Page 36

THIRTY-FIVE

He sighs deeply, rattling his entire body and ending with something like a moan. “I didn’t retire. Not on purpose anyway. I was kicked off the force.”

“No! Ray?” Janice puts a hand to her chest.

“There was a guy we’d been looking for. He was real bad. Used to send little kids out as drug runners for him. Two of them even died. This guy wasn’t an idiot like some of them though. He had a few brain cells on him. I had been trying to pin him for years, but he never did anything risky enough for me to catch him. We didn’t want to bring him in on something small. We needed him to fuck up big so we could put him away. It’s harder to get these guys than you’d think. You have to see them moving massive quantities of the stuff, and even then. But he never touched it himself. He was too smart for that.”

“What happened?” Alex says.

“Well, we watched him. We were patient. It took, like, a year, but finally we got a wire on him. We got word from this kid that we befriended that a shipment was coming in. We were ready to move in on him. We got him, I said to my partner the night before. I was so confident that we were going to be able to do the right thing then. We were so close.”

He picks up his glass and tilts it toward the bar, nodding to the bartender for another. When he gets his full glass back, his hand is shaking so hard, whiskey sloshes over the edge as he draws it toward himself.

“The plan was for Armond to go in the front, and I would circle around to the back of the house and wait for his text. It was dark out already when we got there, which was great. I crept around back to this dilapidated screened-in porch. All the blinds were drawn in the house, but I could see through the window. I eased up to the door. I could see the guy in there. Huge guy. Face like a fighter. Broken nose. He was talking to his friends. Armond’s text came through on my phone. It just said go . Then it was like slow motion. I saw him go in through the front door.” He shivers and throws back the whiskey.

“When I heard the first shots, I had, like, PTSD or something. I had a panic attack. I am telling my body to go but it won’t. And he is in there and I can see him. He is looking for me through the window, but he can’t see me. I couldn’t move. I see this look on his face right before they got him. He was afraid, sure, but beyond that. It was just pure disappointed.”

“Oh, Ray, you didn’t want it to happen,” Janice said.

But Raymond shakes his head violently. “It doesn’t matter. I basically killed my own partner. I wasn’t brave enough. I fucked up. I ended his life, ruined his family in one stupid moment. Do you know how many times I’ve replayed it all in my head, trying to go back there to make myself move?” He grips the shot glass.

“You can’t take that all on,” Alex insists. “Not for your whole life, Ray.” She puts a hand on his arm. It feels thin and knobby beneath the jacket.

“I can. I will. It’s the least I can do.” Raymond jerks his shoulder away from her. He’s not angry with Alex, she knows that. He’s mad at himself, frustrated with the utter impossibility of taking back a wrong. It’s hard to live with regret. Alex understands the way you can relive something that happened to you, turning it over and over, polishing it like rock until its edges lose their definition and you can no longer even remember it clearly. “Doesn’t matter if I meant to or not,” Raymond continues, his voice quiet. “All that matters is that he died and that I wasn’t brave enough or smart enough to help him.”

He gets up from his stool abruptly. “Ray!” Alex calls as he heads for the door.

Janice’s hand lands on her shoulder. “He’ll be okay, Alex. You gotta just let him go walk it off. Trust me. Guys like that, they weren’t trained to talk about their feelings.”

They watch the shape of him grow faint against the glass as he takes the stairs. Through the glow of the neon sign his brown shoes drag sadly past the window and disappear into the night.

“I had no idea that happened, did you?” Alex asks, rattled.

Janice shakes her head. “There are a lot of lonely people who come to the diner, but there was something about Ray that always felt different. No friends, no family he ever talked about. I always thought he was hiding something.”

“But he never mentioned Armond before?”

“No, never. But that isn’t a surprise. Ray and I didn’t used to talk much,” Janice says.

“Oh really? For some reason I thought you two were old friends.”

“Not at all. He sat there at the counter for years before we said more than a few words to one another.”

“What changed?”

Janice sips from her glass. “Well, you showed up.”

The admission startles Alex. She tries to think back on her earliest days in the city, but all she can remember is the way things are now. The two of them, the pillars, and herself as the interloper. She has never thought of herself as someone who brings people together.

“It must be so hard for him—being so proud of being a detective was his whole life, and then something so tragic happens and ends it all just like that.”

“Think of his partner’s poor family.” Janice whistles. “How could you forgive something like that? He just let him die.”

They sit silently, Raymond’s admission heavy on them. Part of Alex feels guilty about how the night progressed. She shouldn’t have gone down this path at all, shouldn’t have brought them into her work drama. She looks down into her whiskey, her stomach turning.

Janice claps her hands loudly, jolting Alex from her spiral. “Oh, I almost forgot! I got some good intel in the bar. From the guy playing piano.”

Alex leans in. “You did? Wait, what? What did he say?”

“He remembered Howard because he dropped a fifty-dollar bill into his tip jar and when he looked up, he recognized him as a famous newspaper editor.”

“He’s hard to miss,” Alex agrees. “Was he with anyone?”

“Yes, he said there was a woman with him, sixtysomething. Graying hair. And, get this, she was wearing a white men’s shirt, rolled up at the sleeves. He said they were arguing about something.”

“Francis,” Alex says, her stomach sinking. “Did he hear what they were talking about? Did he say anything else?”

“Only that she left first, looking upset,” Janice says.

“Men.” They look down into their drinks, commiserating over this statement.

“You two have a good night,” the bartender calls out as they stand to leave. It reminds Alex that danger is not always to be found in the places that seem most predisposed to it, that it often can be found in the places you least expect it.

When she gets home, Alex’s apartment is dark and still. She locks all three locks and taps them with her finger just to be sure. She slides off her sandals and leaves them next to the door. The heat from the day still radiates off the hardwood floor as she steps across the tiny apartment and falls into her bed.

She is exhausted but knows she won’t be able to sleep, not yet. Her mind is whirring with activity. She is thinking about Raymond and the heartbroken woman working at the hotel who lost her husband. Her mind travels through the byzantine maze of the hotel to the Nest. Why would Francis have met Howard there when they could just as easily have met at the office? Unless she wanted to be somewhere else? To confront him on neutral ground? Or perhaps he had been the one to ask her there. It was on his calendar after all. Maybe he wanted to tell her to leave him alone. Alex knows she must be missing something else, that one piece that would make the entire picture of what happened come clear.

She looks around at the little collection of rooms she’s called home for so many years. She’s always meant to make it cozier. To get a bedframe, for Christ’s sake. But she doesn’t have so much as a picture on the wall. She came close a few times, walking into furniture stores and trying things out. Imagining filling her space with objects and plants and comfort; but at the last minute something always stopped her, and she’d return to her flimsy desk and box spring on the floor. It’s sad, she thinks. She never meant for things to be like this. She rolls over and looks at her phone.

Tom has texted. She opens her phone quickly, holding her breath as she reads it.

Hi Alex, how’s your column going this week? I was hoping we could get dinner again soon.

She starts to type a message in reply—then stops, afraid she’ll regret it in the morning. Instead, she pulls the sheet up over her, her head buzzing with whiskey and images of Francis Keen fleeing the Nest.