Gossip (26 page)

“I guess you want me by the window,” I said.

“You’re free to sit wherever you like. You don’t even have to get on this plane if you don’t want to.”

“Right,” I scoffed, and cornered myself at the window.

He buckled himself beside me. A drone in a suit escorting a scruffily dressed fellow with a cropped scalp, our relationship could not have been more obvious if I were handcuffed to him. Imagining handcuffs between us, I had an inexplicable urge to hold Pruitt’s hand. I blocked the urge by stuffing my fingers between my legs.

“Cold,” I claimed.

“For your own protection, I strongly suggest that you say nothing pertaining to your case.”

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“I’m warning you now.”

I turned to the window. Lights floated back as we taxied out until all that remained in the layered glass was my blurred double face. When we took off, vaguely familiar cities of scrambled circuitry tilted beneath me.

“Never liked flying,” I said. “I don’t know why. Except that it messes up time and space in my head.”

Pruitt said nothing, but I didn’t expect a reply. Needing to talk, feeling reckless and obstinate, I decided to say aloud whatever came into my head.

“Last time I flew was coming back from Miami. With Bill. The deceased. Ironic, huh? And I remember telling myself I’d never see him again. I was right, only I don’t think I fully believed it at the time. I don’t believe this is happening. This is too unreal for me to believe. I don’t fucking believe I’m doing this. I keep thinking variations of that, as if this were something I could believe or not believe, like religion.”

Pruitt took the in-flight magazine from the seat pocket.

“You really born-again, Pruitt? Or did Lovelace make that up too, just to spook me?”

“My religion is of no concern to you
or
Agent Lovelace.” He crossed his inside leg over his outside leg, as if to protect himself.

“You married, Pruitt?” I saw the ring on his knuckle. “Yeah. You have that I-know-what’s-real-I’m-a-husband-and-father look. But we homos don’t, you know. We make ourselves up as we go along. We’re fictional. Postmodern.”

I was making this up, wanting only to get under my captor’s skin with idle chatter. I didn’t look at Pruitt but addressed my clutched knees and the velvet seat back.

“Some of us are more plausible than others. Like Bill. He didn’t have a clue. A Republican homo. A homo who worked for the homo-haters. A straight-identified fag who hated women. Like that made him as good as straight. Only I don’t know if Bill really hated women. Or was he just parroting his buddies? When you come right down to it, I never knew much about the bastard. Except that he was hot to succeed. And he was fun in bed. And his silly Calvin Kleins.” I snorted over my incongruous recall of underwear. “He pretended to be so damn unique. But he was a secret clone in his pants. What a deluded case. But did he deserve to die? No. If stupidity’s a crime, we all deserve to be killed. But so violently?”

The police photos swam into my mind’s eye, like the images of young pigs after the bristles were scalded off at hog killings on my grandfather’s farm. Lard white flesh. A closed fist like a cleft hoof. I saw the flat, half-open eyes again. No longer distracted by the need to deny I’d done it, the cruelty of his murder struck deep inside me.

“Why? Nobody deserves to the like that. Was he in pain? Did he know he was going to die? I hope not. I hope they hit him from behind and knocked him cold. He’d just undressed and was all excited to go to bed with them, because I never met anybody who enjoyed sex as much as …”

And it flooded into my throat, a spastic, muscular grief. It seized my entire body. I clenched my teeth to stop the sobs. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the water spilled down my cheeks, a shudder of tears as humiliating as pissing in my pants.

When I could breathe again, raw and hollowed out, panting as though I’d nearly drowned, I turned to look at Pruitt.

He already faced me, his manicured mustache drawn down, his black pupils taking me in through tight hazel irises.

I defiantly wiped my eyes and nose with the butt of my hand. “You think I’m crying for myself,” I sneered. “You think this is all self-pity. You think I did it, don’t you?”

He cleared his throat. “Doesn’t matter what I think.” He frowned and turned away. “All I think is that you better be damn more careful about what you say if you want to stay out of jail.”

“Isn’t that where I’m going?”

He turned a page in his magazine. “No.” The paper stuck to his finger. “Not to my knowledge.”

