The door opened. Detectives Ottman and Quigg walked in. I sat perfectly still. But I wasn’t fooling myself. Cops are also students of body language. So are bartenders. I’ve never actually made a complete list of body-speakers. I include here only the students I know best.
“We read your statement,” Detective Quigg said. “It was pretty thorough, but we have one question.”
“Yes, sir?”
“You indicated that you dropped the man off near a parking lot. Did you see him go into his office?”
“No I didn’t.”
“Did he say where he actually worked?”
“No, sir.”
Quigg nodded.
I felt like a failure.
Even though I rarely make assumptions, I now had to assume that the bank robber did not actually work at an office. I mean, why would someone who stole money have a job?
“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Certainly, Mr. Murphy.”
“How much money did he steal?”
“Well … we’re not at liberty to talk about that, Mr. Murphy, but I will say that he got a large amount.”
I nodded. Then I looked Detective Quigg right in the eye. “Did he use a gun?”
Quigg nodded.
“Can I assume he had the gun with him when he got into my cab.”
Quigg nodded.
I sat there looking at the two detectives, and I felt my face beginning to grow warm. My cheeks were tingling.
“Are you all right, Mr. Murphy?” Ottman said.
“Yes.”
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“No.”
“Your face is turning red,” he said.
“I know,” I said. But it wasn’t embarrassment. It was something worse. It was reality.
All of a sudden I was back in my taxi with a man sitting behind me with a gun. But here’s the strange part: it was as if my skin was thinking about this, and not my brain. My flesh felt like it was starting to flip out.
“Get him a glass of water,” Ottman said, and Quigg left the room. He came back a minute later with a paper cup filled with ice-cold water. I drank it. My cheeks cooled down. I felt then that I understood what was going on. My brain was refusing to extrapolate, i.e., refusing to think about the existence of a gun, and as a consequence my blood was pooling on the surface of my skin rather than entering my cerebral cortex. I was undergoing a “jugular log-jam,” which was exactly what I wanted.
“Will you need me for anything else today?” I said, my voice rather thin.
Ottman shook his head no. “We will probably be getting in touch with you again. We’re talking to a number of witnesses.”
“I guess you haven’t caught the guy, huh?” I said.
“No we haven’t, Mr. Murphy. But I will tell you there is a city-wide search going on right now.”
I nodded. The nod is a handy piece of body language that usually means absolutely nothing, although it can be translated in a number of ways, such as “Yes,” or “I understand,” or “The End,” which was what I was saying there. I wanted to leave.
“Are you finished with me?” I said.
“Yes,” Quigg said. “You can leave. That’s all.”
I wanted to ask if they had found any fingerprints in my cab, but I didn’t. I had seen enough cop shows to know not to ask a million questions about a case that was currently under investigation and was none of my business. I wasn’t a journalist.
As I walked out of the room it occurred to me that instead of writing “The End” at the end of my novels, I should write, “That’s All.” It could become my personal trademark, like e.e. cummings and his lowercase gimmick. You think irrelevant thoughts when you’re suffering from a jugular log-jam. I read somewhere that the human brain can’t live for more than three minutes without a fresh supply of circulated blood. Sensitive bastard.
The same patrolman who had driven me to HQ chauffeured me back to the location on 13th Avenue where my taxi was parked. There was another black-and-white unit parked behind my cab. I thanked my driver before I climbed out. He smiled and nodded. I hardly ever see cops smile. I don’t know why I bring that up.
I opened the door to 123 and climbed in. The two police cruisers rolled away. After they disappeared from view it was as if nothing at all had happened. It was as if I was simply parked at the curb waiting for a fare to come out of an apartment building. I was barely a block away from my crow’s nest, and all of a sudden I wanted to drive home and go to sleep.
