A Reason For It All
The smell started it. It was Eames who pegged it, not Goren.
Eames double knocked on Goren's front door before letting herself in. "Morning, sunshine. You ready to roll?" She called out.
"You're a bit early aren't you?" Bobby asked as he walked out of his bedroom while adjusting his tie.
"Time waits for no man – not even Bobby Goren. Got any coffee left?" Eames asked already walking into the kitchen .
"Yeah, help yourself. You know where everything is."
She stopped short, and a look of confusion flashed in her eyes as her nose wrinkled in disgust. Goren saw the look and figured he was in for a ragging, but he slowly realized the glint of humor had vanished from his partner's eyes.
"What died, Goren?"
"Say what?"
"Take a whiff. You have a rat behind the walls, or something… Whatever it is, it's dead, and it's been dead a while."
He slowly ambled into the kitchen and sniffed, shaking his head irritably. "With this head, I can't smell much of anything now. Damn cold."
Eames didn't answer, but turned away, nostrils flaring as she whiffed and sniffed her way through his apartment, making a circuit of all the rooms. Goren watched, trailing after her.
"I think I see a brilliant career as a cadaver dog if you ever tire of Major Case." Bobby observed. The humor fell flat when Eames didn't respond in kind. Dejectedly, he shook his head. I thought that was pretty good…
"Bath and kitchen," she mused, and then her face hardened into the bleak stillness that most people interpreted as cold and uncaring. Her heart sank; Goren's face took on that perfectly blank look he adopted when what he was feeling was too deep and unpleasant to share.
"The plumbing drains are shared by all the apartments." Goren said.
"Who lives just below you?" Eames asked gently.
"Ahh, no, Eames…" But Goren was on her heels as they headed for the door and the elevator. "Mrs. Taylor… Claire Taylor…she's a sweet old thing ..."
Eames paused outside the apartment, nostrils still twitching. "Was a sweet old thing, I think is the operative phrase."
Goren reached past her to push the bell and then hammer on the door, twisting at the knob and finding it locked.
"Mrs. Taylor? Claire? Mrs. Taylor, it's me, Bobby Goren…"
There was no answer, and Eames spared him a compassionate look of regret.
"I'll pay for the damage if I'm wrong," she said, and then took half a step back and unleashed a powerful side-legged kick that snapped the lock free and bounced the door open on its hinges. Those kickboxing classes are really helping.
The stench that wafted out penetrated even Goren's stuffed nose and he turned aside, half doubling over with coughing and the urge to retch. Eames buried her nose in the crook of her elbow, breathing shallowly through the material of her sleeve, and stepped inside. She was back in short order, and gently closed the broken door behind her. Her hand on his arm gripped with almost bruising strength, and then rubbed comfortingly to steer her partner back toward the elevator.
"We'd better call it in. Get a bus over here. Y'okay?"
Still coughing, Goren managed to nod, but he couldn't seem to breathe until he was back inside his own apartment. He heard Eames on the phone, first to dispatch and then to Captain Ross, explaining the situation. When he looked up, his partner was standing in front of him, mutely offering a glass of water. He took it with a nod of thanks.
She continued to speak into her cell phone. "They're on their way. We'll need to make a statement, but it shouldn't be long." Placing her hand over her phone, she mouthed, "You okay?"
He nodded. "Yeah. It's just -- I never expected that."
Her attention was redirected to her phone. "Yes Captain. I'll tell him." Eames closed the phone and slipped it into her jacket.
"Tell me what?" Goren asked, looking up at her.
"To take all the time we need."
Bobby nodded, "I had no idea. I mean, I haven't seen her for a week or so, but with the hours we've been keeping… well, it's not likely she was going to be up and about at two A.M., now, was she?"
"You had no way of knowing, Bobby. It happens everyday, that's all."
Eames' matter-of-fact calmness grated on his sensibilities, even though he knew better than to take it for callousness. He'd been partners with her long enough to realize that she would use emotional withdrawal to protect herself from being hurt by things she couldn't change or fight, but at times, her lack of response could still irritate, and Goren struck out in automatic reaction.
"Doesn't get to you, though, does it? The randomness of the non-violent death?"
Eames' facial expression didn't change, and she didn't respond to Goren's flash of temper. She understood as well as Goren that her partner's anger was empty, a defense mechanism as false and automatic as his own cold untouchable distance.
She kept her own voice low and controlled. "Yeah, it gets to me. But this is the kind of thing, I can't do anything about. There's no one to blame."
She cast his partner a quick sidelong look of apology. Sirens rounded the corner outside, and she headed for the stairs.
Goren closed his eyes and leaned his head back, vaguely aware of the sounds from below as the police and the medical examiner's teams entered Mrs. Taylor's apartment. She could hear Eames' voice sometimes, but it was always too low for him to make out the words.
