The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  VI.

  “IF YOU CAN WAIT just literally one second, Mr. Schacht.” Officer Pontecorvo said this, the phone pressed against her honey-colored neck. I never learned her first name. She’s the evening desk officer at the Second Precinct, which is where the cops who look after my sleepy neighborhood have their base of operations. Officer Pontecorvo was, on the day I went there, just one member of a color-specked crowd of people in the precinct’s entrance area. They wore suits, they wore coveralls, they wore glaring print dresses. They filled the pews lining the walls or stood near the armpit-high desk behind which Officer Pontecorvo perched like a scribe. She was young, olive-skinned. Kind of hot. Her dark cap covered massive tresses of darker hair. I stood at her high desk with a dry mouth, and she flicked her eyes, one swift up-and-down, as I explained my (stupid) problem. She did that a lot, you could tell: sum up and dismiss men with a single glance. She was nice about it, though.

  The Second Precinct house is, in a word, kind of awesome. I had walked there from the Tip-Top, where I left Digger and my car. I use my car for business, so I figure the less the police know about it, the better. It’s distinctive, and you can never tell what’s going to stick in some cop’s mind. I think they teach you to notice stuff like that in the academy. Don’t get me wrong, though. Unlike most people my age, and despite my occupation, I have no real problem with cops. They seem to lead a pretty good life. With all the excitement of private technical terms and paraphernalia. And they do provide a vital service, for all of their visible fuckups. There were actual cop cars here. And actual cops. Paunchy cops, thin cops, men and women, strutting around with that hip-shot pride particular to gunwearers. I envied them, to be honest. They conducted themselves without any hesitance. This calmed me. The precinct itself looked like the synagogue (Temple Emunah; wispy-voiced Reform) my father and I attended once every three or four years: blond brick, low and spread out. A lot of windows. I didn’t expect that. A milk-pale man with two Bozo-the-Clownish protuberances of gray hair sprawled and slept on a pew, right inside the front door, his blue nylon pants exposing the last eighteen white inches of his shins. That much I remember.

  Going to the cops at all had been Digger’s idea. She hadn’t believed me at first when I told her, still sprawled in the cooling bed, that Lorriner had threatened to kill me. We were both pretty high, and naked. My hard-on hadn’t even wilted. I had difficulty believing the fact of the call myself. I mean, he was just some hick idiot, right? That’s how it looked to me: he was overresponding to my accusation out of fear. I mean, if some stranger called you up and accused you of murder, what would you do? But she insisted and insisted. She got so angry when I tried to shrug it off. I think, also, she was kind of pissed about the sex being interrupted. Although she would never admit anything like that.

  So I agreed to go, “as soon as we come down.” A not-terrible idea. I mean, we hadn’t done anything wrong. But I had an amendment of my own. I didn’t want to go in without some cover story. So I proposed telling them that I wanted to do an oral history project about Kevin, the same lie I had offered our teachers. I’d tell them this at first, and then, once I’d gained their confidence, cleverly let slip what I knew about Lorriner. Digger accepted that compromise. We even stopped off at the Tip-Top on the way. I managed to eat one limp slice of toast, and Digger rammed down a Tip-Top Deluxe in under a minute. The grill man, this Stalin-mustached guy, abandoned his suspicious apathy to shoot her an admiring glare. We parted with a singlepump handshake, in token of greater sobrieties and successes to come. “Should be back in like an hour,” I muttered professionally. Stalin Mustache returned to scraping carbonized fat off the iron horizon of his griddle.

  “No, hang on.” Officer Pontecorvo was now laughing at the person on the other line, her index finger in the air instructing me to be patient. “Yeah, I got this guy with an unusual request. Addison Schacht, he says his name is. Uh-huh.” To me, now, her brow darkening: “You said oral history, right?”

  “Yes, that’s basically it. I read Lieutenant Huang’s name in the paper?”

