Robert B. Parker’s Buried Secrets

Thirty-Four

“You think you got through to him?” Dix asked.

Jesse sat on his couch at home, the phone to his ear. He’d called Dix. Not about himself this time, he told the psychiatrist. He wanted to talk about Tate.

“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “I’d like to think so.”

“What does your gut say?”

“My gut says he’s like a dog testing the chain in the front yard. Seeing how far he can go.”

“But you still want to give him a chance.”

“Yeah,” Jesse said. “I guess I do. I’m not sure why.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Dix said. “You look at him and you see yourself, just like you did when you looked at the corpse of Phil Burton.”

“What?”

“You’re afraid Burton is your future. And you’re afraid that Tate is your past. You made mistakes as a cop when you were drinking, Jesse. You’ve struggled with your anger. You want to give Tate every chance to redeem himself. But you should know by now: Some people cannot be helped. Some people should not be cops. Maybe you can’t rescue Tate the way you were rescued.”

Jesse thought about that. “You think I’ve got some kind of savior complex?”

Dix laughed. “Of course you do.”

Jesse made a noise in the back of his throat.

“Oh, don’t be like that. Neither one of us is completely mentally healthy.”

“That’s not very reassuring, coming from my shrink.”

“You’re tough enough. You can handle the truth.”

“You mean because we’re both alcoholics.”

“No, but it’s related,” Dix said. “You and I both went into jobs, willingly, where we get into other people’s lives. Where we are resented. Where people will sometimes try to hurt us. And we try to fix them anyway.”

“You talking about being a cop or a psychiatrist?”

“Mostly about being a cop. Far fewer people have tried to shoot me since I put up my shingle. So you tell me: Does that sound like a completely healthy thing to do?”

“No.”

“Right. Most mentally healthy people have firmer boundaries. They don’t need to fix other people. They don’t need to make sure other people behave. They don’t need other people nearly as much in general. They deal with their own lives and let other people deal with theirs.”

“I don’t know many people like that.”

“Thankfully for my practice, neither do I. But we’re talking about cops. Cops are required to be involved in other people’s lives. A good cop always has to walk that line between caring too much and not caring enough. And a bad cop — well, a bad cop doesn’t see a line between himself and other people.”

“Are you talking about Tate here?”

“Right now, I’m talking about you. Why do you do what you do? Why are you a cop?”

“To do the right thing.” No hesitation. Jesse never had any doubt about that, at least.

“Right. That’s because you’re a good cop, boundary issues aside. You know the difference between right and wrong, and you are constantly policing yourself to make sure you stay on the right side of it.”

“It’s not that hard.”

“It actually is,” Dix said. “But that’s not my point right now. A good cop wants to do the right thing. A bad cop wants everyone to do as he says because he says it. A bad cop figures that if he’s doing it, it must be right.”

Jesse knew cops like that. There were cops who looked the other way when things were wrong. And there were cops who actively made them worse.

“And if you challenge that, you’re challenging his idea of himself,” Dix continued. “You’re breaking his identity. That’s dangerous. People will do anything to maintain that image. And if it’s a lie — if it’s not real — they’ll even kill to protect the lie.”

“Probably not someone who should have a badge and a gun, then.”

“Absolutely not.”

Jesse thought about that for a moment.

“I’m not sure Tate is that guy,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

“You better decide soon,” Dix said. “Like you said, the longer his leash gets, the more damage he can do.”

“How do you know so much about bad cops? You run into a guy like that when you were on the force?”

Dix hesitated. That in itself was unusual. For the first time that Jesse could remember, Dix was at a loss for words. Jesse heard him take a deep breath before he spoke.

“I was that guy on the force, Jesse,” he said. “Why do you think I left?”