I had been so prepared for hearing the name “Crane” that I had to check if I’d heard her right.
“The guy’s name was Shepherd?”
“Yep.” She looked blank for a moment. “Funny. Nearly twenty years go by, and you can still miss a damned dog.”
Ten minutes later her husband returned home with a clarinet-toting child. My relationship with Don had always revolved around his getting me to tell cop stories. We hadn’t arrived at a new MO since. His daughter greeted me with grave politeness, as if part of a self-imposed practice regime for interacting with the nearly elderly. I had no idea how to broach the subject of her birthday, and so I didn’t.
Natalie walked me to the door soon afterward. “Been nice to see you, Jack,” she said unexpectedly.
“You, too.”
“Sure everything’s okay with you guys?”
“Far as I know.”
“Well, okay then. So—where are you going tonight? Amy was dressed up mighty nice.”
“It’s a secret,” I said.
“I hear you. Keeping that magic alive. You’re an inspiration to us all. Well, come see us again soon—or we’ll come to you, and you don’t want that. Oh, that was the other thing today.” She laughed. “I thought you guys moved to Washington. Not Florida.”
“What do you mean?”
She held up her hand, fingers splayed. I shook my head, no clue what she was talking about.
“Amy in bright pink nail polish?” she said. “What’s up with that?”
I left not knowing where I was headed, walked down residential streets in soft, midevening air. People parked their cars, drove away, got home or went out. Others stood in kitchen windows, glanced down out of bedrooms, stood watering plants in their yards. I wanted to head up those paths, stand in those kitchens, sit in a big easy chair in one of those living rooms, and say, So—what’s up? Tell me how you live. Tell me all. Other people’s lives always seem more interesting, coherent, simply more real than my own. Television, books, celebrity culture, even plain watching the world go by: all a desire for an existence that has a directness and simplicity we never feel, that seems real and true in a way our own smudged and fractured days never do. We all want to be someone else for a while. Seem to believe, almost, that we already are, that something stands in the way of the lives we were supposed to have.
My phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. “Yes?”
“Whozis? Who?”
The voice was thick and hard to understand. “It’s Jack Whalen,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”
“This L.T. here. It’s the building, you said.”
“What building?”
“Shit. You told me money.”
I realized who I was talking to. “You’re the guy who was sitting at the café in Belltown.”
“It is. You want what I got?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not involved with that anymore.”
My interlocutor became loudly disquieted. “You a lying mother fucker! You said you had money. I made the call, cop motherfucker.”
“Okay, sir,” I said. “Tell me what you have.”
“Fuck you! How I know you going to pay me?”
“You got me. But I’m not in Seattle right now. So either you give me what you have, and I pay you later, or I put the phone down and block your number.”
He didn’t hesitate long. “It’s a girl, bro.”
“What?”
“She a kid. Come up the street, last night, late, she stand a front the building. Look like she try a key. Don’t work. She go away up the street. She gone.”
I laughed. “You saw a little girl come look at the building, then go away? And you want money for that?”
“You said—”
“Right. Well thank you. The check’s in the mail.”
I ended the call and made a note to block the number when I sat down. In the old days I’d be doing something like that once a week. Giving out my number to people who might have information they would feel more comfortable giving out later, when no one was around—then blocking it when they got to thinking they had a friend on the force who would fix their parking tickets or get their aunt out of jail. I did not miss those people. Black or white, young or old, these baffled, violent men with their unhappy, shouting wives, hermetically sealed off from their dreams by drugs, poverty, and fate—and laziness, too, often, along with short fuses and shorter attention spans and a bitter yearning for the easy life that guaranteed that theirs would be anything but.
I kept walking, and after a time I found myself on Main, passing places like Rick’s Tavern and the Coffee Bean, iBod and Schatzi, Say Sushi and Surf Liquor, environments that had been a casual part of my existence for years. I’d even met Amy in a bar not far from here. I’d been killing an evening with a colleague when a couple of drunks started working a table of women. The deal with a bar’s being cop-friendly is the understanding that—should anyone not realize that the place often contains off-duty policemen and that good behavior is therefore mandatory (for non-cops, at least)—it will be made clear to them. So I got up, walked by the other side of the women’s table on the way to the men’s room, and communicated via a pointed finger that the guys’ attention would be better deployed elsewhere. One looked like he wanted to make something of it, but his friend got the message, and they left without a fight. There was a fresh beer waiting for me on the counter when I got back. So it goes.
Several months later I dealt with a minor collision a few miles away. One car was inhabited by a pleasant man in his early seventies who was profoundly stoned and admitted his culpability even before he fell down on the sidewalk. The other contained a woman I recognized as having been at the table in the bar. She was sober, calm, and cute. She’d never even noticed me in the bar, but she had by the time this incident was sorted out. I was brisk and efficient with the public. She liked that, I guess. As I came to understand, Amy Ellen Dwyer valued the brisk and efficient above most else.
A couple weeks later, I was back in the bar, and so was she. Facial recognition occurred in both parties, and I briskly and efficiently stopped by to say hello. Though hitting on the victims of crime was viewed by many as a key perk of the job, it lay outside my own personal experience and I expected nothing to come of it. The women left while I was out back sharing a joint with the cook, but when I returned to the bar, I found she had left her number with the bartender.
“Call me,” the note said. “Without delay.”
We met up a few days later and had one of those dates where you start one place and then find yourself in another, and then another, not remembering how or why you moved—because the talk just seems to keep coming and this sense of freedom, of not having to stay put to protect your position and mood, seems to be at the heart of the evening. In the end it became kind of a game, each of us suggesting somewhere more obscure or offbeat to go next, until finally we found ourselves sitting side by side on a bench in a very touristy location and realizing that it felt okay because we didn’t feel much like locals either that night, but as if our lives and selves were in the midst of being freshly minted before our eyes. They were.
When you meet someone you love, then you change for good. That’s why the other person will never know or understand the earlier you, and why you can never change back. And why, when that person starts to go, you’ll feel the tear deep in your heart long before your head has the slightest clue what’s going on.
It was hard not to think of that evening now that I was here, and of others that had come after it, good and bad. I dropped down Ashland to Ocean Front, headed up past Shutters Hotel, under the long ramp road from the pier up to Ocean Avenue, then onto the concrete path on the beach itself. There’s a run of buildings just up from there, right down on the sand, some of the earliest houses built in the area. They’ve always looked strange to me, incongruous, faux-English mansions behind fences on the beach, squatting in the shadow of the high bluffs like imps on the chest of someone who sleeps.