The Last Policeman (22 page)

“Is this how you stay so thin?”

“It helps,” I say. “I need to see what he was working on.”

“Okay.”

“His office—” I close my eyes, think back. “There was no inbox, no pile of active files.”

“No,” says Naomi. “No, since we stopped using the computers, and everything was on paper. Gompers came up with this whole annoying system. Or maybe the regional office did, I don’t know. But every day, at the end of the day, what you’re working on goes back in the filing cabinets. You pick it up in the morning.”

“Is it filed by worker?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would all of Peter’s files be together?”

“Huh. You know—I don’t know.”

“Okay,” I say, and I grin, my cheeks flushed, my eyes flashing. “I like this. This is good.”

“What a funny person you are,” she says, and I sort of can’t believe that she’s real, she’s sitting in my house, on my crappy old beach chair in her red dress with the black buttons.

“I do, I like this. Maybe I’ll make a midlife career change,” I say. “Try my luck in the insurance biz. I’ve got the rest of my life ahead of me, right?”

Naomi doesn’t laugh. She stands up. “No. No. Not you. You’re a policeman through and through, Hank,” she says. She looks at me, right up at my face, and I stoop a little and look right back, I’m suddenly thinking to myself, fiercely, painfully, that this is it. I will never fall in love again. This will be the last time.

“You’ll be standing there when the asteroid comes down, with one hand out, yelling,
Stop! Police!
”

I don’t know what to say to that, I really don’t.

I stoop a little, and she cranes her neck upward, and we kiss very slowly, as if we have all the time in the world. Halfway through the kiss the dog pads in, nuzzles against my leg, and I sort of gently
kick him away. Naomi reaches up and puts a hand around my neck, her fingers drifting down beneath the collar of my shirt.

When we’re done with the kiss, we kiss again, harder, an onrush of urgency, and when we pull apart again Naomi suggests that we go into the bedroom, and I apologize because I don’t have a real bed, just a mattress on the floor. I haven’t gotten around to buying one yet, and she asks how long I’ve been living here and I say five years.

“You’re probably not ever going to get around to it, then,” she murmurs, pulling me to her, and I whisper, “You’re probably right,” pulling her down.

* * *

Much later, in the darkness, sleep starting to seep into our eyelids, I whisper to Naomi, “What kind of poetry?”

“Villanelles,” she whispers in return, and I say I don’t know what that means.

“A villanelle is a poem of nineteen lines,” she says, still hushed, murmuring into my neck. “Five tercets, each composed of three rhymed lines. And the first and last lines of the first tercet return over and over again, over the course of the poem, as the last line of each of the subsequent tercets.”

“Okay,” I say, not really registering all of that, more focused on the soft electric presence of her lips on my neck.

“It ends with a quatrain, which is four rhymed lines, with the second two lines of the quatrain again repeating the first and last lines of the first tercet.”

“Oh,” I say, and then, “I’m going to need an example.”

“There are a lot of really good ones.”

“Tell me one of the ones you’re writing.”

Her laugh is a small warm gust into my collarbone. “I’m only writing one, and it’s not done.”

“You’re only writing one?”

“One great one. Before October. That’s my plan.”

“Oh.”

We’re still and quiet then, for a moment.

“Here,” she says. “I’ll tell you a famous one.”

“I don’t want the famous one. I want yours.”

“It’s by Dylan Thomas. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s been in the newspaper a lot lately.”

I’m shaking my head. “I try not to read the papers too much.”

“You’re a strange man, Detective Palace.”

“People tell me that.”

* * *

At some point late, late at night, I drift awake and there’s Naomi standing in the doorframe, in only her underwear, slipping the red dress on over her head. She sees me watching and pauses, smiles, unembarrassed, and finishes dressing. I can see, even in the pale light from the hallway, that the lipstick is scrubbed from her lips. She looks shorn and lovely, like something newborn.

“Naomi?”

“Hey, Henry.” She closes her eyes. “Something.” Opens her eyes. “One more thing.”

I make my hand a visor against the moonlight, trying to see
her clearly. The bedsheets are scrunched up against my chest, my legs are spilling slightly over the edge of the mattress.

She sits on the bed, down by my feet with her back to me.

