Distemper Read online

  “Isn’t that weird? I mean, I thought being a cop’s wife was supposed to be so stressful and all.”

  “It’s a lifestyle. Her dad was a cop, and both her brothers. She wanted me in the family business.”

  “And you just went along?”

  “Seemed like the thing to do.”

  “So you chose a career to please a girl who wound up dumping you anyway?”

  “Truer words were never said.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “It might have been, I guess. But the fact is I love what I do, and twenty years in the navy would have been about fifteen years too long. So there you go. Sometimes you make the right choice for the wrong reason.”

  “So how did she tell you?”

  “Ah. You want gory details.”

  “Naturally.”

  “She fixed us breakfast, ate some pancakes, and told me she was leaving me while I was washing the dishes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I threw up. Then I moved in with my partner. Slept on his couch for a month while I thought things over, and in the end I decided to get out of Dodge.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I told you before, she was banging my lieutenant. He was married too, and kids. Man, what a mess… I guess I just didn’t want to stick around for the cleanup. And besides, my mom needed the company.”

  “What happened to the ex?”

  “They shacked up for a while, but he ended up getting back with his wife. Last thing I heard she was seeing a captain, sleeping her way up the chain of command. I figure sooner or later she’ll wind up with the chief of police.”

  “You miss her?”

  “Nah.”

  “You with anybody else since her?”

  “Nah.”

  “Why not?”

  “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”

  “You realize that’s from Psycho.” He laughed, a deep chuckle that seemed to clear the dregs of memory. “Pardon me if I don’t go take a shower now.”

  “Your turn.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Unless you want me to call you a chicken.”

  “You want another beer?”

  “Quit stalling.”

  “This is perverse. But okay, a deal’s a deal. Here goes. When I was working at a paper in western Mass, I met this guy. His name was Adam Ellroy. I fell for him like a ton of bricks, but in the end he went back to California to the love of his life. I move to Gabriel, she winds up giving him the shaft, and he comes back east to get away from it all. We sort of get back together, and the next thing I know he’s dead at the bottom of the gorge. Everybody thought he’d offed himself, but I couldn’t let it go. So I didn’t.”

  “And you and your crazy friends tracked down the killer. GPD’s still smarting about that, you know.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. To put it in your parlance, you scooped them.”

  “Goodie for me.”

  “But you’re leaving out the best part.”

  I took a swig of my beer. I knew what he was going to say. “Which is?”

  “That the person who killed him turned out to be…”

  “Stop. Just drop it.”

  “Alex, come on. You should be proud of yourself. I heard you really kicked butt.”

  “Can we talk about something else? I’m willing to share every detail of my miserable love life. Want to hear about how my college boyfriend dumped me for a two-hundred-pound lesbian? It wasn’t pretty.”

  “This really gets you.”

  “Are you crazy? Of course it does. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  “But you did the right thing. You nailed the son of a bitch. You avenged your friend’s death. You got justice for him.”

  “ ‘Avenged’? How melodramatic.”

  He stopped and stared at me. “There’s something I don’t know about this.”

  “There’s plenty. Look, I’m not as tough as you are, okay? Can we just drop it?” He looked disappointed in me. Why the hell was he so interested in all this, anyway? And why did I care what he thought? “Listen, last year was a goddamn nightmare, okay? I nearly got myself killed. But I was lucky. I only got myself just short of raped.”

  “Fuck.” He said the word under his breath, and I realized I’d never heard him really swear before.

  “And for your information, I’ve barely even talked about it in the whole goddamn year since it happened, not that I don’t think about it every five seconds. My parents wanted to pay for a shrink, but I didn’t see the point. What am I supposed to do, somehow ‘come to terms’ with the fact that one of the best people I’ve ever met is stone-cold dead, and the guy who did it is reading the New Yorker up in Dannemora? The only thing I regret is that I didn’t kill the bastard when I had the chance. I could have, you know. I hit him, just enough to knock him out. But when he was lying there unconscious and I was waiting for the cops to come, I could have killed him, and no one would have been the wiser. They would have called it self-defense. Sometime I picture myself hitting him over and over, watching his brains spill out on the carpet…” I was seeing it then, feeling my arm swing down hard. I got a jolt of pure hate that fueled what I can only describe as blood lust. Then I snapped out of it. “Christ. Maybe I do need a shrink. You must think I’m the homicidal maniac.”

  “Actually, I’d only think you were a maniac if you didn’t want to kill him.”

  There were tears prickling at my eyes, and I swiped at them, hoping he didn’t notice. “Would you have done it? If someone murdered someone you love, would you kill him if you had the chance?”

  “I don’t know. I hope I never have to find out.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “No.”

  “Line of duty?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Cops or navy?”

  “Both.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “It felt like work. It wasn’t personal.”

  “Which is why it bothers me more not to have killed someone than it bothers you to have actually done it?”

  “That’s very perceptive. And probably true.”

