Chapter 7 Clearing the Air
Ryan
I didn’t tell him that night. I didn’t tell him the next night either.
Both evenings I walked up our stairs with the sentence ready.
I went to see somebody about Adam. Just a few words to start it, and everything after would have to follow, and both evenings I got to the door and heard him inside, moving around, easy, and I put the sentence away and went in and was pleasant all night instead.
I told myself I was choosing the right moment.
There was no right moment. I just kept not telling him, and by the second night I understood that was a choice too.
So, the third morning started with the two of us walking to work like usual.
It was a good walk, which made it worse.
The sun was shining, Luke was smiling, and he took the traffic side the way he always did, without once mentioning it.
It was playoff season, and Toronto’s hockey team had been breaking the city’s heart since long before either of us was born.
Every spring the whole town talked itself into believing, and the season ended early anyway, and the city swore off the team forever, and by October everybody was back.
Luke had run that cycle his entire life.
This year the ending had come four nights ago, in the fifth game of a series they were supposed to win, and he spent most of our walk explaining, calmly and in order, why he was finished for good this time.
He had watched that last game standing up.
I knew, because I had been in the room, keeping my distance.
“I bet you said the same thing last spring,” I said.
“Last spring I meant it less.” He said it completely straight, and I laughed.
It was the easiest thing in the world, and I would have felt better if it had been hard.
Murphy caught me at the rail outside his office before I’d taken my jacket off. Two sentences, flat, eyes already going back to the paper in his hand.
“IT finished with your files. The program drops entries all over this building and always has, and there’s nothing that says anything about your two, one way or the other. It’s closed as noted.” He looked at me for exactly one second. “That’s the whole update, Carlson.”
And that was the last innocent explanation gone. The system broke everywhere and proved nothing here. I’d stopped believing in it days ago, in a parking lot across the city. Watching it get closed officially was different, and it stayed with me all morning.
Wright was at the duty board when I crossed the floor, laughing at something with two constables, and he didn’t look at me at all.
He had known about my trip for two days.
I was sure of that; the desk sergeant out there had all but insinuated it.
And for two days he had done nothing. No look, no word, no change in him at all.
He had been warm to the whole floor and correct with me, and the longer the nothing went on, the worse it got.
A man with nothing to hide would have asked me about it.
A man merely angry would have slipped somewhere.
If he was doing nothing, it was because he had already decided what he was going to do, and when.
It happened in the copy room, mid-morning.
The copy room was off the back corridor, one machine, no window, and nobody lingered there. I was feeding disclosure pages through the copier when he came in with a single sheet in his hand, and the door swung shut behind him, and there was nobody else anywhere.
“I hear you took a drive this week,” he said. Pleasant. Quiet.
“I take a lot of drives.”
“Detective.” Gently. Almost sadly. “You went out to my old unit and asked questions about me.” He let it rest a second. “Does Luke know you did that? Does Murphy?”
I didn’t answer.
“That’s what I thought.” There was no win in his voice.
There was worry, and the worry looked real, and that was the part I hated most. “Can I say something, one colleague to another? I think you’re under strain.
The review, the flags, me arriving in the middle of your life.
I know what I am to your household, and I should have weighed that better, and I’m sorry for my part in it.
But driving across the city, on your own time, to interview strangers about a fellow officer.
” He shook his head, slow. “Hear how that sounds. I’m worried about you. Genuinely.”
“What is it you think I was looking for, Sergeant.”
“I don’t know, Detective. That’s the part that worries me. A man drives that far, on a day off, he’s usually hoping to find something.” He let a second pass. “I’d hate to think what.”
“Is that all?”
“Almost.” He laid his sheet on the glass and pressed the button, and said, over the noise, “How’s Brar?
Give her my best if you go back out. Three years before she can get out, isn’t it?
” The copier finished. He took his page and looked at me, friendly to the bone.
“She always tried to be so careful. What a shame.”
He went out, and the door swung shut behind him again.
I stood there with my pages half finished and took apart what he had just done.
He had named my witness. Kindly, accurately, in a sentence a review board would read as good manners.
He had told me he knew exactly who I’d talked to, and he had threatened his former partner in a voice nobody could have objected to.
The visit hadn’t bought me one usable thing.
It might have cost her something, and I would find out how much whenever he decided to show me.
That afternoon he made his move.
The floor was full, the day shift and the overlap, phones going, and Luke ten feet from me at his desk working through a stack of disclosure. Wright came out of his office with a folder he didn’t look like he needed and stopped in the middle of the floor, and raised his voice just enough.
“Before everybody scatters. One minute.” The floor slowed and turned, because the floor liked him. “I’d rather say this once, in the open, than have it move around the building on its own. It’s come back to me that Detective Carlson paid a visit to my old unit this week. Asking about me.”
The phones kept ringing and nobody answered them.
“I want to say, in front of everyone, that I take no offense. None. I arrived here carrying history. Detective Hawley and I were partners for years, everybody knows that, and I should have thought harder about what my turning up costs the people who have to live around it. That’s mine, not anyone else’s.
So, anything anybody wants to know about me, the door’s open.
Ask me. I’d rather be asked than wondered about.
” And then he turned to me, and the kindness went all the way up to his eyes.
“Especially you, Detective. Given everything, you’re the one with the best reasons to wonder. ”
Given everything. Every person on that floor could fill in what everything meant, and Luke stood right there while his own history got passed around the room.
Somebody’s chair creaked. Chen had stopped typing. To my left, Luke was not looking at me, and I felt that more than I had ever felt a look.
I knew every right move. Say nothing. Smile. Thank him for his openness and let it blow over. I was raised on those moves; I could do them in my sleep. And I stood there with the floor looking at me, and Luke looking at me, learning where I’d been from this man’s mouth, and I took none of them.
“Since the door’s open,” I said. My voice came out level, which fooled nobody, and me least of all.
“My files threw no flags for months. Then inside two weeks, two of them, both on the part that matters, both clean until somebody went digging. That’s not how I get things wrong, and the reviews go through you now.
Ask yourself that one, Sergeant. At your open door. ”
It was true. It was also useless, and I heard that even as I said it, and I couldn’t stop.
The quiet afterward was the wrong kind.
Wright didn’t get angry, because of course he didn’t. He looked down at the folder in his hands, and then up, and the hurt on his face was arranged so well that I couldn’t have sworn it was arranged.
“I review what the queue gives me, Detective. Every supervisor in this building does.” A pause, exactly long enough. “I’m sorry. I mean that.”
“All right,” Chen said, to the room, already moving. “Floor’s got work.” She said it to everyone and aimed it at me.
The floor got busy again, and everyone kept watching. Murphy’s door was open when it started. When I looked again it was closed, and I hadn’t heard it close.
Luke never moved. He stood at his desk with a file in one hand and nothing on his face at all. I’d seen that face before, in interview rooms, on the other side of the glass, and it had never once been aimed anywhere I was standing.
We worked the rest of the afternoon ten feet apart, and nothing crossed the gap, not a word, not a look.
Once, a court package came through needing both our signatures, and he brought it over, set it on my desk, said “Second tab,” and was gone before the pen was in my hand.
That was the whole conversation. A constable came up with a question for him, looked at the space between our desks, and went away without asking.
The question came by email instead. Around us, the whole floor stayed very busy not watching, and the ordinary sounds kept on, phones and printers and rain on the high windows, as if nothing had happened.
At end of shift Luke stood, took his jacket, and left without me. In all the time since the program had chained us together, through everything, that had never happened once. The floor saw that too.
I gave it twenty minutes, then took the back stairs down to the parking level, because the front doors meant crossing the floor again, and I had nothing left for that.