The Hearse You Came in On (12 page)

Len Zabriskie put a pretty good beating on the young policeman before the cop’s partner came rushing in and handled the big man with his billy club. A little more bad dancing among the three of them and Len Zabriskie was finally facedown on the floor, his hands cuffed behind his back. The young cop’s face was already swelling up. His mouth had filled with blood. With a magician’s move, he reached into his mouth and came out with a large shiny tooth, which he held up for the startled Kate to see. “What do you think this will fetch from the tooth fairy?” he asked her, giving up a great big bloody smile. Kate sprang to her feet, leaped over her father lying there on the floor and, ignoring her own cracked rib, threw herself into a hug with the young hero.

And that’s one of the ways that cops are born.

Kate told me her story at the Screaming Oyster. After leaving the Alan Stuart love fest at the Peabody Library, I had confronted her on the front steps.

“Something is not kosher in Pickleville. Are you going to explain what’s been going on here or am I going to have to beat it out of you.”

Bad choice of words, I know. But I didn’t know it then. Kate had followed me in her car down to the Screaming Oyster.

The Oyster was awash with the regular crowd. Tony Marino was keeping his stool at the end of the bar from floating away. Edie Velvet was parked beneath the hanging dinghy. Sally and Frank were fricking and fracking behind the bar. The TV was on, the jukebox was playing, the pinball machine by the door was ringing and clicking like a spastic robot. Bookstore Bill and Al the video guy—two more S.O.S. regulars—were at their usual table, arguing as usual. The day these two stop disagreeing on everything is to be Earth’s final day, I’m convinced. Having grabbed a beer and a lemonade, I had steered Kate over to a table in the rear of the bar. Once we sat down, the noise cloud remained just above our heads, allowing us to have our little chat without resorting to too much yelling.

Kate had to work at not letting her story catch in her throat. I suspected it wasn’t a tale that she spun on a regular basis. Her voice was low and largely without inflection as she described the abrupt and violent ways of her father. When she got to the part about little Kate leaping over her father to hug her hero, the moment when she decided in that place beneath conscious knowing that she was going to do this same sort of work when she grew up, Kate leaned back in her chair and ran her hand through her hair. She stubbed out her umpteenth cigarette and pushed the overflowing glass ashtray away from her.

“I’m going to quit one day,” she said.

“If you don’t get them, they’ll get you.”

Kate frowned. “I’m not talking about smoking. I’m talking about quitting my job.”

“Your job? You’d give up being a cop?”

“I’ve lost my edge. I became a cop because a cop rescued me from my father. It was such a … I don’t know, such a noble thing to do. ‘Don’t hit her, hit me.’ That’s how he handled it. God, what a hero, you know what I mean? And I thought, this is what the world needs, more people like that. More people who will stick out their own necks for others. That’s nuts, isn’t it.”

“What’s nuts about it?”

“Wanting to be someone who volunteers to take somebody else’s punches? You don’t think that’s a little misguided?”

“It’s very Christ-like,” I noted.

“I’m Jewish.”

“So was he.”

She pulled out another cigarette. “You want to hear some more stories?”

“Do you know any bedtime stories?”

She lit her cigarette and let the match drop to the floor. She blew her smoke just over my head. “Only if you want bad dreams.”

When Kate Zabriskie met Charley Russell he was already a detective. Kate was still a uniformed police officer.

“I was a patrol car cop. A glorified traffic director. I handed out parking tickets and speeding tickets, I told the frat boys at Johns Hopkins to turn their stereos down. In between all that excitement I also handled
my share of bad guys. Mainly muggers and petty thieves. The occasional murderer. I ordered men twice my size to put their hands on the hood and spread ‘em.” She paused and looked over at me. “No wisecracks?”

I shrugged. Too easy. She went on. She told me that she made her arrests, offered her testimony in court, helped to add a layer or two of scum to that which was already festering there behind bars.

She also got to realize her dream. She got to barge into houses and apartments in the greater Baltimore metropolitan area and play the hero for women and children whose husbands and daddies were beating up on them.

“It felt great at first,” she told me. “All noble and righteous and powerful.”

