Let me explain.
Whenever I’m blindsided by reality, my eyes almost pop out of my head. But I have gotten so used to the capricious nature of reality that I always just move on, and brace myself for the next mess. I deliberately try not to think about what might have happened. This is an adjunct to The Positioning Game, which is something a cabbie plays when he has time to waste. But I was just too busy scrambling to make money to think about the fact that thanks to my ineptitude at pouring water from a tin can I had come close to creating a mess so awful that it nearly made my eyes pop out of my head as I sat in Hogan’s office.
I envisioned myself driving the impatient fare to DIA only to have my engine start bucking and losing power. I would have had to call the dispatcher and beg for another Rocky driver to get to the gas station as fast as possible. I envisioned the fare growing hysterical. Me too. It was all too much to dwell on.
I looked at Ottman and began to understand why he was a detective and I wasn’t.
“I guess that was a bit of luck after all,” I said.
“In all probability they would have missed their flight.”
I nodded.
Ottman was being kind to me when he said “probability.” I would have said “certainty” but why split hairs?
“What was wrong with your taxi?”
My shoulders drooped. I took a minute to explain the business with the water. At any moment I expected to hear a hideous sound come from Hogan. Nothing came.
“So you were able to get back out on the road as soon as they filled the radiator?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you go then?”
“I ate a hamburger at a MacDonald’s. After I finished lunch, I drove to the Glendale Bank & Trust and cashed the check given to me by the woman I had driven to Dagwell’s.”
“Why did you choose to do that rather than, say, deposit it in your own bank?”
“Because I don’t trust …” I started to say “people” but instead I said, “… checks.”
“Why is that?”
At this point Hogan interrupted.
“Excuse me gentlemen. May I be allowed to say something here?”
“Go right ahead,” Ottman said.
“It’s not unusual for a taxi driver to cash a check at the earliest opportunity. Drivers are not required to accept checks from customers. It’s a judgment call that’s left up to the individual driver. But basically it comes down to the fact that sometimes fares write bad checks, and it’s best to take a check to the customer’s bank and as soon as possible.”
I was glad Hogan explained it so diplomatically. I hate to say bad things about customers in front of customers. Even cops take cabs.
“I understand,” Ottman said. “All right. You went to the Glendale Bank & Trust and cashed the check, and the check was good. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And then what happened?”
I started to roll my eyes and sigh, but instead I said, “That’s where my witness statement comes in. I wrote down all the things that …”
I stopped abruptly.
“All the things that … what?” Ottman said.
I swallowed hard.
“All the things that happened from the moment I bumped into the man at the bank until the moment I found myself k …” I managed not to say “kissing the asphalt.” I avoided it by turning the letter K into the letter C, as follows: “myself k … coming to a halt along Thirteenth Avenue after I saw the police cars approaching me from behind with their red lights flashing.”
I made the sentence extra long so I could get as far away from the letter K as possible.
But here’s the thing. The reason I stopped abruptly after saying “I wrote down all the things that …” was because I suddenly realized I had forgotten to tell the police about the five-dollar bill while writing my witness statement. I had intended to do that, but I had forgotten. And now I remembered.
This annoyed me. I wondered if it would annoy the police. I thought about mentioning it right then. This is a problem I have. It’s similar to clipping a hangnail. When some little thing bothers me, I have an urge that borders on a psychotic craving to remove it from my life. This is true of big things, too. But I decided to hold off mentioning it because I had learned that the things that bother me don’t always bother normal people. Which is to say, I might have been blowing things out of proportion, and I have found that sometimes it is best to do nothing. If you do have to do something, it’s always waiting for you anyway. I guess you could call this a “wait-and-see” attitude, except my attitude is “wait-forever.”
Detective Ottman made a few last jots on the trip-sheet, then picked it up and looked it over. He turned it around and showed it to me. He held it vertically so that I could see it clearly.
“Now tell me, Murph,” he said. “If you had obeyed PUC regulations and filled out your trip-sheet properly, is this how it would have looked?”
I gave the sheet only a cursory glance. I knew that he knew that I knew it was a rhetorical question. The only real question now was whether I was going to play his little mind-game. “Yes,” I said.
He set the sheet of paper on Hogan’s desk, then looked at me. “All right, Murph, I think I have a clear picture of what you did yesterday. Now I would like you to describe to me in as much detail as possible what you did this morning after you signed out your taxi.”
