I found myself “kissing the asphalt” that afternoon. But let’s back up thirty seconds.
“Get out of the taxi with your hands up!” a cop shouted.
To do this I had to lower my left hand below the windowsill. I had seen criminals do this on TV and to me it always looked like they were going for a gun. I wondered what it looked like to cops. Just to make sure it didn’t look like anything, I did it real slow. I don’t know if that’s grammatically correct, but it got the job done. I kept my right hand in the upright position while I eased the door open with my left and proceeded to extricate my body from the driver’s seat—again, real slow.
“Lay face-down on the ground! Hands behind your head!”
Correct grammar was back “in the loop” so I hurriedly complied. I gazed directly at the asphalt. I wanted the police to understand that I was going to fully cooperate, and I did this by lying perfectly still. This was body language for “silence.” I was golden.
I heard running footsteps, doors opening, puffing and grunting, and low voices. I also heard the clicks and static sounds of police radios. They were talking to headquarters, I assumed. This was one of the few times in my life where I felt it didn’t really matter if I made an erroneous assumption. I idly wondered if police dispatchers ever yelled at newbie cops.
Throughout all this, I kept hearing my dispatcher saying, “One twenty-three, pick up. One twenty-three, pick up.” But after awhile it stopped.
More cop cars arrived. I knew because I peeked.
A finger tapped my shoulder. “Are you the driver of this taxi?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s your name?”
“Murph.”
“Full name?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your full name?”
“Oh … Brendan Murphy.”
I tend to forget that. The police never seem to though.
“All right, you can stand up.”
It hurt my knees to kneel on the asphalt before hoisting my beer belly erect. To be honest, I rarely kneel.
Five cops’ cars were blocking the street now. Traffic was being diverted down side streets. Red lights were still flashing. Police officers were roaming around my taxi. The doors to 123 were wide open. A nearby cop was talking into a radio attached to his upper body. His head was bowed a bit as if he was telling secrets to his shoulder.
“Mr. Murphy, would you please step over to the sidewalk with me?” the policeman said.
I followed him onto the curb and across a six-foot stretch of dirt to a flagstone sidewalk. A lot of the sidewalks on Capitol Hill are made of flagstone. They’re from the cowboy days.
“I’ll have to ask you to wait here,” he said. “We have some people who want to talk to you.”
“All right.”
I thought the cop would walk away, trusting me not to bolt. But he didn’t do either. He stood right next to me while the other policemen prowled around my taxi.
An unmarked car cruised up to the scene of the … well, not “crime,” but just the place where we were. Two men in gray flannel suits climbed out. I started to blanch, but then I stopped. For one moment I thought I recognized them. I thought they were two cops that I had a passing acquaintance with: Detectives Duncan and Argyle. But these were different detectives. I could tell they were detectives by the way the other policemen crowded around and began talking fast. Cops don’t talk that way to rubberneckers. They do it only to men who have years of experience tucked under their belts, along with pistols.
I knew not to ask the uniformed policeman questions. Duncan and Argyle had taught this to me, although not on purpose. It was a learned thing. I didn’t know what was going on, but I did know one thing: they would tell me. They always told me. Sometimes down at police headquarters.
The two detectives walked toward me. Except for their faces, they looked just like Duncan and Argyle.
“Is your name Brendan Murphy?” one of them said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you the driver of this taxicab?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My name is Detective Ottman. This is my partner, Detective Quigg. We’re with the Robbery Division of the Denver Police Department.”
I immediately wondered if Detective Quigg was related to Mayor Quigg Newton. Quigg Newton was the mayor of Denver in the late forties. He and Bob Hope once owned the Channel 4 TV station. I learned this in a Denver history class in college. You learn all kinds of things in college. I recommend college to anybody who doesn’t know much.
“I need to ask you a few questions,” Ottman said.
“Okay.”
“Mr. Murphy, did you pick up a fare from the Glendale Bank on
Colorado Boulevard sometime during the past thirty minutes.”
“No,” I said.
He raised his chin and looked sort of “down” at me, even though we were about the same height. He was acting as if he didn’t believe me.
“Wait. Well. Yes,” I said.
He lowered his chin. “Is it no or yes?” he said.
“It is yes. But I didn’t pick up a fare from the bank. I mean, I was parked in the lot at the bank, and a man tapped on my window. He asked if I could give him a lift.”
“You were in the parking lot of the bank?”
“Yes I was. But …” I stopped.
“But what?”
“What I mean is, he didn’t call for a cab from the bank. I just picked him up off the street. He was what I call a ‘pedestrian’.”
Ottman nodded.
“Could you describe the man to us?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
“He looked like Willy Loman.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was nondescript.”
“How so?”
“He had the kind of face and demeanor that wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. In fact, I saw him twice.”
“Where did you see him the first time?”
“In a crowd. He was standing behind me in line at the Glendale Bank.”
“So you were in the bank.”
I heard those italics. They pulled me up short. People often use italics when they think they have caught me in a lie. Nuns taught me this.
“Yes. I was in the bank cashing a check, and when I turned to leave I almost bumped into the man. After I got outside to my taxi, he came out and asked if I could take him down the road.”
“Down the road? Did he say that?”
“No. That’s cabbie lingo. He said he needed to go six blocks.”
