Over the years, a lot of people had promised Hanson that they would find out where he lived and one night, when he came home, they’d be waiting for him with a shotgun. So he always drove past his flat and parked a couple of houses down, on the opposite side of the street if possible, and looked for anything that was out of place or just felt wrong. Something he’d know when he saw it. He didn’t even think about it anymore. As he walked he watched doors and windows and backyards, listening and smelling the air. It was like looking both ways before crossing a street. One of the reasons most cops lived in the suburbs was so they’d be more difficult to find.
He unlocked the heavy, beveled-glass front door and the piece of toothpick he’d broken off between the door and the doorframe—a little burglar alarm—fell out. He stepped inside, shrugged the bag to the floor and listened to the house, pistol in hand. Nothing looked out of place. Eighty years old, the house had an odor of pitch, mildew, soap, plaster, and varnish. If anyone else was in the house, he’d smell him. Still, he looked in the bedrooms and closets, glanced under the beds, tried the knob on the door to the basement, walked the hallway to the bathroom, where the shower curtain was still open the way he’d left it—all places he’d found burglars and fugitives and the insane hiding in other people’s houses. Then into the kitchen and back to the sagging sunporch—clear. He thumbed the safety of the Browning back on and slipped it into the hip pocket of his jeans.
He poured himself three fingers of green tequila and took it out to the front porch, where the sun was just pushing up out of the hills, huge against the horizon, blowing wind and long shadows down the street, pulling free from power lines, radio towers, the barbed limbs of distant trees, its skin fragile and tremulous through the atmosphere as if it might tear and flood the hills, turning the flatlands of East Oakland into an ocean of fire. He looked away a moment too late, the sun blinding him with light so that he had to feel his way back to the door inside where something or someone, aflame with the colors of the sun—a burning man in the hallway—blew past him and out the door, vanishing into the glare. He poured himself another drink and decided it was time to go see Libya.
At 10 a.m. he was standing on her front porch, his bag slung over his shoulder, wearing fresh jeans and a sage-green dress shirt he’d ironed on the flip-down built-in little ironing board in his kitchen. He wasn’t drunk yet or hungover, but he was nervous in that neighborhood out of uniform, keeping track of passing cars. A block over somebody was setting off Fourth of July firecrackers a week late. The basketball hoop on the small frame garage at the back of the house looked new. Direct course of action, he thought, laughing at himself.
He pushed the doorbell button again and heard the ding-dong inside. It was in working order. He counted ten seconds to verify his sense of passing time. Maybe she wasn’t at home. Maybe she wasn’t alone. Maybe she’d seen him and wasn’t going to open the door. He was stupid to show up at her door without calling first, he told himself, but he’d left his notebook with her phone number in his police locker. He told himself to expect the best, for a change. A pimped-out green Pontiac slowed to look him over, and he wondered if it might be the guy who’d beaten her up and maybe that’s what she liked. Before he’d left his house he’d been having erotic daydreams about her, but now—time’s up, he thought, relieved, when she opened the door.
Be positive, he thought.
“Officer Hanson. What a surprise. Did Radio send you?”
“It’s my day off.”
Her lips, her throat, the fine collarbones, and the swell of her breasts beneath the man’s flannel shirt she was wearing, the shirttail knotted high on her stomach—he hadn’t just imagined his reaction to her.
“I wanted to see if you were okay,” he said.
She made a fluid gesture, delineating with both hands the lines of her body. “All okay.” She was wearing red leather clogs with wooden soles that made her as tall as he was.
“How’s your foot?”
She smiled finally but didn’t laugh. “Healed by your touch,” she said, running ringed fingers into her hair, the tendons flexing on the back of her hand. “Why don’t you come inside? That woman next door is probably peeking at us through her blinds.”
“Okay,” he said, stupidly, thinking that all the neighbors were probably watching them.
By day the house was light and airy, books in the bookcases, mirrors throwing light from the walls. Most of his days, he thought, were nights—headlights and streetlights—and shadows. The kitchen was pleasant too, a 1950s Formica table with tubular chrome legs and a white enamel stove and a cute fat little refrigerator, where all he remembered from that night were the bloody footprints on the floor and the bloody potato peeler in the sink. And there in the sunlight, on the wall behind the kitchen table, was the picture Weegee had told him about the day when they were at All-American Burgers, after Hanson had bought him the bird book. It was an oil painting on a piece of fiberboard, battered and smudged by rough handling, then left and forgotten at some thrift store, the face of a glacier dominating the background, bluer than blue, more massive than the Justice Center, frozen in time by the painter at the moment it had sheared off and was about to plunge into an ocean of icebergs populated by penguins who seemed not to notice or care about the falling cliff of ice and the monster wave it would create.
“You’re Weegee’s auntie,” Hanson said, seeing Libya suddenly illuminated. “He told me he lived with his auntie.”
“You’re the Officer Hanson, aren’t you?” she said. “I never made the connection,” she said wonderingly.
“Penguins are his favorite bird,” Hanson told her.
“He loves this book,” she said, taking Peterson’s Western Birds—Weegee’s bird book, the book that Hanson had signed—from a stack of cookbooks on the refrigerator. “I never made the connection,” she said again. “He’s my little brother. My half brother.”
“Where’s Weegee now?” Hanson asked.
“On a field trip to Golden Gate Park. I’ve got him signed up this week with the Boys and Girls Club.”
They sat in the living room, Hanson in an armchair, sitting forward in the seat, Libya on the velvet couch, barefoot, her long legs curled under her, a low table between them. Beeswax candle scent mingled with the smell of honeysuckle floating in from outside.
She rose up and looked out the front window. “Where’s your car? What do you drive besides a patrol car?”
He’d parked a block down the street, he told her, a habit from the job. His International Harvester Travelall. He bought it right before he went to graduate school and he paid four hundred dollars. The guy he bought it from worked on the transmission by digging a hole in the ground and driving the Travelall over it, then sliding down in the hole to work on it.
“Graduate school?”
“Well, yeah…”
“In what? Criminal justice?” she said.
“Nineteenth-century British literature, actually.”
She just looked at him.
“A long story,” he said.
“Not that it matters,” she said. “That’s what you do now. Get paid to enforce the law whether it’s good or bad. Or right. Dog on a chain. Their dog on a chain.”
“You’ve never had a white boyfriend, have you?”
“No, it always seemed pointless if not just stupid.”
“Where’s your boyfriend that beat you up? The guy you stabbed with the potato peeler.”
“I have no idea.”
Hanson looked at her, angry now, nodding his head, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
“You need to go,” she said, standing up. “Weegee will be home soon. I don’t want him to know.”
“Know what?” he said. “There’s nothing to know. Thanks, see you later. Bye-bye.” And he let himself out the door.