Suddenly Admiral Brendan Aloysius Murphy of the Sixth Fleet lost all of my aplomb and let my jaw hang wide open. I leaned back against the chair and stared at Detective Ottman. This wasn’t merely switching horses in midstream, this was like jumping from a moving train to another train that was highballing in the opposite direction.
Ottman pulled up a folding chair and sat down facing me. Not directly, but at a forty-five degree angle. He was sort of beside me and sort of in front of me. I had the feeling that the next few minutes would determine our physical relationship in a metaphorical as well as a real sense.
He reached to the desk and gently drew the blank trip-sheet toward us. He tapped on the first empty box. “I wonder if you could just walk me through the fares of yesterday,” he said.
Detective Quigg reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small notebook. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a ballpoint pen. He flipped the notebook open and touched the pen to the paper. But he didn’t write anything. Oh no. Not then. He waited until I started talking. Then he started writing. The pen made a sound like this: “skritch skritch.”
“Please begin with your first fare of the morning,” Quigg said.
Right off the bat I did something wrong. I reached up and placed the palms of my hands flat against my face and dragged them down to my chin. I did this to help me think, but suddenly I realized it might have made me look like someone who was slapping his face with remorse after having been “found out.” You often see this in bad melodramas. Not that I equate my life with a bad melodrama, but I could.
The reason I did it though was because I had made a vow to myself that I would just forget about yesterday and get on with my life. This is how I always deal with yesterdays, even the good ones. I would say that it works 93 percent of the time. But some yesterdays just can’t be forgotten. Apparently the police weren’t going to let me forget this one.
“The first fare I picked up was a pedestrian. He flagged me down on the street just after I gassed up at a Seven-Eleven store. But he only wanted to go a couple blocks.”
“Do you normally pick up fares off the street?”
“I never do anything normally. I’m flexible in my choice of fares. Maybe a bit too flexible. My decisions are made intuitively.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I mean whether or not I pick up a pedestrian depends on various factors, such as the time of day, the physical appearance of the flagger, or whether I’m broke. I guess the broke factor is the most common.”
“Aren’t you always broke when you pick up your first fare of the day?”
“No. Sometimes I just don’t have any money.”
“Isn’t that the same thing as being broke?”
“No.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Broke is a state of being that occurs only after six o’clock at night. It has to do with the probability factor of picking up a final fare. If I don’t have any money after six o’clock at night, I’m broke.”
“What about six o’clock in the morning?”
“I never work that early.”
“When do you start?”
“Seven.”
“All right. What about not having any money after seven in the morning?”
“That’s normal. That’s not broke.”
He stopped asking questions for a moment. I stared at the blank trip-sheet and listened to the steady skritch of Quigg’s ballpoint pen. It was a Bic.
“How much money did the fare give you?”
“Three dollars.”
Ottman turned to Hogan, who was sitting behind his desk silently staring at me. He always did this when detectives ran me through the meat grinder.
“Mr. Hogan, would it be possible for me to obtain a blank trip-sheet. I would like to fill one out while Murph describes his day. In this way we can see what his trip-sheet would have looked like if he had obeyed PUC regulations.”
“Certainly,” Hogan said, getting up and going to a filing cabinet.
I didn’t look at Hogan. I stared at the nearest wall. The remark about me not obeying regulations gave me an inkling as to where this situation was headed. I call it “the unemployment office.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hogan,” Ottman said, setting the blank trip-sheet on the desk and pulling out his own Bic. Bic’s are well made yet inexpensive. Detectives have to pay for their own Bics. I learned this the hard way.
Ottman asked me exactly where I had picked up the first fare. I gave him the nearest intersection, the time of the pick-up, the time of the drop-off, and the price on the meter. He wrote it down. For all practical purposes, Detective Ottman was now a trained taxi driver.
“Who was your next fare?” Ottman said. I swallowed hard.
I told him about the penny lady, starting with the brief conversation with the dispatcher about my ability to change a one-hundred-dollar bill, and continuing on to the moment when I walked away without accepting a single coin of the eight hundred pennies. I waited for Ottman to start asking more detailed questions about the woman who was currently lying in the DGH cardiac unit, but he simply filled out the trip-sheet and then looked at me and said, “What was your third fare of the day?”
I swallowed, but not too hard. I felt as if I had “gotten away” with something.
I told him about the kid going to The Ram for a high school reunion pre-luncheon.
