Chapter 11 On the Record
Ryan
Murphy’s street was the kind where people still washed their own cars.
Small brick houses, close together, porches a step off the sidewalk, an east-end block that had gone up a century ago for factory workers and never learned to show off. I parked two houses down and sat for a minute with the engine off. I didn’t look at the folder on the passenger seat.
Luke was at the gym. That was the one clean thing about tonight.
Three evenings a week he went down to the club on Parliament and hit the bag until he got all the day’s or week’s frustrations out.
He’d left with his hands half taped and told me not to wait up, and I hadn’t had to say a single word that wasn’t true.
I got out and walked up.
The porch light was on. Before I could knock, the door opened, and a woman looked at me through the screen.
Tall, dark hair gone silver at the front and loose down her back, silver rings on half her fingers, a streak of dried paint up one forearm and a loose rust-colored shirt over her jeans, bare feet on the cold floor.
She looked at my face for about one second and seemed to recognize whatever she found there.
I was staring, and knew it, and took a second too long to stop.
Whatever I’d pictured for Murphy’s wife on the drive out, someone gray and sensible to match him, this wasn’t it.
She was beautiful. Not for her age, not the way people say it to be kind.
Just beautiful, with paint drying on her arm, and she watched it land on me and didn’t look surprised.
“You’d be Detective Carlson,” she said, and opened the screen door.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“He said you were the funny one.”
“Not tonight, I don’t think.”
“No,” she giggled, like I’d confirmed the weather. “Coffee’s on. Come in before the moths do.”
Inside smelled like coffee and turpentine under the lemon dish soap. The front room was small and lived-in, a couch with a bright woven throw over the back, canvases stacked and hung up the walls that I didn’t look at too hard.
Murphy came out of the kitchen in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled, no uniform anywhere on him, reading glasses pushed up into his hair.
Out of the building he looked smaller and older and harder to lie to.
I still couldn’t get the two of them into the same house.
Him gray and square and closed for the night, her all loose hair and rings and paint.
A veteran on the force in the city of Toronto, and this was what he came home to.
It made me trust him more, and I couldn’t say why.
“Carlson.”
“Sir. Thanks for seeing me.”
“Thank my wife. I wanted tomorrow at the division. She said whatever it was, a man doesn’t call like that to wait for office hours.” He turned toward the kitchen. “Come on.”
The kitchen was warm and yellow. A wooden table worn pale in the middle, four chairs, a dish towel folded over the oven handle, the coffee maker going through its last sounds. Mrs. Murphy poured two mugs and set them down, and put the sugar bowl between us.
“I’ll be upstairs, Dale,” she said. Her hand rested on his shoulder for a second on the way by. “Leave the pot on for the young man. Happy to have made your acquaintance, Detective Carlson.”
And with one last warm smile, she went. Stairs creaked, a door closed somewhere above us, and the house went quiet around the two of us and the coffee.
Murphy sat, took his glasses out of his hair, set them on the table, and looked at me.
“All right,” he said. “You asked for off the clock and off the property, and you’ve got both. Start talking.”
I’d built the order on the drive over. My hands weren’t quite steady, and I made myself keep to it anyway.
“Luke and I are together,” I said. “I don’t mean about the program. We are a couple and it’s been so for a little while. You may have suspected something, but I wanted to tell you. Formally. Do whatever the book says you do with it.”
Murphy didn’t move for a second. Then he reached for the sugar and put one spoon in his coffee and stirred it, taking his time.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll save you the wait.
Who you go home to is your business, not mine.
I haven’t got an opinion on it and I’m not going to grow one.
” He set the spoon down. “What I’ve got is policy.
The two of you are partners. The day this is on paper there’s a conflict question on the work, and disclosure is how you keep it clean, which is what you’re doing, so that part’s handled right.
You mind the rules, you keep the personal off my floor and out of the files, and I keep the rest off your back.
That end of it I don’t lose a minute of sleep over. ”
“Thank you, sir.”
He picked up his coffee. “But you didn’t ask me off the clock and out to my kitchen table to tell me that. That’s a Monday-morning thing, and you know it. So tell me what actually brought you out here tonight.”
