“Take it. Leave the Department.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Why are you telling me this? I don’t need to hear these things anymore.”
“I’m astonished you said that. I’ve never taken money from anybody.”
“I can’t discuss this now.” She sounded tired. “I know you’ll never take money from anybody.”
“So what do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t want to talk about anything. It’s the middle of the night. I feel like Bert being tormented by Ernie in Sesame Street. What I really want is to go to sleep.”
“How’s Lucy?”
Asking about Lucy, knowing that Ellen would have to answer — this was another of my unfair moves, and she sighed, reluctant commitment to the conversation’s continuance. “She was upset when you brought her back. She ran straight to her room. Something about Ted and a gun? I couldn’t get to the bottom of it. I was going to ask you tomorrow.”
“It wasn’t anything. Ted was being a fool. He was drunk. He produced this gun out of somewhere and started threatening a girl. I sent Lucy to the car.”
“What happened then?”
“Ted put the gun down.”
She was silent for a moment. “You’re not telling me everything.”
Basically, Ellen always knew the score. She was the measure of my soul, tough to fool. I changed the subject, saying, “There was a murder today.”
“How many times do you think I’ve heard that? Or, ‘Ellen, I was at a crime scene.’ Or, ‘Ellen, Drew Diamond went off like a loose cannon again.’ Or, ‘Ellen, there’s been a triple down in the southland and they need an extra guy.’ You soak it up. You’re a sponge. This job hasn’t just taken you over. You’re infected by it.”
I was always almost glad when I goaded her to anger; it made me feel less guilty. “Let it all out, Ellen. Tell me what a shit I am.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line while I walked with my glass to the window and pressed my forehead against the coolness of the pane. Outside, the storm was loud as ever, so violent it spread a kind of silence around itself. I was surprised when a smudge of light loomed up out of it, a glow, shapeless at first, but soon defining itself as a triangle, a sail, I realized, getting bigger and brighter as the boat beneath it tacked toward the marina. I wondered who’d be out sailing on a night like this.
An invisible car sluiced and swished on Admiralty Way below. She’d gathered herself. She said, “This is an amazing thing you’re doing for me, Billy, and I really appreciate it. I’m grateful, truly. I need air. I need to get out of this city so bad. It’s a fresh start for me.”
“I’m not so sure. I think now I want to stand in the way. I want to make myself as huge an obstruction as possible.”
“No, you don’t. Try and get some sleep, Billy, OK? Night.”
I’d been a rookie when we met. She was younger than I but she’d already had two years on the job by the time I joined the Department, having been detained by the bookish education of which she was now in pursuit — hence Seattle, where she’d been offered a teaching job while completing her doctorate in criminology. At Marty McFly’s the first time, I asked if she liked Wittgenstein, and she said she couldn’t stand that German beer. She had red hair and clear green eyes, the best eyes and the hardest head in all of LA County; she was tall, with big bones; she had a wonderful, mysterious face. Women adored her, men feared her, and for the same reason — she fascinated them. In those days she usually knew what I’d do before I did it. Nothing much had changed. She was a giggler. She had a blazing honesty that could make other people uncomfortable. She looked at me, her green eyes smoldered, and though she laughed at herself, knowing what she was doing, I still went up in flames, all in all a beautiful, if slightly giddy and drunken, beginning. She was someone I could talk to right from the first moment. A part of me flew across the room and became hers as soon as I saw her. Three nights later we were together on a routine call, domestic violence, in an apartment building in what wasn’t even one of the worst sections of Oakwood. A guy came sauntering down the steps, smiling, cool as you like. It all happened so fast. I didn’t even see him reach behind his back, and suddenly there was a six-inch blade in his hand. I went for my gun, but the holster was stiff and new — too slow; the guy was going to stab me. Then Ellen came up on my side, shot him in the shoulder, and the knife flew away as if in an unseen hand. She’d been my training officer that night, and the whole caper was over in a flash, five, maybe six seconds.
Her father was a Woodland Hills building contractor, and her mother ran a little diner on Ventura Boulevard. I wasn’t the sort of man they expected her to fall for. Back then I was driven, edgy, and half foreign to boot, while I in turn regarded them as a pair of hayseeds, first opinions that failed to modify themselves down the years during which Lucy was born, started to grow, and both our careers prospered.
Ellen made detective and worked Internal Affairs, a route I was to follow, and then she helped start up one of the antidrug programs for schools, which turned out great, a big success. She only went back into uniform when we separated, and it’s my belief that otherwise she’d never have done that. A sergeant by then, she was leading a team in pursuit of a suspect when she fell through the skylight on an abandoned sweatshop on Olympic. The suspect, naked for some reason nobody ever explained, streaked with blood, came at her, capping off rounds like crazy. Hit, flat out on a bed of broken glass, she shot and killed him. Afterward, the surgeons found a bullet in her hip and a nine-inch shard of glass puncturing her kidney through to her spine. She was paralyzed from the waist down.
Sipping at my whiskey, slowly now, I listened. A door banged and a man said, What the fuck. One of my neighbors, drunk, most likely the guy at the end of the corridor who tended bar in Santa Monica. I thought of the tape in my pocket, the conversation with Ricky Lee now snug and safe at my hip, and wondered, idly, if there was some way I could make Ellen take the money. I knew she’d never go for it; besides, it really wasn’t an option. I’d do my best to make sure that the system did work, keep myself aloof, above that sort of damage. I’d managed it thus far. My peers regarded me as a straight arrow that would never plummet. I was the guy Internal Affairs came to if there was a problem, and they trusted nobody; they were mean, nasty people.
Ripping open the cassette, grabbing a pair of scissors, I sliced the tape into strips that immediately curled up into little springs. I opened the window and threw out the whole bunch. One of them stuck, briefly clinging, a smudge on the glass; then it too was gone, whipped away into the storm’s heavy rumble.
NEXT DAY I got up early, but Cataresco was already at the precinct house ahead of me. It was damp and cold, still raining, and I felt niggly, because I’d thought I’d better dress for court and my best suit was an expensive thin wool summer thing, but I’d put it on anyway and my skin itched against a white shirt with too much starch from the cleaner. I didn’t feel right. Cataresco’s quick glance took in the suit and I said, “What?”
She said, “Nothing. I wonder why you’re in such a lousy mood this morning.”
“Yeah, I wonder.”
In front of her at one of the long tables she had the opened murder book of Mario Angel Martinez, a Latino gangster who’d made the mistake of presuming to poach on the drug turf of Ricky Lee Richards. We’d found him about two weeks before, sitting up straight in a stolen Ford. He’d been shot in the back of the head three times with a 9 mm and was wearing his face like a bib.
Cataresco, different when she was by herself, could be shy and awkward; she was sure she still sometimes