Homicide My Own Read online

  HOMICIDE MY OWN

  Neither of these two cops had ever pulled that kind of duty before. One of them a man, the other a woman; one young and the other not so young; one dour and of few words, and the other more dour than he, but with a mouth when a mouth was needed. Why them?

  The man was the young one, Odd Gunderson, and he hating living in Spokane, though he was born and raised there. He accepted the town of his father in the same way he accepted his father’s politics, as a given until taken, or worn away. The same way he accepted his father’s religion, an unsmiling Lutheranism. The woman was a transplant from the coal regions of Pennsylvania, via Los Angeles, where she had gone because of “Dragnet” reruns, and where she became a cop, and where she would still happily be a cop cruising Hollywodd Boulevard, if she hadn’t married a pharmacist from Spokane.

  Odd had ready enthusiasm for an impromptu road trip out of town. All he needed was his tapes, which consisted, the older one regrettably found out, of “Leaving-town-music,” and “Rolling-into-town-music,” and “Driving-in-the-lonely-night-music.”

  The older one, the woman, did not like music and had no tapes, nor any enth, for any trip at all. No method of transportation had yet been invented that could get this one willingly beyond city limits, though she had no more affection for Spokane than Odd did. And she suffered hot flashes, searing uncurlings beneath the skin.

  Odd saw the detail as a reward for something done well; the other one saw it as a punishment for something done wrong. The other one was named Quinn, and that would be me.

  In those days I was sweating constantly. I was told it would pass. Like, when? I wondered. On that particular Thursday it showed no signs of abating anytime soon. That day, I was removing, in a professional manner, a nuisance from Denny’s, a young man in a cheap suit who claimed to be running for President, nominated by Christ’s acclamation. This was the sort of thing I did well, reasoning with the unreasonable, though I also acquited myself honorably whenever it was necessary to wrestle down a runner, to fire off some pepper spray, or to wield a baton. I had never had the occasion to draw my service automatic, and I hoped every day I never would.

  By me, Spokane was not a bad place to live. It wasn’t Los Angeles, but even LA wasn’t the place I had come to with big dreams. Not anymore. Spokane was okay. It was far enough away to escape the liberal influence of Seattle and establish its own identity. Unfortunately, that was as The Gateway to Idaho, a whole other kind of strangeness that included more rounds per minute, fired in a discriminate pattern, if you know what I mean. Swarthy folks were there few, and closely watched. Apple pickers from the Yakima Valley chose to strum their melancholy guitars on a Saturday night closer to their own bivouac. Even I, having never quite lost my Pennsylvania coal-cracker accent, was perceived as something disturbingly foreign, though I had lived there for twenty-five years, with a native son husband held in high regard.

  I had two hours left on my watch, after I had set the candidate off on a different campaign trail, when I got the call to come in. Odd was already there, at the lieutenant’s desk. I looked at him, like, what’s up, but he just shrugged.

  “Charlie and Stacey’s excellent adventure is over,” the lieutenant said.

  Charlie and who? I don’t think Odd remembered either, though with him it’s hard to tell. Unless something truly amuses him, at which time he cracks half a crooked smile, his face remains a blank,

  “A security guy at an Indian casino on Shalish Island nabbed them,” the lieutenant continued.

  “Where’s Shalish Island?” I asked, the first of a few questions I needed answered. Like, who’s Charles and Stacey and what do they have to do with me?

  “Damn near in Canada.”

  On the wall map, the island looked a lot like a Chevy logo, slightly askew in relation to the mainland, as though the right side of the car, let’s say an ‘80 El Camino, were up on the Canadian curb and the left side in the Bellingham mud. The island had no strategic position. From there you could go nowhere but back.

  “I called Stacey’s mother,” said the lieutenant, “and she’s on her own way right now. Charles, however, is our package.”

  It came back to me. Charles T. Houser, thirty, thirty-one, two, a systems analyst with a degree in communications from Gonzaga, deep roots in the community, and no criminal record, jumped bail. He’d been busted for unlawful carnal knowledge, the complaint brought by his other girlfriend, the grown-up one. He was out long enough to pack a bag before he and his fourteen-year-old sweetheart Stacey took it on the arfy-darfy.

  “You two have the honor of going to pick him up and bring him back here, without incident,” said the lieutenant.

  “Okay,” said the Swede.

  “Why us?” said I, not seeing the honor in it. Besides, I thought, why us? They had people for that sort of detail. Odd and I were ordinary in the extreme. Our folders held neither commendations nor reprimands. We were just day to day cops.

  “Because I need my two best people on this,” said the lieutenant. How could this be an insult? Trust me, it was. I’d tell you his name but who cares? He’s a lieutenant, suspiciously thin, close set steely eyes, bristles for hair. He doesn’t like me.

