I’ll never forget the sound of the sandwich hitting the linoleum. It made a kind of “thwup.” I had never heard that sound before—and thinking back on it, I realized that in my entire life I had never dropped a sandwich.
There were six uniformed cops, and behind them came Ottman and Quigg. Quigg held up a piece of paper in front of my face. “We have a warrant to search your apartment, Mr. Murphy,” he said. “We ask that you cooperate. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be held against you in a court of law.”
Now that I was on the receiving end of a monologue from every cop show I had ever seen, it suddenly occurred to me that my Fifth Amendment rights were being violated.
It’s funny how you never think those things when you’re watching TV. What I mean is, “Anything you say can be held against you in a court of law” seems to run counter to the idea that a person can’t be forced to testify against himself. Just because an officer of the law tells you that anything you say can be used against you, does the Bill of Rights go down the crapper? It seemed to me that rather than being told he has the right to remain silent, the cops should force a suspect to remain silent. Gag the sonofabitch if they have to. I wondered how many criminals had been sent up the river just because they accidentally blabbed in front of a cop.
As you might surmise, my brain was having a bit of difficulty dealing with the fact that my crow’s nest had been invaded by strangers. This hadn’t happened since New Year’s Eve eight years back when apparently I invited everyone in Sweeney’s over for a nightcap.
“What’s this all about, Detective Ottman?” I said, taking a cavalier attitude toward my right to remain silent.
“Mr. Murphy, we have reason to believe that you are in possession of the money that was stolen from the Glendale Bank & Trust.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when I did something over which I had no control. I chortled. Even as I was trying to make sense out of his assertion, my throat was laughing. Not a boisterous deep-bellied laugh, but more like a staccato burp. I’ve had this problem all my life. It always seems to be associated with the truth, or more precisely, the lack of truth. Maybe I’ve been subconsciously programmed to respond to untruths the way most people respond to whoopee cushions. When I know for a fact that something isn’t true and I see people running around acting upon a lie as if it were true, I laugh. Some people become outraged. Some people roll their eyes with disdain—Oscar Wilde comes to mind. I, on the other hand, chortle.
“I’m afraid we are going to have to take you down to police headquarters, Mr. Murphy. Things will be clarified for you there. But right now we are going to search your apartment. I would like to ask you to finish getting dressed. Then Officer Quigg is going to escort you down the stairs and place you into the rear of our vehicle. We would be grateful for your cooperation, Mr. Murphy.”
I wanted to ask if they were going to put the cuffs on me. You may not believe this, but I have never been handcuffed by a policeman in my life.
Quigg followed me through the living room where the uniformed men were carefully poking around in my stuff. One of them lifted a chair cushion revealing a VCR remote-control device. “So that’s where it went!” I exclaimed. I glanced at Quigg. “After I lost it I went to Radio Shack and bought one of those remotes that you have to program yourself. Jeez what a bag of snakes.”
Quigg didn’t blink. He followed me into my bedroom where the police were snooping around. I put on my T-shirt. It was a nice day out, so I didn’t bother getting a jacket. I grabbed my billfold off the nightstand. “Do you need to search this before I put it in my back pocket?”
Quigg nodded. I handed it over.
He opened it and looked inside. It was empty but for my driver’s license and a credit card.
“You have a credit card?” he said.
I could tell right away he regretted putting his emphasis on the word You. But I understood. “Yes,” I said. “I got it when I was in college. My Maw co-signed for it. The credit limit was two hundred dollars. But I only use it when I rent cars.”
“Do you rent cars very often?”
“No.”
“Can I ask you the last time you rented a car using this credit card?”
“Yes.”
“When was it?”
“When I flew out to Los Angeles awhile back to save a gi … to try and sell a screenplay about surfing beach bunnies.”
He closed the billfold and handed it back.
I tucked it into my pocket. “My credit’s up to three hundred dollars now,” I said. It had the quality of a non sequitur. He ignored it.
As we walked toward the bedroom door I glanced at a corner and noticed a cop opening the lid of my steamer trunk. I stopped walking. It was like a chortle. I had no control over it. “Does he have to look in there?” I said.
Everybody stopped what they were doing and looked at me.
“What’s the problem, Mr. Murphy?” Quigg said.
My shoulders drooped. “There’s no problem, I guess.”
“It sounds like you have a problem with my man searching that trunk,” Quigg said.
I shook my head. “No, it’s okay.”
“Mr. Murphy, do you have any weapons in this apartment?”
“You mean like swords?”
“I mean guns.”
“Oh … no. I haven’t touched a gun in years.”
“When was the last time you touched a gun?”
“The day before I got discharged from the army. My sergeant made me clean my rifle. It was ridiculous. We had an inspection two days earlier but he made me clean it again before I could go home. He sent me to the barbershop, too. I think he was out to get me.”
“Mr. Murphy, is there anything in the steamer trunk that you don’t want us to see?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Novels.”
“Pornographic novels?”
“Rejected novels.”
“Mr. Murphy, could I ask you to be less obtuse when you answer my questions?”
“Yes.”
“What sort of novels are you talking about?”
“Novels that I wrote and sent to publishers. They got sent back with rejection slips. There’s about a hundred of them in there. The rejection slips are attached to the first page of each manuscript.” I hung my head. “I know you’re not supposed to collect rejection slips. That’s what the how-to books say anyway. But it’s the only proof I have that anybody in New York City even touched them. They make me feel sort of good.”
