The Last Policeman (4 page)

* * *

“So what are you looking for, anyway?”

It’s an accusation more than a question. I turn from what I’m doing, which is sorting methodically through Peter Zell’s desk drawers, and I see a bald woman in a black pencil skirt and white blouse.
It’s the woman I saw at the McDonald’s, the one who approached the door of the restaurant and then turned away, melting back into the parking lot and out of sight. I recognize her pale complexion and deep black eyes, even though this morning she was wearing a bright red wool cap, and now she is hatless, her smooth white scalp reflecting the harsh overhead lights of Merrimack Life and Fire.

“I am looking for evidence, ma’am. A routine investigation. My name is Detective Henry Palace, from the Concord Police Department.”

“Evidence of what, exactly?” she asks. The woman’s nose is pierced, one nostril, a single understated golden stud. “Gompers said that Peter killed himself.”

I don’t answer, and she steps the rest of the way into the small airless office and watches me work. She’s good-looking, this woman, small and strong-featured and poised, maybe twenty-four, twenty-five years old. I wonder what Peter Zell must have made of her.

“Well,” she says, after thirty seconds or so. “Gompers said to find out if you need anything. Do you need anything?”

“No, thank you.”

She’s looking over and around me, at my fingers pawing through the dead man’s drawers. “I’m sorry, what did you say you were looking for?”

“I don’t know yet. An investigation’s proper course cannot be mapped in advance. It follows each piece of information forward to the next one.”

“Oh, yeah?” When the young woman raises her eyebrows, it creates delicate furrows on her forehead. “It sounds like you’re quoting from a textbook or something.”

“Huh.” I keep my expression neutral. It is in fact a direct quote,
from Farley and Leonard,
Criminal Investigation
, the introduction to chapter six.

“I actually do need something,” I say, pointing to Zell’s monitor, which is turned backward, facing the wall. “What’s the deal with the computers here?”

“We’ve been all-paper since November,” she says, shrugging. “There’s this whole network system where our files here were shared with corporate and the different regional offices, but the network got incredibly slow and annoying, so the whole company is operating offline.”

“Ah,” I say, “okay.” Internet service, as a whole, has been increasingly unreliable in the Merrimack Valley since late January; a switching point in southern Vermont was attacked by some kind of anarchist collective, motive unclear, and the resources haven’t been found to repair it.

The woman is just standing there, looking at me. “So, I’m sorry—you’re Mr. Gompers’s executive assistant?”

“Please,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Secretary.”

“And what’s your name?”

She pauses, just long enough to let me know she feels that she could, if she chose, keep the information to herself, and then says, “Eddes. Naomi Eddes.”

Naomi Eddes. She is not, I am noticing, completely bald, not quite. Her scalp is gently feathered with a translucent blonde fuzz, which looks soft and smooth and lovely, like elegant carpeting for a doll’s house.

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions, Ms. Eddes?”

She doesn’t answer, but neither does she leave the room; she
just stands there regarding me steadily as I launch in. She’s worked here for four years. Yes, Mr. Zell was already employed when she started. No, she did not know him well. She confirms Gompers’s general portrait of Peter Zell’s personality: quiet, hardworking, socially uncomfortable, although she uses the word
maladroit
, which I like. She recalls the incident on Halloween, when Peter lashed out at Theresa from Accounting, though she doesn’t recall any subsequent weeklong absence from the office.

“But to be totally honest,” she says, “I’m not sure I would have noticed him not being here. Like I said, we weren’t that close.” Her expression softens, and for a split second I would swear she’s blinking back tears, but it’s just a split second, and then her steady, impassive expression recomposes itself. “He was very nice, though. A really nice guy.”

“Would you have characterized him as being depressed?”

“Depressed?” she says, smiling faintly, ironically. “Aren’t we all depressed, Detective? Under the weight of all this unbearable immanence? Aren’t you depressed?”

I don’t answer, but I’m liking her phrase,
all this unbearable immanence
. Better than Gompers’s “this craziness,” better than McGully’s “big meatball.”

“And did you happen to notice, Ms. Eddes, what time Mr. Zell left the office yesterday, or with whom?”

“No,” she says, her voice dipping down a half register, her chin pressing against her chest. “I did not notice what time he left the office yesterday, nor with whom.”

