The Last Policeman Part 22

"Yes, sir."

"Interview that old guy at the front desk. Someone saw the killer come in."

"Yes, sir."

"Wowie wowie wow," says Dotseth, talking through a small yawn. "A full investigation. At-what are we? Six months to go? Color me impressed."

"It's the kid," says Culverson, and since he's down on his knees now, hunting the rug for the spent casing, it takes me a second to realize he means me. "He's keeping us honest."

I'm watching a silent movie in my head, a woman looking for a file, slim fingers walking across the tabs, a sudden click of a door opening behind her. She turns-her eyes widen-bam!

"Skip the manager, Officer McConnell. The guy who called this in. I'll talk to him." Culverson flips searchingly through his book.

"Gompers," I say.

"Gompers, right," he says. "You'll join me?"

"Yeah." I stop, grit my teeth. "No."

"Palace?"

I feel bad. A kind of pressure, a horror, is inflating itself in my lungs, like I swallowed a balloon full of something, some kind of gas, a poison. My heart is slamming repeatedly against my ribcage, like a desperate prisoner hurling himself rhythmically against the concrete door of his cell.

"No, thank you."

"You all right there, son?" Dotseth takes a step back from me, like I may vomit on his shoes. McConnell has scooted behind Naomi's body, she's running her fingers along the wall.

"You gotta-" I drag a hand across my forehead, discover that it's slick and clammy. My wounded eye socket is throbbing. "Ask Gompers about the files in this drawer."

"Of course," says Culverson.

"We need copies of everything that would have been in that drawer."

"Sure."

"We need to know what's missing."

"Hey, look," says McConnell. She's got the bullet. She pries it from the wall behind Naomi's skull, and I turn and flee. I stumble down the hallway, find the stairwell, and then I take the stairs two at a time, then three, hurling downward, and I kick open the door, spilling into the lobby, out onto the sidewalk, heaving breaths.

Bam!

All of this, all of it, what did I think? You go into this hall of mirrors, you chase these clues-a belt, a note, a corpse, a bruise, a file-one thing and then the next, it's this giddy game that you enter into, and you just stay down there, in the hall of mirrors, forever. I'm sitting up here at the counter because I couldn't face my usual booth, where I sat with Naomi Eddes over lunch and she told me about Peter Zell's secrets, his addiction, his grim fleeting joking fantasy about killing himself in the Main Street McDonald's.

The music drifting from the kitchen of the Somerset is nothing I recognize, and it is not to my taste. Pounding and electronic, keyboard-driven, a lot of shrill beeps and whistles and hoots.

My notebooks are lined up in front of me, six pale-blue rectangles in a neat row like tarot cards. I've been staring at their covers for an hour, not interested, unable to open them and read the history of my failure. But I can't help it, the thoughts keep coming, one fact after another shuffling across my brain, like grim refugees trudging along with their packs.

Peter Zell was not a suicide. He was murdered. Fenton confirmed it.

Naomi Eddes was murdered, too. Shot through the head while looking for insurance files, the files that we talked about together last night.

She sat at the foot of my bed before she left; she was going to tell me something and then she stopped herself and went home.

He told her about the McDonald's: if he was going to kill himself, that's where he would do it. But he'd told his sister the same thing. Who knows who else?

Sixty-milligram bottles of MS Contin, in a bag, in a doghouse.

I'm dimly aware of a cup of coffee growing cold in front of me on the counter, dimly aware of the television floating above me, bolted high on a metal arm. A newsman stands in front of some kind of palace, speaking in agitated tones about "a minor confrontation beginning to a.s.sume the dimensions of a crisis."

Peter Zell and J. T. Toussaint, Detective Andreas, Naomi Eddes.

"All right, honey," says Ruth-Ann, ap.r.o.n, order pad, one fist around the handle of a coffeepot.

"What's this music?" I say. "Where's Maurice?"

"He quit," she says. "You look terrible."

"I know. More coffee, please."

And then, too, there is my baby sister. Missing, possibly dead, possibly in jail. Another catastrophe I failed to predict or prevent.