“All right, men, continue the search,” Quigg said. “Let’s go outside, Mr. Murphy.”
I desperately wanted him to stop calling me Mr. Murphy. It created an image in my mind of Mister Greenjeans being led out of the Treasure House in handcuffs. I saw Captain Kangaroo lying in a crumpled heap in front of Grandfather Clock. Bunny Rabbit was weeping. It was unbearable. But I kept my mouth shut. I figured I had already said too much. I wished I hadn’t mentioned the how-to books. I don’t like people to know that I don’t know how-to write novels.
Quigg didn’t cuff me though, which was a good thing. I thought a lot about that as I made my way down the fire escape, which is about as steep as man-made things ever get. Douglas Fairbanks might have been able to walk down with his hands cuffed behind his back—he probably would have slid down the railing and thrown in a couple of somersaults. I did that one New Year’s Eve without any acting lessons.
Quigg put me into the backseat of his unmarked cruiser. I felt foolish. I felt like everybody in the neighborhood who had a window was looking at me. I always feel like this though. I blame nuns. When I was in sixth grade I once stood on top of my desk after the nun left the room, and when I looked at the door, she was watching me through the window. It gave me a psychological tic.
There were four police cars crowding the parking lot behind my apartment building. I prayed that none of the other tenants would come home. They get crabby if their parking spaces are blocked. I don’t blame them. I myself am pretty territorial when it comes to parking spaces, toys, and barstools.
It took about half an hour for the police to search my apartment. You might think I would have felt like I was being “violated” by the unexpected scrutiny of my personal belongings, but I had one thing going for me: I own nothing.
By “nothing” I mean “practically nothing.” In a way I felt sorry for the cops when they came out empty-handed because I had the funny feeling they felt sorry for me.
Naturally I knew that they wouldn’t find the stolen money in my possession. It made me feel like I had gotten hold of the answers to a pop-quiz in high school. I was going to ace another test. But I tried not to think about all the unpublished novels that they saw, which included a bookshelf built entirely out of novels so badly written that I would never send them to a publisher again. I used them in the way that normal people use bricks. One thing did make me feel uneasy though: I had told the police that the steamer trunk was full of rejected novels, but half of the manuscripts were rejected screenplays. A street-smart cop just might notice the variation in typescript formatting, and wonder what else I was lying about.
I watched as the last of the policemen came trooping down the fire escape with the forlorn expressions that you often see on the faces of people who are acquainted with unpublished writers. They gathered around Ottman and Quigg and spoke for a few minutes, some of them whispering secrets to their shoulders. Then they got into their patrol cars and drove out of the lot. One cop glanced at me, but he quickly looked away. I knew what he was thinking: form rejections. There wasn’t a single handwritten rejection slip in my trunk.
Quigg opened the rear door and asked me to step out. I emerged feeling refreshed. To an innocent man, thirty minutes in the rear of a cop car is like twenty minutes of Transcendental Meditation.
“We’re going to take you down to headquarters for further questioning, Mr. Murphy. But first I’d like to ask you to go upstairs and secure your apartment. I’ll come with you.”
I walked up the stairs trying to keep a smug smirk off my face. After we stepped inside I asked him if it was okay if I policed up my fallen sandwich. I said “policed” on purpose. I was being ironic. It was probably good he didn’t notice. The only thing I have more trouble with than my chortling is my English degree.
I closed up shop and went back downstairs with Quigg. I was again placed in the backseat. Ottman drove. I took what I had begun to think of as “The Ride.” As I said, I had done this before but so far I had managed to avoid actually being arrested. From what little I knew about odds though, I suspected my number was up. I had been accused of threatening an old lady, and I was suspected of possessing money stolen during the commission of a felony. In both cases there were victims old enough to be my grandparents. If this was a cop show I’d be rooting for the hangman.
We rolled down into the DPD basement. I knew the routine. I led Ottman and Quigg up to the Robbery Division and let myself into a small room. I took a seat at a table and invited them to sit down. “Before we get started, gentlemen,” I said, “I have one favor I’d like to ask.”
“What is it, Mr. Murphy?” Ottman said.
“Could you please call me Murph?”
“All right, Murph. This morning around four a.m. the robbery suspect regained consciousness. The nurse informed the guards at the door. One of the guards contacted us while the other remained at the man’s side. The man spoke to him briefly. By the time we got there, the man had lost consciousness again. We were not able to question him, but the guard did get some information out of him. The man identified himself as Carlton Hollister. We already knew this. When he was found unconscious in the parking lot he had a briefcase with him and he had a billfold that contained his driver’s license. The billfold also contained some money. The only thing missing was the money he had stolen from the bank. The teller whom he robbed was able to identify him from a photograph.”
I pursed my lips and nodded. I didn’t really have to do this, but I felt sort of foolish just staring at Ottman as if I was watching a TV show. Sometimes when I watch TV I purse my lips and nod, usually when the lottery numbers don’t match the numbers on the tickets I secretly buy.
“The man was conscious long enough to confess that he had, in fact, robbed the Glendale Bank & Trust.”
I stopped nodding.
“But when we opened his briefcase we found it empty.”
I stopped nodding even more, which is not a scientific impossibility, because I did it.