Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

"Is there anything else, Lieutenant?" Applebee said-trying to fill the silence, Ramsey thought, fearing he might have given himself away.

Ramsey considered getting tough with him but thought better of it. He wasn't ready to go so far as to put his hands on the geezer and, without that, he didn't think the old man would crack. More likely, he'd just get on the phone when Ramsey was gone and warn his daughter that the big bad policeman was on his way.

So Ramsey gave him a brief smile instead. "No," he said. "Nothing else. I'm sorry to bother you, but I did have to check." He went into his wallet, offered the old man his card. "If Conor contacts you or you hear anything, please get in touch."

Applebee took the card without a word. Without a glance at it, he stuck it in his sweater pocket.

The irony and disapproval in the old man's eyes and the irony in the eyes of the angel of judgment and his own self-aggravating superstition continued to annoy Ramsey, but he exercised his famous self-control-merely smiled again and nodded. None of it mattered, none of it was to the point. It was best in this situation just to be polite and move on.

The daughter was the one he was really after.

He knew her. The moment he set eyes on her, he understood exactly who Teresa was. The good girl, he thought, the church girl. It figured, her being Applebee's daughter and all. And it gave him fresh insight into Conor's trajectory.

He was sitting in his Charger now, parked in a no-stopping zone in back of the school where she taught. It was a Westside private school, a big old cathedral-like building of red brick with rounded mission gables. There was a fenced-off asphalt courtyard out in back with some playground equipment and some painted white lines for field games. Ramsey was parked in front of that.

The lunch hour was just passing. At the sound of a bell, the boys poured out into the yard in their neckties and the girls in their plaid skirts, all of them shouting and laughing together, a surflike roar. Ramsey was just about to get out of his car and go inside to find Teresa when he saw her step into one of the rear doorways. She stood there, watching the children at their play.

He knew her face from her license photo in the computer, but he hadn't had a real sense of her until he saw her now. Now he felt a sort of helpless admiration for her and a dark resentment toward her and a dark attraction. The good girl, the church girl. His wife had been one of the same. She was the girl who didn't drink or do drugs or smoke or party. The girl who sang in the choir and decorated her notebooks with marker drawings of hearts and flowers. The girl who said "Aw" when she saw pictures of small animals and "Oh no! What're you going to do?" when her friends got themselves knocked up. She was the girl who walked swishing past when the brothers talked jazz at her passing ass, because she wasn't going to come over here, baby, not even if she was so fine, aw really, he'd be so careful, swear. She had her life all laid out in her mind, her plans confided to her diary, and they didn't include no baby-baby-baby, because she wasn't going to have no baby before the clock struck married. She was that girl.

And here was the thing about it. Girls like that-for some reason, they were love magnets for weak and damaged men. It was some kind of save-me-mommy deal. His wife had told him all about it. They wanted her sympathy, her kindness, her "Oh, you poor thing." They wanted her to make them better than they were, but, fucked-uppedly enough, they wanted to drag her down to their level, too. "I used to tell them if they wanted salvation, they could get themselves a Bible," Ramsey's wife had said. "If you want me, you gotta walk like a man."

That's what they held out for, these girls. Men. Military men. Cops. Long-haul collegiates going for the big degrees, business, engineering, even medicine or law. That's what his wife had done-she'd held out for him. This one, too-Teresa. Got herself a hero soldier, the records said. Only she got handed the short stick of God, didn't she? Husband killed in Sandland. So she was stuck with the kid-and-no-husband scenario, like it was nigger fate.

The thought drew Ramsey's mind back in bitterness and melancholy to his wife. Who had gotten the short stick, too, in the long run, you might say. But that was a whole 'nother story, and he didn't have time to torture himself with it now.

He got out of the Charger. There was a gate in the schoolyard fence. It was padlocked and an older man, a janitor in dirty greens, was sitting in a chair beside it in lieu of a guard. Ramsey showed the man his shield through the diamond links. The janitor rose creakily and opened the padlock.

As Ramsey walked across the yard toward Teresa, the children chased each other all around him. Their surflike roar broke into individual voices, cascades of laughter and wordless cries. These seemed to feed the melancholy in him somehow, seemed to increase his brooding awareness of the evil fate arrayed against him. So, too, did the sight of Teresa as he came closer and closer to her, as she reminded him more and more of his wife.

She had moved from the doorway to settle a dispute between two boys over a kickball. She was turned half away from him and didn't see him approaching. She was bending forward to talk to the children. His eyes went over the curves of her body, and over her profile. Why isn't she teaching in the Northern District public schools where they really need her? he thought-because he wanted to resent her for something other than the fact that she reminded him of his wife, as the laughing children reminded him of his son and daughter.

"Ms. Grey?" he said. He flashed his badge again as she straightened and turned to look at him. As she came around to face him close up-gave him the whole cornball valentine-shaped face with its high cheekbones and warm brown eyes-the jolt of his attraction to her was startlingly sharp. He was painfully aware that he had once been the sort of man she would have held out for, that now he only seemed to be that man-as his wife had finally understood.

"Mrs. Grey, yes," she corrected him-which he also resented, without quite knowing why.

Then her eyes went to his badge, and they were startled and filled with worry. She hadn't expected him, hadn't known he was coming. The old man hadn't called her-or maybe he'd tried to and she kept her phone off at work. Conor hadn't contacted her either. Which meant she probably didn't know about Gutterson yet. The news wouldn't have made it onto TV-in fact, there was only one television station and maybe a website or two where anyone still thought a murder in this city was news.

He said, "I'm Lieutenant Ramsey," and she turned to him expectantly. He couldn't tell whether she recognized his name or not. Was it possible Conor had never mentioned him to her? Or was she just pretending that he never had? He couldn't tell.

"Mrs. Grey, do you know a man named Henry Conor?"

"Yes, I know Henry. He did some work for my father. Why, is something wrong?"

"What sort of work?" he asked her. "Carpentry?"

"Some… carving work, that's right."

The little hesitation gave him everything he needed. She was not thinking about Conor's carpentry. She was thinking about the man himself. She was the girl in question, all right.

"Is that it? Is that your whole relationship to him? He worked for your father?"

"Well, I'm not sure what you mean," she said reluctantly. And then-in case he already knew-she confessed: "We were friendly. In fact, he took me and my son to the fair yesterday."

"To the fair."

She made the classic female defensive gesture, defiantly brushing her hair back with her hand. "What's this about?"

"We're looking to question Mr. Conor about a police detective who was found dead in his apartment this morning. He was killed with one of Conor's hammers."