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"You get the fuck away from her, from us. I'll kill you before I let you hurt her more. You killed her baby, you fucking asshole. My baby brother."
"Edward!"
The white haired woman had come up behind him. She leaned heavily on a cane. She looked like she weighed 100 pounds if she was soaking wet, and yet she had borne four bruising sons.
"Momma, go back. This is that piece of shit- "
"Edward, I'm not one of your floozy girlfriends, and this is your brother's funeral. You will not use that kind of language on this day."
She stared at me, Her face was lined and the lines had lines. I couldn't imagine when she had been a young woman conceiving and bearing these sons.
"Mrs. Smith."
"Mr. Maitland, why are you here?"
"I came to express my condolences for your loss, Mrs. Smith."
"You fucking hypocrite. You got him killed and you have the balls to come here and-"
"Edward, show some respect for your brother. Mr. Maitland, you could have sent a card. Why did you feel it necessary to show up in person.? You have to know that my sons are very upset. Shawn was my baby, our baby, and they helped raise him after my husband died when he was just a toddler."
"I'm very sorry to intrude on your personal grief, Mrs. Smith. I just wanted you to know that I'm sorry it turned out this way. I never intended for it to end like this. I knew that Shawn might, probably would, have to serve some prison time, but people go in and come out all the time. He could have built a new life, a different life, and he had a lot of friends. He could have come back."
The brother who hadn't spoken, Cyrus, had joined us.
"As what? A crooked cop who shot a man in the back and killed him? How do you come back from that? I tried to talk sense to him, but he thought it was the end of everything. When he lost Elise, it was like the heart went out of him. I knew he was going to do something crazy, but he wouldn't have, and he wouldn't have lost Elise, if you hadn't kept hounding him."
"I thought he had murdered a man, maybe in passion, but it was still murder, and I couldn't walk away."
"It's done now. It's over, Mr. Maitland. We'll bury my son and go on with our lives. I appreciate your having the decency to come here and talk to me."
Eddie Smith said, "We'll go on with our lives as the family of the killer cop who murdered three men and then shot down two of his fellow cops before they shot him down like a mad dog. That's what we'll go on with and what we'll have to tell his nieces and nephews and grand nieces and nephews when they come along. That's what we'll tell them about my baby brother."
I shook my head and reached out to take his mother's hand. She stiffened, but didn't pull away.
"No, tell them that your baby brother, your son, Mrs. Smith, was a good and a brave cop. He saved lives and shot down bad guys. He earned commendations. He was liked and respected by the men he served with. He served the public for ten years. He never had a blemish on his record, but then he fell in love. Love makes people do strange things. He made a mistake and it cost him his life, but the way he died doesn't change the way he lived his life. Maybe the public will always look at him as the Killer Cop, but you can tell his nieces and nephews that he was a good cop and a good man, and there are records to prove it."
As I walked back to my Escalade I knew they'd probably never forgive me for the part I had played in Shawn's death. But they hadn't committed Shawn's crimes. They just had to pay for them for the rest of their lives. I hoped my words would help them, even a little bit, to remember the good that Shawn Smith had done in his short life.
I felt tired as hell - maybe it was finally all over. However I didn't know as I drove away from Smith's family that James would die in the hospital within 36 hours. I'd have one more funeral to attend before I could start trying to forget about Shawn Smith. I also knew that, try as I might, I never would.
The gunfire in the FOP hall had only taken seconds, but the ripples of those seconds would change lives for years to come. The sad thing is that I had learned over the past ten plus years that that's the way it always is. Episodes of violence never ever end nice and neat, maybe because life isn't that way.
########################
October 5, 2005 -- Wednesday - 3 p.m.
She had thought she was too late. By the time she had found parking at Jacksonville International Airport, made her way to the departure terminal and found the ticket counter for United, it was already 3 p.m. She knew that Clint was flying out on a 5:30 flight and he'd said he had to be at the airport by 3 at the latest to make that flight.
She looked around trying to make out his slender frame topped by dark hair streaked with gray, but there were so many people. This was a silly, foolish thing to be doing, but even though they'd said goodbye the night he told her about his African adventure, she felt like there was too much unsaid.
