This floors me, I’m not sure why. Maniacs are all around us, but we usually don’t recognize them for what they are. “What kind of person was he?” I ask.
“Timid. Soft-spoken. Like he was ashamed of his speech impediment. I got the idea that he attended the meetings so he could be around people who wouldn’t make fun of him.”
“Then why didn’t you talk to him before you shot him?”
Milo shrugs. “Seemed pointless. Better to get it over with.”
I’m not much of a talker. Maybe because Dad beat me for any show of emotion, I tend to regard anything less than total selfcontainment as a weakness. I like people, but from a distance. I feel that most other people just don’t have much to offer me, and I don’t have anything to offer them either, and so I prefer to observe more than interact with others.
I have a low bullshit threshold, and, since for me, most chat is mind-numbing drivel, I don’t often engage in it. I can count the people I enjoy talking to on my fingers, including Kate. She’s not just my wife, she’s my best friend. Before I met her, I had only ever really opened up to one person in my life, my ex-wife, Heli, and she betrayed me. For the better part of the next dozen years, my best friend was a cat named Katt. And even that dumb bastard died on me.
At this moment, though, I feel an urge for some mind-numbing drivel. “So what do you geniuses do at Mensa meetings?”
Milo shifts in his seat to face me. “They’re fun. We get together maybe once a month, get drunk and have dinner. We might have a speaker, or we might play poker or Go or maybe just hang around and yack. High-IQ geeks have more interesting hobbies than you might think. Scuba diving. UFOs. Witchcraft.”
The requirement for entrance into Mensa is a measured IQ in the top two percentile of the population. As such, I could join, too. I’ll pass on it.
“Later,” Milo says, “I need to tell you the rest of the story about Linda’s apartment.”
“There’s more?”
He grins. “Much more. But I don’t want to talk about it in the station.”
Apparently, Milo enjoys nothing more than dragging his stories out forever. They go something like: God made the heavens and the earth. God gave Adam and Eve the boot out of Eden. God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Moses parted the Red Sea. Now let’s talk about the Filippov murder.
We arrive at the station and step out of the cruiser into a media frenzy. More lights and flashes blind us. We push our way up the stairs. Journalists scream for interviews. I start to open the front door. Milo asks me to wait. He puts an arm around my shoulder and raises his other hand to hush the crowd. They go silent, expectant.
Milo wipes away an imaginary tear. “I have little to say on this sorrowful day,” his voice fake-cracks, “but I’ll make a brief statement. Praise God the children were saved. Let’s all pray for the soul of the poor man who had to die as a result of his sad mental illness. I wish that the burden of taking his life hadn’t fallen upon Kari and myself.”
We go through the door. Once inside, we look at each other and burst into simultaneous laughter. It’s just a stress reaction, but we laugh harder, can’t stop, and soon we’re howling. We find ourselves hugging each other. Two hours ago, I could never have imagined such a thing. “You’re too fucking much,” I say.
“Aren’t I, though,” he says, and we laugh even more.
Cops stare at us, bewildered. We calm down, and a parade of cops congratulate us, shake our hands. We make our way to my office. Our boss, Arto, greets us. “Detectives, well done.”