“That’s him.”
Dupree put his hand on Caroline’s shoulder and gestured to the stack of six-packs in front of her, five sheets of photographs, each with a half-dozen mug shots. “Take one more look,” he said. “I want you to be sure.”
“I don’t need another look. That’s him.”
Dupree smiled. “Humor me.”
Caroline flipped through the stack and settled again on the second sheet, her eyes moving from left to right across the photos. When she was done, she tapped the print and pushed back away from the table. “I’m sure. Number four.”
“That’s right,” Spivey said.
Dupree said over his shoulder to Spivey, “This isn’t a test.”
Caroline turned and looked up at Dupree. “Number four.”
Standing behind them in the interview room, Spivey spoke into his newest toy, a microcassette recorder that had recently replaced his ever-present notebook. “Twenty-nine April. Officer Mabry has identified suspect number four from a photographic lineup as the man she saw on twenty-eight April push Kevin Hatch, AKA…”
Dupree put his hand over Spivey’s and used the younger man’s fingers to squeeze the stop button on the tape player. “Don’t do that,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”
Spivey walked outside, mumbling into the tape as he left.
“Sorry about that.” Dupree gathered the photos and sat on the table, a few feet from where Caroline was staring a hole into the tabletop. “I guess there was a reason they stopped using monkeys in the space program.”
Caroline took the photos from Dupree. “His hair is a little longer,” she said, “but it’s him. The eyes…What’s his name?”
“Lenny Ryan. Just finished a nickel at Lompoc in California. Assault, theft, possession with intent—simple shit. Got out a couple months ago. Skipped on his parole in Oakland. No one knew he was here until he taught your guy to dive.”
Caroline stared at the picture. “So he has family here?”
“Far as we know, just Uncle Pipe Wrench. But we only got the name an hour ago from the guy’s mother. She hasn’t seen him since he got out of prison.”
“So he comes here to buy a dime bag and steal his uncle’s twelve-year-old Pontiac? That makes no sense.” Caroline held the photo in front of her, staring into the man’s eyes. “So why’s he here?”
“Who knows,” Dupree said. “Maybe no reason, a guy like that.”
“A guy like what?”
“Like a top,” Dupree said.
“A top?”
“You’re too young to remember tops. Had a big round end and a pointy end. Wrap a string on the round end, pull, and it spins on the pointy end.” Dupree couldn’t believe there was a theory he hadn’t shared with her, this top theory. After four weeks with Spivey, he was excited to be teaching again. “A guy like this, you yank on his string and he’s gonna spin around for a while, bump into things, careen off, till he just spins off the table or hits something that stops him. You can’t apply the rules of reason and logic to a thing spinning in circles.”
She grinned. “So you think I pulled his string?”
“No.” Dupree was sorry he’d brought it up. “Not you. The bust. Guy gets out of prison and now he’s gonna be arrested for a hand-to-hand dope deal? He doesn’t want to go back, so he pushes your guy into the river to get away. Bang. You got a top.”
“He doesn’t want to be arrested for a misdemeanor drug deal, so he commits felony murder? How much sense does that make?”
“My point exactly. A top doesn’t make sense. Just spins.”
“And so, what, we just wait for the top to stop spinning?”
Dupree considered the question half as hard as he considered the lines above her eyes. “How’s your mom?” he asked after a moment.
“Fine,” Caroline said.
“She feeling better?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
Caroline looked once more at the photo, and it seemed to Dupree that she was memorizing every detail of Lenny Ryan’s face, his blockish head and thick sandy hair, his dark eyebrows and cocked mouth. Then she handed the photo back to Dupree. “You need anything else from me?”
“No. I think that’s it. What’ve you got today?”
“We’re raiding a house over in East Central at ten. Burn’s supplier.”
“Undercover?”
Caroline laughed. “Not me. I’m in the truck. I don’t think they’re gonna let me play dress-up with the fellas for a while.”
“I suppose.” Dupree shifted, still trying to figure out how to approach the things he had so much trouble talking about. “You seem a little…how are you?”
“Lane wants me to see someone in professional services. I made some noise about talking to my guild rep and he turned and ran like he was on fire.”
Dupree nodded, then stood and stuck his hands in his pockets, thinking that maybe he could strike a pose that would say the things he couldn’t, express his feelings for her in a way that wasn’t creepy, because creepiness seemed a definite possibility, given the things he was thinking just then. “There’d be no shame in seeing someone. You know that, right? Might even help.”
“You know, you’re right,” she said. “You really ought to go.”
