BRUSHED BACK

"Dignity is best defined as how well you rise after you have fallen."

Chapter 1 (Partial)

“Don’t do it, Sandy.” I yelled into the phone, as I stood up from my desk chair. I couldn’t believe she was telling me this. Threatening to kill herself because I didn’t want to continue seeing her. My God, we were adults, not lovesick kids. At least I wasn’t – lovesick, or a kid, that is. At thirty-five-years old, I never expected a break up to end this insanely.

       “Gino, if you break up with me, I won’t be able to handle it,” she said. “The razor blade’s in my hand. I’m in the bathtub, so there’ll be no mess.”

I was stuck in a dilemma. It was lunchtime, and all the other detectives were out of the office. If I put her on hold to call the dispatcher, Sandy would carry out her threat. All I could do was keep her talking until I could get someone’s attention.

I tried peeking over my cubicle to see if Jerry Frazier, our burglary investigator, was eating lunch at his desk. Frazier was a cheap milquetoast whose wife controlled all their money. He always brought his lunch and ate at his desk. Always, until today, that is. He probably heard the first part of my conversation with Sandy and decided to give me some space. I couldn’t blame him. I would have done the same thing.

“Sandy, damn it. What’s this going to prove? We had a good time together.” I slammed my chair against the desk. “We could still be friends.” Still be friends? Now I was sounding like a kid. Hell, I’d consider slashing my own wrists if someone used that line on me. I didn’t want to tell her the break up was because I couldn’t continue to put up with her antics that went along with her drinking, like now.

It was a little after noon, and she was sauced again. She had left me a slurred message on my cell phone the previous night, saying she wasn’t going into work today because she wasn’t feeling well, and blamed it on me. I could have called that one. When you drown your sorrow with two bottles of Merlot by yourself, of course you’re not going to feel well.

“Gino, I love you.” She hiccupped as she sobbed. “I can’t live my life without you. What will I do? I’m scared not to have you anymore.” Her words resonated off the tiled walls of her bathroom.

I’d met Sandy six months ago when I was doing a follow-up investigation for the local Cadillac dealership. Three Escalades were missing from their back lot and the business didn’t even know they were gone. I received a tip from an informant who owed me a favor, and was told that three luxury SUVs were surreptitiously having their identification numbers switched at a local body shop.

After I recovered the Escalades and arrested the dealership’s fleet manager as the one who arranged the thefts, I had to deal with various members of their staff to verify the paper trail. Enter Sandy, an attractive but lonely thirty-year-old finance manager with a great body and blonde-streaked hair. We swapped business cards, made phone calls to meet after work, bought drinks, made a follow-up date, and body fluids were eventually exchanged.

“We discussed this yesterday,” I said. “You even said the time apart from each other would help clear your head.” I was hoping she’d remember that yesterday she’d been receptive to splitting up.

Over the weekend, she was fine about ending our relationship. Saturday, she and I talked about how we were going to stop seeing each other. We agreed that the time had come to move on. It was the typical story — she didn’t think I was spending enough time with her and I told her I didn’t have more time to give her, so we agreed to split the sheets. On Sunday, she came by my place to pick up her stuff and watched part of the Forty-niner season opener with me. I gave her a kiss goodbye and told her to keep in touch.

Well, she was keeping in touch now; calling me at work, threatening to kill herself. What logic did she use thinking that this would work? Like I would say, ‘Okay, Sandy, you’ve wooed me back into your arms. It’s going to be fine now.’ After two wives and a handful of live-ins who left me, I’d never encountered a problem like this when severing ties.

I’d seen this type of manipulation before with Sandy. One night last month, she crashed her Camaro into a telephone pole, which resulted in a couple of patrol units responding to the accident. There she was, drunk off her ass, telling two cops I worked with to be nice to her because she was ‘fucking Detective Gino Spinelli.’

Fortunately, for me, that night was a Sunday, and there wasn’t a lieutenant on duty. One of the responding patrol officers was Vic Dinuba, who recently transferred out of the detective unit. Victor owed me one from when I had covered for him, while we were out of town together at a training class. Mrs. Dinuba was on the warpath and called me because Vic hadn’t been answering his cell. I told her Vic had gone to the movies and probably had it turned off, even though I knew all along Vic was in his hotel room, banging one of our police records clerks who’d made the trip down to see him.

So to repay me, Vic called my cell on the night of Sandy’s crash and got a hold of me. I drove over and picked up Sandy, who the Breathalyzer would had shown to be a long way over the limit, and the accident report read that a phantom dog had jumped in the roadway causing her to swerve into the pole.

“Gino, I mean it,” she said. “Without you, my life is over.”

“No, it’s not. You were fine before you met me. You’ll be all right.” I patted myself down, looking for my cell. I could call Dispatch from it while keeping her on the line. Unfortunately, I left the damn thing in the car charger because I thought I’d be leaving in the afternoon.

