Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

Broker raised his voice. “Anyone,” he sang out loud enough to carry over the cubicle walls, “is Gloria Russell married?”

“Happily?” someone asked back. That caused a few titters.

“Is she married?” Broker repeated.

“She was married. BH. Oh yeah. For sure.” Several voices replied from the cubes.

“BH, Before Harry,” someone added.

“Her life is currently complicated by a dietary situation. She developed this craving for chocolate. That’s why she works out so hard.”

Then a more serious voice overrode the guffaws. “Her marriage went in the toilet. She separated. She’s getting divorced.”

Broker mulled it over, drew it out: Miz. . Russell. That tingle on his neck hairs brought him around. A blond, balding, horse-faced guy stood behind him. One of the white-shirt potbellies.

“Who are you?” Broker asked.

“Benish. Fraud.”

“What do you want?”

Benish glanced around the barren cubicle. “We were wondering if you’re going to set up in a cube, you know, hang family pictures? Or maybe you won’t be here that long?”

“Benish, in your professional opinion, do I need a coffee taster?”

“Not my department. You need General Investigations for poisoning cases.”

“Thank you, Benish.”

“Have a good day, Broker.”

A secretary in her early sixties manned the gatekeeper desk at the entrance to Investigations. She had a smoke-cured bingo parlor face, frosted hair, and the trim body of a ballroom dancer.

“Marcy, right?” Broker said.

“You got it,” Marcy said.

“So where’s Lymon?”

“Lymon’s doing Goths.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You don’t have kids in high school?”

“No kids in high school.”

“Goths are to the left of slackers and grunge,” Marcy explained. “Goths wear black all the time, dye their hair green, and insert cuff links in their pierced tongues.”

A voice sounded in back of Broker. “Lymon thinks they also worship the devil. And, in their spare time tip over tombstones, deface and burglarize churches-stuff like that.”

Broker swung around. Benish continued, “So Lymon’s asking the little Satanists if they’ve, you know, whacked any priests lately.”

“So Lymon has a theory about the case,” Broker said.

“Two theories. His first all-purpose theory is Harry did it. If that doesn’t work, then his second theory is the devil did it,” Benish said.

Broker turned back to Marcy. “Has anything come in from the BCA crime lab yet?”

“Not yet,” Marcy said.

“Okay, I’ll be in touch,” Broker said, walking down the length of the room. As he keyed open the locked door, he heard Benish snicker, “ He’ll be in touch.” He took the elevator and paced back and forth as it descended, then left the elevator and started for the garage thinking. .

So, if you want to know what’s really going on, get away from the guys with the suits and ties and the big guts who take the long lunches. Maybe it’s time to check in with the flat-belly street grunts.

Abruptly Broker turned away from the corridor leading to the garage, went up a flight, and walked into the patrol division. He cut through the deserted muster room past rows of folding chairs and a lectern. A yellowed pistol target taped to the bulletin board featured Osama Bin Laden’s bullet-punched face.

He went into an alcove off the muster room where a statuesque brunette patrol sergeant named Patti Palen sat at an administrative desk. She had a full-service belt strapped over her regulation beige-on-tan county uniform. An HT 1000 portable radio sat on the desk and hiccuped static.

“Surprise, surprise,” she said in a grudging voice. “I heard you were in the area.”

“Hey, Patti, how you doing? Yeah, I’m around for a few days,” Broker said. “Thought I’d drop down here belowdecks and see how the galley slaves are doing.”

“You never were any good at small talk, Broker. So what do you want?”

“Hey, how’s your kid doing? It’s Alex, right? He must be, what-twenty-three, twenty-four now?” Broker said casually, avoiding the sight of Patti’s face tightening as his eyes roved the small room.

Seven years ago Broker bumped into Alex Palen, then seventeen, in an entry-level position fencing stolen televisions and VCRs in the electronics division of a biker gang Broker had a relationship with. He’d given the kid a break, steered him clear of a felony bust, and hounded him into the Coast Guard.

Patti drew in a sharp breath, composed herself, exhaled, looked up into Broker’s eyes, and said, “Alex is doing just fine.” Her gaze then moved off and became seriously involved with the linoleum pattern on the floor. “Why don’t you cut me some slack and talk to somebody else.”

“Nah, you owe me. So what’s making the rounds, Patti?”

Patti exhaled again. “Harry Cantrell got suspended for coming in drunk. And we aren’t supposed to know, but a priest got shot in St. Martin’s and they found a St. Nicholas medal in his mouth. The sheriff worked it out with the union so Harry has to go to treatment or he loses his job.” Patti took a breath. “So Investigations is down one body, and we got a Saint’s panic coming on like a storm surge.”

“Anything you left out?”

“Yeah, last I heard, you, of all people, were gonna take Harry to the hospital. So, is he in the hospital?”

“Not yet. Tell me, Patti- you think Harry is the Saint?”

Patti shook her head. “Me personally? No. The coppers are pretty evenly divided on this. There’s a third that think he is, there’s a third that think he isn’t, and the rest don’t really have an opinion.”

“One last question: what’s the story on Harry and Gloria Russell?” Broker said.

They stared each other down. Second by second Patti’s face filled with gravitas until it weighed about a ton. “Some people say they were like crossed live wires on a tin roof from the minute they started working together on the Dolman thing. It got so bad, it deep-sixed her marriage and was interfering with her work. So she talked to John E. and got him to take Harry off the case. Replaced him with Lymon Greene.” Patti sat deeper in her chair and folded her arms. “Which really pissed Harry off.”

“Yeah, go on.”

“Apparently, Lymon replaced Harry in more ways than one. According to this version, that’s why Harry pulled his Mark Fuhrman number. You know, the famous N-word scene.”

Broker lifted his eyebrows.

“I give you one last thing, and then you leave me alone. Okay?” Patti said.

Broker nodded.

“The only thing I know for sure is Gloria and Lymon spend lunchtime together lifting weights downstairs in the gym.”

“Thank you, Patti.”

“Fuck you, Broker.”

Broker continued to the basement motor pool and was going down the lines of marked and unmarked cars when he encountered Cody, the narcotics cop, and his partner, both wearing the tree trimmer costumes. Cody was carrying a black plastic bag. Seeing Broker, he held up the bag and grinned.

“We’re going through garbage. You want to join us?” Cody called out in a sardonic voice.

Broker smiled and kept going, got into Harry’s car, started it up, and drove from the underground garage into the ash-white sunlight.

He turned south on Osgood, crossed Highway 36, and stopped at the Holiday station, went in and bought several packs of Backwoods cigars. Back in the car, he fired up one of the rough-looking stogies with Harry’s casino matches. As the raw but calming smoke meandered from his mouth, he caught himself automatically doing a terrain field scan. A pre-cop habit from a shooting war. He was checking the surrounding area by breaking it into quadrants, then stopping, reversing field to overlap the last quadrant before moving on and repeating the process.