The television now shows jerky footage of a line of South Asian men behind a table, green military uniforms with gold epaulets, one of them speaking sternly into a microphone. A guy two stools down from me makes an agitated harumph. I take him in, a soft middle-aged man in a Harley jacket, a thick mustache and beard; he says, "You mind?" I shrug, and he climbs up onto the counter, balances awkwardly on his knees to change the channel.

My phone is shivering.

Culverson.

"Hey, Detective."

"How you feeling, Henry?"

"Yeah," I say. "I'm all right."

The Pakistanis on the TV are gone, replaced by a pitchman, grinning obscenely before a pyramid of canned food.

Culverson runs through what he's got so far. Theodore Gompers, in his office with his bottle, heard a shot fired at around 2:15, but by his own admission he was pretty drunk, and it took him several minutes to set out in search of the noise, and then several minutes more to locate the narrow storeroom, where he found Naomi's body and called the police at 2:26.

"What about the rest of the staff?"

"It was just Gompers in there when it happened. He's got three other employees at present, and they were all out, enjoying a long lunch at the Barley House."

"Bad luck."

"Yeah."

I stack the blue books, spread them out, shift them into a square, like a fortification around my coffee cup. Culverson is going to do a ballistics workup on the bullet-on the off chance, the way-off chance, he says, that this gun was bought legally, pre-IPSS, and we can trace it. In the corner of my eye the bearded guy in the Harley jacket mops up egg yolk with a crust of toast. The TV pitchman scornfully tosses the canned food into the garbage, and now he's demonstrating some kind of countertop vacuum sealer, dumping a bowl of strawberries in its stainless-steel funnel. McConnell, says Culverson, canva.s.sed the rest of the Water West Building, four stories of office suites, half of them empty, no one saw anything or heard anything strange. No one cares. The old security guard says no one came in or out that he didn't recognize-but there are two back entrances, and one of them leads directly to the rear stairwell, and the security cameras are long gone.

More clues. More puzzles. More facts.

I stare at the TV screen, where the pitchman dumps out his cardboard carton of blueberries into the funnel and switches on the machine. My counter-mate whistles appreciatively, chuckles.

"And the uh-" I say.

And then I'm just frozen, I'm sitting there, holding my head in my forehead. Right at this moment I have to decide, is the thing, am I going to leave town and go north to Maine and find a house on Cas...o...b..y and sit there and stare out the window with my sidearm and wait, or am I going to stay here and do my work and finish my case. My cases.

"Palace?" says Culverson.

"The files," I say, I clear my throat, I sit up on my stool, stick a finger in my ear to block out the TV and the bad music, reach for a blue book. "What about the files?"

"Ah, yes, the files," says Culverson. "The terribly helpful Mr. Gompers basically says we're up the metaphorical creek, on that front."

"Huh," I say.

"Just eyeballing the file cabinet, he says there are maybe three dozen files missing, but he can't tell me what the claims were, or who was working on them, or anything. They gave up on computer files in January, and there are no backups of the paper files."

"Bad luck," I say, I get out a pen, I'm writing, I'm getting it all down.

"Tomorrow I'm going to try and track down some friends and family on this Eddes girl, give 'em the bad news, see if they know anything."

"I'll do that," I say.

"Yeah?"

"Sure."

"You sure?"

"I'll take care of it."

I get off the phone and pack up my notebooks, sliding them one by one into the pocket of my blazer. The question as before is why. Why does anybody do this? Why now? A murder, calculated, cold blood. To what purpose, for what gain? Two stools over the mustache man makes his agitated harumphing noise again, because the infomercial has been broken into by a news report, women in abayas somewhere, running in a panic through a dusty marketplace.

He turns my way with doleful eyes, shakes his head, as if to say, boy oh boy, huh? and I can tell he's about to try to talk to me, have some sort of human moment, and I don't have time, I can't do it. I have work to do.

At home I peel out of the clothes I've been wearing all day-to the morgue, to the National Guard, to the scene of crime-and I stand in the bedroom and look around.

Last night past midnight I woke in this room, in this same darkness, and Naomi was framed in the doorway, slipping her red dress over her head in the moonlight.

