The Silent Hour

29

__________

That night we got to meet the much-heralded Gena. Of course, she hadn’t been heralded at all—that wasn’t Joe’s style—which had only made the anticipation greater. If I’d expected someone like Ruth, I was surprised. Gena was about a foot taller, for starters, brunette when Ruth had been blond, blue eyes instead of green, from Idaho instead of Cleveland. She was younger than Joe, too, probably by ten years, and Ruth had been significantly older than him. She was, in almost all ways, the polar opposite of his longtime wife, but that didn’t make her any less likable. She was attractive and witty and intelligent, and Joe’s eyes lingered on her in a way that made me continuously want to hide a smile.

We left the beach and drove all the way into St. Pete to go to a restaurant Joe liked called Pacific Wave. The food was outstanding, and Amy and Gena ran away with the conversation. Joe hadn’t found himself a journalist, but something close. She was an attorney who’d become an advocate for public records and government access, and with those credentials it didn’t take long for her to endear herself to Amy. I also began to understand why Joe was still here in the summer but hadn’t made any remarks about a permanent relocation. Gena was in Florida only temporarily, as a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a renowned journalism center in St. Petersburg. She’d come down on a grant, and that grant would be up in September.

“Then it’s back to Idaho?” Amy asked.

She nodded, and I saw Joe take his eyes off her for the first time while she was speaking.

“How’d you meet, anyhow?” Amy asked. It was a classic female question, I thought, and one that guys never seemed to ask. They’d met, that was all. Wasn’t that enough knowledge? It’s no surprise that some of the best detectives I know are women.

“One of my colleagues at Poynter has a time-share up here,” Gena said. “I came to a party there, got bored, and went for a walk. Joe was sitting on the beach in his lawn chair. Not so noteworthy, you might think, but this was at ten o’clock at night. It stood out.”

Amy looked at Joe, and he shrugged. “There were always a bunch of people out during the day. They got annoying.”

“We got to talking a little, and he was explaining why palm trees are so resistant to wind, even in hurricanes,” Gena continued, and now it was my turn to look at Joe.

“You learn a lot about palm trees growing up in Cleveland?”

“I did some reading.”

“Evidently.”

Gena smiled. “After a while I realized I’d been gone too long, and I had to get back, but I also wanted to see him again. He didn’t seem to be picking up on that—”

“You can imagine what a great detective he is,” I said.

“Well, that’s what I finally had to use. By then I knew what he’d done, and he knew why I was here, so I told him I needed to have someone with police experience come speak at one of my seminars. Talk about public access and the back-and-forth with the media, things like that. It ended up being a fine idea, but I’ll confess it hadn’t been part of the original plan.”

“You spoke to students?” I said to Joe. “To journalism students?”

He nodded.

“Tell them about the good old days, when there were no recorders in interrogation rooms and every cop’s favorite tools were the rubber hose and the prewritten confession?”

“I might have held a few things back.”

After dinner, we drove back to Joe’s building. He mixed drinks for the three of us and grabbed a bottle of water for himself, and we went out to the patio as the heat faded to tolerable levels and the moon rose over the gulf. It was quiet here, and I thought of Gena’s story, of Joe on his lawn chair alone on the dark beach, and I realized that it had probably been a hell of a good choice for him to come here, to be away from the things that he knew and the people that knew him, for at least a little while. We all burn out, time to time. Some people never find that dark beach and that solitary lawn chair, though. I was glad that he had.

At one point, as the conversation between Amy and Gena became more animated and I thought my absence would be less noticed, I got up and walked down to the water and finished my drink standing in the sand. After a while a light, sprinkling rain began, and I realized the voices from the patio had faded. When I went back up, Amy and Gena were gone. Joe was sitting alone, watching me.

“They go inside?” I asked.

He nodded. I took the chair next to him again. It wasn’t really raining yet, just putting forth a few suggestions.

“Amy was telling us about your friend,” Joe said. “Ken.”

“Friend? I’d known him about a week, Joseph.”

“That make it easier, telling yourself that?”

I didn’t answer.

“I’m surprised you’re here,” he said. “Right now, I mean. Something like that happens . . . the guy working with you gets killed, I just assumed you’d dig in.”

“When your partner gets killed, you’re supposed to do something about it, that what you mean? The classic PI line? Well, I don’t have it in me anymore. So try not to get killed.”

“Understandable. Sometimes it’s good to take a few days—”

“No, Joe.” I shook my head. “I don’t need a few days, and when I say I don’t have it in me anymore, I don’t mean to go find out what happened to Ken. I should do that, I know. I should be back in Cleveland right now, working on that.”

“I didn’t say that. I’m just surprised you’re not, because it seems to be your way.”

“Sometimes your ways change. Or get changed.”

He was quiet. The sprinkling rain had stopped, but the wind was blowing harder, and there was no longer any trace of the moon through the clouds.

“Are you coming back?” I said. “It’s why I’m here, and you know that. I need to know if you’re coming back.”

“To Cleveland?”

“No. Well, yes, I care about that, too, but I mean to work. Are you coming back to work with me?”

He said, “I got a call from Tony Mitchell two weeks ago. You remember Tony?”

“Sure. Good cop, good guy. Funny as hell. What this has to do with anything . . .”

