“I can tell.”
“Sit.”
“Thank you.”
Mallinger pulled out a chair opposite mine.
“There’re a couple of girls at the bar you could roust if you’re working,” I told her.
“I came looking for you.”
“Why?”
“To make sure you’re all right.”
“Why wouldn’t I be all right?”
“Getting run off the highway, seeing a guy’s head half blown off—it shook me up. ‘Course, I’m small town. Might be you see a lot of that sort of thing in the big city.”
I raised my beer.
“All the time.”
And drank.
“Drowning your sorrows, are you?” she asked.
“Did you come here to give me a lecture on sobriety, facing my demons, that sort of thing?”
“No.”
To prove it, she waved at the bartender. The bartender must have known her because he brought a vodka gimlet for Mallinger and another Sam Adams for me without being asked.
“I’ve been thinking about Chief Bohlig,” she said.
“Oh?”
“I believe him. I don’t think there’s a cover-up. I think he dumped the file because it was thirty years old. He dumped a lot of files.”
“You judge people according to your own behavior,” I told her. “You can’t imagine doing something like that, so you can’t imagine why someone else would. Like most honest people, Chief, you think everyone is basically honest, too. They’re not.”
“That’s a cynical attitude.”
I watched her out of the corner of my eye.
“You’re right,” I said. “You are small town.”
We sat silently, watching the game and sipping our beverages. After a few minutes, Mallinger asked, “What kind of music do you like?” I don’t think she really cared. It was just something to say.
“Jazz mostly, but also blues, some rock ’n’ roll. You?”
“You’re probably going to laugh.”
“Not even if I thought it was funny.”
“I listen to Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart . . .”
“Ah, the big bands. What’s funny about that?”
Mallinger didn’t say. Instead, she took another sip of her gimlet. Thus fortified, she said, “What happened today, do you want to talk about it?”
“Not particularly.”
“No?”
“Talk, society tells us these days. Something upsets you, talk about it. Talk to family. Talk to friends. To qualified therapists. Whatever. Talk your problems away. Only the guys who fought World War II, the guys like my father who fought in Korea, who saw hell up close and personal, they didn’t talk about it. Yet they built a nation of astonishing strength and vitality. Talk is overrated.”
“That makes sense,” Mallinger said.
I watched her while she took a sip of vodka.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Me? No. It’s just . . .”
“Chief?”
“It’s just that I don’t know how to behave. No one ever taught me what I should do when I see—when I see things like that. Chief Bohlig, he never . . . I know you’ve seen things. I know you’ve done things.”
“Yes, I have.”
“The suspect you killed, with the shotgun . . . I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never even discharged my weapon except on the range.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“I’ve never even seen a man who was shot before—not until today. I thought . . .”
“You thought I could tell you what to feel?”
“Something like that.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel crappy.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I guess it’s okay as long as you feel something.”
“How did you feel? When you killed the suspect, what was it like?”
“Messy.”
“No. I mean, how did you feel?”
“I just told you.”
She thought about it for a moment, then said, “How do you live with it?”
“I remind myself that I did the right thing, that I saved lives by killing the suspect. I remind myself that that was my job, to protect and serve the public. I remind myself that the world is a better place because I did my job. I remind myself that I’m doing good, that I’m one of the good guys.”
“That works,” Mallinger said.
“It works for me, Chief. The thing is, there is no answer, no formula, no set of rules to follow. It’s like being an alcoholic. You deal with it day by day, some days being better than others, and any code, any philosophy that gets you from today to tomorrow is a good one.”
“That’s a hard way to live.”
“Yes, it is.”
We finished our drinks, ordered another round.
“For what it’s worth, Chief. I thought you behaved very well today. You have nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“You can call me Danny.”
“I should have known Josie was on meth, Danny,” I said. “The way he kept scratching himself, how his teeth were rotting out. Those are pretty obvious signs, but I didn’t see them.”
“Would it have made any difference?”