He smiled at her sharpness and felt a pride and a responsibility that were different from the other thing he felt around her, the shortened breath, the gentle tug and taunt of her proximity. Sometimes he would stare at a hand-sized place on her body, the notch above her hip, the curve of her calf, the groove at the back of her neck, and he worried about the loyalty of his hands, daydreamed about their betrayal. And he wished that putting a hand on her side would be enough, even though he knew it couldn’t be.
The interview room was narrow and long, with a table at its center and no windows, no two-way mirror from the movies, just a door and walls that pressed against Dupree, that hummed with the promise and threat of intimacy. He cleared his throat and looked at the photo of Lenny Ryan again.
“Hey, this is my kids’ swimming instructor.”
She smiled and, having felt the tug too, shifted in her chair away from him, telling herself the usual dodges: He’s married and flippant and skinny and cynical and too old. This last made her smile at her own hypocrisy. Dupree was twelve years older than she; she was twelve years older than Joel. She had dated only one other man significantly older than she was, fifteen years ago, in college. He was a graduate-level instructor in the English department, almost as thin as Dupree, and it made her smile to think how old he seemed at thirty, when she was now six years older than that. He had seduced her by the book, if such a book existed for that kind of man, the kind who quotes Neruda after sex on the mattress on his book-strewn floor, who pretends to listen to her every word, who has a boy’s fumbling zeal when making love. Since she was a criminal justice major, the Neruda poetry was a nice diversion—So I pass across your burning form—but it was a bottle of wine and a Wallace Stevens poem that first did her in, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” its refrain still rattling around amid the guilt and waterfalls and elegies of the job: Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. The graduate instructor had begun to explain the poem, the existential insistence of letting “be be finale of seem,” the triumph of a moment over its potential, tangible over abstract, ice cream over death, but by then Caroline had already decided to sleep with the man and get a double major in poetry and criminal justice.
She thought about that attraction and about this one. Such an attraction said certain things about a girl whose father had left the family. An attraction to a man older and in a position of authority was inherently unhealthy, the blending of father figure and lover, and was fraught with disappointing glimpses of the future, at least the male version of it—love handles and graying hair, an increasing knack for self-delusion, and, in Dupree’s case, the shell he’d built over the years to protect himself.
Noise outside the interview room yanked them both from their thoughts, and Caroline stood. “Well, I suppose…”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’ve got a drug house to raid.”
They left the interview room and returned to the Major Crimes office, both looking around furtively, like people returning from a lunchtime affair. There was a general rush of movement in the Major Crimes office, Pollard putting on his jacket and grabbing a notebook and pen from his desk, beginning to move toward the door. Dupree stood at the long filing cabinet at the front of the room, Caroline at his side.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Pollard answered. “Guy robbed a pawnshop and shot the owner.”
“Jesus.” Dupree shook his head. “What’s that, four in twenty-four hours? That’s gotta be a record.”
“Not yet,” Pollard said. “The guy’s alive.”
“No shit?”
Pollard shook his head appreciatively. “Don’t ask me how. The guy gets popped in the face and sits there for an hour before anyone finds him.”
Caroline walked toward the door, and Dupree turned from Pollard to her. “I’ll see you later, then.”
“Yeah,” she said. “See ya.”
He waited until she was gone before taking a deep breath and rubbing his face. The attraction and tension between them grew in periods of trouble like this; it was an undeniable fact. It was probably true of cops everywhere. No occupation promoted infidelity like police work, especially after women began joining police forces in the seventies and eighties. The worse things got, the longer the hours, the more adrenaline coursed through their bodies, the more they were likely to wind up on the floor somewhere, wrapped up in each other like they could provide some distraction, or cure. And he couldn’t remember a time when things were worse than they were now, couldn’t remember a streak that felt blacker than this one.
“You know,” Pollard said, “if the guy kicks, you win the pot.”
Dupree turned to face him. “Hmm?”
At the door, Pollard smiled on the left side of his mouth, the left eyebrow rising at the same pace as the corner of his mouth. “The pawnshop guy. Shooter used a nine. That’s your weapon, right?”
Dupree thought back to the Christmas party and his surprise that a common weapon like the nine-millimeter was still available when he chose. The other guys howled and giggled and joked that he was going to shoot people himself—detectives carried nines—but in truth it hadn’t seemed funny to him; he could never get drunk enough at the Christmas party to make the drawing seem anything but what it was.
Pollard was still standing there, apparently waiting for Dupree to say something funny. But nothing came.