“Mister Murphy, I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to come down to headquarters and make a written witness statement. I know this is going to inconvenience you. It may take awhile. I can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to drive your cab again today. We just spoke with your supervisor, Mister Hogan. He knows that we have been looking for you and that you are all right. But you might want to contact him and let him know what’s happening.”
“Okay. But I have one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Didn’t anybody tell you?”
“No.”
“For the love of Christ,” Ottman muttered under his breath.
I liked that. I wondered if “Ottman” was an Irish name. It sounded sort of Turkish.
“The man who was in your backseat is suspected of robbing the Glendale Bank & Trust.”
I nodded. By then I had come to that conclusion on my own, only I was hoping I was wrong. I rarely hope, but when I do, I’m usually wrong.
I went back to 123, reached in and picked up the mike from the floor. I switched the transmitter over to Channel 4, the private line used for matters not relating to bells. I told the dispatcher that I would be off-duty for the next hour or so, and that I wasn’t certain if I would be back on the road today. He said he would pass the message along to Hogan. I hung up the mike and walked away from the cab.
I looked at my wristwatch. I did this blatantly so the cops would not see me doing it surreptitiously, which was what I wanted to do. I don’t like people to know that I know what time it is. It was two o’clock. My day was now officially shot to hell.
It was true that if I finished with this police business by three o’clock and got back on the road, there was the slimmest possibility that I could drive until seven and get back to zero. I was down seventy-five bucks. Then I realized that five of my gross had come from the bank robber. Maybe I was carrying stolen money. I wondered if I should tell this to Ottman and Quigg. Maybe the money was “marked” and if I tried to spend it, bells and whistles would go off at Langley.
I decided to come clean.
But I didn’t come clean right then. I was going to wait until I was writing my witness statement at headquarters. I wondered if Duncan and Argyle were working that day. If so, I felt I ought to make a special point of not dropping in on them.
A patrolman in a black-and-white drove me to police headquarters in downtown Denver. We entered through the basement parking lot. I had been there before. That was the time I was suspected of murdering a homeless man. When I was suspected of kidnapping that eighteen-year-old girl I had not been brought to HQ. So far the police had brought me in for kidnapping, assault, and murder, and now I had a bank robbery to write home to Maw about.
I was escorted into a large room. It was different from the small room where I had been “grilled” about the murder. Since I wasn’t a suspect, they were giving me wagon-room, although I noticed that the door clicked with a suspicious locking sound when the cop left me alone.
He had given me a pen and a copy of an official police witness-statement form. I immediately became worried that I would screw it up and have to ask for another form and start over. “Know thyself,” said someone who didn’t even know me. The first sheet of paper was preprinted, but I had been given extra sheets of blank typing paper. The cop had told me to use as many sheets as I needed.
I held the pen poised over the official sheet. It was like holding my fingers poised over the keys of a typewriter. I didn’t know where to start. I had never written autobiographical fiction before, and I sure didn’t want to start now. Most of my novels are pure fantasy, especially the part about selling them. I don’t believe in writing the kinds of books produced by, for instance, Jack Kerouac, which were virtual diaries. If I ever revealed the things I actually did during my travels around America, my only readers would be bounty hunters. I am more into writing what I call the “Jules Verne genre,” i.e., sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc. In other words, things I know absolutely nothing about.
But that wasn’t the problem now. The problem was trying to figure out the precise point at which my involvement in this mess began. Birth came to mind. Then I realized Detective Ottman had given me a lead-in: the first time I saw Willy Loman. Not the real Willy Loman, who was fictional, but the fake one who was real, i.e., the man in the bank.
I started out by asking myself why I had been at the bank. A sales clerk at Dagwell’s had given me a check. Should I mention her? Things could get interesting if she got roped into this case. I wouldn’t mind catching her eye across a crowded courtroom.
I began writing.
“At one o’clock this afternoon, I, Brendan Murphy, a legally licensed driver for the Rocky Mountain Taxicab Company …”
I stopped writing. It sounded like the title of a book about a man going to the electric chair:
I, Brendan Murphy
My shoulders drooped. I started writing again, telling the cops everything I had done from the moment I pulled up at the Glendale Bank until the moment I started “kissing the asphalt.” I didn’t write that down, but I wanted to. I thought the cops might take note of my lyrical prose imagery and ask if I had any aspirations to become a novelist. Maybe some flatfoot could put me in touch with an agent.
After I finished, I signed the statement.
Well, that was that. I set the pen aside and waited for the officer to return. He arrived thirty seconds later, which indicated to me that the police were watching on a closed-circuit TV. But I had suspected that all along. Whenever I’m anywhere, I think people are watching me. I could be locked inside a safe at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and I would still comport myself like a gentleman.
“Is that everything, sir, or am I now free to leave?” I said politely.
“Detectives Ottman and Quigg still need to speak with you,” the cop said, and he walked out of the room with my statement in his hand.
CLICK.
Went the door.
I folded my arms and leaned against the back of the chair. But I quickly unfolded my arms. I was afraid it might have made me look surly. I speak fluent body language, so I knew what I was doing. When you drive a taxi you have to be able to read what I call “the grammar of the flesh and the syntax of the bones.” What people do is often more significant than what they say, especially when they’re getting positioned to shove the back door open and take off running without paying.
My rear-view mirror serves as my textbook.