With Child (6 page)

"That's not what I mean."

"No? Well, in this case, I don't think your suspicions are justified. Your mom probably just thought it was a private message, that's all."

In silence, Kate and Jules walked down the two flights of stairs, Kate feeling absurdly on trial, as aware of the child's inner turmoil as if she could see it on a screen: Which side was Kate on? Kate wondered if it mattered, knew that it did, knew furthermore that she wanted Jules to trust her loyalty, and realized that she'd be a damned fool to get herself between child and mother, with Al Hawkin standing over it all. Have to watch your step, Kate.

Still in silence, she started the car and drove the half mile or so to the park with the swimming pool. Jules walked away onto the grass, and Kate trailed after, to the shade of a tree on a low rise. Jules settled down as if sitting in a familiar chair. Kate sat down beside her.

"This is where you used to meet him, you said?" she asked after a couple of minutes.

"His father used to beat him. Did I tell you that?"

"No, you didn't, but it doesn't surprise me. A lot of runaways come from abusive families."

"He's dead, isn't he?"

"He may be. But in all honesty, Jules, I think the odds that he's alive somewhere are considerably higher."

"Did you ever read
Peter Pan
?" Jules asked abruptly.

"
Peter Pan
?" Kate wondered where this was going. "Not in a very long time."

"I hate that book. It's detestable. I read it again last week, because I was thinking about something Dio said, and when you take away all that cute, cheerful stuff they put in the movies, you see it's about a bunch of boys whose parents throw them away, or anyway don't care enough to bother looking for them when they get lost, who get together to try and take care of each other, only to have another group of grown-ups try to kill them all. What's the difference between a pirate and a serial killer, or a drug pusher, or a... a pimp, I ask you?"

Kate was shocked, though whether by the words or the ferociously dry eyes, she could not have said.

"Um, what makes you think --"

"Oh, get real, Kate. I'm not stupid, you know. I do read." She jumped up and stalked off to the chain-link fence around the swimming pool and stood with her fingers hooked into the wire, staring at the lesson going on in the water. Kate followed her slowly, then leaned with her back against the fence, facing the opposite direction.

"You having problems with your mom?"

"I suppose."

"Most people do, at one time or another. She loves you."

"I know. And she has problems. God, who doesn't?" she said with a bitterness beyond her years.

"We don't," said Kate lightly. "Not today. Today is not for problems. Come on."

They spent the next few hours at the shooting range, and Kate considered that she had done the job well, acquainting Jules with the intricacies of the handgun (a borrowed .22 and Kate's own heavier .38) to the point that Jules could hit the target a respectable number of times, and further, she kept the girl at it until she began to show signs of boredom with this, her mother's bugbear. Ravenous, they ate hamburgers, went to an early movie, ended up, of all places, at a bowling alley, and arrived back at the apartment at 10:30 that night, disheveled, exhausted, and reeking of gunpowder, sweat, hamburger grease, popcorn, and the cigarette smoke of the alley. Jules jabbered maniacally for twenty minutes before she began to flag, and then was dispatched to bed. Jani went to make coffee.

"You gave her a good time," said Al, approving and amused.

"She's a nice kid. And tell Jani I think the fascination with guns will fade, now she knows they're just noise and stink."

"How's Lee? Do you need to call to tell her you'll be late?" Hawkin knew the routine as well as Kate did: Call in whenever you're away.

"No, I don't. She's... she isn't there."

Hawkin looked up quickly. "Not in the hospital again?"

"Oh, no, she's doing fine. Or I guess she is. She's up at her aunt's."

"Still? It's been weeks."

"Five weeks, not that long. She writes. She's okay, getting her head straight." That she could admit this much to Al Hawkin was an indication of how very far she'd come since they first began to work together. However she added, "Don't say anything, around the department."

"No," he said, but he watched her closely-for a long minute before he stood up to get himself a drink. Kate thought vaguely of leaving.

"I've asked Jani to marry me," he said abruptly. "She said yes."

"I did wonder." She grinned. "I'm very happy for you, Al. For both of you."

Al Hawkin and Jani Cameron had met a year and a half ago, only days before Lee had been shot in the culmination of the same case that brought him to the Cameron door. Since then, Al had paid court to this woman with all his might and every wile at his command. "Laid siege" would describe it more accurately, Kate had occasionally thought over the months. A very polite and solicitous siege, true, but for all the chivalry, there was an underlying single-minded determination that made the final result inescapable.