But I knew better than to hope for anything else. I fell against my seat, scornful and exhausted, and sorry for poor, stupid Bill, who did not deserve such an awful death. My gloom was so black and heavy that I could not distinguish between grief for Bill and hopelessness for myself.

The plane docked. Everyone rose. Pruitt took my bag down and passed it to me. I stepped from the corridor of the plane into the sloping corridor of the ramp behind a pair of grumbling businessmen. Entering the lounge, I saw the two detectives before they saw me. One was black, the other white, both men stocky and impatient. Not until Pruitt came alongside me did they spot us and hurry into our path.

“Ralph Eckhart?” said the black man.

“Yes?”

“Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia.” He flashed a billfold at me. “We have a warrant for your arrest.”

When I saw the white detective take out a pair of tarnished handcuffs, I set down my bag and offered my wrists.

He ignored them and jabbed his hands into my armpits. He spun me around, slapping my sides, then cuffed my hands at my back. The metal was colder and heavier than the handcuffs of my imagination.

“What the hell is this?” cried Pruitt. “You can’t arrest this man. He came down here as a material witness.”

“We were told different. He may have been a witness an hour ago, but now he’s a suspect.”

I was amazed that Pruitt acted surprised; I’d expected something like this all along, only not so soon.

“You can’t just take him.”

“Is he in FBI custody?”

“You know damn well he’s not in custody or we wouldn’t be traveling like this. Show me your warrant.”

The black detective pulled out a fold of paper while the white detective chanted, “You have the right to remain silent with the understanding that anything you say may be used …”

People glanced our way and hurried past.

“I’m calling my office,” Pruitt snapped. “Find out what the hell’s going on here.”

“Go ahead, Agent. But we got orders to get this man downtown ASAP. We’re not going to stand around with our thumbs up our ass while you and your supers uncross your wires.” The black detective grabbed my arm; the white detective picked up my bag.

“I got to find a phone,” said Pruitt. “Go on, damn it. I’ll catch up with you, damn it.”

He ran ahead of us. We started walking. I held one hand in the other behind my back, an automatic reflex that disguised the handcuffs. The fingers clutching my arm relaxed, keeping up just enough pressure to steer me. People stopped noticing us. Flanked by two older men, I must have looked like a visiting cousin with a black in-law. So this is how a real arrest feels, I told myself, with cold metal instead of warm plastic around my wrists, and no friends being thrown into jail with me.

We walked past Pruitt at a bank of phones, grimacing in a receiver, his interrogation fury back.

He caught up with us again fifty yards farther on. “Out of my hands,” he snarled. “He’s all yours. But I think this business stinks and I’m going to say so in my report.”

“No skin off our butt,” said the black detective. “You got your people to answer to, we got ours.”

Pruitt tried to look at me, but couldn’t. Then he saw something up ahead. Just beyond the metal detectors stood a man with a television camera on his shoulder. A half dozen men and women waited with him.

“Damn it to hell,” said Pruitt. “You brought the media? Is that what this is all about?”

The hand on my arm slowed me down. “Shit no. Nobody told us we were picking up press meat.”

“Local cable,” said his partner. “Not network.”

The detective pushed at my arm again. “Oh screw it. Let’s run the gauntlet and get out of here.”

There was a single flicker of heat lightning, and I saw the other cameras. We swung to the right of the X-ray machines. A headlight on the TV camera snapped on and I had to turn away. We were surrounded by glare and shouts and waving hands.

“This the O’Connor case?” “This the killer, Detective?” “Where did you nab him?”

Somebody shook a tape recorder like a fist in my face.

“Ralph! Ralph! Did you do it, Ralph?”

I was stunned that the media knew my first name.

They followed us for ten yards, a compact storm of grins, cries and flashing cameras. All at once, they let us go. We rode down an escalator in silence, passersby glancing our way as if one of us might be famous.

Not until we were downstairs did I notice that Pruitt was gone. In the cool night air, I came to myself just long enough to miss him. Then a strong hand gripped my head and thrust me into the back of a police car.

T
HE BRIGHT WHITE MOUND
of the Jefferson Memorial swung past the bridge over the Potomac, a fraud tonight, a bad joke for someone who sat twisted sideways with steel bracelets at his back. The entire city was a mocking cartoon, a sarcasm of public parks and monuments. Even the police building, a coffered brick facade in a campus full of illuminated fronts, looked glibly ironic.

