The Intruders

chapter

SEVENTEEN

On Sunday we had breakfast in Birch Crossing. Afterward we went for coffee, sitting outside so I could have a cigarette. Amy was nice about this, withstanding the cold and denying herself even a pro forma reminder that I was supposed to be giving up. I flicked vaguely through the paper, remaining unchallenged by anything exciting in local news. Amy watched the mother and young daughters at the next table, but after a while her eyes drifted away.

We’d been there a half hour when someone said, “Hi,” and I looked up to see Ben Zimmerman on his way into the coffee shop. He had newspapers under his arm and was wearing battered combat khakis, as usual, along with the kind of sweater you wear to go fishing after your wife has banned its use within civilized company. It struck me, however, that I’d be pretty happy to look the way he did at his age, and being greeted in passing made me feel like we actually lived there.

I nodded. “How’s your friend?”

Ben shrugged, with a half smile. I wasn’t sure whether this meant the friend was as well as could be expected or had died as expected, so I just nodded again, and he went inside.

Amy and I dawdled around the stores for a spell, surrounded by New Age and Mozart. I stood outside watching through a window as Amy fingered a blouse in a color I’d have to call pink. I was surprised. Men of my age and type remain barely aware of pink’s existence, seeing it at close quarters only if they have a baby girl. Wives won’t tolerate it in interior decor, wouldn’t be seen dead wearing it either. It becomes like purple in the Middle Ages—exotic and unknown, and thus intriguing in its suggestion of otherness, among the earth tones and teals and ubiquitous blacks.

When Amy emerged, she raised an eyebrow at me. “What are you grinning at, monkeyface?”

“Never saw you as a pretty-in-pink kind of girl,” I said. “But it’s, like, totally rad. You want to make out at the movies later on? Or go hang at the mall?”

She flushed, slapped me on the arm, and embarked upon a series of unrealistic suggestions as to where I could stick a mall, complete with parking lot. We walked in companionable silence back to the house, wreathed in the smell of firs and pine. It was about as unlike living in L.A. as I could imagine, and in the best ways.

Back home, Amy hit the couch with work and I went into my own study. I didn’t open the laptop right away but sat at the table looking out the big window. I had an idea, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t dumb. And also that it did not merely indicate how hard I was finding it to forget the life I’d left behind.

Being a cop is a strange existence, far more prosaic than the entertainment industry likes to make out. Basically you’re a hall monitor with a gun, dealing with the venal, dishonest, and borderline crazy—and that’s before you leave the precinct, ba-da-boom. You’re the social janitor, patching and mending, trying to keep the place neat and in working order, once in a while joining the endless bar fight of the people who’ve been done wrong versus the people who’ve done it—or who might look like they did, except they were visiting their sister in the hospital at the time, they don’t even have a car and certainly not that type, and why are you hassling me, pig motherfucker, ain’t you got no real criminals to beat up?

The first thing you learn is that we never needed Esperanto. We already had a universal language: untruth. Everybody lies, about everything, all the time. You quickly stop believing what anyone tells you, and you come to realize that the victims will give you worse headaches than the perps will. Either they’re the same people as the criminals but just happen to be on the receiving end this time (and are by Christ going to make the most of it), or they’re middle-class assholes who regard the police as a private security force and who assume that their difficulties can be obviated through confidence and a hundred bucks, proffered discreetly or otherwise.

So you play a role. When you put on your uniform, you become another person. Someone able to block out the fact that this might be the day when the innocuous-looking guy you pull over is pissed at his wife or friend or because he still hasn’t won the lottery and may boil over and reach under his seat for a gun that on any other day would have remained a secret. You try to forget how many weapons surround us: paring knives in kitchen drawers, bottles in bars where fights materialize like junk mail on the doormat, a rusty razor blade hidden deep in the filthy layers around the bum pushing his cart of mysterious trash along the highway—a known local wack job not doing anyone any harm but whom you have to spend an hour moving along because somebody complained and anyway it’s the law— and who surfaces out of fizzy meditations on microwave beams and terrorists who’ve been stealing his pubic hair for long enough to perceive you as a threat compelling enough to defend himself to the death against.

A human being is rarely more than a yard from something he or she can use to damage someone else, and people I know got hurt in all those situations, one stabbed in the throat with a bottle opener by a woman whose mouth was pouring blood but who believed that her life would make no sense if her common-law husband got arrested. The cop got full honors; the woman got a long spell in jail; the guy who’d punched out her teeth in front of her kids is now living in some other woman’s house. Sitting in her chair, fingers drumming on its shabby, ash-dusted arms, unable to understand why her kids are going out of their way to enrage him and why the stupid bitch won’t do anything about it or bring him another beer, and what is it about her face sometimes that makes him want to smash her nose completely flat? Sooner or later one of his scumbag neighbors will run off with his television or his car battery or his shoes, and you’ll turn up and have to treat this guy with the respect he now commands as a victim.

