He called Carol from his car on the way home.
She answered the phone, “Yeah?”
“Hi. Uh, do you still want to go out for dinner?”
“Well, it’s almost eight thirty. It would be nine before we sat down. I don’t know . . .”
“Well, I could stop by someplace and pick something up.”
“Maybe we could have dinner tomorrow night.”
“I’d like to, but I’m picking Amy up tomorrow night,” Hastings said. “But the three of us could have dinner.”
“Well . . . let’s see,” Carol said. He heard her sigh. And Hastings felt it then. A funk. She had spent the day alone and he had let her down. But a girl had been murdered, and it was better to chase leads when they were hot.
Hastings said, “Do you want to be alone?”
“No. I didn’t say that. Just come over.”
“Do you want me to bring food?”
“No. Just come over.”
“Okay.”
Hastings clicked off the phone and his first thought was, Okay, but what am I going to eat?
A fine rain had begun. He turned on the windshield wipers.
Hastings drove to a Coney Island stand and ordered two hot dogs with mustard and onions and a Dr Pepper. His plan was to eat them in the car before he got to Carol’s. He felt little guilt about this. It added about five minutes to his trip to her place, and his being hungry and cranky wasn’t going to be good for either of them. He felt better after he ate.
Driving north on Skinker Boulevard, Hastings considered his relationship with Carol McGuire. He understood that she probably had justification to be irritated with him. He did not consider himself a workaholic, and he often got bored with people who had little to talk about outside of work. It led to even duller conversations about things like the Cardinals, but at least it was something else. In a sense, he and Carol McGuire were part of the same community. She was a criminal defense attorney who had cut her teeth in the public defender’s office. They worked opposite sides, so to speak, but they knew a lot of the same people and the same cases. When they first met, it was under conditions that could arguably have been called hostile. She got a witness out of jail, whom Hastings wanted to question. Both of them thinking they needed to be adversarial to the other, but soon realizing their goals were not all that different.
Carol McGuire had been tentative with him at first. She recognized, as others had, that George Hastings could read people well enough, whether or not they were subjects in a criminal investigation, but that he may not have been the best person to read himself. In the first few weeks they started to see each other, Carol said they should remain friends. A not-so-subtle way of telling him that he wasn’t going to get her in bed too soon. That lasted about six weeks, and after the first few times they made love, she asked him whether he would take Eileen back if she asked.
He expressed surprise at this, if not indignation.
“Take her back? She’s married.”
“I know. She left you for another man. But what if she gave that up, came back to you, and said, ‘Okay, I’ve changed. We’ll do it your way. Take me back.’ ”
“She’s not going to do that.”
“But what if she did?”
“She won’t.”
“But what if she did?”
“That’s like asking, what if she grew wings? She’s not going to do that.”
“She’s not going to what?”
“She’s not going to—change.”
Carol McGuire said, “Are you sure of that?”
“I think so,” Hastings said.
“I wish you were sure.”
“Come on. What is this?”
“George, can you admit some things?”
“Like what?”
“Like, you fell in love with a girl because she was pretty and charming and you hoped to turn her into what you wanted. A good wife, a good mother. A PTA mom. You thought she would become those things because you picked her.”
“That I would be her Pygmalion.”
Carol smiled. “Okay, she said that, not me. But was she really that far off?”
“Wait, let me understand this: you’re defending her?”
“No, not really. This isn’t really about her. You know I’m not a fan of Eileen’s. I’m just saying that I understand where she was coming from.”
“So she was right to leave me?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ. No. I’m saying that you and her wanted different things. She knew it, but you didn’t. Her husband is an idiot, but he’s far better suited to her than you.”
“I don’t know about—”
“George, he is. He is. This is part of the problem with you. Part of what makes you a good detective is this, for lack of a better word, arrogance you have. But it has its drawbacks too. You see Eileen with Ted and you wonder how she could go from you to him. Am I right?”
“No.” But she was. And he knew it.
Carol said, “See, it’s who she is. Maybe it’s always who she was. But you can’t see that because you get in the way. You think because she was your wife, she had the same sort of character you have. Or you could get her there. What I’m saying is, you’re only seeing it through your perspective.”
“So I’m the one that’s delusional?”
“You were both delusional. Eileen probably always will be. But you, well . . . there’s hope for you yet.”
“Gee, thanks.”
He had been rankled by this analysis. But in time he had grown to understand it. And as the months passed by, he had come to respect Carol in a way that he had probably never respected Eileen.
So the divorce was behind him and he had come to terms with it. But as he washed the hot dogs down with Dr Pepper, he thought now of what Claude Dwyer, his old patrol sergeant, had once told another middle-aged cop who recently got divorced. The freshly divorced cop bragged that he had another girlfriend, this one much younger and thinner than his ex, and she was moving in with him and, boy, was he getting the action now.
Sergeant Dwyer said, “Yeah? You want some free advice?”
“What?”
“Get a vasectomy. And I mean now.”
The middle-aged cop gave Dwyer a puzzled frown, but a couple of the wiser cops laughed because they knew where the old sergeant was coming from. That is, that a man freshly divorced doesn’t know his head from his ass. Particularly if he’s middle-aged and a cowboy cop to boot. Dwyer knew that a man in that situation would not be himself for a couple of years and in that interval was likely to seek a quick emotional solution with another woman. My new girlfriend’s pregnant and we’re going to get married and, goddammit, this time everything’s gonna be just great. From one disaster to another.
Hastings smiled at the memory. He hadn’t gotten a vasectomy. Carol used the pill. And they had never discussed children.
•
Carol was watching the news when he got to her apartment. She kissed him on the cheek and said, “It was on the news. The murder.”
“Yeah? Aaron give a statement?” Aaron Pressler, the department’s media spokesman.
“No,” Carol said. “Not on television. The newscaster just said the police were investigating it. I guess it’s not that big a story. Do you want a beer?”
“Yeah, thanks. I can get it.” He went to the refrigerator as she took a seat on the divan. On TV, the local PBS station was playing an old Preston Sturges film. William Demarest in a marine uniform telling small-town folk that he was at Guadalcanal and that was no fooling.
Hastings said from the kitchen, “I wouldn’t say it wasn’t important.”
“I didn’t say that.”
He came back to the living room and took a seat next to her. He said, “No, you didn’t. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. The news said she was a coed.”
“They used that word? Coed?”
“Yeah, they like stuff like that. Coed murder.”
“She was?”
“Yeah. An escort. They probably marketed her as a college girl. It helps, I guess.”
“They—the escort service?”
“Yes.” Hastings put his head back and closed his eyes. It was an involuntary communication. It meant that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Half of the first forty-eight hours gone and they had made little progress in finding the girl’s murderer. Tomorrow was Sunday. He had responsibilities to his work and to his daughter. But he would think about that later.
“George?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to go to sleep?”
“No, I’m fine. What’s on television?”
“A movie. Hail the Conquering Hero. It’s pretty good.”
“Okay.” He opened his eyes to watch it.
Five minutes later he was asleep. Carol McGuire took the nearly full beer from his hands and set it on the coffee table.