Backward-Facing Man
Page 7
At the precinct, Arthur Puckman was surrounded by telephones ringing, bright lights, harsh voices, radio static, buzzers bouncing off the cinder-block walls, and smells from a coffeemaker that had been on all day. The lighting alone was enough to make somebody feel guilty. Out of nervousness, he kept touching the cross hanging from his neck. He tucked his hands between his thighs and touched the vinyl chair.
“I kn-knew this would happen,” he told the desk clerk, pushing his lips out until they looked like a pink volcano. The woman lifted her soda. Fernandez is gonna be thrilled to take this guy’s statement, she thought.
“I jes need to get some information from you, and then you can ’splain it all to Detective Fernandez.” Down the corridor, a door opened. Artie heard a man yelling. He felt his scrotum tighten.
“Where’s my b-b-brother?” Arthur Puckman asked.
“Your last name?”
“G-G-G-Gutierrez?” Artie said. He hadn’t stuttered so bad since his father’s stroke.
The woman arched her eyebrows. “You don’t look like a Gutierrez,” she said, mocking him. Some babble; others clam up. It didn’t matter to her. She lined up a form in her printer. “You want a soda?”
“H-h-how is he?” Artie asked.
“I’m sure they’re doing everythin’ they can,” she said. She looked Artie up and down, his fleshy jowls, swollen mitts clutching a wool beanie. “Right now, I gotta finish this form.” She looked at the clock on the wall. It had been her plan to have a couple of beers with her sister after work. Now, it looked as if she’d have to work late to type this guy’s statement. “Your name and address?”
“Arthur Puckman, 916 South Tenth Street. I live with my mom. Since my d-d-dad left.”
“Bet she’s glad to have you around,” the desk clerk said. The fat man listened for a trace of sarcasm. She seemed simple, asking her questions, lining up the forms, and tapping her keyboard. Simple women were usually kind to him, especially once they heard him stutter. She pointed to a small refrigerator behind her desk. “Help yourself.”
Artie pictured Gutierrez lying on the cement, head tilted back, gasping for air. He felt his body clench, and he imagined himself being arrested, confined, thrown into a pen with hardened criminals. More than almost anything in the world, he didn’t want to go to jail.
A buzzer sounded on her phone. “Detective Fernandez’ll be right with you,” the desk clerk said, pulling the paper out of the printer and sliding it into a folder.
To Artie, Fernandez seemed too young to be a detective. He wore his uniform tight, which gave him a pumped-up look, and he had a buzz cut that showed the veins in his temples when he swallowed. He was tall with an olive complexion and a bland expression. There was a revolver in a black leather holster under his arm, just like the guys on TV.
“Puckman,” Fernandez announced, taking the folder. “Arthur Puckman.” Artie set the soda under his chair and began a cycle of motions—inhaling deeply, shifting his weight forward, shuffling his shoes under the chair, and then leaning back. Thinking Artie was having trouble getting up on account of his weight, Fernandez reached out and took hold of the fat man’s arm. Artie pulled away, kicking his soda over and splashing the detective’s shoes.
“Goddamnit,” Fernandez said, lifting his foot from the puddle. “What the fuck is wrong with you, man?” He pulled Artie like he was a farm animal, only the harder he pulled, the more Artie resisted, staring at him wide-eyed, his face quivering, his three chins and his bulbous cheeks and his fleshy arms shaking. The clerk leaned over her desk and handed Fernandez some paper towels and then turned away to avoid laughing. She wished others could see Fernandez tugging and swearing over a little splash on his hardtops. “Let’s see if we can get you down the hall and into a room without takin’ the fucking doors off,” the detective said.
Artie wore dungaree jeans up high on his belly and a red-and-green button-down sweater. Short, bow-legged, with practically no butt, Artie wore orthopedic shoes that boosted his left instep and heel to balance his height. “Can I have another soda?” he called to the clerk as he waddled down the hallway. Fernandez unlocked a door with a key from a chain clipped to his belt and pushed the fat man into a small room. Three of the walls were bare; the detective pointed toward a chair opposite the fourth, which was covered by a mirror. Turning sideways, Artie shimmied along a table, then collapsed sideways into the chair.
