The True Detective (35 page)

“Red cheeks?” the man says, glancing up from what he is writing. “Red cheeks—that’s what he said?”

“That’s right,” Dulac says.

“The guy I picked up had red cheeks,” the man says. “Did you ask me that? Did I say that?”

“The guy you picked up had red cheeks?”

“He certainly did. I’d forgotten that. He did, though. They reddened, you know, when he got embarrassed or excited—but that’s what he had. Red cheeks. It’s true.”

“Apple-colored?”

“Apple-colored is absolutely right,” the man says.

“Jesus Christ,” Dulac says. “This guy tried to buy child porn. That’s what the clerk says. Between about two and three. He went into the movie then.
Children in Bondage.
Which lasted fifty-five minutes.”

“I met him at five thirty,” the man says. “I bet it’s him. He was trying to buy child porn? That’s amazing, absolutely amazing.”

“Get your stuff,” Dulac says. “Come right back. Let me have that.”

“My name is Martin,” the man says, as Dulac takes the slip of paper from him.

“Tell the cadet you’re there to see me,” Dulac says. “He’ll ring me.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” the man says, as he moves away to the left.

Dulac, watching a moment, goes to the right, slipping the paper into his wallet. Already his mind is on the consequences of the press conference. It has to be him, he keeps saying to
himself. It has to be him. Red cheeks. Kiddy porn. A wayward missile looking for a target. It has to be him. He feels certain of this, if it’s good police work or not.

He strides along. He has to be local, he is thinking. There’s the license plate—and only local yokels would know about the Sex Barn. No, no, that’s not true, he thinks. There’d be networks. When it came to sex, there’d be networks.

You better slow down, Dulac says to himself as he turns the corner to the police station. You could still be wrong about this. This rosy-cheeked guy in his gray car could show up and clear himself in ten minutes. You could be wrong all the way around and end up looking like a world-class fool. And you’re going to endanger the boy, you’d better recognize that. If he isn’t already a statistic, like Shirley said. If the guy isn’t already in Miami, on the beach, or in Montreal. Or looking for another child to pick up. You’re going to tighten the screws on this sonofabitch and that’s going to endanger the boy.

You have to do it, you have to use it at the press conference, Dulac says to himself, reaching the door and entering. You have no choice, really. You have to do it because it has to be done. It’ll scare the shit out of the guy, for sure, if he’s still around. At the same time someone is going to know him. A neighbor, at least, or a co-worker or landlord or gas station attendant is going to know exactly who he is. A mailman. His wife or parents. His boyfriend or girlfriend. No question—with all they have to go on, one person at the very least is going to call in, and if they are lucky, if they can somehow slip up on him or make contact with him—if it isn’t too late—the little Wells kid is going to come walking out. As in some child’s game in darkness, he’s going to be home free.

The odds have to be fifty-fifty. Don’t they?

O
N THE THIRD FLOOR
, V
ERNON IS SITTING AT A CARREL NEXT
to a window. A chill is reaching from the glass to his side but there is little or no sound up here. There are no voices. He hears the wind come up now and then like a distant airplane in the gray sky. Then he doesn’t listen. Perhaps he thinks. The partial enclosure of the metal desk provides some privacy within the privacy of the seldom-used floor. It’s a place to hide, here above the world, and he is hiding. Resting. Trying to rest. Calm down and think, he keeps saying to himself.

No one would look here, he thinks. If only he could stay here. If only he could close off something like a corner for himself on this side of the third floor and stay here forever. There was heat. Running water. Books to read—a window from which to watch life go on, to watch it change out there as it passed by, year after year.

Time passes. He stares out over buildings and treetops. The sky remains gray, painted-over gray. Under the sky, in the parking lot a few hundred yards away, there remains something, a small space, significant to his mind. Will someone make the discovery? Will they trace his car and trace him—appear here in a moment to take him away?

