FOUR
“Who are you?” The man’s pale blue eyes were looking through me.
I had just walked in the door of the dimly lit basement room and was looking at him across a scarred metal desk. A handwritten sign taped to the door said COLD CASE UNIT in black magic marker.
“Me?” I said to the man behind the metal desk. “I’m Mechelle Deakes. You’re Lt. Gooch, right? They had me posted up in Admin, temporary thing. Acting GLBT Liaison? After my leave of absence, medical leave, administrative diversion, whatever you want to call it? Before that I was doing Narcotics, over in Zone Three. The new detective? Mechelle Deakes? The new . . .” I blinked. He continued to look through me as I babbled at him. I tend to babble when I’m nervous. “They didn’t tell you? The didn’t tell you they were assigning you a new detective?”
The man behind the desk shrugged. It was such tiny motion of the shoulders that you almost couldn’t see it. And it was completely unreadable, inscrutable, impossible to parse. It could have meant he’d forgotten; it could have meant they hadn’t told him about me in the first place; it could have meant he didn’t give a hoot in hell about anything at all. I tried to see myself through his eyes: small, wiry, young, female; skin the color of caramel candy; straightened hair hanging to my shoulders. I probably represented everything he despised—everything he thought had gone wrong with the world in general, and with the department in particular. I knew what the white guys in the department said about black women cops—that we were mouthy shirkers looking for a fat government paycheck, people who couldn’t be trusted to back you up when the chips were down. I knew because they’d tell me to my face. They called black female officers “hairstyles.” As in: “Two officers and a hairstyle responded to the scene.” Hey, but you’re different, Mechelle, they’d always say. You’re not like Them. You’re mad! You’re crazy! Mad and crazy being cop slang for somebody who was good on the street, somebody who could be trusted, somebody who could throw down, who could flip out and go ninja when circumstances demanded.
Lt. Gooch—presumably that was who he was—held out his hand, palm up. “File,” he said.
“File?”
“File.”
“You mean like my personnel file?”
He didn’t answer, just kept holding out his palm.
“Here.” I handed him the envelope that the Chief had given me.
Lt. Gooch took the envelope, then pulled a knife out of his pocket—one of those big black-handled lockblades that every hayseed goober in Georgia seems to carry—and slit the envelope with it, pulled out my file, then made a show of going through the folder, licking his thumb and peering at every page.
I studied his face while he inched through the file. I’ll be honest, I’ve always been nervous around men with blue eyes. A certain kind of pale blue eyes, I’m talking about. Those eyes, they go with a certain kind of Southern white man who is basically your worst nightmare—the eyes of a lynch mob boiled down to its barest, palest essence.
Other than the eyes, Lt. Gooch was undistinctive. His voice was quiet, like sandpaper on a piece of glass. But it carried. He was a little past forty years old, if I were to guess, with weathered skin, like he’d spent a lot of time outside; a blunt, square jaw; and brown hair that was starting to go gray, buzz cut like a kamikaze pilot’s, so short it was barely more than stubble. There was a lump of something in his bottom lip—snuff, I suspected.
Lt. Gooch kept paging through the file, slow as itch. It made me antsy.
“Look, sir,” I said finally. “I know they probably told you all kind of stuff about me, what I did, various things that maybe aren’t even in the file, and—”
I’m a talker, I know this. I open my big mouth all the time when I shouldn’t and sometimes I keep it open even when I can tell people want it closed. But when Lt. Gooch looked up from the file with those pale eyes, I just flat shut up.
Finally, after what was probably close to half an hour of reading my personnel file, Lt. Gooch looked up at me for a minute. “Desk,” he said. He pointed at a cheap metal desk pushed up against the wall, covered with a pile of papers. “Chair.” He pointed at the chair.
I looked at the chair and the desk, the anger rising in me. “Are you saying I have the job, sir?” I said sharply. “Or not?”
Gooch just looked at me, impassive as the sky.
Finally I said. “So, like, what do I do?”
This seemed to insult Lt. Gooch in some vague way. “You tell me.”
“Do you have a case for me to work on?”
Lt. Gooch’s pale eyes just kept looking at me.
“I mean, am I being unreasonable? Asking you a couple things? How I’m supposed to do my job, what I’m—”
Lt. Gooch shifted the dab of snuff in his lower lip, prodded it pensively with a brown-stained tongue. Then he reached in his pocket, took out a very large set of keys, leaned over, unlocked the bottom drawer, opened it, took out a wretched, vile, dirty Dixie cup that was about half full of a disgusting brown liquid, dribbled some brown spit into it, put the cup back into the drawer, closed it, locked it, put the keys away.
Finally he spoke. “You got a week. Go to Records, pull some files, find you a case.”