Louis thought of the sensual cabin, with its draperies, music, pillows, candles and incense. He couldn’t see Gibralter tolerating any of it.
“What about your name?”
“I read it in a novel once and I always wanted to go to France. I never used it before that night by the lake when I saw you. It just…came out.”
Her voice had trailed off to a whisper. “I always hated the name Jean. I never felt like a Jean.”
Louis came back to stand near the fireplace, looking down at her. “Why didn’t you tell me you were married?” he asked.
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Yes.”
She stared at him. “It must be comforting to have such a reliable moral compass.”
He couldn’t tell if she meant it to be sarcastic. “You could have left him,” he said.
“We’ve been together since I was nineteen. We had…” She paused. “He needed me.”
“I can’t see him needing anyone,” Louis said.
“He wasn’t always like this,” she said. “In the beginning, back in Chicago, it was different.”
Louis looked away. He didn’t want to hear about the joys of Brian Gibralter’s young married life. She saw Louis’s reaction but went on.
“When Brian was a rookie, he used to come home at night so excited about the job, so sure he was doing good,” she said, her eyes going to the fire. “But he got transferred to Englewood and things changed. He started talking about the bad things, the junkies, the thirteen-year-old hookers, the man who pulled a knife on him after he pulled him over for a broken tail light.” She paused. “One night, I found him sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, still in his jacket. I finally got him to tell me what it was. He had arrested a man who had bashed in the head of his girlfriend’s baby with a baseball bat because the baby wet his pants.”
Louis didn’t respond.
“He stopped talking to me about work after that. He said I couldn’t understand,” she said.
Louis thought of the night Ollie died. Even as she had held him while he cried, he had thought the same thing.
“I didn’t fit in with the other wives and I was very lonely,” she said. “I started taking the el downtown for classes at the Art Institute but Brian made me stop. He said I’d get raped or mugged.”
He heard her voice break. Her face was streaked with tears.
“It got worse,” she said. “He yelled at me for not locking the door when I went down to the laundry room. He yelled at me for not ironing the crease sharp enough in his uniform pants.”
“You should have left him,” he said.
She looked at Louis. “I wanted to but I had no way to support myself, no job. I didn’t even have a high school diploma.” She gave a small laugh. “I needed him.”
“I thought you had a sister,” Louis said.
She nodded. “She told me I could come stay with her. I even had a suitcase packed but then something happened and I couldn’t leave.”
“What?”
She looked at him warily.
“What happened?”
“Brian,” she said. “Something happened to him and I couldn’t leave him.”
He could see something in her face, pain, guilt maybe, and he knew she had to be referring to the incident that Gibralter’s department had covered up, the event that Doug Delp had been unable to unearth. He waited, tense. A part of him, the man who had been deceived, didn’t want to hear one more damn word about Brian Gibralter. But the other part of him, the cop part, needed to know.
He sat down next to her. “What happened?”
She pulled in a breath, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.
Louis went to get her a Kleenex. He sat down again, waiting. “What happened?” he repeated.
She was unable to meet his eyes. “I didn’t find out until weeks later. He wouldn’t tell me. He had been to a doctor, someone the department made him see. I think the doctor was the one who told him to tell me.”
Louis waited. The wind picked up outside, sending a low whistle through the windowpanes.
“He was on patrol alone because his partner was out sick. It was March. I remember because it was very cold for March.” Her voice dropped to a soft monotone. “He turned into an alley, thinking he had seen something suspicious. They had been watching the neighborhood because there was a lot of gang violence. He should’ve called for help but he didn’t.”
Louis suddenly knew where this was going. What he didn’t know was how bad it would be.
“They…a gang…they jumped him. He was alone and they jumped him. They took his gun.”
Louis shook his head.
“Then…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “They held his gun on him and made him undress. They stripped him. It was so cold that night. But they left him there, naked.”
It took her almost a full minute before she was able to speak. “They handcuffed him to a fire escape in the alley and beat him. Then they spray painted…things, words, things all over his body.”
She took a breath and the rest rushed out in one long sigh. “He was there for hours before another unit came by and found him.”
“What happened to the kids?” Louis asked.
“Kids?” She seemed bewildered. “The gang?” He didn’t want them prosecuted because then he would have had to tell the whole department what had happened. The cop who picked him up and one or two others, including his captain, were the only ones who knew.”
Louis remembered what Delp had told him, the drug bust for the gang members that came out of nowhere.
She had stopped crying. She was just sitting there, staring vacantly at some point over Louis’s shoulder, as if she didn’t even know he was there anymore. When she focused back on his face, there was a naked look in her eyes, as if what she had just told him was about her, not her husband.
For several minutes they just sat. He listened to the wind pound the glass and the crackling of the fire. Her soft voice interrupted the silence.
“We came here about a year later. He didn’t even tell me about the ad in Police Chief magazine. He just told me we were going, that he could start over, build his kind of department.”
Louis leaned back on the sofa, closing his eyes.
“I thought things would change,” she said softly, “but they didn’t. I didn’t fit in here either.”
He knew she was talking about being black, or half-black half-Asian. Loon Lake wasn’t like some backwater boonie in the South but it was undeniably white. White in its racial makeup and white-bread in its small-town mind-set. He had come to feel like an outsider in the short time he had been here. He could only guess how a lonely woman like Jean Gibralter could survive.
He moved to hold her, to comfort her the way she had him, but he stopped. There was no future for them. He knew that now, even if he hadn’t been so sure an hour ago. His anger toward her had dissipated but he knew he wasn’t beyond judging. Even after this ugly mess was over if she decided to leave her husband, he was not sure he could give his heart to her again. He wasn’t sure he could trust her again.
“I think I’d better go,” she said, rising.
She went quickly to the door, putting on her coat. He rose and watched as she pulled on her gloves. She looked up.
“I’m sorry, Louis. I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said.
The door opened, a flurry of snow blew in and she was gone.
CHAPTER 33
Louis swung the Mustang around a turn and up the hill. The bald tires spun on the snowy road but finally caught hold. The car moved slowly up through the pines.
A small sign marked the entrance to the driveway — LITTLE EDEN — and the pines parted to reveal a clearing with a large log cabin in the center.
Louis pulled up in front and cut the engine. He frowned, seeing the smoke curling from the chimney and the shiny white Ford Bronco parked at the side. He picked up the raid file from the passenger seat and searched for the owner’s name. Eden, David and Glenda. Damn, they were here now? He hadn’t counted on having to deal with anyone.