Two months later I started law school and a few weeks after that I was Form 6o'd to Financial. Pigeyes threw a nice bash when I left. Everything for the best.
The police, any city you go to, are kind of a sneak fraternity. The Force. Close-knit. Trust each other first and most and nobody very much. There are lots of reasons, maybe the most important being that no one really likes the police. Who should? All these types looking sidewise and waiting for you to slip. I was a cop myself, but when I see a black-and-white just sitting on the corner, the first thing I think is, Why's this bastard got his eye on me?
Also, cops are really by themselves. This retinue of lawyers, prosecutors, judges, wardens, that whole world of rules, they're as far away as Pago Pago when you're in that basement looking for the robbery suspect Mrs Washington saw running. You go through the basement door and wait there on the threshold, come out five minutes later shaking your head in disappointment, just can't find him, that whole crew, lawyers, wardens, so on and so forth, they have nobody to chew on. It's only you — not just your life on the line, but you're the only reason this guy is going to get caught. There's no system. That's why it's so easy to whack the mouthy bastard when he's cuffed in the back of the black-and-white and is still talking about your mother or the violation of his constitutional fucking rights, never mind the seventy-seven-year-old guy he just hit in the head with a paving stone the better to steal his T-check. Because it was only you. And he's yours. And only other cops really understand that.
Which is how come, even forgetting everything else — that you're a sneak fraternity, that nobody likes you — even forgetting all that, coppers don't do it to coppers. When you're there, when it's only you, you do your best. And if some days you're not up to your best, then you're no worse than anybody else, are you? Tomorrow you can try again. Who's to judge? You start that game, I saw you be bad, shit, it's the whole Force tellin tales.
Shift scene: Two years later I'm coming out of Constitutional Law II, here's two Feebies, real types, drawls and polyester suits and white shoes, who want to talk to me — did I work with Gino Dimonte, la-di-da, a few warm-up pitches, then the hard stuff — was I on a dope bust three years ago April? I do the arithmetic real fast. One of the dopers has finally gotten cracked federally rather than stateside and has found some Ivy League A USA happy to cut him a few months in summer camp if he'll talk about Kindle coppers with their hands on dirty money, and the doper naturally doesn't give him everybody he has on the pad who he might need again, he gives him Pigeyes, who used self-help. I know all this at once, I see just where they're going, and I'm like Yeah, okay, yeah, I think I remember that one, oh yeah, that one, there was money on the table.' A bubble in the brain. What am I thinking? It was the weirdest goddamned thing. Five seconds in the law school hallway and I've changed my freaking life. There was not a cop who heard about this — and believe me, they all heard about it before the ink was dry on the 302s, the FBI agents' reports — who didn't think I'd done it because I felt with law school I was now a cut above. Coppers are very sensitive about class and have always got it on the brain, they just can't get over the fact that they make forty grand to keep the world safe for millionaires, eat a bullet for Daddy Warbucks, who'll use your corpse to wipe his shoes. But it wasn't that, I wasn't trying to make new friends, and in point of fact, I never much liked snitches. And it wasn't my sterling character for the truth. Who am I kidding? I've fibbed for worse reasons than to help a pal. It's just that, at that moment, I was standing there in the law school, with its wainscoted walls, and something came over me, that thing going back to when I was a kid when I'd realize I didn't belong, that feeling that the world was objects. That's where I was, I guess, the smartass fourth-grader looking at his life as Something in This Picture Does Not Fit and always thinking the Something was me.
Anyway, I got about three-quarters through the story when it hit me like a bolt that this would not work out. The agents had come on with the usual street immunity, just be straight and you're okay, you won't even get lint on your new suit, but I realized suddenly that the feds were not my only problem. I would have to explain this to Bar Admissions and Discipline, to BAD, and they were pretty tough on the new recruits. Immunity. Felonies. Breach of trust. I was not going to make a good impression with this story of stolen dope money in my sock drawer. So the tale ended with me and Pigeyes in the car and me telling him to inventory my end and his end too, handing the money back so he could turn it all in to the evidence room.
