Koob usually appears at my door every other night. The second time he knocked, I found him on the threshold with a brown paper bag. He handed it over as I stepped aside to let him in. It was a bottle of bourbon, nice stuff.
“I thought you don’t drink,” I said.
“I don’t.” He suddenly seemed shy. “But I enjoyed the taste on you.”
“Awesome.” I pulled the cork and took a slug straight from the bottle.
After our tumble, he laid there silent for quite some time. He got up to smoke a cigarette at the window and then returned, lying beside me again, still with nothing to say.
“Is this strange for you?”
He took his time forming an answer.
“Yes,” he said.
“Too strange?”
He waited another second.
“Casual sex has never really been my thing.”
“God,” I answered. “I hate that term. It’s not worth having sex if it’s going to be casual. The intensity is what makes it great, the way for a few minutes it’s all that’s happening in the universe. Right?” He seemed to be considering that. “Besides, what about when you were in the service? No sex just to get off?”
“Yeah, of course. But I never enjoyed it that much. You know, it was a need. And if you were single, something you were expected to do.”
“You seem to be enjoying yourself now.”
He nodded several times before he said, “Completely.”
“Well okay, then. What’s the problem?”
“I grew up on the fringes of a very traditional society. I like to think I am fully American, but sometimes I find I have a false impression of myself.”
“You think you’re doing something wrong? Or that I am?”
He didn’t answer.
“Hey, look. If you’re enjoying it, then don’t yuck your yum. Cute girl next door? Fucks like a football player? Kind of amusing, right, when it crosses your mind?”
He smiled. He was beginning to find me entertaining.
“Still,” he said.
“Is it because I’m a woman?”
He didn’t want to say it out loud.
“Man, you know that’s strictly cray-cray, don’t you? Guys can wander but girls stay home? Where is that from?”
“I said I’m traditional.”
“Well, it’s a messed-up tradition. One thing I learned when I accepted that I liked women, too, was that I was never going to be fully myself if I waited for someone to give me permission. We want what we want. It’s part of who we are. I have a thing for the weird guy in the next apartment, then I’m going for it. I don’t care about anybody else’s judgments.”
He didn’t answer. I’m not sure I’d been clear before about being bi. But he didn’t seem stuck on that, so much as wondering if he could ever view our thing the way I was recommending.
Usually, we go at it twice and lay in bed and talk in between. I get in a mood with him where I just gush the volcano of strange shit that sometimes boils over in my brain.
For instance. There’s a full-length mirror in my room—it was actually my mom’s mom’s and her mother’s before her, and another mom before that. It has a thick gilt frame of cloud forms, and some of the silver backing has begun to oxidize near the top, leaving a few dark blots. But I was happy to get it when Pops moved to assisted living. I’m not much for history or ancestor worship or whatever, but with my grandfather taking what we both knew was another step toward the graveyard, I guess I was beginning to see the point of treasuring the past. I thought it would be very cool to look at my reflection where generations of women in my family had done it before. Like all those things, when you try to make a big deal of them, it doesn’t last. Now and then I think about my great-great-grandmother examining herself in a corset and a feathered hat. But you know, day by day, it’s just a mirror, and tonight Koob bends me over the bed and does me from behind, standing while we both watch our reflections, which probably happened back in the day, too.
As I am lying next to him afterwards, I say, “You know, when I was a kid, it made me kind of crazy at times. The thought.”
He just looks for a while before quietly saying, “What thought?”
This happens to me now and then, a fugue state where I forget for a second that someone I like doesn’t necessarily know what I am thinking.
“This thought,” I say. “You never set eyes on your own face. You can look in a mirror. But that’s a mirror image. Reversed. You can see the face of every single human being in the world, except your own. Strange, right?”
He laughs, a quick cackle, surprisingly high-pitched, which I’ve heard from him several times now.
“And what do you make of that?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Like I said, it used to make me crazy.”
“And does it make you crazy now?”
I think.