  “I mean, I’m sure he’d like to help you. But I don’t know how much he can say.” Sweet and assuaging. Her nails, painted white, had little enamel palm trees on them, and I knew she was going to hang up and kick me out. So I started to beg. Subtly. Using this wounded, sort of childish voice. It goes with the face Digger was talking about.

  “No, I understand that. I understand that. But if you’ll just … ma’am, it’s like I just need—” And here she interrupted.

  “Please don’t say that. Ma’am. I’m too young.”

  I licked my lips. She laughed again, at my obvious discomfort, and started explaining over the phone to the lieutenant.

  “Yeah, I know it’s unusual. Yeah, I know. I know about the dinner. Yeah, I’m sorry. He seems normal,” she told her interlocutor. “Yeah, yeah, in back. I’ll send him back. No, I won’t. He says it’s for school. Right? No, I told him that. No, I told him that already. Okay. Okay. Yes. I owe you a bucket of chicken. All right? And a six-pack. It’s agreed.” And she hung up. And winked and grinned at me in self-amusement. Her teeth were flawless.

  “Go wait in there, down the hall,” she said, hooking a thumb. “Where all the desks are. He’ll see you. Don’t worry.” This isn’t actually happening, I muttered in my head. That’s how foreign even small-scale fake success is to me.

  In there was a big bullpen filled with partition-fenced desks. Some bank office, or wherever telemarketers work: that’s how it looked. Green baize, photos of children, their tacked-up artwork. Except that it was empty of people. Phones went off and agitated murmurs from the receiving dock filtered back to me. There was a small square filth-specked mirror near the entranceway, and by making dainty leaps and spine contortions, walking toward it and away, I was able to get an image of my whole gestalt. I’d put on my holiday suit, lawyer-black, for the occasion, and a tie I’d swiped from my father’s closet. Also, for some reason, I was carrying a briefcase with nothing in it, this old narrow-gauge black leather attaché my father discarded when I was eleven, and which seemed to me the height of aesthetic magnificence then. Scars of use dented all its edges, and its vertices had been blunted by handling. I know now that I looked like a gawky, underfed idiot, someone über-insignificant. But I managed to convince myself then I looked pretty goddamn impressive. I accomplished this legerdemain in a few seconds and was sitting at one of the desks furiously scratching my balls sub rosa when Lieutenant Huang arrived.

  I should, by rights, still carry a real animus toward Huang. He bears no small responsibility for the dramatic subsequent course of my life. Which presented many new and unpleasant complications. Those of you who live in a less absurd city than D.C. will have a hard time granting any credence to what follows. I don’t blame you. First of all—and let’s be honest—I sound like an asshole. I know that. I mean, I haven’t ever had a real job or fathered a child, or even gone to college. I’ve only fucked one girl. I still believe—though I haven’t done much achieving in this department—that you should fuck as many women as possible. Admitting this will negatively influence your decision about me. But I can’t help believing it. I also know all these qualities mark me out as someone free of experience. And that my writing leaves a lot to be desired, because it pretends to be experienced. How else am I supposed to write, though? Despite these vitiating factors, you have to believe me. About my interaction with the cops, I mean. I mention this now because, in retrospect, a little more professionalism on my part that day would have spared everyone involved in this retarded story a number of painful and lasting memories. Though they say life is meaningless without painful memories. Dubious.

  I have no problem admitting that Huang makes quite an entrance. A tall man with bulky shoulders carried high and clenched, striding squeakily down the linoleum floor. His close-cut dark hair gleamed like a pelt, scattered with gray. He seemed to be looking over my left shoulder, and his mouth was already open for forceful speech.
A golden incisor glinted.

  “Are you Addison? I’m James Huang. We’re going right over here.” How could I refuse that? We left the telemarketer pen for a long, blazingly lit hall, passing room after room, one echoing with the fuzzed shouts of television, and came out in another large open space. A lecture room. Student desks filled it. You know: hard ceramic-and-aluminum setups, chairs with a swooping tiny desk attached to one side. They’re almost impossible to turn around in. There was a dust-patched blackboard, too, on the same wall as the door, which all the desks faced. “Right over here, Addison. Have a seat.” Huang remained standing.

