Tuesday, May 30520Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡy7B3xG4Oyb
Detective Noah Bain stood in the thin shade of a honey locust on a little shag of lawn near the front steps of the Tolumura Police Department's administration building. He wore Ray-Ban sunglasses to cut the glare from the hundreds of windshields and thousands of chrome strips on the cars in the parking lots across the street. To his left, within rock-throwing distance of the police station, a backwater loop of the Sitting Bull River wound under the maze of ramps and overpasses of the Desert Freeway, and the shadow side of the downtown skyscrapers rose against the 10:00 sun like a massive glass escarpment, stretching south beyond the expressways. Ragged ranks of fat clouds drifted to the northwest, but within a few hours they would give way to the hot, ink-blue sky. It was the final week in May, and the temperature had already hit the low 100s seven days out of the last fourteen. An unusually wet and snowy winter had given Tolumura's lush, semitropical landscape a head start on summer, and the city looked and felt like the Sahara Desert with the low, low humidity.
He had been in the crime lab in the next building checking the results of an ejector marks comparison test run on a single cartridge found at the scene of a gangland killing. He had been hoping they would match the ejector marks on similar cartridges fired from an AMT .45 automatic long slide which he had already tied to another hit. They hadn't.
He was just learning this disappointing news when Overpeck had called from their office across the drive in the homicide division to say they had to make a scene in west Tolumura. Overpeck was on his way to the motor pool to check out a car and would pick Noah up in front of the administration building as soon as he could get around there. Noah thanked the firearms examiner, grabbed his Styrofoam cup of coffee and returned down the stark hallways to the front of the building. Outside, the dry air and the gritty traffic pounding by on the nearby expressway turned his stomach against the coffee. He tossed it on the asphalt and carried the empty cup in his left hand, absently punching holes in the rim with his thumbnail as he thought about the circumstances of the second hit and made his way around the corner of the administration building.
At 5′ 8", 45-year-old and eagle-eyed Noah Bain was taller than average for a German-Jewish man. A little more muscular than he wanted to be, he worked out regularly to keep his muscles and torso trim, and, he always hoped, to keep the weight off. He was balding, his coal-black hair covering only the top of his head and cut close-cropped. He wore his sideburns long, '70s style. He never used hair-tonic or used cologne of any kind, a privilege that fate accorded certain types of roguish-looking men whose eyes and face conveyed to women a kind of sensuality. His eyebrows were beetled, yet needed no trimming, not even periodic plucking to keep them shaped.
The morning had started off wrong, even before the bad news from the crime lab, from the moment he'd walked into his kitchen half asleep and ripped yesterday's date off the calendar. He had stood there staring at the new number and the note scrawled beneath it, surprised, offended, resentful and angry with himself. Then he'd turned away and started making his coffee. He'd made it too strong. Later, after putting on his suit and tie, he returned to the kitchen, sipped the strong coffee and stared out the window to the bricked courtyard and resolved once again to take it in his stride, as he did most things, having learned from his father that a long stride would get you what you wanted more quickly than a short temper. Still, his thoughts kept coming back to it, even crowding in on the negative results of the ejector comparisons which had just destroyed his final hope for making a guy who had had such a string of good luck that he could have qualified as an actuarial wonder.
By the time Overpeck pulled up to the curb, Noah had begun to sweat. After eight years as a detective, four of those in homicide, he had learned his lessons about the practical limits of stylish clothes and police work. In the first place the salary he pulled down wouldn't support the kinds of wardrobes he saw on the GQ-oriented career men uptown, and even if it did, the circumstances of the job just made them impractical. Even the most serviceable and businesslike designer clothes just didn't cut it in the environment where Noah encountered most of his clients.
But it wasn't as if he hadn't tried. During his first year in homicide he had ruined half a dozen of his nicer suits because he had been determined to dress a little more attractively than was practical, at least occasionally, and had worn them on days when he just "felt" he wouldn't catch a dirty scene. Boy, was he wrong. The final delusion that this might be possible had passed on a blazing August afternoon in the far East End when he and Kathryn Damato, his partner at the time, had been called out to investigate the suspicious disappearance of a street prostitute. On that afternoon Damato had decided to be uncharacteristically egalitarian and "let" him crawl under the floor of a deteriorating pier and beam house to confirm their suspicions about the source of a distinctly putrescent odor. He kissed the price of the suit goodbye and went in. A man encountering the bad end of a woman, neither of them dressed right for the occasion.
