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It’s 6:40 AM.
Not yet daylight.
The wardroom was empty save for a straggler or two from the graveyard shift. A fluorescent light flickered overhead and threw a dim strobe of white over my desk. It gave me a headache already started by a night of crappy sleep. Maintenance was supposed to change the bulb – we placed the requisition order for it two weeks ago, but you know how it is with City of Atlanta and Fulton County.
This is a City wardroom so it’s not a County maintenance job.
It’s a good thing the crapper never clogged up. We’d be in a real mess.
One more cup of bitter coffee stewed in a Styrofoam cup with which to feed my sour mood, and Mary’s case file spread across the desktop before me. I had my own cup, an old Atlanta Braves mug from the 95 World Series, but sometimes there’s something about the purity of Styrofoam that makes sh*tty coffee taste just right.
That was the case this morning.
Last pot of the night brewed somewhere after 2:00 AM, a couple scoops of granulated sugar and about a three-second pouring of that sawdust looking non-dairy creamer created the just-right consistency of mud water. The right ratio of sugar and caffeine put a charge into the old pulse rate.
Who cares that I didn’t sleep.
Certainly not this morning’s coffee.
There’s not much in Mary’s file that I haven’t already committed to memory. I was there. I saw most all of it. So there’s not a lot about this file that
I don’t know firsthand.
And that’s not good.
There are no secrets hidden here.
I’ve learned them all.
The only secrets now being the same as before, the same as when I reached her lying bleeding and broken in the rain wash as twin taillights flashed in the distance to turn the corner at 14th Street and disappear forever from sight, who did this to her, and more importantly, why?Nine years I’ve spent pouring over the contents of this file, a little less frequently lately as time lengthens the void between now and then. I try, but Mary’s memory becomes glossed over at this point, like a photograph in fact, one stuck somewhere in the center of an old photo album that spends most of its time on the top shelf of your coat closet. I’m starting to forget what she looked like, the sparkle in her smile, and the lilt of laughter in her voice.
Until last night, Mary had become that old photograph, fading and nearly forgotten.
I looked up shortly after seven and saw Frank sitting at the desk opposite mine, coffee cup in hand, slowly shaking his head with an “I-can’t-believe-this” expression on his face.
It was the same old worry-free Frank I always remembered, not the dull-eyed melancholy fellow I sat next to in O’Ryan’s last night.
“I can’t believe you,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s your damn birthday for chrissakes and here you sit, too early in the god damn morning, drinking bad coffee with your head stuck in the past again.”
“I’m just looking things over,” I offered back with an apologetic shrug.
“Well, it’s not right by Mary to look things over like that. I know that’s not how she’d want to be remembered. I sure as hell wouldn’t be.”
I shrugged again, “I know. Sometimes I just pull everything out again and give it a quick once over. You know, maybe something will jump out at me that I might have missed before.”
“John... Jesus, you know that file backwards and forwards. You were a material witness. Half of that stuff in there is because of what you saw. There are no more secrets.”
“I know.”
“John… don’t get me wrong. I loved Mary. I love Mary. She got me through many a tough night with Camille. I’m not disrespecting her memory.”
“I know you’re not,” I said, and played with one of the crime scene photographs, a picture of Mary lying in the gutter. I’d seen the picture enough to no longer be sickened by it.
“Come on John. That’s not Mary. That’s not the Mary you knew. Don’t do this to yourself. The c*cksuckers responsible for this… they got theirs, they got what was coming to them. We might not have been the ones to do it, but guys like that, they always get theirs in the end, and I’m sure whoever did this is river scum somewhere.”
Frank threw an envelope across the desk and it slid to a stop on top of the glossy 8x10 of my wife.
“By the way, happy birthday.”
I picked up the envelope, “Hey thanks. What is it?”
“Open it and find out.”
I did.
Thrashers tickets.
“I don’t know what the deal is with you white people and hockey. I figured you could take Stacy. She’d understand it better than I would.”
I smiled and slid the two tickets into my shirt pocket.
“Thanks, Frank. I appreciate it, I really do.”
“My pleasure,” he said and leaned back, balancing his cup of coffee, and propping his feet up on his desk. “So what brought all this on? Mary’s file and everything.”
I folded the contents back into the manila folder and flipped it closed, sliding the folder back into its familiar slot among active case files in my In Box tray.
‘Damnedest thing,” I said with a chuckle. “Stacy’s birthday present of all things.”
“How so? What’d she get you?”
“A pair of Raybans.”
Frank cocked an eyebrow.
“Oh? I didn’t think you were the sunglass type.”
“I’m not, but these aren’t your ordinary sunglasses.
These are the damnedest things you’ll ever see.”
“No sh*t.”
“They’re not sunglasses per se, but more like a funky X-Box. You know how they’re getting with video games these days.”
“Oh Jesus, don’t get me started on those things. They’re a conspiracy. Demetrius and Jakirra, they have their hearts set on the latest Grand Theft Auto.”
“Well, that’s what the Raybans are I guess. The latest video game, only it is not Grand Theft Auto.”
“Just keep it away from Camille,” Frank said and slid his feet off his desk, leaning forward to doodle on his desk calendar and to fire up his computer. “I’m already losing the battle with those two. Their Dad’s a cop and they’re opting to go all Crips and Bloods on me. Speaking of river scum, let’s see what the latest and greatest in Internet porn has to offer us this morning.”
He clicked on his mouse and waited on this computer to finish the booting up sequence.
“So tell me about this new-fangled video game.”
“It’s not really a video game. It’s more a CGI program I guess. A computer generated video, entirely interactive.”
“Interactive you say?”
“It’ll blow your mind.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What they do, according to Stacy, is that they take your old photographs and literally bring them to life right before your eyes.”
Frank pulled his gaze away from his computer screen and looked across the desk at his partner, genuinely impressed.
“No sh*t.”
I shook my head, “No sh*t.”
“So what was the photograph of?” Frank asked.
“Mary’s fortieth birthday party. At O’Ryan’s remember?”
Frank laughed and shook his head.
“There’s not much about that night I do remember, except for the two-day hangover that followed.”
I laughed, “Yeah, you were pretty wasted.”
“Good and fit-shaced, if you ask me, but how did you know? You didn’t see me all night. I’d been loaded into a cab and sent home well before they ever sang Happy Birthday.”
I laughed some more, “So I heard, but not last night. Last night we talked.”
“We did?”
“Sure did.”
Frank waggled a finger.
“On your video game.”
I nodded.
“Interesting. So what did I say?”
“Well, for starters you called me Uncle John.”
Related Resource: computer desk
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