Cole had gone down this road before with this guy.
Joe Kinsey, first responding inspector, had shown up at the crime scene night of. He spoke to the locals, sniffed for surveillance cameras, lifted prints, collected blood, traced the suspect footsteps’ destination, considered making an arrest or two, some curb creature maybe, a regular, even if it was someone innocent, just to rustle out information in interrogation. He spoke to people who knew Chuck Hattaran back at the Police Officers Association. He spoke with the deceased’s wife, Mia, albeit briefly, just for an idea of where he was headed that night. He checked Chuck’s phone records. He came up with bupkis. So said Kinsey’s paperwork, a beautiful file of professed competence, but Cole knew better. Kinsey didn’t solve crimes. He watched them.
And he’d spent most of that night at the Lively Flea.
“That’s allowed,” he whispered to Cole later.
It had always been this way with Kinsey. His corruption was arguably benign but it stank like Nickelback. Everything about him stunk. His clothes. His jokes. His food, even when they ordered from the same place, his stank worse. Even his computer password stunk. Cole had guessed it months ago — name of his beat-wife (June, up on L, behind the beat desk) and Joe Montana (the number 16).
This was four months ago. Chuck Hattaran was still alive then, still dog-whispering the ACLU about police body-cams, not even a blip on the radar of Central Homicide. Cole had been the only guy on the floor that night, and he didn’t know for how long, but at the time, Kinsey was dragging his feet on a dead body found up in Russian Hill — some old fogey who used to wax poetic at public hearings about how the police were ruining his neighborhood while simultaneously never showing up there. His body was found rotting in his home with the windows open. Heart attack, maybe.
Every time Kinsey got one of these fresh red names, he waddled to the scene of the crime, whistled a morning tune, filed the paper, and moved on to the next one, rarely with a solution to the thing unless the killer confessed on his own volition.
How did he get away with it? Why did Puliard keep this guy on the payroll? What pictures of whose son or whose daughter did Kinsey keep in a deep, dark file for a rainy day?
Five minutes is what Cole had predicted he had, maybe, before someone drifted in or out of the floor and saw Cole snooping on the Dell. He typed the password and clicked enter. That’s allowed. Up came Kinsey’s desktop. Screenshot from the movie The Warriors in the background.
Time was ticking. Cole needed incriminating information. His email, his work files, his recycle bin, those were Cole’s priority-one targets, but this shit was spotless. Nothing malevolent about it. Bad police work, but not evil police work.
Scrolling through file after file, Cole sweated out the thrilling boredom of invading privacy. The unethical excitement. Ridiculous questions crept into his psyche. Did the computer alert Kinsey when someone turned it on? Was there a keylogger or anything like that? Did the little camera on the top of the Dell take a snapshot for safe keeping? Nah, that was crazy. He felt like he was tilting towards the Dark Side, but then he realized that was just the dark perspiration in his armpits.
He checked Kinsey’s Facebook. A couple regrettable private messages to women he went to high school with, but no recent activity. He checked if he had a Twitter, or a Tumblr, or a Gmail account, or a Yahoo account, or hell, an AOL account, but no luck. Nothing incriminating. Just as he was diddling through Drobox folders, he felt a shadow cover his mouse-scrolling fingers.
“Anything interesting?” asked Kinsey, standing over Cole, at Kinsey’s desk.
“My computer wasn’t working,” Cole immediately replied, jumping out of Kinsey’s chair. It had been his go-to excuse thought through in his head, should anyone spot him, but now said out loud—
“That sounds stupid,” said Kinsey.
Cole returned to his desk without another song-and-dance. His heart thumped in his head. Kinsey never said a thing afterward. Instead, it became this invisible trump card, a Right Bower, kept in hand, worn under the sleeve, for whenever Kinsey deemed to play it.
He hadn’t yet.
Now, Kinsey wore tomato sauce on his cheek. He stood by the Giuseppe’s pizza box and picked a sausage morsel off an extra slice.
“You were a wreck,” Kinsey pointed a fat finger at Inspector Tom Timmons, in a bad gray suit, still smarting from the news his wife was divorcing him. That happened yesterday.
Kinsey was talking about his bender at the Lively Flea. Whiskey Night.
He continued the interrogation over the pizza box. “I must’ve saved you from ten different sirens-in-waiting looking to take you home and steal your goddamned soul.”
