Happy Policeman (7 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Rain was coming down in a mist. Outside Bo’s cedar-shadowed cottage the garden had been mulched and bronze mums planted along the gravel drive. Bo answered DeWitt’s knock. Television voices and the smell of bacon wafted from the doorway.

Without the concealing sunglasses, there was a softness about Bo’s face. The round blue eyes betrayed him, displaying a vulnerability so acute that bar owners asked for proof of age, and women mothered rather than seduced.

“We need to talk,” DeWitt said.

Bo opened the door wider. DeWitt wiped his feet on the mat and walked in.

The house was spare and elegant in the manner of someone accustomed to solitude. Bo’s charcoal-and-salmon sofa precisely matched the drapes. The miniblinds were opened in tidy gaps to let in a precise amount of morning light. DeWitt shifted nervously on his feet. He felt more at home in Curtis’s squalor; in Doc’s absentminded clutter. Even in Hubert Foster’s tie-dyed and beaded disarray.

On a salmon-colored TV table a plate of eggs and bacon and toast sat cooling. “What do you want?” Bo walked to the sofa, took a seat before his breakfast.

DeWitt looked at the TV. Tom Brokaw looked back.

“. . . returned to the Soviet Union today,” Brokaw was saying, “amid rumors that Chernenko has died.”

The videotape of the final
NBC Nightly News.
DeWitt felt the urge to reach through the TV, through time, and hand the anchor a scrawled note:
Run for your lives.
Suddenly Brokaw fell silent, mouth open in what looked like mild astonishment. The picture on the screen jiggled, was bisected by tracking lines. Bo lowered the remote control.

Aware of the dampness of his clothes, DeWitt hesitated to take a seat on the wingback chair. “I know since Bomb Day we’ve worked alone, but I think now we should join forces.”

Bo’s smile was brief and as unattractive as a facial tic. “Why? To keep an eye on me?”

The lie was so easy. “You know better than that.”

“People hate me,” Bo said.

A flabbergasted pause. “You give out all those parking tickets, don’t you see? If you’d loosen up, maybe they’d take more of a shine.”

“I can’t loosen up, DeWitt. The law’s the law. It’s all that separates us from the animals. I always figured society worked like a big machine, and you and I were the oil. We can’t let people get away with things. We can’t let them do whatever they have a mind to. First it’ll be illegal parking, and before you know it, we’ll have . . . ”

A murder.

“I went to the clinic.” Bo took a bite of his scrambled eggs. “Doc forgot that the best way to estimate the time of death is by stomach contents. Spaghetti.”

DeWitt sat down in the armchair.

Bo picked up a slice of bacon. “The spaghetti had held its shape, so she ate no more than an hour before death. If I’m right about the time of onset of rigor, the spaghetti was probably ingested about five, five-thirty. Where’s Loretta’s car? Did you search the house yet?”

The bronze mums lining the drive were dying suns in the gloom. “The Torku destroyed the house.”

A sharp clink made DeWitt turn: Bo had dropped his fork. “That about clinches it, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not sure. And we have to find the kids, Bo.”

“Yeah. First things first.”

“So I’m going up to the school.”

Bo lowered his eyes to his plate, as if he were seeing prerecorded tragedy in the remains of his breakfast. “I can’t help you. “

“Why not?”

Bo buttered a slice of toast. “I have the feeling you’ll do anything to protect the Torku. Including casting suspicion on someone else. I’m not that kind of cop.”

“And I am?” DeWitt swallowed his anger. “Look. It would be stupid to run two separate investigations, don’t you think? A waste of time.”

The toast crunched as Bo bit into it.

“I have to interview the people at the church. I have a bunch of kids need talking to. Come on, Bo. I hired you when no one else would. You owe me.”

Bo got to his feet. “I can’t believe you’d bring that up.”

“This is a murder investigation. Everybody’s nerves are bound to get strained. What if your temper gets out of hand again? What if—? Where are you going?”

“The bathroom.”

When the officer left, DeWitt went to a nearby table. Incongruous clutter was piled next to a Norfolk Island pine: an incense holder and a blue bead necklace. A necklace appropriate for a Winter.

Footsteps clicked on the polished hardwood floor. DeWitt quickly sat again.

Bo was rubbing his hands together. “Okay. All right, DeWitt. I’ll help you, but then the slate’s clean.”

“Agreed.”

Bo turned off the TV. They walked out of the house and across the lawn. When they climbed into the squad car, Bo took his sunglasses from his pocket.

“Leave the glasses off. If we’re going to work together, I want to see your eyes. I want to be able to tell what you’re thinking.”

