Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

“I’m not sure she was trying to kill him. It was just anger,” I said. “She never really believed Shiloh was going to get any evidence he could use. And I think”-I paused, looking at Sinclair now-“that she really felt she’d paid her debt to society, through all the good she was doing in Minnesota. Maybe she even felt she’d repaid Marnie Hahn’s memory.”

Sinclair was signing. “And when Mike wouldn’t let it go at that,” Ligieia translated, “when she knew he was really going to make her pay, she got angry again. Just like she got angry at Hahn, years ago, the girl who was ruining her life.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding. Sinclair had Shiloh’s broad, contextual intuition. And in addition, I thought, she understood her brother as well. She saw that he’d been angered as a teenager by Marnie Hahn’s cold-blooded murder and had stoked and fed that long-banked anger during a long, seemingly fruitless investigation that had finally caught fire.

And then I told Sinclair and Ligieia the rest, the part that I thought of as the coda to the story.

Marnie Hahn, Shiloh had told me late the night of the arrest, was a poor man’s lamb.

“Mmm, that’s a biblical thing, right?” I asked. The reference itself wasn’t familiar to me, but Shiloh’s way of making allusions was.

“In the Old Testament,” Shiloh said, “King David desires a married woman, Bathsheba, and sleeps with her. And Bathsheba becomes pregnant, and when David realizes there is no covering up for his sin, he sends the husband to the front in the war. He sends the man to certain death. And it works, the man dies.

“To make him understand that his actions were wrong, the prophet Nathan tells David a story about a rich man who has a whole flock of sheep-that’s King David, metaphorically-who kills the only lamb his impoverished neighbor owns rather than give up one from his own flock.”

“Was Marnie the Hahns’ only child?” I asked him.

“Yes,” Shiloh said. “But that’s not really the point. Annelise is an only child, too.” He fell silent for a moment, then explained. “Annelise and Owen had just about everything. Marnie had almost nothing. And what little she had, they took.”

That night, I’d heard in his voice the unflinching right-and-wrong creed of his youth, and I wondered if such a great ideological expanse had, after all, separated Reverend Shiloh and his son.

When I finished the story, Sinclair signed Thank you. For the story, I supposed. I wanted to thank her for letting me tell it. It had restored my lost equilibrium.

She rose and crossed to me again, looking down at her daughter’s flushed, sleeping face. She bent to take Hope into her arms. Standing, she nodded toward the hall in invitation. It was time to sleep. Ligieia had gone ahead of us into the hallway.

Before Sinclair looked away, I spoke without preamble, facing her directly so she could read my lips. “Did you ever know Mike to use drugs?” It was the question I hadn’t asked earlier.

Sinclair furrowed her brow in what seemed to be genuine bafflement, and she shook her head, No.

Just before I slept, I thought I heard the old-fashioned clatter of a typewriter, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to get up and find out, and then the sound was fading to nothing, like the sound of a passing train receding into the distance.

“Run it by me again?” I said to Sorenson, the watch commander at the Third Precinct in Minneapolis. My bare feet were cold on the kitchen linoleum at home. Minnesota seemed to have plunged ahead into near-winter cold while I had been in the warmth of the West.

“A vice guy brought a hooker in on a soliciting bust. She wants to trade some information, but she says she won’t talk to anyone but Detective Pribek.”

“Information on what?”

“Major felony is all she’ll say.” Sorenson coughed. “I know you’re supposed to be taking some personal time, because of the situation with your husband, but she’s asking for you.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll come down.”

I’d expected a skinny drug user scarcely out of her teens, hardly attractive, ready to drop the dime on her pimp for something he’d done. Someone far different waited for me in the interrogation room. Her age was hard to judge. She had the perfect skin and lustrous hair of youth, but her gaze and especially her poise reminded me of an older woman.

She’d shed a fur-lined coat to reveal a white leather dress that bared her arms. The heat in the Third Precinct building was generous, although my feet were still cold.

“I hear you’ve got something to tell me,” I said.

“Got a cigarette?” she said.

I was inclined to say no, to exert some control over this meeting. But looking at her, I got the feeling that she wasn’t nervous at all. She might very well refuse to proceed until she got her cigarette.

In the hall I flagged down the third-watch detective, a born-again Christian I had a casual acquaintance with. “I need a smoke,” I said, and he nodded. “Matches, too.”

The hooker said nothing when I returned with her cigarette. She took the cigarette and matches and lit up, making a prodigious cloud of smoke. Then she took one drag, exhaled, and stubbed out the cigarette.

“Thanks,” she said throatily.

A power trip. Fuck her information. “It’s been real,” I said. “Enjoy your ninety days.”

When I was at the door she said, “Don’t you want to hear about your husband?”

I stopped and turned.

Her hard eyes traveled me like mine did her, from my wool hat and gray T-shirt down to my salt-stained winter boots. I hadn’t bothered changing into my on-the-job clothes, since it was the middle of the night, and if she’d asked for me specifically, she obviously knew who I was.

“I killed him,” she said, and crossed legs encased in hip-high boots.

I took a seat across the table from her. Standing was a position of greater authority, but I wanted to get my hands out of her line of sight in case they started shaking.

“I doubt it,” I said mildly. “Can you prove it?”

“I have ads in the weekly papers. He called me,” she said. “Looking for sex. When I got here tonight, I recognized him from the picture hanging up on the bulletin board.”

“I said proof, not circumstantial details.” Why are my feet still so goddamn cold?

“I can tell you where he’s buried.”

“Bullshit. If you got away with murder you wouldn’t be here confessing.”

“Great in bed, wasn’t he?”

“Knock it off. You read about Shiloh in the Star Tribune and decided to have some fun jerking the cops around with a fake confession.”

“No, I wanted to get a look at you. He told me that you once picked up a rattlesnake and killed it by breaking its neck. Is that true?” she asked.

“Yes.” Now my hands really were shaking. She shouldn’t have known that.

“I asked him why he was out looking for strange pussy with a woman like that at home,” she said. She leaned forward to speak confidentially. “Your husband told me you could never really let go in bed because of what your brother did to you when you were young.”

The slamming of my heart woke me. It took a moment for me to remember where I was. A poster advertising the Ashland Shakespeare Festival brought it back: I was in New Mexico, Saturday morning, in Shiloh’s sister’s home.

I’d slept on the couch in Sinclair’s study, with motley blankets wrapped around me. My feet, bare and escaping the covers, were cold.

Stiff as an old dog that had slept on a hard floor, I threw the blankets back and rose. Limberness returned slowly as I folded the blankets and stacked them as neatly as possible on the couch, placing the pillow on top. Then I bent to gather up my things. As I did, I rooted through my duffel bag to find Shiloh’s Kalispell Search and Rescue T-shirt, suddenly feeling a desire to wear it today.