11
FOIL-EMBOSSED FRONTALS uncoupling from diadems, confetti dull with soot, business ends of noisemakers trampled under boots, cracked bottoms of disposable champagne flutes, butts of khaki Luckies and pale Pall Malls, nickelbags like punctured lungs, plus bottles: half-full, empty, broken off at the neck for the commission of crimes or smashed into green and brown explosions the red flash of a peep-show sign makes look romantic, in a sleazoid kind of way. Here is the stuff you don’t get on TV. Extraneous footage, B-roll of the aftermath. Broadcast personalities let their Fruit of Islam bundle them into the plush rear cabins of towncars. A union technician in a satin jacket winds cable around his forearm like a hawser; its loose end scrimshaws the snow. By the time the ball, that descended monorchid, goes dark above Times Square, the last masses have drained underground. For a second, the city seems to lean forward and make contact with a future self: ruined, de-peopled, and nearly still. In a sealed hangar, forensic economists move around numbered lots with scales and calipers. Believing themselves to have evolved beyond delusion and loneliness, beyond illness and longing and sex, they hum distractedly and wonder what it all meant. To the extent that they’re right about themselves, they’ll have no way of knowing.
And let us not forget the pigeons, who shouldn’t be active this late, but are. They scrabble over hamburger papers that gust up the building fronts, carry their spoils back to the Public Library lions a few long blocks away. Normally they wouldn’t range this far, but they are agitated tonight by sirens that sing of time out of joint, of things gone terribly awry. Which may explain why a little band of them has taken refuge in the busted skylight of a precinct-house in the quiescent blocks south of Lincoln Center. They choir around a sag of see-through plastic. Their claws make little ticking sounds when they move.
It will take Mercer Goodman some time to identify the egg-like shadows up there, but then, sitting almost directly below the sloppy hole cut into the drop-ceiling of Interrogation Room 2, what does he have if not time? The acoustic tiles around the hole terminate in discolored edges that look less sawed-off than gnawed. Some water has collected in the sagging underbelly of the plastic sheeting stapled there. Every time the wind kicks up, the seams wheeze asthmatically, letting in the bone-cold air, and then in the silence that follows comes the ticking. Mercer shivers. Just behind his eyes is a stippling pressure like the popping of a thousand champagne corks. Or, more accurately, blood vessels. Mashing his hands to his orbitals brings some relief, but for reasons he’s trying not to think about, he doesn’t want to close his eyes. He’s started to wonder, not quite abstractly, whether the hole in the ceiling is some kind of invitation—whether, by standing on the table in front of him, he might reach it and escape—when it occurs to him that the shadows are not eggs, but birds. Which accounts for the smell in here, like sawdust and the unmucked coops of his childhood. It’s as if they’ve been following him.
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, 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 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.”
A look passed between the men, which Mercer was fairly sure he wasn’t supposed to see. Two hands gripping the same ineffable baton. To his surprise, Pulaski won.
The minute McFadden left, the bristle of danger dropped right out of the room. What Mercer felt for Pulaski then was akin to gratitude. The little man, who hunched over even when he sat, took an inordinate amount of time wriggling out of his sportcoat and folding it over the back of the chair. “Polio as a kid,” he said sotto voce, as if he’d noticed Mercer staring but didn’t want to embarrass him. “More common”—wriggle wriggle—“than you’d think. Don’t worry. I’m not in any pain.” He was slightly out of breath as he sat back down. He adjusted his crutch so that it intersected the table’s edge at a right angle. He drew his own notebook from a breast pocket, which seemed to be where they kept them, and aligned it orthogonally in front of him. He patted his pants—“Now where did I put that pen?”—and then, with the sly flourish of a magician, brought out a silver one, like a Waterman Mercer had once had. “I have a weakness, my wife says. But my motto has always been, modest needs, lavishly met.” When the pen was perfectly parallel to the notebook, Mercer thought he heard a purr of contentment. “I must explain to you, Mr. Goodman …”
“You can call me Mercer.”
“Mercer, thank you. Detective McF, rough around the edges though he be, is good police. He believes, and it’s not been disproven, that people are basically animals, and in order to get them to do anything, you’ve got to show your whip-hand. Now I”—slight adjustment to the position of the notepad—“I have my own somewhat esoteric idea, evolved over more years than I’d care to count, which is, provided a spirit of mutual cooperation exists, why make things difficult?”
Mercer might have detected an implied threat here, but his body, still humming with the chemicals of relief, refused to care. And in the sudden absence of any tension to keep him alert, he realized he was exhausted. “It’s freezing in here.”
“Budget cuts.”
“It’s been a long night.”
“I can imagine.” Of course Pulaski could imagine. The record of ten thousand nights like this one was tallied in the white hairs sprinkled liberally in his black brush-cut. In the ridges of spine visible through the fabric of his shirt as he bent to his notepad. It was Mercer who couldn’t imagine. Witness is terminally self-involved, the Waterman would write. “Now Mercer, what I’d like you to do, what would help me, is if you could just start from the beginning, and tell me, as plainly as possible, how you came upon Ms. Cicciaro. That’s the victim. And the name is confidential at the present time, her being a minor. I’d ask that you not repeat it.”
“Can I ask you something first, Detective?”
“Shoot.”
“Is she alive?”
Pulaski looked up, a gaze of infinite pity. “Last I knew, she was in between surgeries.”
“What does that mean?”
