THE HEAVY DETECTIVE APPEARED at the apartment door, flashing his badge to gain entrance. As if Kelly could refuse, as if the detective believed he would.
You again, Kelly said. The detective.
Kelly invited him in, waved him toward one of the two chairs seated at the kitchen table. The hockey game was on the television but Kelly made no move to turn down the sound. He lit a cigarette, held out the pack to the detective. The detective waved away the offer but removed his own from the inside pocket of his jacket.
Sanchez, the heavy detective said. My name is Sanchez. And today is the three-month anniversary of you walking into the hospital with Daniel in your arms. Ninety days without any new evidence means the kidnapping is officially a cold case. I’m supposed to stop working on it.
Daniel. How long had it been since Kelly last heard the boy’s name spoken aloud? The day he’d given him up.
I didn’t know, Kelly said.
You’ve been seeing him, the detective said. He comes here after school.
Kelly smoked and maintained eye contact and waited. The detective had not come to tell Kelly things Kelly knew, unless he had come to tell Kelly he knew as well. There was something the detective had come to hear him say but Kelly didn’t know what. These weren’t questions, required no confession.
Daniel’s parents mentioned it, the detective said. They said they’re not concerned but I am. I’m concerned about why the boy comes here, about what you do when the boy comes. I’m concerned because there are no clues in this case except you.
The boy is my friend, he said.
Daniel is your friend, the detective said. And my name is Sanchez. Detective Sanchez.
Kelly said, Yes. Detective Sanchez.
But that’s not how you think of me.
No. It’s not.
It was simply a guess. A deduction by a detective. And anyway, he wasn’t wholly correct.
Never my boy, Kelly said. The boy. I think of him as the boy.
Yes, that’s right, the detective said. That’s the way you say it, the way you’ve said it from the first time we met. The way you said it when you made those phone calls where you wouldn’t identify yourself. As if it could have been anyone else calling. So tell me: What does it mean when you call him the boy?
Kelly didn’t answer. It wasn’t anything so crude as a clue. As a child he’d learned how in the beginning there were the animals, nameless in the Garden, nameless and without knowledge of their uses. The first man, the giver of names, subjugating the beasts into a system of kingdoms, phyla, classes, and orders: thorny-headed worms, wheel carriers, claw bearers, all the rest. It was an impossible task to name all of creation but in the task there existed a chance to own the world.
And so what did the man who named nothing own.
He’s not my boy, Kelly said. He comes and goes as he pleases.
It’s a mistake, the detective said. That’s what I came here to tell you. You are the sole person of interest in this case. You have placed yourself at the scene. If you are innocent of an unsolved crime, then it is a mistake to continue to associate with the victim.
He said, You have made yourself a suspect.
But he’s gone, Kelly said. The boy has gone back to his parents. I don’t see him anymore. Didn’t his parents tell you? They’ve taken him back. Cut off contact. Whatever might have happened has already ended.
The detective stared, waited for more. The case notes were in the bedroom, in the bottom drawer of the nightstand, next to the stacked mattress. Kelly could give them to the detective, free himself of their burden. He had failed to find the man in the red slicker and he could be released of the charge. He was not a detective. No one was expecting him to solve the case but he had tried his best. He was still trying but in the end he had to admit the paltriness of his notes. The lack of conclusiveness. All the pages were filled with his script but reading them again had left him more afraid than ever. The difficulty of premeditation. How long had he known his course? He was either in or he was out. Ever since he found the boy he had been telling himself a story and it was important that at the last moment the ending became its own inevitable answer to the world.
The simplest version of the ending to come: he had promised to protect the boy.
Kelly thought he could stop everything if he could give the case notes to the detective but he knew he couldn’t, not without explanation. Because he wouldn’t explain himself he sat in silence, let his face sag blankly, waiting for the questioning to be over or for the blow of something worse. Thoughts followed, but nothing he would say without prompting. The heavy detective continued to talk but Kelly stopped listening. He didn’t notice when he closed his eyes but when he opened them the detective was already walking out the door, shaking his head.
The blonde reporter was on the news every night and in his apartment Kelly watched the broadcast until he had seen her and the weather. The forecast was always for clouded skies and snow and whenever the reporter appeared she wore a series of pantsuits and power skirts, blue and black and light and dark gray. He watched every night but he never again saw the tan skirt, the knee-high boots. As if the outfit had been worn for his benefit.
On-screen, she stood beside a median over the west-east freeway, drive time passing fast behind her, the last gasp of quick movement before the nightly slowing of traffic. This was the day of the shooter on the freeway, each shot coming out of a moving vehicle, fired across the median. No one had been killed but the blonde reporter said a wounded man had tickets to the hockey game. The home team lost and the man got treated for a bullet wound and this was the city they lived in. Now the blonde reporter spoke over a photograph of a cracked window, the bullet hole intact in the middle of the glass. Kelly lifted his own loaded pistol from where it sat beside him on the couch, raised it to the screen. Aimed its barrel at the bullet hole.
The blonde reporter’s voice was speaking but he seldom listened to her words. He steadied the pistol. He mouthed the word bang until the bullet hole was gone, replaced by a map of the lower half of the state, covered in fluorescent clouds.
Snow again, the weatherman said, and temperatures dropping ever closer to zero.
Kelly picked up his cell, called the blonde reporter, the number on her card pasted in the case notes. When she answered Kelly said his name and waited. When she didn’t respond immediately he said it again, growled a question. Did she remember him or not. Would she see him again. Could he buy her a drink.
The case notes were in his hands now. He said, There’s something I need to tell you.
I’m married, remember? she said.
I do remember, he said. The ring’s fake.
Not anymore, she said. She’d met a man, engaged him. Now her ruse was her reality.
But you’re not married, he said. Only engaged.
Engaged to be married. It’s the same thing.
Nothing is the same thing, he said. There are no equivalencies.
Kelly liked how when you hung up a cell phone there was no dial tone after. Just the ending of sound, its trailing absence.
The next morning the reporter called back, said she could interview him again. The sports anchor had told her about the fight, about Kelly versus the contender. Bringer was someone who mattered, who viewers could be convinced to cheer. More human interest. The accidental hero versus some future greatness of the sport. A feature story, the blonde reporter offered, a way to close the loop, to connect the finding of the boy with the battle of man versus man.
As mornings passed the preparations for the fight took on a fated aspect: if Kelly were hurt or killed in the fight, then without him the target would go free. He threw himself recklessly against the bodies of the other men, sought a stance to bring them hardest against him in return. What could he say or do to them to remove their hesitance, their resistance to the possibility of lasting harm? He jabbed, circled, jabbed, and moved in for a clinch, a chance to push his forehead into the face of another man, a chance to lift a knee into a thigh or kneecap. He fought dirty, sought to anger, bragged in the locker room to anyone who would listen. There was no difference between the amount of force necessary to knock a man out and the amount necessary to kill a man and he invited whatever might come, wanted to taunt it out of his opponents. They shied away, left him alone in the shower room. He told himself they were practicing for an exhibition and he was preparing for something real, outside the ring. Not the representation of battle but battle itself. Every injury became an exhumation by exhaustion, until there would be nothing hidden, nothing buried, nothing left, and when he was nothing but bruises he would carry his blood in his skin and what was trapped within him would be brought to the surface.