I was plunged into a glare of strip lighting, mustard yellow cinder block, blue uniforms and beeping phones. A black man with a gashed forehead stood across the room, armless in torn sweats, one eye gummed shut with red jam; I stared at him as if at a mirror. Authority stopped having names and became simply black or white. The white detective unlocked his cuffs and gave me to a black cop in uniform. The black cop grabbed my hand, jammed the fingers in ink and then, with startling care, pressed them one by one in a grid, like an impatient father teaching a three-year-old how to tie his shoes. He sat me in a chair and lowered a bar with plastic numbers across my chest. A strobe light softly thumped in my eyes, then my ear.

Then another mustard yellow room, with the black detective again, who pointed at the pay phone on the wall and said, “I bet you want to call your lawyer.”

I dialed the number that Nick had given me. I expected little and got less.

“Rosi had no business telling you to contact me. You need a criminal lawyer, not a civil rights attorney. It’s one thing to bail out protestors, but a capital crime is a whole new ball game. I can’t get down there tonight, but we’ll have somebody for you tomorrow. If I can’t find anyone, I
guess
I can handle it.”

I sat at the detective’s desk, told him I wouldn’t talk without a lawyer, but I wouldn’t have a lawyer until tomorrow. He had expected that. He rolled a form into a typewriter and took my name, birthday, HIV status and other pieces of my life.

“This is the first time anything like this ever happened to me,” I said. “What now?”

“What do you think? We put you in jail. Don’t worry. Your lawyer will know where to find you. You ain’t going anywhere.”

I was not afraid. Emotion shut down in me. I hadn’t known how deeply my sense of reality depended on emotion until now, when every feeling was gone. Fear, hope, grief, anger, shame. I’d been detached from them all night, but now they disappeared. I didn’t even have enough fear to wonder what would become of me. There was only this minute, the next, then the one after.

Another cinder-block corridor, a different cop, another black man in uniform who gripped my arm with one hand and carried my bag with the other. We seemed to be underground. We entered a large room with a long counter and a white cop in glasses.

“Why ya bringing a fresh turd at the end of my shift, Dalton? Can’t you leave him in the tank until tomorrow?”

“Orders from upstairs, Sarge. Read it and weep.”

The white cop frowned at the requisition chit. “Lucky for them we got room at the inn. Okay, bub. Empty your pockets. Valuables here. Strip to your shoes, socks and drawers. Clothes here.”

While he groped inside my bag, I removed layers of myself and laid them on the counter. When I stood in my boots, squalidly half-naked before two cops, I coldly remembered our jokes at demonstrations about
wanting
to be strip-searched. The black cop remained off to the side. The white jailer set out my toothbrush—“Nothing you need except this”—then shoved my clothes and duffel coat into the bag, wrapped a strip of yellow tape around it and tossed the bag in a corner. He flopped a pair of orange coveralls on the counter. “What’re you waiting for? Put ’em on. Lights out in fifteen minutes.”

I stepped into the loose, short-sleeved garment that was like baggy hospital scrubs; the wiry seams bit into my skin. Taking my toothbrush and a roll of toilet paper in one hand, a change of sheets under my arm, I followed the jailer to a pneumatic steel door with a Plexiglas window, the honest version of that first, simple door at the FBI.

The door gasped open on a steady muttering. Not men but radios, two or three boom boxes playing rap. The songs echoed in the hard interior. A harsh smell of ammonia filled the humid passageway, stale cigarette smoke and the gamy ferment of unwashed bodies. The floor was slick with condensed breath. My passing produced no sneers or catcalls, only bored glances from deep within the enameled bars.

“Don’t worry about your sweet A getting popped here,” said the jailer. “We keep you bad boys apart until arraignment.”

He stopped outside an empty cell. I stepped in. I stood there, in a six-by-eight-foot cement cube, looking at a shiny steel toilet, the metal shelf with a mattress pad folded up at one end. The door rolled shut at my back; I heard the clunk of the lock.

It was as though I’d been swallowed by the surface of the earth. And it was all surface, wasn’t it? This was the reality underneath, a maze of cinder block and solitary cells. At least I was alone, but then I’d always been alone.