Happy Policeman (15 page)

Chapter Thirty-Five

They rode to the center in silence. In the parking lot, Seresen got out. DeWitt waited for the garage door to slide back. It didn’t.

“Hey!” He shoved the gear lever into Park.

The alien paused at the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“I am going home. You may go home as well.”

DeWitt approached the Kol, thinking that now was the time. Now. He would take out the cuffs, read Seresen his rights.

But order could give birth to chaos. Arrest Seresen, and the town would hold a lynching. Lynch Seresen, and the Torku would kill them all. “You’re not worried I’ll talk?”

“No. Talk if you must.”

“Look. You and I both know that it’s better if nobody finds out about this.”

“Good. Perhaps you are finally learning something.” Seresen opened the door.

DeWitt pushed it closed. “But I want some concessions.”

Seresen turned his pink eyes toward him, and DeWitt couldn’t tell if what he saw there was irritation or amusement. “I don’t know why you killed Loretta and her boys. It’s convenient for me to believe that there was cholera in that well, and that you were trying to save the rest of us. Do you understand?”

“Of course I understand. That is precisely why I am here. I create my universe in brightness, and you create yours in dark. You drag us down with you. But if this is what you want, it becomes so.”

“I know you’re lying. And I won’t be the fall guy. Understand that.”

Seresen nodded in resignation. “All right.”

“Can’t I come in for a quick shower? People will ask why I’m so muddy.”

“Then tell them. Tell them the truth as you believe it.”

DeWitt parked his hands above his belt as Seresen opened the door and walked in, leaving him alone in the bright mid-morning sun.

The world was not the way DeWitt had left it. He no longer knew his place. Was he cop or fugitive? It took an odd sort of courage for him to climb into his squad car and drive home.

To hide the car from prying eyes, he pulled as far into his carport as possible. Sometime during the revolt, his family must have returned. The kids’ bikes were parked at careless angles under the fiberglass overhang. A molting Christmas tree, stripped of all ornament but stray tinsel, had been tossed In a comer.

He walked to the door, took a breath, and turned the knob.

The house was the same: the almond refrigerator, the yellow no-wax floor. Janet and the kids were seated around the familiar glass-and-rattan table, having lunch.

He found haven where he least expected it: not in the present but in the past. The kitchen was a saga of Thanksgivings with cornbread dressing, a child-free morning making love to Janet against the Formica counter, a frustrating afternoon spent installing the dishwasher.

Denny’s eyes went round with astonished envy. “Daddy’s
dirty!”

Linda jumped up and ran to him, Denny and Tammy at her heels. He knelt and pulled his children close, thinking of the small bodies he had buried and how deflated they had looked, as if the insides of children were air.

His own children’s bodies were round and firm. Against his left ear he could hear the prosaic pump of Tammy’s heart; on his right cheek he felt the warm, milk-scented tickle of Linda’s breath.

Loretta’s boys, what was left of them, were dressed in jeans, and the younger had been wearing one of those bright, plastic raincoats mothers buy so drivers can see the kids on rainy days. That was the orange that first caught DeWitt’s eye, the orange of the dead Loretta saying,
Careful, careful, that’s my child.

“Kids.” Janet herded the children up. “Go back and finish your lunch.”

“Daddy wants to eat, too.” Denny craned his neck and shone his bright face at her.

She ignored the purity there. DeWitt wondered how she could. Suddenly he was kneeling alone.

“You’re filthy. Get cleaned up.”

He got to his feet and faced his wife. Odd. He had always seen her through the gauzed lens of memory. Now, in the jut of the chin and the lines around the eyes, he caught a glimpse not of the girl she had been but of the middle-aged woman she was becoming.

The kitchen changed. The dishwasher, the kitchen table, the Denny-made dent in the refrigerator door seemed an enclosed, self-balanced system. DeWitt was an interloper there.

