Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (23 page)

“Bourbon would be nice.”

“With water?”

“No, just on the rocks.”

“A drinker after my own heart. Coming right up.”

Nolan disappeared into the kitchen, and Marianne sat down in a comfortable armchair. He soon reappeared with her drink, and they filled each other in on how their respective days had gone. Nolan said the Auggie case was stranded, and Marianne sketchily described her tour of showrooms. She even took a bit of a risk and told him all about the design world’s new craze for “expensive frugality,” which he seemed to find highly amusing.

Then Nolan ushered her into his dining room, where the table was neatly arranged with two dinner settings. He served red wine, salad, and a handsome plate of savory lasagna. As they ate, the conversation focused on Marianne. She told Nolan a little about her Quaker childhood, her parents’ early deaths, her days as a bohemian artist, her marriage to Evan, her divorce, and her move to Santa Barbara.

Nolan was quietly attentive all the while she talked, but she couldn’t tell what he thought of her story—particularly her sojourn among seedier counterculture types, her limited experiments with drugs, and her marriage to a philandering, megalomaniac artist. Did any of this jar his middle-class values? It was really rather hard to tell.

He’s awfully quiet this evening.

Marianne remembered how boisterous they both had been last night. They had joked, teased, and laughed with terrific gusto. But tonight, everything was much more muted—and more cautious.

Why was that?

A word crossed Marianne’s mind.

Expectation.

Yes, that was it. Last evening had been spontaneous, fun for its own sake. This evening seemed more like a
date,
with all its unresolved uncertainties and anxieties. Marianne felt her heart jump and her throat tighten slightly at the realization. How did
she
expect the evening to end? How did she
want
it to end? Until this moment, it had not occurred to her to wonder.

She had no answers. She knew she was drawn to Nolan. She felt that she had not been this close to an actual living person for a long time. He made more sounds, displayed more textures, exuded more subtle smells, and just generally seemed more physically
present
than anyone else she knew. She couldn’t help but like it.

A living, breathing, sweating, laughing man.

They finished eating, and Nolan began clearing the table.

“A brandy, maybe?” he asked.

“That would be nice,” Marianne replied, a little tersely.

While Nolan was stacking up the plates, the phone rang.

“I’ll take that in the kitchen,” Nolan said.

He got out of his chair and lumbered quietly out of the room, carrying all the plates and utensils with him. Marianne heard him pick up the phone.

“Hello?” Nolan said. “Oh, hi, darlin’. It’s good to hear your voice. What’s going on?”

A girlfriend?
If so, Nolan wasn’t going to any lengths to conceal his affection. There was no furtive quality to his voice, no murmur of, “Please call back later, this isn’t a really good time.”

If it
is
a girlfriend, I sure know where I stand.

Nolan’s voice echoed softly but resonantly through the house. His words became inaudible for a moment or two, but then Marianne heard him say soothingly, “Oh, honey, you worried the same way last semester about that other midterm, don’tcha remember?”

One of his kids. Calling from school.

Trying to get out of earshot, Marianne got up and walked into the living room, looking at all the photos glimmering in the firelight. There were more than she had remembered from her first short visit—studio images and snapshots of men, women, children, dogs, and cats. Here was a couple at a high school prom, elsewhere the same couple getting married.

That’s Nolan.
She tried to reconcile the craggy man she knew with the youthful, bright-faced groom.

Marianne became entranced by the faces. It wasn’t just a stale and static portrait gallery. It was a living world filled with a multitude of people—a vast array of different families contained in one. The pictures represented a kind of immortality—not just for Nolan’s lost wife, but for the babies, the kids, the teenagers his children had once been. There were actually dozens of different children here, and Nolan had taken care to preserve each and every one of them against time. He had held on to them through the years—not in a selfish, clinging way, but lovingly, protectively.

Marianne felt a deep pang. She wished she’d kept
something
of Renee—photographs, videotapes, anything. And she wished she’d kept more of her parents, too, much more than a single small box of yellowed photographs.

I’ve taken too little care of this. It’s my loss.

A few more words wafted in from the kitchen. It sounded like Nolan was sharing a few bits of knowledge with his studious youngster. Marianne gravitated farther away from the kitchen toward the bookshelves. Some of the books were texts in psychology, law, forensics, and criminal justice. There was also an array of popular paperback novels and numerous classics of one kind or another. Marianne’s eyes did not light on a single book with an unbroken binding. They all appeared to have been read and reread.

