James Benn - Billy Boyle

He stood, folded his hands behind his back, and silently, but very effectively, dismissed us. I watched Skak and Birkeland stand and stare at each other. If there hadn’t been a big wooden table between them, they would’ve been at each other’s throats. I’d bet on Birkeland in a hand-to-hand fight. But I’d bet on Skak in a dirty fight, and this was politics, as dirty as it got.

Beardsley Hall was swarming with Norwegian officials and all sorts of soldiers, sailors, and probably a few doctors and lawyers. Indian chiefs I wasn’t so sure about. Events were moving kind of fast, and I wanted to slow down and think things through. I went out a rear entrance, crossed a patio, and walked into the gardens. I knew I was no Einstein, but I did know how to think about things. Slowly. Thoroughly. Quietly.

“Billy! Billy!” Kaz jogged to catch up with me, or at least jogged a few steps. He wasn’t the most athletic guy around. He puffed like he had just run a mile, and pushed up the heavy glasses that had slid down his nose. I could tell by the look on his face that quiet was not going to be in the cards.

“Billy, this has been most exhilarating, yes?”

“Did you expect something else?”

“Ah! A question. That is exactly what I mean. You are full of questions, why is that?”

I thought about that for a minute as we walked along a garden path, framed by red roses on both sides. Red petals carpeted the ground, like velvet drops of blood. I did like asking questions. Asking questions meant that there might be an answer, and that gave me hope. When you ran out of questions, the case was hopeless, and you just plain ran out of everything.

“Questions are a dime a dozen, Kaz. Answers are what interest me. What’s so exhilarating for you?”

“You. Your approach to things. Very direct. Even more American than any other American I’ve met. You are unafraid to go to the heart of the matter, no matter how, how… inappropriate it may be. Very un-European. I think it puts people off balance.”

“Good way to get a reaction.”

“If you can tell the difference between shock and guilt, Billy.”

Guilt. I turned down a path in the garden, white roses hanging damp and heavy from thick shoots spiked with sharp thorns. Guilt will out, Dad used to say. Guilt will out, except if you’re dealing with a crazy person. Normal people just couldn’t keep guilt from showing, and all you had to do was know where to look for it. That was the hard part.

“Guilt has its own special look and sound.”

“Sound? What do you mean?”

“A catch in the voice, an uplift in tone. You can hear it all the time if you listen. It doesn’t even have to do with crime. It can be emotional.”

“How so?” Kaz asked, not quite believing me.

I stopped and looked at him. Well, he asked. “I heard it in your voice the other night. About your parents, and the suite at the Dorchester.”

“What? Am I guilty of a crime?” I could hear the defensiveness creep into his voice.

“You’re there, and they’re not. It was their place, and now it’s yours. Any normal person would feel guilty, can’t be helped. I’m sorry, Kaz.”

Sorry for his parents, sorry for telling him. He was silent for a minute, then turned and started walking again, watching the ground.

“No, no, you are right. Sometimes I feel like an impostor there. But it is all I have left.” He shrugged sadly. “I just never thought of it as guilt.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, gave a little squeeze, and let it drop.

“People don’t usually think about these things, Kaz. They feel them, act on them, but hardly ever think about them. There’s no reason to; it’s a part of you. A wife will stab her husband one day and honestly think that he said something that made her mad, so she knifed him. Maybe he’s been screwing around and it finally got to her, but she never admitted it to herself. She never thought through the little clues that she found, but they were there, eating at her. So one day he complains that the roast is burnt, and she puts the carving knife in his back.”

“Are these the things a Boston detective thinks about on a case? Self-deception, guilt, the knife in the back?”

“Cops always look for things that are out of place. Very little things, which sometimes lead to bigger things, like why a knife in the back.”

“So how do you look for these little things?”

It was like asking how you breathed or woke up in the morning. It was what a cop learned to do first thing, at least in my family. To look, really look, at every little thing.

“What do you look for when you walk into a room?” I asked him.

“A beautiful woman,” he smiled. “Books on the shelf, artwork… anything else would not be very interesting. Although a bar would attract my attention.”

“I like your approach, Kaz; it’s better than most. A cop will check the exits, look to see if anyone is carrying a hidden weapon, and sniff out any tension in the air automatically, just like you would scan the bookshelf for a rare book. Without even thinking about it.”

Kaz nodded thoughtfully. I could see him taking this in, comparing it with his experience.

“Sometimes you can feel something under the surface, something wrong. You can’t be sure what it is. Everything looks normal, but you just get a feeling that something is out of place, that all the little things don’t add up.”

“What do you do when you feel that?”

An obvious question. It was easy for me to talk about Kaz’s family, tell him what was going on inside his head. But it wasn’t that easy to even think about the first time I came up against that question, saw just what Dad had always told me about. One night, just after I got home off duty, Basher McGee came by the house, tipped his hat to Mom, and headed upstairs with Dad to the den. They shut the door, just like always, but their talk was loud, angry, and not contained by the thin plasterboard walls. Nothing understandable, except that the undercurrent of brewing trouble that Basher always brought with him had boiled over, and neither man was giving an inch.

Then there was silence. The house seemed empty, waiting for the sound of their anger to fill it again. I could hear Mom turn the faucet off in the kitchen as she stood in front of the sink, worried more by the quiet than the yelling. The upstairs door slammed open, bouncing off the wall and almost smacking Basher on the rebound as he crossed the threshold.

“You take it, you’re one of us, no better!” he yelled as he clomped down the stairs, tipped his cap again to Mom just as nice as you please, and let himself out the back door. I started to walk upstairs, but Mom put her hand on my arm. I shook it off, and didn’t look at her, embarrassed at how Basher had behaved toward Dad in his own house, embarrassed at shaking off the hand of my own mother. I gripped the banister and headed up toward the den.

The door was still open. Dad held a small box in his hand, the lamp-light just behind him lighting one side of his face and leaving the other in shadow. The box was wrapped in plain paper, tied by twine tightly knotted. His hand fell to his side, and he tossed the box into the waste-basket next to his desk. I didn’t move a muscle. He sat down at his desk, didn’t say a thing, just stared at the wall. I tried to move, to walk up to him, to go through that doorway and tell him I’d do anything he needed me to do.

I didn’t. I just stood there. He never looked over at me, and finally I walked to my room, shut the door, flopped down on my bed, picked up the latest issue of True Detective from my nightstand, and lost myself in the fiction, dreaming of blazing away at bad guys and watching them roll down the stairs.