by Parnell Hall
I said nothing to Matilda Mae Smith, of course. I just filled out the fact sheet, had her sign the retainers, and got the hell out of there.
In the car, I stopped and wrote the case down on my paysheet: two hours and twenty-three miles. The fact that the case was no good made no difference—I’d still get paid for it. Yeah, two hours and twenty-three miles on my paysheet. That’s all Matilda Mae Smith meant to me, and all she could mean to me. ’Cause the one thing about my job is, you can’t let yourself care.
15.
ON MY WAY BACK from Jersey I began to lose it. This was not surprising. After all, it was less than twenty-four hours ago that I’d found a dead body. Since then I’d suppressed evidence, lied to the police, refused to explain to my boss, held out on my wife, interrogated a member of our car pool, viewed a porno flick, and carried out business as usual for Richard as if nothing had happened. I know TV detectives can do all that without it phasing them in the least, but believe me, I was worn pretty thin. So it wasn’t really surprising that I cracked up, but rather that I held out that long.
I was coming into the toll plaza for the George Washington Bridge. The car in front of me had a BABY ON BOARD! sign. And I thought, Jesus Christ, another one. I mean, forget the mentality that thinks the way to protect their kids is to obscure the driver’s vision out the rear window. What gets me is the obvious implication of the sign—that if I don’t have a BABY ON BOARD! it’s perfectly all right to tail-gate me, side-swipe me, and run me off the road.
And then I thought, Schmuck. What the hell are you doing? Every damn stand-up comic in the world is doing BABY ON BOARD! routines, you dotta do one too?
And that’s when I realized, I wasn’t just thinking all this, I was saying it. I was talking to myself. Out loud.
I do that sometimes, because I’m a writer, and when I’m composing something, I will often say it out loud to see how it sounds. But that’s different, because I’m doing it for a purpose, and I know I’m doing it.
But sometimes, when the pressure gets too much for me, I’ll start doing it without knowing I’m doing it. And that’s when I realize I’m starting to lose it.
I realized it now. And I started cracking up. Jesus Christ, here I am on my way back to my office to view a whole bunch of porno tapes in the hope of beating a murder rap, and I’m talking to myself and doing BABY ON BOARD! routines.
I was giggling so hard by the time I hit the toll booth I was barely able to ask for a receipt. The tool booth attendant, who obviously didn’t get the joke, gave me a funny look, but still accepted my money.
I laughed my way over the George Washington Bridge and onto the West Side Highway. I had more or less calmed down by the time I took the exit at 96th Street. I parked my car, and took the subway back downtown to my office.
My beeper went off as I was unlocking my office. Shit. Of all the luck. Normally I wouldn’t go back to my office after finishing a case, because it meant leaving my car all the way uptown. And then if I got beeped I’d have to go back and get it. But today I needed to see those tapes, so I had, and, sure enough, the minute I get here, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
I shut the damn thing off. Screw it. If the client has a phone, I’ll stall them till tonight if I have to, but I’m going to see those tapes.
I called the office. Wendy/Cheryl answered the phone.
“Rosenberg and Stone.”
“Agent 005.”
“Stanley?”
Well, that was progress. Back to first-name basis.
“Yeah. You got a case?”
“Yes I do,” she said.
She said it nicely. That bothered me. She was too nice. Almost smug.
“Well, what is it?”
“A murder.”
“A murder? Who’s the client?”
“You are.”
“What!?”
“A Sergeant MacAullif called and asked me to beep you. He wants you in his office immediately. He was most insistent.”
16.
“SHUT UP.”
I hadn’t said a word. But I was about to. And Sergeant MacAullif had known it, despite the fact that he was standing with his back to me. I found that rather unsettling.
We were alone in MacAullif’s office. He had brought me in and told me to sit down. Now he was standing looking out the window. I had no idea why I was there. Or rather, I had a lot of ideas, and none of them were very good. I would have liked to have asked, but MacAullif had told me to shut up, and under the circumstances, shutting up seemed a pretty good idea.
MacAullif turned around, put his hands on the back of his chair, and looked at me.
“I don’t want you to talk,” he said. “I want you to listen.”
That was fine by me. I wasn’t looking forward to any part of the interview, but if the Sergeant wanted me to listen, I’d listen. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like what I heard, but listening seemed a damn sight easier than answering questions.
MacAullif leaned on the chair, raised his eyes from me, and looked around the room. His eyes wandered over the pictures and certificates on the wall, as if looking for something. I realized he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. He just had something to say, and was trying to figure out how to begin.
Finally he did.
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” he said.
There was a long pause. I opened my mouth.
“Shut up,” he said. “I told you, I don’t want you to talk.” He took a breath, let it out again. “Three months ago you were in here with a bullet. A bullet connected with a murder case. Now you’re here again. Involved in another murder case. You have a perfectly plausible story to account for your presence. At least, you would have if a secretary hadn’t copied down a wrong address. Still, with the paper missing, your story might stand up. Me, I don’t buy it at all.”
I opened my mouth again.
