. We had this girl Theresa, an accountant, and she came to work on Halloween dressed as the asteroid.”

“Oh?”

“I know. Sick, right?” But Gompers grins at the memory. “It was just a big black garbage bag with the number, you know, two-zero-one-one-G-V-one, on a name tag. Most of us laughed, some people more than others. But Zell, out of nowhere, he
just flipped
. He starts yelling and screaming at this girl, his whole body is shaking. It was really scary, especially because, like I said, he’s normally such a quiet guy. Anyway, he apologized, but the next day he doesn’t show up for work.”

“How long was he gone?”

“A week? Two weeks? I thought he was out for good, but then he turned up again, no explanation, and he’s been the same as ever.”

“The same?”

“Yeah. Quiet. Calm. Focused. Hard work, doing what he’s told. Even when the actuarial side dried up.”

“The—I’m sorry?” I say. “What?”

“The actuarial end. Late fall, early winter, you know, we stopped issuing policies entirely.” He sees my questioning expression and smiles grimly. “I mean, Detective: would
you
like to buy life insurance right now?”

“I guess not.”

“Right,” he says, sniffs, drains his glass. “I guess not.”

The lights flicker and Gompers looks up, mutters “come on,” and a moment later they glow brightly again.

“Anyway, so then I’ve got Peter doing what everyone else is doing, which is inspecting claims, looking for false filings, dubious claims. It seems loony, but that’s what our parent company, Variegated, is obsessed with these days: fraud prevention. It’s all about protecting the bottom line. A lot of CEOs have cashed in their chips, you know, they’re in Bermuda or Antigua or they’re building bunkers. But not our guy. Between you and me, our guy thinks he’s going to buy his way into heaven when the end comes. That’s the impression I get.”

I don’t laugh. I tap the end of the pen on my book, trying to make sense of all the information, trying to build a timeline in my head.

“Do you think I might speak to her?

“To who?”

“The woman you mentioned.” I glance down at my notes. “Theresa.”

“Oh, she’s long gone, Officer. She’s in New Orleans now, I believe.” Gompers inclines his head, and his voice peters down to a murmur. “A lot of the kids are going down there. My daughter, too, actually.” He looks out the window again. “Anything else I can tell you?”

I stare down at the blue book, spiderwebbed with my crabbed handwriting.
Well? What else can he tell me?

“What about friends? Did Mr. Zell have any friends?”

“Uh …” Gompers tilts his head, sticks out his lower lip. “One. Or, I don’t know what he was, I guess he was a friend. A guy, kind of a big fat guy, big arms. Once or twice last summer I saw Zell having lunch with him, around the corner at the Works.”

“A large man, you said?”

“I said a big fat guy, but sure. I remember because, first of all,
you’d never see Peter out to lunch, so that was unusual in itself. And second, Peter was such a small person, the two of them were kind of a sight, you know?”

“Did you get his name?”

“The big man? No. I didn’t even talk to him.”

I uncross and recross my legs, trying to think of the right questions, think of the things I’m supposed to ask, what else I need to know. “Sir, do you have any idea where Peter got the bruises?”

“What?”

“Under his eye?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, he said he fell down some stairs. A couple weeks ago, I think?”

“Fell down some stairs?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Okay.”

I’m writing this down, and I’m starting to see the dim outlines of the course of my investigation, and I’m feeling these jolts of adrenaline shooting up my right leg, making it bounce a little bit where it’s crossed over the left one.

“Last question, Mr. Gompers. Do you know if Mr. Zell had any enemies?”

Gompers rubs his jaw with the heel of his hand, his eyes swimming into focus. “Enemies, did you say? You’re not thinking that someone
killed
the guy, are you?”

“Well. Maybe. Probably not.” I flip closed my blue book and stand up. “May I see his workspace, please?”

* * *

That sharp jolt of adrenaline that shot up my leg during the Gompers interview has now spread throughout my body, and it lingers, spreading up my veins, filling me with a strange kind of electric hunger.

I’m a policeman, the thing I’ve always wanted to be. For sixteen months I was a patrol officer, working almost exclusively on the overnight shift, almost exclusively in Sector 1, cruising Loudon Road from the Walmart at one end to the overpass on the other. Sixteen months patrolling my four-and-a-half-mile stretch, back and forth, 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., breaking up fights, scattering drunks, rolling up panhandlers and schizophrenics in the Market Basket parking lot.

I loved it. Even last summer I loved it, when things got weird, new times, and then the fall, the work got steadily harder and steadily stranger and I loved it still.

But since making detective I’ve been befogged by a frustrating unnamable sensation, some dissatisfaction, a sense of bad luck, bad timing, where I got the job I’ve wanted and waited for my whole life and it’s a disappointment to me, or I to it.

And now, today, here at last this electric feeling, tingling and fading at my pulse points, and I’m thinking holy moly, this might just be it. It really might be.