After (13 page)

9

“Tell me what happened
on the night of March third this year during the traffic stop of Paul Houston.”

By now he should be certain about what happened. But for several moments he’s confused. Stymied. Silenced. But he’s thinking.
March, April, May, June, July, August
—six months. If he doesn’t know now, when will he? He looks at Lester Stovall, the Internal Affairs detective that Matthew Frey wouldn’t let him talk to the night of the shooting, his thin, angular face impassive, the eyes neutral, as though it’s every day that he asks a man to tell him how he came to kill someone.

What happened?
Carson is silent for so long that he feels Matthew Frey shift in the chair beside him, lean over, and ask him if he is okay. There it is again, the question that makes no sense. The question he hates. The question to which no one really wants an honest answer. And then finally he speaks. He speaks and he’s hearing but not hearing his answers. As Carson recounts the events that led up to the stop and what took place during the stop, he wonders if it really happened to him. After six months the incident sounds, to his ears, unbelievable. But even if he won’t claim the incident, its muddy paws have stained him for life. A video camera on the wall facing him films his statement and records every twitch, the shimmering glow of perspiration on his forehead, cheeks and chin, his refusal or inability to look too long at Lester Stovall, the slow, breathless recounting of each moment, as though the remembering and the telling are a physical assault. When he’s finished telling as much as he can remember, telling it the way he’s rehearsed, Carson looks at Matthew Frey, who nods approval.

“The IAD detective isn’t a priest, he’s an investigator, Carson, and you’re to treat his questions as inquiries that require a brief factual response, not second-guessing or conjecture.” That’s what Frey has told him over and over. But in the minutes of the retelling he heard the events as an unexpected resurrection. He told the story the way he was supposed to. Sitting in this room in which the air crackles with the warmth of any possibility, palpable, alive, Carson wants to know and tell the story of that night, to know himself in a new way. There is no other story in his life. This is the story of his life. As the words poured through his lips, he was severed, rent, and simultaneously reformed. He told Lester Stovall what happened. What he did. And the words spoke back to him, under cover, muffled so only he could hear, and now he knows that he cannot leave this stifling small room unless he is in possession of another version of the story. He’s willing to do anything for that version to take shape. He doesn’t care what the new story costs.

“Now I have a couple of questions,” Lester Stovall says, his face suddenly animated, no longer passive, as he leans back in his chair, then stands up and removes his jacket and sits down again. “If Corporal Jordan was on his way to provide backup for you, why didn’t you wait for him to arrive before you proceeded with processing the stop? Why didn’t you have Mr. Houston remain in his car until Corporal Jordan arrived?”

If he had waited. If he had waited. Everything would be different now. He knows that. He has relived the moment when he ordered Paul Houston out of the car so many times he wonders why the incident has not been altered just by his will to make it so.

“I…I’ve thought about that a lot, in fact,” he says, “and I think”—he feels Frey beside him, shifting anxiously. “I had been following him for a while, and…”

“Carson, you don’t want to do this,” Frey whispers urgently.

“I was ready for the stop,” he says anyway, plunging into the answer. “I got out of my cruiser, I guess, without thinking.”

Although Frey’s hand rests heavily on Carson’s arm as if to hold him back from danger or tether him to earth, Carson feels the words he has just spoken have lifted him, curiously, out of harm’s way.

“Without thinking?” Stovall looks at him through his thin, frameless designer glasses, his eyes sharp, blinking, and alert.

“Yes.”

“You know the proper procedure for a traffic stop like this one?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You thought the driver may have been eluding you?”

“I did.”

“Yet you chose not to wait for backup before asking the subject to get out of his car?”

That decision made no sense. Was it a decision? Adrenaline? Instinct? Was I out of control? I wanted to show him I was in control
. He feels himself sinking, liquefying before Stovall’s bureaucratic gaze. “That’s correct.”

Stovall looks away from Carson and writes on a legal pad on the desk.

“Carson, what are you doing?” Frey asks in a loud whisper that Carson ignores.

“How did you approach the driver?”

“I approached the car with my weapon drawn and I told him to get out of the car.”

“Why did you approach with your weapon drawn?”

“Because I thought he was eluding me and I wasn’t sure what I would find.”
Since I hadn’t waited for Jordan, I needed my gun
.

“And because you didn’t wait for backup?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have a few words with him?” Frey asks.

The building is constructed like a bunker, a low, flat, sprawling series of small offices, all concrete walls and cheap, scarred linoleum and fluorescent lights. Outside the room, in the hallway, Frey says, “You’re hanging yourself in there. Why are you doing this?”

“Something happened when I told the story. It just feels like the way I have to handle this. I don’t want to hide anything anymore. I didn’t plan what’s happening.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asks in exasperation.

“Not really. For the first time since this happened, Matthew, I don’t care. I don’t wanna save my ass. I want to get this off my back. Face myself. Face everything about what happened.”

“This isn’t the place for that.”

“I’ve made it that place.”

Back in the interrogation room, Lester Stovall asks Carson, moments after he and Matthew Frey are seated, “What commands did you give the driver?”

Carson folds his hands on the desk and looks at Lester Stovall full on for the first time. “I told him to drop what he was holding in his hand, but he didn’t drop it, and he kept walking toward me and pointing the object at me.”
But you had to be there. You had to be me. It was a blur. And it was the clearest moment of my life. I know there’ll never be another moment that I know so well and remember as a slow-motion catastrophe, my own instant Hiroshima
.

“How many times did you give that command?”

I don’t know. Did he even hear me? Maybe he was pissing his pants, scared and deaf and stupid and sure there was no way he was gonna die that night.

