Jon Talton - The Night Detectives

I never made that mistake. I judge a woman by the books she reaches for.

My life was so unfurnished when we met. I had a fairly new doctorate in history, boxes of books, and the old house in Phoenix that had belonged to my grandparents, now rented out. I happily let her help make me the man I became, in all good ways. She taught me how to open a Champagne bottle like a man of the world. Opened my ears to jazz.

Patty appreciated my love of history, ability to dress well, being “debonair,” as she put it, for turning out well-balanced and kind, despite having lost my parents before I could even remember them. She called me a mensch , one of the best compliments I ever received.

It pleased her that I loved ethnic food and had a very dry sense of humor and possessed an eclectic past that included working for five years as a deputy sheriff trained by a tough older cop named Peralta. I had published my first book, Rocky Hard Times: The Great Depression in the Intermountain West, and it had been favorably reviewed. This also pleased her. We made a sophisticated, good-looking couple. But I knew I was marrying up.

She spoke French well. Not well enough to satisfy the most obnoxious waiter in Paris, but her French was better than my Spanish. Thanks to Patty, I learned fun and useful phrases: cherchez la femme , which proved to be true in cracking one cold case. Dragueur , a skirt chaser. Terribles simplificateurs : the world was full of those, Arizona especially. Billets-doux : love letters, the writing of which she excelled. La petit mort : orgasm. The vocabulary she had taught me was coming back now with the sea breeze.

It was things like this that made me cluelessly happy being with her.

I was one of the few who were allowed to call her Patty. To the rest of the world, she was Patricia. She teased me about spray-painting her name on a wall of I-5. For a long time, I wondered if we would have stayed together if I had committed that simple act of vandalism, decorating the concrete spaghetti with eight letters, leaving drivers to wonder what passion had stirred a man to do such a thing?

A man who would have done that could have kept up when she got on tenure track at the University of California at San Diego, an infinitely more prestigious appointment. He would not have been content being a good teacher, nor would he have bridled at the intentionally dull and social-science-y conventions of academic historiography.

He would have realized that even if I didn’t feel in competition with her, she expected me to overachieve, as her father had demanded of her. The impetuous one with the spray paint would have done more than appreciate, support, and learn from her seemingly infinite avocations, from cooking to film history and painting. He would have tried harder to match her imaginative gift giving even though it couldn’t be done.

That man sure as hell would have focused on publishing more so as to ensure tenure at second-rate San Diego State.

Who knows? I can argue this history one way and then the other. Participants don’t usually make good historians. Even Churchill had his flaws. As for Patty, she was needy and broken, too. She was as insecure as I was. Our insecurities together acted as an accelerant to burn up our marriage. I taught her things of the world, too, made her happy for a time. The collapse of our marriage wasn’t all my fault. Just mostly my fault.

I am too close to the events to recount them dispassionately.

I do know two things. One is that we married too soon. We weren’t the people we would become. And I know a simple, transcendent fact…

She was the Glory Fuck of My Young Life.

Now I stood at the end of the same pier, the longest on the West Coast if I remembered correctly. A man fished off the south side and pairs of lovers strolled out toward me. My chest was tight and I could feel my heart trying to make its escape, my throat tightening. It was merely a panic attack. I knew that now. They never came in situations where a normal person would panic, only when I was quiet and alone. If I couldn’t stop them, at least I could get away from other people so the attacks wouldn’t cause me to do something inappropriate. Like tell the truth. Whatever.

I thought again about Patty. Contrary to Peralta’s baiting, I wasn’t afraid of seeing her. It would be nice, actually, to know she was happy.

As for my native prudence, that had gone away in the preceding months. Now I had barged into a stranger’s apartment and assaulted a man with a move that could kill, and I wasn’t even a cop anymore. Get me a can of spray paint.

I wondered if she remarried and had children.

Now it was hard to imagine that lost love as even real, especially after Lindsey.

I remembered the Fussell book Patty and I had both been reaching for. Writing about World War I, he meditated about how our age couldn’t understand why hundreds of thousands of British soldiers had gone “over the top” to certain death from German machine gunners for something as abstract as honor . But for them, that sense of honor and obligation was as real as our age, drowning in illegitimacy and irony, is for us.

What a pity. Quel dommage .

I had brought Lindsey to O.B. exactly once, when we had first become a couple and I worried that I was falling for her too fast, this magical younger woman with the fair skin and nearly black hair. She had browsed the postcards and made fun of the tourists. The memories caused me to pull out my iPhone and text her:

“I’m in San Diego with Peralta, on a case.”

It was a fool’s errand. She wouldn’t respond. I didn’t say I loved her, even though I did. Why set myself up for the disappointment of her silence? She wasn’t wearing her wedding ring now. I still wore mine, even though I operated heavy equipment: large-caliber firearms. I studied my ring and my hands that had changed the baby. I didn’t even know the baby’s name, but I remembered his tiny hands and arms struggling against me, struggling against a world of trouble.

This little soul who hadn’t asked to be brought into that world. I didn’t even know his name.

That tattooed kid who was his father had better be on his way to Riverside.

Lindsey had worried whether she would make a good mother.

Now this child’s mother was dead. After meeting America’s Finest Pimp and learning about Grace’s venture as Scarlett, I wondered if the man in our office yesterday had been right to question the circumstances of her death. He hadn’t said a word about Grace being a call girl. Had he not known? Hell, I didn’t even know who he really was.

The pimp had mentioned a big man, an enforcer, someone he was afraid of enough to clear out and leave us alone. Was that the big man from yesterday, assassinated on Grand Avenue? And who was Edward, someone else the pimp feared?

Too damned many questions and barely twenty-four hours into our first case. I felt only my lack of ability. This was not what I had done as the Sheriff’s Office Historian. It was no cold case but was uncomfortably warm. Maybe I should have chucked Robin’s fancy that I be Peralta’s partner and found some community college where I could teach.

The idea of coming to San Diego wasn’t unpleasant because of Patty. It was bitter because San Diego represented my spectacular failures.

Looking up the hill at O.B., I remembered that I had broken my vow. I had left my little paradise.

The phone buzzed in my hand. The screen read: “Peralta.”

I gave him an abbreviated report over the comforting noise of the surf. The beach wasn’t crowded and the onshore flow was still keeping things soothingly cool.