Slowly, Bo put back the glasses.

“When we get to the school, you take half the kids.” DeWitt fastened his seatbelt. “I want to know if anybody saw Billy Junior and . . . and . . .”

“Jason,” Bo said in a tight voice.

“Yeah. Jason.”

DeWitt accelerated up a hill. When he crested the rise, his eyes widened. Speeding head-on toward them was a huge shape. A dented grille; the round, alarmed eyes of headlights; holes where a car emblem had once been.

DeWitt wrenched the wheel right, stood on the brakes. Tires squealed as the squad car slewed and came to a stop at a ninety-degree angle to the road. The pickup nosed into a roadside ditch with a crunch of foliage. The door opened, and Curtis emerged, laughing.

Bo got out and marched across the asphalt. “License and registration!”

“Hey, Bo. How’s it going?”

An icy, clipped reply: “Hands on the hood! Spread ‘em!”

Curtis leaned over the Dodge’s hood. Bo kicked his legs back farther and ran his palms over Curtis’s jeans, groping the top of the inseam so resolutely that DeWitt, in sympathy, winced.

Curtis went tiptoe. “Whoa! Kiss me first!”

“Where’d you throw it?” Bo demanded, stepping back. “I saw you throw something down. Where’d you throw the dope?”

“I wouldn’t throw no dope away,” Curtis said. “Ask DeWitt if I would.”

On the dotted line in the center of the road, DeWitt halted, pinned by Bo’s accusing glare.

“Mr. Mayor,” Bo said, “I’m arresting you for driving without a license, for reckless endangerment, and for suspicion of DWI. Chief, search the vehicle for any controlled substances.”

After a moment’s exasperation, DeWitt obeyed. The Dodge’s rusted door shrieked as it opened. Glancing into the cab, he saw that the floorboard was awash with Bo’s pink traffic violations. “Found something.”

“What?” The triumph in Bos voice was like trumpets.

“Inspection sticker’s six years out of date.” “Everybody’s sticker’s six years out of date.”

“Now you get the picture.”

Bo frowned.

Curtis asked, “Where you all headed, anyways?”

“We’re investigating the murder,” DeWitt told him.

Curtis clapped his palm to his forehead. “Oh! That’s why I was looking for you! I couldn’t find Loretta’s road.”

“Why did you want to go to Loretta’s?” Bo’s voice was thick with suspicion.

But Curtis was oblivious. “Wasn’t going to Loretta’s, just by Loretta’s. And then I seen the Torku done peeled up her road. They already planted grass and everything. Come on and look. You ain’t gonna believe it.”

Curtis walked to the squad car. With stereo sighs DeWitt and Bo followed.

“I want the siren.” Curtis planted his elbows on the back of the front seat.

“No siren,” DeWitt said.

Curtis reached so far into the front that he nearly fell in Bo’s lap. He turned on the bubble lights and sat back. A few minutes later DeWitt was stunned to smell the burning-alfalfa odor of marijuana. “Want a joint, DeWitt?”

DeWitt pointedly rolled down his window. “No.”

“You, Bo?”

Bo’s no was, brittle.

An uncomfortable silence settled in the car. “I got a good crop this year. DeWitt? Tell the man what he’s missing. DeWitt and me got stoned after the murder, didn’t we, DeWitt? And I put him up a whole trash bag of dope. Primo stuff, Bo. Mellow you out some, know what I mean?”

“Shut up, Curtis.” Out of the corner of his eye DeWitt saw Bo’s cold appraisal.

“Passed it,” Curtis said.

“Huh?”

“Passed the road, Wittie. Turn around.”

DeWitt slowed the car, negotiated a three-point turn and drove back. When he found a clear spot on the shoulder, he pulled over and parked.

“I don’t see anything,” DeWitt said.

“‘Course you don’t,” Curtis told him with exaggerated patience. “They done took up the road, like I told you.”

Curtis started to get out, but DeWitt stopped him with a sharp look. “Get rid of that joint. The Torku might see.”

“Oh yeah. Sure. I’ll finish it and catch up with you.”

The two officers got out and walked across the dead winter grass.

“He’s stoned,” Bo said. “We’re wasting time here. Let’s go on to the school.”

DeWitt gave the ground a few experimental kicks.

“You know, DeWitt? Long-term marijuana use causes personality changes. A listlessness.”

DeWitt chuckled. “That’s Curtis.”

There was resentment in Bo’s Little-Boy-Blue eyes. “I meant you.”

Curtis trotted to them. “You see it?” He darted off through the trees. “Come on. It’s neat.”

