Soul Patch

“Who got my tag number?”

“We did, the cops.”

“From last night?”

“That’s right. Somebody gave up your plate number.”

“Fuck!”

“It gets worse, Moe. Detectives Bento and Klein are coming to talk to you.”

“When?”

“Like now, so start thinking of something to say.”

“Listen, write this number down.” I gave her Preacher Simmons’ phone number. “Call it and tell the man at the other end what you just told me. He’ll know what to do.”

“Give you an alibi, you mean.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

There was a loud silence on the other end of the phone. I thought she began to say something, but maybe not. I probably imagined it. She was already compromised and she knew it. Calling Preacher for me wasn’t going to make it any worse.

When I hung up and turned around, Katy was standing right behind me. Her expression hadn’t brightened any. No one, not even the

“How did you know Detective Melendez was a her?”

“I met her before. She’s the one who drove me to where they found Larry’s body.” She was the beautiful, dark-skinned detective who was hanging around the cemetery. She was the one who pushed me out of the way of an oncoming car. She was the one who I-

I resisted the urge to say more. The guilty talk too much and in the back of my mind I heard the old steps creaking with the weight of my guilt. Katy opened her mouth to say something, when the doorbell rang. Whatever was in her eyes had gone, at least for the moment.

“Those are the cops for me,” I said. “I’m going to go with them.”

“The cops! What happened?”

“They think I saw something.”

“What?”

I ignored that. “Where’s Sarah?”

“She went down to my studio,” Katy said. “Why?”

“I don’t want her to hear us.”

“Well, what do they think you saw?”

“This!” I held up the Daily News and showed her the story about Kalisha’s execution.

“Oh, my God! You saw it, didn’t you?” There was no fooling Katy. She could see it in my face. That ability of hers gave me pause.

“I’ll explain later. I’ve gotta go.”

She didn’t argue. The doorbell rang again and this time there was knocking as well. I opened up the door and stepped out, rather than letting the detectives in. Sarah was downstairs, but I didn’t want to risk her hearing anything at all. Kids always know more than their parents think they do, but I didn’t feel obliged to help the process along.

For the first time in or out of uniform, I was on the wrong side of the desk inside a police interview room. I can’t say how exactly, but it seemed fitting that it should happen at my old precinct house. I doubted familiarity was apt to make interrogation a more enjoyable experience. On my way back to the interview rooms, with Klein and

I did stop to stare at the spot on the squad room floor where one misstep and a careless piece of litter had combined to forever alter the course of my life. There was no plaque, no ersatz memorial to the death of my undistinguished police career. Shit, they’d probably redone the floor two or three times since I’d slipped and twisted my knee in a way that neither God nor Darwin had ever intended. But I was lucky, I think, to be able to trace the course of my adult life back to one single thing. When most people look in their rearview mirrors, all they see are faint ghosts: tiny, intermittent steps that don’t seem to add up to where they are. How the fuck did I get here? is a question most people take to their graves for consideration. Not me. I’d have secrets to keep me warm through eternal night.

“What the fuck you lookin’ at?” Bento wanted to know.

“Can’t you see him?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Elvis’ ghost.”

“Get the fuck in the room, Prager.”

They’d spruced up the Six-O’s interview rooms since last I stepped inside one over twelve years ago. It’s not like they’d painted the walls a snappy orange or added potted plants, but it was brighter somehow.

Wasn’t it Pascal who said that if you had to wager on whether or not God existed, the safe bet was existence? Although I don’t think he had my situation in mind when he wrote it, I went with Pascal’s advice. I didn’t know if I was in the interview room in which Carmella Melendez had planted the wire, but I acted as if I were. Even if I were so inclined to trust Klein and Bento with the truth-which I wasn’t-I couldn’t be sure of who else might be listening. My answers would be as much for those invisible ears as for the two detectives.

Detective Klein was maybe thirty-five, a lean and quiet type with steel gray hair and eyes to match. He was the kind to hang back and watch. Bento, an impatient, barrel-chested Sicilian, was about my age. He held his hands curled as if holding an invisible salami hero and cold Heineken. He liked his food. I wasn’t stupid enough to think one detective more dangerous than the other.

In the car on the way over, Bento had done most of the talking, mostly about the Mets. They should have won three championships by now. Gooden’s a piece-of-shit drug addict. They never should have traded Kevin Mitchell. It was all crap meant either to make me feel at ease or to disorient me. It did neither. Now inside the box, Bento changed his tune. He was probably a fucking Yankee fan anyway.

“Do you know why we want to speak to you?”

“What happened, you’re not interested in talking Mets’ baseball anymore?”

“That’s not what Detective Bento asked you, Prager.” Klein jumped in. “So let me ask it again. Do you know why we want to talk to you?”

“No.”

“Lying’s no way to begin a friendship,” he said.

“I got all the friends I can use, Detective Klein.”

“Then why just march into our fucking car when we showed up at your door?” Bento asked, already looking pissed enough to rip my head off.

“Because I used to be a cop and when two detectives from my old precinct show up at my door and ask to speak with me, I go with them.”

Klein opened a folder and laid out various photos of Kalisha’s body on the table in front of me. Although I had watched the murder take place and had stood closer to her lifeless torso than I was now to either Klein or Bento, the pictures were worse. Recorded after death had fully taken hold, when the blood had settled and the open wounds had begun to attract the local insect population, the photos caught the ugliness and horror of murder in a way the filtered human eye could not: a tangle of blood-soaked hair caught on a wire fence, a piece of skull lying on the sidewalk next to a crushed soda can, a lone fly crawling into a vacant eye socket, a blood-splattered leather jacket.

“You recognize her,” Bento stated more than asked.

“It’s hard to tell.”

“Name’s Kalisha Pardee,” he said.

I never did know her last name. “Who was she?”

“Come on, Prager. We know you knew her,” Klein said.

“Oh, yeah? Maybe you can refresh my memory a little.”

“She was a working girl. Used to have a boyfriend, a small-time dealer named Malik Jabbar, a.k.a. Melvin