The Disposable Man by Archer Mayor Read Free Book Online Page B

lift the veil from my eyes. Which left me wondering what I was being drawn into—and why.
    Although quiet, smooth, and remarkably clean—attributes for which the Washington Metro was justifiably famous—the subway ride to Judiciary Square was long and predictable, and by the time I arrived, my mind had been dulled by the blurred succession of trains, stations, and thousands of blank faces sealed behind glass. The familiar discomfort of being in close quarters with so many withdrawn people had begun to envelop me.
    I half fled for the exit, toward fresh air and open space, climbing flight after flight of stairs, dogged by the memory that Washington’s subway system had supposedly been designed to double as a bomb shelter. When I finally reached the foot of the last steep escalator and looked up the sun-bleached exit shaft, I saw the sweltering swatch of flame-blue sky with the same relief I’d felt upon entering the Metro’s air-conditioning earlier.
    The illusion of returning to the land of the living was just that, however, since the escalator delivered me to the heart of my destination—the broiling hot, dazzlingly bright National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. From a cool, muted subterranean world of stone-faced commuters, I’d ascended into a three-acre, oval frying pan made of white-hot marble, in which, at the moment, I was the only human being.
    The memorial, with an imposing bronze plaque at its center depicting an officer’s shield superimposed by a single rose, extends out in a series of widening topographical parentheses, made variably of colonnades, trees, and shaded walkways, and finally, at its outermost edges, of two pathways banked by a continuous, curved, knee-high marble wall, inscribed with the names of over fourteen thousand law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.
    Only a few years old, the memorial reflects several standard monument styles—from archways to statuary to a shallow pool of running water. But the most effective is an homage to the style of the Vietnam Memorial, wherein a seemingly endless list of names is arranged as randomly as the ways in which those officers were slain.
    Sweat already trickling down my sides, I crossed to a softbound directory housed in a weatherproof case and squinted against the sun to look up three names: Frank Murphy, John Woll, and Dennis DeFlorio.
    All had been members of my department—Murphy, the man I’d replaced as chief of detectives; Woll, a young patrolman; and DeFlorio, one of my own squad. But contrary to the implied heroism of this formal, austere setting, none of these friends had died catching bullets intended for the civilians they’d served. Murphy had been killed in a mundane car crash, Woll’s murder had been staged to resemble a suicide, which by that time his own miseries had made all too believable, and DeFlorio had been blown apart by a car bomb.
    I collected the reference numbers for each of them and entered the tree-canopied pathway to find their names, grateful for the shade, reminded of the dense, multihued woods of Vermont. As I sat on the rounded stone bench facing the inscribed wall, exchanging silent greetings with my three friends, my chagrin became less for their loss and—typical of most mourners, I think—turned back onto myself. I began recalling all that had brought me up to this point—the daily exposure to despair, deception, and misconduct—and wondered why I’d made some of the choices I had.
    Law enforcement had never entered my mind as a youth on the farm, any more, I guessed, than it had those of most of the people now etched on this wall. But somehow that’s where we’d all ended up, perhaps wanting to be of use to others, or seeking shelter against the vagaries of a capricious upbringing, maybe hoping to find some measure of elusive self-confidence. There are those who believe police officers become so merely to compensate for personal inadequacies. But by and large, I’d found that most