The True Detective (12 page)

At the Y-intersection he follows the winding dirt road down toward the pond’s surface. Under and between tree branches he glimpses a silver reflection of sky on the thawing ice, and he sees, through fir trees—where lights would appear in the cabin—that only darkness comes from the windows. All things come to this, he is thinking. All work. All ambition, imagination. This feeling. His urge is to embrace the boy, to adore him with passion. “I just want to be with you,” he cries to him. “It’s all I want.”

“What does that mean?” the boy says.

Letting up on the gas, turning away from the pond to approach the cabin, Vernon realizes he is sinking into surprising, unexplainable sadness. “Everything,” he says. “It means everything.”

Parking, switching off ignition and lights as always, he doesn’t touch the boy. Nor does the boy move or speak. “Just driving like that,” Vernon utters. “Being with someone. It’s new to me; it’s everything. That’s what I meant when I said it was all I wanted. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Vernon can see little. There is the boy in silhouette, but Vernon doesn’t know if his head is facing to the front or to the side.
His urge is to touch his hair with his fingers, to lift it over his forehead as gently as a mother. His urge is to thrill him as he believes he may thrill him.

He has the boy’s wrist in his hand, reaching and taking it, and there is pressure in the boy’s small arm to pull away, as he cries,
“Leave me alone! Stop it!”

Vernon’s eyes have filmed; he holds the boy’s wrist more tightly. He reaches his other arm and hand to the boy’s shoulders, to pull him closer.
“I want to hold you,”
he cries to him.
“It’s all I want.”

The boy resists. He tries to pull free, cries
“Stop it!”
and
“Don’t!”
and
“Stop it!”
and
“Don’t!”—

Vernon holds him. Through his own tears and gasps he is trying to kiss the boy’s hair and neck, his ear and face. As the boy struggles, as he jerks with surprising strength, Vernon holds, contains him, cries to him, cries upon his neck in desperation,
“I’m not going to hurt you. I love you. Don’t you understand? This is love. This is love.”

T
HEY ARE NOT IN THE BACK SEAT BUT IN THE FRONT SEAT
of the darkened Buick. They are in a darkened garage, under the darkening sky, and one knee and then another has banged the
dashboard. The floor gearshift has been in the way, too, but it is too late to consider moving, to tumble into the back seat like children. It is too late for everything.

Matt holds her. He hears her breathing and hears his own, feels her warmth against him as another minute falls away. He doesn’t know what to do now and seems to be trying to think, to understand. Something like forever has been in his mind, and he is troubled with odd disillusionment, with a wish to go back and be what he had been before.

Lifting his head from her neck, he opens his eyes. He says to her, “I just opened my eyes, but I can’t see anything.”

She doesn’t move. Nor does she speak. A faint breath in her throat tells him that she heard what he said, that she knows what he means.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1981

A
T A FEW MINUTES AFTER SEVEN
,
AS THE MORNING SUN IS
just lifting out of the ocean, Dulac is in Lyle’s Lunch to pick up the Sunday
Globe
. Four or five people are ahead of him in line. At this hour, he remarks to himself. Everyone keeps telling them to be courteous to the newcomers, however, and he determines to take it in stride. Lyle’s Lunch. It’s a nondescript coffee shop, two blocks uphill from the water, and he has been stopping here forever, since he was a newcomer himself, come down from Quebec.

How, he asks himself yet again, could a run-down dive like this become popular?

Lyle’s wooden floorboards meander now as they always have, and Dulac wonders again—does he do this every Sunday?—if proximity to the salt water has raised the waves in the boards. At the same time, a row of new booths has been hammered into place down the center of the place—where there used to be Wonder Bread on shelves and packaged pies only schoolchildren seemed to buy—and the booths seem not to lean or sag. Newcomers sit there now, over blueberry pancakes and fat copies of
The New York Times
. Their imported cars are lined up along the side streets, where for the first time ever parking space has become a problem.

It’s okay for these people to come with all their money, but when parking space . . .

Okay, the overweight detective says to himself at last, as some unknown customer ahead is asking Jenny questions. Let’s move it along now, how about it?

A young woman in a purple jogging suit appears in line behind him. He notices that the check in her hand is the same mint color such checks have always been, and he notices her. He manages a passing glance. He doesn’t stare, for that would be both rude and unprofessional; shifting along with the line, he looks ahead. In his private method of recall, however—another of his pastimes—he files the woman in his mind. His method, one he has yet to take to court, is to call up someone the person resembles. It could be Jackie Gleason or Jane Fonda, a neighbor or a friend. Bert at the Amoco station. Anwar Sadat. Shirley Moss at work. Only the nose was such and such, the hair was this darker color, and he or she came up to here on his shoulder. Add your own details, he has said to young officers. Eh? Lock it in your mind as a variation of your Uncle Phil.

Jill Clayburgh. Yes, Your Honor, Jill Clayburgh. Pale cheeks, soft lips. Eyes circled with a little color. Eyes a little tired. Light brown hair. Ruffled some near her shoulders, and a smell of sleep about her neck. No, I’d not seen her before, and I assumed she was a newcomer to the area or a visitor.

The line moves along. On his turn at the counter, aware that it is a foolish thing to do, he orders the
Times
. As lumpy as a rhino and unshaven this morning, he says, “
The New York Times,
Jenny,” approximately in the angled presence of the woman in the purple jogging suit.

Paying the fare, a dollar fifty, he carries the paper out onto the sidewalk, where he is not unaware of the engaging springlike air coming in again today. He goes along slowly. Holding the
Times
in both hands, he pretends to be reading the front page, to give Miss Clayburgh a chance to catch up, to fall in place beside him with her copy of the
Times.

