“Yes,” I said. I tried not to look at Hogan. I succeeded.
“Did you give this receipt to Mr. Trowbridge?” Argyle said.
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t the cost of the fare filled in?”
I raised my right hand and let it sort of flap for a moment. Then I lowered it. “The fare came to forty-five dollars, but when I offered him a receipt he said he didn’t need one.”
“But you gave him this receipt anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I swallowed hard, the worst thing you can do in front of a detective.
“It was already filled out,” I said. “Or filled in. I don’t know why the English language has to be so wishy-washy. I mean ‘out’ is the opposite of ‘in.’ But anyway, since I already wrote something on it, I just handed it to him.”
This time they glanced at Hogan. So did I. I didn’t like what I saw. I glanced away.
Argyle nodded. He turned the card around so he could examine it. “There’s something we’d like to ask you,” he said.
That struck me as an odd statement at this point in the interrogation, but I “went with the flow.”
“All right,” I said.
“Do you have any idea why Mr. Trowbridge wrote this sentence on your receipt?”
He turned the card around so I could see my own words again, and suddenly I remembered a phrase I first heard in the army: “Never volunteer.” I sat there silently staring at the words and wondering why I had ever left Wichita. If Mary Margaret Flaherty had said yes to me I would probably be a wealthy businessman by now and a deacon at Blessed Virgin Catholic Church. Or does the church have deacons? I was never very clear on that. I never even understood what a warrant officer was in the army.
Rather than replying to the question—which is to say, rather than telling the truth—I cleared my throat and tried to collect my thoughts. That didn’t work, so I said, “If I may ask, why are you asking me these questions?”
The two men eased back a bit in their chairs, and Duncan gave up a small smile. By “small smile” I mean “cop smile.”
“The minister who runs the men’s mission called us yesterday and told us that he was afraid Mr. Trowbridge had committed suicide,” Duncan said. “Among his belongings we found this receipt with your name on it. That’s why we’re here.”
“But … why does he think Mr. Trowbridge committed suicide?” I said.
“Because he left a suicide note,” Argyle said. “We compared the handwriting on your receipt with his note. It matches.”
My ego quivered with pleasure. My handwriting had fooled them. Here I was lying to cops through omission, and my ego was dancing with a top hat and cane. I don’t think my ego has ever given a damn about me, the bastard.
“Can you tell us exactly what made you think Mr. Trowbridge seemed despondent?” Duncan said. “Was it something he said or did?”
I stared at Duncan. I began to hear a faraway ringing in my ears. This happens whenever reality intrudes upon my life, which doesn’t happen very often, but often enough for me to recognize the warning signals.
“He spoke in a dejected tone of voice,” I said. “How do you mean?”
“On the ride to Lookout Mountain he kept talking about his childhood in a voice that I would describe as ‘glum.’”
Duncan nodded. “During the trip, did you get the impression that he might be contemplating suicide?”
I froze.
How could I explain to him that I get that impression from half the people who ride in my backseat?
“It didn’t really occur to me,” I said. “I simply got the impression that he was taking a trip down memory lane.”
“In a taxicab?” Argyle said.
“Yes.”
“Expensive trip.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He was pretty old.”
Argyle nodded. He himself looked to be about thirty-five. So did Duncan. All army officers below the rank of colonel always looked thirty-five to me. The army keeps a man physically fit. That’s one of the multiple reasons I didn’t reenlist.
“Okay, I think we’re about finished here,” Duncan said. “Thank you for taking time out from your job to talk to us Mister … I mean Murph.”
“Yes … thanks, Murph,” Argyle said.
“Any time,” I lied.
They stood up.
Right at that moment there was nothing I wanted more in life than to stand up with them, but I knew it wasn’t time for me to stand up. My face was practically sunburned by now. Hogan had been staring at me for the past fifteen minutes. Taxi supervisor eyes are the scariest eyes of all.
Hogan stood up. He told the two detectives that he was glad to have been able to help out. He wasn’t lying, I could tell. The DPD and the RMTC have a good relationship, as do all law-enforcement agencies and cab companies. Cops and cabbies have a few things in common, like two-way radios, and danger. But the radio is best.
I sat in the chair while Duncan and Argyle said their goodbyes and walked out the door. After they shut the door, Hogan sat down at his desk and looked at me.
“Are you still here?” he said.
I was gone in sixty seconds, down the stairs and out the door and back on the road, breathing heavily and gripping the steering wheel and telling myself that if I ever caught myself getting involved in the personal lives of my fares again I would … but then it hit me: Trowbridge was dead.
I stopped thinking about myself for the first time in forty-five years and glanced in the rear-view mirror where Trowbridge had been seated three times.
Suicide note.
My handwriting had perfectly matched the handwriting of a man who had written a suicide note. I thought of the first fiver that Trowbridge had given me: “You must wake up each day in a state of total despair.”
I thought about the other messages he had written. Then I thought about the message I had written to him on the taxi receipt. That nearly brought my day to an end. What if he had read it and felt he was being ridiculed? In other words, what if he thought like me?
At that moment I experienced a brand of guilt that I had never experienced in my life. For lack of a better phrase I would call it “actual guilt.” This is kind of hard to explain, but basically I had always found it difficult to feel guilty about anything I did—meaning activities that normal people would feel guilty about—because I rarely took anything seriously. But suicide?
