A Moment of Wrong Thinking
Monica said, “What kind of a gun? A man shoots himself in his living room, surrounded by his nearest and dearest, and you want to know what kind of a gun he used?”
“I just wondered,” I said.
Monica rolled her eyes. She’s one of Elaine’s oldest friends. They were in high school together, in Rego Park, and they never lost touch over the years. Elaine spent a lot of years as a call girl, and Monica, who was never in the life herself, seemed to have no difficulty accepting that. Elaine, for her part, had no judgment on Monica’s predilection for dating married men.
She was with the current one that evening. The four of us had gone to a revival of Allegro, the Rodgers and Hammerstein show that hadn’t been a big hit the first time around. From there we went to Paris Green for a late supper. We talked about the show and speculated on reasons for its limited success. The songs were good, we agreed, and I was old enough to remember hearing “A Fellow Needs a Girl” on the radio. Elaine said she had a Lisa Kirk LP, and one of the cuts was “The Gentleman Is a Dope.” That number, she said, had stopped the show during its initial run, and launched Lisa Kirk.
Monica said she’d love to hear it sometime. Elaine said all she had to do was find the record and then find something to play it on. Monica said she still had a turntable for LPs.
Monica’s guy didn’t say anything, and I had the feeling he didn’t know who Lisa Kirk was, or why he had to go through all this just to get laid. His name was Doug Halley — like the comet, he’d said — and he did something in Wall Street. Whatever it was, he did well enough at it to keep his second wife and their kids in a house in Pound Ridge, in Westchester County, while he was putting the kids from his first marriage through college. He had a boy at Bowdoin, we’d learned, and a girl who’d just started at Colgate.
We got as much conversational mileage as we could out of Lisa Kirk, and the drinks came — Perrier for me, cranberry juice for Elaine and Monica, and a Stolichnaya martini for Halley. He’d hesitated for a beat before ordering it — Monica would surely have told him I was a sober alcoholic, and even if she hadn’t he’d have noted that he was the only one drinking — and I could almost hear him think it through and decide the hell with it. I was just as glad he’d ordered the drink. He looked as though he needed it, and when it came he drank deep.
It was about then that Monica mentioned the fellow who’d shot himself. It had happened the night before, too late to make the morning papers, and Monica had seen the coverage that afternoon on New York One. A man in Inwood, in the course of a social evening at his own home, with friends and family members present, had drawn a gun, ranted about his financial situation and everything that was wrong with the world, and then stuck the gun in his mouth and blown his brains out.
“What kind of a gun,” Monica said again. “It’s a guy thing, isn’t it? There’s not a woman in the world who would ask that question.”
“A woman would ask what he was wearing,” Halley said.
“No,” Elaine said. “Who cares what he was wearing? A woman would ask what his wife was wearing.”
“A look of horror would be my guess,” Monica said. “Can you imagine? You’re having a nice evening with friends and your husband shoots himself in front of everybody?”
“They didn’t show it, did they?”
“They didn’t interview her on camera, but they did talk with some man who was there and saw the whole thing.”
Halley said that it would have been a bigger story if they’d had the wife on camera, and we started talking about the media and how intrusive they’d become. And we stayed with that until they brought us our food.
When we got home Elaine said, “The man who shot himself. When you asked if they showed it, you didn’t mean an interview with the wife. You wanted to know if they showed him doing it.”
“These days,” I said, “somebody’s almost always got a camcorder running. But I didn’t really think anybody had the act on tape.”
“Because it would have been a bigger story.”
“That’s right. The play a story gets depends on what they’ve got to show you. It would have been a little bigger than it was if they’d managed to interview the wife, but it would have been everybody’s lead story all day long if they could have actually shown him doing it.”
“Still, you asked.”
“Idly,” I said. “Making conversation.”
“Yeah, right. And you want to know what kind of gun he used. Just being a guy, and talking guy talk. Because you liked Doug so much, and wanted to bond with him.”
“Oh, I was crazy about him. Where does she find them?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I think she’s got radar. If there’s a jerk out there, and if he’s married, she homes in on him. What did you care what kind of gun it was?”
“What I was wondering,” I said, “was whether it was a revolver or an automatic.”
She thought about it. “And if they showed him doing it, you could look at the film and know what kind of a gun it was.”
“Anybody could.”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Anyway, what difference does it make?”
“Probably none.”
“Oh?”
“It reminded me of a case we had,” I said. “Ages ago.”
“Back when you were a cop, and I was a cop’s girlfriend.”
I shook my head. “Only the first half. I was on the force, but you and I hadn’t met yet. I was still wearing a uniform, and it would be a while before I got my gold shield. And we hadn’t moved to Long Island yet, we were still living in Brooklyn.”
“You and Anita and the boys.”
“Was Andy even born yet? No, he couldn’t have been, because she was pregnant with him when we bought the house in Syosset. We probably had Mike by then, but what difference does it make? It wasn’t about them. It was about the poor son of a bitch in Park Slope who shot himself.”
“And did he use a revolver or an automatic?”
“An automatic. He was a World War Two vet, and this was the gun he’d brought home with him. It must have been a forty-five.”
“And he stuck it in his mouth and—”
“Put it to his temple. Putting it in your mouth, I think it was cops who made that popular.”
“Popular?”
“You know what I mean. The expression caught on, ‘eating your gun,’ and you started seeing more civilian suicides who took that route.” I fell silent, remembering. “I was partnered with Vince Mahaffey. I’ve told you about him.”
“He smoked those little cigars.”
“Guinea-stinkers, he called them. DeNobilis was the brand name, and they were these nasty little things that looked as though they’d passed through the digestive system of a cat. I don’t think they could have smelled any worse if they had. Vince smoked them all day long, and he ate like a pig and drank like a fish.”
“The perfect role model.”
“Vince was all right,” I said. “I learned a hell of a lot from Vince.”
“Are you gonna tell me the story?”
“You want to hear it?”
She got comfortable on the couch. “Sure,” she said. “I like it when you tell me stories.”
It was a week night, I remembered, and the moon was full. It seems to me it was in the spring, but I could be wrong about that part.
Mahaffey and I were in a radio car. I was driving when the call came in, and he rang in and said we’d take this one. It was in the Slope. I don’t remember the address, but wherever it was we weren’t far from it, and I drove there and we went in.