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Chapter 3

The waitress brought Ema her breakfast and Gregory stared at the plate of unspeakable monstrosities. He hid his revulsion behind Happy #3 as the waitress smiled and backed away. Chewing food formed a bolus, a clot of spit and snot and food churned by the tongue and squeezed down the throat like a rat wriggling through a python. The bolus caused the stomach to squirm and convulse as chemicals reduced the lump to a suppurating goo. This reeking sludge was pumped past the pyloric valve and into the intestines, where it turned into unspeakable filth that decayed inside you for days.

“Are you all right, dear?” Ema asked as the server arrived with Gregory’s toast and salad. Grains and green vegetables were easiest to digest.

“Why?” he said.

Ema cocked her head, teased-out blonde curls bouncing on the shoulder of her pale and frilly summer frock.

“You looked deep in thought.”

Gregory pushed his plate of half-eaten toast aside. “Exactly, Ema, I was thinking. Until you interrupted.”

“I’m sorry,” Ema apologized. “Was it about work?”

“What else?” he lied. “I’ve put in forty hours already this week.” Another lie.

Ema forked up a gooey lump of poultry ovum. “I’m glad to see you so absorbed in life, dear. Plus you’re looking less thin and frail.”

Gregory’s eyes narrowed. Frail? I’ve never looked frail. Ema’s constant sniping about his pallor and thinness had driven Gregory to a health club membership four months back, but the stink of bodies turned his stomach and the music hurt his head. That’s when he’d invested in a top-of-the-line Bowflex home gym. He could run through a full workout in under a half hour and practice his faces at the same time.

He said, “I’ve been exercising.”

“Wonderful!” Ema chirped. “How often do you work out? Do you have a specific regimen?”

“Not really.”

“Do you exercise to a DVD or anything like that?”

“No.”

“You should drop in on Dr Szekely. She’d love to see how you—”

“Your nattering is driving me mad, Ema.”

Ema swallowed hard, looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice breaking. “I only want for you to—”

“I’m teasing, dear,” Gregory said. “Can’t you tell by now when I’m teasing?”

“Sometimes you look, I don’t know … serious, I guess. Even when you’re teasing.”

“If you can’t tell whether I’m teasing, then I’m teasing.”

“I love you so much,” Ema said. “I want you to be healthy and strong.”

“I am healthy, Ema,” Gregory said. “I just said I’ve been working out. Didn’t you listen?”

Ema’s eyes fell to her lap, telling Gregory he’d failed to keep all the anger from his voice. He sighed internally and reached for his sister’s plump fingertips, feeling microbes crawl from her flesh to his. But the gesture – I Love You and I’m Sorry – was important. Gregory found his most sincere face – This is the Best Insurance You Can Buy – and looked Ema in her green eyes.

“I’m so glad I have you,” he said. “So very happy.” He followed with three beats of I Have a Powerful New Detergent.

A newly buoyant Ema carried the conversation for twenty minutes, Gregory’s contributions being murmurs of assent and smiling in all the right places. He averted his eyes when a fork moved toward Ema’s mouth, looking instead at the ubiquitous pendant hanging from her neck, a shimmering pearlescent orb the size of a robin’s egg, folk craft from Eastern Europe. She had other baubles on her wrists, jangly things. The woman spent her life watching shopping channels and soap operas and police shows. Gregory had started wishing she’d get a full-time job or some kind of hobby.

“How are the kitties?” Ema asked, returning to a recent topic, a population of stray cats in Gregory’s neighborhood.

“Still howling all night. It’s breeding season.”

Ema paused in chewing, the fork poised beside her mouth. “A friend of mine had a problem with stray cats. She caught them in what’s called a humane trap and—”

“What the hell is a humane trap?”

“It’s like a box made of wire mesh. The cat goes in and a door springs shut. Then off to the shelter.”

“I’ll consider it,” Gregory said, thinking a shotgun would be easier.

