Chapter 9

The main characteristic of an investigation is tedium. Unless you're Mike Hammer, you don't go around battering information out of people. Especially you don't do that if you're a cop. There may have once been a time when a rubber hose was a standard interrogation tool, but today everyone's a lawyer or knows how to call one, and if you look at someone the wrong way you and the whole city wind up on the business end of a lawsuit – and even if the plaintiff is just being silly, it costs a lot of money to defend against the suit, and cities don't like cops who cost them a lot of money. So an investigation is just asking people questions, thinking over the answers, asking more questions, thinking, asking, thinking...

And people don't want to tell you things. Unlike TV, where there's always one person who'd give up his mother, wife, and girlfriend if only someone would listen, in real life everyone withholds some of the truth. People may not lie outright, but they never tell you everything they know. They either don't think it's important, or they know it's important but are embarrassed, or they just don't like cops, or they have a vested interest in keeping the information to themselves. Sometimes people just like to play games with the cops. So you have to go back to the same people time after time, hoping that eventually someone will give you what you need to know.

Cops develop all sorts of ways to try to get information out of people. They lie, they act like the most important thing they've ever heard is just another boring tidbit, they play stupid. Columbo might have been an overdramatization, but I have in fact seen cops who acted like they weren't any smarter than a rock in order to get people to tell them things.

By now anyone who thinks an investigation is something like Miami Vice probably doesn't want to know how I spent my days. It was an investigation, and boredom was the main feature of it. I had to keep in mind that cops were the subjects, and cops have guns and know how to use them, but in reality the hazard wasn't any greater than that of getting run over by everyone while crossing the street in Albuquerque. Now that's a dangerous enterprise.

Saturday came along and I tried to decide what to do. The Red Hawk PD's investigators generally took weekends off, except for the one who pulled weekend duty, and he usually just made sure the dispatcher had a phone number – which was easier now that everyone's got a cell phone – and went off to relax. My only task was to investigate the question of possible dirty cops, so I wouldn't be on the weekend rotation. On the other hand cops work every day, so the investigation might have to work every day. I'd postponed the decision all week, and come Saturday morning, when I woke up naturally at about 7:30, I realized that I was going to postpone it again – at least until after Darlia left for her fishing trip.

For of course Cecelia and I had approved. I knew Vernon, and knew that Darlia would be as safe fishing with him as she would be in the room with Cecelia. Accidents happen, of course, but so do tornadoes – and it was getting toward that season in Oklahoma. Tornado Alley was actually a bit further east – Oklahoma City is just about in the geographical center of that nasty piece of sky – but the thunderstorms that spawn the ugly monsters roll in from the west, and we were in the western part of the state. The fact is that a tornado can occur anywhere, anytime, though in springtime the Great Plains of the United States get more than the rest of the world put together. So sitting in the room was no guarantee of safety, and Darlia had to learn about the real world anyway – not, of course, that I went through all these reflections; I just said okay. And Cecelia, trusting my judgment of Vernon and my love for our daughter, gave her approval as well.

Cecelia was still sleeping as I got out of bed. I quietly put my clothes on, stepped into my boots, put my hat on my head, and went outside. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the room, letting the quiet soak into me. If you can't – or don't – live in the country, the next best thing is a small town. Albuquerque is never quiet; even at two in the morning there's traffic somewhere, and perhaps an emergency vehicle speeding toward its duty. People party, sometimes they fire off guns – Albuquerque's the only place I've ever lived where New Year's celebrations involve guns going off, and sometimes they get into arguments. In a small town there are a lot fewer people, and consequently a lot more opportunities for quiet.

After a few minutes I heard a door open behind me, and when I turned to look it was Darlia's. She'd dressed in a pair of cutoff jeans and a t-shirt with the arms chopped off – an outfit that she liked to lift weights in. I don't call her Weightlifter for nothing; she's been working out with Cecelia for three years now, though obviously not with the kind of weight Cecelia lifts. My wife is very solicitous of Darlia's health, and never allows her to overdo it – but as I looked at my daughter's stocky form, I could tell that under the layer of subcutaneous fat that she has and Cecelia doesn't, she has actual muscles.

Darlia came up and took my hand. "You're up early, Daddy," she said in her raspy voice that reminds me, depending on where my mind is, of Bonnie Tyler or Ana Gabriel or Kim Carnes, or any of several other singers.

"I've been thinking about something all week, and I guess it woke me up this morning, 'Lia." Because Cecelia and I have always conducted serious discussions in Darlia's presence if she's been around, she's used to them, and conducts her own with us.

"What are you thinking about, Daddy?"

"Whether to take today and tomorrow off."

"Do it, Daddy."

"I'd love to, 'Lia, but I don't know if I should. I want to get this over with and get back to y'all."

"Let's walk around the parking lot," Darlia said, tugging on my hand. I went with her, my boots knocking on the blacktop while her tennis shoes – which, I saw, she was wearing without socks today – made almost no noise. "I want you to get finished too," Darlia continued. "Mommy and I miss you when you're working."

"I miss y'all. It's not any fun being on vacation, and having to work."

"Do you really have to work, Daddy?"