“Naomi?”

“Forget it.”

She shakes her head rapidly, stands again, speaks, a rush of words in the near darkness. “Henry, just know that no matter what else—no matter how this ends—this was all real and good and right.”

“Well, sure,” I say. “Yeah. Yes.”

“Real and good and right, and I won’t forget it,” she says. “Okay? No matter how it ends.”

“Okay,” I say.

She leans over me and kisses me hard on the lips, and she goes.

“Palace.”

“What?” I say, sitting up, looking around. “Hello?”

I’m so used to being woken from a dream by the telephone that it takes me a moment to realize that I was dreaming not of Alison Koechner but of Naomi Eddes, and then it’s the next moment that I figure out that it was not a dream, not this time—Naomi was real, is real, and then I look around for her, and she’s gone. My shades are open, the winter sun is sending wavering yellow rectangles across the crumpled sheets on my old mattress, and there is a woman on my phone yelling at me.

“Are you familiar with the current statutory penalties for impersonating a state official?”

Oh, God. Oh, no. Fenton.

“Yes, ma’am, I am.”

The blood, the vial of blood. Hazen Road.

“Well, I’ll quote them for you.”

“Dr. Fenton.”

“Impersonating a state official carries a sentence of ten to twenty-five years and is prosecuted under Title VI, meaning automatic imprisonment pending trial, which will never occur.”

“I know that.”

“The same penalty pertains for impeding a criminal investigation.”

“Can I explain?”

“No, thanks. But if you’re not at the morgue in twenty minutes, you’re going to jail.”

I take two minutes to get dressed and two minutes to remove and replace the wad of paper towels over my eye. Before I close my front door, I take a look around: the beach chairs, the empty bottle of wine. No sign of Naomi’s clothes, of her pocketbook, her coat, no traces of her boot heels on the rug. No trace of her scent.

It happened, though. Close my eyes and I can feel it, the trace of her finger tickling the back of my neck, drawing me in. No dream.

Twenty minutes, Fenton said, and she was not kidding. I push the speed limit all the way to Concord Hospital.

* * *

Fenton is precisely as she was when I saw her last, alone with her rolling cart of medical equipment in the stark cold brightness of the morgue. The steel drawers with their gray handles, the strange sad locker room of the damned.

I walk in and she looks at her watch. “Eighteen minutes and forty-five seconds.”

“Dr. Fenton, I hope that you—I hope—listen—” There are tears in my voice, somehow, for some reason. I clear my throat. I am trying to formulate an explanation that will satisfy, trying to explain how I could have stolen blood and had it tested under false pretenses—how sure I was that this was a drugs case, how imperative it was to prove or disprove that Peter Zell was an addict—and of course now it doesn’t matter, turns out never to have mattered, it was about insurance claims, about insurance all along—and I am meanwhile melting under the combined effect of her glare and the brightness of the lights—and there, too, is Peter, she’s taken his body out of its drawer and laid it on the cold slab of the mortuary table, stone dead and staring straight up into the lights.

“I’m sorry,” is all I can muster, at last. “I’m really sorry, Dr. Fenton.”

“Yes.” Her face is neutral, impassive, behind the perfect O’s of her glasses. “Me, too.”

“What?”

“I said that I am also sorry, and if you think I’m going to say it a third time, you are deeply mistaken.”

“I don’t understand.”

Fenton turns to her cart to pick up a single sheet of paper. “These are the results of the serology tests, and as you will see they have caused me to revise my understanding of the case.”

“In what way?” I ask, trembling a little bit.

“This man was murdered.”

My mouth drops open, and I can’t help it, I am thinking the words and then I am saying them aloud. “I knew it. Oh, my God, I knew it all along.”

Fenton pushes up her glasses slightly where they have slipped
down the bridge of her nose and reads from the paper. “First. The bloodwork reveals not only a high blood-alcohol level but also alcohol in the stomach itself, which means he had done some heavy drinking in the hours before he died.”

“I knew that,” I say. J. T. Toussaint, in our first interview: they went to see
Distant Pale Glimmers
. They had a bunch of beers.

“Also present in the blood,” Fenton continues, “were significant traces of a controlled substance.”