Jani, coming in with a tray of coffee, was also happy. At any rate, there was a softness in her that had not been there before, and conversely, her spine was straighter. Al had won her, and she was freed from solitude, and Kate heard the heavy footsteps of returning melancholia as she sat on the comfortable ugly sofa and drank coffee with these two friends who had obviously spent this gift of an unexpected free day mostly in bed. She drained her mug, took her leave of them, and drove home to her empty house on Russian Hill. She looked at the keyhole with loathing, opened the door. No lights, no warmth, no smells, the only noise the sharp echo of the door closing. The only life here was an importunate raccoon.

"You miserable house," she said loudly, and went to feed Gideon his dinner.

Kate woke early after a night of fitful sleep, and she decided the time had come to find her running shoes again. It took her a while, but she uncovered them at last in a box on a shelf in what she had begun thinking of as Lee's closet, where Jon must have put them some months before in one of his fits of tidying. They were old friends on her feet, and she did a careful round of stretches before letting herself out into the gray half rain of an early, foggy morning.

By the base of the hill, her calf muscles were quivering, and the intended easy run of two miles was whittled down still further. At the end of the short circuit, she returned up Russian Hill, walking, and slowly at that, with a red face and heaving lungs. Inside the house, the red dot on the answering machine was glowing, an excuse to sit down on the carpeted stairway to listen to the message - three messages, it turned out; the telephone must have rung the whole time she was out. The first one was from Jon, his voice sounding distant, exaggerated: defensive.

"Katarina, dearest,
why
do I always get the machine? Are you never at home? I
do
hope you're getting these messages; I'll feel terrible if you haven't been. Anyway, I'm back in Boston, but only for a few days. A friend wants me to go to his place in Cancun, and you know how I adore Mexico. Just for a week or two, maybe a bit more, I don't know. I may be back in the City first, but if not, I'll drop you a line and let you know just where I am, exactly. If you really have to get ahold of me, that same number in Boston will do; they'll know where I am. Did you get my postcard from London? Don't you think those helmets the bobbies wear are just so adorable? Why don't our boys wear them? Couldn't you suggest it to the police commissioner or whoever is in charge of the uniforms? Ah well, enough of this, I'll use up the whole tape. Toodle-oo now, Kate, as they say in jolly old. I hope you're well. I'll be in touch soon."

The next message was a brief one from Rosa Hidalgo, who said, "Kate, I just wanted to tell you that if there's anything I can do to help you with Jules, just call me. She's a real sweetheart, but she can be a handful, and I'm happy to offer advice." Kate stared at the machine, wondering what on earth the woman was talking about. She shook her head at the neighborhood busybody and dismissed her from her mind.

Fortunately, the third message was from Jules.

"Hi, Kate. I, um, I suppose you're asleep, and don't bother calling me back. I just wanted to say thanks for yesterday; I really enjoyed it. Especially when that guy in the next lane who was giving you a hard time turned around and dropped the ball on his foot. God, that was funny. Anyway, thanks, I really had a great time, and, if you ever want to do it again, I'd love to. I mean, not just the same things, but anything. Oh, this is Jules - I forgot to say. As if you wouldn't have guessed by now, duh. Gotta run - the French club's going to the beach. Bye, Kate. And thanks again. Bye."

Kate was grinning when the tape clucked to itself, and she pushed herself off the stairs to go shower.

The message from Jules was to prove the high point of a very long and very trying week, a week designed by malevolent fate to push the most phlegmatic of detectives over the edge. Kate was not exactly riding the most even of keels to begin with.

Monday her car would not start.

Cable car and bus got her to work late, irritable, and with leg muscles still quivering from Sunday's run, to find that Al Hawkin was out with the flu and she had been paired with Sammy Calvo, easily the most abrasive and inefficient detective in the city. And of course they caught a call first thing, so she had the pleasure of listening to his offensive jokes - told in all innocence; he truly could not comprehend why a woman might not think a rape joke funny - and going back over his interviews to see what he had left out.

Tuesday, the tow truck was delayed, so she was late a second time. She was further irritated by the truck driver's friendly offer to take Lee's Saab down from its blocks so Kate could drive it - because the thought had already occurred to her and been squelched by the need to reinstate its insurance at a moment's notice, by the knowledge of the comments a Saab convertible would stir up when she climbed out of it at a crime scene in one of the more unsavory parts of town, but mostly by pride. The car was Lee's; Kate would have nothing to do with it.