On an adjoining shelf were the phonograph records. They were all vinyl. Nolan had not yet entered the age of CDs. Marianne’s eyes started at the upper-left-hand corner of the collection and began making their way across the titles, which included jazz, rhythm and blues, and classical—mixed together in dogged alphabetical order.

The large range of titles wasn’t so unusual. Many of Marianne’s friends had similarly varied collections. But they always made a point of departmentalizing their music—keeping the classical away from the jazz and the jazz away from the rock-and-roll as if out of fear of musical interbreeding. Her friends placed records in these separate, monolithic, and highly visible categories to advertise their erudition, to wear eclecticism on their sleeves. Nolan’s indiscriminate arrangement of records could only belong to someone who liked all kinds of music, pure and simple—and didn’t care what anyone thought about him for it.

“Want to hear something?’

Marianne turned with a start. Nolan was standing right behind her, holding two after-dinner brandies.

“I was just looking,” she said. “It’s a nice collection.”

Nolan grinned. “You’re surprised a cop’s got taste?” he asked.

“Not at all,” she said. “These days, I’m surprised when
anybody’s
got taste.”

Nolan laughed. “Go on,” he said. “Pick out something you want to hear.”

“No. You pick something.”

Nolan went straight to the “Js,” took out an old vinyl record of Scott Joplin rags performed by André Previn and Itzhak Perlman, and put it on the turntable. Marianne and Nolan took their brandies and sat down in two large chairs that were pulled up near the fire.

“Was that one of your kids on the phone?” Marianne asked.

“Yeah. Molly. A junior at Berkeley. Going for a psych degree, I guess—that is, if she doesn’t change majors again. She’s got a big midterm coming up.”

“She’s afraid she might do badly?”

Nolan chuckled. “Afraid she might pull an A-minus is more like it,” he said. “Hell, I don’t guess either she or Jack ever got anything lower than a B all the time they were in school.” He sipped quietly on his brandy, then added, “They take after their mother that way.”

“Maybe they take after their father that way, too,” Marianne said.

Nolan chuckled modestly. “Yeah, I wasn’t such a bad student, either,” he said.

They both just looked at the fire for a moment. Marianne could feel the departed wife’s ghost lingering in the room—benignly, unthreateningly, wanting nothing more than to have her presence acknowledged.

“What was your wife’s name?” Marianne asked at last.

“Louise,” said Nolan. “Lost her about five years ago, right around this time of year. Can’t remember if it’s been a little more or a little less than five years.”

He was quiet for a moment. Marianne could feel that it was a good kind of quiet—a nurturing one out of which either of them could speak freely or not at all. It was Nolan’s turn to tell his story, and he could take as long as he wanted to. A sweet Scott Joplin waltz was playing now. Marianne remembered what Joplin had said about his art: “It is never right to play ragtime fast.”

It was good advice for a time like now.

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Louise,” Nolan said at last. “We knew each other all the way back to grade school. We were each other’s first sweethearts. Dated all through high school. Got married when we were both freshmen at UCLA. She was studying sociology, I was studying law.”

Nolan laughed softly. “We both figured we’d save the world,” he said. “It was that kind of time. But we had two babies in the next three years, Jack and then Molly. While we were still in school, can you believe it? Well, we were just a pair of happy idiots, enjoying all the perks of being students, not thinking about the years to come. We thought we could handle everything. I finished my degree on schedule, but it took Louise six years to finish hers. After that, there was no way for me to go to law school. We were flat broke. I had to get a job as fast as I could.”

“So you became a cop,” Marianne said.

“Yeah.”

“Any regrets?”

Nolan’s brow furrowed as he thought about the question. “Louise and I had to skimp over the years, and I sometimes worry that maybe it was hard on the kids. Also, I spent a lot of late nights on cases away from the family. But I think I made up for it during the time we spent together.”

Marianne glanced around the portrait gallery.

Yes. You obviously made up for it very well.

“Besides,” Nolan continued, “I’ve probably done the world more good as a cop. If I’d gone on to be a lawyer, I could’ve forgotten all my ideals and turned into some greedy monster yuppie, just like the rest of my generation. It’s taken some doing in this line of work, but I think I’ve kept my soul. So I guess things worked out for the best. Jack, my oldest, is a clerk in a law firm up in Seattle, going to law school part time. We’ll see how well
his
ideals hold up.”

