“I’ll go with you,” Dupree said.
She didn’t bother objecting and they walked down Sprague together, the flashing lights at their backs, past rubberneckers who stood at the police tape like people waiting in line for tickets. Dupree and Caroline walked next to each other without saying anything until Caroline glanced over.
“Are you gonna tell Debbie that we worked together on this?”
He didn’t answer right away. Six years earlier it probably had saved Dupree’s marriage, the promise that he would no longer work with young Caroline. They spent only that one night together, hadn’t even made love, but Dupree convinced himself that it would be best to tell Debbie straight out. And so he had. That continued to be his only betrayal of his wife, and his deepest temptation, the night Caroline shot the drunk wife beater—after the mess at the crime scene, talking quietly in her apartment, her shaking, Dupree holding and then kissing her, the two of them tossing and rolling and then stopping suddenly, but holding each other tightly so that they couldn’t go any further, couldn’t undress anymore, until finally they just fell asleep. Afterward, when they had pulled apart and he’d driven around for a couple of hours, Dupree marched into his own house and told Debbie flat out, and the next day announced to Caroline that he was requesting a transfer out of patrol. He told her that he was happy with his wife, that it wasn’t his Debbie he didn’t like, but his life.
On East Sprague, the neon lent a crass, peripheral glow to his memories. “I don’t talk to Debbie much anymore,” he said.
“Don’t be like that, Alan,” Caroline said quietly.
“I’m trying,” he said. “But…I’m losing something.”
“You’re fine,” Caroline said. “You’ve always been fine.” She kept walking until they reached a dark, smoky bar with a sign that simply said “Drinks.” Dupree followed, and it took a minute for his bleary eyes to adjust. A dingy blue carpet ran the length of the floor and a foot up the walls. Four stools leaned against a chipped bar, which was manned by a sickly bartender wearing a back brace. Three round wobbly cocktail tables and a pool table with torn felt—the whole bar was home to just two broken old guys and a drunk woman whose filthy jeans gaped where her zipper was broken.
The bartender recognized them as cops and began hovering around his drunk customers. The bar must’ve been cited for overserving recently, the way the bartender suddenly nurtured these people who likely hadn’t shared a sober day in a year.
“Looks like last call,” the bartender said, smiling to Caroline. “Finish ’em up, guys. Bill…time to go.”
Dupree sat at the bar next to Caroline, who was standing and who reached in her pocket for Lenny Ryan’s mug shot. She waited patiently as the bartender moved down the row away from her, toward his paying customers at the other end of the bar. He stood over one of the old guys, who held his beer close to his chest, between his two hands. The bartender was overly polite, smiling back at Caroline and then speaking gently to the old man. “Hurry up, please. It’s time.” The old man looked up at the bartender. “Bill,” the bartender said quietly, and Bill drained his beer and gingerly offered it to the bartender, who took it and moved down the row to the woman and the other man. “May, are you ready? Lou?” He held out his hands for their beer glasses. “Hurry up, please. It’s time.” He had gotten all three glasses now, but none of the old people budged and the bartender could apparently think of nothing else to do, so he put the glasses in the sink and turned to face Caroline.
“I’m looking for a young white hooker who might go by the name Jacqueline. I don’t know her real name.”
“What’s she look like?”
“Twenty. Mousy brown hair. Short. Eyebrow ring. Buggy eyes. Thin, kind of sickly.”
He smiled. “That’s half the girls out there.” He gestured down the street. “That ain’t the girl they found…”
“No,” Caroline said. She slid the photograph across the bar. “How about this guy? Only with shorter hair. You seen him?”
The bartender shook his head. “Boy, I don’t think so.”
“Look again,” she said. “I want you to be sure.”
He lifted the picture and stared hard at it. “No. I’ve never seen him.”
“Is there a pimp or a dealer who runs a lot of girls around here?”
“There are a couple of guys. Kids, mostly. Whoever has the dope.”
“What about names?”
“There’s a guy named Michael.”
“At last!” Caroline turned to Dupree. “The break we’ve been looking for!”
Even the bartender laughed. “I’m sorry. I don’t know his last name. I just seen him in here a couple of times. It’s Michael…something.”
“And where does Michael something live?”
“No idea. I just seen him around, you know? Guys come in, ask about women or dope, and people, they say, ‘Talk to Michael.’ You know, something like that.”
“Who says that?”
“Hmm?”
“You said people say to talk to Michael. So what people?”
“I don’t know—guys.”
She held up the picture of Ryan again. “This guy?”
The bartender laughed again. “I told you, I don’t know that guy.”
Caroline smiled back and Dupree marveled at the way she charmed people. “Just testing you.”
“I’m not saying that guy never came in here. We get guys all the time coming in, waiting for whores to pass by on the street. I don’t pay too much attention.”
“I’ll make you a deal. You start paying attention and maybe I won’t talk to the liquor control board about you serving these people into a coma, okay?”
The bartender nodded.
