J Bertrand - Back on Murder

Instead, as Charlotte drives quietly toward our neighborhood, as the sun’s orange hues deepen and the first fat drops of rain break across the windshield, I steel myself for a nighttime errand. Once she’s satisfied that I’ve been squared away in front of the television, confident enough for a glass of water and a couple of sleeping pills, I’ll dress quickly and limp out to the car, keeping a rendezvous with my last hope.

Joe Thomson, if he’s going to drop in on me, won’t do it at my house. He’ll be waiting at the Paragon for me to show. And after today, there’s not a chance I’ll disappoint him.

The girl tied to the bed and Hannah Mayhew are not one and the same. But Thomson’s still dangling the names of the shooters. My path back into Homicide just contracted into the tightest of crawl spaces, but it’s still there. And no matter what it takes, I intend to squeeze through.

I wait, alone at a table, quite still in spite of the movement all around. For ten minutes. For sixty. For half as much again, until the ice in my untouched glass is down to a pair of floating lozenges, murkily transparent. I wait as the crowd ebbs and wanes, as the music changes and the lights dim. The second hand on my watch crawls by, but I’m done with checking it.

Either he’ll come or he won’t.

If he doesn’t, then I’ll make it my business first thing in the morning to track him down. Regardless of my enforced leave, ignoring all the hoops still left to jump through after a good shooting, I will make Joe Thomson my focus, my case, my mission in life. If he doesn’t come to me, then I will go to him.

The bartender’s playing one trance anthem after another, the rapid pulse insinuating itself into my leg, which doesn’t seem to know the difference between superficial and serious wounds, judging by the throb no quantity of prescription tablets seems to dissolve. No sign tonight of the waitress Marta, sparing me any potential drama. There’s only so much I can take in the space of a single day.

All the televisions overhead are showing silent baseball highlights, except for the small flat-screen just over the bar, where the close- captioned news is running. My eye, drawn to the screen, anticipates the familiar images of Hannah Mayhew, her Ford Focus, the seventies Greenwood Forest mock-Tudor she and her mother call home. Or a clip from one of the local interviews Donna Mayhew finally submitted to – not Larry King, not yet, but she’s finally doing her duty to the public, to all those strangers out there acting, as Carter Robb said, in loco parentis, at least as far as the grieving is concerned.

But they don’t appear. Instead, the usual montage of men in dark suits lit by camera flashes making carefully worded statements to the press, interspersed with the occasional defendant trying to shield his face from the lens as he’s hustled up the courthouse steps. Maybe people have grown tired of Hannah, or at least need a break.

I think about her mother, remembering clenched hands over the crinkly, highlighted pages of her Bible. The physical manifestation of her hopes. Then I ponder my own recently dashed hope, the link between her daughter and the girl tied to Octavio Morales’s bed. Given the nature of my work, it’s not the first time my hopes have run perversely counter to the dictates of human decency. Donna Mayhew wants more than anything to see a living, breathing girl walk through the door – a miracle, more or less, under the circumstances – while I wanted nothing less than to establish Hannah’s death, to match her up to the unknown woman who suffered and probably died in our West Bellfort kill house.

She wants her daughter back, and what I wanted was essentially to take Hannah from her. To make her fit into my rubric, the missing puzzle piece. In that sense I’m no better than the rubbernecking voyeurs tuning in for the latest Hannah updates. Probably worse.

“You of all people” – that’s what Ann said at the dinner table. The words take on a special potency, imposing themselves like a mantra onto the haze of music, the noise of the people all around. You of all people, she’d said, as if they – the powers that be – ought to know better than to put me, me of all people, in a spot like this.

Me of all people. They should know better. Or maybe I should know better.

The sudden buzzing in my leg, which I first interpret as an alarming new symptom of the gunshot wound, turns out to be my ringing phone. Even next to my ear I can barely hear it, so I tell the caller to hold on, flick a couple of bills on the table, and head outside.

“Thomson?” I ask.

The caller fumbles his words. “Is this Roland March?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, good, I thought I got the wrong number there for a second. Hey, Roland, it’s just me. I heard about what happened today, man, and I just wanted to check you were all right.”

I struggle to place the voice, then it comes to me. Brad Templeton. I haven’t heard from him in more than a year, not since he realized my string of special assignments weren’t going to yield new book ideas.

“Brad,” I say, “it was nothing.”

“Getting shot is not nothing.”

Standing outside the Paragon weighing the relative seriousness of gunshot wounds is not my idea of a good time.

“You’ve caught me at an awkward moment,” I tell him. “But I appreciate the concern.”

“Listen, I was wondering… they’ll have you riding the desk now, right? Taking a few days off? It’s just, I was kind of hoping you and me could have a talk about this thing you’ve been working on, the Hannah Mayhew case.”

“Why, are you planning to write another book?”

“The thought had occurred to me. So when I heard what happened today, then found out you’d been assigned to the task force, it seemed like a natural – ”

“The thing is, I’ve spent the last five years living down The Kingwood Killing. Not to mention I haven’t exactly solved this thing. As far as Hannah Mayhew is concerned, there may never be a solution, though don’t quote me on that.”

“I hear you, but look… could we at least talk? There is some interest in this thing. I’ve already spoken to my editor about it, and her ears definitely perked up.”

It’s hard to say no to Brad, mainly because of the relationship that developed during the book research. He was part of the family for a while, back when there was a gap to be filled, awkward silences that needed exactly his brand of unselfconscious banter to alleviate the strain. Even the things I take issue with in his book resulted from a kind of hero worship that, at the moment I was its focus, was profoundly gratifying. He’d reacted to our time together the way reflexively leftist journalists in the Iraqi desert responded to being embedded with troops, sloughing off whatever preconceived notions he’d had about law enforcement – and as a result “holding his manhood cheap,” a quote from Shakespeare he kept repeating until I asked him please not to anymore.

I had no idea what the result of that idolization would look like on the page. The Roland March who dominates The Kingwood Killing goes through all the usual routines, but they’re described as if he invented them personally, and had mastered every one. Especially the one chapter, which I’ve never been able to reread, in which the intrepid March, cruising at high speed along the Atchafalaya River Basin, induces the confession of wife-murderer Donald Fauk, using his own tears of grief as a pry bar into the killer’s soul. Distorted by his awe, Brad got all the details right, and at the same time utterly wrong.

“Look,” he says, probing my long silence for an opening. “I know you had mixed feelings about the book. I can respect that. But let’s at least talk, all right? For old times’ sake, if nothing else?”