I'm pacing, thinking.

She put on the dress and she sat on the mattress and she started to talk-to tell me something-but then she stopped herself, "Forget it."

I walk slowly in a circle in my bedroom. Houdini stands in the doorway, unsure, unsettled.

Naomi started to say something, and then she stopped, and then instead she said that, no matter what happened, it was real and good and right. And she won't forget it, no matter how it ends.

I pace in a circle, snapping my fingers, biting at the ends of my mustache. Real and good and right, no matter how it ends is what she said, but she was going to say something else, instead.

In my restless dream the bullet that tore through Naomi's skull becomes a ball of fire and rock charging through Earth's fragile crust, gouging trenches into the landscape, blasting away sedimentary rock and soil, goring into the ocean floor and sending up spumes of boiled ocean. Deeper and deeper it goes, plowing forward, releasing its stores of kinetic energy, as a bullet rips through a brain, tearing through warm clots of gray matter, severing nerves, creating blackness, pulling thought and life down around it as it goes.

I wake up with the dead yellow light of the sun filling my bedroom, with the next phase of the investigation having announced itself in my head.

A tiny little thing, a little lie to follow up on.

It's not my murder, it's Culverson's murder, but here I go again back toward downtown, back to the Water West Building, like an animal who's witnessed some scene of violence and keeps on restlessly returning to the place of horrid fascination. There's some goon marching in circles around Eagle Square, big parka and a fur hat and an old-fashioned sandwich board-DO THEY THINK WE'RE STUPID in big cartoon bubble-letters-and he's ringing a bell like a Salvation Army Santa Claus. "Hey," he hollers, "do you know what time it is?" I duck my head, ignore him, push open the door.

The old guard isn't here. I take the stairs up to the third floor, and I don't politely call out h.e.l.lo from reception, I just go ahead on in and find Mr. Gompers behind his walnut desk.

"Oh," he says, startled, and half rises, unsteadily, to take me in. "I, uh, I went over everything with the other gentleman last night. About poor Naomi."

"Yeah," I say. He's graduated from a tumbler to a pint gla.s.s of gin. "Not everything, though."

"What?"

My insides feel cold, like my organs have been removed, separated from one another, packed back inside me in mud. I slam my hands down on Gompers's desk and lean in; he rears back, fleshy face retreating from my glare. I know what I look like. Unshaven, gaunt, the one dead eye with an uneven halo of brown puffy bruising around the clean white of the gauze.

"When I talked to you last week, you told me that the parent company in Omaha is obsessed with fraud prevention."

"What? I don't know," he mumbles.

"Okay, well, here," I say, tossing the thin blue book on the desk in front of him, and he flinches. "Read it."

Gompers doesn't move, so I tell him what it says. "You claimed that all your company cares about is protecting the bottom line. You said the board chairman thinks he's going to buy his way into heaven. But yesterday you told Detective Culverson that there are no duplicates of those files."

"Yeah, see, we went to an all-paper system," he mumbles. "The servers ..." He's not looking at me, he's looking at a picture on his desk: the daughter, the one who went off to New Orleans.

"You've got the whole office checking and double-checking those claims, there's no computer backup, and you're telling me there's no hard copies being made? No duplicate set squirreled away somewhere?"

"Well. I mean ..." Gompers looks out his window, and then back at me, steeling himself to make one more run at it. "No, I'm sorry, there's-"

I grab the gla.s.s from his hand and I hurl it against the window pane and it explodes and rains ice and gin and chips of gla.s.s onto the rug. Gompers stares at me, gaping like a fish. I picture Naomi-all she wanted was to write one perfect villanelle-see her fetching this man fresh bottles of alcohol from the corner store, and then I'm grabbing him by his lapels and lifting him out of his chair and up onto the desk, his blubbery neck trembling at the pressure of my thumbs.

"Are you out of your mind?"

"Where are the copies?"

"Boston. The regional office. State Street." I slacken my grip, just ever so slightly. "Every night we run off everything and overnight them. The overnights, they keep 'em in Boston." He says the words again, pleading, pathetic. "The overnights ... okay ..."