The next day had been his day off and he spent most of it at the tailor. Poring over the suit catalogs, he selected a dozen or more classic styles of three-piece business suits, leisure suits and slacks. Then he turned to the fabric samples. He methodically studied scores of fabrics before settling on Egyptian cotton as being both utilitarian and stylishly adaptable. And, thanks to that tailor, he had a closetful of suits that neither sacrificed his masculinity nor caused him too much grief if he ruined them at a scene.
Overpeck had the air conditioner cranked up on high as Noat got in the passenger side.
"So what did Jim have to say?" Overpeck asked, pulling out of the drive and heading for the freeway. He'd already shed his suitcoat, which was thrown over the back of the seat, and had loosened his tie.
"It's no good," said Noah. "Apparently it'd been caught under the rear tire of the guy's car. The asphalt screwed it up. No match."
"You gotta be kidding. Nothing?"
Noah shook his head. He liked working with Overpeck, though a lot of younger detectives might have chafed at the older man's professional lassitude.
"What happened?" Noah asked, closing the overloaded ashtray under the dash so the air conditioner wouldn't whip up the ashes. "I thought Yung and Pittman were first out."
"They are. But they caught something Yung wants us to look at. Said he thought we'd want to see it."
Noah looked at him. "That's it?"
Overpeck grinned. "It'll be interesting, whatever it is. Yung things this is a very nifty thing, getting us out there."
"Out where?"
"A good address. Just south of Paso Bajo, off Mago Vista."
Noah took a foil packet from his blazer pocket, tore it open and took out a small disposable towelette, and proceeded to wipe the ash-dusted dash. When he had first started riding with Overpect, he had just quit smoking and hated riding in a car that had been used by a smoker on the previous shift. He would bitch and gripe and empty the ashtrays and wipe the dash with wet paper towels he would bring from the men's room to the garage just in case. For a while he compulsively cleaned every car they rode in. Gradually, after he got his nicotine addiction under control, he stopped the sanitation exercise and eventually quit worrying about dumping the ashtrays. Noah could let it slide too, everything but the dash.
"Hot enough for you?" Overpeck asked not waiting for an answer. "Every year it gets to the blistering point a little bit earlier in the year. I used to think it was my imagination or my age."
"You don't anymore?" They were passing through the Highway 56 interchange.
"Not since they discovered this greenhouse effect," Overpeck said. "Fluorocarbons. You know, when Molly's mom died she left us that little cabin up on the Colorado. Last time I was up there the water level had dropped five feet. Big shock. And then I got to thinking about fluorocarbons. I'm convinced my family's a major contributor to this global heat-up. Can you imagine how much hair spray and antiperspirant Molly and those four girls have used during the last twenty-five years?" He laughed. "Jesus! By the time I retire up there on the lake that cabin's going to overlook nothing but a stinking brown sandbar."
Zev Overpeck was an old dog, not in age but in homicide experience, and he had been Noah's partner for little over two years. He was fifty-four, broad-built, with dark brown skin, short, curly, graying brown hair, and brown, average-sized eyes. In height he was short (at least that was the way he'd looked to Noah when they'd first met), and he weighed quite a bit more than Noah. He had spent much of his career holding down two jobs in order to put his daughter through college, and at times he seemed older than his years. He was seven months shy of a thirty-year retirement.
But the pension hadn't come soon enough. During the last year Overpeck had burned out. He knew it. Everyone knew it. He had become a detective of the bare minimum. He put in his hours and went home, and his desk cubicle in the homicide division cubbyhole he shared with Noah was decorated with the gaudy, hairy tufts of fly-fishing lures he stuck into the fabric of the walls, his own creations which he studied and revised in his patient search for perfect balance, style, and color. He still did his job, and his work was as thorough as always, but his curiosity was worn out. The veteran detectives recognized Overpeck's problem and accepted it. He'd been a good man for a long time, and nobody was going to call his hand because he lost his enthusiasm so close to retirement. It happened.
