Come Out Tonight

by Bonnie Rozanski

  “Okay,” she said. Nothing I said seemed to ring a bell.

  “It must be a relief not to have so many people clamoring to see you all the time,” I volunteered.

  “Yes, but now no one visits,” she replied, a wave of sadness crossing her face, that she seemed unwilling or unable to cover up.

  “Not your parents?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Back in California.”

  “Not Henry?”

  She hesitated for a moment, as if she couldn’t quite put a face to the name. “Oh, Henry. Yes. He comes sometimes.”

  “Doctors?”

  “Yes. Daddy had some spesh…some specialists come to examine me.” She shrugged. “I don’t know what they found. No one told me.”

  I could see why her father had said he couldn’t stand to see her like this – his brilliant, talented biochemist of a daughter who no longer knew what was going on.…. “If you don’t mind, Sherry, I’d like to ask you about the night you were attacked.”

  “I don’t remember it,” she replied.

  “Nothing at all? Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt you?

  Sherry thought a minute, then shook her head.

  “Do you remember the birthday dinner you had with your parents?”

  She seemed more amused than bewildered. “Oh, were they here?”

  “You told your parents about the side effects of your new drug Somnolux? You wanted to tell the newspapers?”

  Her forehead furrowed mightily in the exertion of remembering, but there seemed nothing to recall.

  “There was an argument?” I persisted.

  She looked at me then and laughed. “There was…always an argument with Father.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  We sat huddled together while she gave me a halting account of her upbringing, her father’s need to control her, to control everyone including her mother, who never seemed to mind so much and did mostly as she was told. That Sherry herself could not. How she had needed to prove herself to the world. And so she did. Sherry spoke eloquently but simply, stuttering over a word here and there, but able to speak fluently from her heart. Somewhere in this broken body a real person still lived.

  “Did he ever hurt you?” I asked when she was done.

  “My father?” Sherry asked, a bitter smile on her face. “Not fis…fis….physically,” she stammered. “But in words. Many times with words.”

  Just then I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around to see Henry Jackman, an irritated look on his face.

  “What were you two talking about?” Jackman asked.

  I really didn’t want to stand here, listening to the whole thing all over again. Besides, now that Henry was here, I could think of something I’d much rather be doing. “I guess I’ll be going,” I said, making my way to the door.

  “No! Don’t go,” he shouted, running after me. “Tell me about the investigation.”

  “No new leads,” I said. “By the way, I heard about the break-in.”

  Henry hissed, “You heard about that?”

  “I know everything,” I told him, smiling. I didn’t, of course, but if a suspect wants to think that about me, far be it for me to disabuse him of the notion.

  I could see him sweat. “Did they find the Oxycontin?” Jackman whispered.

  “Nope,” I told him.

  “What break-in?” Sherry asked from across the room.

  “Oh, didn’t I tellya?” Henry called back. “There was this break-in at the pharmacy.”

  I was out of there. “Nice talking with you, Sherry,” I said, and disappeared out the door, down the hallway and across the parking lot. I sat in my car for a few minutes before I decided definitively what I was about to do. I had signed out the car, and I had to return it to the precinct. But perhaps I could make one more stop before I handed it back.

  I checked my tote for the search warrant I’d received two days ago, and there it was: signed and stamped by a federal magistrate, authorizing me to search the apartment of Henry Jackman for drugs, legal or illegal. I guessed that at night I could get back to the Upper West Side in twenty minutes. Figuring Henry would stay with Sherry an hour and then spend another forty minutes on the subway going home, I should have more than an hour to get into his apartment, search all his hiding places and be out and gone. Easy.

