by Parnell Hall
But I wasn’t happy about it. No surprise there. I was pissed off at life in general and this case in particular. And having to do this nothing case, this stupid, pointless, trivial case—but one which Richard might well win, for Christ’s sake—well, that just seemed like the ultimate humiliation. So this is what it’s come to. This is what I’ve been reduced to. A spineless, sniveling worm, incapable of standing up for anything he believes in, dutifully following other people’s orders in a world that made no sense.
Not, I admit, the brightest of philosophies. But the point is, on top of everything else, I had all of that going on in my head when I left Felix Cortez’s to go out and get my car.
The thing is, I am generally cautious. I have a keen sense of danger—not surprising in a paranoiac. And I’ve certainly been on this job long enough to have learned to be wary. And I have to believe if this had been Harlem or the South Bronx or someplace like that, my preoccupations notwithstanding, I’d have been looking out.
But this was Queens, which always seems safer, perhaps unrealistically so, but it does. And it wasn’t some deserted residential street either. Felix Cortez happened to live over a grocery store on a perfectly decent, heavily populated, commercial block on Northern Boulevard, which is a major two-way street. My car was actually at a meter, for Christ’s sake. And who expects trouble just walking down the street and getting into their car at a meter? Anyway, I sure wasn’t. I just walked up to my car and stuck my key in the lock.
Which is when he grabbed me. Suddenly, without warning, from behind. He grabbed my upper arms in vicelike grips. My briefcase, which I’d tucked under my good right arm, fell to the street, bouncing off my foot. My key ring slipped out of my hand and my keys clattered against the side of the car, dangling from the door key in the lock.
My shock was so great I almost wet my pants.
Good god, this can’t be happening. Good god.
The man spun me around, grabbed my shoulders, slammed me up against the car so hard my teeth clicked and my eyes teared.
I blinked them, looked up into the face of my attacker.
It was MacAullif.
35.
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU think you’re doing?”
The speaker was not me. I hadn’t recovered my faculties enough to be able to talk. No, it was MacAullif who said that.
When I blinked at him stupidly, too overwhelmed to answer, he slammed me up against the car again.
The spectacle of a beefy bruiser like MacAullif manhandling some poor guy with his arm in a sling was too much for two young jock types passing by. They actually stepped out in the street to break it up. MacAullif let go of me with one hand, the other being quite sufficient to hold me still, reached in his pocket and flipped out his badge.
“I’m a cop,” he growled. “Fuck off.”
They did. So much for the rights of ordinary citizens. A police officer can abuse any defenseless cripple he wants.
Their intervention had at least given me time to catch my breath. “MacAullif,” I said.
He shoved me against the car again. “Shut up! Do you hear me? Just shut up! I’ll tell you when to talk. Right now you better listen.
“You don’t return my phone calls. You don’t take my phone calls. You have some ditsy bitch say you’ll call back, but you don’t. Not surprising, the way things worked out.”
“MacAullif—”
He slammed me against the car again. “Slow learner? Keep your mouth shut. You said enough already, believe me.” He paused, exhaled. “So, you tell me in the hospital you’re too doped up to talk. I don’t buy that, but I give you the benefit of the doubt. I even pull strings for you. Make a call downtown, get ’em to give you a break. Give ’em my personal assurance you’ll show up and make a statement the next day.” MacAullif’s eyes blazed. “My personal assurance, fuck-face!”
“I made a statement,” I said. I shouldn’t have. It got me slammed up against the car again.
“You sure did. I’ll say you did. I read your statement this morning, asshole. Who the hell do you think you are?”
I took that for a rhetorical question. I was also getting tired of being slammed up against the side of my car. I said nothing.
“Don’t you wanna know why I read your statement? A statement in a case that ain’t got jack shit to do with me? Well, I have to tell you, I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t go checkin’ up on you. I didn’t call Sergeant Reynolds up and say, ‘By the way, could I read this guy’s statement just on the off chance he turns out to be some incredible asshole?’
“So, why do you think he brought it to me, aside from the fact I vouched for you in the first place? Well, Sergeant Reynolds is a diligent cop. Not the most experienced cop in the world, not the most seasoned investigator, but a perfectly intelligent cop. And he’s a farm boy—the man knows horseshit when he sees it.”