“Right,” I say, nodding, mind buzzing, one step ahead of her. “Morphine.”

“No,” says Fenton, and looks up at me, curious, surprised, a little irritated. “Morphine? No. No traces of opiates of any kind. What he had in his system was a chemical compound called gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.”

I squint over her shoulder at the lab report, a thin sheet of paper, decorated with calculations, checked-off boxes, someone’s precise backward-slanting handwriting. “I’m sorry. What kind of acid?”

“GHB.”

“You mean—the date-rape drug?”

“Stop talking, Detective,” says Fenton, pulling on a pair of clear latex gloves. “Come here and help me turn over the body.”

We slip our fingers under his back and carefully lift Peter Zell and flip him over onto his stomach, and then we’re looking at the broad paleness of his back, the flesh spreading away from the spine. Fenton fits into her eye a small lens, like a jeweler’s glass, reaches up to adjust the hallucinogenically bright lamp overhanging the autopsy table, aiming it at a blotchy brown bruise on the back of Zell’s left calf, just above the ankle.

“Look familiar?” she says, and I peer forward.

I’m still thinking about GHB. I need a notebook, I need to write all this down. I need to think. Naomi stopped in the doorway of my bedroom, she almost said something, and then she changed her mind and slipped away. I experience a pang of longing so strong that it momentarily buckles my knees, and I lean against the table, grasp it with both hands.

Easy, Palace
.

“This is what I really have to apologize for,” she says flatly. “In my rush to conclude an obvious suicide case I failed to make thorough survey of the things that could cause a ring of bruises above a person’s ankle.”

“Okay. And so …” I stop talking. I don’t know what she means at all.

“At some point in the hours before he ended up where you found him, this man was knocked unconscious and dragged by the leg.”

I look at her, unable to speak.

“Probably to the trunk of a car,” she continues, placing the paper back on the cart. “Probably to be taken to the scene, and hanged. Like I said, I have significantly revised my understanding of this case.”

I catch an inward glimpse of Peter Zell’s dead eyes, the glasses, disappearing into the darkness of the trunk of a car.

“Do you have any questions?” Fenton asks.

I have nothing but questions.

“What about his eye?”

“What?”

“The other cluster of old bruises. On his cheek, below his
right eye. He apparently reported that he fell down some stairs. Is that possible?”

“Possible, but unlikely.”

“And are you sure there was no morphine in his system? Are you sure he wasn’t using it the night he died?”

“Yes. Nor for at least three months beforehand.”

I have to rethink this whole thing, go over it again from top to bottom. Rethink the timeline, rethink Toussaint, rethink Peter Zell. Having been right all along, having guessed correctly that he was murdered, provides no joy, no powerful self-righteous rush. To the contrary, I feel confused—sad—uncertain. I feel like
I’ve
been thrown in a trunk, like I’m surrounded by darkness, peering up toward a crack of daylight. On my way out of the morgue I stop at the small black door with the cross on it, and I reach out and run my fingers along the symbol, remembering that so many people are feeling so awful these days that they had to close down this little room, move the nightly worship service to a bigger space, elsewhere in the building. That’s just how things are.

* * *

As soon as I step outside into the Concord Hospital parking lot, my phone rings.

“Jesus, Hank, where have you been?”

“Nico?”

It’s hard to hear her, there’s a loud noise in the background, a kind of roar.

“I need you to listen to me closely, please.”

The noise is intense behind her, like wind whipping through an open window. “Nico, are you on a highway?”

It’s too loud in the parking lot. I turn around and go back into the lobby.

“Henry,
listen
.”

The wind behind her is growing louder, and I’m starting to hear the distinct menacing whine of sirens, a distant shrieking mixed in with the whoosh and howl of the wind. I’m trying to place the sound of the sirens, those aren’t CPD sirens. Are they state cars? I don’t know—what are federal marshals driving right now?

“Nico, where are you?”

“I am not leaving you behind.”

“What on Earth are you talking about?

Her voice is stiff as steel; it’s her voice but not her voice, like my sister is reading lines from a script. The roar behind her stops abruptly, and I hear a door slam, I hear feet running.

“Nico!”

“I’ll be back. I’m not leaving you behind.”