— Thank you, I had a very nice time.
— No, hey, thank you. I had a nice time, too. Palpating the chest wall now, pushing along the sternum…
“Feel any pain here?”
“No.”
“How about here?”
“No.”
Ruling out any inflammation of the carti…
“What’s this?” she asked suddenly.
“What’s what?” Garrod said.
“This scar on your shoulder.”
“Yeah.”
“Looks like a healed bullet wound.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that what it is?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t see anything in your file about…”
“It’s in there, all right.”
“A gunshot wound? How’d I miss a gunshot wound?”
“Maybe you didn’t go back far enough.”
“When did you get shot?”
“Six, seven months ago.”
“Before the chest pains started?”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him.
“The scar’s got nothin to do with those pains,” he said. “The scar don’t hurt at all.”
“But the pains started after you got shot.”
“Yeah.”
“You keep testing normal…”
“Yeah, but…”
“EKGs, stress tests, GI tests, everything normal, no muscular problems…”
“One thing’s got nothing to do with…”
“How soon after the shooting did you go back to work?”
“Few weeks after rehab.”
“Where was that?”
“Buenavista.”
“Good program there.”
“Yeah.”
“Went back to undercover?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you doing undercover when the chest pains started?”
“Yeah, but…”
“Who’d you work with at Buenavista?”
“Oh, the physical therapists. Getting the shoulder working again. I’m in good shape, you know…”
“Yes.”
“So it didn’t take long.”
“Did you talk to anyone about getting shot?”
“Oh, sure.’’
“About the psychological aftereffects of getting shot?”
“Sure.”
“About post-trauma syndrome?”
“Lots of cops in this city get shot, you know. I’m not anybody special.”
“But you did talk to someone at Buenavista about…”
“Well, it didn’t apply, you see. I had no problem with it.”
Sharyn looked at him again.
“There’s someone I’d like you to see,” she said. “I want you to stop at the sick-call desk on your way out, and make an appointment with him. His name is Simon Waggenstein,” she said, writing it on one of her cards. “He’s one of the deputy chief surgeons here.”
“Why do I have to see another doctor? All I’ve done so far is go from one doctor to…”
“This one’s a psychiatrist.”
“No way,” Garrod said at once, and stood up, and yanked his shirt from where he had draped it over the chair. “Send me back to active duty, fuck it, I ain’t seeing no psychiatrist.”
“He may be able to help you.”
“I got chest pains and you want me to see a head doctor? Come on, willya?”
Angrily pulling on the shirt, buttoning it swiftly, not looking at her.
“Why haven’t you applied for a pension?” she asked.
“I don’t want a pension.”
“You want to stay on the force, is that it?”
“I’m a good cop,” he said flatly. “Getting shot don’t make inc no less a good cop.”
“But you can quit with a pension anytime you want…”
“I don’t want to quit.”
“You don’t have to invent imaginary chest pains to keep you off the street…”
“They’re not imaginary!”
“You’re entitled to the pension…”
“I don’t want the…”
“You can claim…”
“I want back on the street!”
“… federal disability incur…”
“I wasn’t afraid to go back!”
“But if you didn’t want to risk it again, nobody would blame…”
“They already blame me!” he said. “They think I got shot because I wasn’t doing the job right. I must’ve been doing something wrong or I wouldn’ta got shot in the first place, you understand? To them, I’m some kinda failure. They don’t even want to be around me, man, they’re afraid they’re liable’a get shot if they’re even around me. I take that disability pension…”
He stopped, shook his head.
“I’m a good cop,” he said again.
“You go another eight months with chest pains nobody can find, you’ll be looking at an Article Four…”
“Yeah, but if I quit…”
“Yeah?”
“If I grab the pension and run…”
“Yeah?”
“They’ll say the nigguh’s got no balls.”
“Neither have I,” Sharyn said.
They stood looking at each other. The phone rang, startling them both. She picked up the receiver.
“Chief Cooke,” she said.
“Sharyn? It’s me.”
Bert Kling?
Now what the hell?
“Just a second,” she said, and covered the mouthpiece. “Promise me you’ll make that appointment,” she said.
“Give me the fuckin card,” he said, and snatched it from her hand.
The rehearsal had resumed at five P.M. that Monday and it was now a little past six. All four actors in the leading roles had been on the stage together for the past hour in three of the play’s most difficult scenes. Tempers were beginning to fray.
Freddie Corbin had named his four major characters the Actress, the Understudy, the Detective, and the Director. Michelle found this pretentious, but then again she found the whole damn play pretentious. The other four actors in it played about ten thousand people, half of them black, half of them white, none of them with speaking roles, all of them intended to convey “a sense of time and place,” as Freddie himself had written in one of his interminably long stage directions.
The two male extras played detectives, thieves, doormen, restaurant patrons, ushers, librarians, cabdrivers, waiters, politicians, hot dog vendors, salesmen, newspaper reporters and television journalists. The two female extras played prostitutes, police officers, telephone operators, secretaries, waitresses, cashiers, saleswomen, token takers, newspaper reporters and television journalists. All four, male or female, were also responsible for quickly moving furniture and props during the brief blackouts between scenes.
There were two acts in the play and forty-seven scenes. The sets for each scene were “suggestive rather than literal,” as Freddie had also written in one of his stage directions. A table and two chairs, for example, represented a restaurant. A bench and a section of railing represented the boardwalk in Atlantic City, where the Actress wins the Miss America beauty pageant that is the true start of her career.
The scene they were rehearsing this afternoon was the one in which someone stabs…
“Do we ever find out for sure who stabbed her?” Michelle called to the sixth row, where she knew their esteemed director was sitting with Marvin Morgenstern, the show’s producer, affectionately called either “Mr. Morningstar” after the Herman Wouk character, or else “Mr. Money-bags” after his occupation. Michelle had shaded her eyes with one hand and was peering past the lights into the darkness. She felt this was a key question. How the hell was an actress supposed to portray a stabbing victim if she didn’t know who the hell had stabbed her?