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unfair and inequitable and evil and he wouldn’t participate in the evil. If he got drafted, so be it. If he passed his physical, so be it. Don’t worry, he’d said. The Army won’t want me. Troublemaker. Anarchist. Rabble-rouser. I’d make a lousy soldier. They’d yell charge and I’d ask where and why, and how come, and why not over there and let’s take a vote. They had laughed at the improbable picture of John Barren leading a group discussion on whether to charge the enemy or not, arguing pros and cons. But her laughter hid a great misshapen fear, and when the letter that began with greetings from the president arrived, she’d insisted they get married, thinking only that she had to have his name, that it was important.
    ‘Susan got better,’ Detective Barren said. ‘It seemed to take forever, but she got better. And suddenly she was a little girl and Annie was a little older and less scared of everything and Ben’s job wasn’t so hard and I guess it was okay, then, just to become Auntie Merce because she was going to live, and I guess I knew I was too.’
    Detective Barren suddenly choked on her thoughts.
    Oh, God, Johnny, and now someone’s gone and killed her! My baby. She was so much like you. You’d have loved her, too. She was like the baby we’d have had. Doesn’t that sound trite? Don’t laugh at me for being a sentimentalist. I know you, you were worse than me. You were the one that always cried in movies. Remember Tunes of Glory? At the Alec Guinness festival? First we saw The Ladykillers and you insisted we stay for the second feature. Remember? After John Mills had shot himself and Guinness goes a little crazy and begins to do a slow death march in front of the other men of the mess? The bagpipes were, faint and you were sitting there in the theater with tears just streaming down your face, so don’t call me the emotional one. And in high school, remember, when Tommy O’Connor couldn’t shoot against St Brendan’s and he threw you the ball and you went straight up, the whole place screaming or holding
    their breath, championship on the line, thirty feet from the basket? Nothing but net, you said, but every time I brought that up, you started crying, you old schmooze. You won and it made you cry. I guess Susan would have cried, too. She cried over sick whales that beached themselves and seals that didn’t have the sense to flee from hunters and seabirds covered with oil. Those are the things you would have cried over, too.’
    Detective Barren took a deep breath.
    I’m crazy, she thought.
    Talking to a dead husband about a dead niece.
    But they’ve killed my love, she said to herself.
    All of it.
    Detective Barren showed her badge to a uniformed officer sitting at a desk, monitoring all the visitors to the Dade County Sheriff’s Office. She took the elevator to the third floor and followed her memory to the homicide division. There was a secretary there who made her wait on an uncomfortable plastic couch. She looked about her, noting the same blend of old and new office equipment. There was something about police work, she thought. Even when things are new, they lose their shine almost instantly. She wondered if there was some connection between the grime of the job and the never-clean atmosphere of police offices. Her eyes strayed to three pictures on the wall: the President, the Sheriff, and a third man she didn’t recognize. She stood and approached the unfamiliar picture. There was a smalil plaque beneath the portrait of a smiling, slightly overweight man with an American flag in the lapel on his jacket. The plaque was tarnished bronze. It had the man’s name and the inscription killed in the line of duty and a date two years earlier.
    She remembered the case; he had been making a routine arrest, following a domestic that had been a homicide. A drunken father and son in Little Havana. A subject murder, the easiest of homicides: the father was standing over the body, sobbing,