Reed Coleman - Hurt machine

“Christ! That was him?” I said, pretending to have known about the accident. Since my family tragedy in 2000 and 9/11 the following year, I’d stopped reading the papers or listening to the news. Reading the paper had once been a part of my everyday routine and one of the great pleasures in my life. Not anymore.

“Yeah, that was Georgie: the bravest of the brave.”

I lied. “The first time I spoke to him, he was still pretty upset over those two EMTs who stood by and let that man in the restaurant die. He sounded really angry.”

“That shit drove Georgie nuts. Said they had set back the cause by twenty years. Man, I tell you what, there was times I thought he was mad enough to kill those EMTs if he got the chance. I’ve seen him pretty crazy mad, but never mad like he was ’bout those two. He only just stopped talking about it.”

“You can’t be serious, not about him hurting those women. He seemed like such a nice man.”

“True that. He was a great guy, a brother. Kept my ass alive more times than I’d like to say, but Georgie had a temper on him, a bad temper. It was his Achilles heel. You know what I’m saying? When the man got a bug up his bee-hind about something, it was hard to calm him down. Don’t matter much now, does it?”

“I guess not,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I do work with some other firefighters. One of them told me that EMT that got murdered was… that she was a… you know…”

“Gay?”

“I guess that’s the better way to say it.”

The man’s previously sad and caring expression turned suddenly cold. “So what if she was? She fucked up, but even that don’t mean she should’ve been cut up like that.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

“Forget it.”

He turned and walked to his Honda Accord parked down the street. I watched him drive away. It’s an amazing thing, what people will tell absolute strangers. They’ll tell you things they wouldn’t tell their best friends or their priests. Investigators count on that impulse. I was kind of disappointed that I’d upset him because he was clearly grieving for Delgado, but one of the things about doing PI work is that you’re never going to win any popularity contests. Whether you tell the truth or lie through your teeth, you’re not usually saying things people want to hear. I thought about finding Delgado’s apartment, but decided there were some situations that were off limits no matter how just your cause. I wasn’t going to intrude on the Delgados’ grief. What I needed to know, they probably couldn’t tell me. Even if they could, I wasn’t going to ask, not today.

I’d never met Jorge Delgado. I’d never even seen a picture of him. To me he was a man who wrote a threatening email and, until I knew more, simply the sum of the parts of a limited background check and the brief testimonial of a grieving firefighter. Still, I could not ignore the feeling in my belly. Hunches worked both ways and I had to trust them equally. If I had been willing to believe that a complete scumbag like Patrick Scanlon was telling me the truth based solely on my sense of him, then I had to believe the gnawing in my gut about Jorge Delgado. I wasn’t prepared to be judge, jury, and executioner-I was already too late for that last part-but I couldn’t deny that bells had gone off in my head during my conversation with the firefighter with whom I’d just crossed paths.

Back in the front seat of my car, I called Brian Doyle. He answered on the second ring.

“Yeah, Boss, what’s goin’ on?”

“I sent your check yesterday as soon as I got the package.”

“Thanks, but that’s not why you called, is it?”

“Nope.”

“Then why?”

“Jorge Delgado. He’s one of the firefighters you guys did a preliminary background check on. I want you-”

“Delgado,” he interrupted. “Why does that name sound-”

“-familiar? He’s that hero fireman that got killed saving a little girl’s life,” I said, suddenly an expert on the subject.

“Right. Right! What about him?”

“I need you and Devo to do the full Monty on him. The works.”

“He’s dead, Boss.”

“You have a flare for the self-evident, Brian. Anybody ever tell you that?” I didn’t wait for his answer. “Yes, he’s dead. Doesn’t matter. Do what you have to as soon as you can.”

“Even if it means rubbing some people the wrong way?”

“Especially that. And I know it’s gonna cost me, but I can’t take it with me, can I?”

I could hear him thinking of how to respond. Brian was a loud thinker at the best of times and this wasn’t one of those. Brian was a doer. I let him off the hook. “Look, forget I said that. Just do it. It’s important to me.”

“Sure thing, I’ll get somebody right-”

“Not somebody, Doyle. You. I want you for this, please.”

“You know, Boss, you’re more of a pain in my ass now than when you really were my boss, you know that?”

“Yeah, but the pay’s better.”

I left it at that and clicked off.

I sat and stared up at Delgado’s building. On the second floor, I saw a chubby-faced little girl staring blankly out her front window. She reminded me of another little girl I’d met once a long time ago. That little girl’s mom, a nickel and dime crack whore, had been beaten to death in a dreadful SRO hotel called the Mistral Arms. The last time I saw that girl, on the day her mom was murdered, she was sitting in a wobbly chair with a one-eyed cat in her lap. She fed him from a tin can. She had the same blank expression on her face as the girl across the way. Maybe I was reading too much into her expression, maybe that wasn’t Delgado’s daughter at all. Maybe, but I knew in my gut it was his kid.

I undressed and showered. The shower wasn’t so much to rinse away the sweat and grime, but to wash off the remnants of the people with whom I’d shared the day. It’s no wonder that good cops sometimes turn to the darkness. When you spend more time with the worst people imaginable than with your family, it rubs off on you. You can’t go down into the sewer and not come up smelling like shit yourself. If I could have scrubbed out the linings of my lungs, I would have. I remembered talking with Mr. Roth about the camps, about how he said the worst part of it all was the breathing.

“Yes, there was smoke,” he said, “lots of smoke and the stink of burning flesh and hair, but it wasn’t all smoke. There was ashes too, Mr. Moe, ashes of the dead falling like snow. You could not help but breathe it in. You would wonder sometimes, who it was you were breathing in. It was better not to dwell on it. If you would dwell on such things, it was all a man could do not to rip his own chest open or to throw himself onto the electrified fence. It was better to think of the small things like surviving.”

Only a man like Mr. Roth, a man who came out the other end of Auschwitz, could call surviving a small thing. But I don’t suppose all the scholarship and study by those who didn’t live through it could make sense of it. I never judged things Mr. Roth told me about his experiences in the camps. Who was I to judge, after all? And some truths can’t be argued.

I had seen three more hate-mailing scumbags that day, but my heart wasn’t in it. My lies were unconvincing and I barely listened to the answers to my questions. There was just something about Jorge Delgado that sang to me. He lit me up like a neon Christmas tree and I couldn’t say why exactly. Maybe it was that he wasn’t simply another run-of-the-mill misogynist or misanthrope. He wasn’t the typical griper or whiner. He didn’t feel sorry for himself or wronged by the world. He wasn’t a narcissist. No, he was something much more dangerous: a believer, a believer with a bad temper. But it wasn’t Delgado I was thinking about when I got out of the shower.