Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Just one more shitty cowardly thing,” he said.

He sits down across from her with the badge clipped to his bare chest.

He says, “The punk look.” Stares with his mouth open and his eyes like an old dog’s and says, “The punk look. Huh?”

“I guess.”

382 / Denis Johnson

“Huh?”

“Yeah.”

“The punk look.”

“Right.”

“Damn right.”

He took the clip-on holster from his belt and placed it in front of him on the table. After a couple of deep breaths he removed the blue.45

from its holster and held it loosely in a two-handed grip, his elbows on the table again and the barrel nodding more or less her way.

She’s white, shitpants afraid: “Man, I’m not happy about this.” He looked at her standing still with one hand on the table and one knee turned slightly inward and her eyes on him careful and steadily seeking.

He said, “You have true grace.”

He held his gold badge in his hand while Jenny talked about her car. The Wankle rotary engine possessed a limited life, and a rebuild presented only problems, insurmountable problems, considering the types of mechanics in this area—

“I like a big V-8. Wouldn’t own anything else,” he said.

She stopped talking and crossed her legs and sat there looking at the phone. Until Merton created another mess, she had nothing else to do.

The badge wasn’t responsible. It wasn’t the badge’s fault. The badge caused nothing. It didn’t give you the disease, it only warned the others that you had it.

He clipped it to his uniform pocket and got on the phone to the coroner’s office in Ukiah. It had been eleven days now. He explained this to the administrative assistant on the other end and told her he couldn’t understand it. “I’m waiting eleven days and nowhere around here is there any letter calling me to the inquest. William Fairchild, the inquest, I assume you’ll need me to testify. I found the body — first on the scene,” he said. “I found the body.”

“William Fairchild? Nothing’s scheduled. Was that an alias?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Give me another name.”

“Ma’am. His name was William Fairchild. Shot in the head.”

“Oh, the Point Arena thing. Oh yeah. Nothing’s scheduled yet.”

“I don’t get all this, not entirely,” he told the voice. “Do you have the Already Dead / 383

final report there? One-page thing, Sheriff’s letterhead, addressed to the county coroner?”

“I do not, sir.”

“What about the inquest?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think there’ll be one. The Sheriff’s people did their report, and the coroner’s ruling it self-inflicted.”

“Based on their report? What about the position of the wound?”

“I don’t know about a position, sir.”

“He got it from behind, in the back of the skull. Doesn’t seem likely he blew his own head off, does it?”

“You can tell the coroner that. I don’t know, maybe I have it wrong.

Maybe he’ll want an inquest. Mainly it was because of the note. Oh, right. It says here they want the inquest deferred pending verification of his hand on the suicide note.”

“It says that where?”

“Right here, the letter from the Sheriff — September twenty-first?”

“I thought you didn’t have it.”

“I thought so too. Sorry.”

“Well Jesus, friend, the earthquake hasn’t happened yet. Point Arena’s still on the map, you know? Could you fax us a copy please? And fax us everything you get about this from now on?”

“Keep your tone civil, please, Officer.”

“Aaah — pretty please,” he said.

“We’re all on the same side, remember?”

“Advise us of all developments please.”

“Everything’s on its way.”

When the fax came through, Navarro held the one-paragraph communication in his grip, his head beating with rage. Maybe the coroner had seen an autopsy report, but these three small sentences made no reference to one, only to a lab report, which was not attached. He called the lab in San Francisco. They’d transmitted a report to somebody, somewhere; it was listed in their document file, a technician told him.

“Fax me that mother.”

“To be faxed it has to be printed.”

He kept a civil tone. “How long?”

“Requests are normally processed within forty-eight hours.”

“Who do I talk to to get it read over the phone?”

“You talk to me, and hang on while I get clearance to put it on my 384 / Denis Johnson

screen. Or I can call you back in a minute, but it’s better to leave it off the hook, so I don’t take ten other calls.”

“I’ll hold.”

In a minute the lab tech rang on. “I remember this one,” he said.

“Okay. The victim’s communication.”

“Right.”

“Did you get what the writing said?”

“Yeah. Eat More Pussy.”

“Beg pardon, now?”

“Yeah. You have to get a few feet away. One of the forensics guys noticed it. Then I think he stole it. One of them did.”

“Wait a minute. What are you doing to me?”

“What.”

“You’re jerking my head.”

“No.”

“Yes. Are we talking about the same thing?”

“The hat?”

“What hat?”

“The baseball cap.”

“Look. Are you looking at the lab report? Would you read me the name, please?”

“William Fairchild?”

“That’s it. What does it more or less say?”

“Yeah…Blood is O positive like the majority of people, brain, bone fragments, powder, copper, steel, et cetera consistent with a bullet wound. Graphite on his fingers. I have solved the problem.”

“Who? You? What about the writing. There was pencil writing.”

“That’s the graphite, the writing, his last words: I have solved the problem.”

He takes the badge out and nails it at the level of his chest to the scabrous bark of some kind of oak tree, the hammer coming at it: pring! — pring! — pring! like the big maul stamping out badge 714 in the original Dragnet shows.

They all said it, fat old cops who ended up retired in their trailers scattered with fishing lures and empties. Sorry about the crap. Nobody to clean up around here. It was par. It was rote. It was standard to the core. He felt like a loser in this shipwreck of bullshit…Busted by the badge. He stepped backward several yards.

Already Dead / 385

I get you thinking it’ll work. Love you in a storm. Vanish like a magic light.

He stands looking over the series of idiot ridges toward their vanish-ing, then wanders toward the Firebird toed in from the dirt road with its engine idling and one door wide open. He pitches the hammer into the back, drags the plastic carrier over the gearshift from the passenger seat and thumbs the latches and takes out the Colt.357—stainless steel, the finish they call “Ultimate”—and three speed loaders. And there you have it. The cylinder out, loader in, the chambers full and the cylinder closed.

He let the empty loader drop anywhere, put the others in the right and left shirt pockets of his uniform, and turned and fired. A bit of bark jumped onto the ground, and he stood there dumbstruck while the gun blast travelled the valleys like a wheel on a track.

Smoke hangs in the air a second, and then a puff of wind sucks it away.

He sent another and then several more down after it, squeezing the trigger regularly until the badge disappeared. He’d blown it from the spectrum. But he saw it off to his right, winking in the grass. Retrieved it, fixed it to the oak again — ran its new bull’s-eye down onto a shag — and fell back five paces to reload.

He approaches the badge with his arm straight out, firing after each step forward till it flies from its tree and spins over into the grass, and then he reloads and stands over it shooting, follows it where it takes a hop and shoots again, stalks it among the shadows of the oaks, shooting, shooting, shooting till there’s nothing left.