“Tony’s retired from the department, too. I expected he’d become a Jimmy Buffett roadie, but evidently that didn’t work out, because he got himself a job doing corporate security for some big manufacturing firm. Place is constantly hiring new employees, taking in hundreds of applications a month. They’ve had some problems with bad hires in the past and want to put a preemployment screening program in place. Tony called me, asked if we’d be interested in running it. Would be real steady work.”

“Screenings,” I said.

“I’d be willing to do something like that,” he said. “Make some money, keep busy. The street work . . . I’ve done it for too long, Lincoln.”

“So you’re coming back, but you don’t intend to do any street work.”

“That’s about it, yeah.”

“Where does Gena figure in?”

“I don’t know yet.”

I nodded.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“That maybe it’s time to fold it,” I said and hated the sound of my voice. I’d gone for detached and gotten choked instead.

He didn’t answer.

“I don’t want to be in this business alone, Joe. I’m not sure I even want to be in it at all anymore, but I don’t want to go at it alone. Hell, you’re the one who dragged me into it. I was running the gym and—”

“And losing your mind. You were so miserable—”

“That was a different time. I’d gotten fired, I’d lost Karen . . . things were different.”

“This job gave you something back. Did it not?”

“Sure,” I said. “It gives, and maybe it takes away a little, too. You’re proof.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Look at yourself. You’re happy down here. Are you not?”

“Generally, yeah. It’s been good. I’m not sure how—”

“You had to go fifteen hundred miles to separate yourself from it,” I said. “From the work. The work was you, and you were the work. I saw it every damn day.”

“I could take that comment the wrong way if I wanted to.”

“You didn’t have anything else, Joe. Nothing.”

“I know I could take that one the wrong way.”

“It was all you were,” I said. “Being a detective didn’t define you, it devoured you, and you know it. Why else did you have to leave, to go so far and for so long? You did it because if you stayed any closer you knew you’d go right back to the job, and you were scared of that. Scared, or tired.”

“You seeing a therapist or just reading their books?”

“Tell me I’m wrong,” I said.

He shifted in his chair, shook his head. “I won’t argue it. I could, but I won’t. Certainly not tonight.”

I didn’t say anything, and after a while he spoke again, voice low. “I thought the biggest headache would be getting you to let me step aside. Didn’t figure you’d be racing me for the door.”

“I’m tired of the collateral damage.”

“Meaning what?”

It came out in a rush. For a long time, I spoke, and he listened. Never said a word, didn’t look at me, just listened. I talked about watching Joe in the hospital when he’d been shot, about John Dunbar’s frightening fixation on a case he’d lost, about the way I felt every time I heard that new security bar click into place at Amy’s apartment, and the uncomfortable pull my gun had on me while I drove to Dominic Sanabria’s house.

“I’ve seen a lot of people around me get hurt,” I said. “You, and Amy, and now Ken Merriman. I’m always untouched, but—”

“You’re untouched?”

I nodded.

“Really?” he said. “Because you don’t look that way right now, Lincoln. Don’t sound it, either.”

We let silence ride for a while then. The rain held off, and once I heard a door open and then close again after a brief pause, and I was certain without turning to look that it was Amy, that she’d walked out onto the balcony and seen me down here with Joe and gone back inside.

“So what will you do?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’ve still got the gym. Maybe put some of Karen’s money into that. Get new equipment, do a remodel, try to expand. Help you out with the employment screening thing, if you need it.”

“And stay away from case work.”

“Yes. Stay away from case work.”

He was quiet again, then said, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out better for you, Lincoln. Like you said, I’m the one who brought you into it. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing. You were a detective. That was as natural and deeply ingrained in you as in anybody else I’d ever seen. I thought it would be good for you, but more than that, I thought you needed it.”

That night, when we were alone in our hotel room, I told Amy about my conversation with Joe. I was sitting in a chair by the sliding glass door, she was on the bed and outside the rain fell in sheets. I thought she might make some arguments, raise some of the same points that Joe had, remind me that when we’d met I was trying to make a living off the gym alone and I was a generally unhappy person. She didn’t say any of those things, though. When I was done talking she got to her feet and walked across the room to me and sat on my lap, straddling me, her hands on either side of my face.

“If you can’t do it anymore, then there’s no decision to be made,” she said. “You just need to step back. Don’t feel bad about it, just do it.”

I nodded.

“One rule,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“You can leave the job. You can leave the city if you want to. You can leave damn near anything, but you better not leave me.”

I shook my head. “Not going to happen.”

“I’ve invested way too much into this ill-advised Lincoln Perry rehabilitation plan to give up now.”

“If anybody ends this, it’ll be you.”

“Remember that,” she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed me before moving to rest her head on my chest. We sat like that for a long time, and then she stood and took my hand and brought me to the bed.

When she was asleep and the rain was gone, sometime around four in the morning, I sat on the balcony with a pad of the hotel stationery and tried to write a letter to Ken’s daughter, the one who’d loved TV cop shows. I wanted to apologize for missing the funeral, tell her how much I’d thought of her father, and explain that he’d been a damn fine detective and that his work had mattered, that what he’d been doing on the day he was murdered had an impact on her world. I sat there for more than an hour, wrote a few poor sentences, and then crumpled the pages in my hand and went back inside.