That’s police work. It’s hot sidewalks at twilight. It’s banging on flimsy doors. It’s telling big-eyed children everything’s okay when it’s clearly not. It’s drunken girlfriends who swear that their guy never fucking did nothing—until they realize that their own position is precarious, at which point they’ll volunteer yes, Officer, he might be a Nazi war criminal. And it’s married couples shouting at each other in their yards, hoarse and inexplicable grievances grown so old that even the protagonists don’t recall how they started, and thus it comes down this afternoon to someone forgetting to bring coffee back from the store and so you stand around talking about this for forty minutes, and then you leave, with handshakes all around, and a month later you or someone else will be back to stop them from killing each other over whose turn it was to take out the garbage.

I was on the job for ten years. I turned up and did what I was paid to do, entering people’s lives only when they’d begun to go wrong, after the God of Bad Things had decided to pay a call. In the end my own life started to veer off course, as policemen’s lives do. The problem with being a cop is, you wander into the field of play of the God of Bad Things so often that you wind up permanently on his radar—as a meddler, a spoiler, someone who has tried to mitigate his attempts to stir disappointment and pain into the lives of humankind. The God of Bad Things is a shitty little god, but he has a great memory and a long attention span. Once you’ve caught his eye, you’re there for good. He becomes your own personal imp, perching on your shoulder and shitting down your back.

Or so I believed, every now and then. I know it’s a heap of crap. But still it came to feel that way.

Being a writer actually made sense after this, and not just because I had long ago been an English major in college. Patrol Division is an intensely verbal profession. You spend every day judging what to say and how to say it; learning to get what you want via sentences even the drunk, drugged, or clinically stupid can understand; then interpreting and sifting the replies of people for whom the truth is a third language at best. If it comes to violence, they may have more experience at it than you do, and certainly fewer boundaries. Sure, you can have backup on site within minutes, but it takes only seconds to end your life, and if you had to call in the helicopters last time, then your next walk down that street will be long and hard. Your ability to choose the right words, to judge tone and stance—that’s what the job boils down to 90 percent of the time, not least of all through the truly endless paperwork, in which you learn to express yourself in a clear, concise fashion, with just a touch of fiction here and there.

Certain terms take on an iconic role in your life. “Sir” or “ma’am” is how you reassure victims they’re being taken seriously—but you employ these words with the perpetrators, too. “Sir, would you step out of the car?” “Ma’am, your husband says you have a knife.” “Sir, I’m going to ask you one more time to put down the gun and get on the fucking floor.” It signals theoretical deference, a withdrawable politeness, recalling the way mothers refer to their children by first and last name only when they’re trying not to say “you little fuckhead.” “Perpetrator” is a key term, one through which you reduce the infinity of difference all individuals represent to their being merely the punishable committers of an (alleged) crime, thus setting them in clear opposition to the victim/s, to yourself, to the universe at large. It’s a big, weighty concept, often concentrated to “perp,” and from it everything else follows.

A “weapon” is an object someone can carry that makes it likely he or she is or may become a perp. An “MO” is the characteristic way in which a perp perpetrates. A “victim” is a role created by the act/s of perpetrator/s. An “intruder” is a specialized form of perpetration, enshrining within its eight letters everything that needs to be said about the inviolability of private space (as defined through property law) and the wrongness of someone who puts himself inside the walls we erect against the chaos of other people. Even a murderer is just another kind of perpetrator, nothing more.

Not every cop is concerned with these matters, of course. But some are, just as there are neurosurgeons who scream at the ball game and priests who while away confession planning the evening pizza: Okay, my son, so you harbor lustful thoughts about your neighbor—but the real question is, anchovies, or not? Your job is to find the utterances that provide a structure for each situation, to show a path out of the present moment that does not involve jail or death. Armed with your words, you cleave the night with your judging hand and set the world to rights. In those written reports, at least. The judicial system has a way of blowing the fog right back in. Lawyers have different words and use them to different ends. Their structures are clean and theoretical and do not have to stand the test of working in stairwells, parking lots, and bars.

And when you leave this circus?

Leaving the police force is like getting out of jail, though not in a good way. It’s like being fluent in the language, culture, and geography of a country—which overnight slides off the planet, taking all its inhabitants with it. Suddenly all this insight and autistic absorption means squat. You need instead to understand what’s been happening in the real world, how to deal with people now that you’re not wearing a badge, and what all these weird normal folks have been talking and caring about while you and your fellow inmates were blinker-focused on the bad, bad, bad.

As a readjustment it’s pretty major. Probably only being dead is going to seem like more of a jolt.

