I was jealous for me and for Cookie. Mostly for Cookie. He was always too nervous or too reserved to do something like that to her. And he’d called this woman in on a case? A charlatan?
Not on my watch. I stood to go prove to Uncle Bob she was nothing more than a fraud when the captain stepped out of the conference room and saw me. He motioned me to his office. After a longing glance toward Ubie, I swallowed hard and followed the captain into his man cave. And what a manly man cave it was. Awards and certifications littered his walls and counterspace, along with files and stacks of paperwork.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked.
“Not so much.”
“That’s too bad.” He sat behind his desk. “Because you are about to feel a lot worse.”
He gestured for me to sit in the vinyl chair across from him. I didn’t. “I want to know why you are having me followed, who those people were, and what you plan to do with those pictures.”
A grimness thinned his lips, like he was about to deliver some very bad news. He stood, retrieved an envelope from his top file drawer, pulled out a stack of photos, and tossed one onto his desk for my inspection.
It was a candid shot of me making what looked like a drug deal outside my apartment building. The photographer made sure to capture the vagrant looking over his shoulder as though watching for a cop as he handed me over something unidentifiable. At the same time, I handed him a few bills, which was very identifiable.
“That’s Chris Levine, a known associate of a man they call Chewbacca, one of the biggest meth dealers in the city.” He tossed another picture down. In it, I was in Misery passing a homeless man a couple of dollars through the window. He was the one who’d handed me the old plastic flower, but that wasn’t in the shot. Naturally. “And that’s Oscar Fuentes. His arrest record is as long as my left leg and reads like a pulp fiction novel. He owed me a favor.” He tossed another one. In this one, I was just getting out of Misery and, once again, handing a man a few bills. I try to be nice, and look what happens. “That’s—”
“I get it,” I said, holding up my hand to stop the tour. “I’ve never bought drugs in my life, and you know it.”
“Sure you have.” A smile that reminded me of sloe gin spread across his face. “And I have the evidence to prove it. Who do you think they’ll believe?”
“All they have to do is test me. I’ll test Pine-Sol clean, bitch.” I was being backed into a corner and did not like it there.
The edges of his mouth twitched. “Oh, I’m very aware of your drug-free existence. I just need insurance.”
“For what?”
“Your silence.”
“You couldn’t just ask? You have to blackmail me?”
“For this I do.”
“That’s so very wrong.”
“True, but just remember what I have on you when I explain my … situation. If I go to prison, you go to prison. I’m just making sure we both have a very good reason to keep quiet.”
“You have my complete attention, Captain,” I said, a cautious anger simmering beneath the surface. “What do you want?”
“I’m not a good person,” he said, seeming to regret that fact.
“Ya think?”
“When I was a kid, my oldest sister was raped by a boy from her school. She was intellectually challenged and he took advantage of that. He was a popular kid, very well liked, from an affluent family. All the things that would allow him to get away scot-free.”
“So he got away with it.”
“For a while. But I’ll get to that. After she accused him of sexually assaulting her, it became a big thing in my hometown. I was from a small suburb near Chicago. Nobody believed her, because why would a kid like that need to rape a handicapped girl? When he could have anyone? The town turned against us. The school turned against her, and what was a little teasing here and there became full-on everyday bullying.”
I could feel the heartache that caused him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to have an ounce of empathy for a man who would set me up so frivolously, so I fought it. I buried it under a mountain of resentment.
“A few weeks later, she couldn’t take the bullying anymore and killed herself.”
That time, a wave of guilt hit me. It had a smooth, pure texture. Zero conflict. Zero doubt. He felt responsible for his sister’s death. In a word, he hated himself, and I realized that had been the odd emotion I felt every time I met him. I just figured he hated me. I got that a lot. But his feelings were directed solely toward himself. That was new. In general, people can’t handle guilt. Their minds won’t let them for very long. So they make up excuses. Excuses work like a salve, allaying the guilt, letting you forget the real problem. For example, every time an abusive husband says something like, “You made me hit you,” he’s twisting the guilt—she didn’t have dinner on the table, so hitting her was surely his wife’s fault.