“Well, I accept that I can’t change it. It’s a condition of life. But it’s still kind of a headbang to realize that we will never actually see ourselves directly or the way other people do. Right? That’s like kind of spiritual or deep, right?” I wiggle magic fingers in the air.
He lays there a second. He seems deeply struck by all of this, but I suspect that’s mostly wondering just how strange this chick really is.
“Don’t get trippy,” I say. “I’m just being Pinky.”
“Who’s Pinky?”
“I’m Pinky. Some people call me Pinky.”
“Not Clarice?”
“My parents called me Pinky. Something about being thirty made me start to feel I’d grown out of it.”
“How old are you?” he asks.
“How old do you think I am?”
“I thought you were around thirty, maybe even coming up on it.”
“I’ll take that,” I tell him. “I’m thirty-three. How old are you?”
“Forty-six.”
That was about what I figured.
“And is Clarice any different than Pinky?” he asks.
“She’s older. Not that I always like it.”
“What don’t you like? You’re too young for backaches and sore knees.”
“Actually, my back hurts all the time, especially in wet weather. Because I broke it boarding. But no, I try not to freak, but when I look in a mirror I can see my shape is changing a little. All the sudden a third cup of coffee makes my heart jumpy. Which makes me feel cheated.”
“Cheated?”
“Sure. The calendar says grown-up, but inside I know I’m not done being an adolescent. Plenty of people would tell you I still act that way. So what the fuck are these gray hairs I pull out? And, you know, I never had any burning desire to be an adult. I thought they were mostly jerks. I still do, frankly. But when you’re a kid, you think, Well, when I grow up, at least I’ll finally be who I’m supposed to be. I won’t be this piece of clay that changes with each new experience. I’ll have a job. I’ll have my own house. Maybe I’ll pair off with somebody so I’m not always alone. It’s all going to be different.
“And you don’t know what a trap that is, that kind of thinking. I mean, mostly life is, you know. It is. Whether you’re three or thirty-three. You get up. You’re breathing. You’re thinking. I still don’t have a clue who I’m supposed to be. I just accept the flow of things. There really isn’t a future or a past. Those are concepts. But you’re alive only in the present. The is.”
He looms up on an elbow, smiling down at me. We watch each other for some time.
“You don’t know anybody else like me, do you?” I ask him.
“Definitely not,” he says.
Two nights later, the Friday after Blanco’s testimony, while we’re laying still for a while before he recovers the energy to leave, I ask him, “So is it okay that I’m so different? I mean, is it good or does it, you know, make you kind of wary?”
He thinks. “It’s interesting,” he says.
I think, too. “I’ll take that. I’ll take ‘interesting.’ It’s sort of positive.”
“Better than weird,” he says.
“Well, you are.”
His lips compress in a smile mysterious as smoke.
“Still?” he asks. “Why is that?”
“Same as ever. Because you’re up to something. I never followed you around enough to figure out what. But I know you’ve got something strange going on. I knew it the minute I saw you. I’m like a witch that way.”
He frowns a little but doesn’t answer.
“Like, why don’t we ever get together at your place?” I ask.
He draws back slightly.
“I would not feel the same there. It would be quite hard for me to relax.”
“This is another world? One door away?”
He tips his head as if that might be true. I laugh because I want to believe it. But I don’t, not completely.
“It’s because you’ve got all kinds of secret shit over there,” I say.
He just stares, ticking his head faintly so there’s no way to tell what the gesture means.
“You’re never going to tell me what you’re up to, right?” I ask.
He sits up.
“Why do I have to keep saying this? Do not ask me about my work and I will not ask about yours.”
“You can ask me whatever you want about my work.”
“No, I cannot. This case with the police chief. Tell me what she’s said to you about that photograph.” Koob had actually come over Monday night when I got home. I was really glad to see him. I told him I’d had a tough evening, but it turned out that was why he’d knocked. The photo, with a bunch of fuzzy circles in strategic places, had already turned up in his news feed—him and half the people who live in Highland Isle.
“I can’t do that,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows emphatically. Point made.
“I’m going to figure it out,” I tell him. “You know I will.”
He shows his usual resting face, meant to be unreadable.