“Several.”

“Why did you fire your weapon?” He hears the tremor of impatience in Stovall’s voice, the judgments, and thinks,
I was afraid. I didn’t know what else to do
.

“I was afraid for my life.”

“How many shots did you fire?”
Seven? Eight? It felt like I unloaded my whole magazine. I’d never fired my weapon before. Never. That night was the first time. The first fuckin’ time
.

“Three. I fired three shots.”

“What did you do after you fired your gun?”

“I examined the driver for his condition. He was dead. And then I saw a cell phone a few feet away from his body.”
And then I wanted to turn my weapon on myself. Then I crawled a few feet away and threw up. And then I lost everything and I still haven’t got it back.
“I radioed in to the dispatcher that shots had been fired.”

“Where did you go
after you left Matthew Frey?” Bunny asks as they sit together on the bed. It’s nine-thirty and she’s been frantic, wondering where Carson went when he left IAD headquarters at three-thirty that afternoon.

“I drove around. Then I needed a drink. In fact, I needed a lot of drinks. So I could stand to look at myself in the mirror.”

“I’m not gonna let you go back into that dark place, Carson. I don’t care what you saw in yourself or think you saw today. I won’t let you take us all back there again.”

“When I heard the story this time, I was hearing a verdict. A judgment that I rendered on myself. And I asked myself the question I haven’t wanted to ask all these months: Am I a bad cop? Have I become the kind of cop I swore I’d never be? If I’m not, how else could this have happened? I’d chalked it all up to a tragedy that couldn’t be helped. I thought what I saw was a gun. It was a mistake. I wanted to believe it happened to me. That I didn’t make it happen. I don’t know what it was. What got into me. Everything Matthew and I had practiced, everything we’d rehearsed, the attitude, the correct type of answers…I lost it. Maybe I didn’t lose it. It didn’t feel like I lost it. It was more like it was lifted or stripped from me. Every question felt like a trial. I walked into that room with cataracts, or blinders. I came out and I’d caught sight of everything I did wrong that night. I caught sight, but it’s a picture I still don’t want to see. And I could tell Stovall was thinking what a fuckup I am. I’d never seen it clear like that in a fellow officer’s eyes, on his face, with no bullshit offers of sympathy or support—how are you? Anything I can do for you? It was all there, staring back at me.

“Leave me alone, okay?” he orders, shrugging out of the grasp of Bunny’s hands on his shoulders. “Leave me alone. That’s the best thing you can do for me now.”

When Carson sees
Carrie Petersen again he tells her, “I don’t know if I can go back. Not with what I know now. It doesn’t matter if they sanction me or send me for retraining or what. I don’t care about that now. There’s nothing the department can do that’ll come close to what I’m going through.”

“Do you want to go back?” Carrie Petersen asks him. She’s been on vacation, two weeks in Aruba, and she’s returned with a bronze glow and highlights in her hair, now shortened to a pixie cut that has made her nearly unrecognizable, Carson thinks. She looks different, and she greeted Carson with a pronounced enthusiasm as she ushered him into her office that he knows is the afterglow of vacation, intense and sure to fade. But she’s the same Carrie, he discovers, once he tells her about the IAD interview, quietly relentless and thoughtful in her performance of what he has come to consider a sixty-minute mental autopsy.

“Sure. I wanna go back.”

“Why?” Her favorite question. No one has ever asked him why so many times. He never realized or imagined the depth of his motivations, how they lay camouflaged, ignored, denied, in the shadow of all his actions.
Why?
The one-word question sends him scurrying in his mind, looking for the hiding places where everything that makes him tick is buried.

“For vindication. To prove in some way that it matters to me that I managed to overcome what happened. That I didn’t really lose everything. I don’t want twelve years to be a waste.”

“Twelve years is a long time, Carson, but not that long. You could start over in a new career.”

“You sound like my wife.”

“Is that a bad thing?” She laughs.

“No comment.”

“What is it that you know now about yourself that you didn’t before?”

“That if I’d done things differently that night, that young man would be alive.”

“You didn’t know that before?”

“I never let myself think about it.”

“And this knowledge makes you feel what?” she asks, her eyes narrowed, lips pursed, forehead wrinkled in quizzical mockery of his pronouncement.

“Like a danger. To myself. To others. Maybe to everybody. There’s something wrong with me. Otherwise it couldn’t have happened. Not the way it did, anyhow.”

“Does that conclusion give you any satisfaction? Does it make you feel in control?”

“At least now I know.”

“Carson, you’ve decided to know; you’ve decided to conclude this about yourself.”

“Maybe I have. And yeah, maybe I do feel like this is where I belong, this is who I am. Who I always was. And I’m a thief in a whole new way. I stole a son from another family. I don’t dream about the shooting as much anymore, but now it’s about that family and the son they no longer have. A thief. A killer, that’s what I am.”

“Do you think you can live in a meaningful way with such a conclusion?”

“I’m taking one day at a time.”

“Tell me about the last couple of years. How’ve you felt about your job? You told me about Eric. When he was killed, what happened in your life?”

“I changed. The job changed. He was more than a friend.”

“In what ways?”

Saying that he was a thief, that he is a killer, that was easier than what she wants him to say now. If he talks about Eric, which he realizes he’s never done with anyone else like this, maybe the talking will bring him back. If for only a moment. “He was a lifeline. I didn’t need the things some of the others on the force need—drugs, booze, other women. I had Eric. I always thought of him as my first real friend. My best friend. I mean, I love my wife and kids. But Eric was out there in the same situations I saw. He understood.”

“What did he understand?”