  I cruised down the Cross Bronx in the dark, rush hour traffic long gone, and any cars that remained headed in the opposite direction. I pulled in front of Henry’s apartment building within eighteen minutes. I didn’t bother trying to find a parking space. There never were any. Alternate parking restrictions forced people to move their car from one side of the street to the other on alternate days. For instance no parking from 9AM - 10:30AM Mon & Thurs. means you must move your car no later than 9AM on those days. What most people do is to idle down the street, double-parked, waiting for the street-sweeping truck to come through, and then scoot back into your own or someone else’s intended space before they realized you were there. Of course idling any longer than three minutes in a double-parked position is strictly illegal. And, of course, scooting into someone else’s spot would get you a glare with a middle finger stuck high into the air; occasionally a threat gesture, with or without profanities.

  But none of those things applied to me at any rate, since it was nine at night. The cars had all gone beddy-bye, tucked into their own little spaces for the night, and no one was going home, because they already were. Anyway, what was I even thinking? I had a police car. I pulled the Crown Victoria up beside a nice Chevy Impala, and turned off the ignition. The nice thing about being NYPD is double parking without getting a ticket.

  Jackman’s building must go back to the 1920’s or earlier. Maybe twelve feet wide, it’s one of the skinniest buildings in the city, just big enough for one apartment on each of its three floors. With its facade of dirty red brick, untouched by a sandblaster, it’s owned by some absent landlord who by the looks of it hasn’t updated anything since the day he bought it. I’d canvassed the building the week before to see what the interior locks looked like. Fortunately for me, he’d never replaced the original locks with dead-bolts.

  The front door was open to the touch, and the inside door was easily opened by sliding a credit card into the vertical crack between the door and the frame. Gloves on, I inserted the card as far as it would go, tilted it till one side was almost touching the doorknob. I pushed it all the way in and bent the card the opposite way, forcing the lock back. I leaned on the door as I opened it. Pop, I was in. Seriously, unless this guy doesn’t care about his tenants getting ripped off, he should do some work around here.

  Up three rickety flights of stairs sat Henry’s apartment. I did the same bit with the credit card, and it surrendered with no resistance.

  Why you might ask did I have to go to all this trouble if I had a search warrant? Well, the warrant was for my legal protection – mine and the department’s. I would never break in illegally. After all, I’m an officer of the law. But why would I want to tip my hand to an increasingly likely suspect? This way, I’m in and out, and no one’s the wiser.

  The door creaked open. It could use some WD-40, but the landlord obviously doesn’t care about that, either. I found the switch inside the front door and turned on the light. The living room was neat but dusty, even dustier than mine, and I’m no housekeeper, believe me. New York City is a dust mine, if there’s such a thing. Whether it’s the diesel from the buses and delivery trucks, the ubiquitous construction, the potholes in the street, you name it: short of the GobiDesert or the Kalahari, New York City is one of the dustiest places on earth. No doubt about it; I was going to have to be careful not to betray my presence by disturbing the dust.

  I examined the spot by the window where Sherry reputedly had been attacked, but moved right on to the bathroom, where, if Henry Jackman was like the rest of the 8.4 million people in New York City, he stored his medicines in the medicine cabinet. There was a single incandesce
nt bulb on the ceiling, to which was suspended one of those strings of metal dots, the kind they used to make fifty years ago. I pulled at the string and the light went on. The medicine cabinet was an old framed mirror with a little knob to open it. Inside, crammed in among dirty toothbrushes, a straight edge razor, and bottles of Tylenol, Sleep-Eze, Sominex, and Nytol, sat fifteen boxes of Somnolux. The sixteenth was missing. I took note of the sequence numbers and checked over the rest. None of the other drugs were there. I took a picture on my phone of the contents of the cabinet and closed the door.

  There were no other shelves or drawers in the bathroom. I walked into the kitchen and examined all the cubbyholes, though I only found the usual suspects: cutlery in the drawers, some cheap dishware and a few banged-up pots in the cabinets. Where would he hide the Oxycontin, I asked myself? The freezer, but all that contained was a plastic tray of ice and a frost-bitten package of Eggo blueberry waffles. The refrigerator, more provocatively, held a tray of uneaten lasagna, carefully wrapped with aluminum foil and topped with an obscene thank you note from someone named Heather. Interesting, but still no Oxycontin.