The two officers followed, walking in tandem.

“I remember when you first put on the badge,” Bo said. “I was twelve years old, and your daddy was Little League coach then, remember? You came out to where we were playing. You looked so—” Bo paused, searching for the right word, and came up with the uncomfortable choice of “Good. You looked so good in that uniform. You’re why I wanted to be a cop in the first place. You’re the reason I came home when everything in Dallas turned to shit. Christ, DeWitt. What’s happened to you? I used to think you were the best police officer I knew.”

Before DeWitt could overcome his astonishment, Curtis shouted, “Look!”

Beyond a screen of pines was the Line, rose-trellised today, like old wallpaper. In front of the Line was a glade. In the middle of the clearing, neatly trimmed boxwoods made a square perimeter around a flat expanse of grass. Loretta’s spindly redbud tree, the one she could never get to bloom, still stood near one comer.

“Ain’t it something?” Curtis asked proudly. “Ain’t it a hoot?”

Bo lunged forward, reaching the back corner of the boxwoods at a run. He halted and looked around, as though he had dropped something. Then, on his long, slender legs, he paced toward the Line. After eight steps he fell to his knees, rummaged in his pocket, took out a pocketknife, and started to dig.

A lopsided smile quirked one corner of DeWitt’s lips. Bo looked like a uniformed Sherlock Holmes.

The best police officer Bo had ever known. No, it was DeWitt’s daddy who had been the best cop. He remembered looking up at his daddy: tall and straight, night stick and gun on his belt. Guardian of the peace.

“Goddamn it, Curtis. Don’t ever talk about dope again in front of Bo. He could arrest you, you fool.”

“Aw, you was there and all. He ain’t gonna arrest me with you being there.”

“What goes on between you and me is nobody’s business. Not the town’s, not Bo’s. Don’t ever, ever try to implicate me.”

Curtis’s face fell. “I didn’t mean nothing.”

“You nearly killed us, you airhead asshole. That’s what grass does to you. A little recreational grass is one thing, but you—”

“I wasn’t stoned, Wittie.” Curtis sounded pathetic. “When I’m stoned I drive real slow, like fifteen miles an hour, and think I got her up to seventy.”

Biting his lip, DeWitt looked away, wondering what changes the dope had made in himself.

“Got it!” Bo cried.

The pair flinched.

“I hit metal. Listen.” As Curtis and DeWitt approached, Bo jabbed the blade in the hole he’d made, producing a clang. “This must have been the well.’ He stood, brushing dirt from his twill pants. His voice was grim, his eyes narrow. “It’s the Torku, DeWitt. They killed her. Nobody destroys evidence unless they have something to hide.”

Chapter Fourteen

The last child DeWitt had to interview was a black kid with a gimme cap and a Michael Jackson T-shirt.

“What’s your name, son?” He was tired. The hard plastic backrest poked at his kidneys. His thighs ached where the Lilliputian seat ended.

“Robert.” On the T-shirt was a cherry Kool-Aid stain shaped like the state of Illinois.

“Sit down, Robert. I won’t bite.”

The boy plopped into the opposite chair and began to swing a leg in feigned boredom. His boot tapped a water-torture rhythm against the table.

DeWitt watched the kid watch him. The library was quiet and scented with winter and children: wet woolen mittens, peanut butter, and furniture oil. Then the boy’s eyes fell on DeWitt’s badge with what DeWitt recognized as worry.

Most people were uncomfortable around the badge. Priests, DeWitt thought, must get the same reaction.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I coveted my neighbor’s wife twice. I parked illegally five times this month.

Planting his elbows on the table, DeWitt leaned forward. The boy immediately leaned back.

“You like to fish, Robert?”

“Huh?”

“I said, you like to fish? You ever go up by the lake with the other kids?”

The kid shrugged. “Sometimes.”

The conversational gambit failed, but DeWitt had others. The one thing he didn’t want to do was scare the kids. He sat back again.

“What class did I get you out of?“

“Texas History.”

“Um. What are you learning about this week?”

“Calvin Coolidge at the Alamo.”

DeWitt wondered who was teaching the class this month. “I hated Texas History.”

The kid gave him a tentative, disbelieving smile.

“When I was about your age, the government came and gave polio shots to the kids in school. I got out of English. The shot was better than the class. Yeah. The Salk vaccine. We were the first:”

The memory of it came in a rush, down to the taste of the cheap cookies the school nurse gave out. There was a tray with two choices: vanilla with cream filling or chocolate with cream filling. It was only as an adult that DeWitt learned that some of the kids died from the shots. Had he known back then that they were dying, he would have said it was from those cookies.

