“Sounds good,” Tim said. While he ate in the warm little kitchen, she washed the dishes. Finally, she sat down across the table from him with her coffee. She said, “I know you have some business or you wouldn’t have come. So go right ahead.”
“It’s about Ed,” Tim said.
“Ed? Did he do something?”
“I don’t know. He says you and he have split up.”
“Trust Ed to tell everybody in town,” Valerie said.
“When did this happen?”
“Oh, I guess it was the day after I found Roy. Ed and I, we never were suited for each other. We were party pals, you know what I mean? When I sobered up, I found out there was nothing else between us.”
“He’s got a fancy room at the Placer Hotel,” Tim said. “How does he pay for it?”
“Well, I can tell you he doesn’t pay on credit. We have no credit,” Valerie said. “He isn’t working around here, or I’d know it. I suppose he’s having a winning streak.”
Her robe softened the hard planes of her face. Her damp hair shone like satin. He wanted to touch it. He drank some more coffee and said, “I didn’t know there really were such things.”
“You stop believing in all that nonsense when the drinking stops,” she said. “Yeah. He might be winning this week, but next week is another thing entirely. He doesn’t think that way, though.”
“Not like us,” Tim said. “Upright and sober. I’m thinking maybe Ed found the body with the money before you got out there, picked a fight with you, and left.”
Valerie’s jaw dropped. She shook her head. “You mean he might have two hundred fifty thousand dollars socked away somewhere? I can’t believe it. He could never keep it a secret. He’d just have to brag about it.”
“Now that you think about it, did you notice anything in his behavior that day, you know, going outside for a long time, anything like that?”
“Just the usual foul mood when he has a hangover,” Valerie said. “I slept late that morning and didn’t go out with Ginger for her walk until ten. But I still—”
“I hate being sober,” Tim said. He rubbed his jaw, wondering what brought that comment on. She would understand, that was it. He could talk to her, and she would understand. “You ever feel that way?”
She stayed right with him, as if he hadn’t suddenly changed the subject. “I know what you mean,” she said. “It’s like, you went to the optometrist, and he fit you with powerful glasses, and the whole world springs into this vivid focus. And it’s the same old ugly world you drank to escape from, and you can see every dirty crevice again...” She looked around the shabby kitchen, at the cracked linoleum and the broken highchair in the corner.
“Yeah. Like you used to love riding the Ferris wheel, and now all you notice is the operator’s tired and mean, hates his job, and doesn’t like you,” Tim said.
Valerie nodded. “I look back, and it’s like we used to live in the night, under those romantic hazy-colored lights, and now it’s daylight. It’s too sharp and bright, isn’t it?”
He sat there looking at her. She had that ironic, crooked smile he’d seen on so many drunks at so many meetings. “Yeah. They keep trying to convince you it’s better,” he said. “It’s worse, but you can’t escape anymore. You’re gonna die if you keep boozing, shooting up, whatever you’re doing.”
“Condemned to real life,” she said, laughing a little. “Forced to grow up.”
“I could love you now,” he said. “We’ve both been through it.”
“Quit kidding yourself,” she said. “You could have loved me years ago, when we were kids and drunk all the time, but not now. You can’t fall in love unless you can get out of your head.”
“Normal people do it.”
“They’re just born insensitive. Born lucky. So we sobered up, and you turned into a depressed cop. And I turned into an unhappy housewife. We’re big successes now.”
“There was something brave about what we were doing,” Tim said. “You know? And now we don’t even have that.”
“We are the driest of dry drunks,” Valerie said. She got up and came around the table to him. She took his big head in her hands and drew him to her breast, and his arms went around her little waist. “Maybe this will help,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“We could give it a try anyway. Even if it only lasts a minute.”
“Count on it lasting a little longer than that.”
“Sobriety sucks, it really does,” she said.
“Yeah. The whole situation. Take your pants off, okay?”
Tim put Bodie on Ed Strickland for the next couple of days. Bodie reported that Strickland sat in on three or four regular floating poker games at Camden and at Timberlake. He seemed content to hang around town, like he was waiting for something to happen.
After the second day, Tim got another search warrant, and he and Bodie tore up Strickland’s room at the Placer Hotel. But they didn’t find anything. The Strickland bank account contained about enough money for next week’s groceries.
The Gibraltar man called. “Are you closing the investigation after the inquest tomorrow?” he said. “I need a final report for the records so I can issue another check for Bayle and get this thing over with.”
“You’re going to give up on finding the money?”
“Let me put it to you this way,” Burdick said. “You’re Joe Schmoe with a mortgage, fishing along the riverbanks, and what do you snag but a bag full of a fortune in cash? What do you do with it?”
“You tell me.”
“You dry out the bills on an inside clothesline. You wait a few months, and you start spending it slowly and carefully, and you thank your lucky frigging stars,” Burdick said with a laugh. “We call it dead money. Now and then it slips through the cracks. You’re never going to find it.”
At the inquest the next day, nothing came out that Tim hadn’t heard before. He gave his testimony, and they all called it a day and sloshed over to the hotel for lunch. The coroner’s verdict was accidental death in the course of committing a crime, and Tim had no evidence to the contrary, except they still hadn’t found the money.
He went back to the office, took care of other business, locked up, went home, and looked in the freezer. Burritos. One of those supermarket pizzas that tasted like paper.
He looked around the place. Something was missing. Oh yeah, Becky and little Dave. They had moved to Illinois. His ex-wife had some kind of restraining order.
He was sick of being struck with that thought ten times a day. Something was stinging his eyes. He was damn bored and damn lonely, and he was sick and tired of being bored and lonely, of listening to the forest outside and not being a part of anything.
Next thing he knew, he was on the phone to Valerie. “Can I come over for a while?” he said.
“Wait until nine or so,” she said. “I’ll get the kids to bed early.”
He couldn’t bring wine, so he stopped and bought her some flowers at the florist shop at the hotel. She opened the door, holding her finger to her lips, and led him directly into the bedroom. The sheets and pillowcases smelled like vanilla and roses, like her. She comforted him, and he did what he could for her.
Sometime later he woke out of a doze, to the clicking of a key being inserted into the kitchen door. Valerie woke up too. He got up quickly, pulling his service revolver out of the holster hung on the bedpost. Valerie tiptoed behind him as he walked down the hall.
Ed Strickland had his head in the refrigerator. When he saw them, his bloodshot eyes went wide and he let out a strangled yell. “You been sleeping with him!” he said. “I’ll fix you—”
“Shut up, you prick,” Valerie said. “I’ll sleep with him if I want. Get out.”
“This is my house,” he yelled, stumbling toward them, his fists up.
“Get away, Ed. Go on, leave,” Tim said. He kept the gun down, but Strickland charged him, still yelling, grabbing for it. They locked in a furious embrace, Tim trying to keep the gun off him. Valerie ran over by the stove. Strickland smashed him in the face, a big dangerous drunk. They wrestled for the gun—
Tim heard the explosion, saw Strickland’s head bloom out red on one side, and then Strickland crumpled on the ground and the kids were standing in the doorway holding each other and screaming—