Funny thing about the apartment. It took me a while to realize what.
No TV.
And a funny thought, on the way out. Suddenly I’m thinking: But she’s a cop’s daughter. This means something. This has to matter.
-+=*=+-
Like all police I guess I’m state-of-the-art cynical, on the one hand. And, on the other, I don’t judge. We never judge. We may make the roust and make the collar. We may bust you. But we won’t judge you.
Fresh from the latest slaughterhouse, that kraut brute Henrik Overmars will listen to a drunk’s hard-luck story with tears in his eyes. I’ve seen Oltan O’Boye give his last fin to some self-pitying asshole at Paddy’s—some guy whose entire acquaintance has drawn down the shade on him, years ago. Keith Booker can’t pass a bum on the street—no, every time he’ll slip him a buck and squeeze his hand. I’m the same way. We’re the softest touch.
Is it because we’re plain brutal/sentimental? I don’t think so. We don’t judge you, we can’t judge you because whatever you’ve done it isn’t even close to the worst. You’re great. You didn’t fuck a baby and throw it over the wall. You don’t chop up eighty-year-olds for laughs. You’re great. Whatever you’ve done, we know all the things you might have done, and haven’t done.
In other words, our standards, for human behavior, are desperately low.
Having said all that, I was due for a shock tonight. I felt what I so seldom feel: Scandalized. I felt shock all over my body. Forget about a hot flush. I practically had the menopause in one fell swoop.
I’m back at the apartment, cooking dinner for
Tobe and myself. The phone goes and a male voice says, “Yeah, can I speak with Jennifer Rockwell please?”
I said, in receptionist singsong, “Who’s calling?”
“Arnold. It’s Am.”
“One moment!”
I’m standing there tensed in the kitchen heat. Tell myself to work on what I was doing already: Keep your voice pitched up. Sound like a woman.
“Actually—hello again—actually Jennifer’s out of town tonight and I’m handling her messages here. I have her datebook here. Hey, were you guys meant to get together tomorrow sometime?”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
“Here we go. Arnold… ? Starts with a D?”
“Debs. Arn Debs.”
“Right. Yeah, she just wants to check where and when.”
“Would around eight be good? Here at the Mallard. In the Decoy Room?”
“You got it.”
That evening, over dinner, I hardly said a word. And that night, after lights out, what happens but Tobe comes across…This is no impulse thing with Tobe. It’s a task of major administration. Like the King Arthur movies—winching the knight up onto horseback. But it was all very gentle, all very sweet and dear, as I need it to be now. Now I’m sober. Before, I liked it to be rough, or I thought I did. These days I hate the idea of all that. Enough with the rough, I think. Enough rough.
-+=*=+-
The night train woke me around quarter of four. I lay there for a time with my eyes open. No chance of reentry. So I got out of bed and made coffee and sat and smoked over my notes.
I’m upset. I’m upset anyway, but I’m also pissed about something personal. Here’s what: The remarks and descriptions in Trader’s letters. Why? They weren’t unsympathetic. And I accept that I must have been a pretty pitiful sight back then—sweating it out behind drawn blinds. What am I concerned about? My privacy? Oh, sure. As I wind down from the job I begin to see these things more clearly. And privacy is what police spend their entire lives stomping on and riding roughshod over. Very, very soon you lose the whole concept of it. Privacy? Say what? No, what’s bothering me, I think, is the stuff about my childhood. As if, given that, there could be no other outcome.
Here are two related things I have to set down.
First is the reason why I love Colonel Tom. Not the reason exactly, but the moment I knew it to be true. There was a high-profile murder up in the Ninety-Nine. A dead baby in a picnic cooler. Talk of drug wars and race riots. Media up the kazoo. I was passing his office and I heard him on the phone. Lieutenant Rockwell, as he then was, on the phone to the Mayor. And I heard him say, very deliberate: My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out. I’d heard him use that parlance before. My Keith Booker.