For his part, Noah was just where he'd always wanted to be. His great-grandfather had been one of the first Jewish detectives in homicide and would have retired in harness if a vengeful bootlegger's bullet hadn't claimed him first. Now, at 45 he was one of only four Jewish detectives in a division of seventy-five officers. He had had to deal with his share of smartasses over the years, but luckily Zev Overpeck wasn't one of them. He was oblivious to religious prejudices----a rarity in Catholic New Mexico----and having grown up as an only boy with four sisters and then gone on to become the father of four daughters, he didn't have an anti-Semitic bone in his body. And he harbored no illusions about Jews, good or bad.
Noah already had already worked with Overpeck long enough to have grown to like and respect him before he started coasting on the job, so he didn't feel any resentment that he wasn't as aggressive as he might've been. As a matter of fact, his gradual disengagement over the past year had unexpectedly worked to his advantage. As Overpeck's enthusiasm flagged, Noah increasingly took the responsibility of determining the style of their investigations as Overpeck calmly went along. He had acquired invaluable experience in case management that he might not have gotten if his partner had always insisted on being the "top dog" of the team, continually asserting his leadership right by virtue of his age and seniority.
But Overpeck wasn't always quiet. He'd had a lot of experience, and from time to time he had something to say. And when he did, Noah listened. The fact was----and it had taken him a while to realize it----Zev Overpeck, while seeming to be not entirely attentive to his business, had managed to carefully guide Noah's development, and as a result he had given Noah the best training any younger homicide detective could ever have hoped to receive from an older partner. It was in large part thanks to Overpeck's taking him under his wing that Noah had developed so quickly into one of the division's hottest and most watched detectives with a reputation for grabbing a case and not letting go "till the devil goes blind," as Overpeck liked to say.
Noah had settled back and watched the traffic on the freeway, his thoughts beginning to wander as soon as Noah had started talking. He listened with him to one side of his brain while the other tracked over scenes from his recent past that had been shoving their way to the front of his consciousness all morning. They were the last things he wanted to think about, but he had tried too hard, and now they were the only things he could think about.
By the time they reached Monolith Plaza he was suddenly aware that Overpeck had stopped talking and was glancing at him out of the corner of his eye. Finally, he say, "Any questions?"
"What?" Noah looked at him.
"I mean about what I've been saying. The lake going down, the black bass not biting, the bad problem with mosquitoes up on the Colorado...."
He grinned. "Okay, sorry."
"You miffed about the screwed-up shell casing?"
Noah shook his head. The fact was, he was "miffed" because he was miffed, a response he knew Overpeck wouldn't think much of as a reasonable explanation. He would have preferred not to talk about it, but Overpeck was sitting over there waiting for him to get it off his chest.
"Every morning," he said, looking out across the city, looking at the traffic, flicking something imaginary off his blazer, "I go into the kitchen, go over to the calendar, and tear off yesterday's date. Always do that, first thing. And I don't even look at it because I'm gone all day, and at night I don't care. But I do it. And then I make coffee. Anyway, today when I did that I was surprised to see that I'd written, in big green letters: 'Divorce final....six months.'" He rolled his eyes. "For some reason I'd marked it like a damn anniversary. Don't even remember doing it. I can't imagine why.......I went through the entire calendar to see if I'd done any more of that kind of crap."
Overpeck turned his head slowly and looked at him to see if he were peering over the top of reading glasses.
"I hadn't," said Noah.
Overpeck had been through the entire ordeal with him, the disintegrating marriage, the affair, the lightning divorce. Noah had buried himself with work trying to get away from it, and Overpeck had watched him, been there when he needed something solid to touch to steady his balance. He hadn't been a father to him, but he had been damn close to it, and Noah would never forget it.
"Why'd that put you off?" Overpeck asked, switching lanes without looking back. Noah had already checked his outside mirror. When they traveled in the same car Overpeck always drove, but Noah always watched the traffic. It was defensive driving by remote control.
"I don't know," said Noah. "That's why I'm 'miffed'." Overpeck was the only person he had ever heard use that word, which reminded him of the 1940s.
Overpeck laughed. "Well, hell," he said, and Noah knew they had reached the point where even his lifetime of experience with ten women wouldn't help him understand.