“But I don’t have a shot for you. I just want to talk.”

The kid rolled his eyes. “I ain’t seen them two boys”

“Well. News travels fast.”

“And I don’t know nothing.”

DeWitt sighed, wondering how Bo had been handling the interrogations. Apparently more directly than DeWitt The kids DeWitt had talked to left the room as confused as they came in. “Maybe you do know something, only you think it’s not important. Were you friends with Billy Junior and Jason?”

The gimme cap, spinach-green and printed with the words JOHN DEERE, was pulled down low over the boy’s eyes. He raised his head to look at DeWitt. “Knew ‘em.”

The boy’s tone told volumes. “Didn’t like them? Why not?”

“They was mean. Lotsa kids would of killed them, I reckon. I would of killed ‘em, too, if I had the chance.” He made an automatic pistol of his finger and sprayed the room with rat-a-tatting fire.

DeWitt waited until the boy was finished. “We don’t know they were killed.”

“Bet they was killed like they mama.”

DeWitt had been patting the tip of one finger against his upper lip. He stopped. “Who told you about that?”

“B.J. He my cousin.”

“Uh-huh, So tell me about the Harper kids, about how they were mean.”

“Threw rocks. Used to get back in them trees and throw rocks while we was walking home from school. Used to yell things at us.”

“What things?”

“Nigger.”

DeWitt let out a pent breath. “I see.”

“Hit a Torku one time.”

“Who?”

“Junior and Jason. Hit a Torku with a rock while we was standing in the road crying. This Torku come up to see what was the matter and–bang–one of them got him right upside the head.”

DeWitt’s mouth went dry. “What did the Torku do?”

“Just looked surprised. He was bleeding a funny kind of blood. Was all over him.”

“He didn’t go after them?”

“Nope. Just stood there. Them Harper boys run off, laughing and all. And that Torku, he walk away, his head bleeding and him not even paying no attention or nothing.”

“You should have told me.”

The eyes darted at DeWitt in shame. If DeWitt waited long enough, people would give their sins to him. During a casual conversation the lead-heavy truth would drop from anxious tongues. “See? So you knew something after all. Little things are what we need to build a case.”

“Sir? You know their mama was gonna see that head Torku.”

“Seresen? Loretta talked to Seresen?”

“Wasn’t that she seen him. She just
wanted
to see him. Thursday at school I heard Justin tell another kid his mama went over there, but that head Torku, he wasn’t in.”

“You don’t know what she wanted?”

“No, sir. He didn’t say.” After a fretful silence the kid told him, “I know where them boys is, Chief.” His eyes and face were suddenly somber. It made him look like a pint-sized adult.

“Where?”

“Sucked up in the Line. Some of the kids seen ‘em.”

“Who saw them?”

“Donno. B.J.
heard it from this sixth-grade white kid. They moan at night. That Line, it eat people.”

“Nobody’s been eaten before, Robert. There’s no reason to believe the Line isn’t safe.”

“It eat people up. There’s ghosts out there. They cry in the dark.”

“That’s the wind, son. Just the wind you hear. Out by the Line the wind makes strange sounds.”

The kid shook his head. It was obvious from his face what this boy’s nightmares were. “It eat people, Chief. And they cain’t never get out of that light.”

DeWitt let the kid go back to class. When he was alone with the dry scent of books and the moist smell of the rain, he rose and stretched. He walked down the scuffed linoleum hall, past a water fountain bulging urinal-level from the tile. Christmas, almost a month yet to arrive, hung in rectangles of Manila paper on the walls: tinseled trees piled high with presents; a stick-figure Santa Claus bearing gifts.

Downstairs, DeWitt found Tyler waiting. The huge black man was parked with his back against a mausoleum row of lockers, his beefy arms folded under his chest.

“You promised me you wouldn’t get the kids het up.” Tyler’s face was a rich medicine-bottle brown, with spills of pastille freckles.

DeWitt lifted a questioning eyebrow.

“Bo’s getting them riled,” Tyler said in his rolling bass. “Don’t want them riled before the holiday break.”

Around the gaps in the closed lunchroom door the smell of macaroni and cheese wafted, carrying with it the quiet tone of Bo’s voice.

“. . . about the last time you saw Jason and Billy Harper.”

A little girl’s reticent “I don’t know.”

“Just think back.” Distance did not cloak Bo’s frustration. “Friday? Did you see them Friday?”

Tyler’s clear brown eyes shifted to a crayon rendition of the angels and the shepherds. The angels in the drawing were stippled gray-brown. Torku color. “I got enough trouble without this. Three of my teachers didn’t show up. Classes are all bolluxed.'

