Chapter 51: A Funeral

December 24, 2007 - December 28, 2007

I was at the station at 0800 Monday morning as usual. It might have been Christmas Eve, but I was a regular working stiff, and didn’t have any vacation time built up. I was practically the only person in Services. Almost immediately after I arrived, I was summoned to Lieutenant Brownell’s office. It didn’t seem as if Jerry Wolinski had told anybody I was too screwed up to become a cop, but somebody must have told Brownell that I had gotten into it with Briggsby. He chewed me out royally and then sent me on my way. Five minutes later, he called me back into his office. He had just received a phone call.

Mike Gorsky was dead.

The call had been from the County Sheriff’s office, which ran the Matucket County Jail. Mikey’s body had been found that morning. He had stripped off his coveralls and used them to hang himself in his cell sometime during the night. He was found when the guards had done their morning rounds.

I just shook my head dejectedly. Some things you just can’t fix.

“When was the last time you talked to Gorsky, Reaper?” asked Brownell.

“Friday, when they were processing him in. I stuck with him until his lawyer showed up, and then I took off. I spent the weekend with my fiancée.”

“Nothing since then? He didn’t call you? You didn’t go see him?”

“No, sir,” I replied.

“Did he give you any indication he planned something like this?” Brownell asked.

“No, sir. I’d’ve mentioned it if he had.”

The Lieutenant shrugged. “Well, I can just about guarantee that the detectives will be questioning you again. Anything that happens at the jail, we have to look into it. Don’t be surprised if the Feds stick their noses in, too.”

“I’ll need to call some people, let them know.” I was figuring to call his lawyer and maybe a couple of guys over at the IAVA, and let them know, before they heard it on the morning radio.

I was surprised when Brownell said, “No, I don’t want you doing that. The detectives will be making the contacts. They’ll have the lawyer’s name from when he saw your friend during processing. You stay out of it until they tell you. Who were you planning on talking to, anyway?”

“Just a couple of guys at the IAVA.” Brownell looked curious, so I added, “The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association. Mikey was an Afghan vet. We look after each other. They got him the lawyer, for instance.”

Brownell nodded. “When you are questioned by the detectives, make sure you tell them who you spoke to. They have to do the follow-up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Grim, I’m sorry about this. If you didn’t need to be questioned, I’d let you go home.”

I shook my head. “I’m good, Lieutenant. I might want to take a day or two off for the funeral, but I’m not even sure where his home is. We might need to contact the VA or Defense Department.”

“Yeah.” He sighed, “Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah. Merry Christmas.” I stood and left his office.

To be fair, I didn’t get much accomplished that morning. About 1030 the same two detectives who had processed Mikey in came and spoke to me. I told them what I had told Brownell, that I hadn’t talked to Gorsky since his attorney arrived on Friday afternoon. I told them who I talked to at IAVA and asked if they had talked to his lawyer yet. They had and had gotten Mike’s contact information from him. They were sympathetic, too. Nobody liked to see suicides, especially on Christmas Eve, and the fact it was in the jail just made it even messier. I told them who I had spoken to about Mikey at the IAVA and they said not to call them, but that they would let me know when I could call them later.

At the end, one of the detectives, Lou Fong, said, “Reaper, I understand you’re going to go to the academy and try to come on board. That right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You did good work on Friday getting your friend to come in. This is kind of the flip side, though. Sometimes, no matter what you do or how right you do it, it doesn’t always work out the way we want it to,” he said. “You need to be able to handle that.”

“Yes, sir. I understand that.”

“Sometimes there simply are no good choices, just less bad ones.” He stood up. “We’ll let you know when you can call your friends.”

“Thank you.”

He was right, of course. Sometimes the good choice is simply the best of the crappy choices. I think that’s what we had with Mikey.

Later that afternoon I was given the green light to call some people and found that the detectives had already talked to them. There wasn’t a whole lot to say. Nobody was blaming me, and surprisingly, I wasn’t blaming myself either. I’d only been home a few months and even I had seen how Gorsky’s mental state had been deteriorating. I mentioned that, if possible and if the family agreed, some of us should try to attend his funeral.

Kelly was very worried about me, but I managed to convince her I wasn’t going to eat my gun. Still, it put a pall on things. By that evening, it was all over the evening news. Both the MPD and the Sheriff’s office put out the standard, ‘The incident is still under investigation’, statement. I already knew the MPD policy about answering any questions by reporters, which was not to do it unless I wanted to be both fired and tossed in jail. Still, several reporters managed to track me down and called the apartment to get something. I just said, ‘No thank you,’ and hung up. I would need to get the phone number changed and unlisted and decided to mention it to my grandparents.

I didn’t get too much grief from Kelly’s family that evening. I had Christmas off, so our plan was to spend Christmas Eve with her family after I got out of work, and then Christmas itself with my family. While her parents had seen the news like everyone else, they didn’t say much. For myself, I wondered about Mister O’Connor. He had been a boy during ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Did he have issues with that sort of thing? What about the IRA? Did guerillas and resistance fighters and revolutionaries get PTSD? That wasn’t something I had ever thought about before. When the war in Iraq ended, and sooner or later it would have to, would everybody on both sides be fucked up? Something to think about, I suppose.

We went over to my parents’ house in the early afternoon, Kelly and me in her car, and my grandparents in theirs. Jack brought Teresa home with him from UGA, which was the first time he had ever brought a girl to Christmas. This was vastly amusing to the entire family, since it was obvious the little girl had well and truly hooked him. Teresa was bunking on a cot in Dad’s study, and Bobbie Joe commented to me at one point that Jack was spending an awful lot of time in there ‘tucking her in’ at night before going to bed.