Fernandez sat down and looked at the printed sheet in the file. Artie removed his glasses. Fluorescent light bounced off the top of his head, and the lazy eye made his face seem a couple centimeters off center. He gave off a strange odor. Right away, Artie started talking. Normally, you let a witness run, but the prospect of listening to a stutterer for hours discouraged Fernandez.
“Excuse me, Mr., uh…” he said, looking again at the paper in the folder, “Puck Man.” He pronounced Artie’s last name in two equally weighted syllables.
“It’s Puckman,” Artie said.
“Puck Man,” Fernandez said again, stressing the first syllable. He smiled. Imagine, he thought, an imbecile teaching me how to talk.
Artie continued, oblivious. “The inspectors t-t-t-told us”—a sudden rush of air escaped—“to stop cleaning metal in the dip tanks….” Artie sputtered and struggled, his voice thick and mangled, his words several seconds behind his thoughts. “But Chuck said…” He gulped for air, unable to catch his breath. His jaw dropped, forcing his bottom lip to twist and quiver.
The detective rolled his eyes. He’d been working since early this morning, and he was tired. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, sitting forward. “Let’s start at the beginning.” Fernandez was an imposing young man, with an ability to take charge of a situation when necessary. “How long have you worked for this, uh”—he looked at the paper—“security business?”
“My dad started it after the war,” Artie said, wiping spittle from around the corners of his mouth. In a painstaking way, one syllable at a time, Artie recounted the company’s history, year by year since its inception, how the market for security guards had developed, how the business was a tough one, how Charlie Puckman, who’d practically invented the industry, had persevered in difficult times. After a while, he seemed to be enjoying himself, as though he was sitting with a new friend at a ball game or in a bar telling his life story. “The secret to staying in this b-b-business is keeping your costs down,” he said at one point, conspiratorially.
“Which means what?” Fernandez interjected.
Artie seemed surprised by the question. “It means paying p-p-people as little and as late as you can get away with,” he said proudly, as if his priority now was teaching the detective.
“How about you tell me exactly what happened today?” Fernandez said, tapping his pen against the paper.
“I don’t know,” Artie said, stuttering again. “I was in the office—”
“What was Gutierrez doing?” Fernandez said slowly.
“We have q-q-quality problems. Paint, mostly. That’s why we w-w-worked Saturdays.”
“What was he doing when he was overcome by fumes?”
“He was cleaning the tank. When you dip metal, you get r-r-residue. Dirt and grease and other impurities. Over time, the chemicals get weak. You gotta drain them and then c-c-clean the tank to get the s-s-sediment out.”
“What kind of sediment?”
“I just told you—dirt and grease.”
“What kind of chemicals?”
“1,1,1 trichloroethylene.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s what it is.”
“That’s what what is?”
“The v-v-vapor degreaser.”
“C’mon, man. I’m not a fucking scientist,” Fernandez said. “How do the chemicals work?”
“If you take a penny in a p-p-pair of tongs and dip it in for a second, it’ll come out in m-m-mint condition. It—”
“Okay, so it vaporizes dirt. What does it do to people?” Fernandez said.
“So how you supposed to handle it?”
Arthur Puckman wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I kept t-t-telling Chuck if you’re gonna use this stuff, you gotta p-p-protect the workers. The tank has to be covered; you gotta f-f-flush the parts; you can’t agitate it; you gotta g-g-give people respirators, aprons, rubber gloves, e-e-eye protection.”
Fernandez stopped and looked toward the one-way mirror. It was exactly what Porter had told Patrick. Fernandez tapped his pen against the tabletop. He cocked his head to one side. Artie continued. “I was in the office when it h-h-happened. When I looked out, Gutierrez w-w-was laying on the floor.”
Fernandez wanted to be methodical, to sort things out in a logical order. He reminded himself that crooners have their own agendas. “What about the regulations?” he asked, touching the pen to his lower lip.
