Lenhardt looked in his lap and Nancy understood that his beeper must have gone off.
“Wife time,” Infante said, laughing.
“Hey, at least Nancy and I are still on our first spouses,” he said, getting up and going to the phone, leaving Infante and Nancy alone.
An awkward silence fell. Although the two had spent plenty of time alone together, they seldom socialized. “I had a case once,” Infante said, “where I thought the guy put his wife in a wood-chipper. Guy was really big on gardening. I’ve never seen so much mulch. Everything was mulched.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Nancy said, with an inappropriate heat.
“What?”
“I mean, if there was a wood-chipper, you could check it for blood. You can’t mulch a person without a trace, much less scour all the trace evidence out of a wood-chipper.”
Infante looked at her as if to say: “The fuck did I do?” Nancy couldn’t tell him, because he hadn’t done anything. But picking on Infante would somehow even up the day, make up for what happened when the last of the quartet was being maneuvered into handcuffs for transport to the county jail.
This was the one who had done it, the one who had taken the knife and driven it into the victim again and again and again. He was slight, weighed less than Nancy. But there was something menacing in the very fineness of his bones, as if a bigger boy had been boiled down until all that remained was this concentrated bit of rage and bile.
He had bugged Lenhardt, too, although he didn’t realize it. That was a mistake, not knowing when Lenhardt was mad at you.
“We got you, you know?” Lenhardt couldn’t help telling the little one after he signed on the dotted line. “Your friends gave you up. They told us plenty, by the way. Your buddies, your pals, your confederates.”
Confederates-another Lenhardtism. He had told Nancy he used it for the very associations it raised. Confederate-Confederacy-Civil War-slavery. For the young black men of Baltimore, the wrongs done to their ancestors brought them nothing but shame. To have been a slave was to have been weak. To be descended from slaves was just as bad. But only Lenhardt would think it through this way.
For a fleeting second, the young man had looked surprised, then his face closed up again. Nancy guessed his emotions had flowed much the same way at the chicken place. He had been caught off guard by his former boss’s bravery-and punished him for it. He had chased the night manager from the kitchen to the parking lot, increasingly desperate, worried not about being caught, but about being disgraced by the other boy’s futile courage. He had killed him to show the others the price of such valor.
Now he lunged at Nancy, grabbing a handful of her ass.
“Nice,” he said, “for a white girl.”
Lenhardt had punched him so hard in the stomach that the kid had doubled over and fallen to his knees. The sergeant smiled at Nancy over the boy’s prostrate body, happy for the opportunity, inviting her to land a kick or a punch if she wanted. When she passed, he gave her a curious look, then helped himself, distributing the punishment he thought fair. The kid had to lie there and take it.
He had touched a cop. Nancy couldn’t help feeling that she had failed, that a better cop wouldn’t have been grabbed in the first place. And Lenhardt had let her mistake slide because he was so happy for a chance to smack that kid before the day was over.
“The wood-chipper-” Nancy began again, and she knew she was going to off-load to Infante the anger she had caught from the kid. Life was just a long game of emotional tag, one bad mood passing from person to person. But before she could finish, her Nokia chirped and the text message scrolled by in plain view.
I’M HOME
The words seemed to shiver on the screen, but that was probably just some disturbance in the cell. The Kenwood Homecoming Queen again. Why didn’t she just get her own public access channel on Baltimore County cable, keep her friends up-to-date with a 24/7 crawl.
“Your hubby?” Infante asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “He’s pissed at me. Besides, I already know where he is.”
The message stared insistently back at her. Was it for her? No way. She wouldn’t even try to make a connection if it weren’t for Lenhardt, the sheer coincidence of tonight’s conversation: If he was a city mutt, I’d know to check Leakin Park .
Leakin Park. Even a near homonym, such as Lincoln or leaking, could make her jump. Leakin Park. The name always brought back the little lean-to in the woods, or the silhouette of her classmate from the academy, Cyrus Hickory, standing in the door. He told her to stay back, but Nancy had to prove she could do whatever he did, so she crossed the stream, walked up to the falling-down house-
No. Over the past seven years, Nancy had learned she could choose, that she had the power not to cross the threshold if she wasn’t up to seeing what was on the other side. So tonight, she did what she didn’t do then. She backed away, so she was moving away from the little house in the woods, splashing backward through the polluted stream, edging up the hill, her gloved hands empty, blessedly empty.
Lenhardt came back to the table, threw his money down, and waved off the bills that Nancy and Infante tried to add. “I’m one drink away from a divorce,” he said. “Marcia is more lenient than.08, but not by much. You should go home, too, Nancy.”
“What about me?” Infante asked.
“Not even Dr. Joyce Brothers herself could save your relationships, Kevin.”
“True enough,” the detective said amiably, more amused than anyone at the string of Mrs. Infantes that had come and gone in the last twenty years. He got up and headed to the bar. The barmaid had a trace of a limp, but she was still redheaded and still pretty, in that hard, shellacked-hair way of a county barmaid.
Out of nowhere, Lenhardt asked: “You ever think about a baby?”
“Baby?” He knows, she thought. All this time, he’s known and he’s never asked. Of course he would know. Cops gossip like Polish grandmothers. You know the background on Porter, right? The Kolchaks’ niece? A shame, but she brought it on herself. You’d think she’da known better, with her background.
“Having a baby. You think about it?”
“Oh.” She was so relieved that she didn’t mind Lenhardt getting personal with her. “Doesn’t everybody? But Andy has one semester of law school left, and I just made Homicide.”
“Babies are more important than any of that.”
“Yeah. How many kids you got?”