Walking Shadow

CHAPTER 50

I was in the Port City Police Station, in DeSpain's office with the door closed. DeSpain looked red-eyed and raw sitting behind his desk. He tipped his head forward and began to rub the back of his neck with his left hand.

"I found Jocelyn Colby," I said.

He stopped rubbing but kept his head tipped forward.

"She all right?" he said. His voice sounded hoarse, as if he had brought it up from a dark place.

"She's not hurt," I said.

"Good."

We sat silently for a time. DeSpain still looking down, his left hand motionless on the back of his neck. There was light from the squad room drifting in through the pebble glass door to DeSpain's office. And the green-shaded banker's lamp was lit on his desk. So the room wasn't dark. But it was shadowy, and felt like offices do at night, even a cop office.

"She faked the kidnapping," I said after a while.

DeSpain thought about that for a moment, then he looked up slowly, his left hand still on the back of his neck, the thick fingers digging into the muscles at the base of his neck.

"Oh, shit," he said.

"Exactly," I said.

I reached into my inside pocket and took out the envelope that Healy had given me containing DeSpain's file. I tossed it on the desk between us. DeSpain looked down at it, at the Department of Public Safety return address. He picked it up, slowly, and took his hand away from the back of his neck, slowly, and opened the envelope, slowly, and took out the file, and unfolded it, and read it, slowly. We were in no hurry, DeSpain and I. Port City was eternal and there was no reason to rush. DeSpain looked carefully at the photocopy of his record with the state police, at the copy of the sexual harassment complaint filed by Victor Quagliosi, Esq. on behalf of Jocelyn Colby, which was attached. He read, though he probably could recite it, his letter of resignation, also attached.

When he was through, he evened the papers out, folded them carefully back the way they had been, and put them in their envelope. He slid the envelope back across the desk toward me. I took it and put it back in my pocket. DeSpain leaned back in his swivel chair and folded his arms and looked straight at me.

"So?"

"You want to talk about Jocelyn?" I said.

"What's to say?"

"She's crazy," I said.

"Yeah," DeSpain said and his voice still seemed to rumble up from a place far down.

"She is."

I didn't say anything. DeSpain looked at me. There were deep grooves running from the wings of his nose to the corners of his mouth. I could hear his breath going in and out, slowly. He unfolded his arms, and rested his chin on his left hand, the elbow on the chair arm, the thumb beneath the chin, the knuckle of the forefinger pressed against his upper lip. He puffed his cheeks and blew small puffs of air past his loosely closed lips.

It made a small popping sound.

"She was crazy when I met her," DeSpain said.

"Only I didn't know it. She doesn't seem crazy, you know."

"I know."

"I was married," DeSpain said.

"Grown kids. Wife drank a little, liked a few belts before supper, got out of hand sometimes at parties, but we got along. Then this little broad comes in with a stalker story and I'm working investigations and I catch it."

DeSpain shook his head. In the shadowy room his eyes seemed simply dark recesses, buried beneath his forehead.

"And.. Jesus Christ. She feels my muscle, she wants to see my gun, she wants to know if I killed somebody, and what was it like, and would I take care of her, and she leaned her little tits on me and looked up at me, and I never had anything like it happen to me in my life. Second night on the case we're in bed and she's a volcano. The old lady did it in her flannel night gown, you know?

With her eyes shut tight."

"What about the stalker?" I said.

"The case was bullshit," DeSpain said.

"Guy wasn't stalking her.

She made a pass at him and he turned her down and she made it up.

"That didn't warn you?" I said.

"If she shot me in the belly it wouldn't have warned me," DeSpain said.

"I couldn't get enough of her."

"So you ditched the wife."

"Yeah. Don't even know where she is now. What happened to her. Kids won't talk to me."

He paused for a moment and leaned back. He pressed his hands together and looked at them as if they were new, and then began to rub them slowly together, leaning back as he spoke, so that all I could see of him now was the hands rubbing slowly together in the lamplight.