Perhaps this was how divorce felt. Perhaps it wasn’t a thing of shouts but of quiet estrangement.
Do you love me at all?
he wanted to ask.
Did you ever?
He wondered if those twenty years had been a fraud. As it was in the Torku center, light was out of place, and he was lost.

“Take a shower. Change your clothes.”

He obeyed. While he was showering, Janet came in the bathroom. Through the curtain she was more Torku-shape than human. “When you’re dressed, I want you to leave.”

DeWitt put the washcloth down. “Is he moving in with you? Has he already?”

“I don’t need him. I don’t need you. Things have been fine here, without a man around.”

“Janet? There’s no place for me to go.”

“Go back to your friends.” The shadow at the curtain went away, leaving a bright vacancy.

The door slammed.

“But they’re not my friends,” he whispered.

Chapter Thirty-Six

When Janet told the children their daddy was leaving, Tammy lurched up from the table and ran to her room, leaving the other children staring in perplexity at her chair.

“When are you coming home, Daddy?” Denny asked. DeWitt felt time slip, arbitrary and fluid, through his fingers: the Denny-stain of grape juice on a chair cushion; the scar on the linoleum where Tammy once dropped a hot pan. “I don’t know.”

Linda put down her sandwich. “Your presents.”

The two children darted from the dining room and came back with three foil-wrapped gifts. The largest and most poorly wrapped was from Denny. Odd bits of Scotch tape made a second grimy ribbon around the package.

“Merry Christmas, Daddy,” Denny said.

Balancing the gifts, DeWitt walked out to his squad car. He took the time to brush the dried mud from the vinyl before sitting down.

He drove through the small subdivision, turned down the straight shot of Ledbetter Road. When spots of color in the winter-blasted lawn of the cemetery caught his eye, he drove though the brick gates and parked.

He made himself an extra large joint for courage, then headed across the dun grass toward the small patchwork quilt of pink and white.

The carnations around the gold ribbon that read REST IN PEACE were wilted; the hothouse rosebuds were dropping petals. He smoked awhile before daring to look at the bronze marker. LORETTA JEAN HARPER, the plaque read .

Loretta would never rest in peace, not with her children buried in the hasty mud, not with the love she’d put into that orange raincoat.

He went back to the car and smoked another joint. By the time he left the cemetery, he was high. Disgusted with himself, he opened the window, but the cold air failed to sober him. He looked at the speedometer: eighteen miles an hour. He pressed the accelerator. The car pounced. Startled, he hit the brakes. Tires squealed. From their pasture an Angus heifer and her calf eyed him.

The car had stalled. He started it again. And, as though the destination was inevitable, he ended up at Billy’s.

He parked behind a tree and studied Billy’s Ford truck in the front yard. But he didn’t realize he planned to face Billy until he found himself halfway down the hill.

He stopped. From the back of the house he could hear the racheting sounds of a pump. What would he say?
Buried your kids, Billy. Seresen and me. Made that alien finish what he started.
Then they’d dig up the bodies and bury them right, with Pastor Jimmy to talk over them, and with flowers to sweeten the air.

He took a step forward.

Am I crazy? I can’t tell anyone about this.
Yet he kept going until his palm pressed the rough surface of the bricks.

Inching around the corner, DeWitt saw that the garage door was open. The sound of machinery was louder, and water was pushing bits of construction detritus down the concrete drive.

He walked a step farther.
I’m sorry,
he’d begin. And then what? Odd, that the words wouldn’t come. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t any experience in bad news.

Parents, wives, husbands would open the door to his knock, little confused smiles on their faces. When he told them of the death, they would stare as if they hadn’t heard. But sometimes the words sank in at once, as if the survivors had been expecting tragedy all their lives.

The garage door gaped; the sound of the compressor was almost deafening. Taking a breath, DeWitt walked around the jamb.

“Billy?”