“I told you to shut up. What is it Chuck Norris says in the movie? When I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you.” MacAullif afforded himself a brief chuckle. “All right,” he said. “Take the Albrect murder. That’s the guy who got killed in that parking lot, in case you didn’t know. You come in with a bullet and a story about finding it that’s just about as plausible as the one about the missing piece of paper. A week later a guy shows up and confesses. He has a written confession that’s been typed on five different typewriters. When we question him about it, it turns out there’s a lot of stuff in it that he couldn’t possibly have known. But it doesn’t matter, ’cause there’s enough in it to justify a warrant. And when we serve it, damned if we don’t find the murder weapon and all the evidence we need, all tied up neat and tidy just waiting for us. And the thing is, when we arrest these guys, they all start singing and blaming it on each other, but each and every one of them swears the gun was a plant. But it doesn’t matter, ’cause the confession stands up enough to justify the warrant, and that means the warrant stands up, and that means the evidence was obtained legally, and that means these guys are going down. Now the other cops say these guys are just lying about the murder weapon being a plant. But I keep thinking about that bullet. And to me, the whole affair reeks of just one thing: gifted amateur.”
Sergeant MacAullif was a master of sarcasm, and what he did with the word “gifted” was a wonder to behold. I opened my mouth.
“Do I have to tell you again?” MacAullif said.
MacAullif took his hands off the chair and started pacing, which wasn’t easy, his office being so small. He came back to the chair again.
“I’m a sergeant,” he said. “I’ve been a sergeant for seventeen years. I’d like to be a lieutenant, but I probably never will. You know why? Because I don’t play the game. I don’t know how. I don’t know how to kiss ass, and diddle the media, and say the right things, and do all those things you’re supposed to do to uphold the glory of the N.Y.P.D. Quite frankly, I don’t want to know how. I don’t care about it. I don’t give a shit. You know?”
; He paused. Looked around. “I got a murder on my hands. I want it solved. And more than that. I don’t just want it solved. I want the fucker who did it in jail.” He shook his head. Smiled. “There’s a difference, you know? Just between you and me I’d like to hang Miranda up by his fucking balls, you know what I mean? Our legal system is a joke. There’s mass murderers walking around today because some cop violated their civil rights by not informing them killing people was a crime, and if they did it again they were liable for arrest.
“Now, as far as I’m concerned, you have to fight back. And if a guy is guilty, I mean really guilty, I don’t care what it takes to send the fuck to jail.”
He paused and looked at me. “Which brings me to you.”
He paused again and took a breath. “I don’t peg you for this murder.”
I would have liked to have thanked him with all my heart, but having been told four or five times to shut up, I held my peace.
“Before you start rejoicing, I should tell you the other cops do. But that’s really because they got nobody else. But I don’t peg you for it. And if you did it, and I can’t get you for it, dumb as you are, well then you deserve to get away.”
He took out a cigar and stuck it in his mouth.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to light it. I used to smoke ’em, but my doctor made me quit. Now I just chew on the end.”
He took it out of his mouth and looked at me. “So why are you here? You’re here because I don’t believe in coincidence. Now I’m not asking you to talk, because you wouldn’t tell me anything anyway, and, frankly, I don’t care. But I think you’re involved in this thing, and I think you were involved in the Albrect thing. And that’s why I’m doing what I’m going to do. And it happens to be the type of thing I’ve been talking to you about, the type of thing that goes against the police department line and is going to keep me a sergeant all my life.
“Because, I figure, if you’re not involved in this, if you’re just some stupid innocent bystander, well, what’s the harm? It’s not going to matter anyway. But if I’m right, and a week or two from now some asshole comes in here and confesses to this crime, well, I don’t care how it happened, or why it happened, I’m just glad it did.”
He studied the end of his cigar for a moment, then looked back up at me.
“So I’m gonna tell you what we know.”
17.
SOMETIMES YOU FEEL GOOD, and sometimes you feel bad, and sometimes you just don’t know. I guess that’s why the word “ambivalent” was invented. That word had never been more appropriate to describe my feelings than it was now. I was overjoyed that Sergeant MacAullif didn’t consider me a murder suspect. I was delighted that he didn’t want to interrogate me. And I was quite pleased that I was about to find some things out about the Darryl Jackson murder that I needed to know. But I was shocked and dismayed to find out he was doing it because he thought I had meddled in the Albrect murder. I had, but he wasn’t supposed to know it. I thought I was free and clear on that one. I thought I’d covered my tracks pretty well. And all the time, all the moves that I had thought were so clever, he had immediately recognized as the bumbling attempts of a gifted amateur. And the emotion that stirred in me was a primary one—at least a primary one for me. And that emotion was fear. That cold, clammy feeling that someone is looking right through you, and knows all about you, and knows what you think.
I had no time to dwell on it, however, for MacAullif was already taking a folder off his desk and pulling papers out of it.
