Junky (15 page)

The cops jumped out with their hands on their guns, but they did not draw them. They ran up to my car. One of them, the driver who had spotted Pat, had a big smile on his face. “Where did you get the car, Pat?” he asked.

The other cop opened the back door. “Everybody out,” he said.

McKinney and Cole were in the back seat. They got out and the cops went through them. Right away the cop who spotted Pat found the stick of weed in Cole's shirt pocket.

“I've got enough here to hold the whole bunch of them,” he said. This cop had a smooth red face and he kept smiling all the time. He found my gun in the glove compartment. “This is a foreign gun,” he said. “Have you got it registered with the Internal Revenue Department?”

“I thought that only applied to full automatic weapons,” I said, “that fire more than one shot with one pull of the trigger.”

“No,” said the cop smiling, “it applies to all foreign automatics.” I knew he was wrong, but there was no percentage in telling him so. He looked at my arms. “You've been hooking that spot so much it's about to get infected,” he said, pointing to a needle welt.

The wagon arrived and we all got in. We were taken to the Second Precinct. The cops looked at my car papers. They couldn't believe that the car was mine. I was searched at least six times by different people. Eventually, we were all locked in a cell about six by eight feet. Pat smiled and rubbed his hands together.

“There's going to be some sick fucking dope fiends in here,” he said.

A little later the turnkey came and called my name. I was taken to a small room that opened off the reception room of the precinct. In the room were two detectives sitting at a table. One was tall and fat with a deep South frog face. The other was a middle-aged stocky Irish cop. He was missing some front teeth, which gave his face a suggestion of harelip. This type cop could just as well be an oldtime rod-riding thug. There was nothing of the bureaucrat about him.

The frog-faced cop was obviously in charge of the interrogation. He told me to sit down and I sat down at the table opposite him. He pushed a package of cigarettes and a box of matches across the table. “Have a cigarette,” he said. The Irish cop was sitting at the end of the table to my left. He was close enough to reach me without getting up. The cop in charge was studying the papers of my car. Everything they had taken out of my pockets was spread on the table in front of him, a glasses case, identification papers, wallet, keys, a letter from a friend in New York, everything but my pocketknife, which the smooth-faced cop from the patrol car had put in his pocket.

Suddenly I remembered about that letter. The friend in New York who'd written it was a tea head and he pushed weed from time to time. He'd written to me asking the price of good weed in New Orleans. I asked Pat, who quoted me a tentative price of forty dollars per pound. In the letter on the table my friend made reference to the forty-dollar per pound price and said he wanted some at that figure.

At first I thought they might pass over the letter. They were Stolen Car Squad and they wanted a stolen car. They kept looking at the papers and asking questions. When I couldn't remember exact dates on the car, that was the clincher. They seemed on the point of getting tough.

Finally, I said, “Well, it's just a question of checking. When you check, you'll find out that I'm telling the truth and the car is mine. But there is no way I can convince you by talking. Of course, if you want me to say I stole the car, I will. But when you check, you will find out that the car is mine.”

“We'll check, all right.”

The frog-faced cop folded the car papers carefully and put them aside. He picked up the envelope and looked at the address and the postmark. Then he took the letter out. He read the letter to himself. Then he read aloud, skipping where there was no reference to weed. He put the letter down and looked at me.

“Not only do you use weed,” he said, “you peddle it, too, and you've got a batch of this weed stashed somewhere.” He looked at the letter. “About forty pounds.” He looked at me. “You'd better straighten yourself out.”

I didn't say anything.

The old Irish cop said, “He's like all these guys. He ain't talking. Till they get their fucking ribs kicked in. Then they'll talk, and be glad to talk.”

“We're going out and search your house,” the frog-faced cop said. “If we find anything, your wife will be put in jail, too. I don't know what will happen to your children. They'll have to go to some home.”

“Why don't you make the man a proposition?” the old Irish cop said.

I knew that if they searched the house they would find the stuff. “Call in the Federals and I'll show you where the stuff is,” I said. “But I want your word that the case will be tried in Federal, and that my wife will not be molested.”

The frog-faced cop nodded. “All right,” he said. “I accept your proposition.” He turned to his partner. “Go call Rogers,” he said.

A few minutes later the old cop was back. “Rogers is out of town and won't be back until morning, and Williams is sick.”

“Well, call Hauser.”

We went out and got in the car. The old cop was driving, and the captain was sitting in back with me.

“This is it here,” said the captain.

The old cop stopped the car and honked. A man with a pipe came out of a house and got in the back seat. He looked at me and then looked away, puffing on his pipe. The man looked young in the dark, but when we passed under a street light I saw that his face was wrinkled, and he had black circles under the eyes. It was a clean-cut, American Boy face, a face that had aged but could not mature. I assumed that he was a Federal agent.

After smoking in silence for several blocks, the agent turned to me and took out his pipe. “Who are you scoring off now?” he asked.

“It's hard to find a score now,” I said. “Most of them have gone away.”

He began asking me who I knew, and I mentioned a number of people who had already gone away. He seemed pleased with this worthless information. If you dummy up on cops they will slap you around. They want you to give them something, even if what you give has no conceivable use.

He asked what record I had, and I told him about the script case in New York.

“How much time did you do on that?” he asked.

“None. It's a misdemeanor in New York. Public Health law. Health Law Number 334, as I remember.”

“He's pretty well versed,” said the old cop.

The captain was explaining to the agent that I seemed to have a particular fear of the State Courts, and that he had made a deal with me to turn the case over to the Federals.

“Well,” said the agent, “that's the way the captain is. He'll treat you right if you treat him right.” He smoked for a while. We were on the ferry to Algiers. “There's an easy way and a hard way of ­doing things,” he said finally.

