Act of Betrayal (7 page)

A dark cloud had settled over him in the last hour, and his glass stood untouched on the bar. She felt that he was ready to leave. When he came out of the bathroom and wove his way back to the stool next to her, she suggested that he go home. She was prepared to stay until they got kicked out of the bar, but if she could get him home at an early hour, so much the better. She could send Officer Baker home and stay with Thomas herself, and Schultz would have a long time to rest. If the way he looked was any indication, he was going to need some recovery time.

To her surprise, he agreed. He offered to drive her home and spend the night in her bed. It wasn’t the first suggestive remark he’d made while they were at the bar, but it was the mildest of them. She hoped he wouldn’t remember his behavior in the morning—especially the times she’d had to remove his hands from various portions of her anatomy.

“You’re not driving, Leo. Give me your keys.”

“Why should I? You afraid I’ll pick up some hot little thing and fuck ’er brains out?”

“Something like that. Just give me the keys.”

“Come’n get ’em.”

So she did. She searched his pockets, eliciting more crude comments, until she extracted a set of keys. One of them was marked with a police department number, which made it the car key. He’d need his house keys. She removed the car key and handed him the rest, then asked the bartender to call a taxi. When the taxi arrived, she hustled Schultz in and gave the driver the address. Schultz had given up protesting, evidently seeing that it was useless to argue with her. The driver’s attitude improved when PJ gave him twenty-five dollars, which was all she had left after paying the bar bill for the two of them. Schultz had left home with two dollars in his wallet.

Schultz tapped on the glass that separated him from the taxi driver.

“Just pull around the block until she leaves,” he said. “Women think they can run your life.” The last part he added to make the driver think they were on the same wavelength, two beleaguered and worldly men. It worked. The man nodded and took off.

The taxi took a slow turn around the block and by the time they got back to the bar, PJ’s Escort was gone. Schultz opened the door and got out.

“Keep the fare,” he said. The driver nodded happily and took off.

Schultz dug into his pocket for his wallet and removed the spare car key he always kept there, right next to the folded fifty-dollar bill for emergencies. He patted the roof of the reddish-orange Pacer affectionately. It wasn’t the greatest car he’d ever gotten assigned by Vehicles, but it had proven to be reliable, even if the steering did pull sharply to the right. Tonight it would take him exactly where he wanted to go, and that was the nearest liquor store. The time in the bar with PJ was merely a prelude to the real thing. He’d actually had little to drink, and nothing in the last hour.

It was time to get down to the business of forgetting, and that required a lot more than a few hours with a well-meaning impediment named PJ Gray.

PJ quietly shut the rear door of her home and walked into the living room, announcing herself as she did so. Al Baker rose from the couch, where he had been watching an opera on PBS. He was in his late twenties, blond, tan, muscular, wearing cutoff shorts and a tank top. A bit of California transplanted to south St. Louis.

“Hi,” he said. “I didn’t expect you until after midnight, at least.”

“We broke up early. Tired, I guess,” PJ said.

“How’s Detective Schultz?”

“As well as can be expected.” She didn’t add that she thought Schultz was a saturated sponge as far as alcohol was concerned. “Thanks for coming over tonight.”

“No problem. I love kids. Thomas really whipped me on that X-Wing game. He’s good on the computer. Good kid, too. We hopped in my car and drove Winston home about an hour ago.”

“You guys got pizza, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. We argued over that,” Al said with a grin. “I’m a vegetarian, and that boy’s a hopeless carnivore.”

Al collected a magazine he’d propped open on the couch.
Scientific American.
So he watched opera and read science articles in his spare time. PJ found herself admiring his trim waist and the firm contents of the cutoffs as Al walked away from her. She wondered if he was married. Or if that made any difference.

“Dr. Gray?”

“Hum? What?”

“I said goodnight, Dr. Gray. Give Detective Schultz my sympathies.”

“Oh, of course. Goodnight.”

PJ closed the door behind him, feeling what could only be described as horny, a response out of sync with the day’s events. She wondered if the bartender had spiked her orange juice or if Schultz’s persistently roaming hands had sparked her sex drive.

