City on Fire (14 page)

And in a way, they’re a welcome diversion; this room is in most other aspects an anxious void. At eye level, the white is monolithic: white door, white formica tabletop, white walls to stare at while you wait for a white man to return, the one who brought you here in the back of a car whose doors lacked interior handles. What had the guy’s name been? McMahon? McManus? Mercer had been too rattled to pay attention, but he’s certain it was McSomething. He’d nudged a Styrofoam cup an inch or two forward, as if to get it exactly halfway between himself and his detainee, white upon the white table. His big body had crowded the doorway. Mercer could see beyond it the open-plan office he’d just been escorted through, the wall of glass blocks like ice unwarmed by sunlight, though Mercer’s throat (bitter ash) and eyes (sandpaper-scoured) suggested it had to be near morning. The tubes of light now overhead revealed Detective McSomething’s eyeglasses to be subtly tinted. Their lower regions, the same blue as his irises, reduced his eyes to pupil. Have a seat, he’d said. I’ll be back in five minutes.

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, freefalling 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 gunmetal 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.”

The older man continued to beam. “Some of my younger colleagues, Mr. Goodman, such as Detective McFadden here, make do with that add-water-and-stir stuff.”

“I don’t see what you’ve got against Nescafé,” McFadden said. “I’m feeling frankly a little what do you call it. Devalued.”

“But dinosaurs like me, we’re set in our ways.”

Pulaski was a detective, too, then, and this must have been part of their patter, their routine. But there was something rusty in it. As the grizzled veteran, Pulaski had too light a touch. And he made McFadden, with his hypnotically Polynesian shirt, seem suddenly less convincing, too. It was as if they’d passed through a wardrobe room on the way here, grabbing whatever was to hand. “So you’re the good cop?”

McFadden turned to his partner. “Mr. Goodman here has decided to play smart.”

“Am I entitled to a lawyer?”

“You see what I mean, Inspector?” To Mercer, he said, “You’re not under arrest, smart guy. No arrest, no lawyer.”

“I’m free to go, then?”

Pulaski’s smile floated above the table like a croupier’s. “I was hoping that with some honest-to-God java we might do this less adversarially, Mr. Goodman. Go ahead, get some kind of statement down, and then get you on your way. I’ve got one light and sweet, one just milk, and one black.” He touched the lid of each of the cups as he named it. “I’m flexible, so I can go either way. Preference, Detective?”

McFadden shrugged. “So long as it’s hot.”

“So we’re flexible, you see. The choice is yours, Mr. Goodman.”

If Pop had been here, he would have warned about Pulaski. Men like this had hovered over Mercer’s ancestors in cane-fields and cotton plantations; shtick was just stick with an accent. But you haven’t smelled coffee until you’ve smelled hot, sweet deli coffee at let’s say four-thirty in the morning on the night you’ve seen your first murder. Or attempted murder? “I’ll take the one with milk,” he said.

The coffees having been distributed, Pulaski pulled out the chair where McFadden’s foot had been resting. He kept his jacket on, as if he might be leaving at any moment, but unclipped the crutch from his forearm and leaned it against the table. McFadden slid the notebook toward him. “We were just coming to the end of preliminaries, Inspector. I’m going to continue now. That all right with you?”

There was an edge to it, but Pulaski raised his hand without looking up from the pad, as if to indicate that he, Pulaski, was not worth considering. “Please.” So to the extent that he actually was that mythical creature, the good cop, he was going to be completely ineffectual in defending the witness against his hulk of a junior colleague, who now leaned forward on his elbows. Mercer took a long sip of coffee, just to place some object between himself and his interrogator.

“So what you were telling me in the park, you leave a party on Seventy-Second, you go to the bus stop to wait. You weren’t wearing just that monkey-suit, were you? I mean, it’s cold out.”

“It’s a tuxedo, Detective. And no, I had an overcoat.”

“Right, you seem like a guy who knows from menswear. This would have been, what, a nice shearling overcoat? From somewhere on Fifth Avenue?”

“Bloomingdale’s. You must have found it covering the …”

“The victim. That’s right.”

The missing coat, it occurred to him, was another thing it was going to be hard to explain to William. “It probably, I don’t know, went into the ambulance or something, or is still there in the park. I don’t see how it matters.”

“Oh, piece of evidence like that, we wouldn’t have left it in the park, I can guarantee you that.” McFadden was warming to this, performing, but Pulaski winced, as if having to swallow, for the sake of etiquette, an hors d’oeuvre that wasn’t to his taste.

“I think we might dispose of some of these details, get Mr. Goodman home quicker.”

“It’s funny, though,” McFadden said. “Wearing a nice coat like that, but waiting for a bus instead of taking a cab?”

“It’s my roommate’s, if you must know.”

“Ah. Here we are again. The mysterious roommate. William Wilson.”

Pulaski looked up. “This reminds me of a person we both know, Detective, when you do this with the details.”

“Fine. Let’s back up. This party, this very high-toned party you’ve stated you were at. Were there any controlled substances being consumed at this party, to your knowledge?”

Mercer was doomed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you talking about champagne?”

“I’m talking about—you know what I’m talking about, Mr. Goodman. Have you been under the influence of narcotics at any point this evening?”

But again, Pulaski winced, and this time, it was accompanied by a tiny cough.

McFadden looked nearly as frustrated as Mercer. “The thing is, Pulaski, I don’t like this story.”

“I called you,” Mercer said. “I called you. I could have just left her there, pretended I didn’t see anything. I waited around for y’all to show.”

“Something doesn’t add up. What’s your job, Mr. Goodman? Your source of income?”

Mercer could feel his cheeks burning. “I work at the Wenceslas-Mockingbird School. That’s a very prestigious school, down on Fourth Avenue.”

“Well, do you like answer phones, or mop the floors, or what?”

“Why don’t you call them and see?”

“It’s four in the morning on a federal holiday, so that’s convenient for you. But you can bet I’ll be calling as soon as they’re open.”

McFadden’s jaw rippled as Pulaski’s hand rose again. “Detective, if I may. Mr. Goodman did call us, and I can see you’ve got a very thorough set of notes here. If you wanted to go type up the preliminaries, Mr. Goodman and I might be able to clear up some of the remaining confusion.”