I recognized a couple of the patrolmen who were drinking coffee out of thermos cups between thick gloved hands. We waved to each other, and for a moment I got sentimental as shit about being a cop. I had had some good times before an appearance in a public-service spot as a cop (what else?) got me interested in acting and led eventually to the breakup of my marriage and my leaving the force. I still couldn’t say it, couldn’t say, “I’m an actor,” when people asked me what I did. I just said, “Security man.” Sounds a lot saner.
My car was parked around the side of the building. The wind was strong enough to make me tilt into it to keep from being knocked over. I had my evening planned. Three or four beers, a sandwich made from the salami, tomatoes, mayo and dark bread in my kitchen, and then a late movie. The Asphalt Jungle was on KTBS. A crusher. A fucking crusher.
By the time I reached my car, a rusted symbol of the days when everybody wanted small Japanese imports, my mind was already tracking back to the murder.
I just kept remembering the froth around his mouth. His bugged-out eyes. His twisted, imploring hands. Damn it.
Channel 3 is located on the northwestern edge of the city. Encircling the new building are woods dense enough to get lost in. Just beyond the eerie touch of the mercury vapors lay trees that formed a virtual wall. And that was where I saw the flash. I was tired enough, and stressed enough from thinking about losing my job, to discount it as nothing more than a piece of stray paper tumbling in the wind.
I got inside my car, the dome light almost lurid in the night; turned on the local jazz station, which was playing one of the best collaborations ever, J. J. Johnson and André Previn playing the music of Kurt Weill; and was just backing out when I saw it again in the rearview mirror. The flash. I knew now it was not a piece of paper but rather a human being darting in and out behind the trees.
From my cop days I knew that the best thing I had going was the element of surprise.
I continued backing out, but when my car angled toward the woods to my left, I slammed open the door and pulled myself out.
Within two steps, I was running.
All of us have these hotdog fantasies. I’m no different. I’d like to rescue beautiful blondes and be amply rewarded, too. But what I was probably thinking about right now was that I was going to find some mysterious person who was lurking about in the woods and turn that person in, thereby solving the murder of David Curtis. No beautiful blondes in this case. It would just mean that I wouldn’t have to find another job.
Even though I jog, running through a wintry wood-scape at midnight is far tougher on the knees and hips than a track or even concrete. Especially when you’ve got low branches trying to dismember you every so often.
The deeper we went, the darker it got.
By now I had gotten a good enough glimpse of the person to know two things: one, it was a girl, and two, it was a blond teenager. Definitely not the kid I’d seen earlier this evening.
She flashed in and out of sight, between trees, behind tall undergrowth, tripping once, regaining her footing, tripping again, then disappearing again. This went on for ten minutes. She must have had rubber lungs.
Twice I stopped to catch my breath, to feel the sweat stand on my otherwise cold body. Then I started running again. We were headed up a steep incline, on the other side of which I could see the glow of lights from a boulevard below.
Once she turned and looked back at me, and in that moment I realized how pretty she was. Even sweat-slicked and desperate, she was fetching.
She fell again and this time let out a loud curse that was mixed with a sob. She was near the top of the hill, lost briefly behind some brambles, then scrambling on her hands and knees to the top of the rise. We were in an area where dead leaves from last fall stank sourly from drying rainwater.
Then she was gone.
It was like watching a parachutist do her stuff. One moment she’s at the crest of the rise and then her hands are going up in some kind of free fall, and then she’s vanished.
She would be fast footing it downhill, down to the boulevard, where a ride could be waiting or a ride could be obtained.
She wasn’t going to get away from me. Not this one.
I came to the top of the rise myself and looked down onto a wide avenue where two lanes of cars moved in each direction with a kind of frustrated allegiance to the speed laws. This street was heavily patrolled. More than one teenager had lost his license on this street. I’d plied this concrete myself in a ’fifty-nine Chevy.
She was at the curb now, running alongside the oncoming traffic with her thumb out. The cars were an unending stream of glistening colors and headlights, like something glimpsed in fast-motion photography. Her blond hair flying, she looked almost posed against this backdrop, like an inexplicably erotic image on MTV.
I didn’t actually see her get hit. Only heard brakes screeching on. And her scream.
By the time I looked up, scrambling down the hill, I saw her grab her leg and fall to the roadside. The way she twisted back and forth, her pain was obvious.
The car, a new Dodge convertible, had stopped, and a suburban-looking guy was running around the front of it.
“Hey!” I yelled, sensing what he was about to do.
They both looked up at me as if I’d just fired a shot. Then she screamed something at him, something lost in the roar of the traffic, something that was not too difficult for me to imagine (he’s chasing me, help me, get me out of here), and then he had his arm around her waist and was helping her quickly into his car.
“No! Stop!” I yelled, running down the rest of the hill to the pavement.
But by the time I reached the concrete, the convertible was tearing away from the scene, the tires literally smoking.
What a hell of a cop I was. For the second time that night, somebody had eluded me, while a poor bastard of a newsman lay poisoned in the studios of Channel 3 and there was a dim chance that I had played at least some role in his death.
4
Exhaustion overwhelmed me the moment I stepped inside my tiny efficiency apartment. When my fifteen-year-old son comes to visit me, he always takes a quick look around and says, “Hey, Dad, why don’t we go to McDonald’s and get something to eat, okay?” He says this without quite getting all the way inside. You don’t need to, really, to get any true sense of the place. Maybe it’s the urine-specimen-yellow color of the wallpaper. Maybe it’s the variously ripped and rent furnishings. Or maybe it’s the fact that there are no windows. A woman I used to sleep with (as opposed to be in love with or even really like all that much) once laid her head on my arm afterward, looked around and said, “I’ll bet it’s nicer in San Quentin than here.”
Anyway, at the end of a long day during which I’d lost not one but two parts (one a voice-over for a muffler shop, the second a walk-on role in a doughnut commercial), and during which I’d ruined an otherwise good record as a security man by letting not one but two people escape my clutches, my place was not exactly the kind of haven where you went to get cheered up.
The first thing I did was check my phone service. One call. Donna Harris. “She said she’d be up watching The Asphalt Jungle, so call even if it’s late,” the woman on the service said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You sound kinda tired tonight, Dwyer.”
“I am.”
Then I dialed Donna.
“Boy you sound grouchy,” she said.
Did I really want to relive all the bullshit by repeating it, even if she was capable of giving me world-class sympathy? I decided no.