Instead, I dialed Channel 4 and told the dispatcher that I was bringing my cab back to the motor. He said he would tell Hogan. I switched over to Channel 1 in time to hear the dispatcher yell at a newbie. I left the radio on all the way back to Rocky Cab. There’s an unwritten rule at Rocky Cab that says a driver should leave his radio on at all times for safety’s sake, and I had not obeyed that non-rule that day. I practically never obeyed it. Usually I turned on the radio at a whim. Another reason for leaving the radio on is to listen for bells. That’s why they give you a radio, so you can take calls.
Let me explain:
We drivers know that the cab company doesn’t really like it when we sit at the cabstands or loaf at the airport, even though both places are legitimate locations to pick up fares. They want us to take calls off the radio, to drive around and service customers, and thus increase business. Drivers who loaf at DIA are called “airport rats” by the drivers who don’t loaf at DIA. I was an airport rat when Stapleton Airport was in business before DIA was built. I didn’t care what anybody called me. I made my fifty bucks a day and went home. After DIA opened, it became impossible to make my nut, so I moved my loafquarters to the cabstands in downtown Denver. And I didn’t turn the radio on. I read paperbacks and waited for fares to come out of the hotels. And when they got in and said, “DIA,” I took them to the airport with my radio off. I almost never turned my radio on because I almost never jumped bells, because I wanted as few people in my cab as possible during a shift. I just wanted to be left alone, make my fifty, and go home.
But I listened to the radio all the way to the motor, and after I got there I turned it off and tried not to think about what would have happened if the radio had been on while I was driving the robber away from the bank. But I knew what would have happened. The dispatcher would have transmitted a code word to let all the cab drivers know that one of us was in jeopardy. Transmission of bells would have ceased. There would have been other verbal signals given by the dispatcher to indicate that all taxis were on radio lockdown and that we drivers should be wary of any passengers in our backseats.
This was what I meant by “reality.”
My method of dealing with reality has always been denial. By not listening to my radio, I was always denying the reality of the danger of cab driving. But it’s like I’ve often said: I need some kind of goddamn therapy.
I gathered my things and got out of 123, walked across the lot and entered the on-call room. Rollo was seated inside the cage. He wasn’t eating a donut. I sort of wished he was. I wanted things to be normal. I handed him my trip-sheet and key and told him I was through for the day. He nodded, then told me Hogan wanted to see me. I said thanks and walked into the hall. I knew that Rollo knew everything. His lack of body language told me. His skin and bones were mum. He was being polite. This is what happens when reality invades Rocky Cab. Rollo becomes almost human.
I went upstairs and knocked on Hogan’s door. He told me to come in. I won’t describe our conversation. I won’t even ask you to use your imagination. I told Hogan everything that had happened, and he told me that I wouldn’t be charged for my daily lease.
“It’ll be credited to your next shift,” he said.
Meaning I could drive for free the next time I showed up for work. This struck me as about as ironic as my life ever gets, because this was doubtless the least-profitable day of driving I had ever experienced—not counting my first day fourteen years earlier. But the first day is automatically terrible for every driver. It doesn’t even count. I netted five dollars on my first day as a newbie. You never talk about that when you brag about having a really bad day during bull sessions with your fellow hacks. It’s considered bad form. After all, anybody can fail on his first day, but it takes a genuine blockhead to eat his lease after fourteen years.
I left the building and crossed the lot to my ’64 Chevy. My car had been stolen dozens of times since I had bought it. It’s always stolen from the parking lot behind my apartment building, and then recovered by the police who always find it within a mile radius of my crow’s nest. The first time it got stolen I was furious, but after awhile I got used to it. Whenever I walked outside to go to work and saw that my car was missing, I would sigh and walk back inside and call the police and ask them to keep an eye out for it. It got to be embarrassing. The police dispatcher learned my name. I never learned hers. It got to the point where she would chuckle when she heard my voice. But my stolen car was as close as I had ever gotten to authentic criminal activity. This doesn’t include the times the police picked me up for murder, kidnapping, etc., because I was always exonerated. By this I mean there never were any murders or kidnappings in the first place. They were just wacky misunderstandings. It gets complicated. Let’s move on.
