Armand blinked, sleepy. Finally — where was he going with this? When he closed his eyes, it wasn’t Beispiel he saw, or the dead woman with the broken tooth, but Jerry Farber, poor guy, sitting on his plaid sofa, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. Jerry Farber saying, “I don’t know. Maybe she had friends downtown; she had lots of friends,” while Washington and Armand nodded and made useless notes. And then Armand was thinking about his own wife, how he last saw her walking out the door to the car, carrying her suitcase through the snow and hoisting it into the back. They had quarreled. Then she drove and drove — Armand was almost asleep now, and in his dream he imagined her driving — north of Kansas City along Highway 71, through the blinding snow, north toward Maryville and Iowa, when her car turned wrong on the ice, skidded, flipped over. The smile of glass on the pavement mixed with the ice, the wheels that kept spinning, the sound of the radio, and now Armand was fast asleep, fast asleep and dreaming of his wife’s last moments, the half full glass of bourbon tipped and fallen to the floor.
“You got to cheer yourself up,” Washington said in the car the next day. “You got to get out some. Rorkisha and I are grilling this weekend. You want me to call her up, ask her to pick up an extra steak?”
Armand shook his head. He was still troubled by his dream, a dream that mixed his own loss with Jerry Farber’s, a dream in which Jerry Farber figured somehow, but how? He’d forgotten the details. Guilt dreams. A year later and he still felt guilty about his wife, who was leaving him when she died. “I’m good,” he said to Washington, who just laughed and told him, “Like hell you are.”
Earlier, before lunch, they’d spent some time with Philip Beispiel, whom Washington didn’t like for the murders.
“C’mon,” Armand had said before they led him in. “There’s something wrong with this guy. I can feel it. He’s too nice to us. And he’s a real estate lawyer.”
Washington laughed, and then Beispiel was at the door, grinning, shaking hands. “How can I help you?” he’d said. He was drinking something from a plastic bottle, something called Glaçeau Vitamin Water, one of those fortified waters the yuppies drink.
“Little of this, little of that,” Armand said. “First of all, seems you’ve had a few scrapes I wonder if you could tell us about.”
Beispiel looked blank.
“By ‘scrapes,’” Washington said, “the man means ‘run-ins with the law.’”
Beispiel seemed startled. “Oh,” he said, “you mean years ago?”
“That’s right.”
“When I was a kid?” He took another sip of his fortified water.
“Keep talking,” Washington said.
“Oh, well, that was nothing.” But it wasn’t nothing, not to Armand. The guy had a juvie prior for arson — he’d set fire to a piano in his high school theater — and later a young woman at the Washington University law school had taken out a restraining order, though she’d dropped it a month later. And when Armand asked him about those he was evasive, always smiling, too confident. Young damn yuppie, Armand thought. He hated his type.
But Beispiel just sat there, smiling, like he was everyone’s best friend. “What were you doing at the crime scene?” Armand asked.
“I saw it on TV, live. Thought I’d take a look.” Armand remembered the helicopters.
“You’re a real estate lawyer? In what area?”
The guy laughed. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “It’s gonna look bad: I work with the Downtown Preservation Society.”
Armand nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. That doesn’t look good.”
“I’m not hiding anything,” Beispiel said. “Look, fellas, I care about the city, and I’m hardly the only one.”
Washington laughed.
But Armand had to admit the guy had a point. There were a lot of angry people in Kansas City, people who hated the monolithic KC Convention Center that sprawled for blocks of downtown, who despised the slick new addition to the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum. Plenty who objected to Starbucks and Barnes & Noble and the corporate ooze that infected the Plaza. Hell, Armand was one of them.
“I think we should take him to the lab,” Armand told Washington after Beispiel left. “This guy’s not right.”
“Take him to the lab?”
“I want a PCR test. See if it matches.”
“Oh, c’mon,” Washington said. “That shit’s expensive. They’re not going to let you work up a DNA profile because he set a couple of fires when he was a kid and he ticks you off.”
“He was at the scene,” Armand said. “He’s a real estate lawyer. And there’s something hinky about him. He thinks he’s playing us. And I got the sample right here too.” He pointed to the trashcan, into which Beispiel had lobbed the Glaçeau bottle before he left.
“Yeah, well, you put in the request then. And deal with it if they laugh you out of town.”
Washington and Armand spent the next few days running other leads, checking Gertrude Farber’s friends, the girl at Wash U (who didn’t want to talk), going through the murder books, waiting for the lab reports on Beispiel’s DNA and the latest note to the KC Star. It was suddenly summer, and in truth, a couple of days after Armand forced the DNA order through Melichar, he began to regret it. Washington was right; he didn’t like the guy because he was a yuppie clown. The case was getting to him, and he hadn’t slept well at all since Gertrude Farber died.
He’d been dreaming of his wife, always the same guilty dream: the snow coming down so beautifully over the road, sticking to the windshield, making little white cones of the glare from her headlights. And then — what was it? A truck? An animal? — she swerved and swerved, the car skidding sideways then, suddenly, rolling over and over until it came to a rest in the field.
And Washington could tell his partner was in a bad way — that was clear enough — and Armand appreciated the invitations for dinner, though what he really wanted after work was to drink. Drink and stay far away from TV or the newspaper, where the local hacks complained about the inefficiency of the police. The chief was getting antsy too, and in the last year Armand hadn’t been dealing too well with pressure.
A couple oftimes he’d seen Jerry Farber in the street — he lived only a few blocks away, and he’d waved, but Jerry hadn’t seen him. And once — this was a week after the murder — he ran into him at Player’s, a bar Armand sometimes stopped at after work. Jerry was deep into what looked like his second scotch.
“How you holding up?” Armand asked him, too suddenly, because Jerry whirled around as if startled, then smiled.
“You know,” he said after a moment. Armand could feel him sizing him up, wondering about any progress on the case. “Bad days,” he said at last.
“Yeah,” Armand said. It was definitely not protocol to drink with the family of a vic, but Armand liked the old man, and no one would see him here. He slid into the seat next to him. “Well, it doesn’t get easier, does it?”
The old man nodded and sipped his drink. Armand didn’t want him to start crying — what would he do if the old man started crying? — but he knew the guy probably needed company. He looked like hell, his shirt disheveled and stained, a pair of shorts exposing thick, white legs. Unhealthy. He hadn’t shaved and there was a bandage around his elbow. “Burned myself,” the old man said. “Gert always did the cooking.” He sighed and Armand bought him another drink. “You know?” the old man said, “it’s like being in a long, long tunnel, and I don’t think I’ll ever reach the end of it.”