Upstairs, PJ changed into her pajamas and splashed water on her face at the bathroom sink. Finally, she was tired—drained—and no remnant of her earlier response to Al Baker remained.

She went into Thomas’s room and let her eyes adjust to the low level of light provided by a night-light next to his bed. He was sleeping on his stomach, with one leg completely off the bed and his face turned away from her. He had surrendered his pillow to Megabite, who curled there like the Queen of All Cats, paid her due by her humans. Megabite’s eyes opened slightly, showing little slices of the cat life within that never slept deeply.

All she could see above the blanket was Thomas’s hair, disarrayed and blacker than the moonlit night sky outside his window. In the dim light she could make out the cluttered top of his dresser, and a photo frame standing there. She couldn’t see the picture in the frame, but she knew it was of Schultz with his arm on Thomas’s shoulder, the day they had all gone to a baseball game together. Schultz had bought her son a Cardinals cap. The picture had caught the moment, a half-smile on Schultz’s face and lines pinched between his eyebrows, Thomas grinning and giving a thumbs-up, black eyes full of life, the red hat barely containing his exuberant hair.

The image of Schultz’s son appeared in front of her, and the remembered smell of death filled her nostrils. She was glad it wasn’t her son. She turned and left the room in which Thomas slept, thankfully alive, and felt guilty for the selfish thought.

When Schultz arrived home he climbed the stairs to the front door accompanied by the satisfying clinks of three fifths of Scotch bumping together inside their sturdy brown bag. The house was dark, and he left it that way. He went into the kitchen to get a glass for the Scotch, having decided to be civilized and not drink directly from the bottle.

He was alone, and it was time to give that pact that he’d made with himself a rest, the one where he’d promised not to fall apart. There was no one around. He could drop the pretense of holding up in public and dig himself a hole in the ground for a while.

Schultz knew that in a couple of days when the haze wore off and he couldn’t justify the binge anymore, nothing would have changed. Rick would still be dead. Schultz would still be a shitty father whose intervention in the downward spiral of his son’s life had come too late. And he would still be the asshole who had given the boy’s mother—his own son’s mother, his wife of many years, for Christ’s sake—the news over the phone. He should have gone to her in person, like the time he went to see her to find out if their marriage was really over.

He wondered if he would actually have been crass enough to leave a message on her answering machine if she hadn’t been home.

Schultz fumbled for a glass in the cabinet next to the sink. There was enough moonlight coming in the window over the sink so that he could see to pour himself three fingers, not bothering with ice. Lifting the glass, he peered through the Scotch as if it were a window to his heart. If he squinted hard enough, he might find a shred of decency there.

He didn’t deserve PJ, that was certain. After this was over, he’d lay off trying to get her to admit she loved him.

Through the murky darkness of the liquid in the raised glass, a small light shimmered. It reminded him of when he was a kid, still living on the farm before his parents were killed. He’d sneak out to the swimming hole when there was a full summer moon. He wasn’t supposed to, and he didn’t take his little brother because even with a child’s reasoning he knew it was dangerous, and he didn’t want anything to happen to George.

Naked in the night, the sounds of the country around him, Schultz had plunged into water that looked black. He knew it was clear as glass, since he could see the bottom during the day. Ten feet down, at the bottom of his dive, he’d open his eyes and look through the heavy smothering water, searching for the sky. And there would be the moon, glorious and beckoning, up in the life-giving air. He’d flex his young arms and push himself to the surface, using the round, shimmering white ball of the moon to keep him oriented. Otherwise, he might lose his way in the uniform blackness.

The light in the glass he held was red, not white, and it certainly wasn’t the moon. It was the message light on his answering machine, probably PJ checking to see that he made it home. If he didn’t respond, she might come around to his house, and he didn’t want that to happen. He didn’t want her to see the bottles lined up like obedient little soldiers on the counter.

He sighed, put the glass down, and checked the machine. There were two messages. Punching the PLAY button, he was prepared for PJ’s voice—concerned, angry, or both. But the voice on the machine was neither. It was mechanical and flat, altered by a device made just for that purpose.

