Aphrodite w-3 Page 4
His eyes fluttered open. Squinting directly into the harsh glare through a heat-distorted haze that made it seem as if he was looking into some other dimension, he could see the glittering outline of a sailboat glide away from the dock that jutted from the end of Main Street.
"Hey, Westwood! What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Westwood allowed himself to slowly come out of his self-induced fog and shifted his gaze in the direction of the two cops twenty yards away from him on Main. Cops, he thought, with contempt. They weren't cops. They were children. Summer help. They were lifeguards let loose on un-suspecting motorists who might, heaven help us all, back up several feet to try to catch a precious parking space or, even worse, park in a public space for one second longer than the allotted two hours.
"Westwood! Seriously, man. What the hell's goin' on? There're two cars that've been here more than two hours and you didn't slap a ticket on either one! What's up with that, man?"
Justin Westwood was thirty-seven years old. These summer cops were maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, and they not only thought he was duller than shit, they thought he was a total loser. They wouldn't be handing out parking tickets in a half-assed, middle-class resort town when they were thirty-seven. They would be police chiefs somewhere where there was real action. Or retire early and own a great bar that served fish and chips and had two big-screen TVs for Monday Night Football and March Madness. Or they'd be working in their daddy's business, knowing that, thanks to the time they spent in the EEPD, they could bully with impunity any neighbor who dared complain that their music was too loud and they were drinking too much beer. They wore Keanu Reeves sunglasses and walked around with a swagger and a smirk. They liked nothing better than writing up tickets and lecturing drivers who were making somewhere around fifty times their salary. Although they had holsters-cool, black, shiny leather holsters-they didn't carry guns. They kept cell phones in their holsters, because that would be the single most helpful tool they could carry in case there was ever an emergency.
Which there wasn't.
East End Harbor did not have a lot of emergencies. The occasional case of food poisoning. Plenty of arguments about the level of noise and the amount of garbage generated by the club in the back of the town's public parking lot. Constant and heated council meetings about the difference between a roundabout and a traffic circle. Politicians came to the Hamptons to raise money and they'd sneak into East End Harbor for a photo op, which raised the town's blood pressure. A few months ago the vice-president had come, along with several cabinet members. They'd had to shut down Main Street and it caused a hellacious traffic jam, and several store owners went ballistic over the lost business. But that was the extent of it. There were no real emergencies.
Justin didn't carry a gun either.
He did have one, though, back at the station. And it was at times like this-when they tauntingly called him "Westwood," because he was always looking to avoid confrontation, because he shied away from anything remotely violent and was, let's face it, out of shape and as far from being a Dirty Harry-type cop as they could imagine-that he was glad he didn't have his gun handy. He had not kept up on the latest mandatory prison sentences, but he was fairly sure it would still be a lot of years for shooting his fellow police officers in cold blood.
He took a step toward the two cops-one was named Gary; he didn't have any idea what the other one was called, even though they'd been working together for at least six months-but he was interrupted by the shrill beep of a car horn. Justin turned back toward the honk and saw an old lady, her car stopped in the middle of the street, frantically waving for him to come over. When he reached her, he tried to say "Can I help you?" but she didn't give him the chance.
"There was a truck on my street this morning!" the woman screeched when he was still several feet from her car. There were two cars behind her now. Justin knew the drivers would wait patiently for all of about one minute. Then they'd start honking or sticking their heads out the window to roll their eyes impatiently or ask what the hell was taking so long.
"I'm sorry to hear that," he said as politely as he could.
"I'm in a no-truck zone!" she yelled. "There shouldn't be any trucks in a no-truck zone!"
"What street are you on?" he asked. "If I know where you are, maybe we could-"
"I'm on Harrison Street! And no trucks are supposed to cut through on Harrison Street!"
"You're Mrs. Dbinsky," he said.
"How'd you know that?"
"You call us every day to complain about the trucks on Harrison Street."
"Yeah? Well, a fat lot of good it does! Every day there's another truck!"
"The thing is, Mrs. Dbinsky, even though it's a no-truck zone, that doesn't mean that no trucks are allowed. They can come to make deliveries."
"These trucks weren't making deliveries! They were just driving around, making noise! You know how little my street is? And you know how big those trucks are? The walls are cracking in my house from those goddamn monsters!"
There were six cars behind her now. Any second now, one of them would start getting pissed off and the chain reaction would set in. He started to ask Mrs. Dbinsky if she'd mind pulling over against the curb, but he knew that would set her off again, and he had a feeling there was more on her mind than just trucks today, so instead he said he'd come by her house later this afternoon, how would that be? He'd come by and they'd discuss what he could do about the trucks-
"What you could do and what you're gonna do are two different things!" she said. "You could put up signs, you could give 'em tickets. You could get the damn trucks off my street. You're gonna do absolutely nothin'!"
