VII
They buried Leon Bellamy on Friday morning at Rose Hill Cemetery under a sky so clear it seemed indifferent. Nine people came: three men from the co-op in clean jeans, a woman from the Baptist church who sang "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" a little flat and with complete conviction, Mr. Lindqvist, and Opal Hensley.
Opal was seventy-four and four foot eleven, in a black hat with a net veil she kept pushing up to wipe her eyes. After the committal she took Marcus by the right elbow, and he flinched, and she moved her hand to his forearm without comment and walked him to her Buick.
"I've got something of his for you. Didn't want to give it to you in front of the casket. Seemed like showing off."
It was a commencement program from the Butler University College of Pharmacy, twenty-one years old, soft at the creases. Marcus's name was on the third page, underlined twice in ballpoint.
"He went," Opal said. "Drove up in his truck and stood in the back of the field house. Didn't tell you because he figured you wouldn't want him there. He was sober seven years at the end. Did you know that? He tried calling you when he got his one-year coin. You didn't pick up, and he said that was his fault, not yours, and he didn't call again, because he didn't want his sobriety to be your job." She patted his arm. "I'm not telling you to make you feel bad. I'm telling you because nobody else is going to."
Marcus stood among the headstones with the program in his hands and his right thumb numb against the paper, and for the first time since the gas station he cried—not long, standing up, the way the men in his family had always done it, if they did it at all. Opal waited it out beside him like someone waiting for a bus. Then she said, "Okay," and got into her Buick.
He drove from the cemetery to the Merritt Police Department, a low brick building on Jefferson Street, and told the woman behind the glass that he wanted to file a complaint and had been told to ask for Lieutenant Yost.
Brenda Yost came down herself—fifties, short gray hair, reading glasses on a cord, a cardigan. She looked like a school librarian; he would learn she had worked patrol in Peoria for fourteen years. In a small room with a box of tissues he didn't touch, she said, "I'll tell you what I tell everybody. I don't know yet what happened, and I won't pretend I do. I'll pull every piece of footage, every radio transmission, every computer entry. I'll interview the officers. It takes time. You'll get the outcome in writing."
"I'd like to give it to you in order," Marcus said, "with times."
She almost smiled. "Please."
He had written it on the back of a funeral-home brochure the night before. Arrival, 7:36. First words. Hands up. Contact. A double beep from the officer's chest as he took Marcus's arm—Yost wrote that down and underlined it. The cuffs. The radio. The silence. The young woman behind the glass, whose name he would not give until he had asked her himself.
"She's twenty-two," he said. "Her uncle owns the store. It costs her something."
"It costs a lot of people something," Yost said, and wrote down the name of the store.
At the Tri-County counter that evening, returning the Camry full, the clerk asked by rote, "Any problems with the vehicle?" Marcus laughed out loud, surprising them both. "No," he said. "The vehicle was fine."