“Can I ask you gentlemen a question?” I said.
Certainly, Murph,” Ottman said.
“What exactly did Mrs. Jacobs tell you?”
Ottman looked up at Quigg, who was holding his pen poised over the notebook. I could tell the cops were communicating. But I had no idea what the “content” of their communication was, which I guess diminishes somewhat my theory about glancing cops. For all I knew they were thinking it was time to head to a donut shop.
Quigg lowered his notebook. “It’s this way, Murph. Mrs. Jacobs called 911 at approximately eight-thirty this morning. The medics arrived and found her lying in the hallway next to her telephone. She appeared to be suffering from cardiac arrest. They brought her to DGH. She told the doctors that she had been assaulted by a taxi driver. We were at the hospital talking to the robbery suspect’s doctors. So we were contacted, and we went to see Mrs. Jacobs. She told us that she had been assaulted by the same driver who had given her a ride the previous day. We got in touch with Mr. Hogan here, and he checked with the dispatcher, who told us that the driver was named Brendan Murphy. So we came here and asked Mr. Hogan to call you in off the road.”
“Did the woman say I hit her?”
“No. She told us that you had threatened to hit her if she didn’t pay you for yesterday’s ride.”
“She lied.”
“That’s why we called you in, Murph. We wanted to get your side of the story. I have to be honest with you, Murph. This is one of those situations where it’s her word against yours.”
His honesty was unnecessary. I was way ahead of him.
“Did she have a heart attack?” I said.
“She’s been in the cardiac ward for about three hours. We haven’t gotten a report from the doctors yet.”
I felt a glimmer of hope.
You can carve that on my tombstone.
“As soon as we had your name, we came straight here, Murph.”
“Am I under arrest?” I said.
“No,” Ottman said. “This is just a preliminary investigation. We have to wait until the doctor’s report comes in, and we will need to question Mrs. Jacobs further. We weren’t able to question her in-depth at the hospital. She was undergoing tests. But I don’t suppose I have to tell you that having your name associated with two elderly people who are in the cardiac care unit at DGH is a coincidence of significant import.”
I nodded. Way, way ahead.
Ottman stood up. “I want you to understand something, Murph. We appreciate the cooperation and information you gave us yesterday concerning the bank robbery.”
That’s all he said.
I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. I looked him in the eye, hoping he might communicate some sort of subtext, but I didn’t see anything. I’ve never been able to read cops’ eyes anyway. It’s like trying to read Proust.
Quigg folded his notebook and tucked it away. “The robbery suspect is still unconscious,” he said. “So we don’t actually know what happened to him.”
Ottman and Quigg looked at each other. They appeared to be communicating something big, but they didn’t speak. Then Ottman looked at me.
“Sorry to have interrupted your working day,” he said. “We’re finished here. We’ll be in touch with you later. Thanks for cooperating, Murph.”
“You’re welcome.”
The two detectives thanked Hogan. Then they left. I looked at Hogan.
“Well, that’s that I guess.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I’ll turn in my trip-sheet and key to Rollo.”
“Why?” Hogan said. “You still have eight hours left on your shift.”
I just sat there staring at Hogan. This was out of character. Things weren’t going according to Standard Operating Procedure. According to SOP, this was the point at which Hogan was supposed to diplomatically tell me that I was suspended until further notice.
“Oh say … as long as you’re here, Murph,” he said, “I wonder if I could get you to fill out your trip-sheet from yesterday. I figured you were so busy helping the police solve the bank robbery that you must have overlooked the paperwork.”
He slid it across the desk toward me. “I gotta run downstairs,” he said. “Why don’t you just fill it in, and then leave it on my desk?”
He laid a pen beside the sheet, then got up and walked out of the room and shut the door.
I looked at the door for a bit, then turned and looked at the blank trip-sheet. Next to it was the sheet that had been filled out by Detective Ottoman.
I picked up the pen and began copying the information that Ottman had written down. When I finished filling out my Monday trip-sheet, I signed it and set the pen on the desk, then got up and walked out of the room.