The first horn honked now. It came from one of the nine cars backed up behind Mrs. Dbinsky. But Justin Westwood wasn't concentrating on the honking. Or Gary and the other idiot-boy cop who were smirking at him, enjoying this whole thing. He wasn't even concentrating on Mrs. Dbinsky. Because from the middle of Main Street, from inside a building somewhere-it sounded like it was near the yoga center-there was a scream. A loud, frightened, and frightening scream.
People were coming out of their stores now, looking around for the source of the noise.
Gary and What's-his-name were running, sprinting toward a small house in the middle of the block.
Westwood was running too. His hand instinctively went to his belt. Even after all these years that instinct hadn't left him, and he was shocked when he realized that. But of course there was no gun there, so he dropped his hand, trying to pretend it hadn't happened, that those instincts were long dead and buried, and just ran.
And he thought: Son of a bitch.
East End Harbor has an emergency. The girl's name was Susanna Morgan and Westwood knew her, of course. Everybody in town knew her. She was bubbly and friendly and curious. She had interviewed him a couple of times, nothing serious; she didn't know anything about his background, hadn't done any probing before they talked. It was just human interest-type stuff, wanting to know the way the local police force worked and thought. Basically, he had told her that the force worked hard and didn't think much, and Jimmy Leggett, his boss, had not been too happy with that quote so that was the end of the interviews.
He'd bumped into Susanna a few times after that. It was hard not to bump into people in East End. There were only so many bars and restaurants. Once he'd seen her at Duffy's. He hadn't pegged her for a Duffy's girl. Not that it was hard-core-nothing was hard-core out here-but it was fairly serious for East End Harbor. Duffy's didn't have any real food, just nuts and pretzels in red straw bowls and sometimes sandwiches that were wrapped in plastic and looked like they came out of a vending machine. They served a lot of beer and straight liquor, didn't keep cranberry juice as part of their stock, and there was a dart-board off to the side, which was about all the atmosphere the place had. It wasn't a pickup place or a place to take anyone you wanted to impress. It was a place to drink and to be lonely, if not alone. So he'd been surprised to see her
there one night. She was with a girlfriend and they drank a couple of beers. He was sitting at the bar when she came in and they nodded at each other. He was still sitting at the bar when she left. She had smiled at him on her way out.
She was twenty-seven years old, he knew.
Well, she'd been twenty-seven years old.
Now she wasn't anything because she was goddamn dead.
The woman who'd found her body was Regina Arnold. She worked with Susanna at the paper and when ten o'clock rolled around and Susanna hadn't shown up for work, everyone got worried. She called Susanna's apartment, got no answer, then called her cell phone and got nothing there, either. She had a spare key-several people had keys, according to Regina; Susanna tended to lock herself out periodically-so she went over because she knew Susanna had called in sick the day before and wanted to make sure she was okay. She wasn't okay. Regina found her sprawled on the floor by her bed. That's when she screamed.
They'd talked to Regina for ten minutes or so, got everything they were going to get out of her, then they told her she could go. Justin couldn't decide if she was so anxious to leave because she was so upset by this experience or if she simply wanted to get back outside and start telling everyone what had happened. She was going to be the center of attention for the next couple of days. She'd be talking about this for the rest of her life. Justin knew that from now on, at every dinner party Regina Arnold went to, she'd find a way to tell all about the time she found her friend's dead body. He wondered how the story would be embellished over time. Would Susanna be still breathing when Regina arrived? Would she have tripped over the body? There'd be something. Something that wasn't true. There always was.
Justin almost had his breath back. Jesus, he'd run only forty, maybe fifty yards, but by the time he got to the second-floor apartment he was actually wheezing and was practically doubled over with cramps. He had to sit down in the living room right after he checked the body. Now the two assholes were coming in from the bedroom, grinning. Justin sucked in a big rush of air, hoping he wouldn't give the two cretins the satisfaction of watching him have a heart attack.
"You ever see a dead body before, Westwood?" the non-Gary asshole asked. There was a slight taunt to his words. "Makin' you a little sick?"
Justin didn't answer. Death did make him sick, and more than a little. There was nothing that made him sicker than its finality and its total lack of discrimination. Its ability to strike anywhere and anyone, no matter how undeserving, at any time. It also had rattled his two fellow cops. He'd seen their faces when they walked into Susanna's room. He'd seen the way they shrank back, the way they hesitated before touching the body. Now that they were protected by twenty feet and a closed door and several minutes of getting used to being in death's presence, their swagger was returning. Their snide bravado was their way of covering up the fact that they'd been just as frightened as he'd been.
"You should cut out the smoking," Gary said now.
Westwood, still breathing hard, looked up, waiting for the punch line, the taunt, but there was none.
"My dad died of lung cancer a couple of years ago. It sucked big time. You can barely breathe right now," Gary went on. "You're gonna wind up like him. Like"-he jerked his head toward the bedroom door-"her."
Westwood looked at the kid, thought, I hate when assholes show signs of being human. He didn't have to respond, though, and pretend to appreciate the thoughtfulness, because that's exactly when Jimmy Leggett, the East End Harbor chief of police, chose to walk through the front door.
"Fill me in," he said. He was looking at Westwood when he said it, but it was Gary's partner who spoke up.