Then I told him about the sales lady whom I took to Dagwell’s. He did interrupt my narrative to ask if I knew for certain whether she was a sales lady. “Could she have been a customer?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He didn’t ask what made me think she was a sales lady. I was glad, because I had no answer, and I did not want to get into a detailed and possibly embarrassing discussion about the groundless suppositions upon which I base all my assumptions.
“And your next fare?” he said.
“I picked up two ladies at the Havana Bank that is cattycorner from Buckingham Square. This took about a minute, and I made one dollar and seventy cents.”
I heard a strange noise come from Hogan’s desk. I glanced over at him. He had laughed. I had never heard Hogan laugh before. It was hideous. Yet I understood. He rubbed his mouth as if trying to erase his laugh. I used to do that in grade school. I had a 97 percent success rate. Hogan failed.
By now the trip-sheet was starting to look like the real thing. Ottman wanted me to be very precise about the times I had picked up the fares and dropped them off. It was a bit difficult to remember, but I felt that I was getting the times to within fifteen minutes, which is actually not very good in terms of taxi facts, especially when you are talking to the police, the DA, the prosecutor, the jury, or your cellmate.
I did have one thing going for me though. Throughout my worst day ever I had kept glancing at my wristwatch, and I was able to picture the hands of yesterday. When you’re having a bad day, details relevant to the badness often stick with you. They frequently emerge when you are seated on a barstool at Sweeney’s telling your troubles to your friends, although in my case it’s usually strangers. But isn’t this the essence of storytelling anyway? Misery? The how-to books refer to it as “conflict”—but it’s simply misery. If a novel doesn’t have misery in it, the author is just having fun at the typewriter. Okay. I’ll admit it. I’ve never had any fun at the typewriter. But that hasn’t gotten me an acceptance slip.
“And your next fare?” Ottman said.
I took a deep breath. “Well, this was where things started to really fall apart.”
“Is this when you picked up the man who is suspected of robbing the bank?’
“Oh no. I would have to say that the ‘falling apart’ was completed by then. This earlier call came from Arapahoe Road and Chambers Road.”
Quigg whistled. It was one of those whistles like a reporter in a 1930s movie would make when he heard astonishing news. It wasn’t a wolf whistle, although it held a sonic resemblance. Quigg sort of looked like a reporter with his notebook and whistle. I smiled at him. He might have thought I was smiling at his whistle, but I smiled because he looked like a young Adolfe Menjou. If you don’t know who Adolphe Menjou was, it really doesn’t matter. Menjou was in The Front Page (1937). It was a movie about reporters, although he was an editor.
“The dispatcher had been offering the call for about half an hour, but no taxi drivers had accepted it. I first heard it when I was on Capitol Hill. By the time I worked my way over to Aurora, the call was still open, so I decided to answer it.”
“Why did you take so long to decide?”
“Well … you have to understand … it takes me forever to make decisions. But I had earned only fourteen dollars and ninety cents in cash after working four hours …”
The hideous noise came from Hogan’s desk again. I glanced over at him and frowned. He yanked out a handkerchief and pretended he had coughed. A feeble ruse, but one that I nevertheless filed away. It had the potential for refinement.
“So I was well on my way to being broke,” I continued. “That’s what motivated me to jump the bell. It was a trip to DIA, so it looked like all of my financial problems were going to be taken care of in one fell swoop.”
“What’s that?”
“One fell swoop.”
“What’s a ‘fell swoop’?” Ottman said. “Is that taxi jargon?”
“Why … no … I don’t actually … I suppose it could be Shakespearian.”
“But what does it mean?” he said.
“Excuse me, Ottman,” Quigg said, lifting his pen. “I’ve heard of ‘fell swoop’ before. It’s like a hawk attacking a rabbit … right?” He looked at me for confirmation.
“That’s correct,” I said, although I hadn’t thought of that. In fact, I had never thought about “fell swoop” at all. I just said it a lot.
I continued to elaborate for Ottman:
“In terms of human beings though, ‘fell swoop’ is sort of like Michael Corleone wiping out all his enemies with one well-planned, welltimed, and well-engineered mob hit at the end of the first Godfather. I decided to take the call because it would make me the equivalent of a smart mobster.”
I grinned.
Ottman glanced at his partner, then looked at me. “Did it work?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“My plan wasn’t very well-timed.”
“How so?”
“I was too far away to get there on time.”
“I believe it,” Quigg said as he scribbled.