I went downstairs and walked past the cage without looking at Rollo. I went outside and walked over to #123 and climbed in and sat behind the steering wheel.
I looked at my wristwatch. It was almost eleven. I had earned five dollars in four hours.
I had eight more hours to earn one hundred and twenty-five dollars.
125/8 = 15.60
Call it 16.
I had to earn sixteen dollars an hour for the next eight hours. This was one-dollar-an-hour below the minimum set by the average old pro. It could be done, and I knew I could do it. This depressed me. It would be different if I had to earn thirty dollars an hour for the next eight hours. Then I would have a good excuse to throw in the towel and give up. Good excuses are the best kind of excuses. But I didn’t have a good excuse. I didn’t have any excuse at all, except an unwillingness to go on living. But that’s everybody’s excuse.
I wasn’t everybody though. I was an asphalt warrior. Drive, he said.
I started the engine, put the shift into gear, and drove out of the parking lot. I turned the Rocky radio on. I wondered if I would ever again find myself sitting in front of a hotel reading and eating. I wondered if I was going to spend the rest of my life actually working.
All of a sudden I wished I was back at Dyna-Plex. I had earned twenty thousand dollars a year when I worked for Dyna-Plex, and I never did a day’s work. I just sat at my desk smoking cigarettes and waiting for the last day of the month so I could write a one-thousand-word typescript of a brochure and hand it to my supervisor who would grab it from my hand and say, “Great! You made the deadline!” Then I would go back to my private office and light up a cigarette and wait another twenty-nine days until it was time to go back to work.
By “day’s work” I mean a full day’s work. It took me only an hour to write the brochure. Ergo, I worked twelve hours per year at Dyna-Plex.
20,000/12 = 1666.66
Let’s make it 1667.
I’ll admit it. I’m superstitious.
I was earning $1,667.00 an hour at Dyna-Plex. But I had thrown it all away for a hotel, a bell, a Twinkie, and a joe.
I started taking calls off the radio. I worked The Hill. When The Hill went dry, I moved out across the city and into the suburbs. By the end of the day I had averaged nineteen dollars an hour. I wasn’t impressed.
I drove back to the motor and arrived at five minutes to seven. I shut off the radio that had been barking at me for eight hours. I signed the trip-sheet. I had filled in the boxes after each drop-off. All the eyes were dotted and all the tees were crossed.
I gathered up my accoutrement and walked into the on-call room. I handed my key and trip-sheet to Rollo. Neither of us said anything. Our Sopwith Camels were grounded. The war was over. I could feel it. Maybe he could, too.
I walked out of the on-call room, got into my heap, and drove back to my crow’s nest.
I dropped my accoutrement on the kitchen table, then went into the bedroom and tossed my profits for the day onto the nightstand. I kicked off my Keds, got undressed, crawled under my blanket and went to sleep.
This always happens to me when I work hard. I slept for more than nine hours.
When I woke up it was five o’clock in the morning, a terrible time to wake up. Too late to go back to sleep and too early to go to work. Who invented five o’clock anyway?
It was Wednesday, my usual day for working. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to work. Which is to say, I didn’t want to work at all, but what’s that got to do with my life? Monday had been terrible, and Tuesday had been terrible in a different way, but at least I had made up my Monday losses. And here it was Wednesday and time to do it again. My life was arranged so that I usually worked only every other day, three weeks out of a month, and now I was working three days in a row. I tried to make sense of it all.
Normally my work schedule gets bollixed up when I find myself getting involved in the personal life of a fare. But I hadn’t tried to help anybody in a long time. Then something clicked inside my brain. Wait a minute. I did try to help somebody. I tried to help those people down on Arapahoe and Chambers. The dispatcher had been begging a cabbie to take the call, and nobody would take it. So I had decided to jump in and save the day. Sure, greed had played a role in my motivation, but still, I tried to help somebody, and look where it had gotten me.