"I suppose I could have told Harry no, and let him find some other way of dealing with it. But I owe him, and I owe this department and this town. And besides, I hate dirty cops."

Darlia changed the subject a bit. "Why do cops become dirty?"

"Cops are people, 'Lia. And so some of 'em aren't as honest as they oughta be, and some are weak, and some are just plain stupid. Police departments try to keep from hiring people like that, but no PD's perfect, and sometimes bad people wind up in the uniform."

"I might want to be a cop when I grow up, Daddy."

I looked down at my daughter. Her face was serious, her mouth – with its lips that are fuller than Cecelia's – clamped tight in some sort of determination. "What for?"

"So I can be a good cop, and catch bad guys, and maybe catch dirty cops."

"Well," I said, "I don't necessarily want you to be a cop. You know that I quit being a cop, and the reasons I did are the reasons I'm not sure I want you to do that job. But if you do become a cop – and you've got a few years yet before you can – I'm sure you'll be a very good one."

"Thank you, Daddy." Now she smiled. "Whatever I do when I grow up, I want to be a good one."

I laughed. "I bet you will, Darlia." I refrained from asking her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Not one of the things I'd thought about when I was a kid were what I was now, and probably few people ever become what they want to be when they're kids.

We were now walking along the road, heading in the direction we'd come from. There was no traffic this early on a Saturday, and our feet on the gravel of the shoulder were the loudest thing we heard. A breeze came by and Darlia sniffed. "What's that smell, Daddy?"

I smiled down at her. "It's horses, I think – maybe cows, but I think horses."

She thought judiciously. "It stinks ... but I kind of like it."

"Maybe you oughta be a farmer when you grow up, 'Lia. Most people would have just said it stinks." That wasn't asking, just commenting.

"Well, I'm not most people, Daddy." Her tone was somewhat severe, but the smile on her face told me it was a mock severity.

I picked her up, an operation that's not as easy as it was when she was smaller. I lightly kissed her nose and said, "No, Darlia, you're not most people – you're a very unique and wonderful person, and I love you."

She put her hands on either side of my head and gave me one of her patented slobbery kisses on the mouth. "I love you, Daddy."

Vernon had come by about 8:30 in his pickup – the only one I've ever seen which could give mine a run for the money in the Decrepitude Sweepstakes, although judging from the sound and the smoking exhaust his engine wasn't in as good a shape as mine – and taken Darlia away. I'd not asked him where they were going, for Vernon knew the fishing holes a lot better than I did and if he'd told me it probably would have been meaningless. I could lose him in five minutes in Lanfair Valley, or on the streets of Albuquerque, but he'd lived and fished around Red Hawk his whole life. I knew he'd take good care of Darlia, and that's what mattered.

By then Cecelia had been up, and we'd mutually decided that I would, indeed, take the weekend off. In fact, while Darlia was out fishing I thought we'd take a drive and get me that CD player. It looked like Woodward was the best bet for Wal-Mart – the atlas I'd bought a couple of years ago at a Wal-Mart in Albuquerque listed one there, and it was the closest good-sized city ... though by my standards Red Hawk was too big; even though I've lived in cities for years, I'm still a desert rat at heart.

As we drove I played George Strait on the CD player in Cecelia's car. She'd handed me her keys, as she sometimes does when the trip's really mine and she's just going along because she wants to be with me, and I'd taken control of the music right away. It's a little game we play whenever I drive her car; I see how long she can take my tastes. I like a variety of music, but her love is jazz, and when I wander away from that she sometimes gets restless. At least I don't listen to rap – I don't consider it music, and Cecelia hates it on philosophical grounds. She once told me, her voice icy, "Being black is no excuse for behaving like savages. The whites have accused us of that – falsely, of course – for so long that I shan't ever approve something which gives them even a shred of reason to continue the calumny." It's one of the few times I've ever heard her speak of either whites or blacks as a group; she judges people individually, for reasons of nature and conviction both.

Since the immediate occasion of the trip was the lack of good country music in Red Hawk, I'd stuck in the George Strait CD. Cecelia tolerates country, but doesn't really like it. But when I'm in a country mood I love George; they call him the King of Country Music, and in some ways he is to today's traditional country what Hank Williams was in his day. He's got the stature to record stuff that "new country" artists wouldn't know how to play, and make it work in spite of the Music Row suits who think real country is for the birds.

But after a while Cecelia reached over and turned the music off. "I think, Darvin," she said, "that we had better do without before I grow spurs and make 'yeehaw' my favorite word." She was smiling, but she was serious too; she just wasn't in much of a country mood.

"Sure, C," I said. Sometimes I actually manage diplomacy – by accident, of course.

"I try to avoid entangling myself in your work," she said next, "but this investigation has interfered with me, and perforce I'm interested. And so I ask: How are you doing thus far?"

"Middling," I said. "You know enough not to expect dramatic results right off the bat, and this kind of gig doesn't move fast at all. I've talked to people at businesses around town, and I've not gotten anything I can put my finger on ... but a couple of times I've gotten something that I wish I could. It's not so much that someone's clearly not telling me something, as it is that someone seems to be filtering his words a bit more than you'd expect. It's real vague."

"I suppose that detective work relies to some extent on intuition and experience."