The True Detective (41 page)

T
HE SMALL HOUSE
is dark; he is not surprised. Pulling into the short driveway, he turns off the car lights and motor. He sits there. That the house is dark simply means that she’s at work, at the restaurant. It simply means that he will have to go there to make his plea to her to save his life. That’s all it means.

T
HE RESTAURANT WHERE
she works, on the highway in the direction of the lakes, has its name in red neon—Brando’s Italian Cuisine/Restaurant and Bar—and a split-rail fence around its parking lot. Pulling up, turning into the lot, Vernon experiences a mixed sense in himself of coming home, as he has any number of times previously. Not often, he thinks, since he went away to school, but enough times to recognize this sense in him of anticipation. Home for Christmas, home for a time in the summer. He cannot help having occur in him a feeling of looking forward to seeing his mother. Even as things might deteriorate in an hour or an evening, there had always been this good feeling in him when he came home after having been away for a period of time.

Now, at once, as soon as he has pulled into a space on the gravel and parked, the good feeling is leaving. He has never come here like this, he thinks. When his mother was at work, he’d just wait at the house until she returned.

Well, here he is, he thinks, sitting behind the wheel. Once more then, he reaches under the sleeping bag, to feel the warmth of the boy, to feel his forehead. He’s been unconscious all day, he thinks. I wish you’d wake up, he thinks but doesn’t dare say in his anxiety. At the same time, from feeling his face, he has moved his hand over his ear until he has touched a stickiness in his hair and the wound. He pulls his hand back.

Another thought comes to Vernon then, an image passing his mind’s eye for the first time. It is of a person out in the middle of Lake Winnipesaukee on a dark and misty night like this, lifting and guiding a child’s body over the side of the boat and into the dark water on a mere bubble or two, knowing it will sail and sink for a minute, and two minutes, before ever reaching the unlighted bottom a lifetime below.

It is as he is in the damp air, on the long wooden porch to the restaurant, however, and looking through a window which is
tinted amber and contains small bubbles, and an interior doorway, on an angle, to see if he can spot his mother where she might appear there at the end of the bar, that it comes to him that his thought of making things as they had been before is hopeless. He sees her, sees his mother. There she is, carrying a small tray. She does not appear at all as he had imagined, sexy, that is, a smile on her face, her hair fluffed and her uniform blouse unbuttoned a button or two. At this distance, at this angle, she appears an ordinary woman. She looks tired. She gives no tosses to her hair as he has seen her do before; rather she places her tray on the counter and stands there. His mother whom he has always loved, Vernon thinks, and loved to excess, in spite of the fact, or because, she has never been able to love him in turn. He who has ruined her life, as she has told him many times. An ordinary woman. A widow at age twenty-four. The war.

Walking back over the gravel and crushed stone, which he notices now is mixed with slush and water, Vernon returns to his car. There is the flashing gold light of another car entering the parking lot; he pays it little mind.

In only a moment, backing out, he is on the two-lane highway driving back in the direction of the interstate. I did it, he thinks. If anyone ever asks, I can always say I did it.

D
UNCAN HAS SAID NOTHING OF HIS SUSPICION TO THE OTHERS
. Nor has he quite said it to himself. In the cottage, in their
“whoever cooks doesn’t have to clean up” arrangement, he has gone to his room to study while Leon—with Wayne’s help, the two
are
one—has assumed the role which will free him, Leon, from the mess made in the process.

It is after they have eaten, and after Duncan has relieved Wayne of any kitchen responsibility—“Go ahead, I’ll clean up,” he has said to him—that it comes to him. Perhaps he relieved Wayne so he might be by himself to think as he washed dishes. Perhaps he did so because of something troubling clinging to his mind. He has finished the dishes. The table remains dirty, and he is cleaning the counter around the sink. He knows then. As he knows, it is as a balloon collapsing in his chest. Vernon, he says to himself. My God.

He finishes cleaning the counter and sink, in a daze. Rinsing the small sponge under the faucet, he turns to wipe the table, and it is as if, at once, he doesn’t know. At the same time all things keep falling into place, again and again, from the beginning.