It was a simple matter: he was furious that he could still be so affected by an unexpected reminder of his ex-wife. Anna-Diana Cohn had been---still was----a criminal defense lawyer, which should have told him something about her from the start. They had met at a trial where Noah had testified about a minor aspect of the case he was defending, and Anna-Diana had dazzled him and the jury with her quickness, confidence----and sincerity. Her client, who was as guilty as Judas, was acquitted. Noah, on the other hand, was nailed. She pursued him relentlessly with unabashed adoration. She was gorgeous, with beautiful eyes and teeth, a personal style of dressing and caring for her body that let you know she was squeaky clean without being fussy. She could think on her feet, which made her a superb trial lawyer and a formidable opponent in the other kind of courtship as well. She was quick to flatter, quick to read your thoughts (though not always correctly), quick to defend herself if she believed (as she often did) that she wasn't winning you over, and, unfortunately, she was quick in bed.
The latter attribute didn't even faze him. He couldn't resist him. The relationship had been fast and hot and thrilling and there had been no time to think it over and no desire to slow things down. But he had to be honest about it, he wasn't thinking anyway. He was feeling, and if there had been warning signs he hadn't seen them because his libido had run amok, scattering reason before it. He had married her after four months of heavy breathing.
Any sidewalk philosopher could've told him what would happen next, but Noah didn't see it coming. It was an old story; he could have read about it in the hundreds of "relationship" or "self-help" or "men's" magazines and books in the pop psychology sections of the bookstores. Men never failed to be caught flat-footed and incredulous about this phenomenon of the Janus-faced new wife. It was like marrying Chang and Chen, the second of the two remaining invisible while you were dating the first, and then mercurially springing to life the morning after your wedding night while the one you had dated proceeded to vanish. The next night you made love to a woman you'd never met!
The adoration was gone. Before their marriage Anna-Diana had joyfully embarrassed him with gifts (she had impeccable taste, knew just what looked good on him, and didn't hesitate to buy it), and surprises (she liked to meet him at the end of his last shift before the weekend with two tickets to Cancun or Acapulco).
But after the wedding, she had undergone a change that had almost given him a whiplash. Flowers? Only for funerals, and then he had to order them. Gifts? If he wanted something he was perfectly free to buy it. Surprises? Her caseload was heavy. It would have to wait, maybe next month (he hadn't seen a beach since).
Before their marriage she spent everyone moment she could get away from her job with him; after their marriage she suddenly seemed to have obligations she never seemed to have had before. She played on the law firm's tennis team which competed every Saturday morning and practiced three afternoons a week. They couldn't have lunches together because she played handball with a group of girls who put her on to clients. It was essential to her career to be attentive to these "players." Sundays she was too tired to do anything but lie on the sofa in front of the television set and watch whatever kind of ballgame was in season.
She never helped with anything that happened in the kitchen----she only got as far as the dining room in that part of the house. She didn't know how to turn on the washing machine, or even get her dirty clothes from the bedroom to the laundry room. She never went to the cleaners or shopped for so much as even a box of cereal----but she knew where the liquor store was and would stop by on her way home. Her indifference to such day-to-day practicalities changed only when she was inconvenienced by an interruption to her routine. Then she could be spitefully impatient----with him.
She was still good in bed, only now she didn't even pretend to postcoital tenderness or even a mild concern for his own satisfactions in such matters. After she had spent herself, she rolled over and passed out like a narcoleptic.
After the first six months she could no longer ignore the fact that this was the way things were going to be. She spent another six months trying to get her to "communicate" (she didn't believe she wasn't) and another six months paralyzed by the realization that the marriage simply wasn't going to work. When he caught her in an affair with another lawyer at her firm, a young man whose ambitions brooked no moral impediments, Noah kicked her out of the house they recently had bought in Peak Brook and which Anna-Diana had long coveted as an appropriate status symbol. And he made damn sure he got it in the settlement. He wanted it not because of what it meant to him, but because of what it meant to her. It was her idea of the kind of place a woman like her ought to live, and it was his idea of getting even to take it away from her. He never regretted it.520Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnAkxvzLE49
He had endured the marriage for eighteen months, had been divorced for six, and was still mad at himself for his astonishing lack of good judgment, and----in those moments when he was being brutally honest----not a little embarrassed by having played the part of the stereotypical gullible male.520Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMCOArtyIzf
