Т Паркер - The Fallen

“Talk to me, April,” I said.

April spoke for almost half an hour before we asked her another question. Her colors and shapes were true. She was fairly intelligent but naive. She didn’t seem to harbor illusions about herself. She didn’t make a lot of excuses, which, you learn very early as a cop, is what criminals do, with endless energy and creativity. She felt bad about some of the things she had done, which is something that criminals almost never do, because they’re too busy blaming someone else.

Home was a crammed-in tract in Temecula, a bustling little city north of San Diego. Dad was long gone, Mom involved with boyfriends, little brother a petty thief and drug user. April knew her effect on men, but the boys her age were immature and totally random. At a party one night a friend’s father had gotten her aside and offered her a hundred dollars to take her clothes off out in the pool house but she said no. This was a year ago. Later some of the tough chicks at school said you could get men at the mall to give you two hundred bucks if you’d get in their car and do oral. Use a rubber, never take off so much as your bra, it was over in five minutes and if you did it five or six times a week you had enough for just about anything you wanted. April had said no to that, too, though she’d hung out and watched her friends hustle and had come close to trying it. This was last June, after graduation. By fall she’d had it. Always thought of that Thanksgiving as the most miserable day of her life. So she ran away to San Diego and hostessed in the Gaslamp for a while but that paid minimum and Hooters was hiring but she wasn’t twenty-one yet and it seemed like every time she turned around some guy was hitting on her, guys a lot older than her, half of them with wedding rings on, made her wonder why anybody got married in the first place. Then, you know, she needed some work on her teeth and she got pneumonia and didn’t have health insurance for the antibiotic and her car tanked and she heard about the Squeaky Clean Madam from one of her new friends, Carrie Ann, and... well, yes, she had actually met one of Jordan’s spot callers and got “approved,” and Carrie took her over to meet this guy Jimmy, who she didn’t know until two days ago was really named Garrett Asplundh, and he paid her five hundred bucks to come back to this apartment and they talked for pretty much the whole night and when they were done April wasn’t going to be a Squeaky Clean anymore, she was going to live here, get a straight job, which she did, and save up for a better car and her own place.

“Did you have sex with him?” asked McKenzie.

April shook her head. “Never.”

“Did you accept gifts or money from him?”

“Well, yeah. I did. All this.”

April admitted how unreal it might sound but Jimmy had something that went straight into her heart and saw everything she was and made her be totally honest with herself and the world around her.

“He never asked you for sex?” asked McKenzie.

April shook her head again. “No. I would have, too. I wanted to please him. Because I think he’d have done anything for me. He was like a good father. He had standards and you wanted to live up to them.”

He had ethics, I thought.

“And now?” she said very quietly. “I can’t believe they killed him. I just can’t believe it.”

“Tell us about the last night you saw him,” said McKenzie.

“He came here about seven-thirty. I was done at the camera stand at six so I’d been here maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Camera stand?”

“Oh, duh. I work at SeaWorld. The stand for disposables and film and videotape and stuff.”

“What did Garrett want? Why did he come here?”

“He was checking up on me. Usually every other day. At least three or four times a week. We’d try to make it at a mealtime but couldn’t always. I mean, we both worked.”

“Just checking up on you?” asked McKenzie.

“Yes, just checking up, believe it or not.” There was an edge to her voice as she glanced at McKenzie. Like she was talking back to her mother.

McKenzie looked at me. By now she is impressed by my “instincts” about whether or not people are being truthful. I was waiting for the red squares of deception to roll out of April’s mouth but they didn’t come. No symbols or colors at all, which is how most conversations go. So I nodded.

“What?” asked April.

“Nothing,” I said. “Go on.”

“He was random that night,” said April. “He was all, ‘I can’t have dinner with you and I can’t stay long.’ I’m all, ‘I’m fine, I’ll be okay. I’ve got some laundry to do and this cute guy from the freeze stand — that’s at SeaWorld, too — he’s going to meet me out at the movies.’ And Jimmy was fine with that.”

“Whatever,” said McKenzie, frowning. She wasn’t buying April’s story.

“Whatever nothing,” said April.

“What time did he leave here?” I asked.

“Around eight.”

“Where was he going? Why the hurry?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t say. But I got the feeling he was looking forward to something. Like he was going to do something he really wanted to. Like he was eager.”

McKenzie’s pen shot across the pad.

“What was he wearing?”

“That’s hard. Jimmy was a really cool dresser.”

“Close your eyes,” I said. “Picture where you were in this apartment. And think of what you talked about.”

She closed her eyes. Took her time. Then, “Hmmm. Oh, duh, black suit and white shirt, and he changed his necktie before he left here. At first he had on a gold one, which I remember because it’s the color of my new Mazda. I’m pretty sure it’s still here, in Jimmy’s room. But before he left, he put on a light blue one. Very cool.”

We sat for a moment without talking. I remembered Garrett Asplundh’s pale blue tie, drenched and splattered. I listened to a car passing down on the avenue, bass loud enough to quiver the Seabreeze windows and the singer’s voice sharp with anger over his bitches. I was trying to fit the singer and Garrett Asplundh into the same world but it didn’t work. Maybe that’s why Garrett was dead. Though maybe the singer was dead, too.

“He said lots of things,” said April. “He told me about his daughter that drowned and his wife. He told me about being a cop before he was an Ethics guy. I called him ‘E-man.’ Anyway, he talked about making yourself. About how good things make you stronger and bad things make you weaker. About what’s true and what’s not and how you can tell them apart. And the scams people will run on you. About creating character and the cost of behavior and losing people you love. Jimmy knew all about that. I didn’t understand everything or agree with everything. He was trying to figure out his own stuff, not just mine. He was hard on himself and on me, too. But it was all good. And once he told me something that I thought was so poetic and true. It was about him. He told me he was afraid of losing himself in the spirit of the chase.”

“Afraid of losing himself in the spirit of the chase,” I said.

“Yes,” said April. “Those were Jimmy’s exact words. I remembered them like you remember lines from a song you really like.”

“Why were they true about him?” asked McKenzie, without looking up. I could see that she was writing carefully, to get those words just as Garrett had said them.

“Well,” said April, “because he was looking for something extremely important.”

“Like what?” asked McKenzie.

“I have no idea. I don’t know if he even knew. He always told me not to let the questions become the answers. Don’t let the path become the woods. And I think what he meant about the spirit of the chase was that the spirit was leading him away from what he wanted. It’s like, the faster you chase, the further away you get from your goal. But he couldn’t help himself from chasing, you know?”