Charlie Huston - Caught Stealing

Yvonne shared the top floor of her building with a guy. He lives in a loft at the end of the hall. He came home and saw the door of her place wide open and, like a goodneighbor, he took a quick look to see if everything was OK. When he saw the covered thing on the table and me sitting under it, he crept back to his apartment and called 911. Nice guy. A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered. He told them I was a guy Yvonne saw sometimes and there I was, catatonic, holding a cat, all bruised up with blood still on my clothes from the fight with Red. It sounded perfect to the cops, some kind of freaked-out sex/violence jealousy crime. Case closed. Except I gather now that there’s a problem because people keep coming in here to whisper stuff to the cops who have been questioning me.

The two detectives in the room with me both drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. They areboth balding, paunchy, and ruddy and have matching mustaches. I can tell them apart because one has a terrible cold and keeps blowing his nose and hawking and spitting into the wastebasket. He’s clearly pissed at me because he wants to be home in bed. The other cop is pissed at me because he thinks I’m a “sick, murdering fuck.” They tried a little good cop, bad cop at first. Then they tried bad cop, bad cop. Now they’re really just Sick Cop, Bored Cop. They keep asking questions though and, through it all, I keep trying to say the same thing and stopping myself just before I say it because I just don’t know what will happen when I finally say the words Roman did it.

Sick Cop launches a lung oyster into the trash and Bored Cop stubs out his cigarette. Then they look at each other and have one of those cop telepathy moments and Bored Cop lights another smoke, looks at me and tells me what’s fucking up their case.

– So, OK, so we know something. We know that more than one person didthis. We have hairs, right. We have fibers and scuff marks and bruises on the body and we know this was two, maybe three people. We know you didn’t do this alone. So fine, so paint the picture: It wasn’t really you, you were just there. OK? Something got out of hand with you and your girl and some friends. You were just there and you didn’t do anything. That’s fine, that’s OK,we can live with that. So paint that picture and tell us how it happened, how it wasn’t you, and tell us about the guys who did do it. Tell us about your friends.

The strings snap. I race down to the end of the tunnel and the glass over my eyes shatters. I reach out and flip the pictures over. I look directly at the one-way mirror because I know who’s on the other side.

– They’re not my fucking friends.

And Roman walks in.

Sick Cop and Bored Cop look over and nod at him. Sick Cop takes out a tissue from the little plastic pack in his shirt pocket and blows a hole in it.

– Lieutenant.

Roman makes a little grunt noise and waves the two detectives over to where he stands by the door. The three of them huddle up with their heads close together and suddenly burst into laughter. Sick Cop laughs and chokes on his own phlegm while Bored Cop guffaws and slaps his knee. Roman chuckles and pounds Sick Cop on the back andthey all settle down. Then Sick Cop and Bored Cop start picking up their stuff and getting ready to leave. Roman holds the door open for them and, as they exit, he says something else to them I can’t hear and they start laughing all over again. Roman closes the door. He walks over to the table, picks up the full ashtray, takes it to the wastebasket and dumps it out. He walks over to the intercom box next to the door and makes sure it’s off. Then he comes back to the table and sits across from me. He reaches out, scoops the pictures together, taps them into a neat stack, flips through them, places them facedown back on the table, looks me dead in the eye and nods at the pictures.

– I didn’t do this.

Roman is a very good driver. He obeys all traffic laws and, more than that, is courteous to a fault toward other motorists and pedestrians. I admire that. I sit in the passenger seat of his unmarked police car while he drives. My hands areuncuffed and Bud is in my lap. I have not been charged with murder.

I am being held for suspicion of murder, but no official charge has been made. In the meantime, Robbery/Homicide has put me in Detective Lieutenant Roman’s custody because of my connection to a case he is already working on. Any assistance I can give him will only help the disposition of my own situation.

Roman has driven into SoHo. He cruises around, turns onto one of the little cobbled streets, parks and shuts off the motor. The clock in the dash saysit’s 1:57A.M., about eight hours since the cops found me. Roman rolls his window down a bit. The street is very quiet and the loudest noise is Bud’s purring. The animal control people hadn’t arrived at the station to pick him up and, as we were leaving, I saw him curled up on a desk. Roman got him for me along with my personal belongings, which are now in my bag in the backseat. Roman loosens his tie a bit and undoes his top collar button.

– I have a “Contact Officer” attached to your name.

I look at him.

– Anytime your name, the name of one of your associates, or one of a few key addresses pops up on the computer, it’s tagged and they let me know.Same thing with Miner. That’s how I ended up at your apartment in the first place. Miner’s address came in associated with a disturbance and, eventually, someone let me know.

– Clever. I thought it was because you were the one who had just broken in there.

– That too, that too.

He reaches into his jacket, takes something out and hands it to me. It’s Ed’s business card. The one I had in my pocket when I was arrested.

– Did you tell them much?

– Everything.

– The key?

– What about it?

– Do they have the key? Did you give it to them?

It’s another beautiful fall night in Manhattan. The air is clean and there’s a lover’s moon in the sky. It’s Friday night or Saturday morning, depending on your point of view and people are out. Back on my street, things are probably in full swing right now. I like to go out alone on my nights off, play some pool, meet new people, have more than a few. This would be a great night for it.

I look at the empty backseat of the car.

– Where is everybody, Roman?

– The partnership has broken up.

– That sucks.

– It was never stable. Frankly, it doesn’t alter my own situation. But it does greatly increase the danger toyourself.

– How so?

– There is now a large number of rogue elements at large, all looking for the key and, thus, for you. And I assure you that to the extent any of those elements have ever been able to show restraint in their dealings, I have always been the one holding them back. They are violent men and you are going to need an ally against them.

– Yourself?

– I nominate myself. Events like these have a momentum. Brutality lends itself to greater brutality and without realizingit, one can be swept along in its wake. If you wait too long, you might find yourself someplace you never knew existed. Doing things you never thought possible. I can both protect you and help to return your life to normal. I would like to do that.

He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment and pinches one earlobe with the fingers of his right hand.

– I would like very much to do that.

All the running around has my feet hurting again. I stroke Bud and feel my feet throb in time to my heartbeat. Yvonne would rub my feet sometimes, not always, but every now and then. She always made me wash them first.

Roman reaches into his jacket again. He flips on the car’s interior dome light and shows me what he has. It’s one of the pictures.A close-up of a bruise pattern on her neck. Roman traces a finger over the bruises.