The Good Lieutenant (27 page)

It was a joke—at least Fowler had intended it that way. But even though the woman seemed to understand this, there was no corresponding laughter. Only a reshuffling of possibilities behind her plucked eyebrows, her wide-eyed, mascaraed face.

“We have a federally funded program for servicemen and -women,” she said, thrusting a brochure into Fowler's hands. “I can prequalify you at a rate of five-point-six percent for the first five years of your mortgage. I can fold your closing costs and your down payment into the loan, so you can walk out of here with immediate access to a couple hundred thou in equity. Plus”—the woman came around so that she was shoulder to shoulder with Fowler, her perfume sharp as spoiled wine—“we will actually pay off, in cash, your title fees. It's our way of saying thanks.”

“For what?”

“For your service,” the woman said. She nodded at Fowler's fatigues.

Fowler handed the brochure back. “Do you think you could help me find Harris Fowler? He's supposed to work around here someplace.”

Speaking her brother's name out loud caused Fowler's legs to go wooden, and her hands seemed cottony and distant, as if her blood sugar had suddenly dropped. For the woman, however, it seemed to have the effect of a slap: her face dimmed without changing expression, like a phone screen that had shifted to sleep. She stepped off briskly to her desk, pushed a button, spoke into her phone's intercom, then savagely rifled her drawers before returning with her business card: Rachel Nystrom.

“I know that Mr. Harris has a good reputation,” Rachel said, “but I can really use the business—and I can pay better attention to you too.”

She hadn't considered the possibility that Harris would have a reputation of any kind, certainly not one that would intimidate a woman like Rachel; she'd imagined that he'd still be wearing a hoodie and a faded T-shirt promoting some deliberately obscure band—Echo and the Bunnymen, the English Beat—that had been popular before they'd been born, and even then not very. His “ironic” Budweiser cap. But instead he exited an office at the far end of the room dressed in a starched white shirt and a flashy yellow tie with a gold clip. His tightly curled brown hair was now cut short along the sides, he was taller than she'd remembered (was he still growing?), but the expression on his face—a studied and carefully arranged lack of focus, an overstudied calm—was familiar. It was the same expression he'd worn when she'd confronted him about the Ryersons' car, as if he knew exactly why she'd come, how she'd found him—though in fact Pulowski had done it on the Internet. “Well, look who's here,” Harris said. “This is a surprise.” He appeared to be evaluating the room to see if anyone else would notice their meeting.

“I was just in the neighborhood,” she said, then stuck her hand out at Rachel Nystrom, rather than hugging Harris, since she wasn't sure what sort of reception she'd receive. “Lieutenant Fowler. I'm, uh—well, I grew up with this kid.”

Immediately Harris stiffened, and a slight warp lifted his lip. But when he turned toward her previous host, his voice seemed artificially loud, designed to draw the attention of the tellers and the other employees. “You learn anything interesting from my sister, Rachel?”

“No,” Rachel said, in a tone that seemed to imply that she hoped that Fowler wouldn't repeat anything she'd just said.

This seemed to set Harris at ease. “No? You're kidding me. You let a client walk in here and don't get a read on her? Come on, haven't I taught you anything?”

“Hey, take it easy,” Fowler said. “I was in the neighborhood. I came by because I've got some family business. If you aren't free, I understand.”

“Now, there's a revealing comment,” Harris said. “Do I have a choice about this meeting? Or does the lieutenant really mean that because we're
family
, she can show up out of the blue and expect me to take off work?
That
, Rachel, is information you can use. Rule one, make sure you know what your client values most.” This was spoken while Harris executed what looked like a series of community-theater stage directions: return to the last, largest desk on the bank's open floor, adjust your name tag so it's visible, hunt busily for props. “Rule two, pay more attention to what they do, not what they say.”

“What's the third?” Rachel asked.

