A real honest-to-God mystery… What would we do without dead hotties?
Never one to waste an opportunity, I began by reviewing the particulars of Jennifer’s disappearance, more to confirm the Bonjours’ version of events than anything else. Fact was, Jon and Mandy were too invested. Invested people tend to get all the details right in the wrong way, seeing ego-friendly things like hope and vindication where there is none. Caleb, I was beginning to realize, was also too invested, but in an entirely different way.
“I think about her, you know,” he said, waving his hands in a curiously frantic gesture. “Out there… somewhere… alone…” He swallowed against cracks opening in his voice. His eyes became frail in that men-don’t-cry way. “I’ve been doing this job for, well, about seven years now. I’ve even solved a murder or two-domestic stuff, though. But I’ve always felt more like a janitor, or custodian, I suppose. Cleaning up messes after they happen. But this… I mean, this girl, Jennifer… what’s happening to her is happening now. I feel guilty just taking time out with my daughter, or reading the paper. I feel guilty for being… well, you know, a small-fry cop in a small-fry town. I feel like she needs a comic book hero or something…”
I had this friend growing up, Joey Sobotka, who always told me that I had superpowers, that I would grow up to be someone important, envied and admired. A real-life superhero. He was killed in a train derailment somewhere out in Montana, of all places. Who dies in a train derailment?
And what kind of superhero lets his friends die?
“The world’s a toilet, Chief. Janitors are the only superheroes that matter.”
Apparently he didn’t know what to make of that. He just stared down at the fan of documents across his desk like a kid wondering how he was going to explain his latest D to his pop.
“Did you know her?” I asked on impulse. “Personally, that is…”
He blinked and frowned. “Yeah. She was the Framers’ representative at these community policing things we put together.”
“What was she like?”
“An angel,” he said. He laughed and scratched the back of his neck. “I would always get this… this… weird urge whenever I saw her…” He must have glimpsed what I was thinking on my face because he fairly tumbled over himself to explain. “No. No. Nothing like that. No. This urge to get her… well, a gas mask.”
“A gas mask, huh.”
“I know how it sounds. But you live here long enough and you begin to take a dim view of things, you know? There was just something about her that made you think she was, well, in danger. Like she was an endangered species or something.”
“She is, Chief. She is.”
I continued reviewing the details as the Bonjours had provided them. Not forgetting anything has made me quite the effective interrogator over the years. In a matter of several minutes I was satisfied that the Bonjour version was in fact the official version-though, given the peculiarities of Nolen’s character, it suddenly didn’t seem all that “official” at all. More like just one more dude’s take.
I then asked the standard questions, about known sex offenders, whether any recent events could possibly be related. No, not in Ruddick. None. Then I moved on to the question that had been burning a hole in my curiosity pocket.
“So I gotta ask: what do you make of the Framers?”
Nolen hesitated.
“Drive up to the Compound yourself,” he eventually said, chewing the inside of his bottom lip. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Framers are good people, you know, but they are, ah… co-operative.”
Part of me wanted to say, But do they have any expertise?
“What about the locals? What do they think of them?”
A lick-lipping pause.
“The thing you need to understand about Ruddick, Mr. Manning-”
“Disciple,” I interrupted. “Call me Disciple.”
“Sure… er, Disciple, then,” he replied with an embarrassed How- could-that-be-a-name look.
The urge to hit him passed quickly, and not simply because he was a cop. You know the saying: bloody a cop’s nose, break your future’s neck. He was too… well-meaning.
“Well, Ruddick has seen better days. Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community, if you know what I mean…”
Ruddick was open for business. I could almost see him sitting with a bunch of Chamber of Commerce fat-asses strategizing around a bucket of KFC. Hell, even cult members make the odd run to the Sam’s Club for toiletries and whatnot. The Enlightened wipe their asses at least as much as the Saved, probably more, given all that hummus.
“But, you know, people…” he added uncomfortably.
“No one much likes them.”
“This is God-fearing country, Disciple.”
He spoke my name as though warming to it, as though realizing it would spike the tedium of his coffee-shop stories.
“And the Framers?” I prompted.
A curious shrug. A guilty shrug. “Well, you know. I don’t want to, you know, stereotype… “
Of course not. That would contradict the police code of honour.
Fawk.
“Not decent folk, huh?”
Nolen grimaced. “Well… Not to sound, ah, er… bigoted or anything, but they are a cult. They have a way of making you forget as much when you’re up there and all… but still…”
I couldn’t resist a winning grin. “They gotta be crazy somehow.”
Another thoughtful pause. “You tell me.” I never did. Nor would I ever. What Albert had told me less than an hour previously about irrational belief had simply confirmed something I had suspected all along. “Crazy” is simply a numbers game. If there were only twenty-seven Roman Catholics in the world, they would be the crazy-ass cult, and people would be wagging their heads about how their symbol is simply an ancient electric chair, or how they pretend to be cannibal vampires once a week, washing down their Maker’s flesh with a gulp of his blood.
Nolen escorted me to the front door, pausing at an office to introduce me to his deputy chief, a dour old law enforcement lifer named Jeff Hamilton. He had the kind of face you see on banknotes from some obscure European country. Shrewd eyes. Buzzed grey hair. Flapjack jowls. He stood, nodded, smiled, and shook my hand with a banker’s choreographed cheer. But something in his look, a kind of Slavic intensity, told me that he disapproved-of me, of Nolen, of his subordinates-that pretty much everything except his wife’s lasagna fell short of his expectations. His office even reeked of cheese.
I would have bet my expenses that he had some kind of contemptuous nickname for Nolen.
I sparked a joint while still parked in the station lot, sat back, and began to review this latest conversation. One statement in particular kept floating back to the harried centre of my attention: “Well, Ruddick has seen better days. Pretty much anyone is welcome in our community, if you know what I mean…” Something about the way Nolen had said “anyone”-a kind of grimace in an otherwise avid, even eager expression…
Was it fear? Had the Framers got to him somehow?
Truth was, earnest people had been freaking me out since at least the second grade, when I announced to the entire class that there was no such thing as Santa Claus, that it was all another social control mechanism. Little Phil Barnes told me-with a conviction that would have made a suicide bomber blush-that not believing in Santa was naughty, and that everyone knew what that meant.
He had this list, you see.
I was out-and-out bawling by the time I got home, convinced I had been blacklisted by the fucking fatman. I’ve suffered an irrational fear of Santa ever since. And a deep distrust of honesty.
Decent folk like Phil.
As a cynic, the problem you face with earnest people is pretty much the same problem the British faced with Gandhi. All of our schemes are corrupt in some manner; gaming the system is inked in our DN-fucking-A. And a certain ability to ignore the disconnect between our rhetoric and our actions is all it takes to keep the show running, an instinctive tolerance of ambient hypocrisy. One honest idiot is all it takes to bring it all crashing down-which is why so many honest idiots end up at the bottom of the river, metaphorically or otherwise. Finding strength in your convictions may be good when it comes to independence from colonial rule, but when it comes to the weave of interpersonal schemes that holds offices and families together, it’s nothing short of disastrous.