“I like kids too, but four’s too many at her age. She’s only twenty-seven.”
“She wants eight.”
“She’s crazy,” Deighan said. “What’s she want to bring all those kids into a world like this for?”
There was an awkward moment. It was always awkward at first when he came back. Then Fran said, “You hungry?”
“You know me. I can always eat.” Fact was, he was starved. He hadn’t eaten much up in Nevada, never did when he was away. And he hadn’t had anything today except an English muffin and some coffee for breakfast in Truckee.
“Come into the kitchen,” Fran said. “I’ll fix you something.”
They went inside. He got a beer out of the refrigerator; she waited and then took out some covered dishes, some vegetables. He wanted to say something to her, talk a little, but he couldn’t think of anything. His mind was blank at times like this. He carried his beer into the living room.
The goddamn trophy case was the first thing he saw. He hated that trophy case; but Fran wouldn’t get rid of it, no matter what he said. For her it was like some kind of shrine to the dead past. All the mementoes of his years on the force — twenty-two years, from beat patrolman in North Beach all the way up to inspector on the narcotics squad. The certificate he’d won in marksmanship competition at the police academy, the two citations from the mayor for bravery, other crap like that. Bones, that’s all they were to him. Pieces of a rotting skeleton. What was the sense in keeping them around, reminding both of them of what he’d been, what he’d lost?
His fault he’d lost it, sure. But it was their fault too, goddamn them. The laws, the lawyers, the judges, the system. No convictions on half of all the arrests he’d ever made — half! Turning the ones like Mannlicher and Brandt and D’Allesandro loose, putting them right back on the street, letting them make their deals and their hits, letting them screw up innocent lives. Sheila’s kids, his grandkids — lives like that. How could they blame him for being bitter? How could they blame him for taking too many drinks now and then?
He sat down on the couch, drank some of his beer, lit a cigarette. Ah Christ, he thought, it’s not them. You know it wasn’t them. It was you, you dumb bastard. They warned you twice about drinking on duty. And you kept on doing it, you were hog-drunk the night you plowed the departmental sedan into that vanload of teenagers. What if one of those kids had died? You were lucky, by God. You got off easy.
Sure, he thought. Sure. But he’d been a good cop, damn it, a cop inside and out; it was all he knew how to be. What was he supposed to do after they threw him off the force? Live on his half-pension? Get a job as a part-time security guard? Forty-four years old, no skills, no friends outside the department — what the hell was he supposed to do?
He’d invented Bob Prince, that was what he’d done. He’d gone into business for himself.
Fran didn’t understand. “You’ll get killed one of these days,” she’d said in the beginning. “It’s vigilante justice,” she’d said. “You think you’re Rambo, is that it?” she’d said. She just didn’t understand. To him it was the same job he’d always done, the only one he was any good at, only now he made up some of the rules. He was no Rambo, one man up against thousands, a mindless killing machine; he hated that kind of phony flag-waving crap. It wasn’t real. What he was doing, that was real. It meant something. But a hero? No. Hell, no. He was a sniper, that was all, picking off a weak or a vulnerable enemy here and there, now and then. Snipers weren’t heroes, for Christ’s sake. Snipers were snipers, just like cops were cops.
He finished his beer and his cigarette, got up, went into Fran’s sewing room. The five thousand he’d held out of the poker-game take was in his pocket — money he felt he was entitled to because his expenses ran high sometimes, and they had to eat, they had to live. He put the roll into her sewing cabinet, where he always put whatever money he made as Bob Prince. She’d spend it when she had to, parcel it out, but she’d never mention it to him or anyone else. She’d told Sheila once that he had a sales job, he got paid in cash a lot, that was why he was away from home for such long periods of time.
When he walked back into the kitchen she was at the sink, peeling potatoes. He went over and touched her shoulder, kissed the top of her head. She didn’t look at him; stood there stiffly until he moved away from her. But she’d be all right in a day or two. She’d be fine until the next time Bob Prince made the right kind of connection.
He wished it didn’t have to be this way. He wished he could roll back the clock three years, do things differently, take the gray out of her hair and the pain out of her eyes. But he couldn’t. It was just too late.
You had to play the cards you were dealt, no matter how lousy they were. The only thing that made it tolerable was that sometimes, on certain hands, you could find ways to stack the damn deck.
Family Business
W. S. Doxey
William Doxey is a professor of English at West Georgia College. He says he got into teaching because he wanted to be a writer and decided he had to “read everything — hence the degrees.” He has five novels in print, of which the most recent are Cousins to the Kudzu (LSU Press, 1985) and Countdown (Dorchester, 1986). He comments: “The Bleekman character in ‘Family Business’ is very real to me. I like him as a person and a detective. ‘Family Business’ is important because it led to a couple of other Bleekman stories and a novel, which I recently completed and which I hope will be the first of a series.”
As I eased my old Chevy into a parking place two doors down from number 171 at the Cobb Parkway Travelodge, I recalled that in days of old people had a nasty habit of killing messengers who brought bad news.
An F-4 jet from the air base down the road screamed in low, its gear down, as though to remind me that we live in modern times. Still, history has a way of repeating itself, and the news I had for Mr. and Mrs. Ovid Johnson wasn’t going to make them happy. So I took my own sweet time walking to the door and mulled over how I was going to break it to them that their nineteen-year-old daughter, Kimberly, preferred life in Atlanta’s fast lane to that on the family farm near Clinton, Tennessee.
This morning I had been on a ladder painting my house in the Virginia Highlands section. When I bought it ten years ago, I told myself that I’d give it a fresh coat every five years, whether it needed it or not. The first time, it started raining the second day of work, so I had to start over. This time the weather wisemen on TV promised four days of sunshine.
But there’s rain and then there’s rain — meaning that I was moving right along, splattering my clothes as well as the house, when a voice behind me said, “Mr. Bleekman, the private investigator?”
I looked down into the face of a lovely young thing — blonde, wearing wraparound sunglasses, designer clothes, and a frown.
“I’m Jack Bleekman,” I said.
“Can we talk?” she asked.
“Well, I’m sort of busy,” I replied, pointing my brush at the house and seeing the paint drip on the azaleas below.
“It’s important, really.”
So I came down from the ladder, wiped my hands, and we sat on the porch.
I offered her a cup of coffee, but she said no, then got down to her business.
Her name was Kimberly Johnson. Six months ago she had left Tennessee for Atlanta. “I found a good job in the entertainment business,” she said.
“Singer?” I asked. I make the rounds so as to stay in touch, but I didn’t recall seeing her.