Ben Winters - The Last Policeman

“Then he calls me up, man. Jack-blue sky. Says, let’s have lunch.”

I click my pen open and closed three times.

“Why?”

“Don’t know.”

“When?”

“Don’t know. July? No. It was right after I got shit-canned. June. Says he’s been thinking about me, since all this bullcrap got started.”

He extends one forefinger and aims it out the window, up at the sky. All this bullcrap . My phone rings, and I glance down at it. Nico. I thumb it off.

“And so, what exactly did you and Mr. Zell do together, the two of you?”

“Same stuff, man.”

“You played Dungeons & Dragons?”

He looks at me, snorts, shifts in his chair. “Okay, man. Different stuff. We drank beers. We drove around. Did some shooting.”

I pause, the wind whipping. Toussaint lights another butt, guesses what I’m going to say next. “Three Winchester rifles, officer. In a cabinet. Unloaded. They’re mine and I can prove they’re mine.”

“Locked up tight, I hope.”

Gun theft is a problem. People are stealing them and hoarding them, and other people are stealing them to sell, for astronomical sums, to the first kind of people.

“Nobody’s going to take my fucking guns,” he says quickly, harshly, and levels a hard look at me, like I was considering it.

I move on. I ask Toussaint about Monday night, the last night of Peter Zell’s life, and he shrugs.

“Picked him up after work.”

“What time?

“I don’t know,” he says, and I can feel it, he’s liking me less and less, he’s ready for me to go, and maybe this man killed Peter and maybe he didn’t, but there is no avoiding the impression that he could pound me to death if he wanted to, just like that, three or four blows, like a caveman destroying a deer. “After-work time.”

Toussaint says they cruised around for a bit, then went to see the new episode of Distant Pale Glimmers , the science-fiction serial, at the Red River. They had some beers, they watched the movie, and then they split up, Peter saying he wanted to walk home.

“Did you see anyone at the theater?”

“Just the people who work there and stuff.”

He sucks the last life out of his second cigarette, crushes out the butt in the state house. Houdini pads over unevenly, darting pink tongue finding the last bites of biscuit at the corners of his mouth, and rubs his thin head against the broad expanse of his master’s leg.

“I’m gonna have to shoot this dog,” Toussaint says, suddenly, absently, matter-of-fact, and stands up. “At the end, I mean.”

“What?”

“He’s a little scaredy cat, this one.” Toussaint is looking down at the dog, his head tilted, as if evaluating, trying to imagine how it’s going to feel. “Can’t think of him dying like that, fire or cold or drowning. Probably I’m gonna go ahead and shoot him.”

I’m ready to get out of here. I’m ready to go.

“Last thing, Mr. Toussaint. Did you happen to notice the bruising? Under Mr. Zell’s right eye?”

“He said he fell down some stairs.”

“Did you believe him?”

He chuckles, scratches the dog’s thin head. “If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t. I’d figure he whistled at the wrong dude’s girlfriend. But Pete, who knows? I bet he fell down some stairs.”

“Right,” I say, thinking, I bet he didn’t .

Toussaint cradles Houdini’s head in his hands, and they’re gazing at each other, and I can see into the future to the terrible and agonized moment, the raised .270, the trusting animal, the blast, the end.

He looks away from his dog, back up at me, and the spell is broken.

“Anything else? Mr. Policeman?”

One of my father’s favorite jokes was when people asked him what he did for a living, he would say he was a philosopher king. He would make this claim with perfect seriousness, and the thing about Temple Palace was that he wouldn’t let go of it. Inevitably, he would get that blank look from whoever had asked—the barber, say, or someone at a cocktail party, or one of my friends’ parents, and there I am looking at the ground in rank embarrassment—and he’d just say, “What?” opening his palms, imploring, “What? I’m serious .”

What he really did was teach English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne, down at St. Anselm’s. At home he was always coming out with quotes and allusions, murmuring literary lessons from the side of his mouth, responding to the random events and mundane conversations of our household with dollops of abstract commentary.

The substance of most of these asides I have long since forgotten, but one stays with me.

I’d come home whimpering, tearful, because this kid Burt Phipps had shoved me off a swing. My mother, Peg, pretty and practical and efficient, wrapped three pieces of ice in a sandwich bag and held them to my injury, while my father leaned against the green linoleum counter, wondering why this Burt character would do such a thing.

And I, sniffling, go, “Well, because he’s a jerk.”

“Ah, but no!” pronounces my father, holding his glasses up to the kitchen light, polishing them with a dinner napkin. “One thing we can learn from Shakespeare, Hen, is that every action has a motive.”

I’m looking at him, holding this drooping sandwich bag full of ice to my bruised forehead.

“Do you see it, son? Anybody does anything, I don’t care what it is, there’s a reason for it. No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life.”

“For heaven’s sake, dear,” says my mother, squatting before me, peering into my pupils to eliminate the possibility of concussion. “A bully is a bully.”

“Ah, yes,” Father says, pats me on the head, wanders out of the kitchen. “But, wherefore doth he become a bully?”

My mother rolls her eyes at him and kisses me on my wounded head, gets up. Nico’s in the corner, age five, building a multistory palace of Legos, lowering into place the carefully cantilevered roof.

Professor Temple Palace did not live to see the advent of our present unfortunate circumstance; neither, unfortunately, did my mother.

In a little more than six months, according to the most reliable scientific predictions, at least half the planet’s population will die in a series of interlocking cataclysms. A ten-megaton explosion, roughly equaling the blast force of a thousand Hiroshimas, will scorch a massive crater into the ground, touching off a series of Richter-defying earthquakes, sending towering tsunamis ricocheting across the oceans.

And then will come the ash cloud, the darkness, the twenty-degree dip in global temperatures. No crops, no cattle, no light. The slow cold fate of those who remain.

Answer this, in your blue books, Professor Palace: what effect does it have on motive, all this information, all this unbearable immanence ?

Consider J. T. Toussaint, a laid-off quarryman with no previous criminal history.

No verifiable alibi for the time of death. He was at home, he says, reading.

Under normal circumstances, then, we would next turn our attention to the question of motive. We would wonder about those hours they spent together, that final evening: they went to Distant Pale Glimmers , they got loaded on movie-theater beer. They fought over a woman, perhaps, or some silly old half-remembered elementary-school insult, and tempers flared.

The first problem with such a hypothesis is that’s just not how Peter Zell got killed. A murder resulting from a long night of drinking, a murder about a woman or a pissing contest, is a murder committed with a bat, or a knife, or a .270 Winchester rifle. Here instead we have a man who is strangled, his body moved, a suicide scene deliberately and carefully constructed.