“MacAullif—”
“Shut the fuck up. So, you make your statement yesterday. It don’t mean nothin’ to Reynolds,’cept he knows it’s shit, but he’s not gonna bother me on my day off, ’cause I don’t take ’em often and he knows I’ll hit the roof. Embarrassed to bring it to me, really. ‘Excuse me, sergeant, but why did you vouch for this flaming asshole?’ Besides, he’s got no reason to think it’s that important.
“Except, I told him you’re a grand jury witness. One of the reasons for leaving you alone, letting you go home and recuperate. So when you sing funny, he pulls the file. First thing this morning. He pulls the file and he reads about Melissa Ford, and like any good cop, he puts two and two together and he makes six.
“So, now he doesn’t come back on me, he goes to Sergeant Thurman, the officer in charge of the case, and he says, ‘Hey man, I think you got a problem with this one.’ Well, that would work with nine officers out of ten, but Sergeant Thurman’s a moron, he don’t wanna hear shit, he’s got his murderer and he don’t care if you got shot just so long as you didn’t get shot so bad you can’t testify. But Sergeant Reynolds is a persistent son of a bitch, he won’t quit till he has the dope, so he gets outta Sergeant Thurman, yeah, you been messin’ around in the case, you been comin’ around askin’ questions about drug paraphernalia. Well, it don’t take a genius to link drugs and Harlem, so now Sergeant Reynolds is real interested, only Sergeant Thurman ain’t a genius and he still won’t tumble.
“Now Sergeant Reynolds wants to talk to me bad, only I’m not in the office, I’m out on a case and he can’t reach me. By then you’re singing to the grand jury so he couldn’t reach you, and he’s not sure he wants to anyway till he’s got some more dope, so while he’s waiting for me, he calls Melvin C. Poindexter to see if you were investigating this murder for Melissa Ford.”
“Shit.”
“Right. Well, that gives Melvin C. Poindexter a severe case of indigestion. He says absolutely not, no go, no way, you are poison, you got smallpox, you’re the kiss of death, he wants nothing to do with you, nothing you’ve done should reflect on his client in any way, and the whole nine yards. So Reynolds pins it down that you were absolutely not working for Melissa Ford or Melvin C. Poindexter when you were shot.”
MacAullif made a face. “Well, Reynolds shouldn’t have spilled that. If Poindexter didn’t know that, there was no reason to hand it to him. But, like I said, Reynolds is young, the eager beaver type, wants to get a rise out of him.
“Well, he gets one. Poindexter flips out. Does an abrupt about face. Now he wants to hear all about it. Figures he hit the jackpot. You can bet your ass he’ll be lookin’ for you.”
“He already is.”
“No shit. So what’s the upshot? I get back from a perfectly routine homicide investigation with a perp in tow. Husband/wife thing, guy croaked her, gonna sing, all I gotta do is the paper work and process it, chalk one up on the plus side of the ledger, and how many days do you get a piece of cake like that?
“But, no. Suddenly I got a fuckin’ three-ring circus on my hands. I got Reynolds all over me for stickin’ up for
you. I got Sergeant Thurman up my ass, wantin’ to know what the fuck Reynolds is doin’ messin’ around in his investigation—as if that were my fault, for Christ’s sake—fuckin’ Reynolds had to go and mention me, that guy has really got to watch his mouth. And then I got Melvin C. Poindexter, whom I never met, talked to, or even fuckin’ heard of, for Christ’s sake, and he’s suddenly my fault, cause Sergeant Thurman’s flippin’ out and wants to know if I’m the jerk who sicced the asshole onto him.”
MacAullif paused, took a breath. He was very red in the face. “You understand all that? You followin’ all that? If not, I’m not surprised, cause I’ve been tryin’ to sort it out all fuckin’ day. Anyway, the upshot is, you’re suddenly Public Fuckup Number One. Sergeant Reynolds wants you bad. This Poindexter lawyer wants you bad, and I want you bad. The only one who doesn’t want you bad is Sergeant Thurman, and that’s just ’cause he’s too fuckin’ dumb.”
“He called me too.”