Dupree looked away from the bartender and his eyes fell on Caroline’s waist, which was at eye level at the bar next to him. All of her weight was on one foot, her arms spread on the bar, this perfect picture of balance. It was strangely erotic, watching her interview this bartender—one of the most mundane functions of their job. Dupree reached out with his hand and held it over her waist and her hip, inches away from where her shirt was tucked into the elastic band of her sweatpants. But he didn’t touch her. When he looked up the bartender was eyeing him strangely, and Dupree let his hand fall.
Caroline turned to face him then and he felt himself blushing. “Can you think of anything else I should ask this guy, Sergeant Dupree?”
He shook his head no.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“Okay,” she said. She gave the bartender her business card and gave him one more look at the photograph of Ryan. “If you see this guy around, or if Michael comes in or if you see a young woman like I described, you call me. Deal?”
“Yeah, sure.” The bartender shrugged and chewed his thumbnail and looked back at Dupree, as if he knew what the detective had been thinking and sympathized with him.
“Hey, can I get a beer?” Dupree surprised himself by asking.
“Yeah,” the bartender said. “You bet.” He raised his eyebrows at Caroline, but she shook her head and sat on the bar stool next to Dupree.
“You sure you’re all right?” she asked.
“Just thirsty.”
She looked outside and then back at Dupree. “You think it’s a good idea to drink before you go out there and investigate a homicide?”
“I can’t imagine a better time.” When the glass arrived he held it up and drained the first half. He tried to sound casual. “So, are you goin’ home?”
“I think I’ll try to find this girl Jacqueline, at least see if I can figure out her real name. I mean, if I’m not in the way.”
He felt a surge of relief and an attraction to her that was something like nostalgia. “No,” he said. “You’re not in the way.” Holding her that night six years earlier, Dupree had told her about his theory that life ought to include mulligans, just like in golf. So that you could make one mistake a round that doesn’t cost you, tha
t doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s not that I want to leave my wife, he’d said that night. I just want a mulligan.
Dupree finished his beer and they stood. Caroline walked out and Dupree began to follow, but first he turned to the other end of the bar, where the old drunks were waiting for the cops to leave so the bartender could continue overserving them. He wanted to ask them if their lives slipped away or if there was a moment of epiphany, like someone throwing a switch and bang, you realize that the best life has to offer is a bottle of fortified wine. The old people looked nervously at him and Dupree bowed and dropped a ten-dollar bill on the bar.
“This one’s on me,” he said. And he was happy that he remembered their names. “G’night, Bill. G’night, Lou. G’night, May.”
20
The thin, exhausted girl, who had decided to change her name that very morning, walked slowly down Sprague, her eyes on the flashing police lights six blocks ahead. Jacqueline. It sounded older. Sophisticated. It didn’t sound like someone who would get all caught up in street shit, that’s for sure. Jacqueline would be above all that. She walked barefoot down the sidewalk, carrying her shoes by their straps, slowing with each step closer to the police lights. God, not another one. She looked back toward downtown, thinking maybe she should take a cab to meet Michael and Risa at the motel where they were waiting for her, probably fucking right now (he was such an asshole) or else smoking Michael’s rock or the weed that Risa had gotten for them. Even by cab, she wasn’t gonna make it back in time for the dope.
Now five blocks away, Jacqueline thought about that lady cop who had bought her lunch today, who asked all those bizarre questions about bad dates. Fuckin’ freaks, some of these guys. There was one guy who tripped her out only a week ago. He felt her up in the Lamplight, a bar downtown where she worked sometimes. Jacqueline had stared at the guy the whole time, even in the motel room that he rented, and it wasn’t until they were done and he was paying her, his hands shaking a little, that she recognized him.
“Hey,” she said, “you teach…biology, right? At Ridgeview Junior High.”
The guy didn’t say a thing.
“Rae-Lynn, remember? I had you for eighth grade.”
His stare made her feel strange, as if she wasn’t even there.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think you’d remember me. I only went there two months.” She shrugged—no big deal—even though it was. “So, you still teaching there?”
Still, the guy didn’t speak.
“Hey, I ain’t gonna tell anyone, if…”
He just stared at her, with the weirdest look on his face, like he’d done something bad to her, but shoot, compared to some of these sick fucks…It wasn’t like with Michael or anything, where she wanted to wake up with him, where she lost herself and felt safe. But it was fifty bucks and it didn’t hurt. She’d wanted to say something to make the guy feel better, but what was there to say?
So she just grabbed her things and left.
That lady cop had asked about guys who made her feel funny, well, maybe she should’ve mentioned the teacher. He didn’t scare her, but she had asked which guys gave her the creeps. And that guy certainly did. She reached in the pocket of her jeans and found the card. Detective Caroline Mabry of the Special Investigations Unit. She turned it over, then put it back in her jeans.
Jacqueline leaned against the bus bench. She didn’t want to walk toward the police lights. The lady cop might be there and might run her with questions again. And this time they might see that she had warrants out on her under her real name. Fuck that.
Behind her was the high chain-link fence of Landers’ Cove, where they sold boats and trailers. For a while, last fall and winter, it had been the place to take dates, in the cabins of the big boats. Back when Burn was pimping her, before she hooked up with Michael, a lot of girls ran dates through the boat place, because it was cheaper than getting a hotel. But the owner of the boat place had gotten tired of hosing it down and finding rubbers everywhere and so they’d put up a better fence and brought in all-night security guards. It was too bad. She liked the big, luxurious boats.