I looked at the folder on the table between us. I’d meant to open it first and let it do the talking, the way you lead with your strongest exhibit. I left it shut.
“Let’s start with the two flags you warned me about,” I said.
“IT told you the records program lost them, and you closed it as noted. That was fair. But I let you think I agreed, and I didn’t.
One of them I know I typed clean, I told you so in your office and it still holds.
The other I can’t swear to, I never could, which is exactly why it’s the easy one to hang on me.
But two flags in two weeks, both on the part that decides a case, both looking fine until someone went digging, isn’t how I get things wrong.
Someone went into my files, changed what mattered, and left my name on it. ”
Murphy turned his mug a quarter and said nothing.
“On its own, that’s nothing. I know it’s nothing. Two flags on a man who was never good at paperwork. That’s the point. Each part of this looks ordinary by itself, and you can explain each one away. I’m asking you not to. I’m asking you to look at all of it at once.”
“Go on.”
“It didn’t start with me. He’s done it before, the same way, to someone else, for years.
Small mistakes that weren’t really mistakes.
Pieces missing from finished files. And the same answer every time.
The system, or you. Pick one. I found that out this week, on my own time.
You’re not going to like how I found it, and I’ll tell you that part too.
But I came back sure. It’s not the system. It’s deliberate. And it’s him.”
“That’s a big jump. A records flag to a sergeant’s name.”
“It is. I didn’t make it on a feeling. It’s in the folder, and it’s on the laptop.
There’s one more piece, and it’s the one that makes me look like the man he’s spent a month telling the floor I am.
You’ll hear it from me first, before you see it.
” I kept my hand flat on the folder. “The flags I could have lived with. Two nights ago, it stopped being only my job. He went after Luke. Anyone who hears that has a fair question. Am I a detective who found something, or a jealous man who can’t stand who Luke used to be with?
So, I’ll answer it before you ask. I sat with this for two days.
I tried to talk myself out of it. I couldn’t. I’m sure.”
Murphy set his mug down and looked at me for a moment.
“All right,” he said. “Show me.”
I opened the folder and laid the three prints on his kitchen table, facing him, in the order they’d been in when they came under my door.
Murphy put his glasses on. He looked at the photographs for a long time, one after another, and his face did nothing at all, and I watched him take in the same things I’d taken in standing in my own dark kitchen, Luke and Wright and the streetlight and the kiss.
“Where did you get these?” he said. Flat. Not looking up.
“Someone slid them under our door. No envelope markings, no note, no prints on the paper but mine now.”
“And you’re showing me this instead of putting a hole in a wall. There’s more to it.”
“There’s more.” I opened the laptop and turned it toward him, but I left it paused.
“I won’t walk you through all of it tonight.
There’s video of that corner from the same evening, off a shop camera on the block I still had a way into.
I’ve watched it enough for both of us. The short version: he pulled Luke back off a curb with nothing coming and kissed him for the camera, and Luke shoved him off and walked.
It was staged. And there was a car across the street the whole time, lights off, there before either of them showed and gone the second it ended.
Someone sat in it with a camera.” I took the folded paper out of my wallet and set it beside the prints. “I got the plate.”
Murphy took his glasses off. He sat back, and the chair creaked, and for a while he didn’t say anything. Upstairs a floorboard shifted, and I sat in his kitchen and let him think.
“He staged a kiss,” Murphy said, finally, “on a public corner, with a photographer already paid and parked. And then had the product delivered to your door.” He said each piece separately.
“It was aimed at me. I’m meant to do something stupid with it. Wave it in Luke’s face or wave it in Wright’s before punching him.”
“And Hawley doesn’t know you have them.”
It wasn’t really a question, but I answered it anyway, because this man had let me into his kitchen and I’d decided on the porch I wasn’t going to lie inside it.
“Not yet. He doesn’t know about the photographs, and he doesn’t know I’m here.” I kept my voice level. “You want to say something about that, you’d be right, and I’ll take it. After.”
Murphy didn’t answer right away. The rosary came out of his pocket, an old habit with old beads, and his thumb moved over them once and stopped.
“I see,” he agreed. “Go on. You didn’t drive out here to show me a magic trick. You’re building something.”
So, I told him about Brar.