Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
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, a cop who’d done the job. They thought he was the spawn of some old eastside ground pounder who’d bumped up against a loose lady while patrolling an alley. When he got his stripes they’d come by and exuberantly pounded his biceps, to engrave them into his flesh.
After the second shooting, there was only a brief phone call and a message to hang in there. He sat at home and grew his hair and beard in the silence.
One night his daughter, Alexis, had come down to the basement where he’d taken to sleeping. She cuddled up to him on the sofa. “We’re okay, dad.” Her hair was blond like Karen’s. She had his thin features and he wondered often if he was looking at the features of the mother he’d never met.
He sat with his arm around her. “Anything you want to ask me, Ax?”
“Nope.” She wouldn’t say anything else except, “We’re cool.”
The next day, in the middle of a fight, Karen flat out asked if it was true, if he was a racist. He packed what possessions would fit into the backseat of a taxi.
At the Swamp his second shooting was cleared reluctantly and they sent him marching orders. He found himself in the alleys, feasted upon by insect life, festooned with bleeding bites and blemishes.
Forgotten, someone joked, but not gone.
* * *
Somehow he’d made a painting of the slashing looping greens. A forest, maybe, or a view of a jungle from a long distance away. There was a suggestion of things hidden, verdant things ready to pounce or reveal themselves. Ray Tate carefully detached the page from the spiral book and put it to dry on the kitchen counter.
His first telephone call was to an inspector at the Swamp. Ray Tate didn’t really trust anyone above duty sergeant. Duty sergeant was the ultimate, he believed, a mentor to the troops, a guy who never heard a joke he hadn’t already heard before. A duty sergeant was the master of his domain, a leader of his tribe. Only good dutys could create good cops. Get above duty sergeant and people feared your career arc instead of respecting your words and deeds. But the inspector he called was a good, young guy whose old man had died early on the job and he’d been raised by a legion of blue uncles who never left him abandoned or confused, who crammed his summer evenings with ball games and winter dawns with hockey practise.
The inspector listened to the list of names from the Chemical Squad roster. Most of the city guys were slobs, he said, duffed-out guys with habits. He warned Ray Tate to beware of the skipper up there. “Gordo’s very … sharp,” he said. “Fifteen to the dozen.”
“This Statie they got me with. Brown? The dyke? What about her?”
“Not a lot of back story,” the inspector said. “She went straight from the State Police training college to the Spout. You know the Spout? Up in Indian country, where they put you when they want you to volunteer to quit, cheap. ‘Up to the Spout, where they pour you out.’ She’s up there, oh, six, seven months with a detachment full of farm boys who never saw a black chick, never