2
BECAUSE SHE DID A LITTLE DOPE EVERY NOW AND THEN, SHE was never comfortable around cops anyhow. She knew this had to be done, coming here this afternoon, but just approaching a police station made her nervous. Gave her the willies just seeing those big green globes with the numerals 87 on them, one hanging on each side of the tall wooden entrance doors, each one screaming “Cop! Cop!” And sure enough, a real live cop in a blue uniform was standing at the top of the steps just to the right of the doors, looking her over as she climbed the steps, and fumbled with the brass knob, and opened the door. She smiled at him as if she’d just killed her mother with a hatchet.
Where she was when she stepped through the door was inside a big, noisy, high-ceilinged room with a lot of uniformed cops milling around, and a high wooden desk on her right, with a brass rail in front of it about waist high, and a sign on the counter stating ALL VISITORS MUST STATE BUSINESS. There were two more uniformed cops behind the desk, one of them drinking coffee from a cardboard container. A clock behind the desk read ten minutes past four. The rain had stopped, but it was still pretty brisk for April, and the room seemed chillier somehow than it did outside, maybe because there were no windows in it or maybe because it was full of cops. She stepped up to the desk, cleared her throat, and said to the one drinking coffee, “My name is Michelle Cassidy, I’d like to talk to a detective, please.
“Kling wondered if Deputy Chief Surgeon Sharyn Everard Cooke had ever been inside a detective squadroom. You worked here at the Eight-Seven long enough, you began believing everybody in the entire city had been here before, everybody knew precisely what it looked like, down to the tiniest fingernail scraping. But he couldn’t imagine Sharyn’s job taking her anywhere near the outer reaches of the solar system here, which he sometimes felt the 87th Precinct was. A planet devoid of anything but the basest form of animal life, an airless, sunless, apple-green void where nothing ever changed, everything remained always and ever exactly the same.
He wondered if her office at Rankin Plaza was painted the same bilious green as the squadroom here. If so, was it as soiled as the paint on the walls of this room that was used and abused twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, six in leap year, which this happened to be? He could remember the squadroom being painted only once in all the time he’d worked here. He was not looking forward to that experience again anytime soon, thank you. He supposed apple green and shoddy were the operative interplanetary words that best described the squadroom, or in fact the entire station house. Well, maybe shoddy was too mild a word, perhaps a better description would have been seedy or even shabby, although to tell the truth the only valid description was shitty, a word he had not yet used in the deputy chief’s presence, and might never find an opportunity to use with her ever in his lifetime if last night’s date was any indication.
The Italian restaurant she’d chosen was called La Traviata, which might have led one to believe they’d be piping operatic music into the place, but instead they seemed to favor Frank Sinatra’s Hundred Greatest Hits. Which was okay with Kling. He was a Sinatra fan, and he really didn’t mind hearing him sing “Kiss” over and over again, even if by the fifth time around he knew all the lyrics by heart.
And so on.
But then “One for My Baby” came on for the third time.
The conversation had hit one of those unexpected roadblocks by then, although Kling couldn’t figure out what he’d said or done to cause her sudden silence. Being a detective, he knew that people sometimes reacted belatedly to something that’d been said or done minutes or even hours ago — sometimes years ago, as was the case with a lady they’d arrested recently for poisoning her husband twelve years after he’d called her a whore in front of their entire bowling team. So he was sitting there across from her, trying to figure out why all at once she looked so thoughtfully sullen, when, gee whiz, what a surprise, here came “One for My Baby” again. Hoping to yank her out of whatever the hell was bugging her, and thinking he was making a brilliant observation besides, he remarked that here was a song that merely threatened to tell a story, but never got around to actually telling the story.
“Guy’s had a disastrous love affair,” he said, “and he keeps promising the bartender he’ll tell him all about it, but all he ever does is tell him he’s going to tell him.”
Blank expression on her face.
As if she were ten thousand miles away.
He wondered suddenly if she herself was trying to recover from a disastrous love affair. If so, was she thinking about whoever the guy might have been? And if so, when had the ill-fated romance ended? Twelve years ago? Twelve days ago? Last night?
He let it go.
Concentrated instead on the linguini with white clam sauce.
“Is it because I’m black?” she asked suddenly.
“Is what because you’re black?” he asked.
“That you asked me out.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
Is it? he wondered.
Before now, he’d never dated a black woman in his life.
But what the hell had brought that on?
“Is it because I’m white?” he asked lightly, and smiled.
“That you accepted?”
“Maybe,” she said.
And did not return his smile, he noticed.
“Well… do you want to talk about it?” he asked.
“No. Not now.”
“When?”
“Maybe never.”
“Okay,” he said, and went back to the linguini.
He figured that was the end of the story. So long, Whitey, nice to’ve known you, but hey, this ain’ gon work, man.
When she told him after dinner that she’d really rather not go to a movie, they both had to get up so early, and it was already close to ten, he was certain this meant so long and goodbye, bro, see you roun the pool hall one of these days. They shook hands outside her apartment. She thanked him for a nice time. He told her he’d had a nice time, too. It was still raining, but only lightly. He walked through the drizzle from her building to the train station five blocks away.
Three black teenagers came into the car while the train was still on the overhead tracks in Calm’s Point. They seemed to be considering him as they approached. He gave them a look that said Don’t even think it, and they went right on by.
The phone on his desk was ringing.
What Michelle saw when she reached the top of the second-floor landing was another sign nailed to the wall, indicating that the DETECTIVE DIVISION was either just down the corridor past several doors respectively labeled LOCKER ROOM and MEN’S LAVATORY and CLERICAL OFFICE, or else right there on the landing itself, since the sign merely announced itself in black letters on a smudged white field, but gave no other directions. She followed her instincts, and — being right-handed — turned naturally to the right and walked down the hall past the smell of stale sweat seeping from the locker room, and the stench of urine floating from behind the men’s room door, and the wafting aroma of coffee brewing in the clerical office, a regular potpourri here in this “little old cop shop,” as the Detective called it in the play they were rehearsing. At the end of the hall, she saw first a slatted wooden rail divider and beyond that several dark green metal desks and telephones and a bulletin board with various photographs and notices on it, and a hanging light globe, and further into the room some more green metal desks and finally a bank of windows covered with metal grilles. A good-looking blond man sat at one of the desks. She stopped at the railing, cleared her throat again the way she had downstairs, and said — remembering to project — “Detective Kling?”