The places I had photographed in L.A. were crime scenes, of a specific type. My book was called The Intruders. The cover showed the house where a woman named Leah Wilson had been found dead: just a standard murder by person or persons unknown, but one that really got under my skin. The pictures inside were also locations where a person or persons had unlawfully gained access to someone else’s place of residence or work. Once there, they had committed a crime, from burglary to rape and murder. Houses, garages, the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant, hotel rooms both cheap and expensive, a coffee shop in Venice Beach. None of the photographs showed victims, nor did I try to capture the aftermath of the disturbance. In the text accompanying the pictures, I merely described what took place—as best I could, as a nonwitness—along with a flavor of the neighborhood. In the photos I was trying to take the places back to where they’d been in the world before something came from without and changed their texture forever. I have some idea why I was doing it. I had spent all my working life dealing with after-the-fact. In effect the photographs themselves were untruths, as they always are.

The idea I now had was simple. It’d occurred to me before but I’d dismissed it, because I’d seen The Intruders as a one-shot. Maybe Fisher’s visit had given me a push, though I still believed that the cops were correct in assuming Bill Anderson to be the best suspect in the murder of his wife and child, and so that crime did not revolve around an intruder.

I realized I could do the same thing again, for somewhere other than L.A. Seattle, say.

I wouldn’t have access to information about crimes or long-term knowledge of the neighborhoods, but I could work around the former, and some research and talking to locals could cure the latter. A phone conversation with the crime desks of the major newspapers would be enough to put me on their radar. I could even try talking to Blanchard again, if I could face it. Missing-persons cases do sometimes start with an intruder, after all. The more I sat and stared out the window, the more the idea made sense. I guess I’d always seen myself as a one-shot kind of guy. But how had Gary put it? Something about nailing your colors to the mast. Enough time had passed.

Maybe I had to accept that an ex-cop was what I was.

When I surfaced from these thoughts, I realized I could hear music from the living room. Amy had something playing, which meant she couldn’t be working too hard—and wouldn’t mind my testing the idea out on her.

I was halfway to the door when I slowed, as the music registered as more than generic sound. I listened for a moment, assuming that what I was hearing would change. It did not, however, and so I walked into the living room. Amy was sitting on the couch. She had a sheaf of documents on her lap but wasn’t looking at them. Instead she was staring into the distance, slightly hunched, as if she’d been in the same position for a while.

“Hey,” I said. I felt tense. There had been a time, a year and half ago, when I’d seen her this way occasionally.

She blinked and turned to look at me. “Miles away.”

“What are you listening to? Not your usual kind of thing.”

“We all grow, babe,” she said. “You want some tea?”

“You mean coffee?”

She frowned vaguely. “No. I’d like some tea.”

I shrugged, not even having realized we possessed such a thing, and walked over to the glass doors as she went to the kitchen. While I waited for her to come back, I looked out at fir trees and dogwood and a sky that had lost the morning’s blue clarity and was turning to cool gray. Many types of music go with such a view.

Old-time jazz is not one of them.

An hour later I was running through the trees and finding it hard going. I didn’t usually go out two days straight, and my body didn’t get what I was trying to prove. I wasn’t sure I did either. I’d just felt like I wanted to be out of the house for a while.

I tried to return to what I’d been thinking about in the study, but my mind wasn’t interested anymore. It wanted to worry on the idea of the music Amy had been playing instead. So I tried to empty my head, concentrated on the slap of my shoes on the ground, on the smell of the trees, the cold air as it sucked and pushed in and out of my lungs.

As I pulled back around toward the big pond at the bottom of our land, I realized I could hear my cell phone ringing. I slowed, trying to fumble it out of my sweatpants pocket, then stopped. I didn’t recognize the number on the screen. I walked toward the pond as I put the phone to my ear, looking up at the house, wondering if it was Amy calling.

“Jack,” said a voice. It was male.

Hearing his voice was no less surprising the second time. “Gary, hi. You caught me out running.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Look, we need to talk.”

“I haven’t changed my mind,” I said. I was only half listening. Now that I could see the house, about a hundred and fifty yards up the hill, it looked as though someone was standing out on the deck.

“I’m not really calling about that,” he said, and hesitated. “You were in Seattle a couple days ago.”

“How do you know that?” I said. “And, in fact, how do you even know my cell-phone number?”

“I’d like you to come back here. As soon as you can.”

“Gary, I’m kind of concerned by the idea that you might have been following me. Maybe you’d better come here, explain what’s on your mind. Because—”

“I can’t come to your house,” he said quickly.

“This is starting to sound strange,” I said, keeping my voice steady. I could see now that it was Amy standing out on the deck. Of course—who else? “Round about now you’re going to need to give me a good reason not to end this call and block your number. And call the cops.”

There was silence on the line. Amy was looking out over the forest, unaware that I could see her. Since she wasn’t wearing a coat, she wouldn’t be out there for long. She really doesn’t like the cold, and it was sharp enough now to be sending a thick little cloud of condensation up around her face.

“It’s about Amy,” Gary said. “I’m sorry, Jack, but there’s stuff you need to know.”