I am thrown for a moment, and then by the time I realize that her sudden pseudoserious intonation is meant to tease me, she’s continuing
in her regular voice. “I left early myself, actually, at about three. We’ve got kind of a relaxed schedule these days. But Peter was definitely still here when I took off. I remember waving good-bye.”

I have a sudden and vivid mental image of Peter Zell, three o’clock yesterday afternoon, watching his boss’s beautiful and self-possessed secretary leave for the day. She gives him a friendly indifferent wave, and my man Zell nods nervously, hunched over his desk, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“And now, if you’ll excuse me,” says Naomi Eddes abruptly, “I have to go back to work.”

“Sure,” I say, nodding politely, thinking,
I didn’t ask you to come in. I didn’t ask you to stay
. “Oh, Ms. Eddes? One more thing. What were you doing at the McDonald’s this morning, when the body was discovered?”

In my inexperienced estimation, this question flusters Ms. Eddes—she looks away, and a trace of a blush dances across her cheeks—but then she gathers herself and smiles and says, “What was I doing? I go there all the time.”

“To the McDonald’s on Main Street?”

“Almost every morning. Sure. For coffee.”

“There’s a lot of places closer to here, for coffee.”

“They have good coffee.”

“Then why didn’t you come in?”

“Because—because I realized at the last minute that I had forgotten my wallet.”

I fold my arms and draw myself up to full height. “Is that true, Ms. Eddes?”

She folds her own arms, mirrors my stance, looks up to meet
my eyes. “Is it true that this is a routine investigation?”

And then I’m watching her walk away.

* * *

“It’s the short fella you’re asking about, is that correct?”

“Pardon me?”

The old security officer is exactly where I left him, his chair still swiveled to face the elevator bank, as if he’s been frozen in this position, waiting, the whole time I was working upstairs.

“The fella who died. You said you were on a murder, up at Merrimack Life.”

“I said I was investigating a suspicious death.”

“That’s fine. But it’s the short fella? Little squirrelly? Spectacles?”

“Yes. His name was Peter Zell. Did you know him?”

“Nope. Except I knew everybody who worked in the building, to say hello to. You’re a cop, you said?”

“A detective.”

The old man’s leathery face contorts itself for a split second into the distant sad cousin of a smile. “I was in the Air Force. Vietnam. For a while, when I got home, I used to want to be a cop.”

“Hey,” I say, offering up by rote the meaningless thing my father always used to say, when confronted with any kind of pessimism or resignation. “It’s never too late.”

“Well.” The security officer coughs hoarsely, adjusts his battered cap. “It is, though.”

A moment passes in the dreary lobby, and then the guard says, “So last night, the skinny guy, he got picked up after work by someone
in a big red pickup truck.”

“A pickup truck? Running gas?”

No one has gas, no one but cops and army. OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn’t anymore.

“Not gas,” says the guard. “Cooking oil, by the smell of it.”

I nod, excited, take a step forward, smooth my mustache with the heel of one hand. “Did Mr. Zell get in the truck willingly or unwillingly?”

“Well, no one pushed him in there, if that’s what you mean. And I didn’t see any gun or anything.”

I take out my notebook, click open a pen. “What did it look like?”

“It was a performance Ford, an old model. Eighteen-inch Goodyears, no chains. Smoke billowing out the back, you know, that nasty vegetable-oil smoke.”

“Right. You get a license plate?

“I did not.”

“And did you get a look at the driver?”

“Nope. Didn’t know I’d have a reason to.” The old man blinks, bemused, I think, by my enthusiasm. “He was a big fella, though. Pretty sure of that. Heavyset, like.”

I’m nodding, writing quickly. “And you’re sure it was a red pickup?”

“It was. A red, medium-body pickup truck with a standard bed.
And there was a big flag airbrushed on the driver’s side wall.”

“What flag?”

“What flag? United States,” he says diffidently, as if unwilling to acknowledge the existence of any other kind.

I write quietly for a minute, faster and faster, the pen scratching in the silence of the lobby, the old man looking abstractedly at me, head tilted, eyes distant, like I’m something in a museum case. Then I thank him and put away my blue book and my pen and step out onto the sidewalk, the snow falling on the red brick and sandstone of downtown, and I’m standing there for a second watching it all in my head, like a movie: the shy, awkward man in the rumpled brown suit, climbing up into the shotgun seat of a shiny red pickup running a converted engine, driving off into the last hours of his life.

