September 5, 2018
“You all right?” Spengler asked, concerned. “You look dead on your feet today.”
“I’m fine,” Loren said. He took both hands off the wheel and rubbed the ridges of his brows. Alarmed, Spengler saw he was steering the car with his left knee. “I didn’t sleep well, that’s all.”
“Maybe you should let me drive—”
“Yeah, right,” Loren said. He put a hand back on the wheel and Spengler’s heart rate dropped again. “As if I’d let you behind the wheel of my pride and joy.”
“You call this your pride and joy?” she asked, astonished.
“What would you call it?”
Loren waited for her answer, but Spengler kept her mouth shut. Probably the best decision. He snorted and reached over, twisted the volume dial on the radio. His car was an early-nineties brown Chrysler LeBaron—This is the height of luxury, Loren told her when she first got in, thumping his fist on the steering wheel, and she hadn’t been able to tell if he was trying to be funny. Probably not. The car was old, but it ran nicely and the interior was in perfect condition. She’d been surprised at how comfortable it was inside. Good lumbar support, Loren had said as she settled into the passenger seat, not the merest flicker of a joke in his eyes.
Loren was an old white man driving an old white man’s car, all kinds of stereotypes there, and she’d assumed that he’d listen to news radio when he drove, or to country music. But Loren liked rap music and R&B, would only listen to a local Denver station, and he always played it loud.
“One-oh-seven-five,” Loren said when she asked. “It’s the only thing worth turning on around here.”
Maybe she still hadn’t worked with Loren long enough to realize that you couldn’t put him in a box, that if you tried to guess what he was going to say or do you’d almost always be wrong.
“Watch yourself!” Loren shouted, jerking the car to the next lane to avoid being hit, causing her shoulder to ram against the door. He might have been yelling at the other driver, or it might’ve been directed at her. It was impossible to tell.
She’d gotten back to the station before Loren and run upstairs, ducked into Chief Black’s office without knocking first. He’d been typing when she came in, his fingers moving surprisingly fast over the keyboard. She’d expected him to be a hunter-pecker sort of typist. She’d dropped the file Ortiz had given her on his desk and waited as he flipped through. Then he’d turned his rheumy eyes up to her, unimpressed.
“This Ortiz guy sure is getting around,” he said.
“You already know about this?”
“Not much goes on around here I don’t know about.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“I don’t want you to do anything. Give it to Loren if you don’t want it anymore. Or shred it. That might be even better.”
She didn’t understand what was going on. It was like watching shapes move under a blanket. Were those bumps just feet sliding around, or were they monsters? Someone else might know the truth, but she didn’t.
“Here,” she said, not looking away from the road as she jammed the rolled file at Loren, poking him in the side until he took it from her. “I think this belongs to you.”
“What’s this?”
“Look at it.”
“In case you haven’t realized this, Spengler, I’m driving,” Loren said drily. “So unless you’d like Jesus to take the wheel, maybe you’d better just tell me what it is.”
“Detective Ortiz gave it to me.”
Loren gave her a measured look from the corner of his eye, then accepted the folder, laid it across his thighs.
“You read it?”
“Yeah, last night.”
“Okay.”
“Did you kill your partner?”
He didn’t answer.
“Ortiz thinks you did,” she said. “And from what’s in that file, it sure looks like you might’ve murdered him.”
She’d joined Homicide fully aware of all the gossip surrounding Loren: he was mean as a rabid dog, and sometimes stupid. There were stories about his hot temper and the way he liked to use his fists, and the crazy things he’d do to close a case. She’d heard he’d once assaulted a suspect, kicked the guy between the legs so hard it’d actually ruptured his balls. He dressed up like the criminals he was hunting, took on their personas, ate what he thought they ate, picked up their bad habits. Hunting, that’s what he called it, like he was dressed in camouflage with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, pushing aside the undergrowth to track prey.
She’d heard all of this about Loren and laughed. How could all that be true about one man? But when she met Loren, when she spoke to him and saw the slow, pendulating way his eyes would constantly swing back and forth and how he’d clench his fists, open and closed, over and over again, she thought the stories might be true.
“Loren, did you hear me?”
Loren was mean and ugly—so ugly he didn’t just fall outta the ugly tree, he planted the damn thing, put it in the dirt, and pissed on it to make it grow—but he was also smart and quick and funny—she’d heard him call Chief Black Rumpleforeskin and Queef Biscuit—but he also seemed … lost? She couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong with him, because it wasn’t just one thing. It was everything. It was the way he’d always hum under his breath without seeming to notice, or the way he’d start speaking out of nowhere, as if he was restarting a conversation that’d already ended, or the way he’d hold his phone up to his ear and listen, even when the screen was black. And it was his office, the walls covered in crime scene photos and typed reports, and the clown paintings. There was an evidence bag tacked up beside his office window, holding a single child’s shoe. Toddler sized, with several drops of blood dried on the toe and laces.
Loren scared her, but she pitied him, too, although she didn’t know why.
“What if I told you I didn’t want to talk about it?” he asked slowly.
“I guess I’d have to accept it. For now, at least,” she said. “But everyone talks, sooner or later.”
Loren sighed.
“You’re a fool if you believe that, Spengler.”
He didn’t speak again for the rest of the drive.