He found her. She turned around and he was standing there, two suitcases at his feet.
"You're really trying to make it hard for me to leave, aren't you?"
She was in his arms and kissing him as hard as she could. She heard laughter and even a little applause from passengers streaming around them. Finally they separated and she saw that his shirt was wet with her tears. He looked at her strangely and she realized his eyes were misting.
"Why are you doing this, Debbie? I know you don't love me. I'm your friend but I never thought or said I was anything more. Have I been misreading the signals all this time?"
She took his hand and said, "Can we talk? Do you have a few minutes?"
He looked around, then said, "probably a few minutes. Let's find someplace to sit down and have a coffee, but I can't take too long."
They found a Starbucks and he ordered while she sat at the one free table in the place. In a few minutes he came over with their Cappuccinos and said, "Somehow this feels like Déjà Vu all over again."
She drank, to have something to do with her hands and to avoid having to look at him directly.
"I'm glad you came, Debbie. I'm glad I had a chance to say goodbye, but what's going on? What the hell was that kiss all about?"
She finally made herself look up at him. He was just Clint. That made her feel so damned good, yet terrified her at the same time.
"I know..."
She took a breath.
"I know that you said you didn't love me. You've never made a secret of that and I never said I loved you. We're friends with benefits, but I love you like a friend. You don't know how important you've become in my life. No matter how shitty I've felt, no matter how guilty I've felt, no matter how bad I've felt, you've been there for me."
He grinned that familiar grin and made a casual gesture toward her body and said, "Okay, Deb, but it hasn't been hardship duty. There's a world full of guys that would have killed for the pleasure of consoling you. As the old saying, goes, it's a rough job, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do."
"I know, Clint, but all I gave you was sex and you could have gotten that a lot of places. You helped me keep my head on,"
He reached out and took her hand.
"You value yourself too lightly, Deb. You remember what I said. There are guys who would die for your smile - not your body, not sex with you, but your smile. If I could have loved anybody, if I could ever have got my head on straight and got over my wife, I could have seen myself with you. The thing is, by the time I got there, you'll be back with Bill. The timing was never right for us."
"Why do you say that? Why won't you believe me when I tell you Bill and I will never get back together, ever?"
He smiled and ran a finger along the side of her face.
"You'll never know, unfortunately, what it's like for a guy just to look at you. You can't think like a man, so you'll never know how we look at female beauty. Trust me, you're a very rare treasure. Why I'm so sure you'll be back with Bill? Because you still love him, because you get a look on your face when his name is mentioned, because you get so damned angry when his name is mentioned. You don't get angry like that at people you've left behind."
"I'm not going back because I don't want to. Our marriage died a slow, painful death and I won't go back to that but, even - even - if I wanted to, he would never take me back. I can't tell you why, but he won't. He's moved on."
"I won't say writers are psychics, but we do have a pretty good grasp of human emotions, and I'm pretty good at reading people as an old newspaper reporter and writer. He was in love with you that night that I met him at your place. It was written all over him."
She sipped at her drink and said, without looking up at him, "Maybe, but you didn't see him the night that we met him and Aline at his condo. Maybe he did love me, and I was egotistical enough to to think he always would, but he's in love with her now."
"He wouldn't be the first man, or woman, to be in love with two people at the same time."
She turned her attention back to her drink. After a moment, she said, "Even if you don't love me, I know you love fucking me. If you think what we had was hot, stay with me, don't get on that damned plane, and I'll drain you so dry you'll need IVs every night. We'll try every position in the Kama Sutra and come up with a few new ones of our own."
He just smiled at her.
"I don't think any woman, any person, has ever paid me that great a compliment, Deb. If it was just the sex, shit, I'd stay. If I didn't know you were in love with another man, I'd think seriously about winning you for myself. I have no idea what it would feel like seeing that look in your eyes for me that you have when you hear his name. I have a feeling it would be wonderful, but..."
"But...?"