“He didn’t die fast, you know,” said the voice. “You think about that, Detective Schultz. You think about him tied up helpless like that, and gasping for air. Then think about what I’m going to do next. Oh, and have a nice day.”

There was a second message, and that one was from PJ, trying not to sound like she was checking up on him. He barely heard her words.

Stunned, Schultz replayed the messages. The time stamp placed the first call two hours ago, when he was with PJ. He plucked the tape from the machine and slipped it into his pocket. Then he emptied the whiskey bottles down the drain.

Suddenly there was too much to do to waste time on self-pity.

P
J GOT TO HEADQUARTERS
early Tuesday morning to work on the computer simulation of Rick’s murder. Deep in thought in front of her monitor, she almost dropped her cup of coffee when her office door was flung open, startling her.

“When’s the last time you saw Schultz?” Lieutenant Wall demanded.

Whatever happened to small talk?

PJ hesitated. She didn’t want to tell Wall that her last view of Schultz had been his backside as she shoved him into a taxi outside a bar.

“I went over to his house last night,” she said. “We talked for a while.”

Wall closed his eyes. She counted to ten mentally right along with him. Exactly at “ten” he opened them.

“When and where, specifically, did you last see Detective Schultz? And the car he was assigned?”

PJ tapped her pencil on the desk. “Want to tell me what this is about?”

“You first.”

PJ was cornered. “I went to his house a little after six. You suggested that someone spend the evening with him, so I volunteered myself.”

What PJ didn’t say was that as a psychologist and a friend—a very close friend—she had thought that she might be able to help Schultz begin to deal with his grief. That was the logical explanation. There was also the feeling that she was drawn to him.

“And?”

“I stopped after work for sandwiches. We ate in his kitchen. Then we went out.”

“Out?”

“Can’t you speak more than one word at a time?” PJ said, irritated. “We went to a bar. Schultz had… a couple of drinks, I think. I had orange juice. About ten o’clock, we went home.”

“What bar?”

Progress. Two words.
“Brandy’s, on South Broadway.”

“I know the place. You were in the Pacer? Did you go into his house with him then?”

This is getting downright personal.

PJ clamped her lips around a remark that she would definitely regret later. She knew that feelings were running high after the murder of a member of a detective’s family, but the way things were going Wall’s next question would be one she definitely didn’t want to hear, or even think about.

“We had driven there separately. We went home separately. What’s this all about, Lieutenant?” PJ fixed a look on her face that said,
I showed you mine, now show me yours.

Wall settled heavily into one of her chairs and propped his elbows on the desk across from her. “There was a hit-and-run this morning about seven,” he said. “A couple of blocks from Schultz’s house. Four-year-old girl, and she’s not expected to live. A couple of people saw it, and they say the car ran up on the curb, like the driver was going after the girl.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” PJ said. She was puzzled, but waiting to hear Wall out.

“The car was described as a reddish-orange Pacer. Two witnesses on the street reported the license number. One got only a partial, the first three letters as MBF. The second witness reported MBF 181. That’s the vehicle signed out to Schultz.”

PJ sat back in her chair, stunned into silence. Wall shook his head.

“There’s more. The driver wasn’t seen clearly enough for a confident ID, one of the reasons being that he was wearing a hat. But the general description matches Schultz.”

“Schultz doesn’t wear a hat. I’ve never seen him in a hat,” PJ said.

“He has one that he only wears to funerals. You haven’t been around long enough to see him in it.”

“Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable.”

“I know that. But I also know they can’t be completely ignored.”

PJ closed her eyes. She tried to imagine a bitter Schultz depriving some other parent of a child. Wearing his funeral clothes and running a four year old over on the sidewalk out of spite, so others would feel the way he did.

“He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.” She shook her head. “Okay, he might have been a little inebriated and depressed when I last saw him. But he was on his way home, and he didn’t have alcohol at home. He had to leave his house last night to get drinks. I think if he’d had a bottle in the house, he would have parked himself at the kitchen table rather than have me tag along after him like a chaperone. You’re saying he deliberately went out this morning and ran down some child while he was sober?”