He remembered Mrs. Taylor knocking on his door two days after he moved in, offering a plate of cookies and a chat over tea as her welcome to a new neighbor. A widow with no children, she'd clucked over him like a mother hen those long months of his mother's slow decline and those first weeks after her death. Somehow, she managed most days to be collecting her mail the same time that he brought in his, even though she never had much and could have fetched it any time, he sensed she waited for him; always offering a freshly baked morsel and tea. If she hadn't seen Eames in a while, she'd ask after her, once Bobby had convinced her they were only work partners. He didn't remember her ever actually venturing a word to his partner directly. She'd confessed to him once that Eames intimidated her because she carried a gun. When he pointed out that he did too, she'd laughed and said, "Well, you're a man. You can." He laughed every time he thought of that, and vowed never to tell Eames.
He hadn't even noticed that he hadn't seen her lately. His own turmoil had made him blind to the goings on around him.
"Hey, Bobby, you ready now? Time to get on."
He hadn't heard Eames return. He opened his eyes to see his partner holding out his jacket, and he sighed as he got to his feet.
"Don't they want to see me?"
"No need. I'm the one found the body. Clear enough who she was, too… there were some pictures on her bureau. Aren't any questions to ask."
"There's always one question. Why?"
If he asks 'Why?' one more time… Eames shrugged, "It's just how it is. She was old. It looks like it was probably a heart attack, maybe a stroke." She added, "It was just was her time, is all."
They both knew they were no longer talking about Claire Taylor.
Bobby wanted to go back down to her apartment to make sure the door was secured. The broken door had been temporarily fixed by the time they passed it. A new hasp and padlock held it shut and police tape sealed part of the jamb, as a defense against looters and opportunists rather than for the protection of a crime scene.
Outside, the air was crisp with autumn and bitter with the rot of fallen leaves that crunched beneath their shoes. Eames' car was a welcome refuge, and he slumped into the seat as she fired up the engine and swung away from the curb.
"It just doesn't seem right, her going like that. Somebody should of been there, should have noticed. I should have noticed."
"You said it yourself, Bobby; you couldn't have. Last couple weeks, we've spent -- what, maybe four hours home, every other night? I don't remember what my own place looks like, much less keeping track of my neighbors. Stop beating yourself for what you couldn't help. Don't go down that road." Again.
"It's still wrong," Goren said stubbornly. "She shouldn't have been alone. There should be a reason; an answer."
"Maybe better her way is better than ours."
"Huh?" Eames' quiet comment caught him totally off guard, and he turned startled eyes on his partner. She gave him one brief glance and turned her attention back to her driving.
"Think about it. There'll be a reason for us, when we go… neither of us likely to die of old age. Most likely a bullet, while Ross shouts that we didn't do enough. Does that make any more sense than living quietly to eighty and just having your heart stop over breakfast one morning? Dead is dead, Bobby. When it comes to that, we each of us die alone, no matter how many people are around."
Goren shivered in the sudden chill of Eames' dispassionate voice. He didn't think it often, but it struck him that this was the point where he and his partner were most unalike. Eames simply accepted most things he couldn't fathom or change, and viewed her own inevitable death as something no different than time or the weather. Oh, she'd go down fighting, and she'd fight all the harder if a friend's life were on the line, but her belief in nothing beyond the life she could see left her with no terror, only regrets. It gave her a calm that Goren could almost envy. Lord knew, his own constant need for reasons and answers left his sleep more troubled than Eames'. Still ...
"I don't want to go with no one knowing," he said.
ooOOoo
Eames smiled. It was never good enough for him. There had to be a reason for it all, a reason that people were born, a reason why some of them died alone and lonely, with no one even to know. She stole a look at her partner. I don't need reasons, but he does.
They pulled into the parking garage at 1PP in companionable silence, but as Goren reached for the door handle, Eames touched him on the arm. One look at his partner's expressionless face told him that Eames knew what he'd been trying to hide.
"I'm sure she was a sweet old lady, Bobby. She was happy enough with what she had. Don't chuck that and get all broody about the way she died. The way she lived is what matters. And it's the same for you and me." A ghost of a smile touched his lips and his eyes.
"I just -- she didn't have anyone, Eames. No one at all. And I didn't even notice."
"She had enough of you that she won't be forgotten. That's plenty for anyone. Let it go, Bobby. You didn't make things the way they are. And if there is Someone who did, then dump the lot on His shoulders and let Him worry about it." Eames tapped Goren's shoulder with a soft fist. "Come on…there'll be at least two of us at her funeral. I'll even bring flowers."
He nodded. "She loved violets, Eames."
"Violets. Got it."
There was some comfort in that, strange as it seemed. And strangely enough, at least for the moment, it was good enough for him. It wasn't a reason or an answer, but seemed a small step toward making sense out of the anger, shame, guilt, and regret.
In his mind's eye, he could see old Claire blushing as she'd done when he'd teased her once, but this time, there were violets in her hand, and she was smiling.
Goren shook his head again, and followed his partner to the elevator.