Ema’s fat breasts wobbled below the pendant as she turned to wave for the check, the ritual over for another few days. Ema picked up her purse, a beaded concoction the size of a bowler’s bag. Gregory watched her pudgy pink fingers scrabble for her wallet.

“It’s my turn to pick up the check, right, dear?” she said, staring into the junkyard of her purse.

“I’ll get it, Ema.” I don’t have twenty minutes for you to find your wallet. Though both had money from their inheritance, Gregory made additional money writing code for a company specializing in industrial controls. Ema had a part-time income doodling out chatty little women-directed newsletters for an HMO and insurance firm, and Gregory figured she did it while watching television.

The pair stood and Ema hugged Gregory so tight he smelled her body odor beneath the cloying perfume. After kissing his cheek – Gregory hiding the grimace – Ema waddled out to the parking lot.

Gregory went to the restroom and washed his hands for two minutes before opening the door with his elbow and striding toward the entrance. An elderly woman pushed the front door open and he jumped past her, drawing a sharp glance for the incivility, but he’d not had to touch anything.

On scene at the C-store until three a.m., I spent Sunday in busywork trying to push the attempted robbery from my mind. Sometimes it even worked for a couple minutes. When Monday arrived, I slept till nine, then walked the hundred paces from my stilt-standing home to the Dauphin Island beach, interrupting a flock of gulls and sending them into the cloudless sky.

I ran the sugar-white strand for three miles and returned, launching into the Gulf and swimming a leisurely down-and-back mile. Then I had breakfast on my deck – cheese grits and andouille sausage wrapped in a plate-sized flour tortilla, a grittito, in my parlance – and drank a pot of industrial-strength coffee with chicory. I felt steady again, Saturday night’s memories fading away. I climbed into a beater truck painted gray with a roller, and headed thirty miles north to Mobile, Alabama.

Almost summer, the coastal heat was nearing typical blast-furnace intensity, so walking into the chilled air of the Mobile Police Department felt delicious. Several colleagues called out as I walked the hall to the stairs.

“Hey, Carson, I need a bag of pretzels.”

“Ryder … now that I know you moonlight at a C-store, how’s about bringing in the Krispy Kremes?”

“Yo, CR … I need fifteen bucks on pump three.”

They were congratulating me, but being cops wouldn’t use those words. The accolades were in their grins. Or the thumbs up after the joke. I climbed the steps to the homicide department. Harry was on paid leave for three days, standard procedure for a cop involved in a killing.

“Carson!” a voice called. My supervisor, Lieutenant Tom Mason, stood at his office door, lean as a teenager though in his mid-fifties, wearing his cream Stetson and cowboy boots. Tom hailed from piney-woods Bama, but he always looked straight from a cattle drive across the plains. I banked in his direction.

“Chief Baggs wants to see you, Carson.”

I winced. “Why?”

“Probably something to do with last night. Make nice, Carson,” Tom said pointedly. “He’s the chief, right?”

I went upstairs to a hushed and carpeted row of offices inhabited by the brass hats of the department, crossing the floor with the same thought I get in funeral parlors: Where’s the nearest exit?

Chief Baggs’s personal assistant sat at a desk outside the closed door of his corner office. Though Darlene Combs was only in her late thirties, she’d already buried two husbands, one a suicide, the other OD-ing at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Her green eyes always seemed as irritated as her hair was red. I studied her outfit: a blue skirt hiked high to display plump thighs she thought slender; a white silk blouse a size too small, to highlight a pair of odes to silicone; and an Evan Picone jacket, to show she didn’t have to wear the big box knock-offs worn by the women on the lower floors.

Darlene said, “The Chief is very busy today.”

“He asked Lieutenant Mason to send me up here.”

“You’re not in the Chief’s appointment book.”

“Perhaps I’m in the footnotes.”

She tapped a button on her phone. “Chief?” she said. “Detective Ryder is out here.” She listened for several seconds, put the phone down. “He’s on the phone to the Mayor. It’ll be a few minutes.”

