"And I can do...?"
"Talk to her. Warn her about what's up. Maybe we could work something out. Maybe she's got some ongoing investigation that she can give me an exclusive on. Or maybe she can promise me a front-row seat the next time there's a major drug bust. Or something. Anything. I don't want to do this story."
I finished my now cold cup of tea and said, "But you will if you have to, won't you?"
Now she glared at me. "Time's up. I've got to get back to the office. Walk me there, will you?"
Outside I gently rubbed the back of her neck as we made the short walk back to her office. "All right, here's a story I might help you with. You heard about the dead guy found at Samson Point?"
"Yep," she said. "Even had a faxed press release from the North Tyler Police Department waiting for us when we got into the office this morning. A male subject found dead in a rental car. Self-inflicted gunshot wound. Identity not made public until next of kin notified. End of story."
"Self-inflicted? You sure?"
"That's what the press release and the follow-up phone call I made to the North Tyler chief all pointed to. Hey, how did you hear about it?"
"I was there, about a half hour or so after the first cops showed up."
She stopped by the white wooden door into the Tyler Building, looking at me with a slight smile. "And what you were doing out there so early in the morning?"
I didn’t want to get into a lengthy explanation so instead I said, “I had my reasons. And I got a look inside the car. I didn’t see a weapon.”
She shrugged. "The cops said there was one there, which was good enough for me. One of the few policies I like here at the paper is that we don't do suicide stories."
"So no follow-up?" I asked, thinking about the three Ford LTDs and their mysterious passengers.
"Nope, no follow-up. Hey, I've got to run. Thanks for the coffee and conversation."
I reached up and squeezed her hand. "My pleasure. Tell me, is the paper doing anything about the mission?"
"What mission?"
"The space-shuttle mission. The one that was launched this morning."
Paula shook her head. "Unless there's a cabal of gay or Communist astronauts aboard, this newspaper now doesn't care. Look, call me?"
"I promise," I said, staying there until I saw her go through the door and pass by the main windows, heading back to the newsroom. It looked as if she waved at me, and so I waved back at her fleeting image.
A few minutes later I was on Route 51, heading toward the main beach and the police station, and for the first time in months I got stuck in traffic. A line of about fifteen to twenty cars were in front of me, at the sole traffic light on this road between Manchester, about 35 miles away to the west, and Tyler Beach. I rolled down the window, enjoying the scents of the warm day. Another sign of spring: the leaves come out, the grass turns green, and tourists start coming into Tyler and its beach, clogging the roads and taking the best parking spaces. Toward the south and the east were the wide flat marshes, still tan and brown after a long winter and spring. Seagulls spun and swirled up in the light blue sky, and when the traffic eased up, I continued heading to the beach.
I rubbed the steering wheel a bit self-consciously as I drove.
This month I was driving a new Ford Explorer, replacing a Range Rover of mine that a couple or months ago got in the way of a few dozen rounds from a couple of semiautomatic weapons. I was still getting used to the new vehicle's feel. While I probably could have had the Range Rover replaced, insurance companies do tend to report to the local police how one's vehicle got full of bullet holes, and I didn't want the attention.
At the intersection of Ashburn Avenue and Route 51, I turned right and in less than a minute was pulling into the rear parking lot of the Tyler police station. Despite years of plans and budget proposals and votes, the station looks pretty much as it did thirty years ago: a squat, single-story white cinder-block structure that could have been a command bunker in some obscure war. As I walked across the bumpy ill-paved parking lot, I noticed how the adjacent town parking lot was only about a third full, and smiled, thinking that in less than two months drivers would sometimes engage in fistfights over the last few available spaces.
The on-duty dispatcher at the glassed-in booth recognized me, and after she had buzzed open a metal door I went down a narrow corridor to an office marked "BCI," for Bureau of Criminal Investigations. When I went inside, I found the entire criminal bureau of the Tyler Police Department on her hands and knees, looking for something under a metal desk.
I leaned against the doorjamb. "On the trail of a major crime?"
Detective Diane Woods slowly backed out. She was wearing sneakers, faded jeans and a brightly colored rugby shirt. Looking up, she gave me a slight smile, a pen in her hand.
"Sure I am," she said. "The problem is, the crime is the same one, committed year after year: not enough bodies, not enough budget to do the right kind of job. Gets to the point where even pens are valuable, so much so that you can spend fifteen minutes looking for one after you've dropped it."
Diane got up and sat down at her desk, which was pushed against one of the cinder-block walls painted a light, sickly green. The desk was covered with me folders and photos and notebooks. A plaster skull served as a paperweight. This spring she was letting her thick brown hair grow out, and her face was still lightly tanned from a trip some weeks ago to Key West. At the base of her chin was a short white scar, earned one night when she was on patrol and a drunk banged her head in the booking room. One of the few times I had ever heard of when someone took advantage of her while on duty, and I still think it made her more cautious in doing her job, in not leaving her back exposed.
She played with the pen in her hand and said, "What brings you here this lovely spring day?"
"Wondering if you're interested in lunch."
“I’m always interested in lunch, especially if you're buying, but I've got a previous commitment. It's career day at the Main Street School and I'm gonna tell the little darlings about the glamour of small-town police work About going to car accidents at two in the morning and diagramming the place where their drunk older brother or sister was ejected through the windshield. Or going into a small cottage to look in after their grandma or grandpa after they've passed on a couple of weeks earlier. Or about trying to do your job when elected officials who would've fit right in at Salem three centuries ago start sniffing around your personal life."
"Gee," I said seriously. "You'll be a hit, I'm sure."