  “Great. If I hadn’t given you my speech about the evils of smoking, I’d probably be asking you for a cigarette right about now. See? I told you I equate smoking with hysteria.”

  “I’m sorry I pried. I didn’t want to upset you. Really, I apologize. I suppose I thought that…”

  “If I could dish it out, I could take it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’d think,” I said. “But it ain’t necessarily so.”

  10

  THE WEEK WOUND DOWN, AND THE DEADLINE PASSED without the killer’s letter appearing in print. Or was he the killer? That was the question, and the cops had come to the conclusion that the answer was no. Or rather, probably not. All week, I’d been playing mind games with myself about what exactly the letter writer had meant. Did he mean a week from when he mailed the letter, which we had no way of knowing? Or from when we got it, which he had no way of knowing? And could the cops be wrong? My desk is right across from the police scanner, which sits on what used to be Junior’s desk—much longer ago, it was Adam’s—and I constantly had an ear cocked for something horrible.

  Not that I spent much time in the newsroom. After that episode at the bio building, the animal-rights movement on campus exploded. The town’s hippie weekly ran an editorial calling it “a watershed in the history of nonhuman rights on this planet” and deeming the screaming pigs “a moving elegy for the millions of lives lost every day in homage to the supremacy of Homo sapiens.”

  Have I mentioned that I haven’t eaten meat since I was twelve?

  Anyway, that editorial rallied the town’s socially conscious legions, who are always up for a good march. Before you could swing a fistulated
frog around your head they’d pledged solidarity with the students, and by Friday there were five hundred people in front of the university administration building, chanting enough to make up for the last silent protest and maybe four more afterward. They’d erected a great pile of products made by companies who do animal testing, and a few diehards were about to light it on fire when someone pointed out that the fumes could kill everyone within a hundred yards. They’d held up placards of monkeys getting electrocuted and bunnies with their brains exposed, and although I’m supposed to remain all journalistic and unbiased, it made me want to dissect somebody.

  The fracas netted me a page-one story, which jumped to page four and ran with two sidebars. One was a run-down of the various fields on campus that do animal testing, listed in bulleted paragraphs—the sort of journalistic Chicklets that readers have come to expect these days (thank you very much, USA Today). The other sidebar was a profile of the leader of Benson Animal Anarchists, a former biology grad student named David Loew who’d shucked off his life after a bona fide crisis of conscience: he’d been in the midst of his dissertation research when, for no particular reason, it occurred to him that over the course of his experiments two hundred lab mice were going to die. “It just struck me,” I’d quoted him as saying, in the elevated language he seemed to favor. “For me to earn this PhD, this mere piece of paper, two hundred lives would be sacrificed. And I thought, with all of the other researchers on campus, all of the degrees they grant, there had to be many other people doing the same thing—thousands and thousands of deaths in the name of science. But they were just lab animals, so no one cared. And all of a sudden, I cared.”

  It was his “personal epiphany” (his words, not mine), and it flipped him to the other side with the zeal of a true convert. He’d dropped out and gotten a job stacking soy milk and nutritional yeast at one of Gabriel’s four health food stores. He’d also cut off contact with his parents who, as luck would have it, owned a half-dozen Burger King franchises outside Milwaukee. He wouldn’t speak to them again, he told me, “until they agree to divest from the economy of death.” Nice.

  “Whoa, man,” Mad said. “How’d you like to be that guy’s mother?” We were back in our window seat in the Citizen Kane, unwinding after a particularly migraine-inducing workday. Mad had been gentleman enough to allow me the evening’s first tirade. “What does he send her for Mother’s Day? A funeral wreath?”

  “Maybe a card with pictures of penned-up veal.”

  “This story’s really driving you up the wall.”

  I raised my glass. “As well as driving me to drink. And get this. You know what I realized today while I was writing my story? The acronym for Benson Animal Anarchists spells out BAA. Like a sheep. Like I bet that was an accident.”

  “That’s almost as bad as that gay rights group last year. What was it called—the one that got their own building?”

  “The Benson Gay and Lesbian Action Detail. B-GLAD. As in, ‘be glad you’re different.’ “

  “That cutesy shit makes me want to kill somebody.”

  “I don’t think that was the effect they were after.”

  He picked up my drink and sniffed it. “What is that putrid concoction, anyway?”

  “Midori sour. Sour mix and melon liqueur. It’s yummy. Want a taste?”

  “No way. It could turn a guy all queer.”

  “Mad.” I looked around to make sure no one had overheard.

  “Don’t worry, Bernier. The P.C. police aren’t on duty in here, thank the fucking Lord.”

  “Someday you’re going to get your ass kicked for talking like that.”

  “And the broccoli-crunching sissy who tries it is going to get his ass kicked right back, only worse.” He started to roll up his sleeve.

  “Oh, Mad, not again.”

  Undeterred, he pulled back his blue oxford to reveal a chiseled bicep and proceeded to flex. “Behold. Witness the power of physical exercise.”

  “Okay, fine, I behold the power. I’m in awe. Now would you please put your shirt back on? People are starting to stare.”

