Happy Policeman Page 2

  DeWitt followed. “You seen Loretta’s kids today?”

  “Nope.”

  In Curtis’s sink dirty plates sprouted like Melmac fungus. Creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon dishwater made a high-tide line on the stainless steel. “When’s the last time you seen ‘em?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, they hang around here a lot, don’t they? Fishing and all? You know of anything Hubert Foster could have had against Loretta?”

  Curtis plucked a cracked mug from the sink and poured himself some coffee from a dented pot. “No. Want a cup?”

  DeWitt’s mouth twitched. “Nuh-uh.”

  “Why the third degree?”

  This time the words came easier. “Loretta’s been murdered.”

  Curtis spasmed, spilling coffee. “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch.” His eyes were so wide that the whites haloed the brown irises. He looked at DeWitt and then at the floor. It was hard to distinguish the new coffee stain from the historical. “You say murdered? Who the hell done it?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “Shit’s gonna hit the fan, DeWitt. Man. Oh, man. I need some.” Curtis looked up fast. “You want a little?”

  The shit was going to hit the fan. And there was nothing DeWitt could do about it. “Hell, why not?” He slugged down the rest of his Coke and tagged after Curtis.

  In the cramped bathroom, weak sunlight struggled to penetrate a high, dirty window. As Curtis locked the door, DeWitt perched in the meager glow at the edge of the tub.

  Curtis dug his hand into a cracked ginger jar. “How’d they do it?”

  “Huh?”

  “How’d they kill her?”

  “Don’t know that exactly, either. But she was naked. It was terrible.”

  Curtis laughed, then clapped a censorious hand over his mouth. “Sorry. Poor Loretta was just butt-ugly.”

  “Yeah, well . . . it was awful that way, too.”

  Rolling a scrap of corn husk into a cylinder, Curtis picked up a greasy box of kitchen matches, lit the joint, and took a toke before passing it.

  DeWitt sucked smoke, hitched it deep. “You have the right to remain silent . . .”

  It was an old joke, and Curtis ignored it. He lowered the seat of the commode and sat. The bathroom was so small that the two men’s knees touched. When they got to the end of the joint, Curtis lit another and handed it to DeWitt.

  “How come you don’t know how they killed her?”

  DeWitt inhaled the reply. “Weapon.”

  Curtis studied the burning end of the joint critically before taking another drag. “I mean, was she stabbed or strangled or what?”

  “Her throat was tom apart.”

  Curtis nodded sagely. “Werewolves.”

  A whoop of laughter. DeWitt slipped off the tub and onto the damp floor, where he got tangled in Curtis’s feet.

  “Think about it, boy. That dog you seen in the store could have been one.”

  The tile at DeWitt’s back felt clammy and chill. “No blood left in her body, either.” He pinched the dwindling roach from the mayor’s fingers.

  “You just think about it, DeWitt. Do you know what these people around here do when the moon’s full?”

  Upside down, Curtis’s face seemed less comical and more menacing. “You always like to scare me when I’m high.”

  “I want you to think werewolves, DeWitt. I want you to think vampires. See, werewolves you can lock up in jail, but vampires—”

  Tap.

  At the soft knock, both men turned, DeWitt having to roll around on the littered floor.

  Tap.

  DeWitt and Curtis looked at each other. The joint was tweezered between Curtis’s thumb and middle fingernail. Suddenly his eyes widened. “Wittie? Did you order me a delivery?”

  “Shit!”

  Raising the commode lid, Curtis dropped the joint inside the bowl and flushed. DeWitt clambered to his feet and threw open the bathroom window. A fresh breeze and an anthem of sunlight burst through the close, hot room.

  “Just a minute!” Curtis shouted. “I’ll be with you in just a minute!”

  DeWitt waved his arms. Curtis flapped a towel.

  “I’m fucking wasted,” Curtis said in a low, pained voice. “God, I’m so fucking wasted.”

  Tap.

  “Just a sec! Jesus Christ, Wittie. I look okay?”

  DeWitt looked at the blue sheep and bit his lip to curb a laugh. Curtis unlocked the bathroom door and slipped into the hall. There was a muffled conversation.

