Dust To Dust (8 page)

"He came by now and then. He liked to fish a little. He keeps his gear here. Stores his boat in the winter. It's like a token sibling thing, I guess. Like he thinks it's his duty to patronize my business. Andy's big on duty."

"When did you last speak with him?"

"He stopped by Sunday, but I didn't talk to him. I was busy. I had a guy here to buy a snowmobile."

"When was the last time you had a serious conversation. "Serious? A month or so ago, I guess."

"What about?"

Fallon's lips twisted. "He wanted to tell me he was coming out of the closet. That he was a fag. Like I needed to hear that."

"You didn't know he was gay?"

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"Sure I did. I knew it years ago. High school. I just knew it. It wasn't something he had to tell me." He took another snort of the Crow, then pulled on the cigarette. "I told the old man so once. Way back when. Just because I was pissed off. Sick of it. Sick of 'Why can't you be more like your brother?"'

He laughed loudly then, as if at a hilarious joke. "Man. He damn near broke my jaw, he hit me so hard. I'd never seen him so mad. I could've said theVirgin Mary was a whore and he wouldn't have been half that mad. I sinned against the golden child. If he hadn't been in that chair, he'd have kicked my ass blue."

"How did Andy seem when he told you?"

Fallon thought about it for a moment. "Intense," he said at last. "I guess it was a trauma for him. He'd told Mike. That mustve been a scene and a half I would've gone back to see that. I couldn't believe the old man didn't stroke out."

He sucked on the cigarette, dropped the butt on the floor, and crushed it out with the toe of his work boot. "It was strange, though, you know? I felt sorry for Andy. I know all about disappointing the old man. He didn't."

"Had you seen him since?"

"A couple of times. He came out to ice fish. I let him have one of my shacks.We had a drink one other time. I think he wanted us to be like brothers again, but, shit, what did we have in common besides the old man? Nothing.

"Howd Mike take this?" Fallon asked quietly, staring at the floor. "Andy being dead." He blew out a breath of smoke through flared nostrils. "He sent you out here? He couldn't call me to tell me himself Couldn't bring himself to admit the perfect son didn't turn out to be so fucking perfect after all.That's Mike. If he can't be right, he'll be an asshole."

Taking the bottle of Old Crow by the throat, he pushed to his feet and headed out the door. "Fuck 'em."

Kovac followed, hunching into his coat. It was getting colder, a damp kind of cold that bit to the bone. His head hurt and his nose was throbbing.

Fallon stepped around the corner of the shed and stopped, staring between the shitty little fishing cabins he rented out in the summer. The buildings squatted near the shore of Minnetonka, but there was no shore to speak of this time of year. Snow drifted across land and

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ice, making one nearly indistinguishable from the other. The landscape was a sea of white stretching out toward an orange horizon. "How'd he do it?"

"Hung himself" "Huh."

just that: Huh. Then he stood there some more while the wind blew a fine mist of white from one side of the lake to the other. No dem*aI or disbelief Perhaps he hadn't known his brother as well as Steve Pierce had. Or maybe he'd wished his brother dead in the past and so had less trouble accepting his death by any means.

"When we were kids, we played cowboys," he said. "I was always the one that got strung up. I was always the bad guy. Andy always played the sheriff. Funny how things turn out."

They said nothing for another few moments. Kovac imagined Fallon was seeing those old memories play out before him.Two little boys, their whole lives ahead of them, in two-dollar cowboy hats, riding on broomsticks. Bright futures stained dark by the jealousies and strains and disappointments of growing up.

The images of childhood faded into the memory of Andy Fallon hanging'naked from a rafter.

"Mind if I have a belt of that?" he asked, nodding toward the bottle. Fallon handed it over. "Aren't you on duty?"

"I'm always on duty It's all I've got," Kovac admitted. "I won't tell the brass if you don't."

Fallon turned back toward the lake. "Hey, fuck 'em."

T H E N E I Q H B 0 R W A S in his yard harvesting burned-out Christmas bulbs when Kovac pulled up. Kovac stopped halfway up the walk to watch him as he unscrewed a light from the Virgin Mary's halo and stuffed it into a garbage bag.