  I checked my watch. Forty-eight minutes had passed since I’d left Henry at the nursing home. I walked down the hall to the bedroom. The bed was unmade, and a pair of pants was lying wrinkled on the floor. I moved over to the bureau and opened the top drawer, riffling gently through the men’s underwear until I found a pair of silky red panties, an embroidered “A” on the right hand corner. Alicia? I thought, taking a picture with my cell phone before tucking the panties back where I had found them. I checked the other drawers, then the closet, under the bed, beneath the pillows, in fact, everywhere I could possibly think to search. Then back to the living room where I examined every inch of shelf, careful not to leave telltale streaks in the uniform carpet of dust.

  By the time I’d finished searching the whole place, my watch showed sixty-three minutes had elapsed. I shut off all the lights and left the place more or less the way I had found it. The fifteen boxes of Somnolux would be enough evidence, of course, but I was frustrated that I’d found nothing else. If Jackman had already sold the rest, why hadn’t there been any news from the street?

  * * *

  I got back home by about eleven, by way of the precinct house where I dropped off the car. Julian was nowhere to be seen. Actually, I didn’t blame him. I had been coming in at all hours. I had no right to expect him to stay home waiting.

  I got into my PJs, hoping to hear his key in the lock. It didn’t happen. I picked up a book I’d been trying to read for the past month and got into bed. But I was restless, waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. I got up, turned on the TV, tried to watch some old Sherlock Holmes movie, but gave that up, too. As much as I tried not to, I was wondering where Julian was.

  I could have called his phone, but it seemed too obvious. And yet….the thought of tracking his phone in the same way I routinely tracked Ryan’s or Henry’s, came to me unbidden, and then I couldn’t get rid of it. I shut off the TV and got back into bed. I lay there, tossing and turning for about twenty minutes, until I turned the light back on and grabbed my cell. Ricardo wasn’t there, but someone always was.

  “Hey, this is Donna Sirken,” I said. “Get me Ralph, please.”

  Half a minute later, Ralph got on. I told him I wanted to add another number to track. He didn’t even ask why, just said, “No problem.” I thanked him and rang off, getting right on the computer. I clicked on the GPS service icon, and the screen changed to the login page. I put in the password and the account number, and the screen changed yet again to a map of a chunk of Manhattan bounded on the west by Columbus Ave, the east by Central Park West, the south by 77th, and the north by 83rd. A yellow dot labeled with Julian’s cell number winked provocatively at 297 Central Park West.

  I sat there watching the damn thing for two hours, and it didn’t move the whole time. For a while, I minimized the site, and google-mapped the address at street level, so I could visualize the stupid building. It was a bland yellow brick apartment building with a dark green awning, fifteen or sixteen stories tall, inoffensive-looking in itself. I wondered which of the many floors Julian was on and what exactly he was doing there. It wouldn’t be hard to check out his phone records, get a phone number, and a name to put with that building address. It could be done, no problem. But it would be wrong.

  I thought back to one of our arguments about technology. How Julian would argue that if we use technology for good, it’s good. Whatever it takes to make the arrest is okay. Most of the time I would plead the other side. That it works just fine, but isn’t it a slippery slope to spying on our own citizens? Damn, I had gone farther down that slope than either of us. I’d spied on Julian for my own personal reasons. And here I was considering going further to commandeer his phone records just to find out who he was making love with instead of me.

  To be a cop is to see the world in terms of good and evil. Maybe legal isn’t always good and illegal isn’t always evil, but you’ve got to have a sense of right and wrong in this job. That’s why the slippery slope is such a big deal.

  I’ve got to remain on the up and up. If I give in to temptation, use police resources for my personal needs, or use questionable tactics to make an arrest, well, then, no one will be able to distinguish me from the bad guys. I’ve got to remain above the fray to do my job.

