Jennifer wore a black leather jacket, jeans, black boots, and driving gloves. Her Japanese two-seater squatted in the driveway like red-metal muscle. Lucas opened the inner door and nodded at her through the glass of the storm door.
“Can I come in?” she asked. She was wearing gold-wire-rimmed glasses instead of her contacts. Her eyes looked large and liquid behind the lenses.
“Sure,” he said awkwardly, fumbling with the latch. “You look like a heavy-metal queen.”
“Thanks loads.”
“That was a compliment.”
She glanced at him, looking for sarcasm, found none, peeled off the jacket, and drifted toward the couch in the living room.
“You want a coffee?” Lucas asked as he closed the door.
“No, thanks.”
“Beer?”
“No, I’m fine. Go ahead, if you want.”
“Maybe a beer.” When he got back, Jennifer was leaning back on a love seat, her knee up on the adjacent seat. Lucas sat on the couch opposite her, looking at her over a marble-topped coffee table.
“So what?” he said, gesturing with the beer bottle.
“I’m very tired,” she said simply.
“Of the story? The maddog? Me?”
“Life, I think,” Jennifer said sadly. “The baby was maybe an attempt to get back.”
“Jesus.”
“That little scene with you today . . . God, I don’t know. I try to put a good face on it, you know? Gotta be quick, gotta be tough, gotta smile when the heavy stuff comes down. Can’t let anybody push you. Sometimes I feel like . . . you remember that little Chevrolet I had, that little Nova, that I wrecked, before I bought the Z?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s how my chest feels sometimes. All caved in. Like everything is still hard, but all bent up. Crunched, crumbled.”
“Cops get like that.”
“Not really. I don’t think so.”
“Look, you show me a guy on the street for ten or fifteen years—”
She held up a hand, stopped him. “I’m not saying it’s not tough and you don’t get burned out. Awful stuff happens to cops. But there are slow times. You can take some time. I never have time. If things get slow, for Christ’s sake, I’ve got to invent stuff. You show me a slow day, where a cop might cruise through it, and I’ll show you a day when Jennifer Carey is out interviewing some little girl who got her face burned off two months ago or two years ago because we had to have something by six P.M., or else. And we don’t have time to think about it. We just do it. If we’re wrong, we pay later. Do now, pay later. What’s worse, there aren’t any rules. You don’t find out until later if you’re right or wrong. Sometimes you never find out. And what’s right one day is wrong the next.”
She stopped talking and Lucas took a swig of beer and watched her. “You know what you need?” he said finally.
“What? A good fuck?” she asked sarcastically.
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Then what?”
“What you need is to leave the job for a while, get married, move in here.”
“You think being a housewife is going to fix things?” She looked almost amused.
“I didn’t say housewife. You said housewife. I was going to suggest that you move in here and not do a fuckin’ thing. Take a class. Think things over. Take a trip to Paris before the kid gets here. Something. That argument this afternoon, those fake tears, my God, that’s so tough it’s not human.”
“The tears weren’t fake,” she said. “The alibi was, afterward. I was thinking, I couldn’t break down and cry on the job. Then I got home, and I thought, why not? I mean, I’m not stupid. You gave me that little lecture about Smithe, you think I don’t know I might have hurt him? I admit it. I might have hurt him. But I’m not sure. I’m—”
“But look at what you’re putting yourself through the wringer for. You got the name out to Kennedy, and for what? A ten-minute lead on the other reporters? Christ . . .”
“I know, I know all that. That’s why I’m over here. I’m screwed up. I don’t know that I’m wrong, but I’m not sure that I’m right. I’m living in murk and I can’t stop.”
Lucas shook his head. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Well.” She took her leg off the love seat. “Could you come over and sit next to me for a minute?”
“Um . . .” Lucas stood up, walked around the table, and sat down next to her.
“Put your arm up around my shoulder.”
He put his arm around her shoulder and she snuggled her face into his chest.
“You ready for this?” she asked in an oddly high-pitched, squeaky voice.
He tried to pull back and look down at her, but she clung to him. “Ready for what?”
She pressed her face against him even more firmly, and after a few seconds, began to weep.
No sex, she said later. Just sleep. He was almost asleep when she said quietly, “I’m glad you’re the daddy.”
CHAPTER
11
Louis Vullion did not laugh.
Home late the night of the announcement, he neglected to look at his videotapes and learned of the arrest the next morning in the Star-Tribune.
“This is not right,” he said, transfixed in the middle of his living room. He was wearing pajamas and leather slippers. A shock of hair stood straight up from his head, still mussed from the night.
“This is not right,” he hissed. He balled up the paper and hurled it into the kitchen.
“These people are idiots,” the maddog screamed.
He turned to the tapes and watched the announcement unfold, his rage growing. Then the face of Jennifer Carey, with her statement that the game inventor, the lieutenant, Lucas Davenport, disagreed, thought they had the wrong man.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
He ran the tape back and played it again. “Yes.”
“I should call him,” he said to himself. He glanced at the clock. “No hurry. I should think about it,” he said.
Don’t make a mistake now. Could this be a ploy? Was the gamesman setting him up? No. That simply wasn’t possible. The game was free-form, but there were some rules; Davenport, or the other cops—whoever—wouldn’t dare permit this man, this gay, to be crucified as part of a ploy. But why was he arrested? Except for the gamesman, Davenport, the police seemed confident that they had a case. How could this mistake happen?
“So stupid,” the maddog said to the eggshell-white walls. “They are so fucking dumb.”
He couldn’t think of anything else. He sat at his desk and stared blindly at the papers there, until his shared secretary asked if he was feeling unwell.
“Yes, a little, I guess; something I ate, I think,” he told her. “I’ve got the Barin arraignment and then I think I’ll take the rest of the work home. Something closer to the, ah, facilities.”
Barin was a teenage twit who had drunk too much and had driven his car into a crowd of people waiting on a corner to cross a street. Nobody had been killed, but several had been hospitalized. Barin’s driver’s license had been suspended before the latest accident, also for drunken driving, and he had served two days in jail for the last offense.
This time, it was more serious. The state was in the throes of an antidrinking campaign. Several heretofore sacred cows, for whom the fix would have routinely been applied only a year before, had already done jail time.
And Barin was an obnoxious little prick attached to a large and foul mouth. His father, unfortunately, owned a computer-hardware company that paid a substantial retainer to the maddog’s firm. The father wanted the boy to get off.
But the boy was doomed. The maddog knew it. So did the rest of the firm, which was why the maddog had been allowed to handle the trial. Barin would serve three to six months and possibly more. The maddog would not be blamed. There was nothing to be done. The senior partners were patiently explaining that to the father, and the maddog, already indemnified against failure, secretly hoped the judge would sock the little asshole away for a year.