But as the domestic disturbance calls continued, became in fact all too frequent, Kate realized that for all of her intervening there was always going to be another brute across town somewhere harassing his supposed loved ones. She was a blue Band-Aid at best. She tried to remind herself that this was a job that she had to take one day at a time. “Step between just one ballistic jerk and his human punching bag and you’ve done a good thing. I knew that.” She knew that the young cop who had poked his chair into her father’s cage and drawn his wrath had done a good thing, a hell of a good thing. He might even have saved her life. And yet Kate found herself growing more and more despondent.

“I didn’t want to be the cavalry anymore. Coming to the rescue was fine, but it was too little too late. Mopup
work. I would see the expressions on the faces of those women and children and it was always the same expression. It was gratitude, sure. But it was mainly this scared, shell-shocked look that said, ‘Where the hell have you been all this time?’ It was ‘Thanks, but the damage has been done.’ And I understood that. I’d cuff these bastards and I’d wish that somehow I could have done this earlier too, yesterday or a year ago, before the trouble even got started. Before the hitting. Or worse.”

Kate finished off her lemonade and slid the glass angrily across the table. “We can’t arrest men who badger or belittle their wives or their girlfriends. That’s the problem.
That’s
where I wanted to stop it. Not after the bruises started to rise. Somehow I’d like to have been able to spot the guys on the street right before they even met their future wives and girlfriends. I wanted to be able to stick my pistol into their face and tell them not to even think about it, buster. It’s absurd, I know. But I got real tired of climbing in at the tail end of the problem. It wasn’t enough for me.

“Then I met Charley and we started dating. He was a detective. He had started off as a patrolman, like me, then worked his way up. And I’d listen to what he was doing and it sounded a lot better than what I was doing. Detectives get to identify a problem and go after it closer to the source. They don’t bust a kid for smoking dope on the corner. They seize shipments at the docks and drag off Mr. Big in cuffs. They get to come into the station and throw the big fish down onto the floor. The stuff you get trophies for. So I decided to become a
detective. Of course, it had no real connection with any new ability to head off a wife beater at the pass, or a child abuser. But it just seemed more rewarding overall, trying to root out the nest itself, whatever it was, instead of just slamming the vipers with my club one at a time.”

A few tables away, a couple of guys and a girl got up and started playing darts. Kids from the suburbs. Kate glanced over at them, then continued.

“I worked overtime. I stuck my nose into other people’s investigations. I made myself available for stakeouts and as backup. In departmental lingo, I kissed the brass butt. That’s how you climb the ladder. And making detective is definitely climbing a ladder.”

So Kate climbed. She knew it would be a matter of years, but she was okay with that. She and Charley moved in together. “About this same time last year,” she said. “May. We got married in late summer.

“We had to hold off on the honeymoon. Charley had just been assigned a case. An industrial waste dumping scam. Bogs for bucks, he called it. He figured it would take several months. But we made our plans. Mexico. It’s cheap there and we just wanted to go to a beach someplace and flop down on the sand. We got brochures and looked at them a couple of times a week.

“It was about a month or so after we got married that Charley had to take the case undercover. He insisted on not giving me too many details about what he was up to. That’s a smart professional choice when you’ve got two cops who are sharing the same home.
The department encourages that sort of demarcation among its married couples. All I really knew was that basically Charley had to pose as a laborer. The work really knocked him out at first. He’d come home completely beat. He assured me that what he was doing wasn’t dangerous. I knew better than to believe him. Still, he said he had complete control over the situation.”

Kate’s eyes were brimming with tears. They came on without warning. She seemed a little surprised herself, and bit down on her lip and looked away. I started to speak, but she held up her hand.

“I was called in for backup one night, over in Sparrows Point. It was a stakeout at a warehouse and it was going all wrong. Two detectives were pinned down. My partner and I hustled over there. You know my partner. Kruk.”

“The golden-haired boy? You were partners?”

