The waiters were back at work already with their trays. Tears rolling down his cheeks, his pale brown myopic eyes moist and sad, Ted said, “But it’s Holly I’m in love with. I love you, Holly. I mean it, babe, I do.”
“Suzie’s left you and you’re devastated but it’s Holly you really love? This sounds a little strange to me.”
“Oh, man!” he said. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s Van Gogh! It’s Renoir painting with the brush between his teeth because the arthritis in his fingers has got so bad!”
Shrugging, waving his hands, eyes crazily ablaze, Ted was talking all of a sudden like a picture he’d taken down from the wall. He was an actor who believed in very little, especially himself, and when he felt passion he needed to convey it with heartfelt magic. “It’s Mozart ripping out the last chords of the Jupiter Symphony when he’s freezing to death in Vienna!”
“I’ve eaten strudel, but I have to disappoint you — I’ve never been to Vienna.”
“We’ve got to walk toward the light, Billy. What else is there?”
My exhausted eyes drooped. I listened while Holly, in tears herself now, stretched up on those enormous heels and touched his face, telling him, “Shush, shush.” This was what the whole show had been, a lovers’ spat, a childish cry for attention with a firearm capable of decapitation or cutting a man in half. On the way out to join Lucy, I shook the bullets from the chamber into my pocket and, having dumped the gun in the trash, turned to say, like the proper English copper I wasn’t, “Evening, all.”
Schopenhauer offers metaphysical consolation to the man driven by confused or puzzled will. He offers the solace of a heartfelt and intense longing for death, for total unconsciousness, for complete nonbeing and the vanishing of dreams. He was German: what can I tell you?
I had done more than duty required, knowing that Ted was more likely not to pull the trigger. He wasn’t that kind of a nutcase. All the same, he’d been drunk, and those were real bullets. The unfunny thing was that part of me had itched for him to go ahead, had longed for that final flash. It wasn’t, in those days, an unusual feeling. Sometimes I’d sit alone in my apartment or in a restaurant, and hours went by while the devils of guilt and loss of self-esteem perched on my shoulder, whispering country-and-Western songs and thoughts of self-removal. Suicide would be like walking into a room bathed in cold blue moonlight. The mess and hullaballoo would be over, a prospect by which I was tempted every day, but then I’d whip myself up again into action, to work, to eat, catching, only while with Lucy or sometimes with Ellen, blurred glimpses of a former happiness. I’m not saying that any of these were unique or unusual feelings, only that they were too powerful to live with for long. I moved between sweet but shapeless hope, the perhaps foolish faith that life could be better, and moods of oceanic desolation. There were, if you like, two Billy McGraths. The suffering Billy was a ship packed with dynamite waiting to go up and therefore down, while the worldly Billy — witty and shrewd, smart and sometimes even wise, capable of footing it neatly on the dance floor of homicide — hoped that the passion and frenzy of work might make everything better, but no longer quite believed that it would.
I walked to the car wondering how it was that, though I loved my daughter more than anything in the world, I still couldn’t make myself care whether I lived or died.
THE INTERVIEW ROOM was small, a dispiriting box without windows. There was a battered steel desk with broken-backed swivel chairs on either side. The walls were pale brown, with no decoration, and the floor, which had once been painted the same color, was now scuffed and scratched. In this room a sixteen-year-old had confessed to me how she’d shot her father. Drunk, he’d made the mistake of falling asleep in front of the TV, having sodomized her the previous night. I’d shown a mother photographs of her homosexual son, beaten to death with a frying pan; his body wasn’t found until five days later, by which time maggots had got to his face, and his scrotal sack was swollen the size of a football. Here I’d told a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty people about the death of a loved one. As a situation it was no longer quite real for me but one of those moments when I felt the awful unreality of the real.
I glanced at the snapshot I’d picked up in Mae Richards’s house. Technically, this was a no-no, against all the rules that said never to monkey with a crime scene; legally, it was a misdemeanor. I wasn’t even sure what had made me take it. In the picture Ricky Lee had a full, soft, grinning face. He’d probably been about sixteen at the time. Thinking about the tennis racquet, I remembered reading somewhere that he’d been a star athlete at Venice High.
My own mother had died in a hospital ward in the north of England, the room so hot the paint had blistered on the walls, her shivering body eaten so thin it scarcely left an impression on the mattress. She’d died sorry to miss the performance of The Mikado that was coming up in next year’s amateur theatricals. She’d been afraid, though I was the one who’d gripped her hand tight: don’t go.
Maybe there’s no such thing as an easy death. My mother’s had been slow, a terrible disintegration of the sort we all fear, though most people’s special modern dread is reserved for sudden death, by which we don’t mean unlingering death — that would be OK — but violent death, in the street, or on the freeway, a quickening of fear and then . . . what? Extinction? For a few seconds, from out of nowhere, at a stupid art gallery party, I’d heard the engine turning. I didn’t feel shaky. I felt like I’d been watching TV too long. My nerves were lasered.
A uniformed patrolman brought in Ricky Lee with his hands cuffed behind him. Tall, skinny, aloof, his face much gaunter now, Ricky Lee wore a black suit and a trim goatee beard. His dark eyes popped out and his dark hair, falling thick on either side of a middle part, was cut off at the top of the ear — a warrior’s helmet of dreadlocks. Thick blood oozed around his nose and mouth, staining the brilliance of his teeth. I wondered if Mae Richards had thought of him as she died. His eyes met mine without greeting or any noticeable change of expression. He glanced down at the floor, and when he raised his head he let his eyes hit me this time with a murderous, searing rage. “Where’s my mother?”
The beefy patrolman was a Cuban, a tortilla cowboy who’d once played ball in the minor leagues and carried at his hip not the Department automatic, but a Smith & Wesson special issue six-shooter in a quick-draw holster. I said, “You the guy who made the arrest?”
“Yes, sir,” he said carefully, talking Pentel pencil language, the one they write the reports in and rub out and change later. The Department used more erasers than the entire LA Unified School District. “The suspect rushed at me and my partner, sir, and we were compelled to restrain him.”
“Very good.” I glanced at the name on his badge. “Officer Campes. I’ll take the report now. Thanks. You may leave us.”
When he’d gone I took the report and ripped it in two, then in four, then in eight, and scattered the pieces on the floor. I said to Ricky Lee, “You and I both know this is bullshit. Your lawyer’ll show up any minute and he’ll serve you out of here faster than Archimedes jumping out of the bath.”
“I’m supposed to be impressed?” His voice was neither high nor low.
“No, you’re not supposed to be impressed.” I’d read in a book about a doctor out in the Midwest who healed people with the smell of herbs and flowers. She cured senility with laurel leaves, asthma with geraniums. For high blood pressure, rosemary was best. It was mostly in the people’s minds, of course, and therefore she had to be very careful about the way she presented each of them with their different flower. She had to gain their trust, almost as if she were trying to seduce them. Interviews are like that. You have to hand over the flower, just so — sometimes gently, or the other way. “You’re free to go,” I said. “But before you do you should probably take this with you.” I held out the snapshot