“Pointless,” Tom said. “Nobody saw nothing, ad infinitum. Can I sit?”
I gestured at the empty barstool beside me. “I’m not staying though. I ordered food to go. I spent the afternoon at the prison in Chillicothe and all I want to do is get home.”
Tom held up his own carryout bag. “Great minds,” he said. “What are you working on?”
“Tracking down a witness in an old case. Maybe a witness, maybe not. Double murder in Belmont a while back.”
“When?”
“Fifteen years ago,” I said. “Ish.”
“Married couple, right? Stabbed to death? Daughter went missing?”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised. “How do you know that?”
“Cops remember everything. I was working a drug task force on the southeast side back then. I was always down there. Belmont and Columbus have weird borders. That case was closed in record time, I recall. What’s going on now?”
“The kid who was convicted is going to be executed in two months,” I said. “His sister hired me. She claims she saw the daughter in Belmont a couple weeks ago.”
“Convenient.”
“Yeah,” I said, letting out a sigh without meaning to. “Have you ever worked a case where someone was framed?”
“Nope. That’s television stuff. Ditto for faked suicides.”
“That’s what I thought.” I finished my whiskey. “I can’t figure this guy out though. The missing daughter—a logical alternate theory of the crime. But he wouldn’t let his lawyer talk about it at the trial and even today, fifteen years later, he still won’t entertain the thought. I don’t know if that’s idealistic or delusional.”
“Fifteen years is a long time to put up a front,” Tom said. “Then again, didn’t they have him dead to rights with the murder weapon?”
“Correct.”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law and all that. Goes both ways.”
“Sure does.”
“So it sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”
The bartender brought over my carryout bag, and I slid off the barstool. “Well,” I said.
Tom and I watched each other for a few beats. He was always a little shy around me, and I found it slightly endearing. “So do you want to come over, or what?”
*
The day of my father’s funeral was the longest of my life. There was a full agenda: private prayer service at the funeral home. Procession to Saint Joseph downtown for the Mass. Procession to Greenlawn for the burial. Light refreshments at my mother’s house to follow. It was after ten when I finally left, dry-eyed and bewildered. I was wearing a strange outfit that belonged to my mother’s neighbor—my own wardrobe selection of a new black pantsuit and flats having been declared unacceptable that morning—and the borrowed pumps rubbed against my heels as I walked down the sidewalk toward my car. As I got closer, I noticed that Tom was sitting on the retaining wall in front of a neighbor’s house, staring at his own shoes.
I sat down beside him. “I thought you left like two hours ago.”
“I did,” he said without looking up. Like the other cops who had attended the service, he was wearing his uniform but he was all unbuttoned, disheveled. His short, dark hair was sticking up like he’d been tearing at it. He had worked with my father for close to a decade and he had spent a fair amount of time around my family in all those years, but I barely knew him personally, wasn’t sure if we had ever had a one-on-one conversation longer than a few lines.
I stood up again. “Sorry, you look like you want to be by yourself.”
“No, no,” he said. He turned toward me, his warm brown eyes full of stunned pain. “I really, really don’t.”
We went to the liquor store at the end of my mother’s street and bought the cheapest whiskey they sold. I had plenty of liquor at home but I didn’t want to go home and I didn’t want that liquor. We sat in Tom’s car and passed the bottle back and forth between us without talking for a long time. The night sky felt heavy, like an X-ray blanket.
“Your mom,” he said eventually. “She has people in town, right?”
I took a long pull from the bottle. The whiskey burned all the way down but not as much as I wanted it to. “Two sisters. They’re staying with her right now.”
“That’s good.”
“She’s had to be strong, to stay married to him. She’s tough. And she has a lot of friends. And my brothers.”
“And you.”
I drew a squiggly line on the fogged-up window and then erased it with my palm. “That’ll do a lot of good,” I said, trying and failing to use a light tone.
“You know you were his favorite,” Tom said.
I stared at him. “He never said that. He didn’t even like me.”
“That’s not true.”
“I don’t even blame him for that,” I said. “How could I? I never listened to a goddamn thing he said.”
“Sure you did,” Tom said. “Didn’t he get you your first job?”
I looked down at my hands. It had never occurred to me that my father had talked about me to Tom. “Is that what he told you?”
He nodded.
“Old family friend used to have a private security company. I worked there through college part-time, in the office, and I kind of stayed after I graduated. I thought I was going to be a psychologist. Frank told me I would make a terrible psychologist. But then I started helping on cases when I was supposed to be studying for the GRE. Which is just as well, honestly, he was right.”
“You would have made a terrible psychologist?”
“I’m too nosy. Too impatient.” I shrugged. “You know he was always right. Somehow. Even for the wrong reasons, he was always right.”
Tom gave me a sad smile. “He was,” he said. “But nosy and impatient, those are good qualities for a detective. So I guess that worked out.”
“I don’t think I really had a choice. It’s the only thing I can do.”
Tom sighed heavily. “Frank was proud of you,” he said again. “For doing your own thing, being your own person.”
“Stop it,” I said, serious now. I had promised myself I wasn’t going to cry and I wouldn’t. I pressed my hand against my mouth until the tightness in my jaw eased up. “Change the subject.”
Tom was quiet for a bit, gazing over the steering wheel at High Street. Finally, he shook his head. “I got nothing,” he said. Then he turned to me. “It happened so fast.”
“Don’t.” I couldn’t hear about how fast it had happened, the end of everything. I picked up his hand. “No crying. I can’t take it. I’ll go home.”
“You can’t drive like this,” Tom said, blinking fast, nodding.
“Then I’ll walk.”
“In those shoes?”
My face felt too weird to smile. But I would have. I brought Tom’s hand to my lips. “I need to feel something else,” I said. It was the only other coping method I could think of. The whiskey wasn’t coming close to touching the way I felt. “Do you want to come home with me?”
“Roxane.” Tom shifted in his seat. “You’re upset.”
“Yes,” I said. “So are you.” I placed his hand on my bare knee.
“I know you’re feeling crazy but we can’t—”
“Sure we can.”