Free Form Jazz. Lee Lamothe
automatically deposited and he had little reason to go outside. Until his beard and hair grew out, and he became unrecognizable from the media photos, he crept to the supermarket in a baseball hat and sunglasses. He started smoking again. He drank, each day starting in earlier until he found himself leaning asleep on his easel in the middle of the day. When he awoke his hands shook as he poured his breakfast.
One night he’d borrowed Mr. Lilly’s old Chevrolet and drove out to the western suburbs to see his ex and his daughter. His wife had been perfunctory and went to the basement to do laundry and watch television. His daughter, graduating high school, sat with him on the deck he’d built with the firefighter next door, and they talked about her photography and her plan to spend a year in Asia. She looked at him funny and then went inside, returning with a handful of photographs and a sleek Nikon. She stuttered it at him a few times and previewed the pictures on the LCD screen.
“Look, Dad,” she’d said. She handed him a photo taken of him before the first of the shootings. The difference was stunning: his face had become lined, his eyes were sunken into his head, his mouth was grim and clamped as though protecting himself from a confession.
“You look afraid,” his daughter said with alarm. “Are you afraid, Dad?”
He’d gone home and poured the half bottles of alcohol into the sink. He took to four sugars in his coffee to keep his blood in balance. The squareheaded duty sergeant from the local station came by one after-shift, looked around and said, “Jesus fuck, Ray. C’mon, man.”
The following day, three off-dutys and a uniformed female officer appeared carrying a folded futon, pillows, some banal framed pictures of Japanese mountaintops, a set of silverware, a television set, and a stack of bedding meant for a queen-sized bed. Each left a police business card with their cell numbers scrawled on the back. The last one, preparing to leave, a trim blond policewoman with a hurricane of freckles and a wide sad smile, said: “You need, you call, sergeant. You got it?”
Ray Tate nodded.
“You want, I’ll stay, sergeant.”
Numbly, he’d nodded and she helped him assemble and make up the futon. She stripped off her uniform. She wore men’s underwear and socks that sagged to her ankles.
Afterwards, as she slept, he turned on a lamp and tilted the shade away from her. He mixed blues and purples and blacks and painted her sleeping, her muscular arm hanging off the side of the futon, her gun belt curled on the floor, her boots neatly aligned beside the futon. He looked at the long tubes of yellows and oranges and bright reds and could think of nothing to do with them.
Then the sun was coming up and spilling thin, perfect north light into the apartment. He lay down beside her. He felt loved for what seemed the first time in his life, although he couldn’t recall her name.
* * *
After leaving the satellite and the skipper’s greasy brotherhood, Ray Tate stopped at a coffee shop and wrote from memory the names and phone numbers from the duty roster in the Chemical Squad’s office into his notebook. Aside from the notorious Djuna Brown he recognized none of them, except for one: Walter Brodski, a stumblebum ex-hero who let the pressures grind him into a bottle.
In his jacket and union sweatshirt, Tate hiked up the hill outside the satellite, past the swank midtown shops and sushi bars, and strode into the gully at the cemetery. At the north end he stopped again for a coffee to warm up, sitting in a window and looking at the streets as though he’d been away a long time. Back on the sidewalk he legged it energetically north, veering off to walk slowly by the local station, keeping half an eye out for the freckled, blond policewoman.
There were framed photographs of his daughter’s work on the walls of his apartment and some faced-in canvases he’d played with, to little result, leaning near his easel. With his lack of enthusiasm or real talent it was getting expensive to buy the stretched canvas so he’d bought a case of thick paper pads. There was a teak, elephant-footed coffee table his daughter had found at an antique shop. Little else had changed in the apartment in the months since the charity run by the local division guys and the mercy of the freckled policewoman. She’d never come back. He’d seen her once, doing up her notebook behind an office building when he cut through one afternoon in his shabby alley rat attire. He passed, he thought, unnoticed. In the days since she’d stayed the night he’d thought about her a lot.
There was no mail. He’d been away in the weeds for days and the apartment smelled of cooped up linseed oil, dirty laundry, and the faint scent of gas from the stove. He reefed open the windows. Old Mr. Lilly had mown the lawn and the earthy fragrance stirred something in him. He reached for his brushes and tubes, hooked his thumb through his pallet, and flipped open a spiral pad of thick paper. He squeezed green.
Ray Tate was no fan of Zen but his daughter’s photographs of calm gardens and forests made him shut his eyes. He slashed vertical; he swooped in curves. Resisting the urge to open his eyes to examine the result, he instead moistened the tip of the brush with his tongue to thin out the colour and slashed and swooped and let his mind flow like water over unfamiliar stones.
The psychiatrist had told him one of her clients, a small-town policeman from a burg across the state line, had cut off his gun hand with a table saw after shooting a teenager dead during an off-duty traffic stop on the Interstate. Another, she said, quit the job and became a bricklayer, even on his off-days building walls around walls at his cottage on the river. All of it, she said, to protect the world from himself. They all suffered, she said, sooner or later. They became quickly grey and their faces lined, their mouths turned into upside down Us. They became impotent and violent in direct proportion to their libido level prior to their killings. They beat themselves. They beat their wives. They beat their children. Some, she said, just vanished, either dead or gone into a void world where they could become something else, usually with the fragrance of alcohol or smoke.
“What did you do, Ray, after the first incident?”
He didn’t like her. She was beautiful and had big brunette hair and perfect legs beneath a business suit with a sexy cut. She looked at him as though he was a specimen. He said: “I answered all the questions, then I went home and …” He looked down at his hands.
She leaned forward. Her breasts were creamy. She was predatory. “And? And then … What?”
“I ate a bacon sandwich.” His face was bland enough that he knew she could tell he was lying. He didn’t tell her his wife, the daughter of a cop, looked at him differently after the second shoot. “Canadian bacon.”
“My dad,” his wife had said, “was thirty years on and he never shot anyone. Ray, how come you shot two people?”
He didn’t answer.
“Ray?”
“Your dad was a crime scene geek, Karen. He shot pictures, not people. When he got there the bad guys were dead on the floor. When I get there, they’re not so co-operative.”
They’d sat in stiff silence and ate their dinner off TV trays. When the news came on and showed the riots starting up downtown she picked up her plate and went into the kitchen.
He’d become a cop because her dad had talked him into it. Being a doorstep baby of the State he’d had no dad of his own, but had been raised in a series of good but indifferent foster homes where one man taught him to shave, another to defend himself and to how to swing on an inside curve ball, another to play chess, another to fashion a half-Windsor knot in his tie. All good men, he believed. A bit of the duty sergeant in each of them.
Karen’s dad, Harry, had extolled the job for the wrong reasons. Good pay, good benefits, a great pension. You can keep my daughter in a good life on that stuff, old Harry had said. Retire early enough to start another career, bank the pension. There was no talk of duty, of public service, of justice or protection. It was to please her dad that he’d applied. The old man’s connections had got him in and moved him along, not in rank but in assignments. After the first shooting the old man and his cronies had come to the house and drank him into the floor. It was as though they’d never seen a real cop before, a working cop,