Jacqueline leaned against the fence and watched the old security guard, Paul something. He walked around the lot with his flashlight. He had gray hair and sunken-in shoulders and walked with a limp, but the guy wasn’t so bad-looking, for a grandfather. She thought it was cool watching a guy who didn’t know she was watching him.
Paul the security guard moved his lips, singing to himself as he walked around aimlessly. He stopped in front of a huge yacht and ran his hand over the hull.
“So you gonna let me in there tonight, Paul?”
Startled, he turned and shined the light on her and smiled. “Hey there, girlie.” He called all the hookers “girlie.” “You thinkin’ of buyin’ a boat?”
“That depends. What would you recommend?”
He turned his bony shoulders back to the yacht he’d been touching. “Can’t go wrong with a beauty like this. Only has one on-board TV, though.”
“Yeah, that sucks. How many I need?”
“That depends,” he said. “You planning to have a crew?”
“Nah. No men allowed on my boat.”
He looked back at the boat. “I used to have a boat. I ever tell you that?”
He told her that every time they spoke, but she said no.
“Nothing like these Cadillacs.” He walked slowly over to the fence. “Just a little fishing boat. Trolling motor and captain’s chair. That was the first time I retired.”
“What happened?”
“To the boat? Or the retirement?”
“I don’t know. Both.”
“Sold the boat. Retirement didn’t take after my wife died.” He smiled to her. “So my son got me into the glamorous world of all-night security. And here I am.”
“How old are you, anyways?”
“Sixty-eight. But I have the body of a sixty-seven-year-old.” He had reached the fence now and he shined the light on her arms, no doubt looking for tracks. “You doin’ okay, girlie? Bein’ careful? Stayin’ off my boats?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m good.” She nodded. “What time is it, Paul?”
“Little after three. You callin’ it quits?”
“Yeah. My boyfriend’s got a room down the way.”
“You want me to call you a cab?”
“Nah,” she said. “Thanks, though.”
He nodded up the street. “Do you know; did they find another girlie up there?”
Jacqueline nodded.
The old man chewed on his lip. “You oughta quit.”
“Two more weeks,” she said, her standard answer when anyone advised her to quit. Probation officers, drug counselors, the lady who handed out condoms at the clinic—she was always two weeks from quitting.
“You were gone for a few days there,” he said.
She shrugged one shoulder. “A guy hired me to dance at the state line and I got out there and it’s just him and some of his buddies and he says they gotta audition me, ’cause there’s so many girls wanna dance at this new club.”
“What’d you tell ’em?”
“Thirty bucks a blow, fifty for the show. Fucker don’t get no free date, even if he owns a club.” She smiled. “’Course, if a high roller like yourself wanted a freebie…”
Paul shook his head. “I pretty much avoid sex with beautiful young women…messes with a man’s expectations, you know?”
She blushed when he called her beautiful. She liked flirting with old harmless guys like this. It reminded her of the movies.
“Besides,” he said, “you’re assuming I’d give you a freebie.” He shined the flashlight on himself. “You think this kind of seasoning comes cheap?”
“You’re funny,” she said. She pushed herself off the fence. “Well. I suppose…”
Paul reached up and hooked his fingers in the fence. “Be careful.”
“Thanks.” She smiled again, reached up and brushed his fingers in the chain-link fence with
her own, and turned to leave. She walked away from the boat dealership and paused at the street. There was a pickup truck waiting for her at the end of the block, and a man staring out from it, smiling as she approached.
21
They sat in Dupree’s car, in front of Caroline’s house. It was funny. Caroline spent the beginning of the night trying to convince men that she wanted to have sex with them in their cars, and now here she was at three in the morning, sitting in a car with a man she wanted to have sex with.
“It’s a bad idea,” she said.
“It is?” They’d been talking about her being added to the serial killer task force, an idea Dupree had floated at the scene because of her rapport with the hookers and her run-ins with Lenny Ryan. But she hadn’t given him an answer and so he’d followed her home and they sat in his car outside her house, discussing it. “You don’t want to work on the case?” he asked.
She smiled at him. “No. I don’t think we should sleep together.”
“I didn’t…” But he didn’t finish the thought and she could tell that he felt caught, somehow. “I’m not putting you on the task force because I want to sleep with you.”
“But you can’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it. I have too. I just think it’s a bad idea. It’s always been a bad idea.”
He looked away from her and rubbed his smooth head, swallowed, and laughed. “Most good things start out as bad ideas,” he said quietly.
“It’s not that I don’t want to.” She touched the back of his hand. “Maybe it’d be better if it didn’t mean anything. If we were just horny.”
“Oh, I can be horny.”
“Yeah, but we can’t be just horny. Not with each other.”
He opened his mouth to object, but again, he couldn’t. “I feel like I’m being blamed for something I never even brought up.”
“I’m not blaming you. Just look at us. I have a relationship with a twelve-year-old who hasn’t uttered an intelligible sound in six months. And I like it that way because it means I don’t have to talk about the fact that I don’t want to live with him anymore.”