Harris came beaming around the desk, swinging the briefcase, a golden moleskin coat over his arm. It was an impressive sight—as if he'd finally arrived in character, a banker who looked just exactly like a banker. He gave Fowler a dry peck on the cheek, slipped Rachel's folder from her hands, and waved it as he headed for the doorway. “The third rule is if you want to
steal
a client, never let them go to lunch with me.”

*   *   *

The skating rink had been Pulowski's idea. He'd called it a tactical move. The fact that neither he nor Fowler nor Harris actually knew how to skate was the point: here would be an opportunity for Fowler and her brother to encounter each other on neutral ground. It also revealed a helpful chink in Harris's man-about-town armor, since Pulowski was the only one who'd googled the rink's name and saved its address—it was farther downtown, in a large shopping complex, and thus Fowler got to drive all three of them in her truck, following the chirps of Pulowski's GPS. The soundness of this plan felt less evident twenty minutes later, however, when Fowler found herself at a white steel-mesh table with a pair of beige rental skates bound about her feet, feeling about as comfortable as an amputee. Pulowski had already wobbled out onto the ice while Harris sat across from her, paging through the forms she'd brought that named him the beneficiary of her estate. Tactically, the papers were her excuse for
why
she needed to see her brother, but all she'd really wanted to know was how Harris was doing and the answer—as the rink's boards thumped with the toes of other skaters and Justin Timberlake pulsed from speakers overhead—appeared to be fine. Better than she'd expected. Definitely better than in San Antonio, when she'd tried to bail him out of jail for a DUI. So why didn't she feel more relieved? “So you didn't have any trouble with your record?” she asked when Harris finished reading. “I mean, I'm glad you've got a job, I'm just trying to make sure you didn't have to lie to them or anything. Make sure it's secure.”

“Fuck,” Harris said warmly. “Lying's practically the job description.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“How much do you make?” Harris asked. He handed the folder of papers back to her across the table.

“What?”

“You heard me.” He jabbed a finger at the paperwork. “You show up and claim you want my approval to make me your beneficiary. What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, cool, I'm your beneficiary'? Because it doesn't feel cool to me. Imagine I gave you some paperwork whose primary takeaway was that my job put me
at risk of being dead
—”

“Forty a year,” she said. It had never been an embarrassing number to die for until now, sitting on the terrace of an ice rink, in the middle of what appeared to be an urban shopping center—tall office buildings looming around, a fifty-foot Douglas fir set out amid brightly painted nutcrackers—watching Harris raise his pale eyebrows in a wince.

“There's good benefits,” she said, trying to make a joke out of it. She reached under the table and touched his knee. “If I make captain
before
I bite it, you'll get an extra bump. Sorry, sorry—” She waved her hands as Harris reared back. “Look, the paperwork is just a technicality. Nothing is going to happen to me. I got a good team. I came out because I wanted to see you. The only real thing I need is your address.”

“You know what's great about the mortgage industry?” Harris pushed the papers back without writing anything. “No team. Straight percentage. Don't have to worry about anyone walking away.”

“I didn't walk away from you, Harris.”

Harris assaulted the pocket of his suit and retrieved a pack of Camels—one of the few habits he'd picked up from their father. Despite his last jab, he seemed mollified by her decision to frame the paperwork as a ruse. “Maybe you're right,” he said. “Maybe running a platoon in Iraq will be a good educational experience for you. Come back down to earth with the rest of us fuckups. Provided you survive.”

Fowler laughed, genuinely this time. “Oh, come on, Harris! Jesus Christ, talk about the Fowler morality hour. Next you're going to be telling me that you want to join Greenpeace and vote for fucking Kerry. I'm sorry. For bleeding hearts, I know plenty of officers who've got you covered. Along with about half the guys in my platoon.”

Harris seemed mildly surprised at this. “Well, that's fucking great. I don't know, does it improve things when you know you're doing something stupid?”

“Depends on how you define stupid.”

“Did Rachel run over our ‘Thank You for Your Service' plan when you came in?”

“I rent,” Fowler said.

“Well, at least you've got some sense,” Harris said.