"It's pretty cut-and-dried," he said. "Her name is Susanna Morgan, the one who works for the paper, you know, and it looks like she was getting out of bed in the middle of the night, to go to the bathroom, we figure, and she trips-"
"And kills herself?"
"Breaks her neck, it looks like."
"Jesus. You call Doc Rosen?"
"He wasn't in his office. Nurse is trying to find him. We left a message on his home machine, too."
Leggett pursed his lips and thought about this for a moment, turned to Westwood and said, "That the way you see it? She trips and…" He waved his hand vaguely, as if vagueness was the best way to deal with what had happened.
Justin Westwood didn't say anything. He sat, staring straight ahead, sucking in a few more deep breaths.
"Jay?" Leggett said. "You looked things over and you agree?"
Westwood squinted and scratched his forehead and contorted his face as if he were going to say something, but it took him a few more seconds before he said, "Yeah, I guess so."
Leggett turned to the two young cops. "Okay, you guys, you can take off."
"What about him?" Gary said, nodding at Westwood.
"He's staying here for a minute."
"We got here first, Jimmy." This was from the other one. "We were the ones, you know, checked things out and-"
"Fine. You checked things out. I'm happy for you, Brian. Now get the fuck out of here."
The two cops scowled and started to leave, but before they got to the door Gary stopped, turned back to Leggett, and said, "Westwood didn't do shit, Jimmy. We got here, we did what we were supposed to do." Then they both went out the door.
"That right?" Leggett asked, when he was alone with Westwood. "You didn't do shit?"
"His name's Brian?"
"What?"
"Gary's little friend. I didn't know his name was Brian."
"Jesus Christ, Jay. You been workin' with the guy for almost a year."
Westwood shrugged. Leggett realized that was all he was going to get on that matter, so he said, "Wanna go back in there with me?"
The chief opened the bedroom door and stepped inside. Nothing had changed since Justin had first gone in. The room was still a mess and the girl was still dead on the floor.
Leggett let a long breath escape, a faint whistle creeping into it, and said, "The only time I ever saw a body was in a casket."
"They seem a lot more dead when you see 'em in real places."
"Yeah," the chief said. "So what's bothering you?"
"Nothing," Westwood said.
Leggett waited. Westwood scratched at his cheek, then he said, "It's funny, though. Look at the broken glass."
"What about it?"
"She got out of bed, tripped, knocked the glass over. It was probably on the nightstand, right? Next to the clock radio."
"Yeah?"
"It's just strange. She must've knocked it over first, you know, flailing around when she realized she was falling, trying to grab hold of something. So she knocks it over, it breaks, and then she falls. But she doesn't fall on it. I mean, you'd think she'd fall on some of the broken glass. It's all around her."
"How do you know she didn't fall on it?"
"There's no cuts. No blood. Even if she died almost instantly, she should've been cut. She couldn't've died before she hit the floor if she died of a broken neck."
"What else?"
"Look at this." Westwood bent down, pointed to the girl's left knee. "A scrape. And it's fresh. How do you scrape your knee while you're sleeping?"
"Maybe she did it before she went to bed."
"She would've put something on it. A Band-Aid. That stuff that stings like hell…"
"Mercurochrome. Okay, maybe she did it when she fell."
"No. This floor wouldn't do it-too smooth. A bruise maybe. A bump. But this is like she rubbed it against something rough."
"So what are you saying, Jay? You saying it's not an accident?" Westwood closed his eyes for just a moment. He remembered being on Main Street, not much more than half an hour ago, with his eyes closed the same way. He remembered the feeling of locking the world out and he remembered how much he liked that feeling. Another song began to rattle inside him. Roger McGuinn. "King of the Hill." It's sunrise again. The driveway is empty. The crystal is cracked. There's blood on the wall…
Then he looked at the chief of the East End Harbor Police Department, such as it was.
"It's an accident," Westwood said. "Has to be an accident. There's no other explanation."
2
Justin was in Duffy's again, sitting at the bar. It was the third night in a row he'd planted himself there. He was almost finished with his third Pete's Wicked Ale and was thinking about polishing it off with a scotch. He wavered. Right now he had a pleasant buzz, was reasonably relaxed. The scotch would put him over the line. Well, the one scotch wouldn't, but once he started he knew he'd have more than one. Tonight he'd have three or four. Or five. Which was what he'd had the night before. And the night before that. He watched a young woman sitting in one of the four booths and for a moment he thought it was Susanna Morgan. Then he realized that it couldn't be and decided he wanted that scotch.
Donnie, the bartender, brought the shot glass over, with some water on the side. Westwood took a sip and enjoyed the burn as it went down his throat and into his stomach. It warmed him instantly and he polished off the rest of it in one more gulp, signaled for another even as his head was tilted back, drinking. When he'd finished the second one, the buzz wasn't quite as pleasant. It was more of a hum and the hum was saying to him the same thing it had been saying ever since he'd examined Susanna's body: Stay away from it. Don't touch this one. Just stay away.