  “DeWitt.” The voice was Curtis’s. DeWitt stood, shoulders against the peeling wood.

  “DeWitt. They know you’re here, and they want to talk.”

  Opening the door, DeWitt eased around the jamb. Kol Seresen’s bulbous eyes, the hue of shrimp jelly on a blue plate, were trained on DeWitt’s face. The Torku leader’s hands swelled like balloons, then slowly deflated. His skin, a living mood ring, changed from mottled brown to beige.

  DeWitt tried to straighten his uniform. Curtis stood next to him, his bare toes twitching on the hardwood floor.

  The Torku gave silence as good as Billy did. Maybe better.

  “How are you, Seresen?” DeWitt asked when he couldn’t take the tension anymore.

  “There is gas.” The small alien pivoted and walked out the front door, his Banana Republic shirt flapping around him.

  “He knows!” Curtis whispered urgently as the screen door banged shut. “He’s figured it out and he’s going after my stash!”

  Padding hurriedly into the bathroom, slipping a little on the wet tiles, Curtis grabbed the ginger jar. He fled into the bedroom.

  DeWitt trailed after. The mayor’s king-size waterbed was in magnificent disarray. The mayor himself was standing knee-deep in clutter, the jar clutched to his belly. “You’re a cop. What should I do?”

  “Don’t act suspicious.”

  Curtis dropped to the bed and, bobbing on its agitated, vinyl waves, curled himself around the jar. “I won’t let this go extinct the way cigarettes and booze did. I’m telling you right now, DeWitt, they’ll have to kill me.”

  “You think somebody told them about the murder?”

  “Look out the window!” Curtis hissed. “See if they’re in the garden.”

  DeWitt peeked through the dusty blinds. No Torku were roaming the privacy-fenced rows of green plants. “Nope.”

  “Go and talk to them, DeWitt. Make sure they’re not planning nothing. I got these thoughts of them with aerosol cans of Agent Orange.”

  DeWitt walked outside. Four Torku were taking boxes from a brown UPS van and carrying them into the store, giving DeWitt’s grazing bay mare a wide berth.

  Behind the wall of video machines, DeWitt found Seresen. The Kol had turned his normal brown again and was loading six packs of Cokes into the cooler.

  “You may go fill your car now,” the alien said. “There is gas, as I told you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Seresen finished with the Cokes and began stacking Jimmy Dean sausage biscuits, the hot first and then the mild. Around the other end of the aisle, a Torku had found a broom and was sweeping up the remains of the dog’s impromptu snack.

  “Is that all you wanted to talk to me about, Seresen? To tell me about the gas? There’s nothing else on your mind?”

  The disorienting eyes, more a murky pink in the gloom than blue, stared holes through DeWitt. Suddenly Seresen lowered his gaze and continued stacking. “The gas seems important to you. You complain about it.”

  Reaching past Seresen into the cool depths of the cardboard box, DeWitt took out a tuna fish sandwich. He stripped the plastic wrap from the end, extracted the soggy bread, took a bite and winced. The Torku imitations were exact: nothing was ever worse; and, certainly, nothing was ever better.

  “The Bo i
s upset,” Seresen said.

  Bread stuck in DeWitt’s throat. He choked. Seresen absently handed him a diet Dr Pepper.

  “I don’t understand why. I thought you might explain it.”

  The Dr Pepper was warm. When it hit DeWitt’s stomach, nerves nearly made it come up again. He belched wetly.

  “Oh. Somebody died. He tell you that?”

  The pink eyes dropped to a carton of Sara Lee brownies. “Yes.”

  “Well. That’s all there is to it. Somebody died.”

  The boneless fingers fondled the boxes in what the humans called “Torku foreplay.” DeWitt thought that perhaps Torku skin was different. It looked softer and thinner somehow, as though the nerves were exposed. When the Torku shook hands with humans, which they sometimes did, the hand would swell and the skin harden as if to protect themselves from the touch. DeWitt imagined that the aliens could sense more through their skin than other creatures could; that they could taste through it, and even smell out lies.