I realized I hadn’t “gotten away” with anything. To my knowledge, I have never gotten away with anything ever. This led me to think about the five-dollar bill. But then I had an idea. Why not just explain to these cops that I had intended to mention the fiver, and that I only remembered it a few minutes ago. This would dovetail neatly with my narrative concerning what I had done this morning. It would not only be a part of my story, it would also be true.
I got sort of excited about telling the truth to the police. I mean, I always tell the truth to the police, but this seemed like an “extra-truth” because it sort of had the appearance of a sneaky lie but wasn’t. They could have wired me to a lie detector and I would have aced the test. That’s how excited I felt. I wanted to race through the business with the penny lady just so I could get to the exciting part, but I had enough experiences with interrogation to know that I’d better take it slowly, and then savor the moment when I got to tell them about remembering the five-dollar bill.
“Okay,” I began. “Last night I started thinking that I had been taken advantage of by this Mrs. Jacobs. Plus, I had made no money yesterday, so I decided that I would go back to Mrs. Jacobs’ house and ask her to pay me the eight dollars. I felt that this would help to make me feel better.”
I paused to let Ottman ask me the sorts of questions that Duncan and Argyle often asked during the middle of my bland narratives. But Ottman just sat and listened.
“So right after putting gas in my taxi this morning, I drove to her house and knocked on her door. When she came to the door I reintroduced myself and asked her to pay me the eight dollars.”
“Did she pay you?” Duncan sa … I mean Ottman said.
“No. She refused.”
“On what grounds?”
I came to a fork in the road. I didn’t want to travel down one of the tines—the one that would make me look bad, i.e., the bent one. But I decided to go ahead and do it, since I was suspected of assault and maybe battery.
“She told me that she didn’t owe me any money because I had turned down the eight hundred pennies on the previous day.”
“Pennies are not considered legal tender,” Quigg said, while at the same time continuing to skritch.
I was impressed by that. I can’t do two of anything at once. I blame Newtonian physics.
“That might be a point in your favor,” Ottman said.
“Might? How about definitely?”
That’s what I wanted to say.
But I decided to hold off. I still had a few more truths in my bag of surprises.
“I knew that,” I said. “But the thing is, I became so frustrated on Monday when she tried to give me coins that I just said ‘Keep your pennies’ and I turned and walked away. I got into my cab and drove off. So basically I turned the money down. What I’m trying to say here is that I now feel that I did not have a right to go back to her house this morning and demand payment. Our contractual relationship had been dissolved by me.” I paused a moment, then said, “I’ve seen The Paper Chase five times.”
“But you walked away from pennies,” Quigg said. “From a legal standpoint, it might be said that you walked away from nothing.”
“Excuse me,” Ottman said, smiling at his partner. “It’s true that Murph walked away from pennies, but he did walk away. A good prosecuting attorney might be able to introduce the idea of ‘intent’ to a jury.”
“What’s this about a prosecuting attorney?” I said so quickly that I hardly recognized my voice. I sounded like a chipmunk.
“I’m just speaking hypothetically,” Ottman said, turning back to me. “The fact that you walked away from the payment might be viewed as the termination of the implied contract.”
“That’s what I was getting at,” I said.
“A good defense lawyer could make mincemeat out of that argument,” Quigg said with a smile. Quigg seemed to be on my side. I didn’t like that.
“What I mean is,” I said before anybody started measuring me for prison greens, “I felt that I had been in the wrong to return to her house in the first place. Especially after she slammed the door in my face. It sort of woke me up.”
“She slammed it?” Quigg said.
“Well … she closed it abruptly. It made a loud sound. I don’t know at what point on the decibel scale an abrupt shut qualifies as a slam, but I will say this … the sound of the door hitting the frame implied a termination of our conversation.”
Ottman and Quigg glanced at each other. Duncan and Argyle used to do that a lot. It always struck me as sort of unprofessional. I mean, it would be obvious to any suspect that the cops were “communicating” with each other when they did it. To take this construct a bit further, it would be obvious to a suspect that a glance between two policemen would be the result of a significant statement made by the suspect, probably an incriminating statement. Ergo, why would the police want to “let on” that the suspect was incriminating himself? Why not remain perfectly motionless and give the suspect enough rope to hang himself? This is one of the many reasons why I frequently remain perfectly motionless. Of course there are others reasons, which I am not at liberty to divulge.
