So when Peter Zell decided to get ahold of a controlled substance—when the odds of impact made the decision for him—he remembered his old friend, because his old friend’s dad was a drug dealer.
Culverson, at last, nodding, rising slowly from his chair. McGully, out of his chair in a flash. My heart, galloping.
“Okay then,” Culverson says. “Let’s go.”
I nod, there’s a pause, and then the three of us move to the door at the same time, three policemen swinging into action, patting their shoulder holsters and shrugging on their coats, and there’s a rush of anticipation and joy so strong in my gut that it comes all the way around, to a kind of dread. This is a moment I’ve imagined all my life, three police detectives up and ready for action, feeling the sturdiness of our legs beneath us, feeling the adrenaline begin to flow.
McGully stops for Andreas on the way out the door—“You coming, gorgeous?”—but the last of the Adult Crimes detectives isn’t going anywhere. He’s frozen in his chair, a half-empty coffee cup at his elbow, his hair a bird’s nest, staring at a tattered pamphlet on his desk: IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY.
“Come on, pally,” McGully urges, snatching away the wrinkled pamphlet. “New Guy has got a scumbag for us.”
“Come on,” says Culverson, and I say it, too. “Come on.”
He turns a quarter of an inch, mutters something.
“What?” I say.
“What if they’re right?” says Andreas. “The—the—” he gestures to the pamphlet, and I sort of can’t take it anymore.
“They’re not right.” I place a firm hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t we not think about this right now.”
“Not think about it?” says Andreas, wide-eyed, pathetic. “Not think about it?”
With a quick flat chop I knock over the cup of coffee on Andreas’s desk, and the cold brown liquid gushes out, rushing over the pamphlet, flooding his ashtray, his paperwork and computer keyboard.
“Hey,” he says dumbly, pushing back from the desk, turning all the way around. “Hey.”
“You know what I’m doing right now?” I say, watching the muddy liquid rush toward the edge of the table. “I’m thinking: Oh no! The coffee’s going to spill onto the floor! I’m so worried! Let’s keep talking about it!”
And then the coffee waterfalls over the side of the desk, splashing on Andreas’s shoes and pooling on the ground beneath the desk.
“Oh, look at that,” I say. “It happened anyway.”
All is the same as it was.
The doghouse, the thorn bushes and the oak tree, the ladder propped against the lip of the roof. There’s the small white dog, Houdini, weaving anxiously around the legs of the ladder, and there’s big J. T. Toussaint, up there fixing shingles, bent to his task in the same brown work pants and black boots. He looks up at the sound of the gravel crunch on the driveway, and I catch a flash of impression, a reclusive animal surprised in his lair by the arrival of the hunters.
I’m out of the car first, straightening up and tugging down the hem of my suit coat, one hand shading my eyes against the winter sun, the other hand raised, flat palmed in greeting.
“Good morning, Mr. Toussaint,” I call. “I have just a couple more questions for you.”
“What?” he says. He comes up from his crouch, finds his balance, and stands full height on the roof, the sun right behind him and all around him, casting him in a weird pale gray halo. The other doors slam behind me, McGully and Culverson stepping out of the vehicle, and Toussaint flinches, retreats a step upward on the roof, stumbles.
He raises his hands to steady himself, and I hear McGully shout, “Gun!” and I turn my head back and say, “What—no,” because it’s not, “it’s just a caulking gun!”
But McGully and Culverson have their weapons raised, service-issue SIG Sauer P229s. “Freeze, asshole,” McGully shouts, but Toussaint can’t freeze, his boots have lost their purchase on the shingled slope, he’s scrabbling, hands in motion, eyes wide, McGully still shouting—and I’m shouting, too, “No, no, don’t—no,” whipping my head back and forth, because I don’t want him dead. I want to know the story.
Toussaint turns on his heel, tries to escape toward the spine of the roof; McGully fires his gun, a sliver of brick spits off the side of the chimney, and Toussaint turns and falls off the house and down onto the lawn.
“Your house smells like dog shit.”
“Let’s focus on what’s material, Detective McGully.”
“Okay. It’s true, though, isn’t it? Stinks in here.”
“Detective, come on.”
J. T. Toussaint starts to say something, or maybe he’s just moaning, and McGully tells him to shut up, and he shuts up. He’s on the living-room floor, giant body prone on the dirty carpet, face buried in the rug, bleeding from his forehead where he caught it on the roof on the way down. McGully is sitting on his back, smoking a cigar. Detective Culverson is over by the mantel, I’m pacing, everyone’s waiting, it’s my show.
“Okay. Let’s—let’s just chat,” I say, and then my body is wracked by a long shiver, shaking off the last of the adrenaline high, the rush of the gunshots, of hurtling forward, charging through the muddy snow.
Calm, Palace. Easy.
“Mr. Toussaint, it seems as if the last time we spoke, you omitted a few details about your relationship with Peter Zell.”
“Yeah,” says McGully curtly, shifting so that his full weight digs into the small of Toussaint’s back. “Asshole.”
“Detective?” I murmur, trying to suggest take it easy without saying it in front of the suspect. He rolls his eyes at me.
“So we were getting high,” says Toussaint. “Okay? We were getting fucked up. Me and Petey, we got high a few times.”
“A few times,” I say.
“Yeah. Okay?”
I nod, slowly. “And why did you lie to me, J. T.?”
“Why did he lie to you?” McGully asks, staring at me. “Because you’re a policeman, you dodo.”
Culverson makes an amused noise from his place over by the mantel. I wish I were alone with J. T., in a room, just he and I, and he could tell me the story. Just two people talking.
Toussaint looks up at me, his body immobile under McGully’s weight. “You come around here, you think the guy got killed.”
“I said he was a suicide.”
“Yeah, well, that was you lying,” he says. “No one is investigating suicides. Not now they’re not.”
Culverson makes his amused noise again, and I look at him, at his wry face: it’s a good point. McGully taps out a fat turd of cigar ash on the suspect’s rug.
Toussaint ignores them both, keeps his eyes on me, keeps talking. “You come here looking for a killer, and I tell you that Pete and me were taking fucking pain pills, you’re going to conclude that I’m the guy who killed him. Right?”
“Not necessarily.”
I’m thinking, pills. Popping pills. Small colorful capsules, waxy coating coming off in a sweaty palm. Trying to imagine it, my insurance man, the squalid details of abuse and addiction.
“J. T.,” I start.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’m dead now either way. I’m done.”
“Yup,” says McGully mirthfully, and I will him to shut up.
Because I believe Toussaint. I do. There’s a part of me that really does believe him. He lied to me for the same reason that Victor France spent his precious hours snooping around Manchester Road to get me the information I needed—because nowadays every charge is serious. Every sentence is a death sentence. If he had explained his real relationship with Peter Zell, he would have gone to prison and not come out. But there’s still no reason to assume that he killed him.