Tough Customer (34 page)

He'd brought home a carton of rich, creamy tomato basil soup, a speciality of a cafe where he often had his meals. They sat at his kitchen table and ate the soup with hunks of French bread he tore off the loaf and buttered with a heavy hand.

When he gave Caroline a second piece of it, she asked, "Are you trying to make me fat?"

"I'm trying to get you to where I can see you in profile."

After their supper, which included vanilla ice cream and fudge sauce, they watched television for a while, but by ten o'clock, Caroline was yawning. "I'm sorry. It's not your company, I promise."

"No apology necessary. I'm beat, too."

As she had the day before, she put up an argument for giving him back his bed and sleeping on the sofa. "I'm smaller. I'm the interloper. I don't mind."

"But I do."

In the end, he wouldn't hear of relegating her to the sofa, and she relented. Dodge spent his second wretched night on the damn hard and unforgiving thing, but relishing every single minute of his torturous insomnia because Caroline was under his roof and snug in his bed.

That first day set the pattern for those that followed. She got up each morning in time to see him off and was there waiting when he returned. At her insistence, he'd stocked the pantry and fridge with more groceries than they'd ever had in them. She wanted foodstuffs and spices on hand so she could prepare dinner each night.

"It's the least I can do to repay your hospitality."

He permitted it, conditional upon her eating half of everything she cooked, and promising not to overexert herself.

He watched the bruise around her eye fade from eggplant to violet, then to avocado green. Natural color returned to her cheeks. Her tiny frame fleshed out a little more each day until she no longer looked dangerously underfed.

She groused about her idleness, but to Dodge she seemed industrious. Daily, she studied the real estate sections of newspapers. She lamented the listings she'd missed and strategized how she was going to make up for lost time when she returned to Jim Malone Realty.

She made endless notes in a spiral notebook she'd brought with her, jotting down ideas as they occurred to her. Her ambition was undiminished by this temporary setback. In fact, because of it, she was even more determined to make a name for herself. Dodge supposed she wanted to succeed in order to spite Roger Campton and his family of untouchables.

She discussed with Dodge the career path she had plotted, as though he could offer valuable advice on how she could achieve her goals in the time frame she'd set. He had little to offer, but she didn't seem to realize that. He was flattered that she often asked for his unlearned opinion.

She was more cultured than he was. She'd read more books, heard more symphonies, listened to more lectures, and toured more museums. Hell, in his whole life, he'd been inside one museum, and he'd gone then only because he'd heard it had an exhibition devoted entirely to paintings of naked women.

Caroline was way above him intellectually. But the way she listened when he talked made him feel smarter, like she thought anything he said was worth hearing.

"I bet you got straight A's in school," he teased one night.

She blushed, which was as good as an admission.

He laughed. "I got my degree by the skin of my teeth."

"But you've got common sense."

"Street smarts."

"Don't dismiss the importance of that," she said earnestly. "In your line of work, that's vital to keeping you alive."

He couldn't talk to her about his present duty, but he told her about previous cases he'd worked, some amusing, some tragic. She seemed fascinated by even the most mundane story.

On one of his days off from the tire plant, they ventured out together for the first time. He took her to the movies. She wore her dark glasses until they got into the theater and the houselights went down.

They shared a box of popcorn. Occasionally their hands reached in at the same time and they had swatting contests. Once when she crossed her legs, her foot bumped his calf, but she excused herself and moved it away.

It was a movie about two brothers, one good, one bad, both of whom hated their tyrannical father but loved the same woman. There was a scene where the leads made love--sexy, hungry, forbidden love. Dodge had never been so turned on by a film sequence, and it wasn't because he got flashed by a celebrated pair of tits that were probably insured for a million dollars by Lloyd's of London. It was because he was sitting next to Caroline, whose breasts were small but the objects of fantasies that each night left him sweaty and fretful on his damn sofa.

