“Most people,” she said, “don’t have your fortitude when it comes to the truth. It’ll make this conversation easier if I don’t have to hold anything back. And neither should you.”
Gage frowned at his tea as if he regretted ordering it. “So you’re not a detective, then? You said ‘officer’ when I sat down. You’re not from Homicide?”
“I am not,” Maureen said. Why hadn’t Detillier told this man, she wondered, that he’d be talking to a patrol officer? For the same reason, she realized, that she’d made him meet her in a restaurant full of black people and Creoles. To knock him off balance. “I am one of the first officers to become involved in your son’s case. I was involved from the very beginning.”
“So you were with my son when he died,” Gage said, using his fingertip to press his glasses against the bridge of his nose. He did that whenever he finished a sentence, Maureen noticed, whether or not the glasses had moved.
“No,” Maureen replied. “I was not with him.” Time to test Gage’s love of the truth. “As far as I know, Clayton was alone when he died.” He’d been found lying spread-eagled with his throat cut open like Leary had, Maureen thought. Like her, left in a place where he’d be found not long after he’d died.
“You’re the one who found his body, then?” Gage asked.
“I am not,” Maureen said. “A college junior named—well, doesn’t matter what his name was—found Clayton’s body. Outside a bar uptown.”
Gage shifted in his chair. He reached into his bag again, tossed a pen on the table. Next came a yellow legal pad. He flipped through several pages of notes written in impossibly tiny, impossibly neat handwriting. “I know about where Clayton was found, how he was found. But maybe I could talk to that boy, then. I’d like to know exactly what he saw. I’ve been to that bar, but no one there was very helpful. I’ll go back.”
“Talking to that witness is not going to happen,” Maureen said. “No way. And I’d advise you not to return to that bar. Clayton’s murder remains an open police investigation. Conducting your own investigation would be considered interference, a criminal act.”
“Is that an official warning?” Gage asked. “Are you authorized as a patrol officer to give it?”
“Mr. Gage, I am here to help you,” Maureen said, “and as a courtesy to you and your family.”
Gage raised his hands, shaking his head, as if only then realizing he’d spoken those last thoughts aloud. “Okay. Of course. Understood. I just, I’m confused.” He paused, looked away from her, frowning at a television, not really watching what was on the screen, a rerun of the local news noon broadcast. Maureen watched the images play across his glasses. He said, “So why are you the one I’m talking to? I asked for that detective, Drayton.”
Maureen shook her head. “Drayton’s no longer on the case. Consider yourself lucky.”
“They could’ve told me that when I called headquarters,” Gage said, pen at the ready. “So who has the case now?”
“I don’t know,” Maureen said, lying, and not sure why she was doing it as she did it. “They don’t tell me these things.”
“But you knew the other detective had been removed. You knew that.”
“Police station gossip,” Maureen said.
“But no one gossips about who gets the case?”
Gage took his glasses off, looked at them as if wondering where the moving images had gone. He put them back on. He waved his hand back and forth over the table. “And we’re supposed to believe it’s not intentional.”
“What’s that?”
“The lies, the confusion, the manipulation.” Gage picked dead skin from his bottom lip, studied it, flicked it off the tip of his thumb. He leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms over his sunken chest. “Did you know that it took the coroner three weeks to find me, to tell me that my son had been murdered?” He pinched his bottom lip. “The little bits, the specks of information we get, so that we think we’re getting answers, that we’re being paid attention to. They toss us crumbs, like we’re birds at the park, and call it a meal. Call it a courtesy.”
“I can tell you why it took so long to find you,” Maureen said.
“Sometimes I’m shocked they looked for me,” Gage said. “I’m surprised Clayton didn’t go right to the incinerator like some homeless nobody.”
Maureen took a deep breath. She needed to settle him down if she wanted to control the conversation. “I’m sorry it’s so frustrating, especially in a time of such grief. Believe me, I empathize. I work in the system. It can be infuriating.”
“It’s built to be infuriating,” Gage said, “for anyone who has a thought in his head. That’s my point. That’s its power. It’s the power the tar pits had over the dinosaurs.”
“And the rest of us, those of us without thoughts?”
Gage didn’t think she was funny. “For the thoughtless, for the passive, it offers enough to pacify. I often wish I was one of them.”
“Right,” Maureen said. “The crumbs.”