Behind him, Lyle’s door opens and swings shut. He listens for her footsteps. In these seconds, too, however overweight and solidly married he happens to be, he imagines the women writing to her best friend in New York:
I met him in this quaint little mom-and-pop store . . . you know the kind . . . we just fell into conversation . . . he’s a policeman but I knew he was someone special when I saw him buy the Sunday
New York Times.

Nothing happens. Five second pass, perhaps five more. When he glances over his shoulder, he sees Jill Clayburgh going the other way. Turning the corner on a pivot, she is starting uphill, and she carries no newspaper. As if on tiptoe, not rapidly, she begins to lope.

Hoisting, shifting his bulk into his unmarked four-door Chevrolet, tossing the heavy paper to the passenger seat, Dulac heads into town. He lights a cigarette. That little number, he thinks. Seabrook is probably the closest she’s ever been to New York City. She’s probably down from Skowhegan or Province du Québec; she picked up the jogging suit at a yard sale in Kittery, and she works as a frontline waitress at Valle’s on Route I. And he has that paper to read which will not include a single score from anything more recent than Friday. Yes, Your Honor, I turned fifty-two last July and I know what you’re going to say.

Half a mile away, at the Porstmouth PD, nosing his car up to his marker—
Lt Gilbert Dulac
—he begins the reverse process of lifting himself out of his car. He can unload quickly if need be, he always tells himself, but of course it is Sunday and he is both off-duty and the ranking man present. The chief’s and the captain’s parking spaces, the only spaces to the left of his own, stand empty, as they generally do on Sundays.

On his feet, Dulac shakes out his wool shirt jacket. He leaves the paper where it is. The station house is his unofficial Sunday morning club, where he often stops to talk, to have coffee and cigarettes and read the paper while Beatrice sleeps in until nine or so, and although he can tell from the scant number of cars in the lot—most, he knows, will belong to officers out on patrol—he is not of a mind this springlike morning to settle in with the paper. Not quite yet. Not without anything on the Celtics or Bruins from at least yesterday. You’d think Portsmouth was closer to Halifax than Boston, the way the news traveled.

The station house resembles a small-town stone church or library, and walking around to the side entrance he is taken with the urge, and very nearly turns back, to go ahead and drive to one of the nearby beaches. To take a stroll in this remarkably warm air. Raising a hand to the cadet on duty at the main desk, who buzzes him through a waist-high gate, Dulac moves back through to the squad room, to the coffee station, to see if anyone is around. If so, maybe he’d tell them about Jill Clayburgh in her purple jogging suit and the foolish tub of lard who bought
The New York Times
to impress her. It wasn’t anything, he thinks, he’d be likely to pass on to Beatrice.

Styrofoam cup in hand—no one is around—he wanders back out to the main desk, to read over the entries in the log. Checking entries, from the bottom up, is a daily habit as well as one of his responsibilities as Lieutenant of Detectives. It’s a curiosity, too, for nothing crucial would have gone down or he would have heard of it long before reading it in the log.

He doesn’t quite pause on the report of an armed robbery of a gas station near the air base, or over an entry concerning a twelve-year-old male runaway, but he does note them. He continues, skims various alcohol-and traffic-related calls and complaints entered since he last checked the log at about
four yesterday afternoon, before leaving for home. Domestic disturbance, shoplifting, burglary from a garage, domestic disturbance, unlawful driving away of an automobile, domestic disturbance, simple assault. An entry which is unusual is the arrest, and release to custody, of three Portsmouth High students, two male, one female, apprehended while drinking beer in the home ec lab of the high school at 0240 hours.

“This armed robbery, you notified Sergeant Mizener?” he says to the cadet.

“Well, no, I didn’t, but I think he was notified.”

“You came on at midnight?”

“Yes sir.”

“How about this runaway? Anything else on him?”

“No sir, I don’t think so.”

“You didn’t take any calls, since you came on?”

“No sir.”

“You didn’t call his house?”

“No sir. Was I supposed to?”

“You could, I guess. He should be home by now, wouldn’t you think?”

“Yes sir, I’d think so.”

“Maybe they haven’t called back—his family—but who knows. It doesn’t say here if he’s run away before. Did you check that out?”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to do that either, sir.”

“Well, it wouldn’t hurt, would it? Then you’d know.”

“Yes sir.”

“Why don’t you do it now. See if we got anything on anyone at that address or by that name.”

Straightening to sip his coffee, Dulac watches as the cadet shifts his chair and begins to tap on the computer keyboard. He watches the screen as the name, entered, produces no file, as
the same thing happens with the mother’s name at the address. “Nothing,” the cadet says, looking back. “That’s all we have.”

“Kid would be hungry by now, wouldn’t you think?”

“Well, yes sir. I guess he would.”

Taking up the telephone, Dulac says, “He’s probably sitting at a counter somewhere scared shitless of what his old man is gonna do to him when he gets home.”

“Yes sir,” the cadet says, smiling.

“There’s nothing wrong with calling,” the lieutenant adds. “If it would help.”

“Yes sir,” the cadet adds.

“Mrs. Wells?” the lieutenant says. “Lieutenant Dulac, Portsmouth Police. We haven’t heard any more about your son, Eric. We’re just wondering if you’ve heard anything?”

Listening, looking more or less above the cadet, the lieutenant says. “You haven’t.”

Then he says, “You did.”

Then, “You don’t think he fell asleep somewhere?”

And then, “Has he ever run away like this before?”

And, “Well, it was entered here as a runaway.”

In another moment he says, “What about relatives? Did you call them?”

In another moment, “Was he upset or angry about anything?”

Then, “You think he might have been mad because you wouldn’t give him money to stop at the party store?”