“We’ve been getting notices f-f-from the DEP, the EPA, and OSHA since ’96. There are federal regulations for halogenated solvents.” The fat man knew his shit. “But my brother ignored them. I kept t-t-telling him, but he said…nothing b-b-bad would happen.” Arthur Puckman rubbed his hands together.
“Maybe he doesn’t know about chemicals.”
“He went to MIT!” It was sounding too pat. There was something very calculated about this performance. Arthur Puckman was starting to really irritate Fernandez.
The detective leaned back in his chair and tried to summarize what he’d learned. There were workplace violations here, no doubt. And they’d be relatively easy to verify. There was negligence on the part of at least one, probably both, of the brothers. But it was unclear why Arthur Puckman was talking. Maybe he wanted to be in charge of the business. Maybe he just liked dissing his brother. Maybe he didn’t realize that if he kept this up, both of them would be in big trouble; but if he shut up and called his lawyer, he’d walk away with a fine. The real loser was Gutierrez. The Puckmans would be making money again, and the world would stay the same. It didn’t matter who you rooted for. A peculiar cooked-meal smell filled the tiny room. Fernandez had the feeling he was back working night shift in a mental hospital. A sharp knock on the door interrupted him. The detective slid his chair back and opened it a crack. “The captain wants to see you,” the desk clerk said, poking her head in.
Artie was grateful for the detective’s disappearance. He shifted his weight and released gas. He believed in his performance thus far, its rightness given the turn of events in the factory and in his family. He rolled his eyes up in his head and relaxed.
Fernandez took a seat in his boss’s office beside a row of beat-up filing cabinets. Captain Murphy, a gap-toothed Irishman in his early sixties, veteran of more than his share of homicides, was talking on the phone and watching Arthur Puckman through the mirror. He leaned back in his chair, the phone up in the air over his mouth. “We got a kid in a coma,” Murphy said, “and we got a business owner telling us he fucked up—no safety instructions, no equipment, no ventilation.” From the sound of things, the person on the other end of the line was not responding the way the captain wanted him to. He was talking into the phone but looking right at Fernandez. “Can’t you people get out here before Monday?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Cocksuckers.”
Fernandez smiled.
“Right,” Murphy said, nodding. “Right…. Okay, okay.” He hung up the phone. “OSHA can’t respond till Monday,” he said to Fernandez, throwing up his hands. The two of them watched Artie looking around the room, nibbling on Fernandez’s pen. “What have you got, Detective?” “Same thing as Patrick’s snitch. That and the history of the security guard business.”
Fernandez said he believed the fat man was spinning things to serve himself, but that he was telling the truth. “Why don’t we do an autopsy?” Fernandez said.
“Because the kid’s not dead yet.”
Fernandez bit his lip. “There’s something fishy about this. Italian guys don’t rat out their brothers this easy.”
Murphy thought about it. “It’s late. Get the guy’s statement and take him home. Be nice to him. We might need him again.” Fernandez stood up.
“And try to find out where they disposed of that shit, will you? If OSHA isn’t interested, maybe the EPA will be.”
“Yeah, boss,” the detective said, turning to leave.
While Fernandez was out, the desk clerk returned to the interrogation room with a day-old box of doughnuts. Artie thought of Sister Theresa, the kindest of the nuns at St. Agnes. How grateful he was as a little boy to be tended to during those long afternoons while his tormentors—boys from the projects—waited outside. When he came back in, Fernandez told the fat man that he wanted to review what they’d discussed so far, so he could prepare Artie’s statement and they could go home. But there was one more thing he wanted to know in order to understand the whole complicated process of cleaning metal. “I think you’ve given me an excellent education in how to clean metal, Mr. Puckman. But I wonder if you could tell me what you do with the chemicals when they don’t work anymore.”
“I told you that already. We drain them.”
“Right. Yes,” Fernandez said, pretending to make notes. “But where exactly?”
“We p-p-pull the p-p-plug,” Artie said, his voice rising in pitch.
Fernandez nodded. “Of course. But where does it go?”
