The Nix(161)

He’d fired his gun. A gun had been fired. Something had been shot.

She turned around, expecting to see his corpse on the ground, his brains on the wall. But there he was, staring down at the trash can behind the diner. And she gathered what had happened. He didn’t shoot himself. He shot the dog.

She sprinted away. As fast as she could. And she was two blocks from the alley when his squad car screamed by. He passed her and sped west, in the general direction of the Circle campus, in the direction of the dorms, where Faye, cleaned, spritzed, floral-smelling, her makeup done, her fanciest clothes on, waited for Sebastian to arrive. Alice had given her two more of those red pills, and she’d taken them before her beauty routine. Now their warmth and optimism were spreading. Her excitement at this moment was unbearable. Lonely her whole life, expected to marry a man she didn’t really love, waiting now for this guy who seemed like a fairy-tale prince. Sebastian seemed like a kind of answer to the question of her life. The nervousness had passed and now she was thrilled. Maybe it was the pills, but who cared? She imagined a life with Sebastian, a life of art and poetry, where they debated the merits of movements and writers—she’d defend Allen Ginsberg’s early work; he, of course, would prefer the later—and they would listen to music and travel and read in bed and do all the things that working-class girls from Iowa never got to do. She fantasized about moving to Paris with Sebastian and then coming back home and showing Mrs. Schwingle who the real sophisticate was, showing her father how she was pretty damn special indeed.

It seemed like the beginning of the life she actually wanted.

So she was elated when her phone rang and it was the front desk downstairs saying she had a visitor. She left her room and flounced down the stairs to the ground-floor lobby, where she found that the visitor was not Sebastian. It was the police.

Imagine the look on her face at that moment.

When this big crew-cut cop put her in handcuffs. Led her out of the dorm in silence as everybody watched and she cried, “What did I do?” How could he bear it, her shattered heart? How could he shove her into the backseat of his squad car? How could this man call her a whore over and over for the entire ride downtown?

“Who are you?” she kept saying. He’d removed his badge and name tag. “There’s been some mistake. I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re a whore,” he said. “You are a f*cking whore.”

How could he arrest her? How could he book her for prostitution? How could he actually go through with it? She tried to keep her face calm and defiant when they took her picture, but in the jail cell that night she felt an attack coming on so strong that she curled up in the corner and breathed and prayed she didn’t die here. She prayed to get out. Please, she said to God, or the universe, or anyone, rocking and crying and spitting into the damp cold floor. Please help me.





| PART EIGHT |


SEARCH AND SEIZURE


Late Summer 2011





1


JUDGE CHARLES BROWN WOKE before dawn. Always before dawn. His wife slept in bed beside him. She would stay sleeping there another three hours or more. It had been this way since they were first married, when he was still a Chicago beat cop working the night shift. Their schedules rarely overlapped back then, and it stayed that way all these years—habituated, normalized. Recently he’d been thinking about it, for the first time in a long time.

He climbed out of bed and into his wheelchair and rolled over to the window. He looked out at the sky—dark navy blue, but gathering color. It must have been four o’clock, four fifteen, give or take. It was trash day, he saw. The bins were out on the street. And beyond the bins, parked at the curb, right in front of his house, there was a car.

Which was odd.

Nobody ever parked there. It couldn’t be a neighbor. His neighbors were too far away. One of the reasons he bought here, in this particular subdivision, was its facsimile of private woodsy living. Across the street from his house was a small grove of sugar maples. The distant neighbors were hidden behind two rows of oak trees—one row on his side of the property divide, one on theirs.

He looked at the screen next to the bed where he’d installed the controls for the home’s elaborate security system: no open doors, no broken windows, no movement. The feeds from his various video cameras showed nothing unusual.

Brown chalked it up to teenagers. Always a good scapegoat. Probably a boy secretly visiting a girl down the block. There was some passionate and quick deflowering happening somewhere in the neighborhood tonight. Fair enough.

He took the elevator to the first-floor kitchen. Pressed the button on the coffeemaker. Dutifully it bubbled and spurted, his wife having prepared it the night before. Their ritual. One of the few ways he knows he’s really living with someone. They see each other so rarely. He’s off to work before she wakes, and she’s off to work before he comes home.

It’s not that they avoid each other on purpose—it’s just how things worked out.

When he quit the police and decided to go to law school—this was about forty years ago now—she took evening shifts at the hospital. They were raising a daughter then; it was the compromise they made so someone would always be home with her. But even after the daughter grew up and moved out, their schedules did not change. It had become comfortable. She’d leave a plate of something for him to eat. She’d fix up the coffeemaker at night because she knew he hated fiddling with the filter-and-grounds apparatus, which always struck him as too much to ask of a person at four o’clock in the morning. He was grateful she still performed these small kindnesses. On weekends, they saw each other more, provided he wasn’t in his study all day poring over various documents, precedents, opinions, journals, law. Then they’d catch each other up on the independent and totally separate lives they were living in parallel to one another. They made vague promises about all the things they’d do together in retirement.