From Potter`s Field

'You'd heard of Gault?' Wesley asked her.

'I can't say that I am intimately acquainted with his MO.'

'You are now,' Wesley said.

Commander Penn pulled in front of the Athletic Club and unlocked the doors.

'Yes,' she said grimly. 'I am now.'

We checked in at a deserted desk inside a lovely lobby of antiques and old wood, and Marino headed for the elevator. He did not wait for us, and I knew why. He wanted to call Molly, with whom he was still infatuated beyond good sense, and whatever Wesley and I might do was something he did not care to know about.

'I doubt the bar is open this late,' Wesley said to me as brass doors shut and Marino invisibly rose to his floor.

'I'm quite certain it isn't.'

We looked around for a moment, as if, if we stood here long enough, someone would magically appear with glasses and a bottle.

'Let's go.' He lightly touched my elbow and we headed upstairs.

On the twelfth floor, he walked me to my room and I was nervous as I tried to insert my plastic card, which at first I held upside down. Then I could not get the magnetized strip in the proper way, and the tiny light on the brass handle stayed red.

'Here,' Wesley said.

'I think I've got it.'

'Could we have a nightcap?' he asked as I opened my door and turned on a light.

'At this hour, we'd probably be better off with a sleeping pill.'

'That's sort of what a nightcap is.'

My quarters were modest but handsomely appointed, and I dropped my bag on the queen-size bed.

'Are you a member here because of your father?' I asked.

Wesley and I had never been to New York together, and it bothered me that there was yet one more detail about him I did not know.

'He worked in New York. So yes, that's why. I used to come into the city a lot when I was growing up.'

'The minibar is under the TV,' I said.

'I need the key.'

'Of course you do.'

Amusement flickered in his eyes as he took the small steel key from my outstretched hand, his fingers touching my palm with a gentleness that reminded me of other times. Wesley had his way, and he was not like anyone else.

'Should I try to find ice?' He unscrewed the cap from a two-jigger bottle of Dewar's.

'Straight up and neat is fine.'

'You drink like a man.' He handed me my glass.

I watched him slip out of his dark wool overcoat and finely tailored jacket. His starched white shirt was wrinkled from the labors of this long day, and he removed his shoulder holster and pistol and placed them on a dresser.

'It's strange to be without a gun,' I said, for I often carried my.38 or, on more nerve-rattling occasions, the Browning High Power. But New York gun laws did not often bend for visiting police or people like me.

Wesley sat on the bed opposite the one I was on, and we sipped our drinks and looked at each other.

'We haven't been together much the last few months,' I said.

He nodded.

'I think we should try to talk about it,' I went on.

'Okay.' His gaze had not wavered from mine. 'Go ahead.'

'I see. So I have to start.'

'I could start, but you might not like what I would say.'

'I would like to hear whatever you want to say.'

He said, 'I'm thinking that it's Christmas morning and I'm inside your hotel room. Connie is home alone asleep in our bed and unhappy because I'm not there. The kids are unhappy because I'm not there.'

'I should be in Miami. My mother is very ill,' I said.

He silently stared off, and I loved the sharp angles and shadows of his face.

'Lucy is there, and as usual I'm not. Do you have any idea how many holidays with my family I've missed?'

'Yes, I have a very good idea,' he said.

'In fact, I'm not sure there has ever been a holiday when my thoughts have not been darkened by some terrible case. So it almost doesn't matter whether I am with family or alone.'

'You have to learn to turn it off, Kay.'

'I've learned that as well as it can be learned.'

'You have to leave it outside the door like stinking crime scene clothes.'

But I could not. A day never went by when a memory wasn't triggered, when an image didn't flash. I would see a face bloated by injury and death, a body in bondage. I would see suffering and annihilation in unbearable detail, for nothing was hidden from me. I knew the victims too well. I closed my eyes and saw bare footprints in snow. I saw blood the bright red of Christmas.

'Benton, I do not want to spend Christmas here,' I said with deep depression.

I felt him sit next to me. He pulled me to him and we held each other for a while. We could not be close without touching.

'We should not be doing this,' I said as we continued doing it.

'I know.'

'And it's really difficult to talk about.'

'I know.' He reached for the lamp and turned it off.

'I find that ironical,' I said. 'When you think of what we share, what we have seen. Talking should not be difficult.'

'Those darker landscapes have nothing to do with intimacy,' he said.

'They do.'

'Then why are you not intimate with Marino? Or your deputy chief, Fielding?'

'Working the same horrors does not mean the next logical step is to go to bed. But I don't think I could be intimate with someone who does not understand what it's like for me.'

'I don't know.' His hands went still.

'Do you tell Connie?' I referred to his wife, who did not know that Wesley and I had become lovers last fall.

'I don't tell her everything.'

'How much does she know?'

'She knows nothing about some things.' He paused. 'She knows very little, really, about my work. I don't want her to know.'

I did not reply.

'I don't want her to know because of what it does to us. We change color, just as when cities become sooty, moths change color.'

'I don't want to take on the dingy shade of our habitat. I refuse.'

'You can refuse all you like.'

'Do you think it's fair you hold so much back from your wife?' I said quietly, and it was very hard to think because my flesh felt hot where he traced the contours of it.

'It isn't fair for her, and it isn't fair for me.'

'But you feel you have no choice.'

'I know I don't. She understands that there are places in me beyond her reach.'

'Is that the way she wants it?'

'Yes.' I felt him reach for his Scotch. 'You ready for another round?'

'Yes,' I said.

He got up and metal snapped in the dark as he broke screw cap seals. He poured straight Scotch into our glasses and sat back down.

'That's all there is unless you want to switch to something else,' he said.

'I don't even need this much.'

'If you're asking me to say what we've done is right, I can't,' he said. 'I won't say that.'

'I know what we've done is not right.'

I took a swallow of my drink and as I reached to set the glass on the bedside table, his hands moved. We kissed again more deeply, and he did not waste time on buttons as his hands slid under and around whatever was in their way. We were frenzied, as if our clothes were on fire and we had to get them off.

Later, curtains began to glow with morning light and we floated between passion and sleep, mouths tasting like stale whiskey. I sat up, gathering covers around me.

'Benton, it's half past six.'

Groaning, he covered his eyes with an arm as if the sun were very rude to rouse him. He lay on his back, tangled in sheets, as I took a shower and began to dress. Hot water cleared my head, and this was the first Christmas morning in years when someone other than me had been in my bed. I felt I had stolen something.

'You can't go anywhere,' Wesley said, half asleep.

I buttoned my coat. 'I have to,' I said, sadly looking down at him.

'It's Christmas.'

'They're waiting for me at the morgue.'

'I'm sorry to hear it,' he mumbled into the pillow. 'I didn't know you felt that bad.'

4

New York's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was on First Avenue, across from the Gothic red brick hospital called Bellevue, where the city's autopsies had been performed in earlier years. Winter-brown vines and graffiti marred walls and wrought iron, and fat black bags of trash awaited pickup on top of filthy snow. Christmas music played nonstop inside the beat-up yellow cab squeaking to a halt on a street almost never this still.