"Half of them could burn out and it'd still be like living next door to the sun," Kovac said.

The neighbor stared at him with a mix of offense and apprehension, clutching the garbage bag to his chest. He was a small man of about seventy with a hard-boiled look and small mean eyes. He wore a red plaid bomber cap with the flaps hanging down like hound's ears.

"Where's your Christmas spirit?" he demanded.-

"I lost it about the fourth night I didn't get any sleep on account of your fucking lights. Can't you put that shit on a timer?"

"Shows what you know," the neighbor huffed. "I know you're a lunatic."
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"You want me to cause a power surge? That's what would happen turning these lights on and off. Power surge. Could black out the whole block."

"We should be so lucky," Kovac said, and went up the sidewalk and into his house.

He turned the television on for company, radiated some leftover lasagna, sat on the couch, and picked at dinner. He wondered if Mike Fallon was sitting in front of his big-screen television tonight, trying to eat, trying to temporarily hide from his grief in the ruts of routine.

During the course of his career in homicide, Kovac had watched a lot of people straddle that awkward line between normalcy and the surreal reality of having violent crime disrupt their lives. He never thought much about it, as a rule. He wasn't a social worker. His Job was to solve the crime and move on. But he thought about it tonight because Mike was a cop. And maybe for a few other reasons.

Abandoning the lasagna and Dateline, he went to his desk and rummaged around in a drawer, digging out an address book that hadn't seen the light of day in half a decade. His ex-wife was listed under her first name. He dialed the number and waited, then hung up when an answering machine picked up. A man's voice. The second husband.

What would he have said anyway? I had a dead body today and it reminded me I have a kid.

No. It reminded him he didn't have anyone.

He wandered back into the living room with the empty fish tank and Stone Phillips on the TV Too much like old Iron Mike sitting in his massage chair in front of the big screen, alone in the world with nothing but bitter memories and soured hopes. And a dead son.

Most of the time Kovac believed he was happier without a real life. The job was a safe place. He knew what to expect. He knew who he was. He knew where he fit in. He knew what to do. He'd never been good at any of that without the badge.

There were worse fates than being a career cop. Most of the time he loved the work, if not the politics that went with it. He was good at it. Not fancy, not flashy. Not in the flamboyant way Ace Wyatt had

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been, grabbing headlines and sticking out his granite J aw for any passing camera. But good in the way that counted.

"Stick with what you do best:' he muttered, then turned his back on his dinner, grabbed his coat, and left.

STEVE PIERCE LIVED in a brick duplex on a drab street too close to the freeway in Lowry Hill. The neighborhood was full of yuppies and artsy types with money to renovate the old brownstones. But this portion had been chopped up into odd little angles when the major traffic arteries of Hennepin and Lyndale had been widened years ago, and it remained fragmented not only physically but psychologically as well.

Steve Pierce's neighbors had no gaudy Christmas displays draining the Northern States Power supply. Everything was tasteful and moderate. A wreath here. A swag there. As much as Kovac hated his neighbor, he thought he liked this even less. The street had the feel of a place where the inhabitants were not connected in any way, not even by ahimosity.

He fit right in tonight.

He sat in his car, parked across and down the street from Pierce's, waiting, thinking. Thinking Andy Fallon probably didn't leave his doors unlocked. Thinking Steve Pierce seemed to know a lot and yet .nothing about his old buddy. Thinking there was more to that story and Steve Pierce didn't want to tell it.

People lied to the cops all the time. Not Just bad guys or the guilty. J Lying was an equal opportunity activity. Innocent people lied. Mothers of small children lied. Pencil-neck paper pushers lied. Blue-haired grannies lied. Everyone lied to the cops. It seemed to be embedded in the human genetic code.

Steve Pierce was lying. Kovac had no doubt about that. He just had to narrow the field of possible hes and decide if any of them were significant to Andy Fallon's death.

He pulled a pack of Salems out from under the passenger's seat, held it under his nose, and breathed deeply, then put the cigarettes back and got out of the car.

