I blinked. I don’t mean that metaphorically, I literally blinked. It struck me as an odd question. I immediately wondered why a policeman would ask a cab driver why he had driven his cab. But rather than get balled up in hairsplitting, I decided to “play along.” “Because I needed the money,” I said. I figured they would fall for that. To my knowledge, money is the only reason cab drivers exist.
“But why a short-shift?” Argyle said.
“Oh,” I countered. “I came up a little short last week, so I wanted to make up for it by working today.”
Argyle nodded. “Mister Hogan here informed us that you normally take a week off once a month, and that according to his records, this would have been the week that you took off.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“How much did you come up short?” he said.
“I …” I said. Then I continued. “I came up twenty dollars short.”
He nodded. “The twenty that you gave to the girls?”
I nodded.
He nodded again.
I didn’t look at Duncan. There were enough useful meaningless forms of communication going on in the room.
“Let me ask you something, Murph,” Argyle said. “If you work only three weeks out of the month, why would coming up twenty dollars short bother you?”
I looked him in the eye. “Because I’m a perfectionist.”
“How do you mean?” he said.
“Well … I live on a fairly tight budget. I try to earn the exact amount of money I need to get by. I try not to work hard. Or … I guess another way of saying it is that I try to work as little as possible. I suppose technically they’re the same thing. But the upshot is that I try to earn exactly fifty dollars a day. This gives me enough money to live on, provided I work two extra days a month in order to cover the rent, which means working five days in a row, usually on the third week of the month. This allows me to take three work-days off once a month, which actually gives me a total of nine days off in a row which I refer to as my monthly spr … not-working week.”
Argyle stared at me. I quickly surmised that I might have given him too much information in one lump. This used to happen when I tried to explain my personal behavior to my friends, which I quit doing years ago.
“Do you always earn fifty dollars per shift?” he said, indicating to me that he understood my lump.
“Almost always,” I said. “I’ve gotten pretty good at it during the past fourteen years. Occasionally I earn more than fifty dollars, but I just accept that as one of the pitfalls of working. But when I fail to earn my quota of fifty dollars I try to make up for it.”
“So you worked today because you needed exactly twenty dollars?”
“Exactly.”
“And last Friday you did earn fifty dollars, but then you gave twenty to these girls, so you were forced to work a short-shift today to make up for the loss.”
“Exactly.”
“Because you’re a perfectionist.”
“Exactly.”
“What would have happened if you had not taken the trouble to drive today and earn the money back?”
I shifted uneasily on my chair. “Well I … I … I … I don’t know. It might have caused me to buy fewer sodas or something. But I almost never encounter that problem. I always seem to earn more money than I need, rather than less.”
“If you do earn more than fifty dollars per shift, does this motivate you to work fewer shifts later on? Or else drive fewer hours per shift?”
“Oh no, I never do that,” I said. “That’s a realm of higher mathematics that I’m afraid to tackle. It would be like trying to trim the legs on a table to make it level.”
“That happened to my brother-in-law once,” Duncan said, thank God.
“So let’s see if I have this straight,” Argyle said. “You earned fifty dollars last Friday, gave twenty of it to the two girls, then you worked today to earn back the twenty. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“How much did you earn today?”
I blinked again. Then I reached up and touched the breast pocket of my T-shirt. All my T-shirts have breast pockets. You wouldn’t believe the trouble I have finding T-shirts on sale that have breast pockets.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t totaled it up yet.”
“Would you be willing to count it right now?” he said.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” I said. I withdrew the wad from my breast pocket.
I was sort of embarrassed because the bills were all crumpled up. Old pros do not normally smooth out their bills until the end of a shift. Newbies are always smoothing out their bills. That’s the mark of a beginner. It usually takes them awhile to fully comprehend the pointlessness of everything.
I laid the bills out on Hogan’s desk one by one and tried to flatten them with a surreptitious maneuver involving the edge of my right palm. The situation made me feel like I had holes in my socks.
Pretty soon I had three stacks of tens and fives and ones. They weren’t very flat. They rested upon one another like autumn leaves.
“Ten … twenty …” I began mumbling, as I counted up the take. It came to ninety dollars. I was astonished, but I tried to hide my astonishment by separating the money into two new groups. Then I looked up at Argyle and smiled.
“How much did you earn?” he said.
“Well, I grossed ninety dollars, but forty of that went to my short-shift lease payment and a half-tank of gas. So my net profit for the day is fifty dollars.”
“That’s thirty dollars more than you wanted.”
“Yup,” I said, trying to sound casual.
“Why didn’t you stop driving when you earned twenty?”
I shrugged. “Table legs?”
I glanced at Duncan for reassurance. He seemed to understand what I was getting at.
“So even though you worked only six hours, you earned the same amount of money you normally would earn on a twelve-hour shift, correct?”
“Yup.”
“Can you explain that?”
“Yup.”
“Go ahead.”
“I worked hard today.”
“Even though you normally try not to work hard.”
“Yup.”
“Why did you work hard today?”
I hesitated, even though I knew the answer. I looked from Argyle to Duncan, then I realized I ought to tell the truth. Two girls were missing.
“Because one of my fares pawned his TV set. It made me feel so bad that I started working hard so I wouldn’t have to think about it.”
“Why would that bother you?”
“Because I hate the thought of someone not owning a TV.”
“That happened to my cousin once,” Duncan said, relieving me of the burden of trying to give Detective Argyle an in-depth analysis of my mental processes.
“So basically you accidentally earned fifty dollars today,” Argyle said.