Wednesday, she sat in the department's unmarked car and had a shouting match with Sammy Calvo over his treatment of a witness, the fifteen-year-old mother of the child whose death they were investigating. His final querulous remark made her blood pressure soar: "I don't understand why you're so hot about this, Katy. I just asked her if she'd ever heard of the Pill." Although sorely tempted to whack him over the head with the clipboard he invariably carried, she satisfied herself with snarling, "It's because you're an insensitive jerk, Sammy. And for Christ's sake, don't call me Katy." She slammed the door of the car behind her and went back into the house to calm the teary young mother and her angry family, finally retrieving some of the answers she needed.

It was a long time until night, and longer still before she came through the door of the house, her very skin aching with the stress and frustrations of a fourteen-hour day, aching for a friendly voice, aching for Lee, aching, most of all, for a drink, many drinks; craving alcohol like a drowning person craves air, she yearned for the world's oldest painkiller to knock the edges off the intolerable day. She heaved her things onto the kitchen table, plucked a bottle of wine from the rack without looking to see what kind it was, took it over to the drawer to get the corkscrew, and then stood with the corkscrew in one hand as a strong and distressing thought intruded itself into her actions.

How long has it been since you did not finish off the better part of a bottle of wine at night? Since the middle of August, maybe?

Oh God - she shook her head - not tonight, no guilt tonight. It's been a hell of a day.

What day isn't? If not tonight, when?

Fuck off; it's only wine.

Only...?

I want a drink.

Or six.

She stood there for a very long time, aching and frightened and knowing at last, on this gray and dreary night, that she was walking on the edge of a precipice, the one that began with just a bit of letting go and ended up with a few shortcuts and reassuring herself that nobody would notice, until finally she would be just another cop who gave up the fight, a woman who couldn't cut it with the big boys, a lesbian who wasn't as good as she thought. And no, she was not exaggerating the importance of this night's bottle of wine that she held in her hands, because she had at last admitted that if she opened it, the wine would be drinking her, not she it, and if knowing that, she went ahead, then she was also being consumed by tomorrow's bottle, and Friday's...

And oh God, who would care? She put the point of the corkscrew to the foil over the cork, and no further.

It was, oddly enough, Jules who pulled her back from the edge, that annoying young reminder of yet another responsibility unmet. The thought of Jules was bracing. Maddening, but bracing, like a slap in the face. She put the bottle away and made herself a cup of hot milk in the microwave, then sat with it at the kitchen table while she sorted through the mail.

Junk mail, bills, catalogs,
Psychology Today
and the
Disability Rag
for Lee (at least she hasn't changed the addresses on her subscriptions, Kate thought with black humor), and two letters - one for Lee, one from Lee.

She put everything but this last in a precise stack, largest on the bottom and smallest on top, the lower left corners aligned. She leaned the cheap envelope addressed to her in Lee's heavy black pen against the saltcellar, then took a swig from her mug, grimaced, got up and found an apple and a piece of leathery pizza in the refrigerator, and ate them standing at the sink. Then she took a can of split pea soup from the cupboard and two slices of bread from the refrigerator, opened the can, put half of the soup into a bowl and put that in the microwave oven, dropped the bread into the toaster, ate the soup, ate one slice of toast plain and the other with a sprinkling from the clotted shaker of cinnamon sugar, reached into the cupboard for the bag of coffee beans and then put them down on the sink and turned and took three steps to the table and ran a finger under the flap of the envelope and pulled the slip of paper out and smoothed it open on top of the table with one rapid hand before it could burn her. Then, because it lay open before her, Kate read Lee's brief letter.

"Dearest Kate," it began. That was something, anyway. Doing well, getting stronger. Learning to use a hatchet, could Kate believe that? Wearing one of Agatha's flannel shirts and a down vest, cold mornings. Beautiful trees. Strong hills on wise islands. Pods of orcas in the Sound. All of burgeoning nature helping her to find herself, transferring the energy of the hills into her body. Still confused, though, and sorry, so very, abjectly sorry, to be putting Kate through this, but...

