The next call was to a convenience store where the owner-proprietor supposedly had a shoplifter in custody. He’d taken a jump rope off one of the shelves and tied the shoplifter to it after a baseball bat to the thigh brought him down. But while he was on the phone, the shoplifter had chewed through the rope and gone hobbling out the door.
Nothing else, then, for some time. It was one of those clear, still nights that seem to have twice as many stars as ordinary, when sounds reach you from far away. We grabbed burgers at Lucky Jim’s and ate at a picnic table outside East High, squad pulled up alongside with doors open, radio crackling. You didn’t eat Lucky Jim burgers in the car. And you didn’t need extra napkins, you needed bath towels.
Randy seemed to be doing okay. He’d moved out of the house, put it up for sale, found an apartment near downtown. He was hitting the gym at least three times a week, even talked about signing up for some classes. In what? I asked. Whatever fits with my work schedule, he said.
Three obviously stoned college-age kids were having their own meal, consisting mainly of bags of candy, potato chips, orange soda and Dr Pepper, nearby. They packed up and left not long after we arrived. Two people just as obviously on the street sat beneath a maple tree. The man wore a Confederate cap from which a bandanna depended, draping the back of his neck and bringing to mind all those movies about the Foreign Legion I watched in my youth. The woman had gone on trying gamely to look as good as possible. She’d hacked sleeves from a T-shirt whose logo and silkscreen photo had long since faded and cut it off just above the waistline. Rolled pant legs showed shapely if long- and much-abused calves. “You know that bugs me!” the man shouted towards the end of our stay. She sprang to her feet and started away. “Why you wanna be doing that?” he said, then after a moment got up and followed.
Though we were talking and continued to do so, Randy turned to watch the man go, I remember, and in that moment of inattention a compound of grease, grilled onion and mustard fell onto his uniform top, just south-southwest of his badge. We kept bottles of club soda in the squad for such situations, just as we kept half-gallons of Coke, useful for cleaning battery terminals and removing blood from accident scenes. But in this case the club soda lost, serving only to create concentric rings around the original stain.
We pulled out of the lot. Traffic was light.
’You give much thought to what we’ll be when we grow up?” Randy said. “I mean, here we are, top detectives, still jumping patrol calls. That sound like a life to you?”
“We like patrol calls. It’s our choice.”
“Is it?”
When the radio sounded ten minutes later, we looked at one another and laughed. Randy was asking if I’d consider accompanying him to temple that Sabbath.
“You’ve been going to temple? When did that start?”
“You know when it started.”
“And it’s okay for me to be there?”
We pulled up at 102-A Birch Street, a duplex in a recently fashionable part of town. Property values had rocketed here. Years later they’d coin a word for what was going on: gentrification. Bulldozers plowed the ground from first light to last, crunching homes, garage-size commercial shops and early strip malls underfoot, making way for new crops.
“You okay?” I remember asking Randy. He’d made no move to get out of the squad.
“Fine,” he said. “Just not sure I can do this.”
“Do what?”
“Never mind.” He swung legs out and stood, with a two-handed maneuver I’d gotten to know well, smoothed down hair and put on his hat in a single sweep. “Forget I said anything.”
Wary and watchful as always, we went up the walk to the front door. Several adjacent houses, though well cared for, seemed unoccupied, as did the other half of the duplex. Drapes behind a picture window at the house next door moved. Probably the person who’d called in, monitoring his or her tax dollars at work.
“Mind taking point on this one?” Randy said.
“Nottingham, huh?”
Police superstition. Back sometime in the 1950s, a squad answering a routine call according to procedure had eased up the walk just like us and knocked, only to be answered by a shotgun blast through the front door. The point man, Nottingham, went down, and died in the hospital six days later. His partner, a rookie, did all the right things. Checked pulse and respiration, went off to call in an Officer Down, came back to pack his partner’s wounds. Then he kicked in the door and took the perp down with his nightstick. After that, though, after that one perfect moment when he became, incarnate, what he was supposed to be, when the training flowed through him like a living force, the rookie was never again able to take to the streets. He tried once or twice, they said; then worked a few years more, filing, keeping track of office supplies, manning the evidence room, before he packed it in.
“I’ve got your back,” Randy said.
“Not my back I’m worried about.”
The door was answered by a half-dressed man whose eyes raked over uniform, badge, side arm and equipment belt before settling on my face. Then a secondary, dismissive glance at Randy behind me. From deep inside the house, echoing as in a cave, the sound of a TV. Something else as well?
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” I said, “but we’ve had a report of a domestic disturbance at this address.” Going on for hours, the caller said. “Mind if we come in?”
“Well…”
“I’m sure there’s nothing to it. Do have to ask a few routine questions, though. Won’t take more than three, four minutes of your time, I promise.”
He rubbed his face. “I was asleep.”
“Yes, sir. Most people are, this time of night. We understand that.”
He backed out of the doorway. I followed into the room. Randy stayed just inside the door. He had yet to speak.
“Someone called, you said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry. Must have been the TV. My wife has trouble sleeping.”
“Yeah, that’s probably it.”
“Your wife?” Randy said.
“Could we speak to her?” I asked.
“She just got to sleep, Officer. Sure would hate to have to wake her now.”
“Please.” This time I didn’t smile.
He led us down three broad steps from the entryway, across a tiled living room the size of a skating rink, and along a narrow hallway into a small room adjoining the kitchen. Wood-paneled walls, single window set high, cotton rugs scattered about on a floor of bare concrete. Not much here but a couple of chairs and a console TV. A conical green TV lamp sat atop the console-these had just started showing up. The vacant chair was a recliner. The occupied one was an overstuffed armchair, ambiguously greenish brown, and nubbly, like period bedspreads.
The woman in that chair, wrapped in a tiger-pattern throw, makes no response when I speak to her.
“She’s not well,” the man says. “She’s… disturbed. Look at her now. An hour ago she was screaming and beating at me. Walking through the house slamming doors.”
“So it wasn’t the TV after all.”
He shook his head.
“Sounds like you need to get her some help, sir.”
“She has plenty of help. I’m the one who doesn’t.” His eyes go from his wife to me. “Mostly she’s up at the state hospital, has been for years now. Home on a pass.”
Randy comes around me, sinking to one knee. Presses two fingers against the woman’s carotid. “Honey, you okay?” he says, but it doesn’t register with me at the time what he’s saying.
And afterwards it takes me a long time to understand what happened here.
The half-dressed guy steps forward, out of the shadow. His hand comes up. Something in it? Randy thinks so. He draws his side arm, stands, shouts at the man to drop the weapon and get down on the floor, hands behind his head. What the man has in his hand is a syringe. The woman’s diabetic, we learn later. He walks towards her.