Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

Verne: “Say something, for God’s sake.”

Kent was the last straw, all right. It has to stop, right here and now.

I looked away from Faith for the first time. Didn’t look at Verne or Thayer as I turned around, or at anyone else. I stared out beyond the light into the dark, above all, the laser eyes and all the faceless, buzzing bodies. Easier that way. It wasn’t much different from addressing a roomful of strangers.

“Faith is right,” I said, “everything he said is right. I did it. I killed her.”

Four of us were present in the interrogation room when Novak taped his confession. Me, Ben Seeley, Joe Proctor, and Verne Erickson because the mayor and city council made him acting Chief. We didn’t have to prod Novak any, or even ask him more than half a dozen questions to clarify minor details. He just rolled it all off the top of his head in a flat, used-up voice — the tone most felons have when they know their ride’s over and done with.

I read the transcript three times. The main part made me feel like puking every time.

She called me Thursday night, late. It was the first I’d heard from her since we broke off the affair six months ago. She practically begged me to come to her house. She was a little drunk but not that drunk. She said she needed me, really needed me. I didn’t want to go because I was afraid of what might happen. I don’t mean violence, I mean getting involved again. The affair hadn’t been good for either of us, me particularly. She was the kind of woman who got under your skin like a tick and just kept burrowing. I spent six months trying to dig her out and I thought I had but I hadn’t. I tried to say no to her that night and I couldn’t. I went to her just like she asked me to.

We made love three times in three hours. For me, anyway, it was making love. But not a good kind, even then. I knew it but I wouldn’t let myself accept the truth. She led me to believe... no, that’s not right. I led myself to believe she felt the same way, that there was a bond or connection between us and we could rebuild what we’d had before. Except we hadn’t had anything before, just sex, that’s all. I don’t know how I could have deluded myself like that. Ripe for it, I guess. Lonely, mixed up inside my head — midlife crisis or maybe just plain crisis. I don’t know. I needed to believe, so I believed.

Friday night I drove back to her house, uninvited this time. Nine-thirty, quarter of ten, I don’t remember the exact time I got there. She let me in, but she wasn’t the same as the night before. In a strange mood even for her. No pretense of softness or sexiness. Bitchy, cutting, like she was spoiling for a fight. More than a fight... as though there was something in her that was pushing me to do to her what I ended up doing. I’m not trying to blame her when I say that. I’m through blaming anybody but myself. I’m only telling you the way it was.

She started yelling, provoking me right away. Saying I had a lot of nerve showing up unannounced and she was through with me, she didn’t want me coming around bothering her anymore. I told her I loved her. She laughed at me. She said I was pathetic, a sorry excuse for a man in and out of bed. She got right up in my face and screamed at me — lousy lover, sorry excuse, get the hell out and leave her alone because a real man was coming over, a man who knew how to satisfy a woman. On and on like that, spitting it in my face. Provoking me until I couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t think straight and started seeing red. I slapped her face, and she hit me back with her fist, screaming all the time. Tried to knee me, claw me. I slapped her again and she picked up the paperweight and swung it at my head, just missed me. I took it away from her and... that’s all I remember. I don’t remember hitting her with it. Only some part of me must have realized I’d done it twice or I wouldn’t have said so to Faith and then to Verne on the radio. Next thing I do remember is seeing her on the couch with her skull crushed and blood all over her head and face. And I was standing over her with the bloody paperweight in my hand.

I panicked. At a time like that... everything’s crazy, mixed up. You can’t think at all. The only thing that seems to matter is getting away, saving yourself. You’ve heard all that before, same as I have, and it’s true. You can’t face what you’ve done, the instinct for self-preservation takes over, you panic and run.

I threw the paperweight down next to her body and ran outside and washed off her blood with the garden hose. There was some on my uniform sleeve, too, and I rubbed that out with water. Faith was too wound up to notice the sleeve was wet, or maybe it’d dried by then... doesn’t matter. I drove away, fast. Just down the road from her driveway I passed Faith’s beat-up Porsche. Only car like it in Pomo, and we’d had words earlier in the day. I guess that’s why it registered, even in the state I was in. In the mirror I saw him turn into her driveway. I thought he was the man she’d been waiting for, the “real man” she’d thrown in my face. I still wasn’t tracking too well. I drove on a little ways and then... I don’t know, I turned around and went back there. I didn’t think about what I was doing or why, I just did it. I had no intention at that point of trying to put the blame on Faith. That’s the truth. If I had any intention at all, it was to cover myself by pretending to show up for the first time after the body was discovered.

But he came running out of the house just as I got there and things got all mixed up again. It was like I really was arriving for the first time and had caught him running out. Denial. Still wasn’t able to face the fact that I’d killed her, that I was capable of such a thing. So I treated Faith the way I would’ve any other suspect in similar circumstances. And when I saw her lying dead inside... it was as though I was seeing her there for the first time and the pain I felt was the shock of discovery. As though somebody else had done it. Faith, because he was right there. I questioned him, accused him, started to arrest him. Didn’t let myself think the whole time. Just doing my job, upholding the law, protecting the public interest. I know that sounds sick and crazy, but that’s the way I was that night. Sick and crazy.

It just went on from there. Faith jumping me and breaking my nose, me shooting him before he went into the lake, the search for his body and all the rest... it made the fiction I’d built up more real. And the more things escalated, the easier it was to shift my guilt onto him, make him the scapegoat. If he was dead or in prison, there’d be an end to it, a closure, and then I could find a way to go on living with myself and do my job. But now... I know I couldn’t have buried the truth, or even continued the pretense much longer. Too much kept happening, like there was an epidemic and I was the Typhoid Mary who’d started it all. I had that on my conscience too, along with Storm. I’ve been a cop too many years. A man like me can’t keep on riding the tiger. Sooner or later I’d have been torn apart. Might’ve been too late for Faith by then, but I never much cared about him from the beginning. God help me, I never gave a damn about him, and I’m not sure I do even now. He was a stranger. He was just another stranger.

Well, maybe Novak never cared about John Faith, but everybody else sure seems to. That’s one of the galling things about this whole lousy affair. They’re whitewashing Faith. Seeley, Proctor, everybody else with any clout in Pomo County. Dropping all charges against him, including one of the worst felonies there is, for my money — assaulting a police officer. The official line is that he’s suffered enough, that prosecuting him will keep the wounds open and delay a return to normalcy around here, but that’s just bullshit. They’re scared to death of a big lawsuit that might bankrupt the county; they made Faith sign a waiver against suing for damages as one of the conditions of the whitewash.