“Oh yeah? Well, that ain’t ’cause he gives a shit. He’s just callin’ to tell you as far as he’s concerned the case is closed, and if you go back on, add to, or in any way change what you told the grand jury, he’ll rip your fuckin’ lungs out. Now that may not sound like too cordial a message, but it’s a valentine compared to what you’ll get from everybody else. To say that Sergeant Reynolds is pissed would be a small understatement. Cops don’t like it when you lie to them. When you lie in a signed statement, they like it even less. Particularly when it fucks up an investigation. In this case, it fucks up two investigations. You’re on Sergeant Reynolds’ shit list. You’re on Sergeant Thurman’s shit list. Right now you’re Melvin Poindexter’s pretty boy, but that’s ’cause he don’t know no better. He thinks you’re gonna help him out. As soon as he hears your version of how you got shot, you’re gonna be on the top of his shit list too.
“At any rate, you’re on the top of everybody’s Most Wanted list. The whole fuckin’ world’s tryin’ to find you.”
“How’d you find me first?”
“How do you think? I called Rosenberg and Stone to tell ’em to beep you. They tell me you’re there. I say, put him on, and they tell me you’re talkin’ to your lawyer and you’ll call back. Well, I’m not stupid. The minute you don’t take the call I know you’re duckin’ me, and I don’t wait for no call back, I go over there. Probably just missed you. The girls say they’ll beep you, I tell ’em if they do I’ll rip their tits off, just tell me where you went. And if they tell anybody else, I’ll haul ’em in on obstruction. Now I’m damn sure neither one of them knows what that means, but they get the idea.”
MacAullif paused, possibly for breath. He inhaled and exhaled. “So, I’m here and you’re here and there’s nobody else here. With so many people after you, that’s a situation that’s not gonna last.”
“So?”
“So we gotta talk.”
36.
“YOU GOTTA GET BACK ON the horse that threw you.”
“What?”
MacAullif and I were sitting in a small coffee shop down the street. I always seem to sit in coffee shops when I talk to MacAullif. MacAullif lives on coffee. The thing is, he seems to hate it. Treats it like it was a chore. Anyway, he took a sip, grimaced like his mother’d just given him castor oil.
“Look,” he said. “I know what you’re goin’ through. I been a cop a long time. I never been shot myself, but I seen enough cops who got shot. Rookies in particular. And it’s just like with you.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“You know what they do when a cop gets shot? Well, it depends how bad it is, of course. But say the guy’s O.K., he can go back to work. They take him off the street a while. Give him a desk job. Ease him back into it.” MacAullif shook his head. “Never believed in that. For my money, that’s fucked up.”
“Why?”
“Gotta get back on the horse that threw you. Know where that comes from? Bronco bustin’. Cowboys. Cowboy’s tryin’ to break a horse that’s too wild, it bucks him off. Busts him up some. What do they do, say, ‘Oh shit, take it easy, try some of these tamer horses, break a few of those and work your way up to this bronc?’ Hell, no. They get right back on. Soon as they’re able. Sometimes before they’re able. A guy with two cracked ribs and a busted arm’ll be climbin’ up on the same fuckin’ horse.
“’Cause the cowboys know. The longer you take, the more you put it off, the harder it is to get back on. It’s the fear, you know? And it ain’t the fear of the horse. It’s the fear of the fear. It fucks up your head. You start thinkin’, am I afraid of this horse? Am I afraid to get back on? Maybe you’re not, but you’re afraid you will be afraid. See what I mean? The fear of the fear. It grows on itself, feeds on itself, gets worse and worse.
“No, you gotta get back on the horse that threw you. Right away. Soon as you can. Before it’s too late. ’Cause if you wait too long, it builds up. The fear. And you reach a point where you can never get back on that horse again.”
“You ever gonna get back to present-day New York?”
MacAullif glared at me from over the top of his coffee cup. “You got a wise mouth for someone in your position.” He took a sip, grimaced. “I’m talkin’ present-day New York. You too dumb to see the connection? I gotta spell it out for you?”
“No. Go on talking about horses.”
MacAullif took a breath. “Jesus Christ. You sure have the balls when it comes to talkin’ to me. Me, the one guy you shouldn’t be talkin’ that way to.”
“Sorry. I just get tired of being used as a punching bag.”