Earlier this week, on Tuesday, the morning after Blanco took the stand, Rik went on the offensive. Since dozens of websites had published the photo of the Chief by morning—a few without even blurring out the hot spots, so to speak—he called a press conference in the early afternoon. It was held in the parking lot outside our building. By the time of Blanco’s testimony, coverage of the hearing had dribbled down to a few local courthouse reporters, but now that things had turned pornographic, there were dozens of journalists fighting for elbow space. It was the usual free-for-all, with the camera operators edging each other aside and shining their lights. Amid all the flashing and buzzing of the equipment, Rik put on a face as solemn as a monument.
“This photograph is a fake, pure and simple. And knowing that it is a fake, someone chose to blast it all over the Internet, to embarrass and degrade Chief Gomez, because they will never be able to show in court that the picture is authentic.
“Mr. Hess has given me his word that he has no idea who leaked the photo. By contrast, Lieutenant Blanco has said nothing so far. Either way, the commission ordered Mr. Hess and Mr. Blanco to produce the original printed photograph this morning. The City hasn’t done it, and I don’t expect them to. I repeat: It’s a fake.
“Furthermore, I stick by what I said last night. It is a disgrace that the City would offer in evidence anything so salacious and unfair to Chief Gomez without hiring forensic examiners to verify it first. They didn’t, because their case was Code Blue and they were desperate to revive it. Whatever second thoughts they have now can do nothing to repair the damage done to Lucia Gomez-Barrera. I am calling on the City to issue an apology and terminate this hearing immediately.”
In the office, Rik called Marc every hour, demanding the original photograph. Blanco, supposedly, was more certain it had been accidentally shredded. Marc apologized every time Rik and him spoke, and finally asked Rik if he wanted the City to bring in outside counsel for the balance of the hearing. I was in Rik’s office at the time.
“The hell,” Rik answered. “Now you want to give this heaping turd to someone else? You did this, Marc, and you get to hold it in your hands while it curls up steam.” Before he hung up, he said, “And I’ll tell you what else I want. I want Blanco’s goddamned phone on my desk by five p.m., just like the Reverend ordered. Or is he going to say now that he shredded that, too?”
Instead, a little after five, we received a motion filed by a local lawyer, Selena Rios Schwartz, a former deputy PA in Kindle County, who Rik thinks highly of. She asked the commission to reconsider its order regarding Blanco’s cell phone. She claimed that it was an invasion of Blanco’s privacy to require him to turn over the device, which was full of personal photos and messages from friends and family, and some confidential police business. Furthermore, she argued, Blanco had already testified that the original digital image was not on the phone.
The commission issued an order Wednesday morning, denying the motion. Mrs. L said, “We have reviewed the testimony from Monday’s hearing again. Lieutenant Blanco in fact testified that all data from the phone where the picture had once appeared was transferred to the current phone. That is a reasonable basis on which Respondent can demand to examine the device. The City cannot expect to offer evidence so critical without affording Chief Gomez a full opportunity to challenge it. Mr. Blanco’s compliance with the commission’s order is essential before we can afford any weight to his testimony.”
Marc then joined Blanco in filing an emergency appeal to the Superior Court of Greenwood County, a move expected to buy Blanco a few days. But overall, Rik thought we were again on the verge of having the case against the Chief dismissed.
“What’s Blanco’s deal with the phone?” I asked. “He acted like the Reverend had shoved a stick of dynamite up his rectum as soon as Frito heard the order Monday night.”
“My bet,” said Rik, “is that what he wants to hide are his communications with the Ritz or Steven, or whoever put him up to all this.”
“Can he just refuse to obey a court order?”
“Not if he wants to keep working as a cop. His only way out, under the law, is to take five.”
“What crime would he say he was worried about?”
“First, he doesn’t have to say. And second, we couldn’t dispute it, if he hints that the phone will provide evidence of perjury.”
“But then the Chief wins, right?”
“Sure,” he told me, “she’s odds-on to win the hearing anyway. But that still doesn’t guarantee that Lucy keeps her job. That was the point of leaking the picture.”
