City on Fire (15 page)

A look passed between the men, which Mercer was fairly sure he wasn’t supposed to see. Two hands gripping the same ineffable baton. To his surprise, Pulaski won.

The minute McFadden left, the bristle of danger dropped right out of the room. What Mercer felt for Pulaski then was akin to gratitude. The little man, who hunched over even when he sat, took an inordinate amount of time wriggling out of his sportcoat and folding it over the back of the chair. “Polio as a kid,” he said sotto voce, as if he’d noticed Mercer staring but didn’t want to embarrass him. “More common”—wriggle wriggle—“than you’d think. Don’t worry. I’m not in any pain.” He was slightly out of breath as he sat back down. He adjusted his crutch so that it intersected the table’s edge at a right angle. He drew his own notebook from a breast pocket, which seemed to be where they kept them, and aligned it orthogonally in front of him. He patted his pants—“Now where did I put that pen?”—and then, with the sly flourish of a magician, brought out a silver one, like a Waterman Mercer had once had. “I have a weakness, my wife says. But my motto has always been, modest needs, lavishly met.” When the pen was perfectly parallel to the notebook, Mercer thought he heard a purr of contentment. “I must explain to you, Mr. Goodman …”

“You can call me Mercer.”

“Mercer, thank you. Detective McF, rough around the edges though he be, is good police. He believes, and it’s not been disproven, that people are basically animals, and in order to get them to do anything, you’ve got to show your whip-hand. Now I”—slight adjustment to the position of the notepad—“I have my own somewhat esoteric idea, evolved over more years than I’d care to count, which is, provided a spirit of mutual cooperation exists, why make things difficult?”

Mercer might have detected an implied threat here, but his body, still humming with the chemicals of relief, refused to care. And in the sudden absence of any tension to keep him alert, he realized he was exhausted. “It’s freezing in here.”

“Budget cuts.”

“It’s been a long night.”

“I can imagine.” Of course Pulaski could imagine. The record of ten thousand nights like this one was tallied in the white hairs sprinkled liberally in his black brush-cut. In the ridges of spine visible through the fabric of his shirt as he bent to his notepad. It was Mercer who couldn’t imagine. Witness is terminally self-involved, the Waterman would write. “Now Mercer, what I’d like you to do, what would help me, is if you could just start from the beginning, and tell me, as plainly as possible, how you came upon Ms. Cicciaro. That’s the victim. And the name is confidential at the present time, her being a minor. I’d ask that you not repeat it.”

“Can I ask you something first, Detective?”

“Shoot.”

“Is she alive?”

Pulaski looked up, a gaze of infinite pity. “Last I knew, she was in between surgeries.”

“What does that mean?”

“Listen, if I were a doctor …” It would have been superfluous for him to touch his crutch; at this point, Mercer felt, they understood each other perfectly. This was confirmed when Pulaski retrieved a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his coat and pushed it into that medial space where the Styrofoam cup still stood. “I picked those up, too.” Mercer’s hands were shaking, from fatigue or cold or nerves, and he had to concentrate to guide his cigarette to the detective’s lighter. The flame danced in a small gold cross. “To be candid, Mercer, whether she lives or dies is out of our hands at this point. We’ve got to focus on justice, and that means treating this as attempted homicide. Now, anything you can tell me. Anything at all, beginning at the beginning.”

He had to struggle not to cough. It had been a long time since C.L. had tried to teach him to smoke, but all his little renunciations seemed to be crumbling tonight. Above him, a brown waterstain in the shape of Florida marred the white foam of the drop-ceiling. A warped tile sagged below the edge of the semiclear tarp, revealing a darkness within which lurked wires, guts, cameras, who knew. In a way, how to begin had been the great problem of Mercer’s life. But now, when he closed his eyes, he could feel the memory coming on like a migraine: trigger, then aura, then pain.

