John Goldbach - The Devil and the Detective

While Elaine slept I sat up awake trying to think what my next move would be. I really was at a loss: sleeping with her, not surprisingly, threw me for a loop. I knew I wanted to be around her, though, as much as I possibly could be, and that in fact was my plan, that is to say, to be around her as much as possible. I watched her sleep and felt a calm I hadn’t felt for a long time, even though she might’ve killed her husband not twenty-four hours earlier. Her eyelashes were incredible. The idea of eyelashes once again became incredible to me, while I watched her sleep, breathing softly, her mouth slightly opened. Her lips looked dry and her face younger than when awake. I closed my eyes and thought of the image of Elaine sleeping; feeling unburdened, I drifted off.

When I woke up I was alone. I knew I was alone immediately, before opening my eyes. I felt around nonetheless. Elaine wasn’t there. I sat up in bed. I looked around the room. I called out her name — ‘Elaine, Elaine, Elaine.’ I got out of bed and put on my pants and T-shirt and went downstairs, the whole time periodically calling out her name. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the den or the living room. I opened the front door. Her bmw was still in the laneway, exactly as she’d left it. Across the street sat an unmarked police car, a blue Ford, and the officer behind the wheel perked up when he saw me at the front door. I waved and shut the door. ‘Elaine!’ I yelled. No answer. The house was silent save for a low-level hum. I was worried, though not yet panicked. I checked every washroom in the house. There were five. I checked every bedroom. There were four. I checked the unfinished basement, which was full of boxes of books and cobwebs and bottles of wine and old sports equipment, like baseball gloves and lacrosse sticks and cross-country skis and an old-style football helmet, for example, and there was a chalk portrait of a woman, a brunette, though it definitely wasn’t Elaine Andrews. The woman in the portrait had light brown skin and brown eyes and wore a yellow dress from, I thought, the seventies. The background was light green. It was a nice portrait, actually, though obviously made by an amateur artist. There was an old microwave the size of a TV and there were boxes overflowing with old tableware. I went back to the main level. She wasn’t in the house. I checked every closet. There were thirteen. Soon, if she didn’t show up, I was going to have to notify the police. Nowhere in the house were there signs of forced entry, not in the living room or the den or the kitchen or anywhere else in the house. I checked the garage. There was nothing but firewood and motor oil and antifreeze and a snow blower and a lawn mower and two bicycles and rock salt and so on. I started panicking, my heart galloping, and as if a blinding white light exploded, charging through my mind and body, I thought: I’ll never see her again.

‘Listen, Rick,’ O’Meara began, circling the kitchen table, where I sat silently, taking his bullshit because I felt on some level that I deserved it, ‘I know your client wasn’t the nicest woman in the world but you had a responsibility, Rick, a simple responsibility: to wit, to take care of your goddamn client if you’re going to have a sleepover and especially if you’re going to bang her. Did you bang her, Rick?’

I didn’t acknowledge his question. I didn’t acknowledge anything, for I was fading in and out of other thoughts. I thought about Elaine’s and my life together, a life that would now never be, though I indulged some fantasies anyway, replete with our home and trips and perhaps children one day, and, later, grandchildren, and so on, but none of that would happen now. Nothing and no one would take the place of her, I thought. She’s disappeared. I’d look for her, I thought, but I knew she was gone — vanished into the thin, suffocating air.

O’Meara continued chewing me out. ‘I’ve got all my men looking for her,’ he said. ‘You’ll lose your licence,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to it.’ He kept circling, without stopping, quickening his pace. ‘I’ll admit,’ he said, ‘Elaine Andrews is a bit of a See You Next Tuesday, but you were still responsible for her.’ He continued circling the table, though I remained silent and immobile. I felt sick and weak. O’Meara, I could tell, enjoyed seeing me withdrawn and suffering and scared.

O’Meara was called away, thankfully, by a uniformed officer, the one from the night before. I, however, stayed seated. My stomach seized and nausea made itself known and the room started to spin in my mind and before my wet, bleary eyes. I clutched my stomach and took deep breaths through my nose. Eyes closed tightly, I tried to focus, focus on something, without success. My heart, too, once again raced. I tried to quell the urge to vomit and knew if I tried to race to the washroom or the kitchen sink or the garbage I’d never make it. Slowly, I took deep breaths. I didn’t want to take in too much air at once and vomit as a result. I counted my breaths. I tried to slow down all thought. Nevertheless I thought about Elaine and her dead husband and feared she was dead now, too, as a result of my negligence stemming from overwhelming concupiscence. I thought about Elaine with a knife in her chest. It was too horrible — I concentrated on the infinite space created by my tightly sealed eyelids. Elaine’s okay , I told myself, Elaine’s okay, wherever she may be, she’s okay, she’s okay, I told myself, over and over and over again. I continued to count my breaths.

Eventually, my nausea passed, or at least abated, and I was still left sitting alone at the kitchen table, the table where Elaine and I had eaten Chinese takeout and flirted and talked about her dead lover and her dead husband. Bodies were piling up and I had no clue what was happening; Elaine’s whereabouts were my only concern but my hands were tied till O’Meara let me go, I thought, but then I decided that if O’Meara was going to leave me unattended I was going to split. I stood up and started toward the front door. O’Meara was barking orders into his cellphone like a maniac and he screamed when he saw my hand on the front door’s handle.

‘Where in the goddamn do you think you’re going!’ he screamed, and I tried to ignore him, but a uniformed officer grabbed my wrist and O’Meara said, ‘Cuff him,’ and the officer quickly twisted my arms behind my back and clasped on the handcuffs.

‘You have no right to do this,’ I said.

‘We’ll take them off when you learn to stay put,’ said O’Meara. ‘Stick him in the office, where he won’t get in the way.’

I sat at Gerald’s desk, manacled, looking at the spines of the hundreds of books that lined the walls of his den: The Warren Buffett Way, One Up on Wall Street, Buffettology, The Alchemy of Finance, Business @ the Speed of Thought, The Downing Street Years, Diplomacy, Years of Renewal , and so on and so forth. Who Moved My Cheese? , by Spencer Johnson, M.D. He only reads books by successful people, I thought. Where Have All the Leaders Gone? Forbes® Greatest Business Stories Ever, The Reagan Diaries, My Life and Work: An Autobiography of Henry Ford, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Mein Kampf, The Wealth of Nations, The Prince, Leviathan, The Art of War and so on. Plus he had two sets of encyclopedias: Britannica and World Book. He had some nice dictionaries in English, German, Italian, French and Spanish. It looked like he had a bunch of books on tape, too. I was stuck in Gerald’s desk chair, handcuffs digging into my wrists, waiting for I’m not sure what. Gerald’s dead, Adam’s dead, and, most likely, I thought, Elaine’s dead. At the very least she’s gone. I wanted to get back to my apartment. I needed rest and time to think about the case. I’d gotten too close, obviously, and lost all perspective. I’d lost the forest for the trees, so to speak. Something had gone terribly wrong, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Something happened while I was trying to figure things out, while I was being, quite willingly, seduced by Elaine. So much escaped me. Everything changed while I had my head up my ass.