James Sallis - Eye of the Cricket

"Wait a minute, okay? I didn't kill anyone."

"You think that matters, Shon? The meter's ticking. I gotta draw a line at the bottom, add it all up, column A, column B. That's what the city and the citizens pay me for. And my wife's expecting me home for dinner.

"You saw anything maybe you weren't supposed to see, something that could put this in a different light for us, now's your time to lay it on the table."

"Only chance you'll get," DeSalle echoed.

"He's right. I don't blow smoke, Shon. We're doing our best here, trying to be up front with you. Your cousin's going down. Up to you whether he drags you down with him or not."

"You need paper and a pen?" DeSalle said. "Want to write it all down for us?"

Shon Delany shook his head.

"Okay, Shon," Don said. "Okay. I understand. DeSalle?"

"Yessir?"

"You want to drop the dime on this young man for me? Just tell County we've got a newfish for them, they want to bring the hooks, come get him."

"Look, I do get to make a phone call, right?" Delany said.

Don looked surprised.

"Man hasn't had his call yet? How'd that happen?"

"I'm not sure, sir. I'll look into it"

"You do that, Detective. Butfirst you take Mr. Delany into my office, let him use my phone."

"Yessir."

"Then you call County. And me, at home, to let me know it's all been taken care of. Pot roast tonight. Should be coming out of the oven just about now. I don't want to miss it."

DeSalle and Shon Delany left.

"Pot roast, huh?" I said. "And a wife."

"Not bad, huh? Maybe I should start writing novels. What can I say? Attitude's eveiything."

Don looked up at the clock on the wall opposite the interrogation rooms.

"Don't guess you want to grab some dinner this late?"

"Why not. What the hell, I might even spring for it."

"Whoa… Scary."

Don glanced back at the clock. We both knew he didn't want to go home.

"Give me a minute or two, okay, Lew? Meet you outside."

"Sad thing is," he said half an hour later, as we settled back in a booth at a hole-in-the-wall named Tony's, one of Don's favorites, "the kid, Delany, he's probably gonna take a hit for this. A small hit, but a real one. Got a sheet now, carry it around for the rest of his life. Never did crapola, probably doesn't have even half a clue. While this other shit, just because he knows the system, he'll get all the breaks."

A huge platter of oysters cruised into port before us.

"Thanks, Tony," Don said.

"You gonna work on these awhile?"

"You better believe it."

"Want another beer?"

Don said yes. He got it instantly.

"You want anything else, just let me know, right?"

"Right."

Tony disappeared into the kitchen. We heard rapid-fire chopping back there.

"You still seeing this O'Neil person?" Don asked. He loaded horseradish onto an oyster, forked the whole thing into his mouth.

I nodded.

"Tilings going all right there?"

Cocktail sauce this time. Another Rabelaisian swallow.

And I nodded.

"Good. That's good, Lew. Happy for you."

Don drained off half his beer in a gulp.

"Maybe we could get together, just the three of us, have dinner some night."

"I'd like that."

"Yeah. Yeah, I would too."

He poured the rest of his beer down.

"We'll work on that, then."

Tony emerged from the kitchen to slide another beer into place before Don and to refill my glass of iced tea, pouring sideways from the pitcher, just as Don's beeper went off.

He pulled it off his belt, put it on the table and stared at it.

"Maybe I should just shoot the damned thing."

"Probably go down okay, you put enough horseradish on it."

"Yeah."

Don stalked off towards the phone booth.

"Ready for menus?" Tony asked.

"Remains to be seen."

"As usual. I'll just leave them here on the table then, check back with you."

"Sounds good."

"Today's soup is cream of artichoke. Specials are trout in garlic sauce and penne pasta alfredo with grilled shrimp. Either one's guaranteed to leave you drooling into next Tuesday."

"Thanks, Tony. I'm drooling already."

"No problem. Need an extra napkin?"

"Not yet. But some more tea would be great, when you get a chance."

"You got it."

Don came back and sank heavily into the booth across from me.

"Guess you have a big night planned, right, Lew? With your new girl and all."

"Not really."

"You mind coming with me, then? I could use the company."

He stood and tucked a five under the saltshaker.

"Sure. Where we going?"

"It's Danny, Lew. They just found him. Place down on Dryades. Apparent suicide."

Danny was half afloat, half submerged, in a tubful of tepid water. One of those old tubs, heavy as a kettle, up off the ground on a platfonu, with clawed feet. A garbage bag around his head was tied at the neck. His tongue, swollen and purple, protruded. Blood vessels in his eyes had burst, making them look like road maps with nothing but interstates. Bladder and bowels had let go in the water.

DeSalle stepped up behind Don. He didn't speak till Don turned around.

"Looks like an overdose, with the bag for insurance. One of the uniforms told me there's a society recommends this route."

"Who took the call?" Don said.

"Patrolman you mean?"

"Yeah."

"Martinez. Young guy. Pretty new, I guess, taking it hard the way we all do thefirst few times."

"He out there?" Don gestured towards the front room.

"Yeah. Thought you might want to talk to him yourself."

"Anybody else around?"

DeSalle shook his head. "Have been, though. Two, three people at least living here, looks like. Maybe more."

"Note?"

DeSalle handed it to him. Sheathed in a sleeve of clear plastic with DeSalle's initials scrawled across the seal. There was only one light in the room, a bare bulb above the sink. Don stood under it as he read the note. Then he passed the note to me. It all comes down to choice, doesn't it? The ones we have, the ones we don't have. Those we make and those we're never able to make. Temporary choices, inadvertent choices, final choices. Fuck them all. While I'm at it, fuck your goddamn houses out in Metairie and your kids in private schools, fuck your minimum-wage jobs, your sorry-ass unions. Fuck your cops most of all. Am I making myself clear here? Everything's water if you look long enough, right? "It's a strange one," DeSalle said.

I handed the note back to Don. "No heading or salutation."

"Right."

"Left side's ragged. Tom out of a notebook, diary, something like that."

DeSalle looked from Don to me and back.

"Something I missed?"

"Lew's just saying the note's not addressed to anyone."

"Hell it's not."

"Yeah," Don said after a moment. "Yeah, you're right Guess any list would have been too long. Boy had a lot of anger in him. Always thought it was other people fucked up his life."

Don stepped into the front room to speak with Martinez.

"You guys go back a way, huh?"

I told DeSalle how Don and I met. Both of us little more than kids, each with his own reason to be searching for the sniper that killed all those people back in the sixties.

"Damn, Griffin. That was you?"

Don had been shot by the sniper. I'd come upon them in a downtown cul-de-sac and probably saved Don's life-at least he insisted I had. Since then he'd saved mine more times than I could count.

"Not many like him on the force," DeSalle said.

"Not many like him anywhere."

"You know it. Has to be tough," looking at Danny there in the tub, "all this."

"Can't imagine anything tougher. But I think he'd been getting ready for it, something like this."

"Yeah. Lives with it every day. Has to know."