Anyway, it was obvious to me that Ottman and Quigg thought I was as guilty as hell. Of what, I wasn’t sure, but by then it seemed irrelevant.
“At any point during your conversation with Mrs. Jacobs did you threaten her?” Ottman said.
“No!” I said.
I stared Ottman in the eye.
“Wait,” I said. “Maybe I did.”
Ottman remained perfectly motionless. I didn’t like that.
“What I mean is, I told her that if she didn’t pay me I might have to call the police.”
Glance.
I hope I don’t have to explain that to you.
“But I wasn’t really threatening her,” I said. “I mean, I suppose that the threat of … I mean the …” I paused. “I’m trying to think of a synonym for ‘threat’ that doesn’t mean ‘threat’.”
“How about ‘possibility’?” Quigg said.
“Or ‘caveat’?” Ottman said.
“Yes, like that,” I said. “I suppose the possible caveat of a visit from the police might be considered a threat, but I was just trying to get her to pay me.”
I sighed.
“I wasn’t thinking clearly. I finally realized I shouldn’t have gone there. It’s not like me to go around harassing old ladies, or young ladies, or any ladies at all. I guess I was just motivated by the fact that my life seemed to be going to hell in a hatbox.”
“Did you say or do anything that might have made Mrs. Jacobs believe you were going to threaten her physically?”
“No. But like I said, I’m not a mind-reader. I don’t know how she might have interpreted anything I said or did.”
“She told us that you threatened to hit her.”
I stared at Ottman for what I estimated to be five thousand years. Then I said, “She lied to you.”
“Why would she lie, Murph?”
“Because she’s wicked and evil,” I wanted to say.
But instead I said, “Why would she try to pay me with eight hundred pennies? Why do old people do any of the strange things they do?” I shrugged. “Maybe she’s senile.” Or maybe she’s a modern-day Morgan La Fay!!!
“So you did not threaten to hit her if she did not pay you?”
“No.”
“But you did threaten to call the police.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“Because I decided it was wrong of me to harass a woman old enough to have played hopscotch wi … back in the nineteen-twenties.”
Glance.
“But you could have called the police, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And in all probability the police would have made the woman pay.”
“I know they would have. They always do.”
“Has this happened to you before?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“It happened a couple times after I first started driving.”
“What were the situations?”
“They were sort of similar. Except the people who wouldn’t pay me were young men. One of the men got out of my cab and walked into a bar. The other man was living at a motel. They were both drunk out of their skulls. Those were the only times I called the police on no-pays.”
“Did no-pays happen at any other times?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t call the police?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it took too long for the police to arrive and make the men pay up. I can earn more money by just going on about my business and picking up new fares. I haven’t called the police on no-pays in more than twelve years.”
“So you have never called the police on anybody aside from those two men?”
“No.”
“Not even threatened?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you at least threaten to do it?”
“Because some things in life just aren’t worth it. It’s a judgment call. The times I called the police it was more for the principle of the thing than the money. I didn’t like getting ripped off. But I finally decided that money was more important than principle, so I just stopped calling the police and jumped some more bells.”
“But you did threaten to call the police on Mrs. Jacobs.”
“Yes.”
“Was it for the principle of the thing?”
“It was a combination of greed and justice. I wanted the eight dollars, and I figured she was just trying to pull a fast one.”
“And that’s what made you decide to go to her house and ask for the money?”
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
“The reason I decided to go to her house and get the money was because I realized I might have died when the bank robber was in my backseat. I decided that life is too short to let people walk all over me. Just because I’m a cab driver doesn’t mean I’m not human. If Mrs. Jacobs had been a thirty-year-old man I might have ended up calling the meat wagon to take him to the morgue.”
Glance.
“Are you serious, Murph?”
“No. But that’s how mad I was when I went to work. It made me mad to think someone had been holding a gun on me and I didn’t even know it. I should have known it though. A man once told me that when you drive a cab you should consider every fare to be armed and dangerous, and be prepared for anything at all times.”
“What man?”
“Just a driver I talked to a long time ago. He was an old pro.” His name was Big Al. It still is. But I wasn’t going to tell the police his name. I would not in my wildest opium-induced nightmares drag Big Al into this. I would let that happen naturally, if it was going to happen at all. I gave it a 1 percent chance of probability, and that was highballing it.