The Poet (1995) Page 8

  On the computer I had only a couple of messages. The most recent was from Greg Glenn asking how it was going. It had been sent at six-thirty the night before. The timing annoyed me; the guy okayed the assignment Monday morning and on Monday night he wanted to know where I was going with it. "How's it going?" was editor-speak for "Where's the story?"

  Fuck him, I thought. I sent back a brief reply saying I had spent Monday with the cops and was convinced of my brother's suicide. That out of the way, I would begin exploring the causes and frequency of police suicide.

  The previous message on the tube was from Laurie Prine in the library. It had been sent at four-thirty Monday. All it said was, "Interesting stuff on Nexis. It's on the counter."

  I sent a message back thanking her for the quick search and saying I had unexpectedly been tied up in Boulder but would pick up the search package right away. I thought she had an interest in me, though I had never responded to her on anything other than the professional level. You have to be careful and be sure. You make a wanted advance and you're cool. You make an unwanted advance and you get a personnel complaint. My view is that it's better just to avoid the whole thing.

  Next I scrolled through the AP and UPI wires to see if there was anything interesting going on. There was a story about a doctor being shot outside a women's clinic in Colorado Springs. An anti-abortion activist was in custody, but the doctor had not died yet. I made an electronic copy of the story and transferred it to my personal storage basket, but I didn't think I'd ever do anything with it unless the doctor died.

  There was a knock on my door and I looked through the peephole before opening it. It was Jane, who lived across the hall and down one. She'd been there about a year and I'd met her when she asked for help moving some furniture around when she was setting up her place. She was impressed when I told her I was a newspaper reporter, not knowing anything about what it was like. We'd gone to the movies twice and dinner once and spent a day skiing at Keystone but these outings were spread over the year she'd been in the building and nothing ever seemed to come of it. I think it was my hesitation, not hers. She was attractive in an outdoorsy sort of way and maybe that was it. I was outdoorsy myself-at least in my mind-and wanted something different from that.

  "Hello, Jack. I saw your car in the garage last night so I knew you were back. How was the trip?"

  "It was good. It was good to get away."

  "Did you ski?"

  "A little bit. I went out to Telluride."

  "Sounds nice. You know, I was going to tell you but you already left, if you're ever going away again, I could take care of your plants or pick up the mail or whatever. Just ask."

  "Oh, thanks. But I don't really have any plants. I end up traveling a lot overnight for the job, so I don't keep any."

  I turned from the door and looked back into the apartment as if to make sure. I guess I should have invited her in for coffee but I didn't.

  "You on your way to work?" I asked instead.

  "Yeah."

  "Me, too. I better get going. But, listen, once I get settled in, let's do something. A movie or something."

  We both liked DeNiro movies. That was the one thing we had.

  "Okay, call me."

  "I will."

  After closing the door I chastised myself again for not inviting her in. In the dining room I shut the computer down and my eyes caught on the inch-thick stack of paper next to the printer. My unfinished novel. I had started it more than a year earlier but it wasn't going anywhere. It was supposed to be about a writer who becomes a quadriplegic in a motorcycle accident. With the money from the legal settlement, he hires a beautiful young woman from the local university to type for him as he orally composes the sentences. But soon he realizes she is editing and rewriting what he tells her before she even types it in. And what dawns on him is that she is the better writer. Soon he sits mute in the room while she writes. He only watches. He wants to kill her, strangle her with his hands. But he can't move his hands to do it. He is in hell.

  The stack of pages sat there on the table daring me to try again. I don't know why I didn't shove it into a drawer with the other one I had started and never finished years earlier. But I didn't. I guess I wanted it there where I could see it.

  The Rocky's newsroom was deserted when I got there. The morning editor and the early reporter were at the city desk but I didn't see anybody else. Most of the staffers didn't start coming in until nine or later. My first stop was the cafeteria for more coffee and then I swung by the library, where I took a thick computer printout with my name on it off the counter. I checked Laurie Prine's desk to thank her in person but she wasn't in yet, either.

  Back at my desk I could see into Greg Glenn's office. He was there, on the phone as usual. I began my usual routine of reading the Rocky and the Post in tandem. I always enjoyed this, the daily judging of the Denver newspaper war. If you were keeping tabs, exclusive stories always scored the most points. But, generally, the papers covered the same stories and this was the trench war, where the real battle was. I would read our story and then I would read theirs, seeing who wrote it better, who had the best information. I didn't always pull for the Rocky. In fact, most times I didn't. I worked with some real assholes and didn't mind seeing their butts kicked by the Post. I would never admit this to anyone, though. It was the nature of the business and the competition. We competed with the other newspaper, we competed with each other. That was why I was sure some of them watched me whenever I walked through the newsroom. To some of the younger reporters I was almost a hero, with the kind of story clips, talent and beat to shoot for. To some of the others, I'm sure I was a pathetic hack with an undeservedly cushy beat. A dinosaur. They wanted to shoot at me. But that was okay. I understood this. I'd think the same thing if I were in their position.