He wanted her. God, did he. But he didn't touch her. For damn sure not during that movie scene. Even the slightest move in that direction would've shattered the trust she'd placed in him. Anyone who knew him would never believe their relationship was chaste, but to take advantage of her situation would be to abuse her worse than Campton had.

Dodge didn't think about the future when she wouldn't be there to welcome him home after his workday, when he would no longer hear her humming in the kitchen, or catch the scent of her shampoo in the bathroom. He pretended it would go on like this forever. Except for his raging, confused, and chaotic libido, he was wonderfully content.

Up till the day he was upended by a stupid, senseless, unnecessary calamity that made him want to pick up a baseball bat and attack God where he lived.

That day, after his grind at the tire plant, Dodge called Caroline and told her it would be another hour or so before he got home. He went to task force headquarters for a scheduled briefing.

He should have noticed the subdued atmosphere in the building immediately upon entering it. But he was thinking about Caroline and the pot roast dinner she had said was waiting for him. Pot roast was such an evocative dish. It connoted hearth and home. Permanence.

His daydream of pot roast dinners for years to come was swaddled in such a rosy haze that he didn't pick up on the funereal mood among his fellow officers until he realized that they were all avoiding eye contact with him.

He asked the room at large, "What'd I do?"

No one said anything.

"What's going on?"

Silence.

"Jesus. There's been another robbery? Did somebody else get killed?

Goddammit!
Was it Albright? What bank? When?"

One brave soul cut off his tirade. "It's not that, Dodge. It's, uh, it's..."

"What?

What?
"

"It's Gonzales."

It took a moment for Dodge to switch his thoughts from their elusive, clever bank robber to his former partner and best friend. But from there he made an instant connection between the glum mood in the room and Jimmy's name.

His heart came to a sudden, thudding halt. He stopped breathing. He swallowed convulsively, but his mouth had gone dry, he had no spit.

"There was an accident," one of his cohorts said. "Gonzales was ... He didn't make it."

"Sorry, Dodge."

"Hey, man, I'm sorry."

"Goes with the territory, but ... shit."

"Anything I can do, Dodge, just ask. Okay?"

The murmured words of consolation barely registered. He turned his back to the other men and tried to assimilate what they were telling him. He couldn't. He came back around. "Jimmy's
dead
?" When that was affirmed with solemn nods, he started hyperventilating.

"Take it easy, Dodge."

"Where is he?"

"The morgue. His folks are there."

"I gotta--"

"Dodge, you can't!"

He made a dash for the exit but was grabbed from behind, and he began struggling savagely to shake off restraining hands. "You can't go to the aid of a cop, Dodge."

"Think, man!"

"You'll blow your cover."

"Fuck that!" he yelled. "And fuck you. Let go of me."

He continued to scream obscenities, but eventually he exhausted himself, and the reasonableness of what the other officers were saying sank in. He ceased struggling, and they released him. He dropped into the nearest chair and sat there for the longest time, trying to collect himself, wishing he didn't believe the unbelievable. Finally he looked up. "You said it was an accident. What happened?"

A rock star had flown into Hobby Airport for a concert to take place that night at the Astrodome. Gonzales, wanting the overtime, had volunteered to ride in one of the squad cars providing police escort for the singer's limo. Word had leaked out of his arrival time. From Hobby Airport, the limo was chased by paparazzi and carloads of crazed, dope-fueled, fanatical fans.

Gonzales and another officer were in the car directly behind the limo. One of the cars chasing the motorcade, trying to get between them, clipped the front bumper of the squad car. They were going so fast that the officer behind the wheel lost control. The car spun out and was slung into a telephone pole, hitting it broadside with such force, it was almost cut in half.

Jimmy Gonzales was.

Cut in half.

The captain asked Dodge if he wanted to talk to a chaplain, a counselor, a psychologist. Dodge told him to fuck off. He didn't stay for the briefing.