The claim that the photo was a forgery more or less protected the mayor from having to take an immediate position on the Chief’s further employment, but that did not prevent several citizen groups, most of them clearly aligned with Steven DeLoria, from demanding Lucy resign. Then on Wednesday night, two jointly owned newspapers, the Kindle County Tribune and the Highland Isle Beacon, published the same editorial about the Chief. The papers said it was unfair to expect the Chief to prove a negative—that it wasn’t actually her in the photo—but then turned around and claimed that unfortunately, unless she could do that, she couldn’t function effectively in the job as chief of police, where, unlike a private citizen, she was required to remain above suspicion.
When I arrived at work on Thursday morning, the Chief was sitting in the hall outside Rik’s office, waiting for him to get back from court. Up until now, she had held up well. She’d had some down moments, but in general, seeing these clowns lie live from the witness stand had enraged her and given her an air of continuing strength. The photo was the first thing to really get to her. Even with all her skill with makeup, you could see she’d lost color. She was wearing her glasses instead of her contacts, because her eyes were so irritated from lack of sleep, and she was not the usual beacon of positive energy. The dimples were on leave.
The editorials the night before had left her in a spin. She was finding it so hard to wait for Rik that she wanted to talk to me instead, even though I had just stopped by briefly to say hi while she was sitting there.
“Having half-naked sex shots on the Internet,” she said, “that’s like the old nightmare of running through the streets without your clothes on. My daughters have hung tough through this whole thing, but I can tell they’re really embarrassed now. I can say ‘fake’ all I want, but everybody just assumes that’s me.”
“I get it,” I said, and told her about something kind of comparable with me several years ago. Back then I went through a phase, which overlapped with when I started at Stern & Stern, where I regularly posted selfies of me and partners in the act on Snapchat (generally speaking, and by no accident, I thought I was lookin pretty killer in the pictures). My grandfather finally begged me to stop, because people were getting no work done in the office while they hovered over the screenshots they’d captured on their phones. I saw eventually that no matter how in-your-face I felt like being, I was providing the wrong kind of entertainment to a lot of people who were like gawkers going by a car wreck, high on my misfortune and stupidity and their relief that it wasn’t them.
But I was nobody important, I’d chosen to put the pictures out there, and the lurid little snickers were mostly behind my back. Blanco’s photo, by contrast, was literally front-page news, and she had to face the fact that the image would be chasing her around the Internet forever, whenever people searched her name.
“The whole thing with the picture is totally shitty,” I told the Chief, standing beside her. “And yeah, your kids are embarrassed. But it happened. It’s a few news cycles. By the weekend, everybody who wants to look will have looked. Monday it will all be boring.”
She shook her head, not buying my optimism.
“I think the papers may be right.” She meant about resigning.
“The papers are full of shit,” I said. “Think about it. Somebody makes up a ton of absolute crap about a police chief, or anybody else in office, and that means that person has to quit unless they can show every single detail is pure manure. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”
She didn’t respond to that. I wasn’t sure Rik would be as positive, because a couple times when we were alone in the office, including right after his press conference, he seemed to have a lot of doubts. He thinks we may be close to the moment when the mayor jettisons the Chief. Plus, even he’s lost a little confidence in her. We both know there’s more to the story about that picture than she’s told us. By claiming it’s fake, Rik has put his own credibility on the line, meaning the truth that our client won’t share may end up canceling out a lot of what he hoped to gain by taking the case.
But right then, the Chief was asking for my opinion, not Rik’s.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not the lawyer. But all Blanco’s crap about the photograph and his phone means his testimony is worthless. So you’re going to win the hearing, and the takeaway after a couple weeks will be that you got a massive railing. Rik may even figure out a way to sue the City and make them pay for this.”
She was staring up at me, those big black eyes of hers swimming with pain and uncertainty. The whole exchange left me with a strange feeling, because our physical positions made it seem like she was the child and I was the grown-up, and my instinct is still to squirm whenever I’m in that role. But I held her eye, trying to look like I thought I was right, which I pretty much did.