“Let’s start with the autopsy report,” he said. He held up the paper and read from it. “Death was due to a laceration from a sharp object entering the back and perforating the left ventricle, etc., etc., bullshit, bullshit.” He lowered the paper. “We know all that. He got stabbed with a knife. Now, the time element. The medical examiner’s covering his ass like crazy. He puts the time of death at somewhere between eleven o’clock and one-thirty. That’s pretty gutless, under the circumstances, seeing as how your call was logged in at 1:27. But that’s what happens when the lawyers start chewing the shit out of the legal system. This guy’s been on the stand before, and he knows if he made the outside limit 1:15, some wise-ass lawyer would make him look like a damn fool for saying the murder couldn’t have taken place at 1:16, so there you are. 1:30 is a pretty safe outside limit, seeing as how the radio patrol cops got there by 1:35. At any rate, that’s what the spineless fuck has done, and that leaves you right in the middle of it.
“Just between you and me, the murder probably took place somewhere between 12:00 and 1:00, which would almost let you out of it, but we have to live with what we get.”
MacAullif looked at me. “Any comments?”
“I thought you didn’t want me to talk.”
“Naw, I just didn’t want you to lie to me about how you’re not involved. I don’t want to hear it. We’re discussing the case now. Let’s discuss it.”
“All right. What do you want to discuss?”
“The time of death. When do you think he was killed?”
“Before I got there.”
MacAullif looked at me. “Don’t be smart. This is a limited-time offer, and it may be withdrawn. When do you think he was killed?”
“I don’t know. I just know it couldn’t have been too long before I got there, ’cause when I saw the body there was still blood coming from the wound.”
“And what time was that?”
“That I got there?”
“Yeah.”
I realized the difference between this discussion and an interrogation was not bigger than a breadbox.
“Didn’t you say the police logged my call at 1:27?”
“Yeah. And how long was that after you found the body?”
“I don’t know. A matter of minutes.”
“How many minutes?”
“I don’t know. Three or four.”
“Three or four minutes? And what were you doing for that long?”
“Throwing up in the bathroom.”
“Ah, yes. All right, let’s put this together. How long were you knocking on the door before you got into the apartment?”
“I don’t know. Five, ten minutes.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be silly. Nobody stands in the hallway for five or ten minutes banging on a door. It may seem a long time, but you figure three, four minutes tops.”
I shrugged. “If you say so.”
“I do.”
“All right. Say three or four minutes.”
“Then you opened the door.” “Right.”
“You saw the apartment had been ransacked, so you went in.”
“That’s right.”
“You say you went in to see if anything had happened to Darryl Jackson.”
“That’s right. I did.”
“Did you search the apartment?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think you had. Because, after all, you weren’t looking for anything. You were just trying to find Darryl Jackson.”
“That’s right.”
“So, as soon as you saw he wasn’t in the living room, you went in the bedroom.”
“Yes.”
“And found the body.”
“That’s right.”
“That couldn’t have taken more than a minute.”
“No, I guess not.”
“And we have just determined that was three or four minutes before you called the cops.”
“That’s just a rough estimate.”
“Yeah, but it’s a pretty good one. Anything more than that would seem excessive.”
“So?”
“So, let’s put it together. Your call was logged at 1:27. You found the body three or four minutes before that. That’s 1:23, 1:24. You found the body within a minute of entering the apartment. That’s 1:22, 1:23. You got into the apartment after three or four minutes of pounding on the door. That puts your arrival at the apartment no earlier than 1:18.”
“If you
say so.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been any earlier than that. Because Wendy Millington puts the time she beeped you at approximately 1:15.”
“I wouldn’t take her word for anything.”
“Neither would I. But I have to accept the facts as I get ’em, and that’s a fact.”
“That she beeped me at 1:15?”
“No. That she says she did.”
“O.K. In any case, her story corroborates mine. What’s the point?”
“A Mr. Claude Phillips, from the adjoining apartment, told the police, and I quote—” He grabbed a sheaf of papers, flipped through them, found what he was looking for. “Some dumb-ass honky motherfucker bang on the wrong door.”
“I see,” I said. “So you intend to get the gentleman up here to attempt to identify me?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary. I think we can I.D. you just from the description.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“The thing is, Mr. Phillips lists the time of the incident as approximately 1 o’clock.”
“He could be mistaken.”
“He could.”
“Or it could be some other dumb-ass honky motherfucker.”
“It could. I don’t think the idea merits serious consideration.”
“Perhaps not.”
MacAullif looked at me. “Well, do you have any explanation?”
“All I can say is, the gentleman must be mistaken. I thought this wasn’t an interrogation and you didn’t want to hear any of my lies.”
MacAullif held up his hands. “It isn’t, and I don’t. Sorry. Let’s move on.”
“To what?”
MacAullif didn’t answer me directly. He looked at me, frowned, then chuckled softly. “I should explain something to you,” he said. “About homicide investigations. Since you obviously know nothing about them.” MacAullif held up one finger. “Now, the murder of a pimp in Harlem, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t rate this much attention. Know what standard procedure is? No, of course you don’t. Well, it’s forty-eight hours. That’s how long we’d spend on this case. If we hadn’t cracked it by then, it’s go in the Unsolved Crimes file, and it never would get solved. Not unless we busted some punk for something else, and when we broke him he copped to this one too.