Free Fall (2 page)

“He became anxious and scared and secretive. We never keep secrets from each other and now there are things that he won’t talk about with me.”

I looked closer at the picture. Thurman had long forearms and a ropey neck and a country boy’s smile. He must’ve been fourteen inches taller than Jennifer Sheridan. I said, “I know a lot of police officers, Ms. Sheridan. Some of them are even my friends. It can be a hard job with unusual hours and you see too much of what’s wrong with people. You don’t want to go home and chat about it.”

She shook her head, telling me that I didn’t get it. “It isn’t just him not talking about the job. He was in uniform for three years and I know to expect that. It’s the way he acts. We used to talk about getting married, and having children, but we don’t anymore. I ask him what’s wrong, he says nothing. I say tell me about your day, he says that there’s nothing to say. He was never like that before. He’s become irritable and snappish.”

“Irritable.”

“That’s right.”

“He’s irritable, and that’s why you think he’s involved in crime?”

She gave me exasperated. “Well, it isn’t just that.”

“Have you seen him perform a criminal act, or heard him speak of it, or seen the results of it?”

“No.”

“Has he exhibited signs of an income other than his police salary?”

“No.”

I tapped the desk. “Sounds like you think he’s up to something because he’s irritable.”

She gave me more of the impatience. “You don’t understand. Mark and I have known each other since the seventh grade. We fell in love in the ninth grade. That’s how long we’ve been going together. I love him and he loves me and I know him better than anyone else in all the world.”

“All right,” I said. “Do you have any clues?”

She frowned at me.

“Clues,” I said. “An overheard snatch of conversation. A subrosa glimpse of a secret bank account. Something that I can use in ascertaining the nature of the crime.” I hadn’t used
ascertaining
in three or four weeks.

She said, “Are you making fun of me?”

I was getting one of those headaches that you get when your blood sugar starts to drop. “No, I’m trying to make you consider what you want and why you want it. You claim that Mark Thurman is involved in criminal activity, but you have no direction in which to point me. That means that you’re asking me to surveil an active-duty police officer. Police officers are paranoid by nature and they move around a lot. This will be expensive.”

She looked uncertain. “How expensive?”

“Two thousand dollars. In advance.”

You could see her swallow. “Do you take Visa?”

“I’m afraid not.”

She swallowed a second time. “That seems an awful lot.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

She put the photograph of Mark Thurman back in her purse and took out a red doeskin wallet. She dug in the wallet and got a faraway look like she was working with numbers. Then she pulled out two twenties and put them on my desk. “I can pay you forty dollars now, and forty dollars per month for forty-nine months.”

I said, “Jesus Christ, Ms. Sheridan.”

She clenched her jaw and brought out another ten. “All right. Fifty dollars.”

I raised my hands, got up, and went to the glass doors that lead out to the little balcony. The doors that came with the office were aluminum sliders, but a couple of years ago I had them changed to a nice set of double-glazed French doors with brass handles. I opened the doors, set them so that the breeze wouldn’t blow them closed, and that’s when I saw two guys sitting across the street in a brown unmarked sedan four stories below. A tall guy with shaggy, thick-cut hair sat behind the steering wheel and a shorter guy with a ragged face slouched in the passenger’s side. The tall guy had long forearms and a ropey neck and looked a lot like Mark Thurman. Sonofagun. I turned away from the doors and looked at Jennifer Sheridan. Nope. She didn’t know that they were out there. “Mark work today?”

She looked surprised that I’d ask. “That’s right. He works Monday through Friday, from eleven until six.”

“He let his hair grow since he went to REACT?”

Jennifer Sheridan smiled, trying to figure me. “Why, yes. He had to, for the undercover work.”

Thurman, all right.

I walked back to the desk and looked at her. You could see how much she loved him. You could see that she trusted him, and that she’d never think that maybe
he was following her. I said, “Do you and Mark live together?”

She made a tiny headshake and a bit of the red again touched her cheeks. “We’ve talked about it, but we decided to wait.”

“Uh-huh. So you believe that he’s hiding something, and you want me to find out what.”

“Yes.”

“What if I find out that Mark Thurman isn’t who you think he is? What if I look, and I find something that changes the way that you feel about him, and the way that he feels about you?”