“It was one of those things that occasionally happen to taxi drivers,” I said. “It usually happens only to beginners. I call them ‘newbies.’ But every once in a great while it happens to old pros, and to me.”
“Were the customers gone by the time you arrived?”
“No. The house was in a cul-de-sac, and when I drove in they were loading their luggage into a four-wheel-drive vehicle. When I pulled up, a lady told me that they couldn’t wait any longer so they had asked a neighbor to drive them to the airport.”
“Even though you were already there?”
“Yes.”
“How did you react to the situation?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you get angry?”
“I never get angry at customers.”
“Why not?”
“There’s no point. That would be like getting angry at a wave.”
“How’s that?”
“Customers are like waves.”
“What kind of waves?”
“Water waves. Like on an ocean.”
“What do you mean by that, Murph?”
“I mean there’s always another wave coming along. They just keep coming and coming and coming, and they’re all the same, except sometimes you find a big score on one of the waves, but not often enough that you can expect a lot of money from every wave. You mostly find flotsam and jetsam.”
“What’s jetsam?”
“It’s navy lingo.”
“So they told you that they already had a ride?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you do?”
“I drove around in a circle.”
“In anger?”
“No, in the cul-de-sac. In fact, I made only a half-circle. Then I drove away.”
“And you didn’t argue or make any attempt to change their minds?”
“No.”
“That must have set you back in terms of time and money.”
“You better believe it.”
“How did you feel after you drove away?”
“Well … I felt resigned to fate. Cab drivers do that a lot.”
“But you weren’t angry?”
“No.”
“Even though you were broke.”
“Yes. No. I wasn’t angry about being broke. In a sense, I am always broke, so I’m used to it. I suppose if I was a millionaire and didn’t have any money, I would be angry.”
Ottman glanced at Quigg, then looked at me and raised his chin. “I’m just trying to understand something here, Murph. I hope you don’t mind my dwelling on this.”
“No. I’m used to the police dwelling on my activities.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Have the police ever dwelled on your activities before?”
“Yes.”
“What police?”
“Duuu …” I said, then stopped.
I almost said “Duncan and Argyle.” Thank goodness I caught myself. It might have sounded flippant. I cleared my throat.
“Detective Duncan and Detective Argyle of the Bureau of Missing Persons down at DPD have run me through the meat … have interrogated me in the past.”
“We know Dunk and Argy,” Ottman said with a smile. “What did they interrogate you about?”
“Oh … just some cases they were working on awhile back.”
“What cases?”
“Oh … you know … a couple of murders, a kidnapping, a robbery. Just average stuff.”
“Were you a suspect?”
I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. “To tell you the truth, Detectives Duncan and Argyle never really made that clear to me. I’m not a mind-reader, you know, but I think they were sort of wondering if I knew something.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“What did you know?”
“I knew I was innocent. But beyond that I didn’t think I was much help to them. They can probably fill you in. They took notes, too.”
“All right. Let’s get back to the fare on Arapahoe and Chambers. It must have taken you a long time to get down to the address, and just as long to get back to town. On top of that, you made no money at all, correct?”
“Correct.”
“So it seems to me that you might have been upset.”
“Well … maybe a little.”
“Or maybe a lot?” Ottman said.
“No. Just a little. I’m always a little upset.”
“About what?”
“Life in general.”
“But didn’t missing out on a lucrative fare to DIA and wasting so much time make you more upset?”
“No. Nothing makes me more upset than life in general.”
Ottman then asked me what time I had gotten the Arapahoe call, what time I had arrived at the address, and the exact time of my next call.
“My next call came at one-thirty.” Ottman looked down at the trip-sheet.
“You dropped off the two women from the Havana Bank at eleven-thirty, and you picked up your next fare at one-thirty?”
“That’s correct.”
“That’s two hours between calls.”
“You’re telling me,” I said.
“Do you mean to say that you were unable to take a single call off the radio during those two hours?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because my taxicab broke down.”
Ottman glanced at the trip-sheet. “When did this happen?”
“I would say that it happened about ten minutes after I left the Arapahoe address. I was headed north on Chambers Road when the engine started to lose power.”
Ottman glanced at Quigg, then looked back at me.
“Well … you certainly were lucky you arrived late at the Arapahoe address,” Ottman said. “If they hadn’t talked their neighbor into driving them to DIA, you would have found yourself in a very awkward and embarrassing position.”
My eyes almost popped out of my head.