B
EATRICE NEVER LIKED NORTHERN MAINE
,
IN TIME CALLING
it The Great Haunted Loneliness. And this
isn’t
northern Maine, Dulac admits—they are on the Maine Turnpike, well into the darkness south of Portland—yet he is feeling in himself a strain of the haunted homesickness that unnerved her those times they were on the narrow two-lane blacktop state roads up near New Brunswick, where they seldom saw another car or another
person and their headlights highlighted only various thicknesses of moisture and blacktop.

Beatrice. He’s missing her as he drives. She would know, would understand the fatherly intent of his voice, his words, to this fifteen-year-old boy. And of course she would help.

Coincidence has it, irony has it, he thinks, that the time he is recalling is the time, a dozen years or so ago, when they received word that Beatrice would never be able to conceive a child and they drove north, over a Thanksgiving weekend, to give themselves a slight if haunting vacation, as if to let themselves know that they and their life were okay.

In fact it was another message that they received. Stopping at a restaurant in Calais, near the Canadian border, and just across an especially wide stretch of the Croix River, they saw, separately, a message printed by finger in the steam on a window near the kitchen, on the way to the restrooms. In moisture lightly bleeding the message said:

Thanks be to my mother and father. If Charlene could have had them for parents and not me and if Roy had not lost his life on the other side of the world we’d have something to be thankful for—Rae.

Later, when they were driving on, crossing into Canada and looking for a place to stop for the night, he happened to say, “I keep wondering what happened to Charlene,” and Beatrice said, “I do, too. What an unusual thing to write on a window,” and at last, when they had lain sleepless for an hour or more in a cinder-block motel which smelled of disinfectant, and Beatrice began to weep softly in the dark and she said to him finally, “Can we go home?” he said of course, and turned out of bed, and returning to the highway and finding coffee at a misty Dunkin
Donuts near the border crossing, he drove all night, and she sat beside him, drifting in and out of sleep, and perhaps they had never been closer before or since, or happier in their closeness, than they were throughout those hours of darkness, looking for the divided highway to begin, and looking for daylight to break out over the Atlantic, and looking for Portsmouth to come into view, their small hometown on the water, and looking for the driveway to their house, on Lincoln Avenue, and looking for the familiar comfort it offered within. Looking for themselves.

“What do you think of Portland?” he says to the boy.

“Fine,” Matt says. “It seemed fine.”

“There’s a place there where you can learn to make wooden boats,” Dulac says.

“Yeah,” the boy says.

“Not much to see, though, after dark,” Dulac says.

He drives along, quiet again. The videotaping crosses his mind. His central message was simple and direct—“We know, I know, that you don’t want to do what you are doing, and I want you to know that if you call me, at the number appearing on the screen, I will do all that I can to help resolve this situation”—and he wonders yet again if it will have any effect, if the tone was right, the words right, if they will trigger the willingness to surrender. Of course he will look soft to some, he thinks, especially other law enforcement people, but he can’t afford to worry about that.

“I wonder,” he says to the boy, “if I should have used the word
please.
What do you think?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” Matt says.

Dulac is only making small talk, but he tries to be serious about the subject.
“Please
could be a key word for such a person,” he says. “It’s a word everyone knows, from everyone’s childhood. I wish I had used it.”

“I see what you mean,” the boy says.

Dulac feels encouraged; it is as much as he has gotten out of him, and perhaps out of himself, so far. “What’s your gut feeling, Matt, about Eric?” he says then.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think he’s okay? Do you feel positive?”

“I’m scared,” Matt says.

Dulac drives along. Bad subject, he thinks, at the same time that he is saying to himself that it is the subject he wishes to address, that it is this boy’s feelings and fears he wants out in the open, his strength he wants to encourage, to bolster.

Near Biddeford, he radios in to speak to Shirley.

“We have his statement and he’s on his way back to McDonald’s,” she says. “Everybody thought he was reliable. A good witness. It’s a near certainty, Gil, that Eric Wells was in that car, which he says was gray. He thinks it was either a Pontiac Sunbird or a Chevrolet Monza—this kid knows his cars—which means we’re on the right track, that Eric was okay on Sunday night. Matt with you?”

