When we told Wolski about the inauguration, about Frank’s wife and kids, he said he would go see about the guy after all. He got Frank’s real address, using his real name, from a buddy over at the MFD. Peter wanted to go too, but Wolski said we’d already risked too much when we’d unlawfully entered Frank’s apartment. He’d said he’d had to fudge too much paperwork to make that all go away. Pete was irate. Did I think Peter was capable of killing Frank? I’m convinced now that we are all capable. Over millennia, our brains have gotten very large, and very complex, but I know that the simple animal portion of our brains is still powerful. Why did he leave his dog alone in his apartment? Where was he the whole summer? How long had he lied to Dee about his wife and family in Ohio? Where was he the night she went missing? When was the last time he saw her? Did he send the picture of Leif and me to Wolski?
Wolski met us at Ma’s to report back on all of Frank’s dumb answers. Frank had thought of everything. This was not impressive. He’d had a long time to formulate these answers—he’d effectively been missing since Dee had been. Apparently, Frank had asked his buddy to take care of the dog while he was back in Ohio, but the asshole had forgotten and abandoned the animal. Frank had allegedly spent most of his summer in Ohio, where his family lived. He had the apartment in Milwaukee as a sublet while he was training for the firefighting exam. I thought it was a hell of a nice place for a firefighter in training. He planned to move the whole family up from Ohio after the inauguration. His wife had a good job at GE and was waiting to be transferred to the Milwaukee branch. The kids’ names were Samuel and Joshua. They were five and seven years old. Frank said he barely knew Dee. He said it was true they’d met at a bar, but they hadn’t had a relationship. It was his word against ours. He said he was at a cookout in his Ohio neighborhood on the Fourth. Wolski said he didn’t act suspiciously or seem perturbed by the interview; Frank said he was happy to help.
We sat at the kitchen table to receive the news. My grandfather had made that table when he was a young man, and though it was worn by the time he passed it on to Ma, my father had refinished it beautifully. He’d polished it in the garage until it glowed amber. I rubbed my thumb into a whorl of wood until it shone with grease. Ma only nodded at Wolski’s report as if she’d been briefed already. Peter stared at his hands folded tightly on the table. When Wolski was done, he let us be quiet for a minute, and I admired the space he left for silence. He occasionally showed a gentleness and a compassion that I never would have believed he was capable of when I’d first met him. After some long minutes, he asked, “Do you folks have any questions?”
I was certain Ma would (she had so many questions for us), but she only shook her head and stood up. She put her arms out to receive Wolski, and he pushed his chair back brusquely, and they hugged. I caught Peter’s eye and he shook his head at me just slightly. I didn’t know what he was trying to communicate. Ma climbed the stairs and we heard her bedroom door shut with a click. Wolski had a line of sweat running down the right side of his face. I had an urge to dab it away. He jerked his head toward the door and motioned for me and Pete to follow him.
Outside, he lit a cigarette and offered one to me. Pete didn’t flinch when I accepted, and Wolski lit it for me. Maybe Pete figured I was black on the inside anyway. He was maybe right. We had learned all kinds of secrets about each other that summer. I’d learned that Pete was seeing one of Dee’s friends during our informal investigations into her disappearance. He’d met her at Dee’s dorm. I’d never heard of the girl, but she claimed that she and Dee were in drawing together during the spring semester. I saw Peter with the girl in his car outside of Ma’s house late one night. It was dark out, but the sky was purple, and the streetlamps flooded the inside of the car so their faces were lit up. They were arguing. Peter kept tossing anxious glances toward the house. The girl had her hand on the car door. When the argument ended, Peter put his hands on the sides of the girl’s face and drew her into him. They kissed gently, and then he started the car back up and drove her maybe back to her home, or maybe back to the dorm, or maybe to someplace where he could be sure there weren’t any eyes on them. Peter never mentioned the girl to me or Ma.
I inhaled deeply on the cigarette and blew the smoke up to the sky. Wolski was eyeing the sad stick shrine I’d made on the lawn, and sweat rolled from his temples.
“She’s a strong woman,” Wolski said. Pete and I nodded, and Pete motioned for him to go on. “I couldn’t do it to her, though.”
I was getting impatient. “What is it, Gary?” Pete asked him. He almost never used Wolski’s first name, and finally, Wolski wiped the sweat from his temples.
“Frank, or Tony or whatever, tried to tell me that your sister was a . . . an escort or a call girl type of what have you . . .”
“Fucking ridiculous,” Pete said. “What was his evidence?”
“He showed me bank statements, money he’d paid her, I guess. And . . .” His face was pinched. “Pictures . . . of her all dressed up . . . and in compromising . . . situations.”
“First he says he doesn’t know her and that he never had a relationship with her, and now he says she was a call girl,” I protested. “He’s got so many different stories.” I had a memory of Dee on the bus with her Walkman. I had a memory of opening her closet to stacks of SlimFast cans behind which hung long shimmery dresses. Why hadn’t those dresses seemed suspicious to me? Where had she gotten them? Why did she have them? Maybe I’d assumed they belonged to her absent roommate.
“Well, he didn’t consider it a relationship. Now, I have to be honest. I felt compelled to investigate this, so I had one of my buddies who has ears in a couple of those . . . agencies ask around.” I wanted to ask Wolski if this was the first time he’d actually done any investigative work by himself, but I held my tongue and let him continue. I knew what he was going to say. People with that kind of lifestyle go missing all the time. “The girls all have fake names, but one company said they had a woman with Candace’s description working for them this summer. They haven’t seen her in about a month, though.”