“I’ll bet he’ll do just fine,” Marianne said.

Nolan smiled. “I’ll bet so, too,” he said.

Then his face darkened.

“When the kids got well into their teens,” Nolan said, “Louise and I both figured it was time for her to go back to school and finish her education. She was way too smart to spend the rest of her life keeping house—an empty house, at that. So she started doing graduate work in psychology. And she took a job doing social work with inner city kids—keeping them off drugs, out of gangs, out of trouble. It had its frustrations, but she loved it. She loved the kids she could help, and I think she even loved the ones she couldn’t help.”

Another silence fell. This silence seemed strangely final, as if Nolan had finished his story and had nothing more to tell. When he spoke again, he sounded as if he had to force every word out of his throat one at a time.

“One night, I was working late at my desk at the division. It was nine-thirty, maybe. I got a call from a buddy on patrol. He was real upset. Wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Just told me to come right away to this alleyway in East L.A. When I got there, I saw her, just like she was when the guys had found her. Even the coroner’s assistants hadn’t touched her. She was splayed in a concrete enclosure next to a rust-colored dumpster. She looked like a tossed-away rag doll. She had bled to death from the knife wounds. You could see from the blood trails that it hadn’t happened there. She must have crawled there to get away. But I still can’t figure out how she got all sprawled like that. Her arm was twisted above and in back of her head and her legs were wrenched every which way. I guess … when you’re in pain and terror and you’re dying … you don’t worry too much about how you look.”

His voice had faded away into a barely audible whisper.

“Did they catch whoever killed her?” Marianne asked.

“Yeah. It wasn’t hard to run them down. A couple of teenagers she’d been working with. They knew her route, knew she’d be stopping at an automatic teller. All they had to do was wait for her across the street from the machine. I’m sure she didn’t resist or scream or anything. They were either junked up or in withdrawal, and that’s probably why … why they killed her. They just got out of control.”

Nolan closed his eyes.

“I remember, after they’d been caught, I decided I had to meet them face to face. I was worried about it. I didn’t know how I was going to react. I was afraid maybe I’d go berserk, pull out my service revolver and blow the both of them away. But when I actually saw them in their jail cells, I didn’t feel much of anything. It wasn’t like I loved or pitied or wanted to help them, but I didn’t
hate
them—didn’t itch to break their necks with my bare hands or watch them die from lethal injections. I wondered if something was wrong with me. Eventually, I figured it was just because I’d loved Louise too much to want to add more deaths onto hers.”

He fell silent again. Marianne thought about herself and Renee—all the unfinished matters, the unanswered questions they had left behind.

“Maybe that’s what it means to love somebody completely,” Marianne said softly. “Losing your capacity to hate.”

Nolan nodded and said nothing.

Marianne took a long, deep breath. “Do you … ever forget she’s gone?” she asked. “Do you ever expect to see her step into some doorway in this house, for her to call you at the office, anything like that?”

Nolan looked at her with a curious expression. “No,” he said. “I never did. The division counselor told me all about denial, told me to expect it, but I never went through it. Don’t get me wrong. I was a wreck. I drank too much for months and screwed up cases and almost got myself fired. But I never went through denial, never failed to get it through my head that she was dead. I guess it was because I saw her in that place, all twisted up like that. It didn’t leave any question, any doubt.”

Marianne watched the fire and thought about Nolan’s words. She had seen Renee’s corpse in the morgue, had mourned with her friends and family. But even so …

“What about you?” Nolan asked. “Have you accepted the truth about your friend?”

“No,” Marianne said simply. “I haven’t.”

“Give it some time. It’s supposed to take time.”

Marianne and Nolan looked into each other’s eyes. They jumped slightly when the phone rang.

“Your other child, maybe?” Marianne asked.

“No such luck,” Nolan said. “I’ll try to keep this short.”

*

Nolan felt an edge of apprehension as he wandered into the kitchen. Other than the occasional chats with Molly or Jack, phone calls were seldom a welcome part of his life. They usually had to do with business—and they almost always came when business was going badly.

He picked up the kitchen phone.

“Hello?” he said warily.

“Nol?”