I climbed into my car and looked at my wristwatch. It was four o’clock. I theoretically had three hours left on my lease, and I was down seventy-five bucks for the day. I suddenly had the craving to get back into 123 and see if I could pull out all the stops and earn seventy-five dollars in three hours. It was like a challenge that tempted me only because I knew it wasn’t going to happen. “Hold me back, boys,” as they say in fake fistfights.
It was at this point that I realized I had not mentioned the stolen five dollars in my witness statement.
I froze, even though I wasn’t moving. I guess you could say my mind froze. Then my shoulders drooped. It was just like the times when I was trying to write novels and had completed a chapter and suddenly realized I had forgotten some plot element or scene or bit of dialogue that had inspired me in the first place. I was so busy worrying about crap like style that it got left out.
I started to shake my head with disgust, but I was tired and I was hungry, so I decided instead to buy a hamburger. I could shake my head with disgust after dinner, if I had the strength. And I knew why I was tired. I had been running on a low-voltage infusion of adrenaline ever since the cops had blocked me in. Add to that mix everybody’s guns— cops and robber alike—and my nerves were like a wet Fizzie.
I started the engine and drove out of the lot. It felt strange to be heading home at four in the afternoon. My life is pretty rigidly structured for a person who does nothing. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I work from seven a.m. until seven p.m. That’s the structure. The slightest variation tosses me for a loop. When I was a kid our family owned a female sheltie dog. She slept at night in a little doghouse in the backyard. One day my sisters decided the dog was uncomfortable on the wooden floor, so they spent the entire afternoon installing a rug in her house. They had gotten an end-piece from a neighbor who was redoing his living room. That was what made my sisters suddenly think the dog was uncomfortable. They found a scrap of carpet.
The next morning we came outside and found the rug torn to shreds and scattered all over the backyard. The dog had spent the night ripping it out. She was exhausted. She was asleep in the doghouse. My sisters freaked. Their plan, their good deed, their dream of greatness, had been shattered. They ran into the house crying. I walked to the drugstore and ate a chocolate sundae, and waited for the tide to ebb.
Now I was like that sheltie. My Utopian world had been disrupted. Even though I was tired, I felt like I ought to be “doing” something. That shows you how traumatized I was by the events of the afternoon, not to mention the tooth-grinding frustrations of the morning. Frankly, I have always cast a jaundiced eye on people who “do” things, and now there I was, wanting to be just like them. I was forced to conclude that the entire human race lived in a perpetual state of trauma. This caused me to take pity on the people that I used to smirk at. Previously I had thought that people who “did” things were just showing off.
Live and learn.
Of course the thing I felt I ought to be “doing” was driving my cab. The fact that I wasn’t doing it meant I would be doing it the next day, Tuesday, my regular break from doing the thing I don’t want to do at all, which is work. Not that I mind cab driving. That’s much ado about nothing. In fact, driving a cab is to work what absolute zero is to molecular vibrations. In theory it is impossible to arrive at absolute zero where molecules literally cease to move. By the same token, it’s impossible to do less than drive a cab, short of doing nothing at all. That’s why I took up novel writing in my youth. The way I had it figured, one good bestseller and I would arrive at absolute zero. I envisioned this taking place on a beach in Tahiti. I would show the scientific world a thing or two.
I pulled into a Burger King. As I paid at the drive-up window for my hamburger I started thinking that I could take advantage of this three-hour hiatus by starting a new novel after I got home. I had arrived at a place that I call “the little dream,” which is the dream of all novelists to find some free time to write. It’s true that I did not work four out of seven days a week, but I was thinking in terms of abnormal free time. It was like winning ten bucks on a scratch ticket, “found money” so to speak, that I could use to buy something I had not been planning on buying. But because I never buy things that I hadn’t been planning on buying, this always forced me to think up something to buy, and I had enough trouble thinking up plots for novels without thinking up crap to buy at K-Mart. Ergo, a little bit of money is like a little bit of knowledge—it just gets in my way. I really ought to quit buying scratch tickets.