  “And well they should.” He rolled his sleeve back down. “You want another round?”

  “Oh, God, yes.”

  “What do you call that swill again?”

  “Midori sour.”

  “You chicks are a pain in the ass.” He was about to get up when Mack the bartender saw us, anticipated our desires after several years of second rounds (and third rounds, and fourth, and give-me-your-keys), and delivered the drinks himself. Mack also owns the place, and Mad and O’Shaunessey are putting his kids through college.

  “Okay, manly one, it’s your turn. How was your day on the cop beat?”

  “You little vixen. You’re just thrilled that this baa-baa story is keeping you from my clutches, where you belong.”

  “And you could just as well be covering it yourself, Mr. Wizard. It’s turning into something way more up your alley than mine. Or aren’t you the science reporter anymore?”

  “Rolled up my alley today, actually. Bill wants me to do some big package on the science of animal testing, nitty-gritty kind of thing. Wire might pick it up.”

  “And he wants you to write the whole damn thing while you’re working on the murder story.”

  “I can handle it, baby. I’m a reporting machine.” He reached for his cuff button.

  “Mad, I swear if you try to roll that sleeve up again I’m going to staple it to your wrist.”

  He smirked. “Your friend Emma doesn’t mind a man showing a little muscle.”

  “Are you about to kiss and tell?”

  “Nah.”

  “So did you file on the cop thing or what? I didn’t see anything on the story budget.”

  “Don’t rub it in. I haven’t gotten jack. Everybody’s sniffing around, trying to break the name of the first vic. But you know what? I’m starting to think the cops don’t even know.”

  “You think? Last I heard they were waiting to notify next of kin. But that was ages ago.”

  “Right. And once you ID somebody, it only takes a couple of days at the most to track down their family or else figure out they haven’t got any. You just get the local cops on it and that’s that. So you know what I think? They thought they knew who she was and it turned out they were wrong. But nobody’s talking.”

  “They’d hardly advertise their own mistake.”

  “Why don’t you ask your friend Cody?”

  “He’s not my friend. And he wouldn’t tell me anyway.”

  “Anybody else you know might crack?”

  “Zippo. So what are we gonna do? Sit here and get shit-faced until they call the next press conference?”

  “I’ve had worse offers.”

  “Come on, we’re smart kids. We went to college. Let’s think about this for a minute. How can it possibly be so hard to identify a dead girl?”

  “I’d rather think about that cute little number out there.”

  I peered through the plate-glass window to check her out. There were a dozen girls slacking en masse on the Gabriel Green, our beloved pedestrian mall that, contrary to its name, is entirely paved. “Which one?”

  “Red tank top.”

  “The one with both her bra straps showing?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Mad, that girl isn’t a day over fifteen. She was born during the Reagan administration, for Chrissake.”

  “Cool. I enjoyed the eighties.”

  “Can we please talk about the story? Come on, let’s just brainstorm a little. Then I’ll go home to my dog and you can get arrested for statutory rape.”

  He sighed into the bottom of his beer mug. “Have it your way.”

  “Thank you. Okay. Here’s what I’m wondering. How can a girl just get lost? I mean, think about how the first girl was described. Healthy, nice clothes, good teeth, expensive boots. People like that don’t live in refrigerator boxes. They have families. They have jobs. They have connections. When they go mis
sing, somebody looks for them, right?”

  “And since the cops have had weeks to scour every report of every missing girl in the U.S. and Canada, she wasn’t one of them.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “So if the cops couldn’t find her, how can two lazy drunks do any better?”

  “Come on, Mad, we’re just free-associating. Don’t you want to play?”

  “Do I have to watch you drink another goddamn Missouri sour?”

  “It’s Midori, and why yes, I’d love another one. Thanks very much.”

  He rolled his eyes and waved to Mack. “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “Let’s think about this logically for a minute. Why in the world would a girl like our victim not be reported missing?”

  “You want me to answer that?”

  “Please.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “All right. Okay. Lemme see here. Well, what if she’s all alone in the world? No family, no friends, no job, no nothing. There’d be nobody to miss her.”

  “Sure, but let’s face it. Even the guys who collect cans on the Green have at least one friend who’d worry about them if they disappeared. This girl had resources. She wasn’t dressed like some transient.”

  “What if they weren’t her clothes?”

  “Man, I never thought about that. What if that’s true? But wait. She wasn’t starving or anything, and the description said her teeth had been straightened. Doesn’t a few thousand dollars worth of braces mean she was at least middle class?”

  “Maybe she hit the skids.”

  “Yeah, but let’s not forget that this guy seems to have a pattern. His victims are physically similar, and the second girl was no hooker. She worked at the Gap, for Pete’s sake. You can’t get more middle class than that.”

  “How come all my ideas get shot down?”

  “Sorry. I’m just trying to be logical. It doesn’t come naturally.”

  “Well, you’re probably right anyway. Which brings us right back where we started.”