“I don’t think there have to be any consequences. I just want to know the truth.”
“Okay. Well, the truth is, I saw no reason to tell you about Peter’s theft and drug abuse, and I told Sophia that.”
“We made the decision together.”
“I talked you into it.”
Erik Littlejohn shakes his head, looks at me squarely, almost sternly. “I told her there was no sense in telling you.”
I rise to look at him, and he looks back, unflinching.
“Why?” I say.
“What’s done is done. The incident with Sophia’s prescription pad was unrelated to Peter’s death, and there was no sense in telling the police about it.” He says “the police” like it’s this abstract concept, somewhere out there in the world, “the police,” as opposed to me, a person, now standing in their living room with an open blue book. “Telling the police would mean telling the press, telling the public.”
“My father,” murmurs Sophia, then looks up. “He means telling my father.”
Her father? I think back, scratch my mustache, and I recall Officer McConnell’s report: father, Martin Zell, in Pleasant View Retirement, the beginnings of dementia. “It was bad enough for him to know that Peter had killed himself. To find out also that his son had become a drug addict?”
“Why put him through that?” says Erik. “At a time like this? I told her not to tell you. It was my decision, and I take full responsibility.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
I sigh. I’m tired. My eye hurts. Time to go.
“I have one more question. Ms. Littlejohn, you seem so certain that Peter killed himself. Can I ask what it is that makes you so sure?”
“Because,” she says softly, “he told me.”
“What? When?”
“That same day. When we had lunch in my office. It already started, you know. There was one on the news. In Durham. The elementary school?”
“Yeah.” A man who had grown up in Durham, the Seacoast area, he traveled back there to hang himself in the coat closet of his fourth-grade classroom, just so that the teacher, whom he had loathed, would find him.
Sophia presses her fingertips into her eyes. Erik moves behind her, places his hands comfortingly on her shoulders.
“Anyway, Pete—Peter said that if he were ever going to do it, it would be at that McDonald’s. On Main Street. You know, it seemed like a joke. But I guess—I guess it wasn’t, huh?”
“No, ma’am. Guess not.”
There you go, Detective McGully. How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim? The answer is, it doesn’t.
The fancy belt, the pickup truck, none of it matters. When his experiment with controlled substances had turned out to be a disaster—when he was discovered in his one audacious act of theft and betrayal—left with that shame and the lingering painful symptoms of withdrawal—faced with all that, and with the impending end of time—the actuary Peter Zell did another careful calculation, another analysis of risk versus reward, and went ahead and killed himself.
Bam!
“Detective?”
“Yep.”
“You’re not writing.”
Erik Littlejohn looks at me, almost suspiciously, like I’m hiding something.
My head hurts. The room swims; two Sophias, two Eriks. What did Dr. Wilton call it? Diplopia.
“You’ve stopped writing down what we’re saying.”
“No. I’m just—” I swallow, stand up. “This case is closed. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
Five hours, six hours later, I don’t know. It’s the middle of the night.
Andreas and I are outside, we’ve both escaped from Penuche’s, the basement bar on Phenix Street, from the din and the smoke and the grim dive-bar haze of it, and we’re standing on the grimy spit of sidewalk, neither of us having wanted to come out for a beer in the first place. Andreas was literally dragged from his desk by McGully, to celebrate me solving my case; a case I didn’t solve, and which was never really a case in the first place. Anyway, it’s awful down there, the fresh cigarette smell mingling with the stale, the TVs blaring, people crammed against the graffiti-marked load-bearing poles that keep the whole place from collapsing in on itself. Plus some wiseacre has larded the jukebox with irony: Elvis Costello, “Waiting for the End of the World,” Tom Waits, “The Earth Died Screaming,” and of course that R.E.M. song, playing over and over and over.
It’s snowing out here, fat dirty chunks slanting down and ricocheting off the brick walls. I shove my hands into my pockets and stand with my head tilted back, staring up at the sky with my one working eye.
“Listen,” I say to Andreas.
“Yeah?”
I hesitate. I hate this. Andreas draws a Camel from a pack, I watch balls of snow lose themselves in his wet mop of hair.
“I’m sorry,” I say, when he’s got it lit.
“What?”
“About before. Spilling your coffee.”
He chuckles woodenly, draws on his smoke.
“Forget it,” he says.
“I—”
“Seriously, Henry. Who cares?”
A small crowd of kids comes out of the stairwell that leads up from the bar, laughing like crazy, dolled up in weird pre-apocalyptic fashion: a teenage girl in an emerald ball gown and tiara, her boyfriend in full-goth black. Another kid, gender indeterminate, baggy shorts over plaid tights, broad red clown suspenders. Music drifts out from the open door, it sounds like U2, and then fades again as the door closes.
“Newspaper says the Pakistanis want to blow the thing up,” says Andreas.
“Yeah, I heard that.”
I’m trying to remember what U2’s end-of-the-world song is. I turn away from the kids, stare at the road.
“Yeah. They say they’ve figured it out, they can make it happen. But we’re saying we won’t let them.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“There was a press conference. The secretary of state, secretary of defense. Someone else. They said, if they try, we’ll nuke them before they can nuke it. Why would we say that?”
“I don’t know.” I feel hollow. I’m cold. Andreas is exhausting.
“It just seems crazy.”
My eye hurts; my cheek. After the Littlejohns, I gave Dotseth a call, and he graciously accepted my apology for wasting his time, made his jokes about not knowing who I was, what case I was talking about.
Andreas starts to say something else, but there’s honking to our right, at the top of Phenix, where the road crests and starts to bend down toward Main Street. Loud, boisterous honking from a city bus, picking up steam as it barrels down the street. The kids cheer and holler, wave at the bus, and Detective Andreas and I look at each other. City bus service has been suspended, and there was never a night-owl route on Phenix Street in the first place.
The bus is getting closer, rattling fast, two wheels up on the sidewalk, and I go ahead and draw my service pistol and aim it in the general direction of the broad windshield. It’s like a dream, in the dark, a giant city bus, display lights spelling OUT OF SERVICE, sailing down the hill toward us like a ghost ship. Closer now, and we can see the driver, early twenties, Caucasian male, baseball cap backward, scruffy little mustache, eyes wide with adventure and delight. His buddy, black, also early twenties, also in a baseball cap, has the shotgun-side pneumatic door open and he’s leaning out and hollering, “Ya-hoo!” Everybody always wanted to do something, and here come the guys who always wanted to joyride in a city bus.
The teenagers on the curb with us are dying laughing, cheering. Andreas is staring at the headlights, and I’m standing there with my gun out wondering how to play it. Probably do nothing, let them sail by.