Brad Parks - The Good Cop

She informed me I had missed a similar amount of nothing in the office. The Belleville Police had promised some kind of statement in “a few hours,” though they had started making that pledge a few hours ago. The Newark Police were in total shutdown mode-Hakeem Rogers’s office was letting all calls go through to voice mail and no e-mails had been answered.

Even Buster Hays’s normally inexhaustible Rolodex was, so far, getting shut out. Not that I had lost faith in him. It was not quite ten o’clock, still early in the news-gathering day.

“So, anything else I need to know?” Tina asked, and I could tell she was in a hurry to get off the phone.

“No, I guess not … except … well, we never got a chance to, uh, talk about what happened last night.”

“What, the sex?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, it was fine. Better than fine. I’m sorry, I’m just distracted. It was great.”

“Well, thanks, but I wasn’t looking for a grade on my report card. I meant … are you, I don’t know, okay with everything?”

“Oh, honey,” she said with a chuckle, “I’m not in high school anymore. You’re not exactly my first. Daddy isn’t coming after you with a shotgun.”

“I just … After all this time, I didn’t expect … I didn’t go over there thinking anything like that would-”

“I swear, you’re more of a girl than I am sometimes,” she interrupted. “Look, we’re grown-ups. We had sex. It happens. Not to me a lot lately, but it does happen.”

I slid through a toll plaza going perhaps a little too fast, still not feeling I was getting my point across. “But did you, I don’t know, did you mean for it to happen? Was it the wine? Was it an accident?”

“What do you mean? Like did I just accidentally get naked and stumble onto your cock? No, I’d say that was pretty intentional.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

Tina gave an exasperated sigh, then blurted out, “Look, you were a booty call, okay?”

“I was?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to have sex last night, and it was either you or a random bar hookup. I didn’t feel like going out. So it was you. My God, what did you think that was about? I was barely wearing any clothing to start with, and then I began taking it all off. I would have been offended if you hadn’t had sex with me.”

“Oh. Right,” I said, and the conversation took a moment to lag as I thought of how to form my next question in a way that wouldn’t make me sound like an insensitive lout.

“What, you feel cheap now?” she said.

“No, I … No, that’s cool. What guy doesn’t want to be a booty call?”

“Great. I’ll talk to…”

“Wait, just … we weren’t … we didn’t exactly use protection. Was this … are we … am I going to be attending Lamaze classes soon?”

“First of all, don’t be an idiot, no one uses Lamaze anymore. All it does is make the woman hyperventilate and deprive the baby of oxygen. Haven’t you read any childbirth books? Second, I’m on the pill. So you have nothing to worry about.”

“The pill? Since when?”

“Since … I don’t know, a couple months now.”

“But what happened to … all your plans? Last I knew, you had everything from a car seat to a Bumbo Baby in your closet.”

“Yeah, I regifted the car seat and gave the Bumbo Baby to Goodwill.”

“But … why?”

“I just decided I’m just not cut out for that,” she said. “Lately, I feel like I can barely keep my own stuff together. Somehow adding another life-form into the mix didn’t seem too smart, especially if it was a life-form that was going to be totally dependent on me for its physical and emotional development.”

“Oh,” I said, because sometimes I like to offer my friends and loved ones brilliant insights like that.

“Anyhow, I have to go,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Okay, bye,” I said to an already empty phone line.

* * *

The Malibu had made enough trips to Rutledge Avenue in the past three days that I wondered if it was going to steer itself there. Still, I kept my hands on the wheel-just in case-and arrived a few minutes later.

I hastily ditched my car a few doors down, the only place I could find a spot, and walked briskly toward the front porch, where I was confronted by Mimi’s doorbell button. I pushed it and waited. At least I knew she’d answer this time.

As I looked down at her leaf-insulated flower bed, I pressed the button again, growing frustrated. She had invited me there all of fifteen minutes earlier. What happened? She slipped into narcoleptic slumber?

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.

I backed away from the porch and stepped down onto the sidewalk to have a look at the house. There were no lights on and no one making out in the second-floor windows, either. I whipped out my phone and dialed Mimi-maybe she had just taken the baby for a walk? — but didn’t get an answer.

Walking back up on the porch, I decided to knock this time. I did knuckles first, then switched to the butt of my palm, which is louder and, besides, it hurts less. But that got about as much attention from inside the house as the doorbell did.

“Mimi?” I eventually yelled at the door. “Mimi, it’s Carter. Are you there?”

A woman from the other side of the duplex appeared on her front porch, which was no more than ten feet away from the Kippses’ entrance.

“She ain’t here,” the woman said.

“But she just called me,” I said, as if this woman, upon hearing the injustice of this fact, could somehow change it.

“Well, she left.”

“How long ago?”

“You just missed her. Two minutes ago, maybe?”

“Was she alone?”

“No, she was with a man.”

A man? Another one? I wondered if this guy knew what the life expectancy was for men who hung around Mimi Kipps. “What did the man look like?” I asked.

The woman shifted on her heels and appraised me with suspicion, giving me the kind of look you give someone who is suddenly asking too many questions and might actually be a stalker. So I added, “I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner . I was supposed to be meeting her here for an interview.”

“Oh, well I think it was her preacher. It looked like they were in a hurry.”

Her preacher? What was he doing back here? I thought he was finally out of the picture. “Was he a big guy?” I asked, holding my hand above my head to indicate a man of some stature. “About yay high? Probably wearing a suit? Glasses?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

The woman was leaning her weight back toward the door, giving me a “can I go now?” look. So I said, “Thanks for your help. Sorry for the noise.”

She disappeared inside, and I buried my hands in my jacket, hunched my shoulders, and began walking back down the sidewalk, feeling annoyed. I had told Mimi I’d be there in fifteen minutes. It had taken me maybe twenty. Where had she rushed off to with Pastor Al in such a supposed hurry? An emergency prayer meeting?

True, I was only coming to her house because I thought she was going to confess to murder. But still. Rude is rude.

I was still stewing about this when I saw a silver Mercedes cruising with quiet majesty down the street toward me. It was one of the larger kind, an E-class maybe, and it had tinted glass and tricked-out chrome wheels. I’m not sure what made me even give it a second glance-other than that its list price was probably about forty grand higher than any other car on the street. But I was still looking at it when its rear driver’s side window rolled down maybe six inches.

That, in itself, was curious. It was forty-five degrees outside, not windows-down weather. So I kept staring.