"I don't know how to explain it and I wish I could. I just feel like this is something I need to do - something I have to do. It's just like when I had to write that first novel, and it changed my life. I don't know what I'll find in Africa, but I feel like I can't live the rest of my life not knowing what I've missed."
Then she was crying again and hating it.
"I don't know why I can't make you understand, Clint. I have this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that when you walk away to the boarding area, that will be the last time I ever see you. I don't think you're coming back. I think you're going to die over there and that thought....devastates me.
"Bill - Bill is never coming back. Doug is gone and I won't see him again, and you've getting ready to leave me. My husband, my lover, my friend. It feels like I'm losing everything."
He moved around to put his arms around her.
"It might feel that way, but you're not. You've got your kids, a good job, friends and your ex working in the same building. He's alive and I will come back. Your feminine intuition has been wrong before."
He put his arms down and reached into his wallet. Not looking at her, he took a crumpled check out and put it on the table. He motioned to it and she picked it up. It was a check for $10,000 -- made out to her. Beside it he put a folded piece of white copy paper.
"What?"
He deliberately looked down at the table rather than meeting her eyes.
"I -- uh...I need to ask you for a favor, Deb, a big favor and I don't want you to get upset when I tell you what it is, okay?"
"What kind of favor?" But even as she was asking the question she remembered their late night conversation and knew what it was.
"I plan on coming back but, nothing in life is certain, and if I don't..."
He took a last sip of his Cappuccino.
"I would like you to cash and deposit this into your account and hold it. If I don't come back, this will pay for a pretty good sized marble monument. I want you to have it put up on her grave. It's in Palatka Memorial Gardens cemetery. There's just a little marker there now. I....after she died I wasn't.....real happy with her and I didn't put anything but the bare minimum at her grave site."
He reached back into the wallet and pulled out an old and frayed color photograph. It had been sealed in plastic so it had stood up pretty well to the ravages of time. The woman, who had long, black straight hair down to her waist, sat in the bend of a huge tree trunk on a lushly manicured lawn with a large building that had to be a courthouse behind her.
She wore a green blouse over a dark green short skirt that rode up on her thighs as she sat forward, smiling at whoever had taken the photo.
"I've carried it for 25 years," he said, biting his lip, "It's the last picture I have of her -- when she still loved me."
He ran his thumb over the picture.
"You can see how beautiful she was. Too beautiful to die as young as she did. She was only 24 - only 24."
He stared at it and Debbie felt that he had gone somewhere where only two people existed.
He took a deep breath.
"I should have done this a long time ago. She uh....she was an only child and her parents are gone now. My parents died a few years ago and my brother never really knew her. He lives up in Canada. All our friends are long gone, scattered to the four winds."
He looked up and met Debbie's eyes. She wondered if any man would ever again look at her the way he looked at the faded photo on the table.
"She was so beautiful. Before it all fell apart, she was as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside. But I'm....the only one left alive who knows how beautiful she was, how wonderful she was. If something happens to me..."
He took her hand.
"It's not right that she should be forgotten like that. If we had had children, there would be somebody to mourn her, somebody to bring flowers, to keep her memory alive. It's not much, but all I can do is put up a memorial, a granite marker, to tell people who pass by that somebody special lived and is buried there.
"I want you to have her name -- Margaret Elise Abbott -- put on the marker, and the dates January 3, 1956 and November 7, 1980, and these words -- 'Here Lies A Most Beautiful Lady.' The $10,000 should more than cover the expenses."
"No."
She tried to pull back but he held her hand.
"I don't expect you'll have to. I expect to come back and I want to do it myself. I want to say goodbye to her properly but, I couldn't stand the thought of dying and letting her be forgotten. I don't want you to do anything until you know I'm not coming back. Do this for me, Debbie. Be my friend. "
She closed her eyes and felt him release her hand. He slipped the check under her palm. He kissed her cheek and stood. When she opened her eyes he and the photo of the love of his life were gone.
#########################
October 5, 2005 -- Wednesday - 4:30 p.m.
