Caroline gives her two dollars. "Go to the coffee shop across the street and get yourself a cup of hot chocolate. I'll be over in a minute." The girl leaves and Caroline turns back to Pete, who makes no move to cover himself or his sore testicles.
"Bitch."
I could shoot him, Caroline thinks, and she immediately thinks about investigating her own crime: the trail of witnesses, the barrista, the teenagers, the father with the blond son, the girl who showed Caroline the door; Caroline's handprint on Pete's neck, the police slug in his chest. Maybe she'd confess, ask for three legal pads and some coffee and sit down next to Clark the Loon, drawing a line between all the events in her life and this one crime.
"Pete," she says, "you should get some friends your own age."
"Fuck you."
"You're a lucky man, Pete. I'm not gonna arrest you today."
Finally he pulls the dirty blanket over himself. Caroline walks to the window and looks down on the street. She sees the young flannel girl cross the street, swing around a parking meter, and go into the coffee shop. Caroline turns back to Pete.
"I need some information about a guy named Clark. You know him?"
"No."
Pete Decker is used to having cops ask if he knows someone. "Come on. Think. Clark something. About my age. Mid to late thirties. Dark hair. Good looking. Little over six feet tall. Has an eye patch."
With that last bit of information, Pete Decker sits up in bed and smiles. "Clark? No way. How is he?"
"He's okay. So you do know him?"
"Sure, we was like… best friends when we were kids. You know, little kids. Rode bikes and shit. Before-" He doesn't say before what.
"You know his last name?" she asks.
"Clark? Oh, fuck. Sure. You know. Clark… uh… starts with an M. I used to know it. You know, when we were kids. So how is Clark, man? Still the same?"
Not knowing what he was like before, Caroline isn't sure how to answer.
"Man, I haven't seen Clark in… fuck, years."
"You don't keep in touch with him?"
"Clark? Nah, man." He looks around the one-room apartment. "Yeah, I don't keep in touch with too many people from the old neighborhood, you know."
"Clark have a beef with anyone, someone he might have wanted to hurt?"
"Clark? Nah," he says. "No, everybody liked Clark. He's funny. Smart as shit too. Get all A's and shit. I used to tell him, 'Clark, don't worry about your ol' buddy Pete. You go make something of yourself. Ol' Pete, he'll be fine.' You know why? I used to kind of protect him from bullies 'n' shit. We was tight."
Pete sits up in bed. "Yeah, Clark, he was the kind of guy you always knew would be okay. Played sports and banged all them cheerleaders, even with…" He raises his hand absentmindedly to his own left eye. "… You know, the accident and shit."
"Yeah, his eye. How'd that happen?"
"Oh." Pete looks around nervously, as if he's wondering about the statute of limitations. "Some kind of accident. You know. Kids."
"When did you see Clark last?"
"Huh." Pete thinks. It does not appear to be his strong suit. "Oh. Probably 1979. Yeah. Probably then."
Caroline nods. She's not sure whether to be upset that this has turned out to be nothing, or glad that Clark whose-last-name-starts-with-an-M the Loon told the truth when he said Pete Decker was nobody.
"Okay, Pete," she says, and she crouches in front of him. "In just the last ten minutes, you've committed six felonies. I'm gonna give you a break, but I need you to do some things for me. Four things. Can you do four things for me, Pete?"
"Sure." He sits up, all sunken cheeks and vacant eyes, and she knows he will do nothing, that twenty minutes after she leaves, the teenagers will be back and they will all be smoking crystal and watching Pete's stolen TV. "Anything," he says.
She pulls out her notebook and writes, 1. GIRL. "That girl," she says. "The one you hit. Never see her again. You understand? Send her home to her parents."
"Yeah," he says.
2. TV, she writes. "This morning, you take this TV back where you stole it from."
"Okay," he says.
"Monday morning, you go to your probation officer and tell him that you're using again and you need to get into treatment." She writes, 3. Treatment.
"Good," he says, "I've been thinking that I need some help to…"
She doesn't bother listening.
"And number four. You avoid me. Because if you don't do all four of these things – and we both know you won't – then I'm gonna shoot you in your fucking head. Do you understand?" She writes, 4. Me.
"Yeah," he says.
Caroline rips the page from her notebook, tosses it on the bed, straightens up, and starts for the door.
"Hey." Pete has pulled the blanket up to his neck, suddenly modest. "Will you tell Clark I said hi?"
She's a little unsure what to make of this. "Sure," she says.
"And tell him that if I could, I would've voted for him last time."
And that, of course, is when it hits her. She stops cold at the door to Pete Decker's apartment and closes her eyes. She did vote for him.
4
Clark Anthony Mason works over the third legal pad just as he did the first two, almost in a state of self-hypnosis. Caroline watches him with a new kind of fascination. Tony Mason. No shit. He chews the end of his pen and takes a sip of the coffee she gave him. She didn't say anything when she got back from Pete's, just handed him the coffee and went to write an intelligence report encouraging the drug detectives to go back and visit Pete Decker. She looks in the window of Interview Two. So that's Tony Mason. Now it's obvious: the solid good looks, the weird diction, the politician's bearing. Before, she couldn't see past the dirty clothes, the long hair, and especially the eye patch. She kept running the current version of the Loon through her memory (Who do I know with an eye patch?) rather than trying to picture him without it.
Caroline checks her watch. It's going on nine o'clock Saturday morning. He's been at this almost twelve hours. She walks back to her desk and flips through her Rolodex until she finds the number of a newspaper reporter she nearly dated before remembering that she hates newspaper reporters. She taps out the number and Evan O'Neal answers on the second ring.
"Evan. It's Caroline Mabry. I'm sorry to bother you at home."
"How you been, Caroline?" Evan covered cops back when she was on patrol, but now he's a government reporter.
"Good. I need to run a name past you: Tony Mason."
"The kid who ran against Nethercutt?" Kid. Only in politics does someone in his thirties qualify as a kid. But in truth he had seemed like a kid, standing at the opposite podium against the gray-haired four-term Republican, looking as though, if elected to the House of Representatives, he would act immediately to change the mascot and make Homecoming a formal dance.
"Yeah, that Tony Mason."
"No shit? You seeing him now, Caroline?"
Funny that a cop would call a reporter and the reporter would assume that it was about romance. She's not sure if that says something about her, or Evan, or Tony Mason. She looks up, through the small window of the interview room. "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am seeing him," she says.
"You get fixed up?"
"Something like that."
Evan is quiet for a moment.
"What is it?" Caroline asks.
"It's just… I don't know… you can do better."
"Yeah," she says. "I'm starting to think that. What do you know about him?"
"Mason? Just that he got thirty-six percent and that was twice as much as anyone expected from such a lamb."
"Lamb?"
"Yeah." Evan shifts the phone. "Nethercutt owns the seat, just like Foley did before him, so the Democrats have to pick their spots, only take a big run every six years or so. The rest of the time, they just throw lambs to slaughter – an old labor tough or a cute young lawyer like Tony Mason. Some political outsider who gets outspent five-to-one and goes home disillusioned and broke."