At the same time there is a feeling of some safety in this hideaway corner. No one would think to look here, he keeps telling himself. Even if they had found the boy and traced his
car, they wouldn’t look here. They’d go to the cottage. They’d question Duncan, and Leon and Wayne. Placing his head on his arms on the desk, thinking, Vernon stares away at nothing. In time his eyes close, and he dozes some. Coming around in a moment, he feels troubled again. Something is out there. Everything is wrong. The terror will not go away.

This is Tuesday, he thinks. Only last Friday, even Saturday, his life was okay. He was miserable over what was happening with Anthony, but it wasn’t like this. He was unhappy and helpless. So it seems now. But it was nothing like this. This is like death. It is death. The tremor within him is the tremor of death. His heart knows it, feels its nearness.

If only they would catch him. If only the progression of fear within him would stop. Would someone listen to him? He’d tell everything. Would they let him explain? Would anyone listen? What a godsend it would be if merely one person in the world would listen, would hear his explanation, if they understood him or not.

W
ALKING INTO THE POLICE STATION
,
TELLING THE CADET
on duty that he is there to see Lieutenant Dulac, Matt is directed instead to a woman working next to a uniformed policeman at a long table, in a far corner of the room. Both the woman and the policeman are holding telephones to their faces, listening and
talking; inviting him with her eyebrows to state his purpose, the woman then covers the receiver with her free hand. She says to him, “Wait just a minute, please,” and Matt retreats a step and a half and stands looking around while she turns her face down and finishes her call.

“You’re Matt, aren’t you?” the woman says to him.

“Yes,” Matt says, pleased to be known.

“The lieutenant’s busy right now,” the woman says, keeping her eyes on him. “What did you want to see him about?”

“Oh, nothing,” Matt says.

“Nothing’s ever nothing around here,” the woman says. Again, there are her eyebrows extending an invitation. “If it’s an emergency—” she says.

“Oh no,” Matt says. “No, it’s nothing.”

“I don’t mean to pry,” she says. “We’re all working on your brother’s case. The lieutenant’s in the interrogation room right now, but he’s going from there into a press conference. I’m going to tell him you stopped by, and he’s going to ask me what it was you wanted. You see?”

“I just wanted to see him,” Matt says.

“That’s all—nothing in particular?”

“No, that’s all.”

“Okay. That’s fine. The thing is, he’s really busy right now. After the press conference he has to go meet with some expert at the university, because this guy doesn’t have time to come here. Who knows when he’ll have lunch.”

“I understand,” Matt says.

“How old are you?” the woman says then.

“Fifteen,” Matt says.

“Tenth grade?”

“Ninth.”

“You’re home from school today?”

“I went,” Matt says. “Then I left.”

“You felt out of it.”

“I sure did.”

“Well, it’s a hard time. Is your mother at home?”

“Yeah.”

“You feel out of it there, too?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll tell the lieutenant you were here, that you wanted to see him. Because you’re feeling out of it. Okay?”

“Okay,” Matt says, feeling better, smiling some.

“Where can he reach you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, I’ll pass on the message. I know he’ll want to see you, so you check back in, okay? This afternoon.”

“Okay,” Matt says.

“I mean that,” the woman says.

Matt looks at her.

“You look after your mother, too,” the woman says.

“I will,” Matt says.

H
EAD DOWN INTO
the wind, though, as he walks along Marcy Street close to where the wide river begins to open into the harbor, it is not the care of his mother which is on Matt’s mind but an idea all at once of yet another place to look for Eric. Only a block and a half ahead, over a causeway, he can climb down the rocks and search the shore around Pierce Island, a semi-forbidden, uninhabited island attached to downtown where he and Eric have explored before. Perhaps he will find him there, he thinks, as his hopes become airborne again. That will show Lieutenant Dulac, he thinks. It will show them all.

He imagines Eric in a cave. Waiting to get aboard a passing ship. Maybe caught in the rocks. For however off-limits the sandy-rocky beach was to their mother, the water was one of those places toward which Eric was always tending.

Down over the barricades and fifty yards along, however, Matt has a sense of being wrong. He will have to go all the way around the island, however, just to be sure. Something called him; he can take no chances, even if the weather here is wetter and windier. What if Eric was near the tip of the island, his foot pinned by a rock?

