The True Detective (56 page)

The eyes look down. More of the face appears, a face rippled in the wind.
“I want to die,”
the face cries down to him.

Dulac has to turn his neck down again, against the accumulating pain. Looking back up, where the eyes keep staring down, he calls up, “Did you do it?” Guilt seems to Dulac in this moment to be the key question to be ascertained, as if to settle things.

“Did you do it?”
he calls again.

“It was an accident,” the face calls down to him.

Dulac only looks up at the suspect, in spite of the pain in his neck. The answer is amazingly disappointing to him, although he doesn’t know why. He keeps looking at the eyes, at the amount of face visible up there, to see if he can see another answer.

“What kind of accident?” he calls back.

There is no reply.

Dulac stares back. Then he can stand the neck pain no more and looks out over the countryside, to relieve his neck, perhaps to think. Looking up again, he calls out, “That’s a lie.”

There is no response; the face just looks down at him.

“You’re a liar!”
Dulac shouts up at him.
“You’re a liar!”

The face only looks down at him now, seems to simply stare at him in unanswered question.

Dulac keeps looking up at him, as the pain points into his neck, then he turns his head down again. Looking back up in a moment, be calls, “Come on down.”

The suspect starts down. The holes in the hollow steel posts are three to four feet apart, and stepping, moving from one and reaching to another means he has to extend the full length of his body. In his fear, though, he doesn’t quite want to release his hand- or his footholds, and he tries in a way to both cling to the post and to inch or shimmy down, and as he does this, above him, an image comes up in Dulac’s mind of seeing him fall to his death.

Dulac doesn’t seem to actually think in these moments, as the suspect is trying to make his way down. Dulac’s mind seems to be chilled in the grip of the image which has come to him and seems not to reach or to move elsewhere. Yet he will know always that other thoughts and images did pass through his mind, not of the boy or of the suspect there with his apple-colored cheeks, in his terror, but of himself, of his life, of his
years growing up in Canada, an image of his father, his time in the U.S. Navy, his years on the police force.

Still holding the railing with one hand, he frees his other hand and extends it overhead to the suspect, where he is clinging to the last hole in the column before coming within reach. Dulac keeps his hand extended. He doesn’t know what he is going to do.

Shifting one hand from the post, the suspect reaches with it to grip—both hands are sticky—Dulac’s extended hand. Dulac grips the suspect’s hand within his own.

Steadying himself, the suspect removes a foot from its perch then, to reach it downward, and as it touches the railing, settles its toe there, on a breath, he removes his other hand to reach it down to Dulac’s offered hand, like a child climbing out of a tree.

Dulac may not know that he is going to do anything. Perhaps he doesn’t do anything. Before the suspect’s second hand arrives to take hold, however, his hand is losing its grip on the sticky hand he has been grasping, and he looks to see the open-eyed expression on the suspect’s face as there is nothing holding him but his feet and he knows, they both know, that he is going to fall, that only his toes on the railing and his other toes raised to the edge of one of the holes are holding him, and Dulac is reaching to him as he is sitting backwards, as there is an expression in his eyes—flapping his arms as one does attempting to maintain balance, flapping and lurching to grip air again as Dulac is leaning to reach to him, and cannot reach him, as he folds at the waist in a last attempt to reach his toes, to reach his toe perch, and drops away, on a gasp, into the space behind him.

Dulac doesn’t look out or down to see him fall, not yet at least. He is returning his free hand to the railing, to brace himself from toppling sideways, as he hears the merest cry of disappearance, the slightest whimper.

Looking into the wind at last, he sees nothing. There is a distance to the water, the air, the vertigo within him. He sees something then. A small white splash occurs, more to one side than he would have guessed, and he looks up once more, looks upstream against an elevator-dropping sensation rushing through him in this moment, through his brain, down through his life, as he holds tightly, as he braces himself in the ceaseless wind.

H
OURS HAVE SLIPPED AWAY
;
DARKNESS IS OVERALL NOW
.