  The Denver papers were feeders for the bigger dailies in New York and L.A. and Chicago and Washington. I probably should have moved on long ago and had even turned down an offer with the L.A. Times a few years back. But not before I used it as leverage with Glenn to get my murder beat. He thought the offer was for a hot shot job covering the cops. I didn't tell him it was a job in a suburban section called the Valley Edition. He offered to create the murder beat for me if I stayed. Sometimes I thought I had made a mistake taking Glenn's offer. Maybe it would be good to start somewhere fresh.

  We had done all right in the morning competition. I put the papers aside and picked up the library printout. Laurie Prine had found several stories in the eastern papers analyzing the pathology of police suicides and a handful of smaller spot news reports on specific suicides from around the country. She had the discretion not to print the Denver Post report on my brother.

  Most of the longer reports examined suicide as a job risk that went with police work. Each started with a particular cop's suicide and then steered the story into a discussion among shrinks and police experts on what made cops eat their guns. All of the stories concluded that there was a causal relationship between police suicide and job stress and a traumatic event in the life of the victim.

  The articles were valuable because what experts I would need for my story were named right there. And several pieces mentioned an ongoing FBI-sponsored study on police suicides at the Law Enforcement Foundation in Washington, D.C. I highlighted this, figuring that I could use updated statistics from the bureau or foundation to lend my story freshness and credibility.

  The phone rang and it was my mother. We hadn't spoken since the funeral. After a few preliminary questions about my trip and how everybody was doing, she got to the point.

  "Riley told me you are going to write about Sean."

  It wasn't a question but I answered as if it was.

  "Yes, I am."

  "Why, John?"

  She was the only one who called me John.

  "Because I have to. I . . . just can't go on now like it didn't happen. I have to at least try to understand."

  "You always took things apart when
you were a boy. You remember? All the toys you ruined."

  "What are you talking about, Mom? This is-"

  "What I am saying is that when you take things apart you can't always put them back together again. Then what have you got? Nothing, Johnny, you have nothing."

  "Mom, you're not making sense. Look, I have to do this."

  I did not understand why I was so quick to anger when I talked to her.

  "Have you thought about anyone else besides yourself? Do you know how putting this in the paper can hurt people?"

  "You mean Dad? It might also help him."

  There was a long silence and I imagined her in her kitchen at the table, eyes closed and holding the phone to her ear. My father was probably sitting there, too, afraid to talk to me about it.

  "Did you have any idea?" I asked quietly. "Did either of you?"

  "Of course not," she said sadly. "No one knew."

  More silence and then she made her last plea.

  "Think about it, John. It's better to heal in private."

  "Like with Sarah?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You never talked about it . . . you never talked to me."

  "I can't talk about that now."

  "You never can. It's only been twenty years."

  "Don't be sarcastic about something like that."

  "I'm sorry. Look, I'm not trying to be like this."

  "Just think about what I asked you."

  "I will," I said. "I'll let you know."

  She hung up as angry with me as I was with her. It bothered me that she didn't want me to write about Sean. It was almost as if she was still protecting and favoring him. He was gone. I was still here.

  I straightened up in my seat so I could look over the sound partitions of the pod my desk was in. I could see the newsroom was filling up now. Glenn was out of his office and at the city desk talking with the morning editor about the coverage plan for the abortion-doctor shooting. I slumped back down in my chair so they wouldn't see me and get the idea of assigning me to rewrite. I was always dodging rewrite. They'd send out a bunch of reporters to a crime scene or disaster and these people would call their info back to me. I then had to write up the story on deadline and decide which names went on the byline. It was the newspaper business at its most fast and furious, but I was burned out by it. I just wanted to write my stories about murder and be left alone.

  I almost took the printout up to the cafeteria so I'd be out of sight but decided to take my chances. I went back to reading. The most impressive piece had run in the New York Times five months earlier. No surprise there. The Times was the Holy Grail of journalism. The best. I started reading the piece and then decided to put it down and save it for last. After I had scanned and read through the rest of the material, I went up for another cup of coffee, then started to reread the Times article, taking my time with it.