“Listen, if I were a doctor …” It would have been superfluous for him to touch his crutch; at this point, Mercer felt, they understood each other perfectly. This was confirmed when Pulaski retrieved a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his coat and pushed it into that medial space where the Styrofoam cup still stood. “I picked those up, too.” Mercer’s hands were shaking, from fatigue or cold or nerves, and he had to concentrate to guide his cigarette to the detective’s lighter. The flame danced in a small gold cross. “To be candid, Mercer, whether she lives or dies is out of our hands at this point. We’ve got to focus on justice, and that means treating this as attempted homicide. Now, anything you can tell me. Anything at all, beginning at the beginning.”
He had to struggle not to cough. It had been a long time since C.L. had tried to teach him to smoke, but all his little renunciations seemed to be crumbling tonight. Above him, a brown waterstain in the shape of Florida marred the white foam of the drop-ceiling. A warped tile sagged below the edge of the semiclear tarp, revealing a darkness within which lurked wires, guts, cameras, who knew. In a way, how to begin had been the great problem of Mercer’s life. But now, when he closed his eyes, he could feel the memory coming on like a migraine: trigger, then aura, then pain.
When he’d finally narrated his way back to the little white cube in which they now sat, he and the detective both yawned, so close to simultaneously it was impossible to determine who had influenced whom. Mercer, embarrassed by how far he’d lowered his defenses, wasn’t sure what else to say. Pulaski had gone quiet, too. The fluorescent bulbs behind their square of ridged plastic gave a bleached, insistent thrum. Pulaski had taken notes in small block-capitals, and as he flipped back through the pages (how had he managed to write so much so neatly, and in so short a time?) Mercer tried to read them upside down. 
he saw. And 
Had he sensed Mercer’s conscious omissions? Well, it was none of Pulaski’s business whom Mercer chose to sleep with, and though it was in a literal sense his business to know that Mercer was coming down from a marijuana high, it didn’t bear on the crime before them. He thought he sensed in the detective’s attention other, unintentional lacunae: questions he hadn’t thought to ask, shadowy agencies behind the surfaces of things. But perhaps the ticking of the pigeons was driving him crazy. Then the Waterman tapped the pad, and Pulaski looked up, a summary glance. “The tie,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“You had on a tie when you arrived at the party. You said you stopped to retie it before you went in.” The butt end of the silver pen indicated the open collar of Mercer’s shirt. “You must have removed it at some point.”
“Yeah. Yes, sir. When I was waiting for the bus, I think.” But all he could remember was having it on. From one end of the night, he looked back at the other, at a boy on a deserted corner. The apartment building across the street had been a great, glass pleasure-ship. If he could just get in the door, all his dreams were going to come true. He’d squatted to brush some snow from a sideview mirror while he untied, retied. Having practiced this a thousand times, he’d needed the mirror only to check that it looked right. He hadn’t yet understood that it took more than a bow tie to make things look right. “I must have left it in the pocket of my coat.”
Pulaski made a signal with his hand, and the door to the room opened. It was McFadden, carrying William’s overcoat. He cast it down in the middle of the table like a fuzzy gauntlet, stared smugly at Mercer, and then turned and walked out. “Any guess where we found that, Mr. Goodman?” Pulaski said.
“I was trying to keep her warm until the ambulance came.”
“And any guess what we found in it?” He reached into the pocket with both hands. One emerged and unfolded itself, and a black necktie uncrumpled. When Mercer reached for it, the other hand placed on the table, with fearsome tenderness, an unzipped leather kit the size of a small Bible. Inside were two syringes and a Saran-wrapped bulb of powder.
“See, this is confusing for me, Mercer. I’m a cop. You know what the job is? Evidence. That and paperwork. Handwriting and fingerprints, is what it is. And what I’ve got here is a coat, linked to you, linked to the girl, and what looks like a gram of street-quality heroin.”
“But that’s not mine!” He felt like he’d been kicked in the balls—the same dull sickness spreading through him. They were framing him. He wanted a lawyer. Then he knew where he’d seen the kit before: oh. Oh. “It must be someone else’s. The person whose coat it is.”
“Looks like you and that person need to have a talk, then.” They stared at each other for who knows how long. Beneath the brushy moustache, the little cop’s face twitched. Mercer was about to put his wrists forward and ask for the cuffs already when Pulaski added, “Meantime, you’re going to want to have the coat dry-cleaned. There’s some blood on it. We’ll be keeping this, of course.” He palmed the kit.
“Wait, you’re not going to arrest me?”
“Mercer, I tell you, I get myself in trouble this way, but you’ve got a face I want to trust, and I feel you’ve been honest with me, to the best of your ability.”
“I have. I swear I have.”
“So here’s going to be our bargain—” and now, from somewhere within the mysterious creases of the notepad, a business card emerged. “Should anything else come back to you—I mean the smallest thing—you’re going to call me. Otherwise, I know where you live.” Mercer reached for the card. For a second, their fingers were in contact. “Now comes the part where you get the heck out of here.”
Pulaski let him get up, collect his coat, and move for the door, all the while pretending to be adding to his notes. He was halfway out the door when the guy said, as if to no one in particular, “You realize you may have saved a life tonight.” And it was funny, at this specific moment, this was exactly how Mercer felt about the little detective. Or inspector, really. 
the card said. And as he stood there, something was already coming back to him, something he might have told Pulaski, had he not suspected it would have kept him even longer. He’d thought for a moment someone had been watching in the park. Kneeling there in the snow—stupid as a pigeon, settling the beautiful overcoat over the twisted and now silent body whose smell would never leave him—he’d felt sure, for the briefest second, that he was not alone.