“Briefly. Anyway, it was all screwed up. One of the detectives—a guy named Connolly—had been hit in the leg. When Kruk and I got there, Connolly had just gotten outside the warehouse. He was okay. Kruk got to work putting a tourniquet on his leg. I drew my gun and went in. I found Lou, that’s the other detective. Lou signaled me down. There was a guy up on a walkway, about thirty feet overhead. He had a barrel or something he was hiding behind. Lou couldn’t get a clear shot on him. Basically it was a game of chicken.”

The dart players started cheering on each shot. Kate locked onto the action as she continued. Her head didn’t move, but her eyes followed each dart as it hit the cork target.

“All of a sudden, about twenty feet away from me, someone stepped out of the shadows.”

“There were two men?”

“Yes. And this one had the drop on me. I saw his arm rising and I knew he had me. I swung around anyway. Suddenly I recognized his face. But before I could say anything … there was a shot. He dropped.”

Over by the dartboard a chant had started up. It was the girl’s turn. I leaned closer over the table so that I could hear the rest of Kate’s story.

“I spun around to see where the hell the shot had come from. Just as I did, Lou was squeezing off a shot at the guy up on the walkway. It was perfect. Nailed him.”

“Wait. I’m confused. This guy down on the ground, the one who was about to shoot you… who shot him?”

“Apparently the one on the walkway.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. Weren’t they in on this together?”

“That’s what you’d figure, right? Though at the time I wasn’t really thinking straight.” Kate’s eyes followed one of the darts as it zoomed though the air. It veered left of the bull’s-eye, missed by a mile. “I was too busy screaming.”

“Screaming?”

“The guy on the ground. I was screaming for him to move.” Kate gave me a dark look over the table. “It was Charley. On undercover. It was my husband. I was screaming for him to move. So that he could show me that he wasn’t dead.”

A huge cheer went up from the dart players.
Bull’s-eye.
The girl leaped up and down like a game show winner. Kate glared over at the high fives, then she looked back at me. All signs of life had gone out of her eyes.

“I was wasting my breath.”

O
ne of our chief suppliers of coffins, based in Nebraska, was rolling out several new models. He had been trying to get me on the phone to make his pitch. I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a hard sale. I’m no pine box purist, mind you, but I do happen to feel that if the basic realities of dying haven’t changed much over the course of the history of mankind, then the need to constantly upgrade the exigencies of burial is a little difficult to justify as being for anything other than a profit. The implication that we’ve been getting it wrong for over a thousand years now … well, that’s something I just find difficult to swallow. Give me a sturdy box and a soft pillow and let’s call it a deal.

I avoided the supplier’s calls all day.

That night I made my pitch to Gil Vance for a lectern. The idea struck me as I crossed the square on my way to the Gypsy Playhouse.

“The audience is a voyeur, Gil, am I right? They’re sitting out there, hidden in the dark, watching the goings on of this town, peeking in. Our town is in a goldfish bowl.”

Gil’s eyes went wide. Christ. He was seeing a literal goldfish bowl up onstage. I’d be giving my lines dressed in a Diver Dan getup.

“Okay. Gil, look. As it stands now you have the Stage Manager tramping around out there, unseen by the characters on the stage, but in full view and conversational mode with the members of the audience. But the Stage Manager literally moseying about on the fringes of the action like that… well, it sort of muddles things up, don’t you think?”

Gil was taking this all in with some very serious head nods. Which meant he had no idea in hell what I was saying. “How does it muddle things up?” he asked.

“The Stage Manager is … he’s in the way,” I declared. “He is standing in front of the action. Is he part of the play or is he part of the audience?”

“Both,” said Gil.

“Muddle,” said I.

“Hitch, why don’t you tell me what you’re saying,” Gil suggested.

I threw myself at his feet. “Give me a lectern, Gil. We’ve got a nice one at the funeral home that I can appropriate if you need it. Plant me off to the side. Let me read my lines as if I am giving a lecture. Or a sermon. Or… or like an anthropologist. Giving a slide show! That’s it.
That’s
what I’m saying, Gil. The Stage Manager is an anthropologist. He is reading from his field notes, delivering a lecture about the feeding and mating habits of the New England WASP, circa blah blah blah. It makes perfect sense.” I took a deep breath. “Give me a pith helmet.”