Here is a passenger plane, a Boeing 727, lowering over the dotted lights of coastal highways, offering in its landing pattern out over the dark ocean a night view of Portland, Maine. The plane, a connecting flight from Newark, is all at once, on a line, passing lights, buildings, and trees as high as itself, until its wheels hit and skid, its engines squeal in reverse, and at last, a teetering finned whale with rows of seats in its belly and portholes along its sides, it dips and drifts and rolls uncertainly over the tarmac on its way to the terminal.

At a window seat, in the smoking section in the rear, is a man of forty-nine with a weather-worn face, wearing a western shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps under a mismatching suit coat, open at his dark throat. Not anxious to leave the plane, he watches through the small window at his side, seeing nothing
of any greater significance than small ground lights of red and blue, while the other passengers are getting to their feet and unloading belongings from overhead compartments.

It’s a new airport, different from anything he ever saw here before. Noticing the highlighted overlapping tails of other planes, and glimpsing a portion of the city skyline in the distance, he wonders, in a way, as he does almost every day of his life still, if things might not have picked up and straightened out for him here if he’d stuck around.

This is Warren Wells. A Maine native, he is coming back tonight for the first time in over seven years. He is the father of two young sons, one of them due to be buried and the other grown up, more or less. Two sons and a previous life. A hometown and a home state. All of which he’d never quite stopped remembering, not for a minute it seemed, although it was true, all these years had slipped by, and it was true, too, that no one would believe him.

In the seat to his right, waiting for him, is his second wife, Vivian—Vi, he calls her—who has never been so far north or seen snow before, and who may be in no more of a hurry than he is to leave the plane and face whatever it is they have to face. “I guess it’s Portland,” Warren says to her. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“You don’t see your friends?” she says.

“Not from here,” he says.

The plane is three-fourths empty by now and she says, “Come on, Warren, let’s just go and do what we have to do.”

She is up from her seat, giving him room to move into the aisle from his, as he finally presses the release on his seat belt and follows. They retrieve their bags from an overhead compartment, as Vi says, “Come on, your friends will think you didn’t make the flight.”

As Vi is starting along the aisle and he would follow, he holds his bag on an arm, slides a zipper, and half turning his shoulder, slips out a pint in a paper bag, uncaps it, throws off a sizeable shot, wheezes, blinks his tired, watering eyes, and returns all to its place as he moves on along the aisle to close the gap. Vi seems not to have noticed.

Close to her there is still a short line of people deplaning, and taking in a whiff of the sharply chilled Maine air, Warren seems to know in his heart that the trip is a hopeless mistake. For an instant, he wonders if they might stay on the plane, and fly back south just as they had flown north. Fly anywhere, he thinks, as he follows, as emotions he had forgotten were his seem to be returning to him in the familiar misted air. It’s a mistake, he thinks. All his life here, he was pressed and crowded. As if it was any different anywhere else, he thinks. Claire and the two boys. He had loved them, and, it was true, he had run out on them, had worked at not loving them. Nothing in his life had ever really worked out. And it was no one’s fault but his own.

Pausing, turning to him then as they are the last passengers making their way into the terminal, Vi whispers, “No more drinking, Warren, the rest of the time we’re here, or I’m going right back to Louisiana.”

They are on carpeting, as they enter a waiting area and Warren is looking ahead for Bill and Ceil Arthur, his friends from the old days, who had telephoned him about Eric coming up missing and about the discovery of his body. He lets Vi move about half a step ahead of him. He will do, he knows, what she has told him to do. As much as he is able.

He doesn’t see Bill and Ceil, but he knows in the instant of seeing two men in topcoats who lift ever so lightly away from a painted wall and start in his direction that something is wrong—even as he doesn’t know yet just what it is. He is trembling. Bill
and Ceil aren’t there. He looks to be sure Vi is close at hand, as he sees the two men coming on. He pauses and wants Vi to pause with him or turn back with him, but she hasn’t tuned in to anything and is walking on. “Vi,” he says. He is looking at the men, though, and in this instant has the thought that his life is not worth the match it might take to light it and burn it up. Is there any way he can get to the bottle in his bag and have another drink?

