Detaining prisoners is a big part of what we do. They’re kept in six different jails, including the former sheriff’s fabled Tent City jail, where the inmates live in tents, wear pink underwear, and eat green baloney. They seem to enjoy it.
Fifteen deputies have been killed in the line of duty, starting in 1922.
But that’s all numbers and organization, gadgets and background material off the sheriff’s web site. I know. I helped write it. But it doesn’t get at the heart and character of the organization. Even college faculties have heart and character. At the MCSO, even under the former sheriff’s showbiz years, those traits were best expressed, and embodied, in a man named Peralta.
I knew all his bad sides. He was stubborn. He could be relentless. He was the very antithesis of the teary-communicative, huggy-therapeutic postmodern man. But I had been blessed by his brave heart and manly charity more times than I could count. Not just the night in Guadalupe when he saved my life, but in the aftermath of the shooting when he made sure I was assigned to easy duty. He would have been insulted if I had thanked him. To his mind, I had done my duty, and that wrapped me forever in his web of mutual obligation. That’s why he stayed in touch all those years when we had nothing in common but a shared past. And it’s why he gave me a job when nobody else would, and kept the Jack Abernathys of the department off my back until I had time to prove myself. That was Peralta.
But right then he lay before me unseeing, unhearing, a machine doing his breathing. We were alone in the room. I sat deeply in a chair with slick vinyl sides, watching his chest rise. I was in quite a state. But no one would know. Only Lindsey would, but she had gone with Kimbrough to log in the evidence we found in Dean Nixon’s ammo box. They figured I would be OK alone here, guarded by a phalanx of deputies in jumpsuits and flak jackets patrolling the hospital halls.
“Log the evidence in quietly for now,” I’d instructed Kimbrough. He’d looked at me pointedly. “What are you asking me to do, Sheriff?”
I said, “I am asking you to do just what I said. That’s all.”
And then I came to Good Sam to sit with the man whose badge number appeared repeatedly in Dean Nixon’s logbook next to large amounts of cash.
I’m a good man to have in a crisis. The high-functioning child who grew up around old people, “man child” Grandmother called me. The multitalented adult who could do all sorts of different things well, but could never quite succeed at any of them. The cop who was too smart for law enforcement. The professor not smart enough to get tenure, or conform to the new political conventions of the academy, or even write popular history books that would sell.
And now, through a strange collision of events, all these destinies had been placed in my hands. Right that moment, my hands shook. My heart clubbed my ribcage. The point of pain between the belly and my heart had grown into a persistent ache.
“What have we gotten into?” I said to the mountain in the bed before me.
Only the mechanical wheeze of the respirator responded.
My voice was a dull monotone in a dim room. “Why is your badge number on those pages?”
I was suddenly so tired and angry with him, for putting me in this situation, for getting hurt, for abandoning us-it wasn’t rational, but, as I say, I was in a state. Just as quickly, I filled with remorse. But finally, I came back around to Dean Nixon’s record book, and the terrible history it gave. Could it possibly be true?
It would all have to go to Internal Affairs, of course. And to the feds. And to the media.
I had a lot of complaints and crotchets about the Sheriff’s Office over the years. But I never, even at my most discontent, thought we were corrupt.
Maybe this was all some kind of put-on.
But if so, why did my stomach hurt so damned much?
I could not accept that this man before me was a dirty cop. I could not. I owed him my life, on more than one occasion. But a voice inside me, a voice trained by an unfaithful wife and a career ruined by betrayal, said, How well do we really know anyone, especially the people we love? And the voice of a trained historian, who knew to look beneath the surface, to view institutions skeptically, to distrust one’s preconceptions…well, that voice told me I was in too deep.
“David?”
It was Sharon. She had come in silently and now stood behind me. I stood and gave her a quick hug.
“Have you been crying?” she asked.
It was a slander. It was the smog. I said, “You went back to the radio show?”
“I had to find a routine,” she said. “Better to deal with other people’s problems than mine.” She was wearing expensive-looking cream slacks and a black blouse. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, bringing out her high cheekbones. She sat in the other chair and took my hand.
“He won’t wake up, David,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve read whole books and web sites on head trauma and comas, but it’s shocking how little they know, even today. So much of it seems out of our hands.”
She stood and worked her way around his bed, inspecting gauges, connections, fluids, contraptions. “We’ve been taking shifts, the girls and I. We try to have someone with him every moment they’ll let us.”
Peralta’s color looked all wrong. His broad, expressive face-the turbulent synthesis of Aztecs and conquistadors-was several shades lighter than I had ever seen it. The crinkles around his eyes seemed etched in pink blood.
“David, how is the hunt going for this convict?”
“Badly,” I said. “But I don’t think he’s our suspect anyway.” I told her of the events of the past few hours, cleaning it up for civilian sensibilities, leaving out the part about the gunshot aimed at my head.
She shook her head with increasing agitation. “I can’t believe someone can try to kill the sheriff of one of the largest counties in America, and you people are so helpless!”
“It’s not that,” I said quietly, feeling pretty damned helpless. “We’re making progress. But it’s taking us in a different direction.”
“But David, you have a note pointing to this…”
“Leo O’Keefe.”
“What a name,” she said. “No wonder he’s deranged. I’m going to write a book someday about what parents do to their children with rotten names.”
“I’m not saying he’s not involved. I’m just saying I don’t think he pulled the trigger.” I let silence fill in the room again. I had to talk to her. I just didn’t know how.
“How is Lindsey? That is a pretty name.”
“She’s OK,” I said. “She’s concerned.”
“Sometimes,” Sharon said, “she reminds me of a young Susan Sontag, all that dark hair, and that poetic watchfulness she has.”
“Different politics,” I said. But I liked the phrase “poetic watchfulness.” I added, “And she doesn’t consider herself an intellectual. She’s quite stubborn about that. But she is a great mind and soul.”
“I like Lindsey,” Sharon said, turning aside my idealistic parry. “I’ve come to like her. She’s knocked off a lot of her rough edges the past couple of years.”
“She’s knocked off some of mine, too.”
“I suppose so,” Sharon said. “You certainly seem happy around her. I don’t know if that’s a reason to get married. Who said a second marriage is ‘the triumph of hope over experience’?”
“Dr. Johnson,” I said.
She patted my hand. “David, the Renaissance man. I hope she gets that about you.”
“She does,” I said. “She reads. We read to each other. That’s a big deal today.” I felt uncomfortable, as if I were defending Lindsey from a subtle, professionally engineered attack.
“You know,” she said, “the day he was shot, I was wrapping up an article about women and marriage.”
“Oh, yeah?” I was relieved for a slight change of subject.
“The headline, I guess, is that marriage is bad for women’s growth. That’s the way I see it.” She sighed heavily. “I was trying to figure out how I was going to tell him about this without setting him off. How screwed up is that?”