I felt like turning in my cab for the day and going back to my crow’s nest. Then I thought of tracking down Big Al and telling him about these things. But I already knew what he would say. First he would admonish me for getting involved in the personal life of a fare. Then he would convict me for driving a man to suicide. Then he would order me to go to a grotto and dwell on my sins. Finally he would give me my penance, whatever that amounted to. That’s what stopped me from tracking down Big Al. He had graduated from a Jesuit high school. The difference between a regular Catholic education and a Jesuit education is the difference between the army and the marines.
Instead, I decided to take refuge in work. I knew a lot of people who had real jobs, and more than once I had heard them say that work is a form of refuge. I never really knew what they meant by that because for me work had always been like jail. I suppose that, technically speaking, a jail might be viewed as a form of refuge—Henry David Thoreau probably viewed it that way, but I decided to give it a try anyway.
Rather than sit outside the hotels the rest of the day, I worked the radio, jumping bells and keeping busy so I wouldn’t have to think about the ghost of Mr. Trowbridge, whom I imagined sitting in the backseat. But whenever I glanced into my rear-view mirror, I saw only people going to DIA or Cherry Creek or Union Station or the Denver Tech Center, and not Trowbridge’s face superimposed over the faces of any men or women or teenagers or pets. I sometimes get pets in my cab, usually dogs. We’re supposed to charge an extra fifty cents for pets, which is about the most cretinous rule I ever heard in my life—although that doesn’t include seeing-eye dogs. Seeing-eye dogs have it made.
My plan didn’t work very well. Every time a fare climbed out of my cab, my mind went back to thinking about Trowbridge and his glum voice. By five-thirty that evening I had earned back my lease payment and gas and Twinkies, and had made a profit of forty-five dollars. When I counted the forty-five, something caught in my throat. It was the same amount as the ride to Lookout Mountain. It was the same amount I had earned on the first day I met Trowbridge, after excluding his crispy from my profits.
It was a sign from God. I recognized it. He was telling me to go home. Sweeney often gives me this sign around midnight on Saturdays. My friends do, too, mostly at parties, although they simply say it out loud. They don’t mess with symbolism.
By six o’clock that evening I was back in my crow’s nest lethargically chewing on a burger and sipping a beer and staring at the gray/green screen of my TV. There was no sound and no picture. I couldn’t face Mary Ann. After I finished supper and did the dish, I went into the living room and pulled out The Stranger and removed the fivers and held them in my hand. They felt like blood money. The messages were the second to the last things that Trowbridge had ever written in his life, and suddenly I wanted them out of my life.
I thought about throwing them away, but that seemed sacrilegious. I had thrown away money before, mostly at the dog track, but throwing away Trowbridge’s final words was too unsettling. Then I thought about driving down to the men’s mission and putting them into the donation box, but that seemed too little, too late, and too obvious. I thought about simply spending them as if they were normal fivers, but …
I didn’t know what to do with them. Then a line of poetry came to mind. It was from an epic poem I had been forced to memorize in high school. “…With my crossbow, I shot the albatross.” This occurs to me about three times a year, so there was nothing unusual about it. Then I started thinking about Albert Camus.
Didn’t he write a book about suicide?
Of course he did. I read it when I was a junior at the University of Colorado at Denver. It was assigned in a class on European literature. It was called The Myth of Sisyphus. I quickly scoured my bookshelves but did not see it anywhere. It was a nonfiction book, which may explain why it had disappeared. I mostly read novels and biographies. Essays don’t interest me much. I may have loaned the book to someone and forgotten about it. But I tried to remember—what was it he said? I did recall that he was opposed to the concept of suicide, but on what grounds? It had something to do with the meaninglessness of existence.
I sat down in my easy chair and clutched the fivers in one hand and L’Étranger in the other, closed my eyes, and mentally drifted back to my UCD days. I overshot my goal and saw myself naked inside a taxi. The driver was asking how I intended to pay for the trip back to the campus, which I felt was an irrelevant question. From my point of view he was missing The Big Picture.
“I left my money in my pants,” I slurred drunkenly.
“Yeah,” he said, “but where are your pants?”
He had me over a barrel.
But all that had taken place in Wichita. I drifted forward in time to my student days at UCD, to a literature class, and tried to recall the Camus lecture given by a female teacher whose psychotic love of Henry James had resulted in my getting a D on a sarcastic theme paper about The Turn of the Screw, but let’s not get into that.
I had a hard time remembering what the teacher had said about Camus because I never paid any attention to the English teachers in college. The only reason I majored in English was because the government was paying for my education, and I figured studying English literature would help in my quest to become a novelist. End result? I drive a cab for a living.
But then it came to me. Camus said that it was irrational to commit suicide based on the premise that life is meaningless, because that would imbue the act of suicide itself with a significance that already has been voided by the assertion that any act is meaningless. Was that it? That was the best I could come up with: a study in circular illogic. I interpreted it to mean that you had to come up with a better reason to commit suicide than meaninglessness. Hell, I could fill a notebook.
So Camus was no help as usual. I did remember my teacher saying that Camus’ death was absurd. He survived WWII and the Nazi occupation of France, only to die in a traffic accident at the age of forty-six. I would be forty-six in a year. I stopped thinking about Camus. I turned on the TV and looked at a James Bond movie for a few minutes. I would never see thirty-seven again.
I went into the bedroom, turned off the light, kicked off my Keds and collapsed into bed. And then as I was drifting off to sleep a thought occurred to me: If suicide is the only answer, find a different question.