Vi has turned. “The police,” he says.

The two men close on him, as does Vi, who seems ignorant yet of what is happening. “Warren Wells?” one of the men says in an almost friendly voice.

“Yes sir,” he says, as if he is a Southerner.

“Sir, would you step over here, please. County Sheriff’s Department, Mr. Wells. Mrs. Wells?” the man adds to Vi.

“Some friends were supposed to meet us,” Warren says.

“They’re just ahead, Mr. Wells. You can speak to them in a minute, as we go through.”

“We were told no charges would be pressed,” Vi says.

“The sheriff’s office has issued a warrant, ma’am, so we will be taking Mr. Wells into custody, where he will have the right—”

“We were told that his wife—his former wife—was not going to press any charges! My God!”

“Mr. Wells’s former wife doesn’t administer the law, ma’am,” the man says. “I’m sorry. Any decision about charges pending against Mr. Wells will be decided by the prosecuting attorney for the county and by a judge. Now, ma’am, you’ll be able to join your friends here, if you like. We’ll be taking Mr. Wells to the County Building, where you can see him, if you wish to, after he is booked.”

“My God,” Vi says, with anger, even as her eyes have filled.

“Honey, it’s okay,” Warren says.

“She said she wasn’t going to press any charges,” Vi says. “My God, he just came here to go to his son’s funeral. To see his other son.”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” the man says. Turning then, as if to draw Warren a step away from her, he says, “Mr. Wells, I’m going to handcuff your right hand to my left. And we’re going to have to frisk you, if you’d just step over this way, please.”

There are the man’s handcuffs, as he removes them from under his suit coat.

“Good God,” Vi says. “He’s a broken man; give him a chance.”

“Oh, Vi,” Warren says.

H
ERE AFTER DARK
,
LEAVING THE STATION AND DRIVING
through the small city, it occurs to Dulac that he loves his wife and that he is no longer in love with Shirley Moss. Yesterday and today he has fallen out of love with Shirley, and in the loss he is experiencing he feels solitary and old.

He desires to be home. He desires to be with Beatrice, and to make up with her, even if she may not know—he gives no thought to actually telling her—what it is he is doing. At most, he knows, he will tell her that he needs her tonight, that he needs badly the abstraction they refer to as home. He will make no attempt to explain any of the complicated matters or degrees of
fidelity as he has known them, nor any of the characteristics of reach and responsibility on the bridge, however much the two remain alive and troubling in his very heart.

As he pulls over at the house of Claire Wells’s friends, the idea of going out with Beatrice for a drink comes to mind and offers a promise of comfort. Several drinks, he thinks. With Beatrice, whom he does love, loves truly when all is said and done. There is that country music place down on the river and they can go there and have some drinks and hear the jukebox speak of going back to Luckenback, Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys.

He has this last chore. After so much paperwork, this will be his last item of work for the day, and even if he may not be free, he will be off-duty.

Tapping on the door, let into an entryway by the woman, he is told that Claire is upstairs and she will go and call her down. As he asks where Matt is and the woman says he is in the basement—did he want to see him?—Dulac tells her no, no, he just wondered if he was there.

Coming downstairs, Claire Wells appears entirely confused as he greets her, and then she says to him in a low voice. “Can we talk outside?”

He tells her yes, of course, and as they step outside into the chilled night air, he asks her if she’d like to sit in the car. She says yes and they walk to the car, with her friends’ lighted house behind them, where he opens the door on the passenger side for her to get in.

Going around, getting into the car himself, he says, “I’m sorry about your former husband’s arrest.”

She makes no response to this, so he lets it drop. He had been prepared to explain that once her former husband signed an agreement to make up the child support payments—which
would mean nothing more than his word, anyway, because they’d have to let him return to Louisiana to his job—he would be released to attend the funeral service. Such at least was his understanding from the authorities in Maine.

They sit in silence. It’s her meeting, Dulac is thinking. In this moment, though, he sees again the brief white splash in the swollen green water far below. He experiences, too, the momentary dropping of the elevator. “What’s the problem, Claire?” he says to her.