Wakeland fumbled with the vodka bottle’s screw cap, his hands shaking, his face distressed with furrowed lines. He disappeared for a moment, and then he was back, carrying a tumbler. He filled up the glass—no ice, no lime, just clear liquid to the top—and stood at the kitchen counter and sucked down the drink. After three gulps, he set the tumbler on the counter and stared out the window. The orange sunlight burnished his face and Ben could see he was upset. He’d seen the look before—knew it well, actually; the vulnerability in it had always surprised him, the depth of feeling surfacing in his eyes. He topped the glass off again and then sat at the kitchen table, rubbing his temples with his left hand.
This was it, this should have been the moment. Ben should have gone in through the unlocked door, flashed his badge, and started asking questions. He’d spent hours in interrogation trying to get a man to his breaking point; it’s when they screwed up, revealed things they’d been concealing. It was when cases broke open. He should have gone into that apartment, done his goddamned job, but he escaped the backyard, feeling weak and stupid, and hightailed it through the greenbelt.
Back at the cruiser, Ben fired up the car and was about to punch the gas when it came out of nowhere, just jumped out of him, and he barely got the door open before the contents of his stomach sprayed across the pavement.
11
WITHOUT CONSULTING HER, MENDENHALL HAD signed off on the boy’s file: suicide.
“What about the inconsistencies?” Natasha said to him in his office on Monday afternoon. “Gun in left hand, shot near the back of the head?”
“He’s ambidextrous. He was agitated,” Mendenhall said, writing something down on a clean white piece of paper that he folded in half. “His hand shaking.”
“His hand shaking?”
“Yes, Deputy Medical Examiner,” Mendenhall said, his voice lowering. “His hand shaking.”
Natasha called Ben and told him she needed a drink. By the time she got to the Reno Room in Long Beach—a Sigalert for an accident on the 22 Freeway had everything backed up to the Crystal Cathedral—Ben was propped on a stool at the end of the bar, a Viper fins cap pulled low over his eyes, halfway into a vodka tonic.
“You sign off on Lucero?” she said, lifting herself up onto the stool next to his.
“So this is a business drink?” he said, an edge in his voice. His eyes were rimmed red, blurred in the blue light of the television screen bolted to the wall.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you on the hard stuff.”
“Something in the wind,” he said.
She could see why Rachel left him. He was a room with a locked door, and a wife wanted access. She lit a cigarette and waved the bartender over for a Dewar’s. “One rock,” she said, “and three fingers.
“So, did you sign off on Lucero?” she asked again.
“It’s a suicide.” He gulped the last of the vodka and crunched a cube between his teeth. Shook the glass toward the bartender to ask for another.
“That’s what the suits are telling me,” she said. “Shaky hands.” She blew smoke. “But I’m asking you. Did. You. Sign off on it?” She was leaning into him, trying to get a look at his eyes. He looked at her then, the door in him opening a crack.
“Not yet,” he said. “There’ll be some shit to catch for it, though.” The bartender, a woman with a shaved head and loose-fitting Minutemen shirt, slid Ben another drink. “Mayor made a visit today. Got investors in. He can’t make the serial go away, but this one he can.”
“Because the kid’s illegal.”
“Yep, wetback Juan Nadie,” Ben said. He put away half the glass in one gulp.
He’d had a couple before she arrived; she could tell. After Rachel had left him, when Ben and Natasha started meeting for drinks, he was drinking heavily, putting away vodkas on ice, soaking himself in it. Sick of bearing witness to it, she finally told him one night that Rachel had left him because he was a drunk.
“No,” he’d said then. “That’s not why.”
But he never elaborated, and she didn’t give him a chance. “Well, that’s why I’m leaving you.” She’d said it just like that, as though they were already a thing, and then she walked out the door, leaving him ringing wet circles on the bar. He called her a couple of days later and apologized. He’d stayed mostly sober since then, at least in her presence. A Bohemia, a few Modelo Especiales, but not the hard stuff, not like tonight.
“You know it is a suicide, right?” Ben said.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t know that. And there’s a protocol to follow here.”
“Lucero was seeing a boy,” Ben said. “Helen Galloway over at the high school put me onto him.”
“Sleeping with him?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” Ben said. “But it was pushing that way. They were having some kind of fight.”
His voice didn’t sound right. She remembered his hands shaking the other day when he asked her about “unusual” sexual activity. She had thought it was just the late nights, the burden of two death investigations, but there was something else. He seemed rattled.
“Fighting about what?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said, his voice sharpening. “How am I supposed to know what two fags fight about?”
She jerked her head back. In all the years she’d known him, she’d never heard him speak like this. Cops could be a macho group, assholish to the tenth degree at their worst, but not Ben, not as she’d known him. After a raid, he’d found foster homes for Thai girls prostituted out in a massage parlor. When he had to tell a loved one about a death, he did it in person, not over the phone like most of the guys did.
“Probably the same things we all fight about,” she said pointedly.
He glanced at her. “Sorry,” he said. “My head hurts.”
“Could we get a water over here?” Natasha said. “God, and I thought I was the one who was going to get drunk tonight.”
The bartender plopped a glass of ice water in front of Ben. Natasha lit another cigarette and twirled the ash to a point in the tin ashtray. A guy playing pool slipped a quarter into the jukebox, and Tom Waits’s “Shore Leave” came plinking out of the speaker.
“You ever thought about doing it?” Ben said.
“Suicide?”
He nodded, his chin bowed toward the bar, his eyes fixed to the glass. He looked old suddenly—double-chinned, dark circles rimming his eyes, unshaven with patches of gray coming in.
“Not really,” she said cautiously. “I don’t have the dramatic flair. You think about it?”
He was silent for a moment. “A long time ago.”
“Why?”
“I was upset.”
She gave him a sarcastic look, but he wasn’t playing.
“What’d it feel like,” Natasha said, “?‘a long time ago’?”
“Like hope.”
“Hope?”
“For relief.”
“Relief from what?”
He gulped the water. She hoped that meant he was going to pull himself together, that he wasn’t going to go home and put his service revolver to his temple. It happened with some of the cops, the synapses gone haywire with the things they’d seen.
“Look, this kid killed himself,” Ben said. “Prints on the gun are his, there’s no bruising on the body, no evidence there was a fight, no strangulation, so it’s not the serial’s MO.” He was counting the reasons off on each finger. “Everyone I talked to—Helen, Rutledge, Santiago the strawberry picker—said he was gay. Santiago said he found out and threatened to tell the kid’s mother.”
“Who would do that to a kid?” she said, shaking her head. Something was off. Ben was never this sure about a case. He always had doubts.
He looked at her, his eyes wet steel.
“Santiago said it would be easier if he’d been killed by the serial.”