Arthur Puckman was silent.
“I mean the contents of the tank, the residue of those chemicals—1, 1, 1 TCE, whatever it’s called.” In his office, Murphy leaned toward the glass, listening intently.
“We s-s-spray it first t-t-to loosen it up,” Artie said quietly.
“Uh-huh,” Fernandez said. The detective flipped his paper cup into the trash can. “When the chemical loses its strength—when it doesn’t clean metal anymore—you spray water in, to kind of loosen it up.”
“Exactly,” Artie said, nodding.
“And then you pull the plug and drain it.”
“Yeah. Right.”
Fernandez leaned forward. “So where does it go?” He was enjoying himself.
“Into the p-p-pipe…”
“Uh-huh.” Fernandez tapped his pen against the table. “And the pipe leads where?”
“I d-d-don’t know.”
“Really? You seem to know so much.”
Artie smiled nervously. “Not really.”
“Into the sewer?”
More silence.
Fernandez leaned in again. “C’mon, Mr. Puckman, it has to go somewhere.”
“I d-d-dunno.”
In his office, Captain Murphy picked up the phone.
Artie folded his arms over his chest. His mouth hung open, his tongue pressed against his bottom teeth, and his eyes rolled up in his head. His brow was a deep shade of red, and there were beads of sweat on his upper lip and scalp. He was angry. These questions had caused him to lose his composure, which was a dangerous and familiar feeling. The detective had tricked him.
Fernandez would have kept going, but the captain interrupted. “It’s a wrap,” he said over the loudspeaker. He’d left a message with an Agent Keaton at the Environmental Protection Agency, Region Three.
Fernandez pushed his chair back from the table and studied the malodorous human being who sat before him. Artie’s body posture had changed completely. While he’d never been at ease, the fat man had seemed comfortable enough before. Now, he was mumbling to himself and moving his hands around as if he were conducting several simultaneous conversations with invisible beings that encircled him.
Since he was a kid, Fernandez had heard about guys who rat out their friends out of loyalty to someone or something, either as a favor or to carry out a threat. Some trade what they have, and others tattle to extricate themselves from bad situations. There are those who plea-bargain, or buy what they think is the
ir own safety, and there are crooners who say what they say and then regret it. There are religious nuts and those who just don’t give a shit. The one thing they have in common is that you can’t trust them. Every one of them is playing an angle. As a detective, you had to filter what you heard, examine the physical evidence, and then come back and ask questions. The faster you draw conclusions, the sooner you make mistakes. Even though the fat guy’s story wasn’t playing for him, Fernandez would write up the report, leave it with Murphy, and then head home for a few hours of rest.
“We’re gonna break here,” he said to Artie. “I’ll have the girl type up what we’ve got,” Fernandez said, looking at his watch. “You look it over, sign it, and I’ll take you home. How’s that sound?”
Artie nodded his head.
The statement Arthur Puckman finally signed contained three disclosures that Captain Murphy said would give the police, the EPA, and OSHA maximum leeway to investigate the Gutierrez accident. First was that the Puckman brothers knew about numerous safety violations that existed in the plant, including those involving the use of hazardous chemicals. Second, that Chuck Puckman specifically ordered Gutierrez to clean out the tank, knowing he’d have to climb inside, where he was likely to be overcome by fumes. And third, that either Arthur Puckman didn’t know or, more likely, Puckman Security hadn’t arranged for toxic liquid from the tank to be discharged legally.
In exchange for his cooperation, Arthur Puckman earned himself a ride in the back of a 1997 undercover police cruiser, driven by Detective Fernandez. This, in and of itself, was not unusual. It was rainy and cold, and Fernandez was exhausted. Sitting behind him, Artie closed his eyes. His mind was going a mile a minute. They were only a few blocks from the precinct when the fat man asked Fernandez if he could visit his father before being dropped off. “He’ll go into shock if he hears about this from somebody else,” Artie whined. Indeed he will, Fernandez thought, when he learns that his son has for some mysterious reason implicated all three of them.