Chapter 7 Clearing the Air #2
The parking level was concrete and half the lights, pool cars in their row, the ramp up to the street at the far end. I was ten steps in when Wright came down the ramp on foot, coat over his arm, and saw me, and stopped.
The warmth, the openness, the worry, all of it went out of his face between one step and the next, and what was left looked at me with nothing in it at all. When he spoke, the voice had gone down a register, flat and unhurried, and I understood that I was hearing him for the first time.
“You’ve been reading your own file, Detective.” He came closer, no rush. “Whose mistakes do you think they are?”
I didn’t say anything. He wasn’t asking.
“Here’s where things are,” he said, “since you paid for the answer.” He set his coat over a pool car’s mirror, smoothed it once.
“Luke got more interesting than he expected while I was gone. That’s worth something.
I intend to ride it. So is he, when I get to it.
And when something better opens up, they can both go back where I found them.
” He said it with no weight at all, a man reading a duty roster.
I didn’t move. Part of that was training: give him nothing, hold the face, let him do all the talking. The rest was simpler. There was nowhere to put what I was hearing, so I stood there and took it.
Somewhere over our heads the building went on. A pipe ticked. My own pulse was very loud and very slow.
“So,” he said. “Take it upstairs. Tell Murphy a sergeant confessed the whole thing in an empty garage with no witnesses. Better, go home and tell Luke, tonight, while he’s that angry with you.
Use the voice from this afternoon.” He lifted the coat off the mirror and put it on, unhurried, squared the collar. “You see the problem?”
A door banged in the stairwell above us and feet came down, some constable with a banker’s box, and the warmth was back in Wright’s face, instantly.
“Get home safe, Detective,” he said, at normal volume, and walked to his car, and on the way he said something to the constable with the box that made the man laugh.
I stood there in the cold with all of it. Every word of it was true, and none of it was worth anything past the bottom of that ramp. He hadn’t threatened me, hadn’t sworn me to anything, hadn’t needed to. The floor upstairs had done it for him this afternoon, with my help.
The apartment was lit when I got home. Luke was at the counter, still in his work clothes, two plates made and neither one touched, and he didn’t get up.
“Two days ago, you told me you were chasing paper on an old case.”
“Luke…”
“I’m not done.” He didn’t raise his voice.
He never raised his voice. “At the diner you told me it was the machine. You sat there and watched me be relieved, and you paid the bill and walked me home. And this afternoon Adam stood in the middle of our division and told everyone we work with you’ve been investigating him. ”
He hadn’t gotten a single thing wrong, and I had nothing to answer with.
“I was going to tell you.”
“When?”
“That night. Then the next night. I didn’t know how to broach the subject.”
“And what else?” He said it evenly, and that was worse than if he had yelled.
“That’s my real question now. Until two days ago I’d have sworn you didn’t lie to me.
Now I get to go back through the whole month and wonder.
The flags. The nights you went quiet. Every time you looked at your phone and put it face down.
What else have you decided I don’t get to know? About work. About him.”
There was a true answer to that. It was worse than anything he was imagining. I didn’t give it.
“That long a pause is giving you away,” he said.
“I told you everything,” he said. “On that couch. Every ugly thing I had, some of it things I’d never said out loud to another living person.
Because we said nothing sits between us that hasn’t been said.
I heard you agree to that.” He looked at me for the first time since I’d come in.
“And then you lied to me and went asking around about my past behind my back.”
“The person I went to see was his partner, Luke. Four years, same as you. She told me she read everything he touched before it went out, because it wasn’t safe not to.
And that the one time she stopped covering for him, her own files started coming back wrong.
Missing pieces. Flags she couldn’t explain either… ”
“Stop.” The word came out sharp. “Listen to what you’re doing. You found one cop at the end of her career, and you’re building a case out of her bad memories.”
“She wasn’t bitter. She warned me to stay away from him.”
“And I rode with him for four years.” His voice started to rise.
“Four years, Ryan. That is longer than I have been with you. I know the man. I know him on night shifts and at funerals and on the worst calls this job has. You think I don’t know he’s careless with reports?
I fixed half of them myself. I told you that, on the couch.
Careless is not a crime. Being bad at paperwork is not the same as falsifying police files, and you’re accusing him of a crime based on an impression. ”
“The flags are real!”
“The flags are the system. Murphy said so. IT said so. That program loses entries in every division in this city, and if it lost yours, that isn’t Adam’s fault either.” He spread his hands. “Nothing you’ve brought me tonight would hold up for a minute. Nothing.”
I listened to him defend the man, and somewhere in the middle of it I finally understood.
In four years, Luke had never been shown anything worth doubting.
Brar got the worst of him. I got that too.
Luke got the best of him, every day, on purpose.
That wasn’t luck. He had built it that way.
I knew how that worked, because I had done the same thing myself, this morning, on the walk.
He took his plate to the sink untouched. Halfway there he stopped, came back, pushed the other plate across the counter at me, and kept going, and neither of us said anything about that.
“And he caught me at the doors on my way out tonight.” His back was to me at the sink.
“To apologize. For the position I’d been put in today.
For his part in it. I stood in the lobby of our own division and accepted an apology from Adam, on your behalf, and thanked him for it, because anything else would have been a second show for whoever was watching.
So don’t tell me any part of today was for me. ”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For how I did it. For every night I didn’t say it. I mean it.”
“I know you are.” He turned around. “It’s not the same as it being okay.”
“Luke.”
“For what, Ryan?” His voice went up then, and stayed up.
I had never heard him raise it before, not once.
“What is it you think he’s taking from you!
He’s the past. You’re the one in my arms. You have nothing to be jealous of, nothing, and instead of believing me you drove across the city looking for something wrong with him, because me choosing you every single day apparently isn’t proof of anything! ”
“I’m not jealous of him!” My voice came up too. I couldn’t stop it. “I’m afraid of the damage he could cause.”
That stopped him for a second.
“Afraid,” he said. “Of Adam.” He laughed once, without any humor in it. “The man spent today apologizing. To the floor, to me, for you, for himself, for taking up space. And you’re afraid of him.” He shook his head, and his mouth set. “I can’t do this tonight. I can’t even look at you tonight.”
He walked out of the kitchen. The bedroom door shut hard enough to rattle the glasses in the cupboard.
I stood where I was for a long time. The plate went cold on the counter. The bedroom door stayed shut. After a while I turned off the kitchen light and stood in the dark with everything I hadn’t said.