Billy, about three feet into the garage, flinched in surprise. Something laid a burning track across DeWitt’s leg. He stepped back and saw that his twill pants were cut open. Across his drenched skin was a bleeding, angry welt.

His puzzled gaze rose. Billy’s cheeks were pasty with shock. Then Billy lunged, the nozzle of the sprayer held before him like a knife.

DeWitt caught the jellyfish sting on his raised forearms. In his blundering, backward flight he knocked over an empty paint can and sent it rolling down the drive. Wet uniform flapping, he ran to his car. There he stopped and looked back. The yard was empty, Billy nowhere in sight.

Odd. As if Billy had tried to kill him.

DeWitt scowled as his brain struggled to process information. If the commercial spray rig had bruised him from a foot or so away, it could gouge out flesh if held closer. It only misted rain the night of the murder, yet Billy’s yard had been sloppy with mud. Had Billy been cleaning out his paint sprayer again?

DeWitt dug into the glove box, took out his small set of binoculars, and focused on the Ford pickup. Dunlops. Of course, Dunlops.

He keyed his mike. “Come in.”

“Here,” a Torku answered.

“This is DeWitt Dawson, and I’m at—”

“We know where you are.”

Of course. The Torku knew where everyone was. They’d probably watched Billy bury his kids.

“Get Bo out here quick. Tell Seresen to bring my gun, understand?”

But the Torku was already off the line.

From the hill DeWitt had a clear view of the house and the yard around it. Billy still hadn’t emerged. The compressor was chugging away, from here as faint as the hum of a mosquito.

Something he should do. Something . . . He couldn’t think.
Stay straight,
he warned himself, and took a few deep sobering breaths.

On the wall facing him were three windows, one the smaller, higher square of a bathroom window. An electric meter bulged like a transparent pimple from the bricks, installed, DeWitt supposed, more from tradition than for need. Below it sat the dull metal of the main breaker switch.

Oh. Cut off the juice to the house.

He crept back down the hill, wondering if Billy was watching. He grabbed the steel bar of the main breaker and pulled. The clatter of the compressor hushed.

In the silence, a noise of engines. Two UPS vans were coming down the hill. The first braked beside DeWitt. Seresen stepped out and handed him a bill of lading. On the pink slip was printed DR. BERNARD CULPEPPER AND OFFICER BODEEN WOODRUFF. Doc must have been with Bo when the Torku grabbed him. DeWitt initialed the page, and workers shoved the two men from the van.

“Goddamn it.” Doc brushed angrily at his sleeves. He looked at DeWitt and snapped, as if the uniform were his own and the rips DeWitt’s fault, “What’d you do to yourself?”

“Billy just tried to kill me with an airless spray painter. And he has Dunlops on his truck. And a Tommy Lift. He murdered Loretta.”

Doc’s mouth quirked as if he was considering a laugh. Didn’t they understand? DeWitt’s words tumbled like puppies. “You see, Foster and Janet are having an affair . . .”

DeWitt caught Bo’s look of surprise and realized the embarrassment his words were causing. “Foster—maybe he thought he could get rid of me for good—or maybe I just scared him when I accused him of the murder–but he was the one who put that evidence in my squad car.”

Bo took DeWitt’s injured arm. For a moment DeWitt thought he was going to go for his cuffs. Instead, Bo studied the welt.

Suddenly he stood back, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Billy! Billy Harper! It’s Bo Woodruff. I want to talk to you.”

The house was silent. In the nearby woods, one grackle called tunelessly to another.

Bo turned to Seresen. “You brought our guns?”

“No guns.”

“He’s got saws in there,” Bo said. “Screwdrivers and God knows what else. We’re unarmed. If he’s guilty, he’s going to fight.”

“No guns.”

Bo nodded. “Wittie? You want to take the back?”

“Uh . . . “ Before Bomb Day, DeWitt had put his life in Bo’s hands more than once. The man was still a good cop. Nothing between them had changed, really.