Kinsey proceeded to explain how he protected Tom Timmons, how he was a guardian angel standing at the bar of the Lively Flea, casting wards against predatory singles before they could rub the neck of swimmy-eye Tom. “It’s just my nature, Timmons. Don’t thank me. Learn from it. Next time, I might not be there to save you from trouble. When I say let a tequila shot be, let the shot fucking be,” Kinsey concluded.
Cole was half-listening, seen only from the neck up behind his partition, scooping up his pertinent inventory in preparation: he was going to the Tenderloin. His phone. His gun. His Sam Browne belt. Ziplocs. Tweezers. Synthetic gloves (he was allergic to latex). His black bomber jacket.
“For what?” Puliard asked. He poked at his salad behind his desk in his little office like a caveman assessing the Monolith. “What do you need a car for?”
“I’m going out. There’s work to do,” said Cole. “There’s gold in them thar hills.”
“I mean, what do you need an unmarked department car for?”
“Because I’m going to the Tenderloin.”
“No.”
Puliard ate a cherry tomato and frowned.
“I once took a call on a body in the Tenderloin.” Puliard’s eyes got beady. “Loser OD’d in the sewer. He had half a dozen Ninja Turtle people drugged out of their minds picking at his body when I got there.”
“I remember being on Narcotics,” mused Inspector Timmons. “Made friends with a lot of women back then. They ran the corners. Kept the drugs in little baggies stuffed up their hoo-has. Called it ‘the Vault.’ One of the baggies broke up there. She OD’d. Yeah. She died. Yeah. That’s how I knew I was born for Homicide.”
“Bunch of parolees living on Taylor. Fuck those guys. We were checking on a body found outside their halfway house. They were throwing TV sets and radios out the windows. One of ’em hit my car. Department still ain’t fixed it.” That was Inspector Wayne Butte, with his characteristic lisp, but nobody ever said anything about it because he was six-and-a-half feet of black machismo.
Kinsey ambled over to the conversation and gave Cole the smallest eyebrow. Yeah, I see you, thought Cole.
***
“You’re a vegetarian, right?” Cole peeled off pepperoni and handed the slice to a young man behind prison bars. Cole had slipped away while the old men shared their war stories, spitting out new, better anecdotes while Cole’s request to make his own remained denied. Now he was on the bottom floor, the hold-up, a horribly out-of-date facility, barely up to code. No ventilation. It still smelled like prisoner’s piss from twenty years ago.
Cole’s dining partner was Gummy, a twenty-year-old corner boy from Oakland caught with a stolen Cutlass in Telegraph Hill (Central’s domain). He did this thing when he ate where he closed his eyes while he chewed.
“Unfortunately, that was the last slice,” remarked Cole.
“Where you goin’?” Gummy noticed Cole was wearing his jacket.
“Out. Got a dead body depending on it.”
Gummy’s faced screwed up at the thought. Dead bodies creeped the kid out.
“The TL,” said Cole, a nickname for the Tenderloin. “What’s going on down there?”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t go down there.”
“Who does?”
“Idiots.”
“Gummy,” started Cole. “I can ask the Grand Theft Auto guys to put your paperwork at the top of the list and get you out of here, but you gotta help me. Weekend’s coming fast.” Cole knew some pro-wrestling pay-per-view was teed up for Sunday. Super Brawl or some shit. Gummy never missed them.
He finished the pizza slice, sucking the flecks of crust off his fingers. He gave Cole a smirk, as if Cole was the idiot.
“Usual deal, right? You didn’t hear from me.”
Cole gave the universal head shake and shoulder roll for, “yeah, duh.”
“I’ve never been there, by the way,” Gummy started.
“The TL?”
“No, the place I’m about to tell you. Got a brother who goes. Idiot.”
“Okay.”
“It’s stupid. Don’t know why it’s still standing.”
“Complete the sentence, Gummy.”
“Bible Study,” he divulged. “There’s this church called St. Cajetan? It’s in the TL somewhere. I don’t know. At night, it’s a casino. My brother goes. Idiot.”
“What am I supposed to do with that? Bet on seven?”
“People talk there. Maybe they’ll say something. If that Bayview shit ain’t made them crazy.”
“All right. And your brother. He goes? Would he be there?”
“Idiot.”
“Could I meet him maybe?”
“You’ve met him,” he reminded Cole. “Little Reggie.”
A memory flashed: No no po-po. No no po-po. No no po-po.
A memory flashed: two hands clanging their cuffs against the window in the backseat of a patrol car. All the way back to the station.
Little Reggie.
“Idiot,” muttered Cole.