Jennifer Sheridan made a little move with her mouth, and then she cleared her throat. “Mark is a good man, Mr. Cole. If he’s involved in something, I know it’s not because he wants to be. I trust him in that, and I love him. If we find out that he is in trouble, we will help him.” She had thought about these things. Probably lay awake with them.

I went back to the doors and pretended to adjust them. Thurman and the other guy were still in the sedan. Thurman had been looking up, but ducked back when he realized that I had come back onto the balcony. Fast moves are bad. Another couple of years on the job and he’d know better. You just sort of casually look away. Shift the eyes without moving the head. Eye contact can kill you.

I went back into the office and sat, and Jennifer Sheridan said, “Will you help me, Mr. Cole?”

I said, “Why don’t we do this? I’ll nose around and see if there is anything worth pursuing. If there is, I will work for you and pursue it. If there isn’t, I will return your money, and you won’t owe me anything.”

Jennifer Sheridan said, “That will be fine,” and then she smiled. Her tanned skin dimpled and her white teeth gleamed and there came a quality of warmth to the room as if a small sun had risen from beneath my
desk. I found myself returning the smile. I wrote a receipt in her name for the amount of forty dollars, and noted that it was paid against a due balance of one thousand, nine hundred sixty dollars, payable in monthly installments. I gave back the extra ten with her receipt, then put the forty dollars into my wallet. My wallet didn’t feel any fatter than it had without the forty. Maybe if I went down to the bank and had the forty changed to ones, it would feel like more.

Jennifer Sheridan took a folded sheet of paper from the huge purse and handed it to me. “This is where Mark lives, and his home phone number, and his license plate, and his badge number. His partner’s name is Floyd Riggens. I’ve met Floyd several times, but I don’t like him. He’s a mean-spirited man.”

“Okay.” Riggens would be the other guy in the car.

She took back the paper and scribbled something on the back. “This is where I live and this is my work number. It’s a direct line to Mr. Beale’s office, and I answer his phone, so I’ll be the one who picks up when you call.”

“Fine.”

She stood, and I stood with her. She put out her hand. I took it. I think we were in a contest to see who could smile the most. She said, “Thank you, Mr. Cole. This is very important to me.”

“Elvis.”

“Elvis.” She smiled even wider, and then she gathered her things and left. It was twelve forty-six, and I stopped smiling. I sat at my desk and looked at the paper that she had given me with the information about Mark Thurman and herself, and then I put it into the desk’s top right-hand drawer along with my copy of the receipt.

I leaned back and I put my feet up, and I wondered why Mark Thurman and his mean-spirited partner Floyd Riggens were following Jennifer Sheridan while
they were on duty. I didn’t like the following, but I didn’t have very long to wonder about it.

At twelve fifty-two, Mark Thurman and Floyd Riggens came in.

T
hey didn’t kick the door off its hinges and they didn’t roll into the office with their guns out like Crockett and Tubbs used to do on
Miami Vice
, but they didn’t bother to knock, either.

The guy I figured for Floyd Riggens came in first. He was ten years older than Thurman and maybe six inches shorter, with a hard, squared-off build and weathered skin. He flashed his badge without looking at me and crossed to Joe Pike’s office. I said, “It’s empty.” He didn’t pay attention.

Mark Thurman came in after him and went out onto the balcony, like maybe a couple of Colombian drug lords had ducked out only seconds ago and were hanging off the side of the building with grappling hooks and Thurman wanted to find them. He looked bigger in person than he had in the pictures, and he was wearing faded khaki fatigue pants and a red jersey that said
LANCASTER HIGH VARSITY.
Number 34. He looked younger, too, with a kind of rural innocence that you rarely find in cops, sort of like
Dragnet
as played by Ronnie Howard. He didn’t look like a guy who’d be
into crime, but then, what does a criminal look like? Boris Badenov?

Riggens came out of Pike’s office and scowled at me. His eyes were red and swollen and I could smell the scotch on his breath even though he was standing on the other side of the chairs. Hmm. Maybe he didn’t have the weathered look, after all. Maybe he had the drunk look. Riggens said, “We need to talk about the girl.”

I gave him innocent. “Girl?”