“He’s right here,” Dulac says.

“Is he helping?” Shirley says.

“Oh, he’s a big help,” Dulac says. “And good company.” He glances to Matt, smiles.

“Gil, listen,” Shirley says. “I know you’re anxious but there’s no need for you to rush back. Ya Know? I mean I know you haven’t had any dinner. Something big comes in here, I’ll be in touch with you. Okay?”

“Okay, Shirley, fine,” Dulac says.

Driving on then, Dulac is trying again to sort out how to proceed. There are things he wants to say to this boy that he hasn’t been able yet to say, or even to formulate for himself, and he wants, too, to be back in the squad room. How
is
a man an effective friend or father? he wonders. How do you get through to saying what counts, what will be heard and understood?

Oh, it’s the same old story, he thinks then. Time. Not having time. The preciousness of time. Needing to be elsewhere. “Matt,” he says in the midst of this, “would you like a pizza?”

“Well, sure,” Matt says.

“You’re hungry?”

“I guess I am,” Matt says.

“You’d
like
a pizza? Tell me the truth.”

“Sure,” Matt says.

For the first time, in a glance, Dulac detects something of a smile coming from the boy. “We’ll do it,” Dulac says. “I’m starving. And we’re going to have a talk about things, too. Okay?”

“Okay,” Matt says.

On the car radio then, Dulac tells Shirley that they are turning off at Biddeford. “Pizza stop,” he says. “With everything. Matt’s idea,” he adds. “Matt said if we didn’t stop for a pizza, he’d break my arm.”

“I’d like to see that,” Shirley says.

All three laugh politely, through car and airwaves; Dulac’s smile holds as he triggers his turn signal to leave the highway. “I know a place here,” he says.

V
ERNON CONTINUES DRIVING STEADILY
. T
HE UNIVERSITY
is just ahead now. Its smokestack and gray smoke are visible in the night sky. There are no houses or lights along this last stretch of two-lane pavement before coming to the agricultural
and athletic fields, the animal barns and tennis courts. All is dark on this approach to the campus and his has been the only car on the road since leaving the four-lane bypass a mile back; even this absence of people speaks to him of darkness ahead.

A car does appear then, coming down a hill toward him. The car’s lights go dim. He dims his own. Still the car comes on, and he fears for an instant that they are going to collide head-on. In a sudden shoulder-to-shoulder flash of lights, however, the car passes. For the moment, he feels safe. In his rearview mirror, the car’s red taillights float away into the darkness, close to the ground, as if to signal the only other boat on the wide lake of the world in the middle of the night.

Vernon keeps going his way.

Up the hill, where the terrain flattens, he is coming opposite the first university building, the field house, and there, of all things, is a campus police car, making a turn through a paved space, around the flagpole, before the vast brick building. The car’s exterior paraphernalia is dark on its roof, nonetheless glistening and reflecting under high streetlights, and Vernon is seized with a desire to turn himself in. This is it, he says to himself. Oh God, this is it right now.

He flips his turning signal to send its flashing light to the face of the police car. He turns his steering wheel, turning directly into the extremely restricted university parking space before the field house, thinking how he will do it right now, will confess, say all, and have it done with at last. For the moment, he is not breathing; his car is hardly moving. Here is the police car.

It doesn’t stop. Its roof lights do not flash on. Even as he looks to their faces—one and the other—and they appear to look back, they do not see what he is trying to say. The police car simply rolls by. There is its door insignia a foot away, then its taillights arc in his side mirror—much larger than the previous
car’s—and there goes the car on into the street, accelerating in the direction of the town’s concentration of beer dens and mom-and-pop take-outs, its gray exhaust disappearing over the pavement surface.

Vernon reverses direction. He doesn’t know where he is going.

He kills the boy then within a feeling of time having paused. Back off the road, he parks in the shadow of the football stadium which, overhead, is like the prow of a battleship against a night sky. He had hesitated leaving the restricted parking area before the field house, turning part of a turn after the campus police car, but changing his mind in midstream and turning back into the darkness from which he had come. His actions following seem unbothered with start-and-stop uncertainty.