  Seresen didn’t bother to look up from his unloading. “There is no use being upset about such things. It is harmful. You must warn the Bo about that.”

  Chapter Four

  POLICE BUSINESS demanded DeWitt’s return to town. A mellow high drew him the opposite direction.

  Leaving his horse in Hattie’s show barn so the mare couldn’t be seen from the road, he hurried across the yard, an anticipatory swelling in his pants.

  Hattie was in the kitchen staring at a wastebasket so ugly that it had to have come from Granger’s workshop. DeWitt thrust his pelvis forward, a surprise gift.

  “All yours.”

  She ignored him. “Granger’s doing things with wooden trash cans and dried flowers and gold paint. It’s sort of his spray paint and environmental period.”

  Unzipping his pants, DeWitt shoved her hand into the front of his shorts. “Come on, come on, Hattie. Have a Torku handshake.”

  She grabbed him, fingernails first. It was like being nipped by an annoyed dog. At the unexpected pain, he moved away, a wilting, a deflated man. “You could have just told me you didn’t want to.”

  “How would you know what I want, DeWitt? You never ask.”

  DeWitt needed Hattie in an intense but simple way, as an itch needs a scratch. “Are you in one of your moods? If you want me to leave, Hattie, just goddamned tell me.”

  Putting the wastebasket down, Hattie walked to the hall. Still hopeful, he followed. It was in the bedroom, with the door closed and locked behind them, that he was sure he would have what he came for.

  They undressed and got into bed. DeWitt didn’t waste time exploring Hattie’s familiar territory. He assumed the missionary position and, with one ear, listened for the sound of her teenaged sons’ return.

  The instant before climax he pictured Janet beneath him, and after he came, he rolled away—a distance without promises,

  “If you’re mad about Bo taking charge of the case, why aren’t you out looking for the murderer?” Hattie asked when he told her about Loretta.

  DeWitt put a hand on her breast and replied, “I’m working on it,” before realizing the evident fallacy in what he had said.

  “Any suspects?”

  He cleared his throat. “Well, Billy implicated Hubert Foster, but I have the feeling he’s just trying to avoid suspicion himself.”

  From their tumble in bed, Hattie’s brown curly hair had gone nappy. The glow from the window highlighted the furrows of encroaching age on her cheeks. “It’s such a cliché to suspect the next of kin.”

  That stung. “So where were you last night?”

  “Asleep. You want to bring my boys in as witnesses?”

  “I’m making a point. Billy is an estranged spouse. Police build cases on opportunity and motive. You don’t have a motive that I know of.”

  “I suppose if Janet died under suspicious circumstances, I’d be the first one you’d interrogate.”

  Tight-lipped, he sat up. It scared him when Hattie mentioned his wife. It sounded like she expected something from him, as if she were an honest-to-God mistress. “Who do you think did it?”

  “The Torku.”

  An abrupt intake of air made him cough. Hattie pounded him on the back. She had hard hands and strong, mannish arms. The pummeling nearly knocked him out of bed.

  “Think about it, DeWitt. From what you told me of the fatal wound—”

  “You don’t know shit about police work, Hattie. And I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “The kids are missing. Bo’s right, the Torku had to have done it. A man isn’t going to kill his own kids.”

  “Before Bomb Day it used to happen all the time, remember? Remember how the real world used to be?” His tone was sharp.

  Hers wasn’t. She was careful: a cultured bull in a china shop relationship. “Yes. But we don’t have the same pressures we used to have. I think a good deal of those murders were economic. The—“

  He swiveled, put his feet on the floor. His angry words came out as if shot from a cannon. “What kneejerk liberal shit!”

  The bed bounced. He turned to see her sitting ramrod straight, her small breasts still jiggling. “Don’t patronize me!”

  The tears in her eyes startled him. “Hattie? What’s the—“

  “Jesus God! I don’t know why the Torku bothered with us. Why didn’t they save innocent people? There must have been lots of innocents to choose from—folks in Norway or Spain or Poland.”

  “Maybe they did. Maybe . . .”