  The news peg was the seemingly unrelated suicides of three of New York's finest within a six-week period. The victims didn't know each other but all succumbed to the police blues, as it was called in the article. Two with their guns at home; one hanged himself in a heroin shooting gallery while six stoned hypes watched in dazed horror. The article reported at length on the ongoing police suicide study being conducted jointly by the FBI's Behavioral Science Services in Quantico, Virginia, and the Law Enforcement Foundation. The article quoted the foundation's director, Nathan Ford, and I wrote the name down in my notebook before going on. Ford said the project had studied every reported police suicide in the last five years looking for similarities in causes. He said the bottom line was that it was impossible to determine who might be susceptible to the police blues. But once diagnosed, it could be properly treated if a suffering officer sought help. Ford said the goal of the project was to build a database that could be translated into a protocol that would help police managers spot officers with the police blues before it was too late.

  The Times article included a sidebar story about a year-old Chicago case where the officer had come forward but still was not saved. As I read, my stomach tightened. The article said Chicago police detective John Brooks had begun therapy sessions with a psychiatrist after a particular homicide case he was assigned to began bothering him. The case was the kidnapping and murder of a twelve-year-old boy named Bobby Smathers. The boy was missing for two days before his remains were found in a snowbank near the Lincoln Park Zoo. He had been strangled. Eight of his fingers were missing.

  An autopsy determined that the fingers had been severed before his death. That, and not being able to identify and catch the killer, apparently was too much for Brooks to take.

  Mr. Brooks, a highly regarded investigator, took the death of the precocious, brown-eyed boy unusually hard.

  After supervisors and colleagues became aware that it was affecting his work, he took a four-week leave and began intensive therapy sessions with Dr. Ronald Cantor, whom he was referred to by a Chicago Police Department psychologist.

  At the start of these sessions, according to Dr. Cantor, Brooks openly spoke of his suicidal feelings and said he was haunted by dreams of the young boy screaming in agony.

  After twenty therapy sessions over a four-week period, Dr. Cantor approved of the detective's return to his assignment in the homicide unit. Mr. Brooks by all accounts functioned properly and continued to handle and solve several new homicide cases. He told friends that his nightmares were gone. Known as "Jumpin' John" because of his frenetic, go get'em attitude, Mr. Brooks even continued his ultimately unsuccessful pursuit of the killer of Bobby Smathers.

  But sometime during the cold Chicago winter something apparently changed. On March 13-which would have been the thirteenth birthday celebrated by the Smathers boy. Mr. Brooks sat in his favorite chair in the den where he liked to write poems as a distraction from his job as a homicide detective. He'd taken at least two tablets of Percocet he had left over from treatment of a back injury the year before. He wrote a single line in his poetry notebook. Then he put the barrel of his .38 Special into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was found by his wife when she came home from work.

  The death of Mr. Brooks left family and friends bereaved and full of questions. What could they have done? What were the signs they had missed? Cantor shook his head wistfully when asked during an interview if there were answers for these troubling questions.

  "The mind is a funny, unpredictable and sometimes terrible thing," the soft-spoken psychologist said in his office. "I thought that John had come very far with me. But, obviously, we did not come far enough." Mr. Brooks and whatever it was that haunted him remain an enigma. Even his last message is a puzzle. The line he wrote on the pad offered little in the way of insight into what caused him to turn his gun on himself.

  "Through the pale door," were his last written words. The line was not original. Mr. Brooks borrowed it from Edgar Allan Poe. In his poem "The Haunted Palace," which originally appeared in one of Poe's best-known stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe wrote:

  While like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh-but smile no more.

  The meaning of those words to Mr. Brooks is unclear but they certainly carry the melancholy incumbent in his final act.

  Meantime, the murder of Bobby Smathers remains an open case. In the homicide unit where Mr. Brooks worked and his colleagues still pursue the case, the detectives now say they are seeking justice for two victims.

  "Far as I'm concerned, this is a double murder," said Lawrence Washington, a detective who grew up with Brooks and was partnered with him in the homicide unit. "Whoever did the boy also did Jumpin' John. You can't convince me any different."

  I straightened up and glanced around the newsroom. No one was looking at me. I looked back down at the printout and read the end of the story again. I was stunned, almost to the same degree as the night Wexler and St. Louis had come for me. I could hear my heart beating, my guts being taken in a cold and crushing grip. I couldn't
read anything else but the name of the story. Usher. I had read it in high school and again in college. I knew the story. And I knew the character of the title. Roderick Usher. I opened my notebook and looked at the few notes I had jotted down after leaving Wexler the day before. The name was there. Sean had written it in the chronological record. It was his last entry.

  RUSHER

  After dialing the editorial library I asked for Laurie Prine.