Caught Stealing - Charlie Huston [42]
This is it, this would be the time to finally call the police and let them sort it out, take my chances with Roman, and have it over with. But I find that it really is too late for that because, just as I’m thinking about it, several officers of the NYPD come running in and stick their guns in my face.
They find I have no record in New York. They find I was once arrested as a juvenile in California for breaking and entering and burglary, that I pled the case, served a year of probation, and did over a hundred hours of community service. They find these things out without my help because I’m not talking.
My eyes have become little glass windows at the ends of two dark, narrow tunnels. I sit at the other end of the tunnels and look at all the things happening out there. People talk to me and it sounds like voices traveling between paper cups tied together by long pieces of string. Deep inside, back behind the tunnels, I am aware that I am in shock. And at a deeper level I realize that I am also thoroughly fucked.
They have me in one of those little rooms with steel screens on the windows, where all the furniture is bolted to the floor and the wall opposite the door has a small one-way mirror. They think I’m a toughguy. They think I’m giving them the freaked-out-psycho-killer-silent-treatment. The fact is, I just can’t talk. Words form in my mind and I send them to my mouth, but they never get there. What I really wish they would do is take the pictures off the table in front of me because, no matter how hard I try not to look, my eyes keep getting dragged back. They beat her. They didn’t cut her or burn her or strangle her or rape her. They beat her until she was dead.
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 good neighbor, 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 are both 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 did this. 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.