  “Don’t you get it yet? There is no one left out there. Reagan dropped the bomb. He dropped the damned bomb, Wittie. You thought Mondale and Carter were pussies. Well, was nuclear war macho enough, DeWitt?”

  A vein in his neck throbbed. “Goddamn it. This city council thing’s gone to your head. Why do you always bring politics into everything? You’re not running for reelection. Besides, the Russians attacked us.”

  “How could they? Chernenko was dying. Who was left to push the button? Reagan figured he’d catch the Soviets with their pants down.”

  Crises magnetized beliefs; they created polarities. If Pastor Jimmy divided the world into sinners and believers, Hattie divided it into those who had voted Republican and those who had not. Still, what she said made uncomfortable sense. The responsibility for the war was so compelling a question, in fact, that DeWitt refused to think about it.

  “Why are you getting upset? You should like the Torku. Big Brother dole. A chicken in every pot.”

  “God! I hate when you do this.” She floundered among the sea of covers, raising whitecaps of sheet and waves of comforter.

  “Do what? What am doing?”

  “Making me angry. Evading the question by starting an argument.”

  “I didn’t start this.” DeWitt lurched to his feet and began furiously pulling on his clothes. Hattie was standing, facing him, stark naked. She was thinner than Janet. And older. At the fold beneath her stomach was a line of tired, sagging skin. Her pelvic bones poked at her hips. She was sad and pensive suddenly, a homely orphan watching a prospective set of parents leave the shelter without her.

  “It must be time to go, right? That’s why you’re pushing me away.”

  “Don’t exaggerate, Hattie, I—“

  “Fighting with me makes it easy for you to go home to Janet.”

  Tottering on one leg, DeWitt tried to pull on his boot. His foot stuck halfway in. “We set up rules two years ago, remember? My home life is none of your business.”

  “What do you want to talk about?” She grabbed him by the arm, tried to force him to look at her. He steadied himself on her dresser and averted his eyes. “The murder has changed everything, don’t you see that? God. If Bo wasn’t around, you’d go on doing what you always do, wouldn’t you. You’d drive around drinking coffee and writing up what the Torku n
eed to get done. You’re Seresen’s gofer!”

  DeWitt wrenched from her grip and lumbered off, buttoning his shirt. His left boot hit the floor with a solid tap; his right boot, still only halfway on, made a double clunk. He bent and, grasping the sides of the boot, jerked upward. The sudden, clumsy move toppled him, and he landed on the throw rug, a pile of embarrassed fury.

  Hattie’s lips twitched. She snickered.

  “Shut up! Just shut the hell up! You’re not my goddamned wife!” DeWitt tugged on the boot and rose.

  A whispered, “I love you.”

  He ducked as though the whisper had been a hard object thrown at him.

  “I can’t help it, Wittie. I love you.”

  He couldn’t give her the reply she wanted, and he couldn’t help that, either. He squeezed his eyes shut. Hattie was a strong woman, a self-reliant woman. DeWitt was her only vice. “Don’t make this more than it is. It’s not even an affair, it’s a goddamned friendship. Besides, Hattie, if you really loved me, you wouldn’t keep pushing me away. Jesus. I don’t know why I come back.”

  “You like Torku handshake.”

  He laughed. When he opened his eyes, he was surprised to see she was crying.

  Chapter Five

  PASTOR JIMMY SCHOEN could smell sin. He smelled it through his telescope when he caught sight of the adulterer leading his mare into Hattie Nichols’s barn. He could smell it lingering like sulphurous aftershave on the godless doctor. He could smell it in the pharmacy, too. Sin stank of brimstone and burning insulation.

  He could smell it around the condom rack and on the black teenager who was surreptitiously studying the stock. And when Purdy Phifer came in, the stench of homosexuality nearly overpowered him.

  “Hey, pastor!” Purdy called.

  Schoen riveted his gaze to the shelves of analgesics. Picking out the store brand of aspirin, he walked to the rear counter.

  “Hey!”

  Turning down an aisle, Schoen left the little man between the cold remedies and the laxatives. Reaching the back counter, he rang for the pharmacist. When no one came to check him out, he dug into his pocket and got a folded Bible verse.