Right then and there I made a vow that as long as I lived I would never again try to help anybody from Aurora.
I relaxed and gazed idly at the ceiling. The curtain on the window that fronts my headboard, if my bed had a headboard, was parted, and every so often a car would pass on 13th Avenue. The glow of the headlights made abstract shapes on the ceiling. It was like gazing at fast-moving clouds in the sky. A sky made of plaster. Clouds made of light. Darkness made of shadow. It was a pleasant little light show.
Then my eyes almost popped out of my head.
I had forgotten to tell Ottman and Quigg about the five-dollar bill!
“Goddamn it,” I snarled.
Why hadn’t I remembered to tell them about the fiver? Then I remembered why. I was a suspect in an assault case and my mind had been befuddled. Thank God I had a good excuse. I forgave myself. I rarely do that.
I started thinking about Mrs. Jacobs. I thought terrible things about her. I thought she had taken her penny scam further than she had ever taken it before. I thought she had been ripping off cab drivers for years, and now she saw an opportunity to make some real dough. I thought she was going to sue the Rocky Mountain Taxicab Company for a bundle by filing a bogus assault charge against one of its employees. Except I wasn’t an employee, I was an independent contractor. But a good lawyer could make mincemeat out of that fact. The insurance company for Rocky Cab would probably pay her off, and might insist that I do a little hard time in Cañon City.
Her word against mine.
Jaysus.
It was five-thirty a.m. when I finally got out of bed, pulled on my jeans and Keds, and walked into the kitchen to make a pan of scrambled eggs. I rarely do that. I usually eat a cheese sandwich with a soda. Bachelor breakfast. But I hadn’t eaten since noon the previous day, not counting Twinkies. I hadn’t been hungry when I got home. I just crawled under my blanket and went to sleep. This happens every time the police interrogate me for assault or robbery or kidnapping or murder. It’s a psychological tic.
I carried the frying pan full of eggs into the living room. I watched TV while I ate my scrambles and sipped a soda. I channel-surfed in between forkfuls of egg. I was completely out of my element. I hadn’t watched morning TV since I was a little kid. But that was long ago, and in smaller shoes.
I surfed the channels for two minutes. That was how long it took to eat breakfast. Afterwards I carried the pan into the kitchen and set it in the sink to soak. I decided to go for broke and make a cheese sandwich. I was still hungry. It’s a funny thing about eggs. When you scramble five of them, they seem like only three eggs. I probably should have scrambled seven eggs, then it would have seemed like five. I wondered if there was an algebraic formula I could apply to scrambling eggs. I figured algebra must be good for something.
I unwrapped the end of a loaf of bread and pulled out two slices. I reached into the fridge and pulled out a slice of American cheese. I placed the cheese squarely in the center of one piece of bread. I placed the second piece of bread on top of the cheese. I was a regular Wolfgang Puck.
Then I felt something.
My kitchen began to vibrate. I recognized it. Someone was coming up the fire escape. The last time this happened, the vibration was caused by a guy named Harold. He’s a bartender at Sweeney’s Tavern. I don’t want to talk about him.
I stood in the middle of the kitchen with the sandwich in my left hand. I heard a knock on my door.
It was like hearing the sound of a telephone ringing. I hate telephones—especially the ringing part.
“Who’s there?” I said.
It occurred to me that I had never said that when answering a telephone. If I had, maybe it would have caused people to stop calling me. People freak out when other people diverge from accepted social protocols. Except I didn’t have that problem anymore. I owned a telephone answering machine. I wished like hell I owned a door answering machine.
“Police! Open up!” a voice shouted.
At last—after a lifetime of unexpected surprises—my eyes finally popped out of my head.
“Okay!” I said.
I unbolted the lock and pulled the door open. It was the police all right, and they were dressed for business. Some people call it “S.W.A.T.”
They came in fast.
A cop pointed a glove, or a gun, at me. Either way, it was black. “Drop the sandwich and raise your hands!” he said.
I reached for the plaster sky.