The Last Policeman - By Ben H. Winters Page 0,13
the windshield.
“All right, man, all right,” he says. “I’ll figure out who juiced the truck. Give me a week.”
“I wish I could, Victor. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” He heaves an extravagant sigh. “Asshole.”
The irony is, pot is the one exception. The use of marijuana has been decriminalized, in a so-far-unsuccessful effort to dampen demand for the harder and more societally destabilizing drugs. And the amount of marijuana I found on Victor France’s person was five grams, small enough that it could easily have been for his personal use, except that the way I discovered it was that he tried to sell it to me as I was walking home from the Somerset Diner on a Saturday afternoon. Whether to make an arrest, under those ambiguous circumstances, is at the discretion of the officer, and I have decided in France’s case not to exercise that discretion—conditionally.
I could lock Victor France up for six months on Title VI, and he knows it, and so at last he emits a long, agitated noise, a sigh filled with gravel.
Six months is hard time, when it’s all the time you’ve got left.
“You know, a lot of cops are quitting,” says France. “Moving to Jamaica and so forth. Did you ever think about that, Palace?”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I hang up and put the phone in the glove box and start the car.
No one is really sure—even those of us who have read the eight-hundred-page law from beginning to end, scored it and underlined it, done our best to keep current with the various amendments and codicils—not a hundred percent sure what the “Preparation” parts of IPSS are supposed to be, exactly. McGully likes to say that sometime around late September they’ll start handing out umbrellas.
* * *
“Yeah?”
“Oh—I’m sorry. Is this—is this Belknap and Rose?”
“Yeah.”
“I have a request for you.”
“Don’t get your hopes up. Not a lot left in here. We been looted twice, and our wholesalers are basically AWOL. Want to come in and see what’s left, I’m here most days.”
“No, excuse me, my name is Detective Henry Palace, with the Concord Police Department. Do you have copies of your register receipts from the last three months?”
“What?”
“If you do, I wonder if I could come down there and see them. I’m looking for the purchaser of one house-label belt, in black, size XXL.”
“Is this a joke?
“No, sir.”
“I mean, are you joking?”
“No, sir.”
“All right, buddy.”
“I’m investigating a suspicious death, and the information might be material.”
“Alllll right, buddy.”
“Hello?”
* * *
Peter Zell’s townhouse, 14 Matthew Street Extension, is a new building, cheap construction, with just four small rooms: living room and kitchen on the first floor, bedroom and bathroom upstairs. I linger on the threshold, recalling the relevant text from Criminal Investigation advising me to work slowly, divide the house into a grid, take each quadrant in its turn. Then the thought of the Farley and Leonard—my reflexive reliance on it—reminds me of Naomi Eddes: it sounds like you’re quoting from a textbook or something. I shake that off, run a hand over my mustache, and step inside.
“Okay, Mr. Zell,” I say to the empty house. “Let’s have a look.”
The first quadrant gives me precious little to work with. A thin beige carpet, an old coffee table with ring-shaped stains. A small but serviceable flat-screen TV, wires snaking up from a DVD player, a vase of chrysanthemums that turn out, on close inspection, to be made of fabric and wire.
Most of Zell’s bookshelf space is given over to his professional interests: math, advanced math, ratios and probabilities, a thick history of actuarial accounting, binders from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Institutes of Health. Then he’s got one shelf where all the personal stuff sits, as if quarantined, all the nerdy sci-fi and fantasy stuff, Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series, vintage D&D rule-books, a book on the mythological and philosophical underpinnings of Star Wars. A small armada of spaceship miniatures is suspended from wires in the doorway to the kitchen, and I duck to avoid them.
In the pantry are nine boxes of cereal, carefully alphabetized: Alpha-Bits, Cap’n Crunch, Cheerios, and so on. There is one empty slot in the neat row, like a missing tooth between the Frosted Flakes and the Golden Grahams, and my mind automatically fills in the missing box: Fruity Pebbles. A stray candy-pink grain confirms my hypothesis.
“I like you, Peter Zell,” I say, carefully closing the pantry door. “You, I like.”
Also in the kitchen, in an otherwise empty drawer beside the sink,