Cole pulled a pen out of his jacket and handed it to Gummy.
“Write it on my arm.”
“Write what?” Gummy asked.
“What do you think? His number.”
“Hope he didn’t ditch the phone,” Gummy considered as he chickenscratched. “Brother’s an idiot. Brother’s got problems.”
***
“Brother got the night off?” That was Blake, Cole’s brother, about ten minutes later, heading down the staircase while Cole was heading up. Blake was five years Cole’s junior, with a face and a body kind of like Cole’s but as mom used to insist, Blake was just a little more handsome. Like the second gestation in their mother’s womb benefited from the previous experience.
Blake flicked at Cole’s bomber jacket.
“Or are you just that cold?”
“Heading out,” replied Cole. “Fucking work. You know.”
Blake nodded solemnly, then his face lit up like a bright idea just gave him a blow job.
“Hey! Jean was asking and I think I texted you but you didn’t answer. Dinner at the house tomorrow. What do you want?”
Jean was Blake’s wife. So normal and friendly it made Cole sick.
“I’m full,” Cole spat.
The Hoffer family line at Central Station, a local fixture, up and down the stairs, seeped into the brickwork. Old patriarch Scott L. Hoffer once put down five redballs in a night, that’s five bodies, no known suspects at the start, and he got ’em all. That was 1987. Legendary Scottie. Then he goes and dies, choked on a pretzel, but lo and behold, like the Hydra, here come two more, whip-smart, gung-ho, and fresh from the academy. Be an inspector? Get off the beat? Sure!
Cole had enough bad memories from the beat. He batted those out of his mind.
“You guys are gonna run this place one day,” predicted Puliard. That was seven years ago.
“I didn’t ask for this,” complained Cole to Blake at the time.
“Then don’t take it,” remarked Blake to Cole. There had been a lottery to see which department got whom. Cole was made Homicide. Blake was made Property Crimes. Blake wasn’t happy about the hand-out either, but he always was a Johnny Supercop at heart, and damn, you just don’t say no to that.
“No,” said Blake, back on the stairs with Cole, trying his best to pull off the air of sarcasm. “Homicide’s sitting on its hands? Gee golly whiz, I don’t believe it.”
Cole had just got done lamenting his situation to Blake. With a huff, Cole took another step up to Homicide.
Blake must’ve channeled some brotherly telepathy because he caught on to Cole’s misery and changed his tune. He rubbed his chin like he was molding clay.
“You know,” Blake confided with a hush, “I got a light load tonight. Maybe I finish up early, maybe I come up to Homicide, damn it, maybe you and me, we take a trip out there?”
“Forget it,” Cole answered, and continued up the steps. “Anything but Italian tomorrow night, all right?”
Blake shrugged and continued down to Property Crimes.
Cole stuffed his hands in his bomber jacket pockets. Bring his baby brother along. What an idea. Just what he needed. A one-man-band Greek chorus giving him shit while he’s trying to juggle the dramatic masks of a Sophoclean tragedy told in the TL on a street corner days ago. All the explaining he would have to do, all of the catch-up he’d have to throw down. Where would he even begin?
Once upon a time there was a boy named Cole and a girl named Mia, and they loved each other very much. But a man from her past got in the way and the boy was left to drift. Now the man was gone but the drift remained. Two men, almost equals, with Mia in the middle, the X in the equation. Cole needed to solve X.
So why did it feel like he was spending too much time trying to decipher a Y or a Z or some other irrelevant variable?
Why was Cole’s love life shaped like a silly straw, while Blake’s love life fit together like a plug in a socket?
How come Blake got to plan casual dinners and go home to a bed with his wife who would curl her finger through his hair and ask how everything went?
And how come Cole had to look for love like it was illegal? Why did human connection always feel like a dinner order that’s just slightly off, or a video bogged in blur, or a car he couldn’t have? What god gave him desire in the form of a fractal? For what Jobian purpose? What lesson was meant to be procured? For whose benefit? How much longer did he have to kick life in the ribs until it let him cuff the fucking thing and bring it back home?
“You got nothing,” surfed Kinsey’s words across the folds of Cole’s gray matter.
Why didn’t he? Why did some people get a someone, get close, by default, au naturel, while Cole lived life like a lesser person?
What made that kind of person so much better than him?
What did that kind of person do that lesser persons didn’t?
He was about to find out.
He was about to find out exactly what that kind of person did.
Cole was on floor L. He stepped outside into the brisky Bay air.
He was going to the Tenderloin.