He hung up, leaned forward to scribble something on a pad, then straightened up and looked at me.
"You look like you walked into a fan," he said. "What happened?"
"I got in with bad company," I said. "Joe, I want that bastard picked up. I want to swear out a complaint."
"Against Motley?" I nodded. "He did that to you?"
"Most of what he did is where it doesn't show. I let myself get suckered into an alley on the Lower East Side late last night." I gave him a condensed version, and his dark eyes narrowed as he took it in.
He said, "So what do you want to charge him with?"
"I don't know. Assault, I suppose. Assault, coercion, menacing. I suppose assault's the most effective charge to bring."
"Any witnesses to the alleged assault?"
"Alleged?"
"You have any witnesses, Matt?"
"Of course not," I said. "We didn't meet in Macy's window, we were in an empty lot on Ridge Street."
"I thought you said it was an alley."
"What's the difference? It was a space between two buildings with a fence across it and a gap in the fence. If it was a passage to anything, I suppose you could call it an alley. I didn't get far enough into it to find out where it went."
"Uh-huh." He picked up a pencil, looked at it. "I thought you said Attorney Street before."
"That's right."
"Then a minute ago you said Ridge Street."
"Did I? I met the hooker on Ridge, in a toilet of a place called the Garden Grill. I don't know why they call it that. There's no garden, and I don't think there's a grill, either." I shook my head at the memory.
"Then she took me around the block to Attorney."
"She? I thought you said a transsexual."
"I've learned to use female pronouns for them."
"Uh-huh."
"I suppose she's a witness," I said, "but it might be a trick to find her, let alone get her to testify."
"I can see where it might. You get a name?"
"Candy. That would be a street name, of course, and it might have been made up for the occasion. Most of them have a lot of names."
"Tell me about it."
"What's the problem, Joe? He assaulted me and I have a bona fide complaint to file."
"You'd never make it stick."
"That's not the point. It's enough to get a warrant issued and pull the son of a bitch off the street."
"Uh-huh."
"Before he kills somebody else."
"Uh-huh. What time was it when you got in the alley with him?"
"I met her at midnight, so—"
"Candy, you mean. The transsexual."
"Right. So it was probably half an hour after that by the time the assault took place."
"Say twelve-thirty."
"Roughly."
"And then you went to a hospital?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I didn't think it was necessary. He caused a lot of pain but I knew I didn't have any broken bones and I wasn't bleeding. I figured I'd be better off going straight home."
"So there's no hospital record."
"Of course not," I said. "I didn't go to a hospital, so how the hell could there be a hospital record?"
"I guess there couldn't."
"My cabdriver wanted to take me to a hospital," I said. "I must have looked as though I belonged there."
"It's a shame you didn't listen to him. You see what I'm getting at, don't you, Matt? If there was an emergency-room record, it would tend to confirm your story."
I didn't know what to say to that.
"How about the cabdriver?" he went on. "I don't suppose you got his hack license number?"
"No."
"Or his name? Or the number of his cab?"
"It never occurred to me."
"Because he could place you in the neighborhood and give evidence of your appearance and physical condition. As it is, all we've got is your statement."
I felt anger rising, and I made an effort to keep a lid on it. Evenly I said, "Well, isn't that worth something? Here's a guy who went away for aggravated assault on a police officer. After sentencing he threatened that officer in open court. He served twelve years, during which time he committed other acts of violence. Now, a few months after his release, you've got a sworn statement charging him with assault on that same police officer, and—"
"You're not a police officer now, Matt."
"No, but—"
"You haven't been a police officer for quite some time now." He lit a cigarette, shook the match out, went on shaking it after the flame had died. Without looking at me he said, "What you are, you want to get technical about it, you're an ex-cop with no visible means of support."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"Well, what else are you? You're a sort of half-assed private detective, but you don't carry a license and you get paid off the books, so what do you think that looks like when you write it up?" He sighed, shook his head. "Late last night," he said. "Was that the first time you saw Motley yesterday?"
"It's the first time I saw him since his sentencing."
"You didn't go over to his hotel earlier?"
"What hotel?"
"Yes or no, Matt. Did you or didn't you?"
"Of course not. I don't even know where he's staying. I've been turning the city upside down looking for him. What's all this about?"
He rooted through papers on his desk, found what he was looking for. "This came through this morning,"
he said.
"Late yesterday afternoon a lawyer named Seymour Goodrich turned up at the Sixth Precinct on West Tenth. He was representing one James Leo Motley, and he had with him a recently obtained order of protection on behalf of his client against you, and—"
"Against me?"
"— and he wanted a complaint on the record about your actions earlier that day."
"What actions?"
"According to Motley, you turned up at his lodgings at the Hotel Harding. You menaced him, threatened him, and laid hands on his physical person in a threatening and intimidating manner, et cetera et cetera et cetera." He let go of the paper and it floated down onto the cluttered desktop. "You're saying it never happened. You never went to the Harding."
"Sure I went there. It's a flop at the corner of Barrow and West, I knew it well years ago when I was attached to the Sixth. We used to call it the Hard-on."
"So you did go there."
"Sure, but not yesterday. I went there when I was knocking on doors down there. Saturday night, it must have been. I showed his picture to the desk clerk."
"And?"
"And nothing. 'No, he don't look familiar, I never seen him before.'
"
"And you never went back?"
"What for?"
He leaned forward, crushed out his cigarette. He pushed his chair back and leaned all the way back and fixed his gaze on the ceiling. "You can see how it looks," he said.
"Suppose you tell me."
"Guy comes in, swears out a complaint, he's got an order of protection, a lawyer, the whole bit. Says you shoved him around and got rough with him. Next day you came in looking like you fell down a flight of stairs and you're the one with a complaint this time, only it happened in the middle of the night somewhere in the asshole of Manhattan, Attorney Street for God's fucking sake, and there's no witnesses, no cabdriver, no hospital report, nothing."
"You could check trip sheets. You might find the cabbie that way."
"Yeah, I could check trip sheets. I could put twenty men on it, a high-priority thing like that."
I didn't say anything.
He said, "Going back twelve years, why'd he sound off in the courtroom? 'I'll get you for this,' all that crap. Why?"
"He's a psychopath. What does he need with a reason?"
"Yeah, right, but what was the reason he thought he had?"
"I was putting him in jail. That's as much of a reason as he needed."
"Putting him away for something he didn't do."
"Well, sure," I said. "They're all innocent, you know that."
"Yeah, nobody guilty ever goes away. He said you framed him, right? He never fired a gun, he never owned a gun. A frame-up all the way."