Vanessa keeps flashing into his mind, too, but he looks away from thinking of her. There is the choppy cold water, its whitecaps coming up. And the Naval Shipyard across the harbor; trying to spot ships over there, especially subs, lying in the water, was one of Eric’s favorite activities. Could he have gone over there, trying to drive away a submarine?

What happened between him and Vanessa never happened at all, Matt thinks then. It was a dream. He’d show her, too. Still, it is the big cop who holds the center of his mind, the big cop’s smile.

What if Eric just came walking along the beach? he thinks, pushing through weeds to another stretch of sand. It seems so possible, Matt looks ahead over approaching rocks, to see if he will appear, experiences disappointment as an empty stretch comes into view.

He recalls the submarine story then and how Eric was always so taken with it. Its log showed, so it was said around town, that during World War II a German U-boat had slipped into Portsmouth Harbor and lay in overnight, near the Memorial Bridge, watching the Naval Shipyard. The Coast Guard operated a steel-mesh fence across the mouth of the harbor, and when it was opened the next morning to let fishing boats and lobstermen go out to sea, the submarine slipped out underneath them. Matt liked the story, too, although he always insisted to Eric that
it wasn’t true. Eric wouldn’t have it. “Can’t you just see it?” he liked to say. “Its periscope on the shipyard all night—then this big, long, black thing goes along under the fishing boats. Think how you’d feel if you looked down and saw it! You could blast it with a hand grenade!”

At last, near the tip of the island, Matt spots something dark red in gray rocks. Pushing closer in the breeze, though, he can see that it is only a rag, a cloth or a shirt, caught on the rocks. An image stays with him, though, as he pushes on through loose sand.

Other things disturb his mind, too. One is a man’s upturned brown shoe, caught in a tangle of dried seaweed. Another is the carcass of a fish, lying in the suds. For the first time an image of a body comes into Matt’s mind. The body lies on its side.

Matt tells the image to go away. He pushes on, as if it is his duty. His spirit leaves him, though, and doubt comes up in its place. Did he make a fool of himself, going to the police station? It seems he did. It did not seem that way then, but it does now. That woman, asking him all those things. They’d probably laugh, he thinks, when she tells the lieutenant of his wandering in and asking to see him. He’s the one who told him to do it, Matt thinks, all at once close to tears. He didn’t just come up with it on his own.

“I
T
’
S NOT A REAL IMPORTANT THING
,”
SHE SAYS
, “
BUT
I
BELIEVE
the brother is developing a kind of fix on you.”

“You believe what?” Dulac says.

They are entering his cubicle, as he has just stepped away from the press conference—some reporters are literally jogging with their machine-copied composite sketches—and Shirley is coming to give him an update of calls and callers.

“You had children, you’d see it in a second,” she says. “He’s turning to you. You’re the strong figure in this thing. He’s in need and there’s no father. He’s a kind of lonely kid anyway, it seems to me.”

“What about his mother? What are you saying?”

“I don’t think his mother is the one he wants to be around right now. And I’m not saying anything. All I’m saying is that it’s something for you to be aware of. He’s fifteen. That’s young. This is no small thing for him, even if he won’t know it until later. And he probably doesn’t know he’s gravitating toward you. With his mother he probably feels that
he
should be the responsible one. I just thought you should know, that’s all. There are other things to talk about.”

“Did he say that?” Dulac says.

“No, Gil, of course he didn’t say that.”

“Should I do something? I have to leave here almost at once, to talk to this guy at the university. And I have to call the secret witness—told him I’d only contact him in an emergency—to see if he’ll go with me. And I’m going to ask him to take a polygraph, too, which is going to piss him off, I’m sure.”

“You’re taking him where?”

“To see the expert guy at the university. State Police delivered the sex film. Expert’s going to give us a critique, say if the film could suggest behavior. The secret witness I’d like along because he
knows
the suspect, and because he’s a very astute guy. Now you’re making me feel bad because I don’t have any time for the brother.”

“Take him along. He’d be thrilled.”