When we got to the house the captain grabbed me by the back of the belt. “Who's in there besides your wife?”

I said, “Nobody.”

We came to the door, and the guy with the pipe showed my wife his hunk of tin and opened the door. I showed them the weed I had in the house which was not more than a pound, and a few caps of junk. This didn't satisfy the captain. He wanted forty pounds of weed.

“You're not coming up with all of it, Bill,” he kept saying. “Come on, now. We've shown you every courtesy.”

I told them there wasn't any more.

The man with the pipe looked at me. “We want it all,” he said. His eyes did not want anything very much. He was standing under the light. His face had not only aged, it had decayed. He had the look of a man suffering from a fatal illness.

I said, “You've got it all.”

He looked vaguely away and began poking about in drawers and closets. He found some old letters which he read sitting on his heels on the floor. I wondered why he didn't sit in a chair. Evidently, he did not want to be comfortable while reading someone else's mail. The two cops from Stolen Cars were getting bored. Finally, they collected the weed, the caps, and a .38 revolver I kept in the house, and got ready to leave.

“He belongs to Uncle, now,” said the captain to my wife as they left the house.

They drove back to the Second Precinct and I was locked in. This time I was locked in a different cell. Pat and McKinney were in the next cell over. Pat called to me and asked what happened.

“That's tough,” he said when I told him.

Pat had given a wagon-chasing lawyer ten dollars to get him out in the morning.

•

I was in a cell with four strangers, three of them addicts. There was only one bench and that was occupied, so the rest of us stood up or lay down on the floor. I lay down on the floor beside a man named McCarthy. I had seen him around town. He had been in for almost seventy-two hours. Every now and then he would groan slightly. Once he said, “Isn't this hell?”

A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for nonjunk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.

C
ole was talking about Yokohama. “All that good Henry and Charly. When you shoot Henry and Charly, you can smell it ­going in.”

McCarthy groaned hollowly from the floor. “Man,” he said, “don't talk about that stuff.”

Next morning, we were taken to line-up. A kid with epilepsy was ahead of us on the stage. The cops took a long time wisecracking with this subnormal character.

“How long you been in New Orleans?”

“Thirty-five days.”

“What have you been doing all that time?”

“I've been in jail thirty-three days.”

They thought that was funny and batted it around for another five minutes or so.

When our turn came, the cop who ran the line-up read off the circumstances of the case.

“How many times you been here?” they asked Pat.

Some cop laughed and said, “About forty times.”

They asked each of us how many times arrested and how much time done. When they came to me, they asked how much time I did on the New York script charge. I said, “None. I got a suspended sentence.”

“Well,” said the cop in charge of the line-up. “You'll get one here, too.”

All of a sudden there was a tremendous slobbering and screaming off stage, and I thought for a minute the cops were working over the epileptic. But when I walked off the stage, I saw that he was flopping around on the floor in a fit while two detectives were hovering around trying to talk to him. Someone went for a doctor.

We were locked in a cell. A fat dick who seemed to know Pat came and stood at the door. “The guy's a psycho,” he said. “He's saying now, ‘Take me to my captain.' A psycho. I sent for the doctor.”

After two hours or so, they took us back to the precinct where we waited some more hours. About noon, the guy with the pipe and another man came to the precinct and drove a bunch of us over to the Federal Building. The new man was young and fattish. He was chewing on a cigar. Cole, McCarthy, I and two Negroes piled into the back seat. The guy with the cigar was driving. He took his cigar out and turned to me.

“What is it you do, Mr. Lee?” he asked politely, in the accents of an educated man.

“Farm,” I answered.

The man with the pipe laughed.

“Corn with weed between the rows, eh?” he said.

The man with the cigar shook his head. “No,” he said. “It won't grow well in corn. It has to grow by itself.” He turned to McCarthy, speaking over his shoulder. “I'm going to send you up to the penitentiary at Angola,” he said.

“Why, Mr. Morton?” asked McCarthy.

“Because you're a goddamned drug addict.”

“Not me, Mr. Morton.”

“What about those needle marks?”

“I have syphilis, Mr. Morton.”

“All junkies have syphilis,” said Morton. His voice was cool, condescending, amused.

The guy with the pipe was making an unsuccessful attempt to kid one of the Negroes. The Negro was called Clutch because of a deformed hand.

“Old monkey climbing up on your back?” asked the man with the pipe.

“I don't know what you're talking about now,” said Clutch. It was just a flat statement. There was no insolence. Clutch did not have a junk habit and he was saying so.

They parked in front of the Federal Building and took us up to the fourth floor. Here we waited around in an outer office and were summoned to the inner office one at a time for questioning. When my turn came I walked in and the man with the cigar was sitting at a table. He motioned me to a chair.

“I'm Mr. Morton,” he said. “A Federal narcotics agent. Do you want to make a statement? As you know, you have a Constitutional right to refuse. Of course, it takes more time for you to be charged in the event you do not make a statement.”

I said I would make a statement.

The man with the pipe was there.

“Bill isn't feeling very well today,” he said. “Maybe a little shot of heroin would help.”

“Maybe,” I said. He began asking me questions, some of them so pointless that I could hardly believe what I heard. Clearly, he had no cop intuition. No way of knowing what was important and what was not.

“Who are your connections in Texas?”

“I don't have any.” This was true.

“Do you want to see your wife in jail?”

I wiped the sweat off my face with a handkerchief. “No,” I said.

“Well, she's going to be in jail. She uses this benzedrine. That's worse than junk. Are you and your wife legally married?”

“Common law.”

“I asked are you and your wife legally married?”

“No.”

“Have you studied psychiatry?”

“What?”