“Tell me something. How’d it go tonight? In your estimation.”
“Well, you were there. I mean, aside from our initial approach plan not working, things went smoothly.”
“How about tactically?” I said I hadn’t expected Donald to suddenly head up the stairs without any discussion. “I am not happy with Donald,” he said. Then he asked me if he’d heard correctly, had I said, “Oh, I guess we’re taking our guns out now,” as we approached? “We’ll do your evaluation tomorrow,” he said. “I just want you to think about something: What would you have done if I’d been shot? What if I lay on the stairs bleeding to death? Because I’m a father now.”
The next day I got on the phone to the out-of-state PD that had arrested Wexler ten years earlier. I decided not to say anything to Jason about my concern that the arrest might be invalid because he always said, “If their lips are moving, they’re lying.” I called the correctional center where Wexler had served time, the prosecutor’s office, the superior court clerk, and parole board and requested the case file, probation presentence report, and prosecutor’s postconviction sentence statement. Over the next couple nights I received faxes and learned that his conviction had been reversed and remanded for a new trial and that the court had overturned the conviction and released him; Wexler’s rap sheet had never been amended to show this. Legally he was entitled to own guns. I wrote a report supplement and attached a memo to the Chief when Jason invited the ambulance crew over for pizza and eggnog. I included a copy of a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation that described Wexler as having latent paranoid schizophrenia with probability of becoming actively psychotic, so that we could work on a strategy for keeping his guns legally. If Jason had asked what I was working on, I’d have shown him. But Jason was flirting with the female EMT, showing her how his numchucks worked and, at one point, chasing her around the briefing table and putting a piece of apple pie down her blouse.
The Chief asked to speak with me in his office. Jason sat next to me. The door was open. I’d always had reason to think the Chief liked me because once or twice when he’d seen me working at the computer he’d said, “How’s our future sergeant?” And when he’d hired me, he’d sounded almost apologetic about the department, as if he wanted to give me a chance to reconsider. But now he looked like someone who has been deeply disillusioned. He asked me a rapid series of questions that seemed insane in their lack of context.
“What do you like best about this job?”
“The fact that you never know what’s going to happen next.” I watched him turn rose-geranium pink.
“Uh-huh. And how does your husband feel about you working Christmas day?”
“He’s very supportive.” The pink deepened a notch.
“How would you feel if you found a dead body?”
“Horrible, I guess.”
“How ‘bout if I arrange for you to view an autopsy?”
“That would be great,” I said. “I’d appreciate it.”
“Wrong choice of words,” he said dryly. “But we’ll see what we can do. I’ll contact the coroner and request something unholy, if possible. We may have to be patient.” I was confused. Was seeing a dead body supposed to have some effect on my marriage?
The Chief began talking about the creeping darkness that invades the life of an officer, what with shiftwork, holidays spent away from family (Jason, for example, would miss his daughter’s first Christmas), and so often observing only the negative side of human nature. “Everyone here really likes you,” he said. “We don’t want you to change.” He paused and looked at me like he wanted a response, a signal as to how to proceed, that I was not giving him. He had the advantage, I thought, of knowing the contents of my in-depth psych profile; I wished I could have read it so I’d know which buttons he thought he was pushing. The Chief held out my performance evaluation from the night I’d arrested Wexler. When I’d searched Wexler, I’d had my gun side toward him for two minutes — Jason had counted them — when Wexler, though cuffed, could possibly have reached the gun. They were going to give me a remedial mark in my evaluation. I would have to watch a video on officer safety and then demonstrate competent searching techniques.
“Now having said that, I read your supplement on Wexler. You’re working at a seasoned investigator’s level in some respects. But what good is that if you don’t nail your traffic stops?” He asked me why I still let potential stops pass by. Was I afraid of confrontation? Working swing shift in the nontourist season, there were not a lot of incidents, and it was true, I did sometimes throw them back, like too-small fish. “Is there anything we can do better on our end?” the Chief said, in a clipped manner, like he was wrapping things up and expected me to say no, and thanks for asking. I mentioned that no one had yet cracked my field training manual open, that I’d never been quizzed and that I wasn’t following any type of formalized training program, as were trainees I knew working in Napa, Fairfield, West Sacramento, Vallejo, Antioch, and Richmond. “We’ll fix that,” Chief said.
On Christmas day Sergeant Tom told me I had a rare opportunity. They’d never had a police sketch artist come in before, and he was sure I could benefit from watching because the drawing process is all about paying attention to detail. A red-headed woman in a silk dress was swiveling in her chair and licking her coffee spoon. She didn’t seem like a victim. She was laughing and telling the artist, a cop from the Bay Area, how she was fixing lobster ravioli for Christmas dinner. The woman, staying in a guesthouse bordering a vineyard, woke in the night and saw a man at the foot of her bed. She yelled and chased him outside into the vineyard, clutching a high-heeled pump, which she threw at him.
“That was a stupid thing to do,” the artist told her. “What would you have done if you caught him?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I was just pissed off. I think I hit him with my shoe!”
I could see this woman being referred to as “spunky” or “a real spitfire” and felt mildly jealous. The artist had sketched a face shape and was now asking the woman to choose eyes from a book of all possible eye shapes. The woman became frustrated that she’d never find the right eyes and wanted to take a smoking break, then suddenly said, “These!” Gradually, a face emerged with long hair, high cheekbones, almond eyes. A good-looking face. “No, no, I can’t remember,” the woman said, looking depressed for the first time. “Look, tell me what’s wrong and we’ll fix it,” the artist said.
I felt a constant slow, fateful pressure after that day and sometimes imagined that I was a splinter being extruded from a finger. I’d think of George Orwell’s essay about shooting an elephant and how he called his police career an “unsuitable profession.” Every impulse in my personality seemed in conflict with the extroverted, grounded, aggressive, sensory nature of a cop. Still I did not relent, though it occurred to me that I had become like someone who enjoys watching pigeons get fed — oh, lovely, lovely, all those crumbs — so circumscribed had the pleasures in my life become. When skinny, acne-scarred cadets, awkward in suit and tie, interviewed for the remaining trainee position, they were labeled “too aggressive,” “won’t stay long-term,” “not enough life experience,” until a bit of hope would rekindle in me that I was, after all, an adequate fit.
In January shifts rotated, and the way they described graves to me was this: Nothing happens. But if something does, it’s more likely to be dangerous. My life was as silent and dark as the surface of the moon. No matter how much I slept, nights I was slow, leaden, and ill, a false vampire working against my own vigorous diurnal metabolism. All I wanted in the world was to sleep, which was dangerous. But when I drove home in the mornings, in the lightening sky, I would experience a strange kind of euphoria I don’t understand, a kind of chemical surge in my blood, a prickling warmth and expansiveness, like the first chills of fever. I drove with my windows open, and the air was so sweet it was like breathing deep into a carnation. I wanted to scream things into the wind, “I love my husband,” or crazy things, “I will live forever.” At home, I’d fix us eggs, coffee for him, sometimes a martini for me, then I’d sleep, and dream. I ran through the streets of Saint Amelia into the moonlit vineyards, and I felt no pain or tiredness, no burning lungs or side stitches, but a kind of ecstasy of ever-growing strength, as if I could run forever. Sometimes I’d fly over the rooftops of Saint Amelia, and all the roofs of the houses would gently loosen and float away, so that I could observe the floor plans and even fly in for close-ups of the sleeping citizens.