Pierce answered the door in sweatpants and a U of M hockey jersey, the smell of good scotch hovering around him like cologne, and a cigarette dangling from his lip. In the hours since his discovery of

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Andy Fallon's corpse, his physical appearance had degraded to the look of a man who had been battling a terminal illness for a very long time. Gaunt, ashen, red-eyed. One corner of his mouth curled up in a sneer as he pulled the cigarette and exhaled.

"Oh, look. It's the Ghost of Christmas Present. Did you bring your rubber truncheon this time? 'Cause, you know, I don't feel like I've been abused enough for one day. I find my best friend dead, get in a fight with Hulk Hogan in a cop uniform, and get harassed by a dickhead detective. The list Just doesn't go on long enough. I could go for a little torture."

He made his eyes and mouth round With feigned shock. "Oops! My secret is out now! S and M. Shitt"

"Look," Kovac said. "This hasn't been
my favorite day either. I got to go tell a man I used to look up
to that his son probably killed himself"

"Did he even listen?" Pierce asked. "What?"

"Mike Fallon. Did he even listen when you told him about Andy?" Kovac's brow creased. "He didn't have much choice."

Pierce stared past him at the dark street, as if some part of him still clung to a tattered scrap of fantasy that Andy Fallon would materialize

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from the gloom and come up the walk. The weight of reality defeated him. He flicked the cigarette butt out the door.

"I need a drink," he said, and he turned and walked away from the open door.

Kovac followed him, taking the place in with a glance. Dramatic colors and oak furniture of some retro style he couldn't have named on a bet. What he knew about decorating wouldn't dot an i, but he recognized quality and big price tags. The walls of the hall were a patchwork of artsy photographs in white mats and thin black frames.

They went into a den with dark blue walls and fat leather armchairs the color of a fielder's glove. Pierce went to a small wet bar in one corner and freshened his glass from a bottle of Macallan. Fifty bucks a bottle. Kovac knew because he had been asked to kick in a few so the department could buy a bottle for the last lieutenant when he left. He'd personally never paid more than twenty dollars for a bottle of booze in his life.

"Andy's brother told me Andy stopped by about a month ago to come out of the closet:' Kovac said, leaning a hip against the bar.

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Pierce frowned at that and made a task of wiping imaginary condensation off the soapstone counter." I guess it didn't go well with the old man, huh?"

"What was the point of telling him?" Pierce's voice tightened with anger he was trying hard to camouflage. "Sure, Dad, I'm still the same son who made you so proud in all those ball games," he said with heavy sarcasm to the room at large. "I Just like it up the ass, that's all."

He tipped back the scotch and drank it like apple Juice. "Jesus, what did he expect? He should have just let well enough alone. Let the old man see what he wanted to see. That's all people really want anyway. "How long had you known Andy was gay?"

"I don't know. I didn't mark it on the calendar," Pierce said, walking away.

"A month? A year? Ten years?"

"A while." Impatient. "What difference does it make?"

"Coming out-was that something he'd saved for his family? Everyone else in his life knew? His friends, his coworkers?"

"It wasn't like he was a queen or something," Pierce snapped. "It wasn't anybody's business unless Andy wanted it to be.We roomed together in college. He told me then. I didn't care. It didn't matter. More chicks for me, right? Major competition out of the dating pool."

"Why'd he tell them now?" Kovac asked. "His father, his brother? What brought that on? People don't just up and spill their guts. Something pushes them to it."

"Is there a point to this? Because if there's not, I'd sooner Just sit here alone and drink myself into unconsciousness."

"You don't strike me as someone wanting to sit down, Steve," Kovac said. He pushed away from the bar to lean against one of the fat leather chairs. It smelled like a fielder's mitt too.That probably cost extra.

Pierce held himself stiff before Kovac's scrutiny. People even hed with their body language-or tried to. That was seldom as successful as the verbal variety.

"Your friend took a big step coming out," Kovac said. "And he landed on his chin, at least with his father. That kind of rejection might push a person. A person like Andy, close to his dad, wanting to please him-"

"No." "He wrote an apology on the mirror. Why would he do that if he was just playing around,just getting himself offl"

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"I don't know. He just wouldn't have killed himself, that's an." "Or maybe the note on the mirror wasn't Andy's," Kovac sug-