From the lunchroom came the little girl’s, “I don’t know.”

DeWitt said, “Tell me about the Harper kids, Tyler.”

Tyler was a huge man, and his glower was larger than life. “Bad ones. Just plain bad. I’m telling you, DeWitt, Janet and your kids aside, those folks down at the Biblical Truth Church don’t teach life right.”

“Well . . .” Tyler was a Catholic. Even before Bomb Day, even before he left his cornfields to take over the vacant post of school principal, the man had looked askance at the fundamentalists.

“And what worries me is, the Torku are getting awful interested in what Pastor Jimmy’s saying.”

DeWitt’s breath hung like food caught in the gullet. “What do you mean?”

“He’s converting ‘em.”

The lunchroom door swung open. The little girl walked out, Bo a couple of steps behind. “You remember anything, you just phone me, okay?”

The child glanced over her shoulder and hurried on.

Tyler checked his watch. “‘Bout that time. Chief? You’re set to teach third-grade math for a month after Christmas break. Don’t you forget now. I already give Tammy your study books. You look ‘em over before class. I purely hate when my teachers fail in their class preparation.”

With that he was gone, hurrying back to his office.

“You ready?” Bo asked.

DeWitt stared idiotically at Tyler’s retreating back.

“I said, you ready?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.”

As they climbed into the squad car, Tyler rang the bell. There was a broken-drainpipe gush of kids from the school, a few teachers caught in the flood like flotsam. DeWitt searched the tiny faces. The kids, bundled in down parkas and mufflers, looked like brightly colored Michelin men. He didn’t see his son.

“Chief?” Bo prompted.

DeWitt roused himself. Keyed the ignition. And then he saw Denny, lunchbox banging his thigh as he ran in an awkward, swaddled gallop to the school bus. Relieved, DeWitt pulled away from the curb and drove down Guadalupe.

They found Doc in his spacious, threadbare office. He was talking to Granger. The men hurriedly broke off their conversation when DeWitt and Bo walked in. DeWitt could read contrition in their faces and wondered what they were hiding.

“Ah,” Doc said, recovering first. “The crimefighting odd couple.”

It was actually Doc and Granger who made the odd couple. Granger was a hulk of a man in a faded Farmer Brown coverall. As though aware his height was imposing, he always stood hunched.

Granger reached into his pocket and brought out a palm-sized wooden toy. “Duckies,” he explained, handing the toy to DeWitt. “See? He’s got a little string that makes his beak go up and down.”

“Clack-clack,” said the duck as Granger demonstrated. Its voice was the sound of Torku playing Monopoly.

“Got your name on it and all.”

“Thanks.” The duck was white and orange with a big green ribbon on its neck. An Autumn, that duck. DeWitt slipped it into his pocket.

Doc nailed him with a look. Early afternoon, and he was sober. “You find out about them kids?”

“I found out who saw them last and when.”

Bo swiveled in surprise. Evidently the officer with his direct interrogation hadn’t gotten past the I-don’t-knows.

“Jason spent Saturday night and all Sunday fishing with an Austin Berry. Austin saw him in school up through Thursday. Friday, Jason was out sick. Jason was afraid of his daddy. Said his daddy came over day and night. Woke them up shouting outside the house and wanting to move back in. His mama was scared.”

“You still think Billy did it?” Doc asked.

“I’m just looking for motives.”

“And you?” Doc peered at Bo.

“I think it was the Torku.”

Doc nodded. “I think you need to see something. Granger?”

The big man was Ieaning against a peeling cabinet, his hands in his pockets. “I been listening a lot.” Granger’s voice was a loud baritone, a voice for calling to neighbors across fences. There was a slight cast to the man’s left eye that caused DeWitt’s gaze to slide. He ended up staring at Granger’s ear.

The farmer pulled from his pocket not another duckie but a tiny transistor radio. He turned it on. Static hissed through the room.

“Over by the window you can get better reception,” Doc said.

Granger complied. He put the radio against the frame.

Music. They heard music. . .

It was so interspersed with white noise that you couldn’t tell what sort of music it was. It might have been country. It might have been classical. But between the explosions of static DeWitt caught two notes. Then another three.

“Lock onto the station,” Bo said.

“She’s locked on as she’ll ever be.”

DeWitt tore the radio from Granger and studied the numerals at the red marker. He didn’t recognize the station. Through the steam-kettle sputter, the notes were faint. Sketchy as memory.

“There’s the proof civilization’s back.” Doc eyed them one by one. “Now the Torku got to let us go.”