Will asked, “Do you think he kept poking around because he was worried you’d change your mind about his extracurricular activities?”
“I think he just couldn’t let it go that I’d gotten the upper hand with him.” She smiled that sweet smile that meant she was going to push him. “Come on, baby. Your clearance rate is bigger than his, right?”
“Let’s talk about Ormewood.”
She pretended to pout, but couldn’t hold it for long. “I just told you—Michael likes to be in control.”
“He seemed all right to me.”
“Guys don’t see it, but it’s there, right under the surface. Trust me, ask any woman and she’ll tell you after spending ten minutes with him that he’s a control freak.”
“All right.” This wasn’t an unusual trait for a policeman and Will ran into it often. “I did notice that he’s pretty competitive.”
“That’s an understatement,” she told him. “He took the transfer, but he just couldn’t let go of it that I’d beat him. He’d always come around at the end of my shift, right after I’d typed all my DD-fives.”
“Did he go through them?”
“I would’ve ripped his fucking cock off if he did.” She tossed another cube of cheese into her mouth. “But I think if I’d left him alone for two seconds, he would’ve turned my desk upside down.”
“He got a temper?”
“No more than the rest of us.”
Will wondered what she meant by that, but didn’t press it. “Sounds like he’s making sure you’re not banging him up.”
“Could be.” She chewed some more, keeping her thoughts to herself.
Will studied her for a moment, trying to guess what she was hiding. With Angie, there was always something she kept in reserve. Even after all these years, Will wasn’t certain whether or not she did this on purpose or if it was just a protection mechanism. There was lying and then there was what he thought of as survival instinct. He was the last person on earth who could fault her for that.
Will said, “Ormewood seemed very upset about his neighbor this afternoon.”
“He really likes kids,” she told him. “His son’s got some mental problem, but I met him once and he’s super sweet. The wife is pretty cold, but I would be too if I had to bang that prick every night.” She explained, “I met them at a retirement dinner for his partner. Ken Wozniak, black guy but another pollack. I thought I’d go and support the home team.”
“Nice of you.”
“I doubt he’s long for this world. Had some kind of stroke right in the middle of the squad. Half his body’s gone.”
“He got any family?”
“Nope.”
They were both quiet for a while.
Angie opened her mouth to speak, then changed her mind. Will knew better than to prompt her, and sure enough she finally told him, “The thing about Michael is, he’s not his own person.”
“Which means?”
“He’s always trying to fit in, but it just doesn’t work for him.”
Will thought the same thing could be said about himself. “Is that a bad thing?”
She stopped a few seconds to think before explaining, “Like with Wozniak. We weren’t close, but I’d seen him around. Big guy, has a gut out to here.” She held out her hand several inches in front of her stomach. “But he’s a real lady’s man, right? Always has a comment about what I’m wearing, ‘Can I have some fries with that shake,’ and that kind of bullshit, but he’s an older guy, a real teddy bear, so it’s funny and maybe kind of flattering instead of being creepy.”
“Okay,” Will said, not really understanding the line but knowing the important part was that the man hadn’t crossed it.
She continued, “Ken has these sayings. Like, he hands a civilian his card and says, ‘Something to wipe your ass on,’ and it’s kind of disarming, and they laugh, but they keep the card, you know? He may be a freaking cop, but they know he’s a cool guy.”
“Right,” Will agreed. Cops had all kinds of tricks they used to connect with potential witnesses. Everybody had a different bag they pulled from, but they all needed the same magic if they were going to get anything done on the street.
“So, Ken’s in the hospital, right? Laid out on his ass. I mean, frankly, the guy’s not gonna make it.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah,” she waved her hand, dismissing his words. “The point is, a couple of weeks later, I’m on my strip with the girls and Michael drops by. The girls know he’s a cop because…well, fuck, he’s a cop. They can smell it, right?” She sat back in the chair, and Will could see she was getting angry at the memory. “So Michael goes up and down the line, cock-of-the-walk, gives me a fucking wink like what he’s doing is funny and not stupid and risking my fucking cover, and he asks the girls if they’ve seen this guy hanging around, says he’s one bad motherfucker and to stay clear of him. Then he hands out his card and says…?”
Will guessed, “Something to wipe your ass on?”
“Right,” she said. “He’s always like that, always trying so hard to be the cool guy, to fit in, but the thing is, he doesn’t know how so he has to mimic other people.”
“Like guys who copy lines from movies.”
She did a perfect Austin Powers, “Yeah, baby.”
Will thought it through, considered the brief time he had spent with Michael Ormewood before they had found the dead girl in the detective’s backyard. Angie had obviously given a lot of thought to the man’s personality, but Will wasn’t totally buying her conclusion. “I didn’t pick up on that.”
“No,” she said. “But you think there’s something off about him. Your radar went up.”
Her words cut straight to the core of their relationship. Twenty-five years ago, they had met each other in a state children’s home. Will was eight, Angie was eleven. They had both already spent a lifetime honing their instincts; both learned the hard way to listen to their gut when it said that just because someone was wearing a white hat, that didn’t make them one of the good guys.
“Yeah,” Will admitted. “I didn’t get a good read on him. I assumed that was because he was irritated with me. Nobody likes to be forced to play well with others.”
“There’s more to it than that,” she insisted. “And you know it just as well as I do.”
“Maybe.” He picked up Betty to give her a scratch behind her ears.
Angie stood up. “I need you to look up a name for me.”
“What name?”
She walked back into the living room to get her purse. Will followed, holding Betty to his chest. The dog’s tiny frame was so fragile that sometimes he felt as if he was holding a bird.
“Here.” Angie held up a pink Post-it note with block letters neatly printed across the middle. “He said he was mixed up in something. It sounded bad, but I just got this feeling…” She shrugged off the rest of the sentence. “I think he’s in trouble.”