MacAullif put up his hands. “Oh. My fault, of course. Like you did nothin’ to bring this on. You’ll pardon me, but just who’s punchin’, who? As I recall, I’m the guy who got dumped on, lied to, fucked over and made to look like a fool. And here I am, instead of chewing you out, sittin’ here tellin’ you I know how you feel.”
“Talkin’ about horses.”
“Fuck the horses!” MacAullif banged the table so hard coffee jumped out of his cup. He rubbed his head. “Jesus Christ, you know why you don’t wanna hear about horses? It’s not ’cause you don’t understand or you think it’s stupid. It’s cause you do understand and it hits too close to home.”
I said nothing, sipped my coffee. MacAullif was right. About the coffee, anyway. It was pretty bad.
“Look,” MacAullif said. “You got shot and now you’re scared. That’s normal. That’s a typical reaction. If you weren’t scared, there’d be something wrong with you. You’d have to be a fuckin’ moron.”
MacAullif took a sip of coffee, set it down, leaned in. “So, you take the fact that you’re scared as a given, and you deal with it, see? You say, hey, I got a problem, I gotta deal with it, and you do. I’m not sayin’ that’s not hard, I’m just sayin’ you gotta. ’Cause the only alternative is to say, I’m scared, I can’t do nothin’, I’m too scared. And if you do that, it builds on itself like the fuckin’ cowboy and then you can’t get back on the fuckin’ horse.
“So, here’s you. This guy shoots you, you say fuck it, I can’t take it anymore, I’m scared, he shot me, I’m scared he’ll shoot me again, I don’t want him to shoot me again, I’m scared, I can’t deal with it, I’m bailin’ out. So when the cops say ‘Who shot you?,’ you tell some stupid lie. And when I say stupid lie, I mean stupid lie. I mean, Jesus Christ, ‘I don’t remember, my mind’s a blank?’”
“You don’t believe in traumatic amnesia?”
“Sure I believe in traumatic amnesia. I’ve seen cases of it. When I see it, I believe it. In your case, I’d sooner believe in the fuckin’ Tooth Fairy.”
MacAullif glared at me, took a sip of coffee, glared at it. “Jesus,” he said. I didn’t know if he was referring to me or the coffee. Probably both.
“Look,” MacAullif said. “Believe it or not, I didn’t get to be a sergeant by bein’ a dumb cop. I look at you, I see how scared you are and the fact you lied to the cops, and I put all that together and there’s only one thing th
at makes sense.”
He waited, made me ask. I knew it was a tactic on his part, but I couldn’t help myself.
“What’s that?” I said.
“You know who shot you. You know it perfectly well. That’s why you’re so scared, and that’s why you lied. It’s the only thing that makes sense. If you didn’t know who shot you, there’d be no reason for you to lie to the cops.”
I said nothing. I sat quiet, hardly breathed.
“You waitin’ for more?” MacAullif said. “That’s it. That’s all there is. That’s the story. You know who shot you and you’re afraid of him, so you lied to the cops. Perfectly simple and straightforward. And perfectly understandable. But it ain’t gonna work.”
That was where I was supposed to say, “Why not?” But hell could freeze over before I’d do that. Saying “why not” would be tantamount to admitting what MacAullif had said was true. Instead, I took a sip of coffee. An unpleasant alternative. The lesser of two evils.
“You wanna know why it ain’t gonna work?” MacAullif said. “I’ll tell you why not. Because it’s too fucking stupid. Looking for potholes to register. Give me a break.”
“Happens all the time.”
“Sure it does,” MacAullif said. “That’s why it would make a perfectly legit story. But you can’t carry it through.” He shook his head. “You’re such a moron. You can’t even lie straight. You wanna lie to someone, at least be consistent. Say something like, ‘I was out looking for potholes and I saw this big rubble-filled lot and it occurred to me, Jesus, here’s a place a guy could really fall down in,’ and I’m walkin’ around the lot lookin’ at the defect and suddenly I hear a loud noise like a shot and the next thing I know I wake up in the hospital.” MacAullif shrugged. “See, that’s a lie, but it’s simple, straightforward. It’s one lie and you carry it through. As it happens, it wouldn’t work, since the evidence indicates you were shot in the building, but at least it would be a step in the right direction.