She stuck out her tongue and threw the pen at me, and I'm grateful she's better with a gun than a pen, for it ended up in the hallway somewhere behind me. "Why don't you take Paula out to lunch? Word is, maybe you two are finally on track after all these months."
"I just had tea with her a while ago. Didn't want to overstay my welcome."
Diane reached up to scratch her side, raising the rugby shirt and showing a tanned, flat belly, and a holstered Ruger .357 and detective's shield pinned to her waistband. "Well, ain't that nice. How is the young Miss Quinn?"
"The young Miss Quinn is fine," I said. "But her new boss isn't. Look, I don't know how to say this, but --- "
She held up her hand. "Forget it. I already know. Their hired gun is here to stir things up to increase circulation, and it looks like I’m next on his hit parade. I already know the drill. Slobbering dyke detective on the public payroll, put in a place to corrupt the youth of our fair town. Blah, blah, blah. It was bound to happen one of these days. I guess now's the time."
I felt a flash of anger toward that well-dressed and well-oiled man back at the newspaper office, sitting there comfortable and well-fed, waiting to toss my best friend's life into a threshing machine of publicity.
"Any idea what you're going to do?" I asked.
"Do? Me? Well, I had thoughts of firebombing the place, or maybe tailing that Rupert guy and arresting him on suspicions of being a professional jerk. But since firebombing is against the law and being a professional jerk isn't, it looks like my options are limited."
"Paula wants you to know that if you can help, there might be a way to avoid her doing the story."
Diane's eyes narrowed and her little white scar seemed to whiten, both dangerous signals indeed. "Like how?"
'Tm not sure. But she said if there's some investigation that you're doing that she can report on, some big story that will focus attention away from this profile piece, then she'll be glad to do it."
"I see. Give her one exclusive in exchange for not doing a tabloid story about my love life. Your girlfriend definitely has a reporter's sense of ethics."
"She's not my girlfriend," I said, the words sounding ridiculous right after I said them. "A dear friend, but nothing romantic."
"Yet," she observed.
"Yet," I agreed. "But she's willing to help you, if it's possible."
Diane shook her head and got up and went out to the hallway, retrieved her pen and then sat heavily down. "You tell Paula ... okay, I won't go there. Look, I appreciate where she's coming from. Honest, I do. But I'm not in the business of trading that kind of favor. In anything else, yes, I’ll do that. Exchange an exclusive story on a drug bust for some good publicity for the department. That I’ll do. But not when it comes to what kind of woman I am and whom I love. That’s not up for trade. All right?”
It wasn’t time to press the matter. “All right, it is,” I said. “And speaking of who you love, how’s Kara doing?”
Her face widened in a smile. “Better, much better. She still gets the occasional bad dream about the assault and all, but she’s got a new job at Digital. Involves some travel, which I hate, but she seems to thrive on it. I think because it gets her away from the memories here. She promises that the travel won’t last long, but she’s doing better. Honest, she is.”
“Good.”
“And you?”
Diane looked at me with the face of a friend, but the face was also backed up by the look of a professional interrogator. I struggled for a moment about what to say, about the strange sense I had this spring of being disconnected, of feeling that nothing I was doing making any kind of impact, was making a difference in anything at all.
I said, “Okay.”
“Okay? Just okay?”
“Well, there’s something going on that I’m curious about, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“Go on.”
"You hear about the dead guy the North Tyler police found up on Samson Point?"
"Yeah, heard a brief news report. Something about a self-inflicted gunshot wound. What about it?"
"Well, I was there ---“
She sat up. "You were there when the guy killed himself?"
"No, no," I said. "I was out on my deck and saw the lights of the cruisers and the ambulance. I walked over and checked it out. And it just looks strange, that's all."
"Why strange?"
I told her about the three Ford LTDs and the crew of five men, headed by a woman, who quickly secured the scene, and she nodded a couple of times. "Yep, that sure sounds strange."
"What does it sound like to you? The Feds?"
From nearby the door to the booking room clanked open, and I listened to a couple of Tyler cops drag in someone who was yelling about calling his lawyer and congressman. Diane turned to the noise for a moment and said, "Sounds like a good guess. The feds. But what kind, I couldn't tell you. Maybe it was the Marshal's Office. Those guys are pretty closed-mouth. Maybe that was a witness they were suppose to be escorting, or some guy in the witness protection program that decided to end it all. That kind of stuff can be very embarrassing. Not the kind of story you'd spill out to a local magazine writer who happens to stumble by on the crime scene."
I reached into my coat pocket, took out a piece of notebook paper. "Well, could you help me satisfy my curiosity? These are the license plate numbers off those three Ford LTDs. If you could do a trace ... "
Diane laughed and pulled the paper from my hand. "If I charged you for each plate I ran, I could afford to take you out to lunch. Hold on, I'll walk it out to dispatch."
She went out and headed to the dispatcher, and I stayed there and looked around the office. Another sign of how much she trusted me. Any other detective wouldn't have allowed a writer to stay unescorted in a detective's office. All those files, stuffed full of confidential information about ongoing cases. Little fruits of stories, just waiting to be picked. If I had been a true professional magazine writer, I would have stood up and started looking down at what was on Diane's desk.
Instead, I sat in my chair and thought of other things. About I he times I had spent here with Diane in this little office. A snowy night in December, going out to a Christmas party somewhere in town, agreeing to be her date and watching her as she came out wearing a black evening dress that looked spectacular. The times I had been in here, either seeking or giving information, both of us in the pursuit of what passed as justice these days. Sometimes sharing a take-out lunch on her desk, laughing about local politics or the misadventures of tourists. And that horrible time a couple months ago, after her lover Kara had been assaulted --- the furies and the angers that had been coming from her, sometimes directed at me, sometimes ending with the demand that I never see her again.