  “They’re holding him at tribal headquarters, at my request. The Indians would just as soon drop him down a white hole, but I talked to the chief, who seems like a stand-up guy. He’ll keep him on ice for us. Only we’ve got to hustle. If we futz around, they’ll have to turn him over to the county and it’ll add another jurisdiction and another couple of levels of paperwork. Let’s get him back to Spokane before anyone east of the reservation, like our own local newshounds or some young pussy protective society, finds out he’s been had. It’s a nice drive, you’ll enjoy it.”

  Until you hit the Snoqualmie Pass, where you can run into snow in June and traffic at 120 mph, the drive from Spokane to Seattle is as boring a five hours’ drive as God has ever devised, and then you still have to go north to this island I had never heard about before.

  “I’ll have to go home and change, shower,” I said.

  “What for? Shower when you get back.”

  Working with men all my life, I’ve grown tired of justifying hygiene. They sweat as much as we do, it just doesn’t bother them.

  “Besides,” said the lieutenant, “I want you in uniform.”

  Rebuked, I argued for the new Lexus in the confiscated vehicle pool, but he gave us, as I knew he would, the shit-brown Chevy Lumina, with the cage in the back for restraining Charles T., the short-eyed lover boy.

  “You stop for gas, for coffee, you stop to pee,” the lieutenant said. “Let’s say six and a half hours to get there. Here’s your Xeroxed directions. Figure an hour for the transfer...”

  Like that could happen. “More like two, my guess,” I said.

  “...Six and a half hours back.”

  “Overtime?” I asked. “Right?”

  “Time off for time volunteered.”

  Da frick. Who volunteered? If he had asked for volunteers, I would have taken one step backwards. And never known. Would never have had to know.

  2.

  Odd did not have to do anything before we left town, not pick up anything, or say anything to anyone. Me, I had to pull the shit-brown Lumina into the Rite-Aid lot on our way out of town and give Connors a kiss good-bye.

  “Kiss Esther for me, while you’re at it,” he came up with.

  I shot him a look.

  “What?” All innocent.

  “Kiss her yourself.”

  Esther worked behind the pharmacy counter with Connors and doled out the prescriptions he filled. Every man in town wanted to kiss her, and I thought most of them probably already had. If young men like Odd had lascivious thoughts about her, what about
older men like Connors? The same thoughts squared. I worried about it because it had been nearly a year since I’d flatlined sexually. I was slowing down even before that. The half-and-half’s I’d been giving Connors once a month did nothing for me and I worried they were not enough to hold him. I would not be the first woman to lose her husband because of nature’s way of zapping women at a cerain age.

  I used to love it. Now sex was a chore, one more wifely chore, and not the best of them. I’d rather iron, da frick.

  To be fair, Connors had his husbandly duties too, and he came across without complaint. For example, I like to have dinner out, at a nice place that doesn’t have a salad bar. There are maybe three in Spokane. He’d rather eat at home, but he took me out once a week and he made it a pleasant thing for both of us. Why couldn’t I make my obligation just as nice, bring a little imagination to it. At the time, it somehow never occurs to me. Only afterwards, when he drops oblique hints? Because every time we did it was a reminder of what I had lost so completely. Whenever his hand dropped between my legs, foreplay was over and I was down to business, fast as I could, until he pushed me away and climbed aboard. I never knew how long the ride would last, so I’d just hold on, though it sometimes felt like my teeth were cracking.

  I still loved him as deeply as ever I did. We were grown-up, we always knew that over years life would change, and some of the change would happen in bed, but neither of us ever suspected that precious element of married life would disappear completely, never to be recovered. It was unfair. We were adults, and we knew in the grand scheme of things there were greater tragedies. All I wanted was once and again to revisit where we used to be, but you can’t get there from here.

  At first, Connors thought it was him, that he had lost his appeal to me—what man wouldn’t think that?—but I knew that no man would ever again light me up. Oh, I knew I was still attractive to men, they let you know, but it neither pleased me nor reassured me. Their long eyes meant nothing to me. It kind of pissed me off, to be truthful.

  I stopped for a moment in the aisle, unseen, and watched Esther taking care of a customer. Connors was in the glassed-off pharmacy behind her, head down, doing his job. She was a beauty, how could you not notice, how could any man not imagine what it might be like, including my man. I used to have that. My calves, objectively speaking, are still every bit as good as hers, if maybe a little thicker, not that nice line of hard muscle she had that rose with every step. I have her beat in the boobs too, only hers stand on their own. I could have matched her in the doopa too but twenty hours of delivering Nelson along with twenty years of sitting in a squad car had spread things out a little. What a wicked inventory!

  It came down to the years, though, didn’t it, the years that put her at one away from thirty and me only one shy of fifty. I had to believe that those years were to my advantage, because I had spent them all with Connors. That had to count for something.