I had returned from James' funeral and was diving back into the accumulated paperwork that had piled up over a week. I make it a habit just to glance at arrest reports, to see if anybody interesting might have entered the system. I almost overlooked it, but something caught my attention and then I realized the name I was looking at.
I rang the Lieutenant in charge at the jail and asked him about the prisoner who'd been brought in Monday and had sat in the jail for the past two days.
"The charge is aggravated battery and attempted murder but there's no bond. Why?"
"He was going to go before a judge Tuesday morning," Lieutenant "Red" Butler said with his Arkansas HillBilly Twang that 20 years out of the Ozarks had never eroded.
"He nearly killed a woman, tried to strangle her, but he didn't finish the job. He scared the hell out of her and she filed an order to keep him the hell away from her regardless of the charges the arresting officer filed. However, before he could go in front of the judge, the son of a bitch nearly killed two inmates in the general holding cell where we were keeping him. He also sent one of my guys to University with a dislocated shoulder when he tried to get in the middle of it."
"What happened? Why weren't more charges filed against him?"
"Two of our alleged tough guy thugs moved in on him Monday night. Before it was over, he'd crippled one guy -- smashed his knee up, broke his arm and collarbone - and beat the other guy so badly that he's in the hospital in a coma. Harrington, Bob Harrington, was on shift duty and came in to try to save the guy. The 'victim' did something that nearly tore Harrington's shoulder out of its socket."
"Why the hell no charges?"
"Cameras caught the whole thing. He was defending himself. The two guys in the hospital started it all and he -- uh -- he tore them up before anybody could do anything to stop him. When he realized that Harrington was a jail officer, he backed off. He even helped pop his shoulder back in its socket before the other officers could get in there."
"You're absolutely sure?"
"Cameras don't lie. We have audio as well. One of your guys told us we'd be lucky if he didn't wind up suing us and making a bundle off the city for not protecting him better than we did."
"Where is he now, and has he seen a judge?"
"No, we couldn't charge him, but in light of everything that happened, and the fact the woman he nearly killed is terrified and begging us to keep him behind bars, we managed to put off a court appearance for a few days. That gives us a chance to figure out what the hell is going on and maybe let this guy cool down. We're keeping him in a solitary holding cell. It's not safe to leave him in the general population."
"I'm coming down, Red. I'll be there in 10 minutes. Don't tell him I'm coming."
"To what do we owe this honor? You don't usually come down for a face to face with anybody."
"It's personal."
Butler himself was waiting at the entrance to the maze of halls and walkways that make up the jail when I got down there. They buzzed me in through the admitting door and he led the way. It took 10 minutes to reach one of the few individual cells we kept for dangerous visitors or those who were in danger themselves in the general population.
There was a hallway about four feet across, bars and a room with only enough space for a cot, a sink and an overhead television. A dark haired man lay on the cot, his arms folded under his head, staring at the television which was broadcasting soap operas at that time of day.
Butler stood beside me and he noticed that I didn't get close to the bars, or close enough so that the man lying relaxed on the cot could get to me before I could move back.
"I guess you do know the guy," he said.
"Paul. Paul Donnally."
After a moment, Donnally turned his head toward me and glanced at both of us. Butler he didn't recognize, but I could tell he remembered me. I looked for what I'd seen in his eyes the day I'd fought Doug at UNF, but they were simply blank. He turned his head back away from me to stare at the ceiling.
I told Butler to get me a chair and when it came I sat down across from Donnally.
'Mr. Donnally, I need to talk to you. Could you give me a few minutes of your time?"
He was silent for an unnerving amount of time, then sat up on his cot so quickly I almost leaned back away from him.
"I guess I've got the time, Mr. Maitland, but what brings a man of your stature down to talk to a simple wife beater?"
"Not beaten, the hospital records said she might have permanent damage to her vocal cords. You strangled her so severely you actually broke a number of blood vessels in her throat. They say it's a miracle she didn't die there, choke to death on her own blood. That was your wife, your wife of nearly 20 years. Why did you try to kill her?"
He looked at the floor as though studying the tile pattern, then said, "I didn't try to kill her. If I had, she'd be dead."