“Yeah?” Fowler said. “What's so bad about what Rachel offered?”

This was the Harris that she remembered. In the old days, she'd imagined his arguments like a snare. Fowler was always trying to defend something—school, grades, not getting stoned at three p.m.—that put her in the position of sounding impossibly square, impossibly naïve. The more she tried to avoid being pushed into that position (who didn't recognize that there were arguments against going to school, who didn't know the world wasn't fair?), the angrier Harris got and the more he'd argue, until finally she'd step into the snare. Once it happened, she imagined a loop circling around her ankle and her body being dragged suddenly upward into the air by a bent tree, until she dangled helplessly upside down, so that Harris could lecture her on her stupidity.

“First of all,” Harris said, leaning forward in his seat, “how much of a loan did she say she could set you up with? Three bills? Yeah? And how the fuck are you going to fulfill a mortgage payment on three bills while making forty grand a year? The answer is you're not. And we don't even care if you do. We're going to sell that thing, securitize it, and it's out of our hands. You guys, the blacks, and the Latinos—our triumvirate of morons. And do you know what you all have in common? You all are stupid enough to believe that you actually
deserve
something. Because you're good Americans. Because you like to feel that you're morally superior. Hey, I'm a good soldier. Hey, I'm going off to war to save my country! Aren't I awesome! Don't I deserve to be thanked? No! You
volunteered
to get screwed. Okay? And at some level, you know that.”

Fowler relaxed back into her chair. She felt some guilt for having egged Harris on, but there was also a certain relief, proof that her brother was the person she'd claimed he would be—especially for Pulowski, who'd swung up to the boards beside them, close enough that he'd likely overheard the whole thing. No hope here. Nothing to see.

“You guys coming out?” Pulowski said, tugging at the wrist of his right glove with his teeth. “You pay for the skates, you gotta skate. Come on, now, it isn't possible for either one of you to be worse than me.”

Harris's green eyes flitted between the two of them, as if an ally were the last thing he'd expected. “We're having a conversation,” he said.

“That's not what it sounds like to me,” Pulowski said. “What it sounds like to me is that you are passing off garden-variety, bullshit MSNBC skepticism as actual opinion. You're going to have to do better than that or I'm going to have to start thinking that Fowler here may have actually fucked up your childhood as badly as she imagines.”

“Pulowski is one of those bleeding hearts I was talking about,” Fowler said. “He'd probably agree with you on the whole volunteering-to-get-screwed thing.”

“Maybe,” Pulowski said. “But, hey, going to Iraq isn't any
more
ridiculous than lecturing people on the ways of the world because you're making eighty grand a year selling mortgages. If that. Imagining that somehow you're not getting used. It's a multi-billion-dollar industry, slick. Where do you think
you
stand in the fucking pecking order? You are right there on the bottom with the rest of us idiots. We're all getting used.”

“Yeah, well, at least I'm not going to get killed while it's happening,” Harris said.

“And if you were going to get killed, who'd you want to be with?”

“I wouldn't want to get killed at all.”

“
Now
you're making some sense, dude,” Pulowski said. He clopped over to their table on his skates, his pants smeared with ice chips. “Fortunately”—he stuck his hand out to Harris, waggling his fingers, as if to pull him from his seat—“getting killed is not a risk while skating. The only risk is looking like an idiot, which, you know, comparatively isn't any worse than, say, stealing some asshole's car.”

The entire argument embarrassed her. Even if she agreed with some of Pulowski's points, the car issue was supposed to be buried territory between herself and Harris—his job to bring it up, his job to apologize, since who else in the universe other than Pulowski would claim that somehow stealing a car wasn't wrong? And yet here was Pulowski defending her by using language, principles, and ideas that seemed every bit as bleak as Harris's. So far as she was concerned, the snare was still wrapped around her foot and she was dangling up in the air, battered by both of them now—though Pulowski's argument was being made in her favor, which counted for something, at least.

“I'll go with him,” she said. She stood, a bit wobbly, and took her brother's hand.