Bo walked DeWitt beyond the earshot of the others. “You been smoking dope again?”

“I’m high, Bo, but I’ll be okay.”

Bo’s cheeks puffed, and he let out a long sigh. “We’ll have to go in there anyway. You’ll take the back?”

“Sure.”

Bo sprinted toward the front door. Hitching his belt, DeWitt went to the back and peered into the damp recesses of the garage. It was empty. The door to the kitchen was closed. He tiptoed to it, wondering how fast he was moving. Stoned as he was. he couldn’t tell. The door opened without a hitch, without a squeal. Billy had always done fine work.

The kitchen smelled of newly hewn pine. Cabinets of pale, raw wood had been hung.
Stay straight,
DeWitt cautioned himself when he realized he was standing stock-still in the kitchen, watching the whorls of the woodgrain. He went forward and turned right at the dining room.

A buzz. Something punched DeWitt hard in the stomach. The buzz rose in pitch, then choked off.

Billy stumbled back, staring in surprise at the thing he held. “Goddamned worthless piece of shit . . “ the man hissed, annoyed that he had chosen the wrong tool for the job. On the side of the charcoal-colored metal was a Black and Decker logo. The head of the cordless drill was wet, and there was red on Billy’s hand and on his shirt.

DeWitt screamed. “Bo!”

Billy lunged again, the drill once more humming dutifully. DeWitt seized Billy’s wrist. Warmth was running down his leg. There was a sick lethargy in his right thigh.

“Bo!”

Where was he? Why didn’t he come? DeWitt couldn’t run, the wall was at his back. Billy had located a soft spot for entrance: the drill was eye-level. DeWitt knew he wasn’t strong enough to stop it.

Suddenly Billy was gone.

DeWitt slid down the wall into a sitting position. The Black and Decker drill was lying next to his foot, and on the other side of the room Bo had Billy in a hammerlock. With his free hand the officer was beating Billy in the face with a brick. Billy’s nose was at a crazy angle, his mouth open, his teeth bloody. The brick fell.

Then Bo was there, bending over him. “DeWitt?” DeWitt couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

“Christ,“ Bo said in a squeezed voice, and he ran from the room.

A stomach cramp hit. Then Doc, Bo, and the Torku were looking down at him. DeWitt lay doubled up, feeling insignificant, weak, and embarrassed. Any moment there would be a load of muddy warmth in his shorts, and everybody would laugh.

“I’ll need a scrub nurse,” Doc said. “Call in Delsey McGowen, tell her to meet us at my office. She needs to look up his blood type and find somebody to match.”

The Torku bent to lift him. DeWitt would have screamed, but didn’t have the breath.

“No, no. He’s going into shock. Get something to carry him on.”

The Torku left and came back with a door. They put DeWitt on it and straightened his legs. And pain sucked him down into dark.

* * *

He opened his eyes to the brown metal of the van’s ceiling; saw Billy lying unmoving, his face slick with blood.

Bo’s voice came from a distance. “. . . drinking?”

And Doc: “None of your fucking business.”

“Are your hands going to shake, Doc? Will he die on the operating table because you’re boozed up?”

“Don’t start. I’ve doctored you since you were a baby. I can handle myself just fine.”

“Handle yourself? I was raised by a drunk. I know all about just fine.”

“There’s no anesthesiologist and Delsey’ s no scrub nurse. The last time I saw major surgery was in residency. So don’t blame it on my drinking. If he doesn’t die on the table, he’ll die later of peritonitis.”

“Shhhh. He’s awake.”

DeWitt reached out. Bo came into focus, his features blurred, as if DeWitt were seeing him through murky water. Frightened, DeWitt struggled to swim to the light.

Then Bo took his hand and it didn’t matter. Nothing between them had changed. DeWitt’s fingers tightened, as if Bo could pull him from the undertow.

“Oh Christ, Wittie. I’m sorry,” Bo said.