Rage Against the Dying

Nine





There are designated cop spots, places where everybody might not know your name, but where you can be sure they’ll cover your back because there’s a shotgun behind the bar. The Naugahyde elbow rest on the bar is cracked in places, the lighting is bad, and you try not to think about the kitchen. People besides cops go to these places, of course, like silent elderly couples on fixed incomes who appear to have said everything they have to say to each other decades before. Everyone knows it’s a safe place with reliably standard fare and dollar happy hours. This one turned out to be close to the hotel, about a mile north from the Sheraton on Campbell in a freestanding old building close to the road, one of the few in Tucson that hadn’t yet been torn down for a strip mall.

I got there first and recognized a couple deputies from the sheriff’s office, if only by first name. Wally and Cliff both stopped grinding their burgers just long enough to lift a greasy palm in greeting, as did the bartender, one of those cheerful lugs who look like an overweight baby.

At the bartender’s direction I took a table against the wall that was painted to look like crumbling adobe. A waitress came up before I had a chance to unstick the little white band that kept my paper napkin folded around the silverware. The waitress was in her late twenties, I thought, though young people look younger the older I get. She had a runner’s build and was African American. If I was still living in DC that last thing wouldn’t be worthy of remark, but there aren’t many black people living in Arizona.

I could have waited for Coleman to arrive so I didn’t seem in such urgent need but holding up my palms like two scales said, “Vodka in one glass, ice in another.” Customary maximum at cop bars is generally two light beers; the cops glanced over when they heard me order. I ignored them and looked around the place, noting the Special Olympics and Toys for Tots appreciation certificates on the far wall and the usual mass of photographs of customers mugging cheerfully. It felt good to get away from Zach and meet somebody for cop talk.

Coleman must have been booking it because she showed up before my drink was gone, so I didn’t have a chance to order a second without her knowing. When she sat down and leaned her black satchel against a leg of the chair, she looked at my glass. Though I spooned some more of the ice into the vodka glass I didn’t feel as if I had to justify myself.

After registering my alcohol she looked around at her surroundings, at the other cops in the bar, and didn’t seem entirely comfortable with it all, too low class or too barish for her.

“So why did you leave Fraud for Homicide? Usually people go the other way,” I asked.

“I just felt that was what I had to do.” She gave a mild shrug to go with her nonanswer and turned up one corner of her mouth. For someone so eager to get together she was evasive, her eyes pausing only in the vicinity of mine. Under the pretext of raking her fingers through her short curls she passed a hand over a pale copper birthmark on her right temple as if she considered that birthmark her only flaw and wanted to hide it. Other than that my only impression was that in high school she might have been the sort of girl who rode on floats.

The waitress came back. “Do you know what else you want?” she asked, as if there was a statute of limitations on how many times she would come to the table. Funny how, after spending the past two days with a serial killer and assorted dead bodies, neither of us had the courage or energy to object to the pressure of an assertive waitress. We defaulted to taco salads. As Coleman closed her menu, I spotted the name on the cover. “Emery’s Cantina,” I remarked. “Is that ironic?”

“No, why?” asked the waitress.

“Cantina. Emery. Emery sounds about as Mexican as … Moishe,” I suggested, the vodka stimulating my creativity.

“The Mexican theme is a common leitmotif in the Southwest,” she said with a carefully straight face as she extended one hand palm up toward the bartender. “That’s Emery, the owner. He’s Hungarian. I’m Cheri. I’m not.” Said Hungarian was leaning across the Formica bar comforting some clearly off-duty cop who was also not following the two-light-beer rule. I heard, “a taxi.”

I raised my glass and clinked the remaining ice. Coleman asked, “Do you have any wine, Cheri?”

“The house burgundy’s palatable after the first glass,” she said.

“Iced tea, please.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “Give it a little effort.”

“Okay, a light beer. Any brand.”

Cheri went off to put in our order.

“Leitmotif?” I asked, not because I cared but to end a small uncomfortable silence that Coleman could fill only so long by arranging her jacket over the back of the chair, fussing with the napkin around her own silverware, and using the napkin to polish her glasses.

“Everyone in Tucson is either getting a degree or writing a book,” Coleman said, and pointed back over to the end of the bar where Cheri, after bringing us the beer and a second vodka, now sat reading an introduction to criminal justice textbook propped against one of those jars of pickled pigs’ feet that no one ever eats.

“I know that. What I meant was, what’s the difference between a leitmotif and a plain motif?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she admitted and, for the first time since we’d met the day before, smiled. But she still wouldn’t quite look me in the eye, and passed her hand again over her birthmark.

I guessed this had something to do with trouble over not getting authorization from Morrison for Sig’s and my involvement, but she wasn’t ready to tell me yet. We talked about the office some, people we both knew, drank a little more, talked a little more, ate our salads when they came, but Coleman took a while to get to the point of why she had agreed so eagerly to meet me, and it wasn’t to bask in my fame or apologize for her lapse in following procedure. There was a line being drawn and she wanted me on her side of it.

“So what did you think of Lynch?” she asked. She seemed to pin me with her eyes, trying to catch my reaction before I spoke.

The feeling I had at the scene after being with Lynch came back to me, but I tried to ignore it. I said, carefully, “Narcissistic, conscienceless, repulsive. Every inch a sociopath. Though not totally the one I expected.”

“What did Dr. Weiss think of him? I read his profile of the Route 66 killer in Criminal Profiling. Did he think Lynch matched it?”

I felt my first genuine smile of the day. “You have to say the whole title to get the full impact: Theory and Practice of Criminal Profiling: An Interdisciplinary Case Study Approach. Sigmund will be so tickled to know somebody read it.”

“Sigmund? It is David, isn’t it?”

“David, sure, we’ve known each other a long time, since he was brought in to help set up the Behavioral Science Unit in the seventies. We called him Sigmund for Freud; you know how everybody gets a nickname.”

“I saw you two talking yesterday. I just wondered if he had an opinion.”

I felt like the lights went up. I knew now that she hadn’t gone around Morrison because she just forgot procedure. I knew that with Weiss having been dismissed I was the only one she could turn to, and I wondered why. I dipped my upper lip in my drink to indicate my control while I thought about how to respond. I didn’t tell her Sigmund refused to say much at all. “I don’t know, there were a few surprises. For starters, we would have expected a stronger guy who could lift a hundred pounds deadweight overhead into his cab. I always pictured Route 66 being smarter, too, but that’s all conjecture of course. Why are you asking me now?”

Coleman took a deep breath. Her body clenched as if she was expecting me to reach over and wallop her. She reached into her satchel and pulled out a sizable report that she placed in front of me with the care of being in the presence of an explosive device. Then she finally spilled. “Because I think we have a false confession.”

You don’t navigate Bureau politics for forty years without knowing what’s what. All the collegiality I’d been building for Coleman evaporated as I leapt to the implication of her words. It was all f*cking bullshit and I told her so.