Robert Bennett - The Company Man

Another handful of pages, another memory. He remembered a little black newsie no older than sixteen, shot four times next to a newspaper stand. Keeled over with one hand clutched around the leg of the stand as if trying to anchor himself to life. He had held a sheet of newspaper over his face, trying to prevent passersby from witnessing his death. Some curbside Julius Caesar who considered his fellow man too common to see his passing.

They had not found his killer. It went unfiled. Still he wrote.

Then when Garvey was done he sat looking at this new report. John Doe, found floating in a man-made river, washed away like the other refuse of this city. There were only three pages of it so far. Almost nothing.

He wondered how Hayes would look at it. He probably wouldn’t even bother. That was what made him good, plus the mad gift that ate his brain alive, thought Garvey. But it also made him weak. He would look for the flash and the glitter, things that intrigued and teased him. But without it there was no point to the chase. No fun.

This was not fun. Nor was it meant to be.

“Garvey?” said a voice.

He looked up and saw Collins sidling over, his hangdog face somehow even deeper and sadder in the light of the table lamps. “What are you doing here?” he said. “This isn’t your shift.”

“No, Lieutenant,” said Garvey. “I’m just waiting. I’ve got a body downstairs. Gibson’s going to start in on it in a second.”

Collins shook his head and leaned over Garvey’s shoulder to read his paperwork. His lieutenant was a big man, broad in the shoulders with a walrus mustache, but his droopy, pessimistic demeanor often made people forget his size. On the rare moments when he showed his anger he suddenly seemed to swell up and tower over people. Whether they were errant detectives or babbling suspects, it often had dramatic effects.

“Always gets to me,” he said. “How you look. Most cops, they’d do anything to get away.”

“I know,” said Garvey.

“You think this one’s got any promise?”

Garvey helplessly lifted his hands and dropped them. “It’s a piece of shit.”

“Hm. No one likes a floater, that’s for sure. What about your spook? The blondie, did you bring him in?”

“Yeah. He didn’t have anything. Makes sense. If our boy was McNaughton he was definitely lower-level. Insignificant, I suppose.”

“I hate that little shit. I don’t see why you run around with him.”

“He gets bodies filed.”

“I still don’t like him,” said Collins. “He stinks of that goddamn company he works for.”

Garvey hesitated, tongue between his lips. “Lieutenant?”

“Yeah?”

“Mind if I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“This prioritization thing. I heard that came in from Brightly. You know, over at-”

“I know who he is,” said Collins sharply.

“Well. Is it true, sir?”

Collins eyed him sourly, hunching up his shoulders until the muscles bunched around his neck. His gin-blossom cheeks deepened in tint until they were nearly purple. “You know what, I’m going to suggest you put your attention elsewhere,” he said. He reached out and touched the files on his desk with one thick finger. “Maybe on this, eh? Does that sound agreeable to you?”

Garvey nodded and stared into his desk. “Right,” he said. He glanced sideways and sighed as he watched Collins hulk back into his office.

“Detective?” said a voice.

He looked up. A scrawny boy in a white smock stood peeking into the Homicide office. “Yeah?” Garvey said.

“We’re about to begin,” said the boy.

“All right.”

Garvey stood and followed the boy across the rotunda and down the steps, then across the lower levels to the bleached tile stairs that wound down to where the dead slept and doctors did their best to make them speak.

The air grew cool down in the basement. The light was so lifeless here it was almost a different type of dark. Dusky jars of pink fluid lurked on shelves and blades winked from nearby rolling tables. The nauseating fragrance of formaldehyde and God knew what else floated in the room like a fog. And somewhere among it all was Gibson, overweight and darkly humorous, a cigarette dangling from his thick lips. No one had asked why he came seeking this job. It was the type of question you didn’t ask because you might get an answer.

“Heyo, Garv,” said Gibson. “Long time no see.”

“Not long enough.”

“You wound me, Garv,” he said. “You wound me. Who’s our lucky boy tonight?”

“No idea. That’s the problem.”

“I know. I was just making conversation.” He led Garvey to the little cabinets that hid the dead. Their shoes were loud on the tile floor, painfully so. The morgue was usually silent except for the hiss and chuckle of the pneumatic tubes in the walls as messages and packages shot in from somewhere out in the city. Other hospitals and labs, perhaps. Garvey had heard the contents were often gruesome. There was a story of a jar of fingers that had been misdirected up to Vice with the day’s mail, and Garvey wasn’t sure whether to believe it.

Gibson came to one cabinet door and offered Garvey a small jar of perfumed salve. “Here you go,” he said.

“I don’t need it.”

He chuckled. “You will.”

Garvey looked at it, then at the wall of small metal doors. “You got a ripe one?”

“Riper than a homegrown tomato,” Gibson said cheerfully.

“Then yeah. Yeah, I do.”

He laughed again and tossed it to him. “Smart boy.”

Garvey opened it and smeared a thumbful of the salve across his upper lip. Then he took a chair, put it next to the table, opened up the report, and began to write. Gibson and his attendant glanced at each other and Gibson smirked and shook his head. Then they opened the door, reached in, and pulled out the tray carrying the morning’s load.

His color and thickness had changed slightly, but that was all. His face had drained off some water and perhaps he had lost more of what little blood he had left. But overall it was the same. Garvey looked at his thin, intelligent face, his retreating hairline. Strong, worn hands, scarred lower arms. Genitals shrunken against the inside of his thigh. A man like any other, washed up on cement shores.

“Well,” Garvey said. “At least we know he wasn’t killed by denners.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Gibson.

“He’s still got a face, doesn’t he?”

Gibson chuckled and then began his inspection, chanting his litany of facts as he went along. Cause of death, estimation of age, summary description of wounds. The Latin terms for each body part formed some strange incantation in Garvey’s head. He and Gibson’s attendant wrote as fast as they could.

Garvey did this with nearly every homicide he caught. No other detective did, choosing instead to rely upon Gibson’s reports. Gibson was a fine doctor and did his job well, and Gibson knew that it wasn’t a sign of Garvey’s doubt that he was down here whenever he could be, watching their grim procedure. He knew it was something else.

Garvey did not know the word “vigil,” but he didn’t need to. This was a ritual for him, even though it had no name. It was a process of documentation, of marking the passage of the dead and the beginning of Garvey’s attempt to exact some sort of justice. And that was what their job was, at heart. They were men who noted deaths and attempted to change the world because of them. To put their killers to justice, perhaps, but what was that beyond a way of saying that this man mattered, that his life was important, and so his death should affect his killer’s life in turn?

And so he listened. And wrote.

He was considering the official phrasing of one of his sentences when he heard Gibson say, “Did you hear that, Detective?”