CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Long table down the middle, seats ten, with a checked vinyl tablecloth on it that has been taped at one corner since before I met any of these men.
A row of mugs on hooks. A whiteboard with a column of names and a column of numbers, which is the grocery money, and a note underneath in block capitals about whoever keeps taking the good knife.
The crockpot was on the counter with a dish towel folded under the lid.
Gus pulled out a chair for me and then went around and pulled out one for himself on the far side, which is a thing I noticed.
He poured two coffees without asking.
Mine came in the cracked one. It has a hairline running from the rim down to about the middle and it has been in that kitchen for at least ten years, and every man who works out of that building knows it does not leak, and every one of them takes a different mug.
I have had coffee out of that mug maybe fifteen times.
“It was the guys,” he said.
“What was?”
“The envelope. We passed it around. Two shifts.” He turned his own mug on the table a quarter turn. “It’s not, you know. It’s not from the department. There’s a whole thing with the union for that, they’ve got a form and it takes six weeks. That was just us.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not—” He waved a hand. “Don’t.”
“How much of it was yours, Gus?”
He looked at the tablecloth.
“Does it matter?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to give it back either way.”
That got something out of him. Not a laugh. A short push of air through the nose, and then his face went down again.
We sat there. Out in the bay somebody started an air compressor and it ran for a while and shut off.
“September,” he said.
I put my coffee down.
“The eighteenth,” I said.
He looked up fast.
“You know the date?”
“I have a calendar.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you would.”
He set his hands down on either side of his mug, like a man about to push himself up, except he didn’t.
“You called the house at like nine at night. Danny had a fever.”
“A hundred and four.”
“And I picked up.” He was looking at his own hands. “And I told you he was tied up at a training review and I’d get him to call you back.”
“Yes.”
“He wasn’t at a review.”
“I know.”
“He wasn’t even—” Gus stopped and started over. “It was his day off, Erin. He wasn’t in the building at all. He wasn’t on the schedule.”
“I know that too. I found it eleven days ago on my phone.”
He shut his eyes for a second.
“Did he tell you to say that?”
And here is where I found out what Gus Kraus actually is, which is not a coward, or not only one.
Because he could have said yes.
Nobody in that building would have contradicted him.
Mike was never going to admit to a standing arrangement.
It would have cost Gus nothing at all to sit at that table and tell me he had been following an order from an officer, and I would have believed him, and it would have made him a man who did a bad thing in a hard position.
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“No. He never asked me anything.” He picked up his mug and didn’t drink out of it and put it back down. “I did that on my own.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew.”
The compressor came on again. He waited it out.
“I’d known since like June. Not like I saw anything.
You just, you’re in a building with a guy for twenty-four hours at a time, you know what his phone does.
” He rubbed the back of his neck. “And then you’re standing there with the phone in your hand at nine o’clock at night and it’s you on the other end, and your kid’s sick, and I had about one second to pick something, and what came out of me was a review. ”
“Why that?”
“Because a review sounds like nothing,” Gus said. “A review is boring. You don’t ask about a review.”
He was right. I didn’t. I said okay and I hung up and I went back into the bathroom and sat on the floor with a washcloth.
“How many times?”
“Twice on the phone with you. That one and one in August, and the August one I don’t even think you thought about, you just said thanks and hung up. And then a bunch of times with guys, you know, just, you cover a little. You say he’s in the back. You say he stepped out.”
“And that’s normal.”
“That’s completely normal.” He said it flat and did not defend it.
“That’s the job. You cover a guy. Somebody’s ten minutes late off a break, somebody’s got a thing at his kid’s school, you say he’s in the back.
Every guy in this building has done that for every other guy in this building and I’d do it tomorrow. ”
“And the difference is.”
“The difference is I knew,” he said.
We sat there.
“I told myself it wasn’t my business,” he said.
“I told myself that for five months. And it’s the truth, Erin, it isn’t my business.
A guy’s marriage is not my business. And then on the twelfth I’m standing on your landing and Ray says who’s on the list for 4C, and Wes goes quiet, and I’m standing there in front of your door and it’s the door I’ve eaten Christmas cookies behind, and I thought—”
He stopped.
“What did you think?”
Gus Kraus put his face in one hand and left it there for a couple of seconds.
“I thought, I could have just told her in June.”
Out in the bay the side door banged.
“Fourteen hundred dollars,” he said, into his hand. “I know exactly what that is. I know what it is. I couldn’t even walk down the hall.”
“Gus.”
He took his hand down.
“You were the first person in eight months who told me anything true,” I said. “It was a lie about a training review, and you have told me the truth about it, and you did it in a room with the door open, and you did not make yourself the victim of it once.”
He blinked at me.
“That’s not—”
“You don’t get to argue with me about it. I’m the one you lied to.”
He shut his mouth.
I turned the cracked mug around by the handle.
“They’re going to ask you,” I said. “Ostrander’s already gone through most of the shift. And there’s the other thing, the discipline side, that’s separate and that one has lawyers.”
“I know.”
“Are you going to tell them what you just told me?”
He didn’t answer for a long time.
“Are you?” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked at the whiteboard with the grocery money on it. His face did not do anything dramatic. It just got very tired all at once, the way a man’s face does at the end of a shift when he sits down and it catches up with him.
“Okay,” he said.
That was all. Two syllables at a kitchen table on a Tuesday afternoon with a compressor running in the next room.
I found out five weeks later what it cost him, and by then he had already paid for it, and he never once mentioned it to me.
Behind me, in the doorway, somebody said my name.
I knew the voice before I turned around.
“Erin.”
Wes Nowak was standing there with his coat on.