Every time I’d come here, I’d waited out a call to the Mayor. I once compared notes with Harry, who’d been here twice. Both times Harry cooled his heels while the Chief finished his consultations. Harry, ever the detective, had noted Baggs’s phone line wasn’t lit, but perhaps he communicated on a secret line like the Batphone.

Darlene returned to penciling a magazine page as I studied the walls, laden with photos of Baggs shaking every political hand in four states, including such Washington stalwarts as Alabama senators Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby. Both men’s eyes seemed to say, Who is this geek at the end of my arm?

Though the degree in Police Administration was framed near center on the Wall of Baggs, most prominent was the law degree. The name of the institution was unknown to me, perhaps a correspondence subsidiary of Harvard or Tulane. While the bulk of the photos and certificates were in simple black frames, the degree was in a baroque gilt rectangle. It seemed a shade overwrought, but who was I to judge, being sans entrée into the world of police administration.

The ambition-prone Carleton Baggs was late to the top floor. Though he and a cabal of like-minded administrators had been headed upstairs several years back, Baggs had cast his lot with an ambitious manipulator named Terrence Squill who eventually ascended to Acting Chief. Squill’s career had slammed a wall when he’d been murdered by an even more ambitious manipulator.

Since Harry and I – me particularly – played a major role in the incident, we were not beloved of several old-timers in administration, feeling we had delayed their ascension to the uppermost ranks, thus costing them time and money. When the former chief retired last fall, enough years had passed for the scandal to have become history. Baggs, twenty years in grade and boasting well-framed degrees in law and police administration, got his shiny new Chief hat.

Darlene’s phone buzzed. “You can go in,” she said, not looking up from her pencilings. I shot a downward glance and saw Darlene was taking a quiz: “Test Your Hotness in Bed”.

I mumbled Somewhere between death and dry ice.

“What?” she said.

“I said you look lovely today.”

Chief Baggs was staring out his window, his back broad and blue in summertime seersucker. I could smell his cologne, one of those over-musked concoctions advertised by ageing jocks wearing towels. He turned, snatching a memo from his jacket pocket.

“Your lieutenant recommended you for a citation,” he said. “I want to present the award in a department-wide ceremony to let the public see what their taxes are paying for.”

The situation wasn’t about me, it was about the department’s image. Baggs pursed his lips and studied my clothes: green tee, cream linen jacket, jeans, black running shoes. “You’ll wear a uniform or a suit,” the Chief said, recalling the time I received a citation dressed in chinos and a T-shirt touting CRAZY AL’S MARINA AND BAR.

“I’ll do the department proud,” I promised, holding up a two-fingered Boy Scout salute as I backpedaled.

“One more thing,” Baggs said, halting me with an upraised hand. “Shumuchuru is taking a leave of absence to care for his mother. He can’t teach his class series at the police academy. We need a replacement, starting tonight. It appears, Detective Ryder, that you’ve never done a teaching stint.”

I resisted a groan. “The classes always seem to be at times when I’m indisposed, Chief.”

“The last time the academy asked, you said you had to visit a sick brother. Didn’t you tell me you were an only child, Detective?”

I had a brother, but not one I admitted to – for various reasons. Thus I had long fostered the only-child story. “A misunderstanding, sir. It was, uh, an uncle.”

“You’ve also claimed your house had fallen into a sinkhole. Do they allow sinkholes on Dauphin Island, Detective?”

“Uh, more like quicksand, Chief. The stuff can be treacherous if—”

“I don’t know why you’re dodging the academy, Ryder,” he scowled. “People like you usually jump at the chance to pontificate before an audience.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what good I could do, Chief. They’re raw recruits. Kids, basically.”

“Meaning what exactly, Ryder?”

I shook my head, Baggs just wasn’t getting it.

“It’s a total waste of my time, Chief,” I said. “Pearls before swine.”