Clown Girl - Monica Drake [94]
He said, “Sure, Sniff, but look around. There’s acres of stuff, right?” He gestured toward shelves of appliances, toys, sports gear, and car parts. The evidence room was practically a Wal-Mart.
“What’s stuff got to do with—”
“Everything here was part of a crime. And for every last bit, there’s somebody who’ll say it was society’s fault. I don’t buy it. I mean, maybe I’m just a cop, but I make my own choices. ‘Society’ seems like another word for a whole lot of people trying to shake responsibility…”
Fast, I said, “But not everybody has the same options. Some people are born into money, others are poor, compromised… forced to—”
He laughed then, and stood up. He bent and picked up a handful of golf balls from a bucket. “You’re talking to a kid from Baloneytown. If I let society push me around, the society I lived in? I’d’ve been dead a long time back.”
He tossed one golf ball in the air and caught it in the same hand. “I started making my own choices in grade school.” He gave a second toss, one ball again. Then two, and three, juggling, and then the first ball went out of bounds, too far in front. Jerrod caught it by a long reach. The second one came down close to his chest. He stepped back, then ducked as the third fell. It was a dance, the way he grabbed out and back, arms akimbo, knees bent, and his holster danced with him; the asp and cuffs jiggled and clanked. Then I was the audience, resting on our mattress. His awkward, heavy cop dance was cute, and out of control, and he missed one ball, then a second bounced against the linoleum.
When I laughed, he said, “See? I’m a clown too—made you laugh.” Fallen golf balls disappeared like mice into the plastic-wrapped evidence piles. “I have to warm up, but I can juggle, when I practice.”
“I believe it,” I said, though for a real juggler warming up doesn’t matter. The moves come naturally.
He bounced the last ball hard against the floor. It shot toward the ceiling, came down again, flew up, and was gone to a rattle and crash. He reached a hand, pulled me to my feet, and the two of us, trailed by Chance, started back toward the door. I pushed the lawn mower.
Jerrod said, “I’m kind of a performer myself. I’m not a real big cop, right?” He held his hands to his chest and walked backward a few steps in front of me. He wasn’t much taller than I was but he was solid. Strong. “Not half as big as most of the guys I go after. There’s an art to being tough, so I keep my act up, same as you.”
I said, “Don’t forget the gun. That’s a pretty good prop with the law on your side.” I maneuvered the mower around a spill of electric cables in broken boxes that cluttered the aisle. Jerrod kicked cables out of the way.
“Sure, and the art is to not use the gun. It’s a prop, exactly. You know what Chekhov said about guns.”
That caught me off guard. “Chekhov? The Russian author?”
“Who else?” He shrugged. “In school, I read all that stuff.”
So he’d read Kafka, and now Chekov too, it seemed. “They have you read the Russian classics in cop school?”
He pointed at me and said, “That, right there, is what I mean. People make assumptions. I’ve got an associate’s in English.”
I didn’t expect that at all.
“Anyway, Chekov said if you plant a gun in the first act, it’d better go off before the show ends. As a cop, that means I’d have to shoot somebody every time I flashed the weapon. And that’s probably about the way it goes down; a cop on the scene changes the story.”
“Bingo!” I said. “Exactly!” Precisely what Herman was afraid of.
He said, “So I keep the gun holstered.”
“You take law-enforcement tips from Chekhov?”
“And,” he said, “I read Crime and Punishment. I think about Raskolnikov and his moral code when I hit the streets of Baloneytown. I read