For a while, he drove around the city looking for someplace in which to vent his roiling anger but soon realized that his erratic driving was a danger to innocent motorists and their passengers. Where would be the sense in his killing somebody in a car crash? No one would appreciate the irony. Least of all Jimmy Gonzales, who would rebuke him from the cold slab in the morgue on which the halves of him lay.

He wound up at a batting cage. It felt good to have something hard and potentially lethal in his hands, taking whacks at something as defenseless as Gonzales had been against the laws of physics and that goddamn telephone pole.

He didn't go home until hours later. By then the pot roast had been put away. Caroline's eyes were soft with sympathy when she greeted him at the door. "It was on the ten o'clock news. I'm so sorry, Dodge."

He nodded and walked past her into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator but didn't know what he was looking for, so he just stared into it sightlessly.

"I want to do something to help you," she said with feeling. "But I don't know what to do."

He slammed the refrigerator door, rattling glass containers inside. "You can't do anything to help. I can't do anything. I can't even go to his funeral. I've been ordered not to. I can't go see his parents. Nice folks, by the way. Proud as punch of their son Jimmy, the cop." His throat seized up, and he groaned, "Jesus."

Caroline took a step toward him, but he rebuffed her. "There's nothing you or anybody can do, all right?" he shouted. "Don't you get it? The dumb asshole should have been off duty. Instead, he's dead! And for what? He died protecting that flaming fairy with pink hair and green satin pants, whose singing, frankly, sounds to me like a cat getting fucked in the ass.

"And the person who caused the wreck fled the scene. Didn't even have the decency to own up to taking out a good cop and a great guy. Probably some cokehead. If I ever find out who..." He raised his hands, curled his fingers toward his palms. "If I ever find out who was driving that car, I'll kill him with my bare hands."

"Dodge, you're--"

"You don't think I mean it, do you?"

"Dodge."

"Think again, nice girl. I beat up your fiance, didn't I? Have you forgotten that?"

"You're not yourself."

"I'm exactly myself." He sneered. "This is me, Caroline." He pounded his fist against his chest. "Take a good look. This is the
real me.
"

He could feel the angry blood throbbing through the veins in his head and neck. He knew that his eyes were glowing with fury, that he was spraying spittle with each word, that he probably looked feral.

That he probably looked like his old man.

But even knowing that, he couldn't stop himself from saying what his father used to shout at him. "Just leave me the fuck alone, will you?"

With remarkable calm, Caroline sidestepped him and left the room.

Then he had no one on whom to direct his rage, so he threw himself down into one of the kitchen chairs, put his head on the table, and sobbed till his throat was raw.

He stayed there until dawn, benumbed by grief, steeped in self-loathing.

When he realized the sun was coming up, he stirred. He toed off his shoes and tiptoed through the house to the bathroom, where he splashed his face with cold water. His shirttail was out, his hair standing on end, he had a full day's growth of beard. He looked like a derelict after a weeklong binge, but he was too weary in body and soul to make repairs.

As he left the bathroom, he looked down the hallway toward the bedroom. The door was ajar, not quite an invitation, but she hadn't barred herself against him, which, after the way he behaved, she'd had every right, practically an obligation, to do.

He went to the door and pushed it open. Its hinges creaked, but that didn't waken her because she was already awake. He sensed she was even though she was facing away from him, lying on her side, her knees pulled up nearly to her chest. She lay on top of the covers, fully dressed except for her shoes. The pads of her toes, perfect dots of flesh, were lined up against the balls of her small feet.

The sight of her caused the bitterness that he had nursed through the night to disintegrate, and all he was left with was emptiness.

He walked to the bed and lay down, close to her, but without touching. He expected her to tell him to get away from her, that she couldn't stand the sight or sound or smell of him. But she didn't. She lay perfectly still, and that silent acceptance of his presence emboldened him to speak.

"I was wrong last night," he said in what, for him, passed as a whisper. Even so, his voice sounded abnormally loud. He tried lowering it another decibel. "When I said there was nothing you could do to help me, I was wrong. There is something."