Things sort of went in natural sequence after that. I testified in the grand jury, just what I'd said in my statement to the agents, nothing more. The last six months I was a policeman, I was assigned behind a file cabinet, I didn't get near the street, and even the khaki crew, the unsworn personnel, would spit in my coffee when I turned my back. Then Pigeyes got indicted and I went to court and testified against him. He had paid about thirty grand to Sandy Stern, who a few years ago I would have described as a Jew defense lawyer, and Sandy made it look like the government did not have much of a case. They had a couple of the shitbum dopers who had to admit they'd had their faces planted on the floor; a narcotics officer's inventory of two grand in cash on the table when the beaners said there had been forty; and they had me. Of course, I was up there only sort of telling the truth, with my old pal Pigeyes giving me the death look, and something uneasy came to the surface, like bones bubbling up in tar. Stern asked if I was jealous of Pigeyes, felt he was a better cop than me, and I said yes to that, and I agreed that I never checked with Evidence to see what Pigeyes had inventoried. I allowed as how there were beaners who didn't know one Anglo cop from another, and I even said yes when Stern asked if Yours Truly was in fact the only police officer who admitted having received money removed from that table. The AUSA got this look like he needed Preparation H and the jury came back not guilty in two hours. When I walked out of the courtroom I had really lit the scoreboard: I don't think there was a soul there, not the judge, not even the toothless buffs out in the peanut gallery, who didn't think I was lower than pond slime. Nora, never one to miss a point of vulnerability, put it nicely: 'So, Mack, now do you think you got what you want?'
Did I? There were a few strange turns, I admit. One of the strangest was that BAD publicly embraced me. They thought ratting out your friend was a mark of character and gave me a job, since I'd demonstrated such fidelity to the rules of upstanding conduct in another calling. As for Pigeyes, he was ruined. For the jury it's always opening night, but the cops had all seen Stern's act before and they didn't need a trial to know that Pigeyes was dirty. All his buddies in the department, and there are a million, they'll do him favors day to day, get him twice as much for uniform allowance, but as far as going higher, he smelled bad, to the brass he was wearing lead boots. He's been on his unhappy trail down the hill ever since, getting the kind of discipline they practice out of Rome, sending the pederast priest to dwell at a convent. Pigeyes's punishment is Financial Crimes. Personally, I'd always liked the intricacy of Financial, the fact that there was more to investigating a case than finding the perp's girlfriend and sitting on her house until he came by for a cha-cha, but for Pigeyes, a proof mark will never take the place of drawing his gun.
From what I hear he has a sad life now. These days the rare dope bust he horns in on, he's picking powder off the table, not money. Behind his back, guys call him G-Nose or Snowman, and it's not cause he likes winter weather. He was always a copper's copper, full of twitches and complexes, sort of hated everyone, so there never was a Mrs Pig, just the usual copperbar girls and chickies on the edge of trouble who thought it was a good idea to give a cop a screw. He did not have much. Until now. Now he had me.
D. Pigeyes and I Renew Acquaintances
'Didn't I
'Refresh me,' he said, 'memory serves, this ain't you.' He was holding the credit card.
'I'm sorry, Officer?'
'Detective, shitface.'
'Detective Shitface, I'm sorry.' Personally, I didn't believe I'd done it. But there you have it. Chasing Bert and teasing myself with the notion of another life, I was becoming a new man. By the door, the younger cop in lizard, in his long hairdo with shiny sidewalls, grimaced and turned a full pirouette. I was looking for it. But he didn't know the history. If Pigeyes kicked the bejesus out of me, he could never fit a story good enough. He stared at me with those little black eyes without any visible whites, while this reality crowded in on both of us. Then he extended one finger, thick as a stake, and gave me his own unique look, a laser right to the heart. 'Not again,' he said.
Trilby spoke up at that point, a pudgy black man of middle years, sitting behind his desk. He and his sidekick out front had done a nice job of setting me up. The coppers obviously had been here long ago looking for Kam and had left instructions to get in touch if anybody connected with him ever reappeared. While I was on hold, Trilby was probably on the line with Pigeyes, who gleefully thanked whatever idol he worshipped as soon as he heard my