There’s a dream I used to have, pretty consistently once or twice a week, going back to when I was right around twelve years old.

The dream featured the imposing figure of Ryan J. Ordler, the long-serving chief of the Concord Police Department, long-serving even back then, whom in real life I would see every summer at the Family and Friends Picnic Potluck, where he would awkwardly tousle my hair and flip me a buffalo-head nickel, like he did for all the children present. In the dream, Ordler stands at attention in full uniform, holding a Bible, on which I place my right hand, palm down, and I’m repeating after him, pledging to enforce and uphold the law, and then he’s solemnly presenting me with my gun, my badge, and I salute him and he salutes me back and the music swells—there is music in the dream—and I am made detective.

In real life, one brutally cold morning late last year, I returned to the station at 9:30 a.m., after a long night spent patrolling Sector 1, to find a handwritten note in my locker instructing me to report to
the office of the DCA. I stopped in the break room, splashed water on my face, and took the stairs two at a time. The Deputy Chief of Administration at that time was Lieutenant Irina Paul, who had held the post a little more than six weeks, after the abrupt departure of Lieutenant Irvin Moss.

“Good morning, ma’am,” I say. “Did you need something?”

“Yeah,” Lieutenant Paul says, looks up and then back down at what’s in front of her, a thick black binder with the words U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE stenciled on the side. “Gimme one sec, Officer.”

“Sure,” I say, looking around, and then there’s another voice, deep and rumbling, from the far end of the office: “Son.”

It’s Chief Ordler, in uniform but no tie, collar open, shrouded in semidarkness at the small office’s only window, arms crossed, a sturdy oak tree of a human being. A wave of trepidation washes over me, my spine straightens, and I say, “Morning, sir.”

“Okay, young man,” says Lieutenant Paul, and the chief nods minutely, gently, titling his head toward the DCA, letting me know to pay attention. “Now. You were involved in an incident two nights ago, in the basement.”

“What—oh.”

My face flushes, and I begin to explain: “One of the new people—newer, I should say—” I’ve only been on the force for sixteen months myself, “—one of the newer people brought in a suspect for preventive detention under Title XVI. A vagrant. A homeless individual, that is.”

“Right,” says Paul, and I see that she’s got an incident report in front of her, and I’m not liking this at all. I’m sweating now, literally
sweating in the cold office.

“And he was, the officer I mean, he was being verbally abusive to the suspect, in a way I felt was inappropriate and contrary to department guidelines.”

“And you took it open yourself to intervene. To, let’s see,” and she looks down at her desk again, flips over the onion-skin pink paper of the report, “to recite the relevant statute in an aggressive and threatening manner.”

“I’m not sure that I would characterize it that way.” I glance at the chief, but he’s looking at Lieutenant Paul, her show.

“It’s just, I happened to know the gentleman—sorry, the, I should say, the suspect. Duane Shepherd, Caucasian male, age fifty-five.” Paul’s gaze, unwavering but distant, disinterested, is flustering me, as is the quiet presence of the chief. “Mr. Shepherd was my scout leader when I was a kid. And he used to work as an electric-crew foreman, in Penacook, but I gather he’s had a hard time. With the recession.”

“Officially,” says Paul quietly, “I believe it is a depression.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Lieutenant Paul looks down at the incident report again. She looks exhausted.

This conversation is taking place in early December, deep in the cold months of uncertainty. On September 17 the asteroid went into conjunction, got too close to the Sun to be observed, too close for new readings to be taken. So the odds, which had been inching steadily upward since April—three percent chance of impact, ten percent chance, fifteen—were stalled, late fall and early winter, at fifty-three percent. The world economy went from bad to worse, much
worse. On October 12 the president saw fit to sign the first round of IPSS legislation, authorizing an influx of federal money to state and local law-enforcement agencies. In Concord, this meant all these young kids, younger than me, some recent high-school dropouts, all of them rushed through a sort of quasi-police-academy boot camp. Privately, McConnell and I call them the Brush Cuts, because they all seemed to have that same haircut, the same baby faces and cold eyes and swagger.