“I do.”
“Well, then, I know this lake is just a pond to you.”
Another surprise, from this man who once lived to one-up everyone around him. At least a hundred times a day.
“It’s a nice lake,” I said, looking out over the water. I could see maybe a dozen boats, not nearly as many as I would have thought. “You’ve got a nice quiet place here.”
“Hell, you should see this lake during the Bud Bash.”
“What’s that?”
“Every summer, they get thousands of people here, all these boats tied together in a big flotilla down the shoreline a bit. People drinking like crazy, just going insane.”
“Funny, we don’t get that in Paradise.”
“It’s enough to drive an ex-cop out of his mind, Alex. All those drunks driving their boats around. Then later on their cars when they’re going home. It’s a miracle they don’t have a dozen people killed every year.”
The final surprise came when we got to his dock. I would have guessed a sleek speedboat for good old Detective Bateman. Instead, I saw a big fat lazy pontoon boat, with deck chairs, a full roof, and a motor just big enough to move it along at two miles per hour.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “This thing is just a floating gazebo. But on this lake, it’s perfect. I can anchor anywhere, throw a fishing line out, catch a few walleye, maybe take a little nap.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Come on, I’ve got the cooler packed already.”
He opened up the little gate and stepped onto the deck. I followed him. The boat barely dipped as I stepped on board.
“Rock solid,” he said, sitting in the captain’s chair and pushing the electric starter. I untied the front end and we were off, backing out into the lake. When we were clear of the dock, he put it into forward and gunned it. A baby duck could have paddled faster.
We moved north for a while, Bateman pointing out resorts and bars on the western shore. Then he cut over by Houghton Point, and we started on a great loop that would keep us out here all afternoon. The sun was hot now, even with the awning over our heads.
“So why did you look up your old buddy Detective Bateman after all these years?” he finally said. “Let me guess. It has something to do with that call we both got from Sergeant Grimaldi.”
“Well, I did come down to have a drink with him. Your name came up once or twice.”
“I bet it did. Grimaldi never did like me that much.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. He just never got to know you like I did.”
Bateman looked at me. “We spent a lot of time together that month, didn’t we? I’m glad it all paid off in the end. Although now that he’s getting out…”
“Nothing we can do about that,” I said. “But the thing is, I never got the chance to see how that case was closed. With what happened to me…”
“The only thing that happened after you left was his plea and then his sentencing.”
“I never heard his confession.”
He looked at me again. “You didn’t see the tape?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Too bad. It was my finest hour.”
He was smiling when he said it, but I knew he wasn’t completely joking. It was the biggest case of his career, for all the obvious reasons, spoken or unspoken. A photogenic white woman from Farmington Hills, stabbed two dozen times by a young black male. That same pretty face on the six o’clock news, and in the paper, every day for most of that month. The frustration building every day we couldn’t find our suspect. The pressure from every direction. Until finally we had our man and he was locked in a room with a homicide detective who did things his own way. If this was a television show, you might even say he played by his own rules. Of course, it wasn’t a television show, and the blood on the floor of that balcony was very much real.
“I’ve always wondered how it went down,” I said. “That call from the sergeant was sort of a reminder, I guess.”
Bateman nodded his head. Then he cut the engine. He got up, fished out the anchor, and threw it overboard.
“I take it we’re stopping?”
“Good a place as any,” he said. “It’s only fifteen feet deep here. Most of the lake’s about that. I’m guessing Lake Superior gets a little deeper.”
“Just a little.”
“Interest you in a cold beer?”
“You could twist my arm.”
He opened up the cooler and pulled out two bottles of Sierra Nevada. Not bad if a Canadian isn’t available, especially in the summer.
“I’ve got some sandwiches in here, too.”
The only thing I had eaten that day was the slice of Mrs. King’s chocolate cake, so I was ready for a real lunch. We sat there and had our ham and cheese sandwiches while the other boats on the lake zoomed right by us.
“Okay,” he said, when he was done eating and was wiping his hands on his napkin. “You want to know how I got that confession.”
“If you don’t mind telling me.”
He smiled. “You know how much I hate talking about myself, but I’ll see what I can do.”
I took another hit on my beer, squinting at the sunlight reflected off the water. I ended up closing my eyes, all the better to listen to him, and to bring back that summer and the case that would bind the two of us together forever.
“So we’ve got this kid,” he said. “Remember how we were thinking he was seventeen, eighteen years old? And he turns out to be sixteen?”
“I remember.”
“Sixteen on paper, but he was already a hard case. That day we finally caught him, when he just stood there in the doorway with a dozen cops all aiming their guns at him? The way he didn’t even blink?”
I thought back to that day. That strange, almost anticlimactic arrest, after everything we’d gone through to get there.
“It wasn’t my first confession,” he said. “You know that was sorta my thing.”
“So I had heard, yes.”
“The secret is approaching each suspect on their own terms. Everybody’s different. Everybody’s got their own story. Something that might work on one person will get you nowhere with the next one. So you can’t go in already married to one strategy. You gotta react to the situation and you gotta be quick.”
He gave an ironic grimace of pain as he resettled his bad hip on the chair. The man’s last quick day must have felt like a distant memory.
“So remember, the clock is ticking here, right? We got the kid in the room. His mother’s there with him, because that’s the law. Darryl’s not saying a word, but Mama’s telling everybody to let them go because her little boy ain’t done nothing.”
Having just spent time with Mrs. King, I knew she was a hell of a lot more articulate than that, but I let him go on.
“I know we’re running out of time before we have to charge him or let him walk. I think you’d already gone home at that point, right?”
“Sergeant Grimaldi told me to go home, yes. He didn’t think there’d be anything else to see.”
“That’s right,” Bateman said. I could tell he was happy to hear it put this way. Like fourth and long from your own one-yard line, just a few seconds left on the clock. So everybody’s already on their way out of the stadium.
“So I finally go in the room,” he said. “I sit down in front of him. His mother starts talking, but I tune her out. It’s just me and Darryl. I don’t try to get real close to him like I might to some guys. Get right in his face or anything. I just sit back and I don’t say anything for a while. He’s looking right back at me. I had to remind myself he was only sixteen years old.”
Another boat roared by. He took a sip of his beer and gave the boat a quick glance. Then he was back to that day in the interview room.
“Finally, I just say to him, ‘You think you’re a man already, don’t you.’ He gives me a look, doesn’t say anything. I say, ‘Some people might look at you and say you’re nothing but a little punk gangbanger, not even seventeen years old yet. Think you’re so bad and everything.’ Notice I’m not saying that I think that. I’m just saying some people. That was the important part. Make it all indirect, you know?”