Peter shook his head. “You’re an incompetent asshole, you know that? Fuck you, Wolski. Fuck you. I should have believed Peg.”
I felt my face flush. I could see Wolski was hurt, and I suddenly felt for him, though I hated myself for it. “What description? Did you send her picture?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I didn’t want to risk it. The fucking Journal. They’re pariahs over there. That’s the last fucking thing you need is for someone to leak the photo, and then there’s a whole news story about how she was a . . .”
“So what . . . Five-seven? Dark blond hair? Brown eyes? You know that describes half the white girls in this damn city,” I said.
Wolski shook his head. I still had a hard time looking at the man without seeing the twitching St. Bernard at his feet. Blood does not flow like any other liquid I’ve ever observed. “Dee thought they were going to get married. She thought they were serious. He’s a fucking liar. Why would he agree to meet me? To meet my boyfriend?”
“He says he never met you either.”
“We hung out twice!”
“Now, look, I’m not saying I believe him. I’m just telling you. And there’s something else. Frank was acting so smug the whole time, I thought I’d test him a little bit. Asked if he’d mind if I took a look in his car. He’s no fool. He read me the whole riot act about warrants and reasonable suspicion and what have you. Gave me his lawyer’s card. The whole thing. And then he surprised me. He laughed, said he was just joking, clapped me on the back, led me out to the garage, and handed me his keys. Everything was pretty tidy—a couple of atlases in the glove box and a pack of Marb Reds on the dash. It reminded me of the way his apartment looked—sort of sanitized, you know. But then I looked in the trunk and found a whole bundle full of shovels.” Wolski paused.
“Fuck,” Peter said.
“He said his parents own a cemetery, and he helps them out from time to time. We already knew that, though.” Wolski scuffed the toe of his shoe against the stoop. “Look. This guy. I mean. If he didn’t do it, he had something to do with it, and he’s lying through his teeth. I know that. Believe me, I know that. I just want you to know that . . . without a body—”
“We know,” I interrupted him. “No crime.”
“I’m sorry, Pete,” Wolski said.
“I’ve been thinking,” Pete said. “Maybe we should get some more help. I’ve made some appointments with private detectives. I know you’ve got other cases. I’m not saying you’re doing a bad job. I just. I thought we should exhaust all our options. We have to.”
Wolski inhaled deeply. His eyes narrowed. Pete hadn’t said anything about this to me. Maybe he’d discussed it with Ma.
“Those people will suck you fucking dry. I’m telling you right now. They are disgusting. They hang around grieving families and sell you a whole bunch of bullshit. I’m not kidding, Pete. Listen to me. They’ll get you on a retainer and they’ll give you less than nothing.”
Peter turned his back and went inside without a word. I walked Wolski to the car. He seemed surprised by this gesture. I stood on the curb rocking back and forth on the balls of my feet. He turned the engine over, and it hummed awake. He rolled the car windows down and clenched the steering wheel. I leaned into the open passenger window.
“What about the photo?” I whispered, as if Peter and Ma could hear me from the house over the noisy engine idling.
Wolski shook his head. “You don’t know Frank sent it,” he said. “There’s no evidence of that.”
“Who else could it have been?”
“Honestly, I thought you’d had enough of that photo,” he whispered. “I was ready to let you forget about it. Let it go.” I slammed my fist down on the hood of the police car. Did he think he was protecting me? “That is official City of Milwaukee property, Margaret. Step away from the vehicle.” I took my keys out—I had a key to my place with Leif, which I was sure, as I stood there on the curb, was collecting so much dust and grime that it was now inhospitable to life, and my house keys, which I never used because our house was always unlocked. I jabbed the end of my apartment key into the passenger side of Wolski’s car and dragged it across the door. The noise broke something inside my ear. He put the car into a jerky first and sputtered away, and I stood there on the curb with the keys clenched in my fist. Across the street, a woman I didn’t recognize was watching me with her hose running at her feet. The water ran to the curb and swirled down the sewer.
I was embarrassed that I’d keyed Wolski’s car. Peter and I had treated Wolski badly that day. He was an easy target. Hell, he was the only target. He called later that night and left a long voicemail on the home phone. He didn’t seem to care if Ma heard it. Maybe he wanted her to hear it. I think his intentions were good, but much like the rest of us, he never had any idea what he was doing. In the message, he said he wished he was better at his job. He said he wished the department had given him the resources he needed. He said he wished they’d tracked Frank down that first week. He said there was only one piece of knowledge he could pass on to us that might put our souls at ease. He said humans are not so complex as we’d like to believe. They are weak and easily consumed by their own thoughts. When someone commits a crime like murder, it will eat, and eat, and eat away at every part of them, at every part of their life, until it has ruined them and everyone near them. I wished this were true, but I really didn’t know.
And honestly, I didn’t know how that was supposed to comfort us. Pete said before we’d seen the kids, Joshua and Samuel (Pete got in the habit of saying their names), and the leggy woman at the graduation, that he’d had fantasies about killing Frank. I remember Dee’s pained voice on the phone when I’d told her I’d tell Pete about Frank’s infidelity. Don’t, she’d said, he’ll kill Frank. My brother was capable of this. I had no doubt. He said that sometimes, in order to keep from getting too sad, he’d dream up different ways of killing Frank. He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t want to know. But he said after we saw the kids, Joshua and Samuel, that he began to force himself to quit. He couldn’t believe he’d turned into the kind of man who would ruin a family. But he said it was hard to control the fantasies, and he doubted they’d ever go away completely. Now I was scared of him too.