“Well, not entirely,” I said.
“How do you mean?”
“I earned fifty dollars because I took calls off the radio. Normally I sit in front of hotels and read paperbacks. I don’t make as much money working the hotels.”
“So if you always worked hard, you conceivably could earn one hundred dollars in profit during a normal twelve-hour shift?”
“Piece of cake,” I said.
“But you don’t work hard because you don’t like to work hard.”
“Exactly,” I said. I felt we were making progress at last, although in what direction I didn’t know.
“Let me ask you one more thing, Murph,” Argyle said.
“Okay.”
“Is there any other reason why you might have driven your taxi today?”
“What do you mean?”
“Aside from your pursuit of perfection, might there be another reason why you wanted to cover your … losses?”
I heard that ellipsis. Cops rarely use them. It indicated to me that he was hinting around at something.
I shrugged. “No. Not really. Whenever the tiniest little imperfection enters my life I try to smooth it over as soon as possible, except on weekends. I never work weekends.”
“Why not?”
“Because when I was in the army they sometimes made us work on weekends, and I really got to hate it.”
“You served in the army?” Argyle said.
“Yes.”
“What rank did you achieve?”
“Private. Although I didn’t really achieve it. I started out as a private and just sort of stayed there.”
Argyle nodded and sat back in the chair. “One more question, Murph.”
It seemed to me that he had been saying that with regularity during the past ten minutes, but I tried not to dwell on it. I couldn’t tell if this was a subtle interrogation technique commonly used by policemen, or if Argyle was simply forgetful. There was also the possibility that he spoke what might be referred to as “sloppy” English. As you can see, I have trouble not dwelling on things. I have a tendency to parse things to death and often end up losing track of conversations. I have the same trouble when watching movies. An actor might say something funny or interesting, and I’ll start dwelling on it and the next thing I know I’ve missed some critical dialogue which forces me to either rewind the tape and play the scene over, or else wait for the show to come on TV again, which can take forever.
“Did you?” Argyle said.
“Pardon me?” I said.
Argyle glanced at Duncan, then looked at me. “I asked whether or not you happened to notice if the two girls met anyone before they walked through the gate at the rock concert?”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, I was …” I stopped.
“You were what?”
I wanted to say my mind was wandering, but I didn’t think he would buy it. It sounded like something a person would say if he was being evasive. But then I realized I may have given Detective Argyle the idea that I was, in fact, being evasive.
“I was trying to picture the scene in my mind,” I said. “I once heard that if a person tries to picture something in his mind he can get a clearer … picture.”
I then realized that this was almost the exact same thing that Tony Perkins said to Martin Balsam in Psycho. I started to get nervous. If Argyle had seen Psycho he might “eye” me knowingly.
“As I recall,” I said, “the girls just walked toward the gate. In fact, I believe they were trundling.”
“Trundling?”
“Walking side-by-side so that occasionally they bumped into each other as they moved forward. To me, that’s trundling.”
“What did you do then?”
“I made a U-…” I stopped again. I almost said I made a U-turn, which is illegal. Of course I doubted he could have ticketed me right there in the office, but he was, after all, a policeman. Even if he didn’t have a ticket book on him, he could have called in a black-and-white unit to write me up.
“Where did you go after you made the U?” he said.
I realized that he thought I had actually finished my sentence. I quickly picked up where I had left off. I didn’t want him dwelling on the fact that I had whipped a u-ey on a public thoroughfare.
“I drove back to Denver.”
“Was that the last you saw of the girls?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, and said, “All right. I guess that about covers it.”
On previous occasions, this was usually the point where I held my breath and waited for the cuffs to come out. But Argyle just closed his notebook and slipped his pen into his pocket.
Then he paused and looked at me.
For some reason I interpreted this maneuver as part of an “act” that he was performing, like the good-cop/bad-cop act that you see on TV shows. Except this was more like an epilogue. “Is there anything else you can tell us about the trip to Red Rocks, Murph? Something you might have left out? I know it’s tough to remember the details of a situation that you never expected to be questioned about, especially when you have so many people getting in and out of your taxi. But sometimes in the course of a conversation something might be said that will shake loose a memory.”
This made me think of the love beads I had found in my backseat. That in turn made me think of the pot smoking.
I frowned real hard. I didn’t want to lie, so I looked to my left and back again, which I hoped would be misinterpreted as a negative head-shake. Is it my fault that he misinterpreted it correctly?
“All right,” Argyle said. “Thanks for your cooperation, Murph. I’m glad we caught you at the end of your shift so you didn’t come up short again.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for making you work tomorrow.”
Was that a dig, or was he being empathetic? It took all of my willpower not to dwell on it—although to be honest I think there was a smidgen of a dig in there.
“I was happy to cooperate, Officer Argyle,” I said. “I hope you find the girls.”
I realized my remark might have sounded banal but it wasn’t as bad as a question I almost asked: “Do you think you’ll find the girls?” I had known Duncan and Argyle long enough to know that cops are not issued crystal balls along with service revolvers. But my statement seemed like a polite way to bring the conversation to a close. An epilogue, you might say.
“So do we, Murph,” Argyle said.
I won’t describe the departure of Duncan and Argyle. I want to jump ahead one minute.
Duncan and Argyle’s footsteps were still echoing in the stairwell of eternity when I turned to Hogan and said, “I know what you’re thinking, boss.”
Managing Supervisor Hogan sat back in his office chair, which creaked. He intertwined his fingers and gazed at me through the thick lenses of his glasses, and waited for me to reveal the secrets of my crystal ball.