“When Brian was a rookie, he used to come home at night so excited about the job, so sure he was doing good,” she said, her eyes going to the fire. “But he got transferred to Englewood and things changed. He started talking about the bad things, the junkies, the thirteen-year-old hookers, the man who pulled a knife on him after he pulled him over for a broken tail light.” She paused. “One night, I found him sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, still in his jacket. I finally got him to tell me what it was. He had arrested a man who had bashed in the head of his girlfriend’s baby with a baseball bat because the baby wet his pants.”
Louis didn’t respond.
“He stopped talking to me about work after that. He said I couldn’t understand,” she said.
Louis thought of the night Ollie died. Even as she had held him while he cried, he had thought the same thing.
“I didn’t fit in with the other wives and I was very lonely,” she said. “I started taking the el downtown for classes at the Art Institute but Brian made me stop. He said I’d get raped or mugged.”
He heard her voice break. Her face was streaked with tears.
“It got worse,” she said. “He yelled at me for not locking the door when I went down to the laundry room. He yelled at me for not ironing the crease sharp enough in his uniform pants.”
“You should have left him,” he said.
She looked at Louis. “I wanted to but I had no way to support myself, no job. I didn’t even have a high school diploma.” She gave a small laugh. “I needed him.”
“I thought you had a sister,” Louis said.
She nodded. “She told me I could come stay with her. I even had a suitcase packed but then something happened and I couldn’t leave.”
“What?”
She looked at him warily.
“What happened?”
“Brian,” she said. “Something happened to him and I couldn’t leave him.”
He could see something in her face, pain, guilt maybe, and he knew she had to be referring to the incident that Gibralter’s department had covered up, the event that Doug Delp had been unable to unearth. He waited, tense. A part of him, the man who had been deceived, didn’t want to hear one more damn word about Brian Gibralter. But the other part of him, the cop part, needed to know.
He sat down next to her. “What happened?”
She pulled in a breath, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.
Louis went to get her a Kleenex. He sat down again, waiting. “What happened?” he repeated.
She was unable to meet his eyes. “I didn’t find out until weeks later. He wouldn’t tell me. He had been to a doctor, someone the department made him see. I think the doctor was the one who told him to tell me.”
Louis waited. The wind picked up outside, sending a low whistle through the windowpanes.
“He was on patrol alone because his partner was out sick. It was March. I remember because it was very cold for March.” Her voice dropped to a soft monotone. “He turned into an alley, thinking he had seen something suspicious. They had been watching the neighborhood because there was a lot of gang violence. He should’ve called for help but he didn’t.”
Louis suddenly knew where this was going. What he didn’t know was how bad it would be.
“They…a gang…they jumped him. He was alone and they jumped him. They took his gun.”
Louis shook his head.
“Then…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “They held his gun on him and made him undress. They stripped him. It was so cold that night. But they left him there, naked.”
It took her almost a full minute before she was able to speak. “They handcuffed him to a fire escape in the alley and beat him. Then they spray painted…things, words, things all over his body.”
She took a breath and the rest rushed out in one long sigh. “He was there for hours before another unit came by and found him.”
“What happened to the kids?” Louis asked.
“Kids?” She seemed bewildered. “The gang?” He didn’t want them prosecuted because then he would have had to tell the whole department what had happened. The cop who picked him up and one or two others, including his captain, were the only ones who knew.”
Louis remembered what Delp had told him, the drug bust for the gang members that came out of nowhere.
She had stopped crying. She was just sitting there, staring vacantly at some point over Louis’s shoulder, as if she didn’t even know he was there anymore. When she focused back on his face, there was a naked look in her eyes, as if what she had just told him was about her, not her husband.
For several minutes they just sat. He listened to the wind pound the glass and the crackling of the fire. Her soft voice interrupted the silence.
“We came here about a year later. He didn’t even tell me about the ad in
Louis leaned back on the sofa, closing his eyes.
“I thought things would change,” she said softly, “but they didn’t. I didn’t fit in here either.”