But she couldn't say when she would be home. But Kate couldn't come to visit. But she couldn't tell Kate what to say to her clients, her friends. But as soon as she had her head together, Kate would be the first to know, be patient. "Love, Lee."

Kate looked down at her hand on the table. She had clawed the page together into her fist and it lay there now in a tight wad. She opened her hand, picked at the edges of the letter, smoothed it onto the tabletop with long movements of her hand as if trying to bond it to the wood of the table. She leaned forward, stood, pushing the chair away with the backs of her knees, and turned away.

Beaten, flayed, and too weary to weep, Kate went upstairs to bed.

Thursday's brightest spot came early, when Kate succeeded in running two miles and still managed a (very slow) near jog coming back up the hill. The rest of the day went downhill fast.

On Friday, Hawkin was back, and she and Calvo went out to the Sunset and arrested the dead child's father, a pleasant, rather stupid, frightened, unemployed eighth-grade dropout who had been abused himself as a child and who sobbed uncontrollably when Kate read him his rights, then - sure sign they had arrested the right man - fell asleep in the squad car from sheer relief.

His interview and confession brought no satisfaction. He was only a cog in a deadly mechanism, grinding on to produce yet more poverty and brutality. He was no killer, yet he killed, unforgivably, his own child.

Al Hawkin was near the interview room when Kate came out. Waiting for her? He dropped in beside her as she marched away.

"Al, good to see you. You should be home; you look like hell."

"How'd it go?"

"We got a confession."

"And?"

"And what? He'll go to prison and get himself a fine set of muscles in the weight room, and when he gets out, he'll find his girlfriend has two more kids by two other men, and everyone will go on beating everyone else, happily ever after."

"One of those days, I see."

"Do you ever think, Al, that maybe someone should just sterilize the whole goddamn human race, admit that it was a mistake, leave the planet to the dolphins and the cockroaches?"

"Often. Let's go get some dinner."

"I can't, Al. I have to see a man about a car."

"What kind of car?"

"A piece of junk, by the sound of it, but cheap."

"Oh, right. Tony said you'd been having car problems."

"I don't have a problem now. I just don't have a car. Three thousand dollars to fix it so it won't quit on me - I don't have the money."

"What's wrong with Lee's?"

"Nothing. Everything. It's too complicated to go into, Al. And Jon lent his to a friend while he's away."

"So where's the car you're looking at?"

"It's just up Van Ness."

"I'll take you; then we can have dinner."

"If I'm buying, it's a deal."

The car proved impossible, too big to park, too shaky to corner, and probably had had its odometer turned back at some point. They went to a Greek pizza house to eat a feta and pesto pizza, and at 9:30 Hawkin pulled up in front of her empty house and turned off the engine.

"Lee's not back yet," he said after a glance at the windows.

"Nope."

"You heard from her?"

"Short letters. They're in her handwriting, but they're not Lee."

"What's going on?"

"Ah, shit, Al, I wish I knew." When he continued to study the side of her face, she sighed and squinted at the house. "She's been getting flaky over the last few months. She said she wants --" She stopped, realizing that she really didn't want to go into Lee's fantasies and desires, not even with Al. "She wants all kinds of things she can't have, in the shape she's in. And she's become secretive. She's never been one to hide anything, but suddenly there were all these things she wouldn't talk to me about - Lee the therapist's therapist, who's always talked over every little nuance, suddenly there were these areas she'd go silent about."

"Any pattern to them?" asked Hawkin the detective.

"Any discussion about the future was off-limits. Her future, our future."

"You think she wants out?" he asked bluntly.

"I did finally ask her that; she seemed, I don't know, shocked. Desperately unhappy that I'd think it. She's just going through a lot of stuff, I think," Kate said weakly. "Part of it has to do with her job - you know she's dropped most of the AIDS therapy? She hated to give it up, but it was too much for her, after the shooting. She doesn't have any stamina. She's seeing a lot more women now, and kids. I thought it might be money that was bugging her, because we still have heavy bills and she's not earning much, but when I suggested we move, she got really upset. I mean, look at this place. The taxes are unbelievable. She could retire on what it would bring, but she wouldn't hear of selling it - 'Not yet,' she said."

"It is a beautiful house."

"I'm beginning to hate it. It's like living in a mausoleum. And that car of hers in the garage - she'll never drive it; she could sell it and buy something with manual controls and still have money left over, but she won't hear of it. Won't even say why, just refuses to talk about it."