THE INTERVIEW MUST HAVE TAKEN another hour, proceeding forward in little steps, prodded by Pulaski. Roommate unable to make it to party. Mercer there instead. Overstuffed rooms, a kitchen, a pink sink, a conversation on a balcony, insubstantial as smoke. He’d thought—Mercer blanched now, in the interrogation room—he’d thought he’d heard two pops, echoing like firecrackers in the night. And then the park, the body. Maybe twenty minutes later. Legs splayed as if to make a snow angel. He saw his hand returning the payphone to its cradle. He’d stood there alone for the longest time, in the sickly light of the booth. Then he’d gone back to check on her. Then back up to meet the sirens, leaning against a police cruiser, trying to explain to whoever wanted to know, the fender cold against his thighs, salt caked onto it. More vehicles frozen at odd angles in the street, beyond which massed party-goers, faces looming and receding in the ambulance lights. The rear compartment of that selfsame cruiser, whose plashing tires, whose dryness and darkness and emphysematic heater, rendered the world beyond the window remote. The light on the dashboard conducting them through intersections already empty.

When he’d finally narrated his way back to the little white cube in which they now sat, he and the detective both yawned, so close to simultaneously it was impossible to determine who had influenced whom. Mercer, embarrassed by how far he’d lowered his defenses, wasn’t sure what else to say. Pulaski had gone quiet, too. The fluorescent bulbs behind their square of ridged plastic gave a bleached, insistent thrum. Pulaski had taken notes in small block-capitals, and as he flipped back through the pages (how had he managed to write so much so neatly, and in so short a time?) Mercer tried to read them upside down. he saw. And Had he sensed Mercer’s conscious omissions? Well, it was none of Pulaski’s business whom Mercer chose to sleep with, and though it was in a literal sense his business to know that Mercer was coming down from a marijuana high, it didn’t bear on the crime before them. He thought he sensed in the detective’s attention other, unintentional lacunae: questions he hadn’t thought to ask, shadowy agencies behind the surfaces of things. But perhaps the ticking of the pigeons was driving him crazy. Then the Waterman tapped the pad, and Pulaski looked up, a summary glance. “The tie,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“You had on a tie when you arrived at the party. You said you stopped to retie it before you went in.” The butt end of the silver pen indicated the open collar of Mercer’s shirt. “You must have removed it at some point.”

“Yeah. Yes, sir. When I was waiting for the bus, I think.” But all he could remember was having it on. From one end of the night, he looked back at the other, at a boy on a deserted corner. The apartment building across the street had been a great, glass pleasure-ship. If he could just get in the door, all his dreams were going to come true. He’d squatted to brush some snow from a sideview mirror while he untied, retied. Having practiced this a thousand times, he’d needed the mirror only to check that it looked right. He hadn’t yet understood that it took more than a bow tie to make things look right. “I must have left it in the pocket of my coat.”

Pulaski made a signal with his hand, and the door to the room opened. It was McFadden, carrying William’s overcoat. He cast it down in the middle of the table like a fuzzy gauntlet, stared smugly at Mercer, and then turned and walked out. “Any guess where we found that, Mr. Goodman?” Pulaski said.

“I was trying to keep her warm until the ambulance came.”

“And any guess what we found in it?” He reached into the pocket with both hands. One emerged and unfolded itself, and a black necktie uncrumpled. When Mercer reached for it, the other hand placed on the table, with fearsome tenderness, an unzipped leather kit the size of a small Bible. Inside were two syringes and a Saran-wrapped bulb of powder.

“See, this is confusing for me, Mercer. I’m a cop. You know what the job is? Evidence. That and paperwork. Handwriting and fingerprints, is what it is. And what I’ve got here is a coat, linked to you, linked to the girl, and what looks like a gram of street-quality heroin.”

“But that’s not mine!” He felt like he’d been kicked in the balls—the same dull sickness spreading through him. They were framing him. He wanted a lawyer. Then he knew where he’d seen the kit before: oh. Oh. “It must be someone else’s. The person whose coat it is.”

“Looks like you and that person need to have a talk, then.” They stared at each other for who knows how long. Beneath the brushy moustache, the little cop’s face twitched. Mercer was about to put his wrists forward and ask for the cuffs already when Pulaski added, “Meantime, you’re going to want to have the coat dry-cleaned. There’s some blood on it. We’ll be keeping this, of course.” He palmed the kit.

“Wait, you’re not going to arrest me?”

“Mercer, I tell you, I get myself in trouble this way, but you’ve got a face I want to trust, and I feel you’ve been honest with me, to the best of your ability.”

“I have. I swear I have.”