Riggens squinted like I’d spit on his shirt and grinned out the corner of his mouth. Mean-spirited. “Oh, I like it when jerks like you get stupid. It’s why I stay on the job.”

“What are you drinking to get eyes like that—Aqua Velva?”

Riggens was wearing a baggy beachcomber’s shirt with the tail out, but you could still make out the butt of his piece riding high on his right hip. He reached up under the shirt and came out with a Sig 9-mil and said, “Get your ass against the goddamned wall.”

I said, “Come on.”

Mark Thurman came in off the balcony and pushed the gun down. “Jesus Christ, Floyd, take it easy. He doesn’t know what this is about”

“He keeps dicking with me, he won’t make it long enough to find out.”

I said, “Let me guess. You guys work for Ed McMahon and you’ve come to tell me that I’ve won the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes for a million bucks.”

Riggens tried to lift his gun but Thurman kept the pressure on. Riggens’s face went red to match his eyes and the veins swelled in his forehead, but Thurman was a lot stronger, and sober, so it wasn’t much of a problem. I wondered if Riggens acted like this on the street, and if he did, how long he had been getting away with it.
Stuff like this will get you killed. Thurman said, “Stop it, Floyd. That’s not why we’re here.”

Riggens fought it a little longer, then gave it up, and when he did Thurman let go. Riggens put the Sig away and made a big deal with the hand moves and the body language to let everyone know he was disgusted. “You want to do it, then do it, and let’s get out of here. This asshole says she wasn’t even here.” He went to the couch and sat down. Petulant.

Thurman sort of shook his head, like he couldn’t figure Riggens out, like he had tried for a long time and was maybe getting tired of trying. He turned back to me. “My name is Mark Thurman. This is my partner, Floyd Riggens. We know she was up here because Floyd followed her up.”

I glanced at Floyd again. He was staring at the Pinocchio clock. “Maybe Floyd got confused. There’s an insurance office across the hall. Maybe she went there.”

Floyd said, “Okay, she wasn’t here. We’re not here, either, you want to play it that way. You fell asleep and you’re dreaming all this.” He got up and went to the clock for a closer look. “Hurry up, Mark. I don’t wanna spend the day.” Like a little kid.

Thurman looked nervous, but maybe he was just uncomfortable. His partner was looking bad and that made him look bad. He said, “We called in about you and the word is that you’re a straight shooter, so I thought we should talk.”

“Okay.”

“Jennifer and I are having some trouble.”

“You mean, this isn’t official police business?”

Riggens went back to the couch and sat down. “It could be, you want. We could have information that you been up to something. We could even find a snitch to back it up. That would look real good for your license.”

Thurman’s face went dark and he said, “Shut up, Floyd.”

Riggens spread his hands. What?

Thurman came to the front of my desk and sat in the right-side director’s chair. He leaned forward when he sat and stared at me the way you stare at someone when you’re trying to figure out how to say something you don’t want to say. “I’m here for personal reasons, and they have to do with me and Jennifer. You want to pretend she wasn’t here, that’s fine. I understand that. But we still have to talk. See?”

“Okay.”

Riggens went, “Jesus Christ, get on with it.”

Thurman’s face clouded again and he once more looked at Riggens and said, “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m going to clock you, Floyd.” Enough’s enough.

Riggens frowned and crossed his arms and drew himself into kind of a knot. Drunk enough to be pissed, but sober enough to know that he’d stepped over the line. These guys were something.

Thurman turned back to me and sat there, his mouth working. He was having trouble with it, and he didn’t strike me as a guy who’d have trouble with a lot. He made a little blowing move with his lips, then laced his fingers and leaned forward. “We followed her because she’s been pressing me pretty hard about some stuff, and I knew she’d try something like this. She’s pretty strong-willed, and she gets a head on about things, if you know what I mean.”

Riggens made a snorting sound, then recrossed his arms and put his feet up on the little coffee table I have in front of the couch. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t say anything.

Thurman said, “Jennifer and I have been going together since we were kids. I’ve been acting kind of distant with her for the past couple of months and I haven’t told her why, and Jennifer has it figured that I’m
mixed up in something. I know that’s what she talked to you about, because that’s what she talks to me about. Only, that isn’t it at all.”