“I can feel the tip of the blade against my wrist,” she said. “I’m dragging it against my skin right now. All I have to do is just dig it in harder. It’s all your fault, Gino.”

“All my fault? This is my fault because we decided to stop seeing each other?”

“We haven’t decided anything,” she said. “You have. You just used me, and now you’re discarding me like a piece of rotten meat.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I threw my pen, watching it bounce off the padded wall of the cubicle.

I hated it when she drank. The giving, gold-haired woman I first met became a self-centered bitch when alcohol was added. Maybe that’s why her marriage ended three years ago. Over pillow talk, she told me her ex just moved out one day, leaving a note saying he was moving to LA and seeking a divorce.

“Okay, Sandy, I’ll come over to your place and we’ll talk about this,” I told her. “Just put the razorblade away.” I tried to look out the third floor window by my cubicle, to see if any of the detectives’ rides were parked near the police annex on Weber Street. I only saw my own city-issue Chevy Lumina below, parked at a meter on El Dorado Street, with the cell phone and hand-held radio I desperately needed to use inside.

“No, don’t come over. You’ll just bring your cop friends and have me put away.”

“We’ll talk about this,” I said. “I want to help you.” She was right. If I did see her, it would be as a police officer. I couldn’t walk away from a suicide threat.

 Chapter 3 (Partial)

The ringing cell phone jarred me from a sound sleep. I looked toward my nightstand at the digital clock, showing 1:08 as the phone started its second ring. I reached over and grabbed the flip phone from its charger.

“Yeah.” My voice was gravelly from about two and a half hour’s sleep.

“Gino, it’s Chief Hogue.”

Phone calls at one in the morning usually weren’t good, and when they were from the boss, it usually meant it was serious. I sat up, and my spine felt like it was tingling.

“I just got a call from the Sheriff’s Office,” Hogue told me. “Pucci’s been hooked up for killing his wife.” Hogue’s tone was direct. It was obvious he’d been awake for a while and had time to get his head clear. I figured he’d been told the particulars of the arrest by one of the responding deputies after they found out Pucci was a cop.

“No shit!” I said. Now I was fully awake. I couldn’t believe Pooch would kill Theresa.

“No shit, I’m serious. I need you to go out there and get some info.”

“What are the details?” I asked. I presumed I was getting the assignment because Hogue didn’t think Skinner, who should have been on duty, was able to handle the incident or at least competently represent the department to an outside agency. That, and the fact that Pucci lived in the unincorporated area of the county, about two miles from me.

“From what I got, Pucci called the Sheriff at 12:35 am, and reported his wife was shot,” Hogue said. “The SO arrived and found Theresa in their hallway with a gunshot wound to her chest. There were no signs of any struggle or break-in.”

“So why are they arresting him?” I was beside the bed, scrambling to get dressed while cradling the phone to my ear. Damn flip phones. Why couldn’t they be like regular phones, where you didn’t have to act like you had a broken neck while doing a balancing act with that quarter-inch-thin receiver.

“He hasn’t been arrested yet, but they’re holding onto him for questioning,” Hogue said. “I need you to get out there and find out what he has to say about this. Let’s do this official. Tell him he’s on leave pending the investigation. Get his badge and ID. Even if they don’t book him, I can’t have him around while they try to figure out who did this.”

While listening to Hogue, I pulled on my jeans and slipped my feet into my Nikes. No shower or shave; I’d be a real professional sight to the deputies at Pucci’s place.

“And don’t let Pucci bullshit you with what happened. If that son-of-a-bitch did off his wife, he’d better be man enough to admit it. Those deputies may want to believe a fellow cop and try to cover up things, but not in my department.”

Unless he wasn’t telling me everything, I couldn’t figure out why Hogue would’ve thought Pucci would commit such a crime, or that the Sheriff’s Office would conceal a homicide. Hogue was always bitter toward the sheriff’s department, ever since they made a proposal to contract for police services in Tieton Grove about two years ago. From what I gathered, the sheriff had a proposal to provide police services for about three-quarters of what the police budget was at the time. The officers would have been offered jobs as deputies, but Hogue would have been out on his ass. I guess the city didn’t go for it, but ever since then, Hogue had his paranoid personality disorder in hyper-mode when it came to the Sheriff doing anything except dispatching for us.

Chief Dennis Hogue was what you became when you transplanted yourself to a behind a desk job that you weren’t ready for when you made the move. He lived on twenty year old war stories of his past, and the embellished events of other officers’ tales. He did his best to keep things stagnant, to avoid any fall-out from the city manager or city council. 250 pounds of fast food, hypertension, and nicotine stuffed into a once 170-pound frame. His short-sleeve shirts and polyester pants made him appear like the Michelin Man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, waiting for the final vapor lock to hit. As Hogue laid out my orders, thoughts of my own destiny came to mind. Whatever happened, I vowed this: there was no way I’d ever end up like him.