“Whatever it is you wish to see me about,” she said. “You’re wrong. Wrong to my right.”
“I wonder if this Officer Avery might not qualify as Grade A numbskull, calling you on that DOA.”
“Maybe worry about your own classification, he done good. Most suggestive call I’ve gotten in years.” Then she said interesting but with minimal breath.
“Interesting? I’m sorry but the fancy letters you passed on the way in still spell homicide. An ancient man lying on his kitchen floor having travelled the full course of all flesh? Think I’ll go ahead and suspect fair play.”
“Fairly foul and causes unnatural.”
“Helen no. Don’t do this.”
“I’ll not do anything, other than inform you of reality. I don’t shape, however. To shape reality you need a Callahan or a Diggens.”
“They’re good detectives first of all and I’m not asking you to shape anything. I am asking you to be at least slightly conventional for once.”
“Asked and answered.”
“I’m serious, all that red on the board out there and you want to paint it with more?”
“Your belatedness is showing, it’s up there.”
“You put a ninety something —
“Hundred-eleven.”
— year-old John Doe on my board? Who gave you access to the red marker anyway?”
“It’s a red marker Franklin, if you crave exclusivity you might want to rethink the procedure.”
Furillo’s life, and this is not even a criticism, was readily reducible to an almost epochal conflict between two deceptively simple colors: anxious, hateful Red and accomplished, finality-infused Black. Red — didn’t escape him the color of blood — spread on that board like a spill. Every red addition meant human tears. He knew this but sometimes failed to make relevant others understand it. He had twenty of these others and they needed to understand that every red name once denoted an actual human being. A human being that cried when it first saw light, cried that it couldn’t return, when its desires weren’t met then later at the realization that it was nothing but unmet desire, at physical decay and mental torment day after relentless day and when it stopped crying, because it had stopped only everything, passed those tears on like a baton to those left behind. And whenever someone he needed to understand this — that the responsibility was not to the dead but to the living — would object something like the red name had it coming or that there was no one left behind who cared about the red name Furillo would employ various stratagems he had honed over a quarter century with the inevitable result that the speaker would soon not be one of his twenty so that just then he was eighteen out of twenty and hard at work on reaching a hundred percent.
Helen Tame was not one of his twenty. So sui generis the phrase seemed almost criminally inadequate, Tame was of no one and belonged to no group and that final case she had been threatening him with he now realized was written in red on the board.
“But where it’ll remain red the briefest of whiles,” she said. “Enough of this night’s black will bleed onto the board to conclusively resolve the matter.”
“But why? Why do we even temporarily need a centenarian John Doe?”
“Do you even listen to yourself when you speak? A man lives more than a century, is discovered dead in what is clearly his home, said home is located in twenty-first century America, yet we’re unable to name him? So, yes, in large part because he’s a centenarian John Doe is why.”
“Why he interests you, fine, but does that warrant such indiscriminate use of the red marker?”
“Bottom line is not natural, his end lacks nature, so it reds on the board. Possible suicides go up red as well you know.”
“How’s it not natural? You spoke to the medical examiner?”
“Did I speak to an M.E. before deciding unnatural? Do you consult with your cat before deciding whether to refinance your mortgage? Helen Tame, nice to meet you.”
“Fine not natural but what are you saying, homicide? A hundred-year-old suicide? Be real.”
“Reality? For real?”
“Serious, tell me where you are with this.”
“No. Far as suicide there’s a missing pet cat, as in given away just before death, but what I really want to do is at the end kind of gather every possible suspect then dramatically declare the killer’s identity followed by a painstaking rendition of how I came to that conclusion.”
“So you are leaning homicide.”
“You’re off tomorrow, when you get back it’ll be black.”
This thing where Detective Helen Tame casually said something like you’re off tomorrow even though Furillo had only an hour before even formed the intent to take the next day off and where he was certain he had not yet conveyed that information to another living being, that thing, Furillo had learned to ignore. When he didn’t, before he learned, it always ended with him feeling less than human even though Helen argued that one was never more fully human than when conforming perfectly with the highly predictable actions of humanity. Still the first few times someone looks at the position of your shoulders or the contents of your desk and extrapolatorily tells you some seemingly wildly unrelated truth it’s at least highly disconcerting.
“Well then,” he said. “It doesn’t seem right to end on such an easy case, maybe you should reconsider.”
“No, it feels conclusory. And far from easy. But I will stay here until it’s black and when you return the report will be on this desk explaining how it darkened and although it will be fairly voluminous it will be true, understand?”
“Not doubting you but how can you be so sure?”
“Because I already have everything I need save for time to sit in the dark and stew on it.”
“Look if this really is your last case then I have no doubt I’ll never see you again.”
“True.”
“So I have to know what you mean when you say something like that, how you can claim to have no doubt about something’s truth when it results from only thought or deduction or what you call artistic leaps. Because the truth I value comes from reports, scientific analyses, confessions, get it?”
“I didn’t hear you complaining about my artistic method on all those television programs with the fancy re-enactments.”
“I begged you to let me mention your name and credit you.”
“Please, this is our last interaction, don’t insult me during it.”
“Okay keep your methods to yourself, I doubt I could understand anyway, but keep employing them whatever you do. If you need more concessions we’ll work with you, whatever you need.”
“No.”
“No? Just no?” He hoped the desperation he was feeling, a desperation that stemmed from more than just the immeasurable loss to a unit whose function it was to identify and seize those who’d killed their fellow man or woman, wasn’t showing but how could it not? For example, one time it had seemed to be only the men of the unit in the break room which necessitated that the subject of various known women’s attractiveness arise and when it did, somehow, despite everyone’s palpable fear of her, Helen Tame came up. That Helen Tame was one of the most beautiful women in the world had long seemed obvious but that served not in the slightest to reduce the shock of hearing that fact spoken aloud then received with universal assent. It seemed unreal, truly, that this same woman was also undisputedly the highest-level practitioner of their craft and the oddness of this situation was meager in comparison with the experience of actually knowing and interacting with her. For further example that very break room discussion culminated in the single strangest sight Furillo had ever seen: Helen Tame standing in said room, where she’d apparently been all along, making no apparent effort to disguise or conceal herself yet clearly invisible to all, and here was the unsettling almost haunting part — looking so utterly almost mythically bored that Furillo didn’t even feel compelled to apologetically address her or otherwise interrupt the conversation in any way. Just saying that when a person like that tells you you’re seeing them for the last time it can give rise to a form of desperation.