  Esther defined niceness. All of her conscious thoughts were directed to helping others in some way, preferrably small but noticeable. She saw me and acted incredibly blessed for the experience, as though now at last her day was made. It made me want to puke. All I saw was an operator smart enough to flatter the wife of the man she’d like to steal. Maybe I was too sensitive. Conners always said I was. I was the love of his life, he continually reassured me. Even when he had a dirty dream, I was the girl in the dream. He would rather have me, the way it was, than anyone else, no matter how good it could be. That’s what he said. Which went a long way toward finding some kind of acceptance of our situation. Still, it could not calm my fear that given the opportunity, he would jump it, so to speak. And why shouldn’t he? How could I be so entirely uninterested in sex and at the same time so jealous he might enjoy it with someone else? Because that’s the way I am. That’s the way we all are.

  I smiled at Esther the way you do at a scooter going by, and caught Connors’ eye. He came out and met me at the end of the counter. I explained the last-minute detail.

  “That’s the shits,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “The end of your watch, and they want you to .... And then turn around and come home and go to work the next day?”

  “The green weenie,” I agreed.

  “Can’t you get out of it?”

  “Not without being an old lady about it.”

  Nobody wants to be an old lady. Connors understood that.

  “Then let Odd do most of the driving.”

  “Okay.”

  “You ride in the back seat and try to get some sleep. You need your sleep.”

  “I will. I do.”

  “Why don’t you just quit? The hell with it. We don’t need the money.”

  “Twenty-two months, and I’m outta there. Listen, angel, I don’t have anything at home for your dinner.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of myself.”

  He was a good husband and I had no complaints. I was the best wife I could be and he didn’t complain either, though the silences were getting longer.

  “See you in about...let’s say, fifteen hours,” I said.

  He came out from behind the counter for a hug and a kiss.

  All my life I have been aware, more than most people, of the possibility of sweeping changes during unexpected moments, and yet, like everyone else, I go on assuming things will occur more or less as they were supposed to occur. See you tomorrow, plumber on Tuesday, eight and a half percent interest, cloudy and mild, Woodlife the deck in August, early retirement in twenty-two more months.... What fools we are, ain’t?

  3.

  My old man had to take a yearly vacation. It was forced on him by my mother, who would not go along but believed it important for him to get away from the store once a year, for at least a week, though if he were to be gone for a week, the drive had better be three and a half days each way, because he never lasted longer than the drive itself. When I reached the age of sixteen and got my driver's license, I went with him.

  He would sit next to me with a sixer of Bud, tune in the baseball game, and let me drive him all the way to Toronto or Atlanta or Rapid City, South Dakota. He had no love for those particular cities, no sights he wanted to see. Their only appeal was that they seemed far enough away to constitute a vacation, far enough away from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where we lived. The old man and I would reach Toronto or Atlanta or Rapid City, and we would stay the night in some eight-dollar motel. He would caution me not to walk around the room in my bare feet, because we did not know who occupied the room before us. We would have dinner, supper we called it, in some restaurant recommended by the desk clerk. Early the next morning, often before daybreak, we would start the long drive back to Pennsylvania, having seen nothing but the road, the motels, the restaurants.The old man could claim a vacation and my mother would leave him alone about it.

  On the road, this is the story I told Odd, about me and my old man and our road trips. He got half a kick out of it, cracked half a smile.

  “Were you a tomboy back then?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Relax. It’s just the way I picture it.”

  “It was my transistion period. A year or two before, I played shortstop on the boys’ team. I played center in vacant lot football, and it was only years later it dawned on me that I won that position so the guy playing quarterback could cop feels. I did some street fighting too, and held my own.”

  “Your father still alive?”

  “No, they’re both gone.”

  “You had a good childhood, though, sounds like.”

  “Yeah, there was usually a lot of yelling but no one ever got hit. I was the only child, but nobody doted on me. Just the opposite. They made sure I was tough.”

  “There was never any yelling in my house,” said Odd. “There was hardly any talking. I wasn’t real sure I even belonged there.”

  “I had the same feeling! Felt out of place. In the family, in the town, da frick. Maybe it’s tha
t way with all kids.”

  “Could be. Like Spokane, I kept wondering why in the hell we had to live here, but nobody else seemed to think about it.”

  “How come you didn’t just leave, when you came of age?”

  “Good question. It’s not like I never thought about it.”

  “Still not too late. You’d qualify in most any other department.”

  “Yeah, but you’d miss me too much.”

  He was being sarcastic, but I would miss him if he left.

  We burned the rest of the daylight getting to Ritzville. Once we stopped for gas and Odd offered to take over, but I wasn’t feeling at all tired. Anyway, it was easier for me to drive than just to sit. We used the facilities at the gas station and he crawled into the back and fell right to sleep, to one of his “Driving-in-the-lonely-night” tapes.