Bobbie Joe also brought around his girlfriend from high school. She was a junior, Jamie Hughes, and she was the youngest sister of my old buddy Brax Hughes. She promised to call him and let both Jack and me talk to him. He was playing for the San Diego Chargers now, his rookie season. Last year he had been one of the final candidates for the Heisman Trophy, as had our fellow teammate, Terence ‘Speed Demon’ Wayans. (No wonder we had taken State my senior year! We had two future Heisman Trophy candidates playing for us!) Brax had played yesterday; the Chargers had a rare Christmas Eve Monday Night Football game against the Denver Broncos.

My parents were very worried about my mental state because Mom worried about everything, and she got Dad to worrying. I once asked him if he had suffered sympathetic pregnancy when Mom had been pregnant with us; his reply was to swat at me and call me a smartass. Regardless, Kelly and I were able to convince my family I wasn’t going to do something foolish, unless they regarded becoming a police officer as foolish. Mom wasn’t thrilled with that, but I just smiled and said if I could survive Iraq, Matucket was going to be a piece of cake. It wasn’t that there wasn’t crime in Matucket, but I really wasn’t expecting people to come out of their houses and fire RPGs at the patrol cruisers!

I got a phone call from Bart Simmons over at the IAVA on Wednesday afternoon. He had spoken to Mikey’s father earlier in the day. Mike Gorsky was from Raleigh, North Carolina. His body was being released from the morgue at Matucket General and was being sent home on Thursday. There would be a memorial service Friday evening and the actual burial Saturday morning; we would be welcome at both. Bart said, “Want to go? It’s about a seven-hour drive from Matucket to Raleigh. I’m going with Wojo. You can ride with us, but we’ll be leaving in the morning.”

Wojo was Patrick Wojohowitz, a Marine vet like Mikey, only while Mikey had lost his mind, Wojo had lost his legs below the knees. Bart was an Air Force vet who had done two tours in Afghanistan, mostly at Bagram Airbase, which he described as a major league shithole. “Give me a minute.” I set the phone down and knocked on Brownell’s door. He yelled to come in, and I stuck my head inside. “Lieutenant, is it alright if I take Friday off? We got the details on the funeral. I’ll need to drive up early Friday. It’s in Raleigh.”

He nodded. “Fine by me. Not much happening anyway. Before you go, I’ll want to talk to you tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.” I closed the door behind me and went back to my desk. “Bart, I’m in.”

“Okay, I’ll call you tomorrow after I figure out a few details. We can drive up in civvies but dig out a dress uniform for the service and funeral.”

I acknowledged that and we hung up. Suddenly I was glad I hadn’t chucked my Class As. It had never occurred to me when I saved them that I might ever need to wear them again, and certainly not like this. I just hoped I didn’t need to get them dry cleaned.

I told Kelly my schedule and plans for Friday and Saturday. That basically tied us up all day both days. It would be seven hours up on Friday, attend a service, and then Saturday morning attend the actual burial, followed by another seven-hour drive back. Add in meals, gas, and pit stops and we wouldn’t be getting back until late Saturday. She offered to come with me, but I shook my head. It was something we needed to do for Mikey ourselves.

Thursday morning Bart called me with the funeral details, and we decided to leave Matucket at 0800. The service was at 1900 Friday night. That should give us plenty of time to get there, even figuring in rush hour traffic in Atlanta, and getting in and out of places with Wojo. He had prosthetic legs, but he really wasn’t all that comfortable using them yet, so he also had crutches and tended to take a bit of time moving around. We had a lot of missing limbs in the IAVA and the Coalition; I occasionally wondered which was worse, losing parts of your body or parts of your mind. Which of us were the more crippled?

At 0730, I was outside of Bart’s house in Piney Glens. Bart was different from Wojo, Mikey and me. While the three of us had been grunts, Army and Marine enlisted, Bart Simmons had been an Air Force officer, a former Captain. He had graduated from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He once told me that he had given the Air Force eight years, four duty stations, two tours in Afghanistan, and his first marriage. At that point, he got out and started fresh. He was also an oddity in that he was a black man married to a white woman, which in Georgia was still considered more than a bit unusual. He taught science and physics at Matucket High. When I got there his new wife, a pretty blonde, was loading their toddlers into her minivan. She smiled and waved, and then kissed Bart when he came out. I grabbed my hanging bag and tossed it into the trunk of his Honda Civic. Next stop was Wojo’s house. He and his wife lived in a small rancher close to West Springs. Wojo was using his VA benefits to go to school over at Matucket State, and his wife worked at the Wal-Mart warehouse; he had plans to get his degree and get a job there, also. He figured that by the time he graduated he should be fairly expert at getting around.

In the meantime, he was a bit ungainly. His wife came out the door carrying a large hanging bag, which I grabbed, and then she held the door for him. He was using forearm crutches because he really wasn’t quite used to his new prosthetic legs. Still, he considered this a considerable improvement over the wheelchair he had started in. His wife kissed him good-bye, and we got him into the back seat of the car. Bart and I would swap off driving; Wojo said that he would be able to drive, too, someday.

It was a straightforward drive - I-20 to Atlanta, I-85 to Raleigh. If the timing worked out, we’d find a truck stop or something in the Charlotte area to gas up and have lunch. Bart explained that we each had rooms at a Best Western somewhere near the church in Raleigh. The plan was to get there, check in, and grab a bite to eat. At some point, either before dinner or right after, we’d all change into our Class As and go to the service. The memorial service was being held at the funeral home; the service tomorrow would be held at his family’s church. I figured they would somehow gloss over the fact that Mikey had offed himself, at least in regard to the church services.