“And your supply of Clarify,” I venture, “has it perhaps been coming up a little short?”
“Yes.” She swallows. “That’s right.”
I write in my Day Book.
“And so the conversation you’re having here, that’s you asking the boys if they happen to know where your surplus dream meds might have gotten to?”
She lowers her head.
“Mom, you don’t have to answer all these questions.” That’s Eddie, the smaller of the brothers, giving his voice some spine.
“Well, she does, actually. She does.” He glares at me, his face tight with anger, and I gaze back at him impassively.
It’s dead quiet in here now. No waitresses are taking orders. No one is chitchatting in their own booth. Somebody has killed the jazz radio in the kitchen. Everybody is staring at us, at the big man in his blacks, towering over the three-top by the front window. And, you know, this is my nineteenth year doing this job and there’s something I’ve learned, which is that you can talk however calmly and reassuringly you want to, but people are gonna hear your words colored by their own feelings, by their own anxiety or fear or impatience.
“Tell me the rest,” I say to Ms. Tarjin.
“Mom—”
“No, Eddie,” I say. “You keep quiet, son. I’m gonna talk to your mom a minute. Don’t obfuscate.” I shift on my feet, turn out, so I’m talking as much to Ms. Tarjin as to the boys. “A lie hidden in a shell of truth is a lie just the same, and I will know it.”
“I was afraid that my son Eddie was stealing my pills.”
“Mom!”
“But—but—” She looks at the boys, and Eddie is looking at me, coldly furious, and Todd is inspecting the backs of his hands. “But Todd says it wasn’t Eddie. Todd says it was him.”
“It was, Mom. It was me.” Todd looks up, presses a hand to his chest. “It was, okay?”
She gives him a look I can only half see because the air is bending, the air is bent, and she says, “I thought it was Eddie because Eddie had been at the house but Todd told me that I had it wrong. So we’re getting it straightened out. That’s all. It’s not a matter for, for”—she meets my eye, very briefly—“for your department.”
“Oh,” I say, “I see,” and I look at the family looking back and I am feeling it now, and I know right where it is, and Todd knows that I know and he jumps, grabs the back of the booth in a pivot, and runs for it.
I huff once, like a bull, and go after him.
He slams open the door and I catch it before it closes, hollering “Stand back, friends” as I charge out onto Pico Boulevard just behind him, slamming into a small flock of businessmen that Todd has just managed to dance around, scattering them in their lightweight summer suits like blue-breasted birds.
“Sorry, fellas,” I say over my shoulder, grabbing on to my hat with one hand and steaming after Todd, four or five feet behind him, head down, body like a truck, my black boots slamming onto the sidewalk.
I like this part. It’s not the part of the job that people talk about, but it’s the part I like: pure law enforcement, my feet in the boots and the boots on the ground, me breathing heavy and charging after a liar.
He’s got no chance because I will catch him, and even if I can’t—and I will catch him, because giving chase is part of the job and I am competent and confident in all aspects of my employment—but even if by some miracle he gives me the slip, the captures are on: captures on every corner, captures in every doorway, forging history, putting us on the Record. Reality in progress.
I’ll catch him or we’ll requisition the stretches, scour the Record, trace him to where he’s gone. Plus, the thing is, I know these streets, I know this block of Pico and every block of Mid-City all the way till it hits downtown, and I know what’s coming up. There’s an alley mouth three more doors down, between the strip club and the hardware store, and it’s going to sing out to this desperate kid like his own true love, like a sure-thing escape hatch, which I know damn well it is not.
Todd, dancing around a lady and her dog, bounces off a parking meter, loses his balance for half a second, and I grab the scruff of his T-shirt, shout “Come on, man!,” but he wriggles free of my ham of a hand and—sure as shooting—flings his narrow body up the little alley next to the topless bar, and I race after him, breathing hard, slowing down a little, slipping on the uneven ground, the pavement slick with garbage juice and discarded sheets of Authority.
“Train’s coming, Todd,” I say between heavy breaths, just loud enough for him to hear me.
“What?” he says, but he can see it now—the yellow flash of the warning light at the end of the alley, where it lets out onto the light-rail tracks. He turns, cursing, staring at me, shaking as the gate arm lowers behind him. He raises his left hand and it’s got a gun in it—oh, this fucking kid. A gun? What has he got a gun for? His brother is the drug thief.
Everybody’s got their secrets, I suppose. He points the gun at me but I keep coming. I have a gun of my own, of course. We all carry heat. But I leave it in my pocket. Closing the distance between us. The alley is short, noxious with the stink of trash and the midsummer city. Just bricks on one side, just the blacked-out windows of the strip club on the other.
“I’ll kill you, man,” says Todd, loud over the rattle and rush of the train. “I swear I will.”
“You’re not going to kill me.” He’s lying. I know and he knows that I know. “No more, Todd, okay? No more.”
By the time I close the distance he’s lowered the gun. He drops it and I kick it away, take him calmly by the shoulder and clap him into the cuffs and turn him around, push him against the bricks of the hardware store. The last rattling car of the commuter train goes past, revealing a scrum of strangers on the far side of the tracks, watching me gently place this poor young liar in cuffs. Catching my breath, I tug out my radio and get a line in to the regular police, and by the time the sirens start to sing their way closer, a crowd has gathered and Ms. Tarjin and the other boy are out here too, pushing through the front of the jostling semicircle of lookers-on.
“Oh Lord,” she says, wringing her hands. “Oh Lord. Todd, honey.”
Todd is silent. His eyes are locked on the wall. His head is hanging down.
“So?” she says to me, tearful, defiant. “Well? What happens now?”
“Well, there’s a whole process,” I say. “But, uh—but it’s going to be bad.”
“Oh no,” she says, her face crumbling. But what am I going to do—lie?
“I will tell the regular police what I know, and your sons will be charged with their respective crimes.”
“Crimes,” she says quietly.
Eddie, the other son, the one who stole his mother’s drugs, now puts a hand on her shoulder, but Ms. Tarjin shakes it off. Todd keeps staring stoically at the alley wall. Ms. Tarjin has got one hand on her brow, massaging her temple—a mother’s pose of grief. One more grief that the world has given her, a new pain to be etched into the sad lines on her face.
“The thing is,” I say, and then: “Oh good—hey fellas.” I help the regular police make their way through the crowd, two young officers I don’t know. They move Todd away from the wall, and I keep explaining to Ms. Tarjin: “Way it works is, you could decline to press charges on the stolen pills, if you wanted to. The kid’s not looking at more than six months.”