George Higgins - A change of gravity

The waiter, an unfamiliar elderly man, delivered Merrion's chicken salad. Hilliard ordered a second glass of the house red. Merrion said: "No, make that a bottle. I'll need at least two glasses to go with this." The waiter nodded gravely and departed.

"I hope he can get back to us by midnight," Hilliard said.

"He's in the same condition I was in this morning," Merrion said. "The way I felt after the gun went off."

"Yeah, but yours was apparently temporary," Hilliard said. "His looks permanent."

"It's a very strange feeling," Merrion said. "Out-of-the-body experience. Other people're waking up. Running around all over the place, whooping an' hollering, bloody murder, which for at least a while it looked like. Murder was certainly what the crazy bitch had in mind when she took the pistol out and let her husband have one in the brisket in the lobby.

"We're not used to this kind of event. On a Monday in the courthouse the routine is: we do the best we can, knowing it wont be enough. See if we can maybe make some sense out of what is basically an impossible situation every day, come right down to it, but especially impossible on Mondays. It looks like business as usual, and it is, but nothing actually makes any sense. The reason that it looks like it's making sense is that by now we're all so used to it being that way, chaos doesn't scare us anymore. We oughta be beside ourselves, frantic, but we're not; we're used to it. What wed all been doing there was coping, same as always, when she opened fire.

'"We never hear that sound here, that we've all just heard." This's what I told the investigating cop. And this's an example, what I mean, about things not making any sense in that place. We had all kinds of cops, State and local both, right there in the courtroom with us when we heard the shot. But for some reason I'm not clear on it seems this disqualifies them from taking charge of the investigation. Being there makes them witnesses, apparently an entirely different kind of being.

"It's like the cops've got union rules for this kind of situation.

Jurisdictional rules like the unions at the light company and the gas company and the phone company and the water department guys've got, who can open manholes, climb up poles, work on pipes and cables. Every crime's a new manhole to be opened. In this case, now I think of it, the crime that was committed was trying to open a hole in a man."

"Jesus," Hilliard said.

"Aw come on, I hadda hard day," Merrion said. "Apparently the rule is that nobody can have more'n one job on any given crime. Either you can be there, so you see it and hear it, in which case you are a witness; or else when the crime took place, you were not there; you got called to the scene. Then you respond, and investigate.

Take statements; collect evidence; put it into nice little plastic baggies with dainty little white labels you put your initials on. Make arrests and tidy up. So that then when this particular crime comes up to be replayed in court, you will be a cop, okay? Have to get all of this straight.

"It's kind of confusing until everybody finally gets their parts assigned. By now there's quite a few more people've come to join those of us who attended the shooting. It's becoming sort of a weird party-atmosphere now. People're all milling around all over the place, shoving each other, uttering warlike cries "Get outta the way; I tole you to move' so as you can imagine this takes a while. Have to make absolutely sure everybody's happy, no one's nose is out of joint, before we can get to work on this. "Now, now, Billy, play nice. Can't have any pouting. I promise if you do real good as a policeman this time, you can be a witness in the next one, okay Billy?"

"The strange thing is that if no woman'd come flying through the air through the swinging doors backwards with a pistol in her hand, I don't think any one of us in that room who heard the noise when the gun went off would've been able to say: "Well, that was a shot that I just heard. Someone just shot a gun off." It didn't sound like what we think of as a gunshot.

"I was thinking about that," Merrion said. "After the EMTs'd come and the doors're open now, I could see them out there in the foyer, attending to the victim. I recognize him from the jacket he had on. It was like a short white Eisenhower jacket, had his name on it in red over the pocket, "Ellie." Like the one John Casey made me wear at Valley Ford, I was a kid. He was this Ellsworth Ryan guy I just met, the way my office. Talked to him maybe two-three minutes, no more'n that. I think at this point I am practically the only guy in the courthouse who has met him at all, and knows who he is. Except for his loving wife Sheila, of course, his devoted wife, Sheila, who's just finished shootin' at him. That is what made him really mad at her, made him pick her up off her feet and fling her like a shot put bass-ackwards through the doors.

"He is one strong dude, this guy. Just been shot in the right side of his tummy, it looks like, and he can still do something like that. Pick up a hundred-and-fifty, hundred-and-sixty-pound woman and pitch her about nine-ten feet through a pair ah swingin' doors. Of course the reason that he could was that he was strong and he was not disabled. It was a popgun twenny-two, not a grown-up gun like a forty-five or a nine millimeter, lot of stopping power. One them hits you, I don't care how strong you are, you would not feel like picking anybody up and flinging them through the air. You'd be feeling like somebody threw a bowling ball into your guts at couple hundred miles an hour."

"And then also there was the fact that the slug didn't actually hit his stomach. What it hit was his call-book, and that took the impact, or a lot of it at least. Cops told me later when emergency room people got his shirt entirely off him, they confirmed what the EMTs'd told them to expect: the bullet never penetrated. Never broke the skin. Just an enormous bruise, I guess, so he's a lucky bastard, too, addition to being a strong one."

The waiter reappeared soundlessly with a bottle of red wine, already opened, and two more glasses. He set the glasses down and poured the wine. Hilliard said "Thank you." The waiter nodded. Then he drifted away.

"I don't like it when they bring the bottle already open," Merrion said. "I always suspect it isn't a fresh bottle; that they're refilling old Cotes du Rhone bottles over and over out in the kitchen from a vat of cheap jug-wine from Outer Mongolia, someplace like that.

Wine made from yak fat; there's a tank of the stuff in the basement."

"I doubt it," Hilliard said. "I think in this case the explanation is the waiter's too feeble to get the cork out at the table, so he has some muscular pot-walloper out back use the corkscrew for him." '1 think I saw the guy in a movie once," Merrion said, 'a small supporting part. I forget the name of it. Boris Karloff was the star."

"Now this would be your victim," Hilliard said, 'or is it our waiter we're still talking about?"

"Could be either one, I suppose," Merrion said. "Except I don't think Karloff was also in the movie where I might've seen the victim. In that one I think the star was Peter Boyle.

"Anyway, today he was being an appliance repairman: refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, and when he came into the courthouse he forgot to leave his call-book in his truck. Good thing for him. It's one of those thick black leather ledger-things they make out of punched forms, two hard covers and a couple of || steel bolts. He carries it hooked over his belt, back cover inside his pants.

"His adoring wife, Sheila, thinks when he keeps those appointments he meets lots of horny young housewives that he's bangin' all the time.

For all I know, he is. So she gave him the idea first chance she gets she's gonna stick a blade in him. He got sick of it and told her he was comin' in today to file a complaint against her, for saying that, and ask for a restraining order, and so she decided it'd be fun if she also came in today and plugged him. Dovetailed very nicely.