DeSalle stepped up behind Don. He didn't speak till Don turned around.
"Looks like an overdose, with the bag for insurance. One of the uniforms told me there's a society recommends this route."
"Who took the call?" Don said.
"Patrolman you mean?"
"Yeah."
"Martinez. Young guy. Pretty new, I guess, taking it hard the way we all do thefirst few times."
"He out there?" Don gestured towards the front room.
"Yeah. Thought you might want to talk to him yourself."
"Anybody else around?"
DeSalle shook his head. "Have been, though. Two, three people at least living here, looks like. Maybe more."
"Note?"
DeSalle handed it to him. Sheathed in a sleeve of clear plastic with DeSalle's initials scrawled across the seal. There was only one light in the room, a bare bulb above the sink. Don stood under it as he read the note. Then he passed the note to me. It all comes down to choice, doesn't it? The ones we have, the ones we don't have. Those we make and those we're never able to make. Temporary choices, inadvertent choices, final choices. Fuck them all. While I'm at it, fuck your goddamn houses out in Metairie and your kids in private schools, fuck your minimum-wage jobs, your sorry-ass unions. Fuck your cops most of all. Am I making myself clear here? Everything's water if you look long enough, right? "It's a strange one," DeSalle said.
I handed the note back to Don. "No heading or salutation."
"Right."
"Left side's ragged. Tom out of a notebook, diary, something like that."
DeSalle looked from Don to me and back.
"Something I missed?"
"Lew's just saying the note's not addressed to anyone."
"Hell it's not."
"Yeah," Don said after a moment. "Yeah, you're right Guess any list would have been too long. Boy had a lot of anger in him. Always thought it was other people fucked up his life."
Don stepped into the front room to speak with Martinez.
"You guys go back a way, huh?"
I told DeSalle how Don and I met. Both of us little more than kids, each with his own reason to be searching for the sniper that killed all those people back in the sixties.
"Damn, Griffin. That was you?"
Don had been shot by the sniper. I'd come upon them in a downtown cul-de-sac and probably saved Don's life-at least he insisted I had. Since then he'd saved mine more times than I could count.
"Not many like him on the force," DeSalle said.
"Not many like him anywhere."
"You know it. Has to be tough," looking at Danny there in the tub, "all this."
"Can't imagine anything tougher. But I think he'd been getting ready for it, something like this."
"Yeah. Lives with it every day. Has to know."
"For a long time now."
Then forensics was upon us.
Tape measures chirred, whisk brooms and tiny vacuums whispered, bits of debris tumbled into baggies. Again and again our shadows struck huge on the walls as flashes went off.
Don stood at the edge of it all, just outside the doorway, watching.
Also there, wheezing like a bad accordion, sucking alternately at metered-dose inhalers of Atrovent or Albuterol and oxygen from the portable compressor hung like an oversize binocular case under one arm, directing auteurlike this too-real dramatic moment, stood Dr. Bijur.
"Your boy, I understand."
"Yeah."
She shook her head. Squeezed off two hits of Ventolin then wheezed a long exhale.
"Sure it's top of the list for you. For me it's just one more, pick a number, twelve, thirteen, in there. Wait your turn."
"I say anything?"
"You will."
Her shoulders lifted with the effort to drag more air into faltering lungs.
"Do the same myself in your position, Walsh. No way I wouldn't. King's horses couldn't stop me."
"Special favors aren't an option here, Sonja. Okay. But I would appreciate anything you can give me quick."
What she gave him was a fit of coughing. Sounded as though nails and planks were l›cing ripped out of her body's floor.
Don waited for her to recover.
"City lets me have half the personnel I need with twice the workload I can handle. Not a good match, Walsh."
"I know something about that myself."
"My department's response time is half that of LA., beats out New York, Boston, Baltimore, and D.C. by several wide miles. Our reports hit your desk within twenty-four hours. Thirty-six at the outside. You ever got your head out of this city's ass long enough to look around, you could probably work up some pride in that."
Again, coughs racked her. She cranked up the O's from 2 L/M to 4.
"You know what it'll take, right? Some young sport's gonna come in here once I'm gone. Wear a tie to work every day, have nice letterhead, maybe an MBA. That's the new thing."
"Yeah. Yeah, we got them coming up that way through the force now too. Straight off the streets and into offices with espresso machines."
"Reports are gonna get slower and slower. They'll also get increasingly woilhless as the M-B-Assholes worry about covering their own butts above all, to hell with evidence, fact, inference, extrapolation."
Dr. Bijur dosed herself with Atrovent, inhaling the puff and holding it like a hit of marijuana, talking around it.
"We been. At this. A while now. Haven't we?"
"We have indeed, Sonja."
Another long exhalation.
"Bumpy road. Lots of lows. A few highs."
"Few enough."
"Truly sony about this one, Walsh."
Our shadows leapt on the walls again.
"Never had a family myself. Doesn't mean I don't know what it's like."
"Yeah."
"You're a better cop than you ever were a father."
"Being a cop's easy."
"Yeah. I guess." Words came in a rush, breathless, high in her chest, barely heard the last few. "You-"
Her mouth went on moving but no words came forth. Her face turned Jark.
"Sonja? You okay? Want me to call the paramedics?"
"No… no. I'm, okay. Give me. A minute."
It took more than a minute, but gradually her breathing eased, her color improved.
By then her technicians had finished and came to tell her so.
She looked at Don.
"Guess we're packing it up. Both have to get back to work now, huh? The real work."
"Looks like it."
"No more time for flirting."
"Flirting. Now, there's a word I haven't heard in a while. My God, are we really that old, Sonja?"
"How'd it happen, huh? I know. I wonder myself. Things goon, years pile up. All the lists get longer."
He stood watching her go.
"Lew," Don said.
"Yeah."
"Okay if I stay with you tonight?"
"Absolutely."
26
"DAMN. ANOTHER MOUTH to feed," Zeke said. He'd passed by Don, asleep on the couch, on his way into the kitchen where I sat drinking coffee, wondering how early I could start making calls: Sam Delany to tell him I'd found his brother, Keith LeRoy to thank him for his help, Deborah.
Zeke poured himself a cup and sat down across from me. Sniffed at it and held on with both hands, huddling over it the way cons do.
"I was worried about you," I told him. "Haven't seen you in a few days."
"Well, I been working on something, just steady chippin' away at it. You know how that is."
"Getting anywhere?"
Zeke shrugged. "Hard to say. We can talk about it later. Meantime, that cop draped all over your couch out there's gotta be your friend Walsh." He'd know instantly, of course, that Don was a cop. No surprise there. "What's up?"
I told him about Danny. Zeke's eyes narrowed when I described the bathroom scene, but he said nothing.
Afterwards he shook his head and poured us each another cup.
"Guess I'd best be puttin' together some breakfast."