“You should get out of this place,” I said. “Go somewhere else for a while.”
He nodded.
“It’s a great idea,” Bateman said. “Is there someplace you can go?”
“I’ll find a place. You’re right. I’ll just go crazy here.”
He stood up then. He went into the bathroom and slapped some water on his face, tried to do something with his hair. When he came back out, he looked like he remembered how to be a human being, at least.
“I appreciate you guys coming over,” he said. “I guess I needed somebody to knock some sense back into me.”
We left him with a promise to get back to work and to let him know the second we had a break. The detective and I walked back to the car in silence. We got in, he started it, and we headed back to the freeway. Back to work.
“Grief’s a bitch,” Bateman finally said.
I nodded my head once and watched the other cars as we blew by them.
“So that reward…” I said, a few miles later.
“Yeah, I hope you’re ready,” he said. “We’ll get a thousand calls by the end of the night.”
We got the calls. Maybe not a literal thousand, but our phone did not stop ringing for more than a few minutes at a time. Most of them were fishing expeditions. A young man down the street who always acted suspicious. He kind of looked like that portrait in the newspaper.
Some of the calls were more specific. This young man next door, he came running home that same evening as the murder. I haven’t even seen him since then, which is weird because he’s always hanging around front with his no-good friends. Now it’s like he disappeared off the face of the earth.
Those were the calls we followed up on, right away. A drive out to the house in question, a knock on the door. A quick census of everyone who lived there. Your older son, ma’am, where might he be? Oh, there he is right now. Okay, that’s not who we were looking for. Sorry to disturb you. Have a good night.
Then back to the car, trying not to let the disappointment build when it was one dead end after another. We worked every lead we could that night. We picked up more leads in the morning. The photograph I had in my mind was still right there. I knew I’d recognize him the second I saw him. That was the frustrating part. All those doors opening, all those young faces looking up at me. Not one of them was the face I was looking for.
Other murders kept occurring in the city. They weren’t going to stop just because we had one particular case we wanted to solve. They weren’t even going to slow down. It was a hot summer, and there were wars going on over the crack business. The casualties would get rolled into the hospitals every night. Literally every night without fail that summer. You didn’t say it loud, that one drug dealer shooting another was not something that was going to make you lose any sleep. An innocent bystander was another matter altogether. Someone just standing there on the street when a car comes by and the bullets start flying as randomly as raindrops.
The Uzi was big that summer. A compact little machine pistol from Israel, not much louder than a sewing machine. It was the perfect weapon for making a point about who owned a particular corner, and making it dramatically.
Five days after the murder of Elana Paige, we had another high-profile case in our precinct, this time an eighteen-year-old kid from Allen Park who was shot dead over a ticket-scalping dispute outside the Masonic Temple. He’d come down to attend a rock concert, ended up bleeding out on the sidewalk. His assailant had disappeared into the crowd, this time with no police officer around to serve as an eyewitness. Another news story, another grieving family. Another case to eat up some of Bateman’s workday, because there were only so many homicide detectives to go around.
At the end of the week, Sergeant Grimaldi called me aside and told me that the approved overtime for my double shifts could not last forever, and that I’d end up killing myself if I didn’t go back to a normal schedule anyway.
By the start of the next week, it was official. The case wasn’t closed, of course. It would remain open until it was solved, whenever that might be. But there were other crimes to solve, too, and resources had to be put back into balance. Priorities adjusted for maximum effectiveness. Or some words like that. Whatever they were, I didn’t really hear them. Because to me they meant we were all but giving up on ever putting away the man who killed Elana Paige.
I was back on patrol, but I still checked in with Detective Bateman every day. He was usually sitting at his desk, a pile of paperwork in front of him. Often on the phone. Never a smile on his face. Not his usual flashy self at all. Not that month.
“I had to call the family today,” he said one morning. “The Graysons first, then the husband. Naturally, they all wanted to know what the hell was going on. All these days gone by, still nothing.”
He stopped to beat the edge of his desk with a pen.
“I’m not a good liar,” he said. “I’m sure they could hear it in my voice. Everything I was saying was just so useless.”
Later that same morning, he received what he thought might be a solid lead. He called me in from the beat, and we went out together to chase it down. Once again, it turned into nothing. Once again, we were no closer to breaking the case.
So aside from those occasional futile morning trips with the detective, it was back to the squad car for me. Back with my partner, Franklin. He took it easy on me for a while. He could tell I was still wearing the case around my neck.
I kept watching as we drove, of course. Every young black man on the street, that could have been the man I was looking for. One day, I was driving through a neighborhood when I suddenly stopped dead, sending Franklin’s coffee onto his shoes.
“What the hell!” he said.
I was looking at a woman hanging up her laundry in her backyard.
“That’s what made you stop?” Franklin said. “Because all I see is a woman putting out her family’s clothes to dry. Probably doesn’t have a working dryer in the house.”
Out of all of her laundry, the shirts, the pants, the dresses, the towels, it was the one combination that had caught my eye.
“Wait, is it because she’s got some blue jeans on the line?” Franklin said. “Along with that gray shirt? Because I hate to break it to you, but those aren’t exactly exotic items of clothing. I’m pretty sure we could both go home and find that particular outfit for ourselves right now.”
I got out of the squad car and went to talk to her. A minute later, I came back and got behind the wheel. Franklin was still looking around for something in the car to wipe his shoes with.
“Those clothes are hers,” I said. “There are no men in the house.”
“You’re going to drive yourself crazy. You’re going to ruin all of my shoes, too.”
He was right, of course. At night, after a full shift of driving around with my eyes wide open, I’d always make a point of taking the long way home. North from the precinct, through those same neighborhoods in Detective Bateman’s “horseshoe.” Or even east or west, because there was no guarantee that we were one hundred percent right in our initial assumptions about where he was running to. In fact, I was becoming more and more convinced that I didn’t see him running up Trumbull at all. Or if I did, that he took a last-second turn and didn’t cross that bridge over the freeway. He could have doubled back and gone toward one of the neighborhoods next to Mexicantown. So that’s where I drove, down one street after another. Then I’d finally go home to Jeannie.
I wasn’t talking to her enough that month. With everything else that was going on, I should have reached out to her. But I have to admit, I just didn’t do it. I had no idea what to say. I kept it all inside me, and the next day I’d get up and do it all over again.