  And yet, I’m human just like everyone else. I’m attracted to the wrong men, and I’m tempted to cut corners. I double park because I can, and have been known to lie by omission whenever it suits my purposes. I try my darndest to stay on this side of morality, but sometimes, despite what I know to be right, I go over the line. So sue me.

  HENRY

  It took a long time to figure this all out. It wasn’t something you could just decide overnight. Well, of course, it was me who did it. But then again it wasn’t really me. If I took all that stuff, but I did it without my knowledge, then it wasn’t really me who took it, was it?

  If there’s no volitional movement, no external awareness of himself or the environment, is that person really conscious? No, of course not. That’s the definition of PVS. So if someone kicks or moans or turns off a security system and steals some drugs, but all he’s really doing is reflexive acts, then is it really him who’s doing it? No! It wasn’t me who stole the drugs at all. It was the Somnolux that did it.

  This whole thing played out over about a month. Back and forth and back and forth. The evening I found the Somnolux in my medicine cabinet, I told myself that I had to come clean and tell Carl that it was me who took all the drugs. But I didn’t remember doing it. I mean, what if someone else took them and came up my fire escape and crept into my living room window and planted them in my medicine cabinet? I mean, it could have happened that way. After all, someone came in and hit Sherry over the head. These things happen all the time in New York.

  Then there’s the fact that I never found any of the other stuff that was missing. I searched the apartment from top to bottom, but there was no trace of the Oxycontin, or the Valium, the Sonata, or any of that. All I found was the Somnolux. Maybe the thief was a really nice guy, and he knew that I didn’t sleep well. So, he sold the Oxycontin, for which he would have made a very tidy profit, and the Valium and all the rest of the stuff, and just to be a nice guy - just to repay society a little, he took the Somnolux and stuffed it into my medicine cabinet. Hey, you mean that couldn’t happen? Anything can happen in New York.

  So, what first seemed very clear cut was anything but. I had no evidence I had committed this crime. So why should I confess to a crime I didn’t commit? For a while, I thought I’d ask someone else, maybe Sherry or Carl. But I knew exactly what Sherry would say. “Confess!” she would say, as she came out of her vegetative state, sidestepping the whole messy business of whether it was really me or it wasn’t really me. Sherry could be very black-and-white about issues, but this time I didn’t think it would be very fair to me, to be honest. So, I didn
’t ask Sherry. Of course, if I asked Carl, I wouldn’t have to confess, because I’d already have confessed. And then he’d fire me. Or he’d never let me live it down, joking how I took the Oxycontin and lost it. Either way I’d lose big time. So that’s why it took me a month of back and forth and back and forth to work the whole thing out.

  But by the end of a month, I’d completely used up one of the sixteen packages of Somnolux. So I’d never be able to make full restitution, not to mention the Oxycontin which wasn’t there in the first place, something that Carl would never believe....So, on the last day of September, I resolved...to decide. And I decided...not to tell.

  * * *

  One evening after finding the sixteen packages of Somnolux, I took the subway up to see Sherry. Across the tracks, on the local platform I could see the back of a brown suit, buzz cut, shiny shoes. I knew it was him even before I caught the glint of his dark glasses in the glare of the station. The train pulled up and I got in, but then we just sat there for more than a minute, don’t ask me why. I could see the local pulling in on the other side. It stopped, opening then closing its doors. By the time it pulled out, Old Brown Suit wasn’t there anymore: headed, I guessed, for the same place I was.

  Eventually, I got there, too. I looked around the station, but of course, he wasn’t exactly waiting to be seen. I walked the fifteen blocks to the nursing home in the dark. For all I knew, Brown Suit was marching in lockstep with me on the other side of the street.

  I must have gotten there around eight. As I walked in the room, I could see Sherry, sitting in the corner chair, talking to a short-haired woman whose back was towards me. They seemed to be having a real heart-to-heart. Sherry was so into it, she didn’t notice me come in till I was halfway into the room. The woman turned around, and it was whaddyaknow Detective Sirken.