“So here’s going to be our bargain—” and now, from somewhere within the mysterious creases of the notepad, a business card emerged. “Should anything else come back to you—I mean the smallest thing—you’re going to call me. Otherwise, I know where you live.” Mercer reached for the card. For a second, their fingers were in contact. “Now comes the part where you get the heck out of here.”

Pulaski let him get up, collect his coat, and move for the door, all the while pretending to be adding to his notes. He was halfway out the door when the guy said, as if to no one in particular, “You realize you may have saved a life tonight.” And it was funny, at this specific moment, this was exactly how Mercer felt about the little detective. Or inspector, really. the card said. And as he stood there, something was already coming back to him, something he might have told Pulaski, had he not suspected it would have kept him even longer. He’d thought for a moment someone had been watching in the park. Kneeling there in the snow—stupid as a pigeon, settling the beautiful overcoat over the twisted and now silent body whose smell would never leave him—he’d felt sure, for the briefest second, that he was not alone.

12

WIRES RACING ALONG through chords and triplets, swelling every so often into corroded connections, weird shapes against the sky, triangles and spheres like a coded message trying to tell him something. This morning, the whole mute breadth of Long Island was trying to tell him something: that he was a fucking coward, that he should have been back there with Sam, instead of here on this train, with the pajama bottoms on his unjeaned legs and this hat on his head so he looked like a fucking loon. Power transformers tilted up like weary crucifixes, shot through with rust and ice on the far side of a window he could see through only imperfectly, as he could remember the night only imperfectly. Condensation drew lines on the fogged parts of the glass, and beyond these lines, birds floated in a clearing sky, the gulls of Jamaica. Grasses sprouted from the snow like whiskers on a pale gray face. “Tickets,” the conductor said. “Tickets.” Under his breath, Charlie began to hum, both to calm himself down and because maybe that way the conductor would take him for an actual loon and pass him by. Keep your ’lectric eye on me, babe. Press your raygun to my head …

The truth was, he didn’t have a ticket. He’d spent the last few hours hiding out in the predawn freak show of Penn Station, trying to find a place far enough from tourists and hustlers and junkies and the odd baby-faced cop to safely crash. But he could feel hungry eyes sizing him up. I am a human being! he wanted to shout; Leave me alone! And when he did find a patch of floor upstairs in the deserted Amtrak waiting area, between two planters of sickly hostas, the last thing he felt capable of was sleep. The stench of the basement level reached him even here, like hot-dog water mixed with roofing tar and left in an alley to rot, and when he closed his eyes, a high-frequency white flashed against the normal, reassuring pink. That would have been some mixture of beer, schnapps, and panic. Because he had no idea where they’d taken her. How many hospitals were there in the City? With a phone book and a roll of dimes, he could have called them all. But even as every inward cell twitched and fluttered, outwardly he was comatose, curled on his side, with Grandpa’s hat cushioning his head and his pajama bottoms picking up stains from the tile and his size 14 combat boots trying to stay drawn up out of sight between the ugly stucco planters. And how dare he feel sorry for himself, when this could have been snow underneath him, or a stretcher, or …

He was trying to remember how to pray, Baruch atah, when he heard a cloud of disco somewhere nearby. He opened his eyes to see an aging black man dragging his custodial cart down the rows and rows of empty seats. They might have been the only two people on the Amtrak level at this hour, and the man affected not to see Charlie as he gathered yesterday’s newspapers from chairs and stuffed them into a trashbag. Most significantly, there was a transistor radio hooked to one leg of the cart. It was too early for morning papers to have been delivered to the station’s shuttered stands, but there was news every ten minutes at 1010 WINS, if Charlie could somehow get the radio retuned. If AM penetrated down here. With the man almost out of sight, Charlie stole after him. And when the cart vanished behind a column, Charlie hid on the other side. He kept close enough to hear the disco giving way to endless commercials, but the man never got more than ten feet away from the cart, and when he moved downstairs, the signal broke up. Charlie was still waiting for it to return an hour later when the departure board began to ripple with Saturday morning’s first trains. And so could he be blamed for having forgotten that his return ticket was back in the pocket of his jeans, in a bush in Central Park, and that he’d given his only money to a chick at a nightclub he shouldn’t have been in in the first place?