Chapter 6 How Did It Start with You #2
“That was the end of the files.” She looked at the cigarette instead of me.
“The rest I found slower, because the rest never had his hands anywhere near it. Stories started coming back to me. Things I’d supposedly said about people, in rooms I’d never stood in.
A call we’d taken retold with me freezing on it, told friendly, like a joke everybody was already in on.
My staff sergeant asking me one day, kind about it, whether everything was all right at home.
” She turned it over once. “And twice, twice that I caught, I opened a report of mine and data was gone. Not wrong. Gone. An interview summary down to the header. A property list short by half. And through all of it, to my face, he never changed one degree. Same good morning. Same coffee on my desk after a bad night. He was the best partner in the building, right up until I understood what I was partnered to.”
I stood very still. A wrong tag number. Two canvass entries I knew I had typed, and a file with no record they had ever existed. Not wrong. Gone.
She watched me arrive at it, and didn’t ask.
“Did you report it,” I said? “The data?”
“I took the two reports to my staff sergeant.” Still no heat. “You know what came back? The error came from the system or me. Either the program dropped the fields or I’d been careless and forgotten to save. Those were the choices on offer.”
“And you stayed.”
“I had a transfer request half filled out in my desk drawer. Eighteen years in this unit, and I was going to be the one who left.” She said it flat.
“Then the promotion came through instead and that asshole became Sergeant Wright. Off the partner list, into an office, and I tore the form up, because just like that, he wasn’t my problem anymore.
Problem solved, the lazy way.” She looked past me at the building.
“And then this spring he put in to go back to 51. Papers in, desk cleared, gone by end of shift. No goodbye, no party. He’d have won the party too, if he’d wanted one.
Nobody in that building knows why a man walks away from a posting like this, and I’ll tell you the part nobody else will: he’d still be here if he’d wanted to stay.
Nobody was ever catching him. Places like this don’t catch men like that. They give them fucking plaques.”
“Did he say why he transferred back?”
“Not to me. We didn’t talk much by then, outside of hallways.
” She finally looked back at me. “But I heard him on the phone once, near the end. Somebody must have asked him why he’d give this up, because he laughed, and he said it would be more fun back at 51.
” She shrugged. “Fun. I don’t know what that means. Maybe you do.”
I could guess. I kept it off my face.
“Would you say any of this on paper?” I said. “To my inspector. To anyone.”
“No.”
“That’s the whole answer.”
“I’ve got three years to a pension and a place near Bancroft with my name on it.
” She said it without apology. “What I’ve just given you is true, and it’s worth nothing.
You already know the difference between those two things, or you wouldn’t have driven across the city at dawn to hear it in a parking lot. ”
“Why tell me at all, then?” I said. “You don’t know me.”
“No. But you are from 51, you drove out here at dawn, on your own time, to ask a stranger about Adam Wright. That means it’s already happening to you, and you’re somewhere around my year one.
Somebody should have said all this to me back then.
” She put the cigarette away for good. “And you’re going to do whatever you’re about to do no matter what I say.
You have that face. So take the one piece of advice I’ve got, and then we’re done.
Stay clear of him. All the way clear. Whatever he came back to 51 to have, be standing somewhere else while he takes it, if you plan on keeping your career. ”
She turned for the building, and I thought that was the end of it. Then she stopped.
“How did it start with you?” she said. “Little things in your files. Flags you can’t rule out.”
I didn’t answer.
She nodded, exactly as if I had.
“Watch your paperwork, Detective,” she said. “And don’t come back here. I mean that kindly.”
I went back through the lobby to sign out, because the book had a column for an out time and my morning was already in it in my own handwriting. The desk sergeant slid it across to me, friendly as ever.
“Find her all right?”
“I did. Thanks.”
“You said 51.” He tapped the book, pleased with himself. “Adam Wright’s over there now, you know him? Transferred back in the spring.”
“We’ve met.”
“Good guy.” He said it the way everybody said it, in both buildings. “Tell him the front desk says hello. Heck, I might give him a call myself.”
“Yeah, you do that.” I said, and signed my name for the second time that morning, and left.
The rain followed me back across the city. I added it up at the long lights, because there was nothing else to do. I had a witness who would never speak, a pattern that wasn’t proof of anything, and a story about a warrant that would end her career faster than his.
The rain gave up somewhere along Lake Shore, and the traffic thickened toward the middle of the day, and I spent every slow stretch of it looking for the way out.
I went through it the way I’d go through a case, and it came out the same every way I turned it.
Brar would deny all of it to anyone who wasn’t me, and I didn’t blame her.
Murphy was fair, but fair only reached as far as the paper, and the paper said what it said.
A complaint put my word against a saint’s, the jealous boyfriend with a theory, and Wright had already shown me, at my own desk with the floor cleared, exactly how that sounded.
The IT check was the one card still face down, and I’d stopped expecting it to save me.
Nothing he’d done could be touched, and everything I could do looked like the thing he’d built me to look like.
And there was Luke. I built the sentence at the red lights, the one I’d have to say tonight or not at all.
I went to see somebody about Adam today.
Tell him, and I handed him back everything he’d finally set down, on the strength of a story the teller would deny, about a man the whole floor loved.
Don’t tell him, and I’d be sitting ten feet from him within the hour, smiling, with all of this in my pockets.
Both were bad. I couldn’t pick which was worse.
The desk sergeant would mention me to Wright sooner or later. Buildings like that talk. Maybe it was already done.
By the bridge I had nothing. By our exit I still had nothing, and I took it anyway, toward home, and Luke, and the thing I still hadn’t decided whether to tell him.
Nobody was coming to get me out of this.
Whatever the way out of Wright’s mess turned out to be, I’d have to build it myself.
I put both hands on the wheel and drove the rest of the way like that.