"Child-care supervisor, the one she said stalked her, he threatened to sue her for defamation, so I went up and knocked him around a little, you know, to discourage him, and the bastard got a lawyer and went right to the C.O."

"The bastard," I said.

"Yeah, well C.O. got him calmed down. Made some sort of settlement that didn't get all over the papers, and I had to go. C.O. liked me, but he had no choice."

In the darkened room DeSpain's voice sounded as if he were talking through a rusty pipe.

"But you still had jocelyn I said.

"Yeah. Except as soon as I moved in with her…" he shrugged.

"She lost interest. Told me I was just an animal, just after sex like some kind of dirty animal. Came home one day and she was gone.

No note, no thanks-for-the-memories."

"You weren't forbidden fruit anymore," I said.

"Sure," DeSpain said.

"But I still knew how to be a cop. I found her easy enough. So I come up here too. C.O. knew some people here. They needed a chief. C.O. gave me a plug."

"To be near her."

DeSpain didn't say anything. In the lamplight his hands were now still. Behind him through the window I saw small lightning shimmer across the sky. It was so far away that I never did hear the thunder.

"And Lonnie Wu?" I said.

"When did you hook up with Lonnie?"

"I never bothered her," DeSpain said.

He leaned forward now, his face back in the lamplight, his thick hands, still pressed together, resting on the desk top.

"I'd go see her sometimes in one of those asshole fucking plays she was in," he said.

"She couldn't act for shit. But I never went near her. Just liked knowing where she was, being around, maybe, if she needed help or anything."

"Lonnie?" I said.

"Fucking gook," DeSpain said.

"Was smuggling in Chinamen.

Been going on a long time. People on the hill that owned the mills, when the mills folded, moved into fish processing, and needed cheap labor."

"So most of the smuggled Chinese stayed here?"

"At first, then the fish plant jobs filled up. So Lonnie would smuggle in a few replacements for people who died, or saved up enough to get out, or got killed for not making the trip payments on time. And the rest he would funnel into Boston, and the tong would place them."

"Kwan Chang," I said.

DeSpain nodded.

"Lonnie was Fast Eddie Lee's brother-in-law," I said.

"I knew he was wired," DeSpain said.

"And he paid you not to see the smuggling."

"Yeah."

"You know who killed Sampson?" I said.

"Yeah."

"You know why?"

"He was fooling around with Rikki Wu."

"You know how he found out?" I said.

"Jocelyn told him," DeSpain said.

"You know why she told him?"

"Probably after Sampson," DeSpain said.

"I never cared."

"She was after Christopholous," I said.

"She thought Rikki was in the way."

DeSpain was silent for a time.

"So, right broad, wrong guy," he said finally.

"Why'd she fake the kidnapping?"

"To get my attention," I said.

"She was after you?" DeSpain said.

"It was my turn."

DeSpain rocked back in his chair and sat, his body slack, his arms limp, his hands inert in his lap. He didn't speak. I didn't either.

Behind him the lightning nickered again, and, distantly after it, some thunder, not very loud.

"You thought Lonnie took her, didn't you?" I said.

DeSpain didn't say anything.

"You figured since she'd told him about Sampson, then she'd know Lonnie did it, and he wanted her quiet."

DeSpain still sat looking at nothing at the edge of the lamplight.

"I figured she was squeezing him," DeSpain said.

"Be her style."

"And he wouldn't just kill her?"

"He knew about me and her. He knew he couldn't get away with killing her. I figured he took her and was going to negotiate something with me."

"So you went and got him and dragged him out to Brant Island and tried to make him tell you where she was," I said.

DeSpain was motionless and silent.

"Except, of course, he didn't know," I said.

The lightning flashed outside, shining for a strobic moment on the black-and-whites parked in the lot, and the thunder came, much closer behind it now, and rain began to rattle on the glass in DeSpain's window.

"So you beat him to death," I said.

DeSpain thought about that for a long time, his hands perfectly still in the circle of light on the desk top in front of him.

"Yeah," DeSpain said finally, "I did."