Garth Hallberg - City on Fire

Of course, with no clock, Mercer had no way of numbering the minutes. There was no way of knowing how long it had been since, in a fever of compassion, he’d knuckled his dime into the NYTel slot uptown. Was it late enough now that William would be home? If so — had he started to wonder?

Not that Mercer was under arrest. Not yet, anyway. Rather, he appeared to be a casualty of some ambiguity in the term “witness,” which he’d assumed connoted actually witnessing something happening. What he’d witnessed, instead, was what came after, to which the medics who’d answered his call, or the cops themselves, could just as easily have testified. He could see them still, the first responders, emerging from the park grimmer than when they’d gone in. He could see the stretcher, the grotesque bulge of feet under the white sheet. And the outstretched arm, the bloody snow. It was all burned into his eyelids. Hence his effort to focus only on what was here before him.

His hard institutional chair was bolted to the cement, and there was a hole in the table through which the cuffs, had he been wearing cuffs, would have passed. The coffee cup had a nibble missing from its rim. It all contributed to the room’s air of experiment, of elaborate dare. Set into the wall was a mirror that was probably no mirror, and he could imagine three or four cops watching, rumpled, tending to fat. Five bucks says he tries the skylight. No, five bucks he goes for the cup. Five bucks says five more minutes and this nigger’s gonna break down and confess.

Though perhaps this was lingering paranoia from the marijuana they doubtless knew he’d smoked, or a craving on some level for punishment, or the residue of William’s TV shows bleeding through the beaded curtain at night and into his dreams, Baretta and Starsky and Barnaby Jones. Because when the door reopened at last, there was only Detective McSomething again, and the long, low ranks of cubicle walls behind him, dividing the empty cop-shop into offices, nested rectangular hells. “Everything okay in here?” Without waiting for an answer, he dropped his imitation-leather jacket over the back of an empty chair. His revolver’s grip jutted from its holster like a hand eager for a shake.

To be honest, everything was not okay — in addition to being half-deranged with uncertainty, Mercer was now freezing his ass off, and could have put that jacket to good use — but he knew better than to be honest; he could already see how this was going to be.

From the pocket of a garish tropical shirt, a flip-top notebook emerged, and after some theatrical patting of pockets — more delay — so did an eraserless half-pencil familiar from miniature golf and the tops of library card catalogues. “I’m going to ask you some questions now, Mr. Freeman.”

“Goodman.”

“Sure. Goodman.” The cop yawned, as if it were more exhausting to sit on that side of the table in judgment than to sit on this one being judged. Then he proceeded to take down the very same information Mercer had volunteered up on Central Park West, maybe testing to see if the answers would change. Mercer gave his date of birth. “So that makes you, what?”

“Twenty-five.” Or almost twenty-five, but if the guy couldn’t be bothered to do the math …

A sneaker from beneath the table found purchase on the empty chair beside him. The detective levered himself back at a lazy angle. His gum cracked like a flatting tire. Was Mercer supposed to think, Wow, we’re just alike, you and me, or was this simply part of a general lowering of standards, the entropic bent of all things? “I take it you’re a transplant?”

“I’m not from around here, no.”

There was a little crackle of danger as the cop looked up from his pad to see if he was being mocked. No, for whatever reason, McSomething didn’t like him. Paranoia mounted. It was like when you drove past a speed trap and all of a sudden it seemed entirely possible you were carrying a body in your trunk. And did they know this, too? Was the possibility of their knowing one of the scenario’s complex parameters?

Asked for an address, he gave an address.

“That permanent, or …?”

“I’m staying with a friend until I get my feet under me.” It was a line he’d used on his mother. He couldn’t tell anymore whether or not it was a lie, technically speaking.

“Right, this is coming back to me. And remind me, what was the name of the friend?” The man’s outer-borough inflections had sharpened, the better to convey the vast and widening difference between them. Mercer had heard it before, this special machismo reserved for suspected inverts. You’ll never turn me, fairy! As if Mercer could ever be attracted to so unremarkable a face. Take away the glasses, and it was like the average of every Irish-American face in New York: just so many freckles across the bridge of a just-so-upturned nose. But his cheeks did dimple when he smiled. “Oh, wait, I got it. It’s Bill something. Billy-boy. Bill Wilson.” Mercer had grabbed a surname from a Poe story; if caught, he could claim he’d been misheard. “This is just a roommate deal, right? Just two bosom friends.” The Hawaiian shirt seemed to swell to fill the room, and here was Mercer, tiny, defenseless, free-falling past coconut trees and moonlit water and finding nothing to grab on to.

He blew on his hands. “Can I ask you a question, Detective?”

“You just did.”

Eighteen years on the lee side of C.L. should have been enough to scare resistance out of him. You kept your fool head down. You Yes, sirred and you No, sirred, and you did not give them an excuse. But this was 1976, not 1936—or it was 1977, in the capital of the free world, and he had done nothing wrong. “If you already know this stuff, why go back over it?”

The quiet that followed did not bode well. But then there came a knock from outside, shave and a haircut, and a gray head, much lower than it made sense for any head to be, poked through the widening gap in the door. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

The detective didn’t answer, or even turn around.

“Fantastic.” The door opened wider, and a body followed the head into the room. Given the obstruction of McSomething’s shoulders, not to mention all the other calculations he was in the middle of, it took Mercer a second to puzzle out what wasn’t quite right about the head: it never straightened up. With its bemused eyes, its ruddy billiard-ball cheekbones, its mouth all but vanishing under a thick salt-and-pepper moustache, it appeared to be falling forward, dragging the body after it like an anchor trailing its chain. A metal half-crutch was clipped near the elbow of the newcomer’s neat sportcoat; the dull thud of its distal end on the concrete floor made the pigeons resettle themselves in the skylight. Tick, tick. The other arm hugged a brown paper bag, which the man deposited on the table. Releasing the crutch, he gripped the table’s edge and reached across to Mercer with a grin. “Larry Pulaski.”

Mercer took the hand reluctantly. Its knuckles moved in his grip like marbles in a velveteen bag. The man produced three blue deli cups. “You have to go a few blocks to find coffee, this time of night.”

“So where did that come from?” Mercer asked, nodding toward the Styrofoam cup on the table. He’d been helpless to hold it in, another little burst of defiance, and now he braced for Detective McSomething’s big hand to let go of its notepad and dart like a kiss toward his mouth. (And how would he explain his own split lip to William, without revealing where he’d been?) Instead, he got a contemptuous smirk. “That’s to catch the drip when the skylight leaks. You want to drink pigeon shit, be my guest.”