  “Thanks,” I chirped. Huang was already speaking again, though.

  “Hey, Baltimore? Baltimore? You wanna sit in? You wanna sit in on this? Addison, this is Sergeant Baltimore. Addison comes to us from Kennedy. He wants to talk to us about the Broadus killing. You were classmates?” he asked me. Another cop hooked himself around the steel jamb of the entrance. He was younger than Huang, rectilinear of build, dark skinned.

  “Yes, sir. Class of two thousand. I mean, he would have been class of two thousand. I’m doing a kind of a project?”

  They stood there eyeing me from their separate positions, like a vaudeville team. I had no idea what to say. So I didn’t say anything. Huang waited before speaking, looking (it seemed) at each separate part of my face, noting each element. I admired his craft.

  “Well, Addison, I’d like to help you. I know how disturbing it is, something like this. I have a daughter that age. Your age. So I know.” Baltimore was flicking through a stack of papers he’d brought with him, his fingers swift and certain. “And I’d like to help you with your project.” Huang was grinning, flashing me his incisor again. “I’d like to. The thing is, Addison, I assume you got my name from that article? I’ve gotten a lot of calls because of that. I don’t know Arch Sexton. Personally, I don’t know him. But I think he was unfair to us. I think he made us look like we weren’t doing our jobs.” He worked something out a dental crevice with his tongue. I could see its motions through the skin of his cheek.

  “No, sir, I don’t think that at all.” I poured as much saccharine assurance into my voice as I could muster.

  “Okay, fine, that’s fine. Whatever. I don’t want to seem unfriendly,” Huang continued. Baltimore stopped shuffling papers, his hands poised and pincered. “I know how upsetting events like this are. But we are working. The investigation is ongoing. And because it’s ongoing, there’s not much I can say to you about it. About Kevin. Do you understand? Legally I can’t say anything to you. Does that make sense?” asked Huang.

  “I mean, do you guys have like a system for that? For privacy and things like that? Like with priests?” This slipped out, but I actually liked how stupid it sounded, hanging in the still air of the lecture room.

  “Do we have like a system? I’m not sure what you’re asking. There are procedural rules that forbid me to tell you anything. It’s just a simple matter of protecting the people involved with the investigation. Of protecting their privacy. So I suppose we have a system, yes. But it’s not like priest-penitent. Do you know what I mean by that? It’s not codified.”

  I nodded. My I’m just a dumbass kid act was working. Huang’s speech was couched in a tone of friendly concern, despite the stony clarity of his eyes. As though I were asking him for some confusing but reasonable favor. “You want some coffee?” Huang drummed one heel while he spoke, which made all the metal on his person jangle.

  “No, I’m not like the biggest fan of coffee. Although I drink it a lot. That’s not like a position of criticism or anything.”

  “Well, in that case,” murmured Huang, through his clinkings, “I think we’re pretty much clear here, yes?” Baltimore made an affirmative noise deep in his throat. “So since we’re clear—I mean about the fact that I can’t talk to you, Addison, and I don’t mean to sound unfriendly here; I would not want you to get that impression—but since we’re clear I think we should probably just stop this before it gets into legally murky areas. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Well, it’s like sort of like an involved situation,” I offered, my eyes narrowed in fake confidence. Then I added, “And I wanted to like make you aware of it. I wanted to do this project. It’s not about the crimes. It’s about Kevin. As a personal thing. Just about your opinions. An interview.” You know that voice you use when you’re instructing a bellhop? I had it now.

  “An interview.” Huang sighed, dropping his heavy lip over the golden incisor. Baltimore rotated himself into the desk next to me, sprawling forward to speak: “We’re not trying to hurt your chances in school. But we just can’t talk to you.” Having said this he flicked his (extremely cool-looking, bottle-green with a gray ovoid feather) fedora back from his forehead. I flinched away at the movement and flushed at my own cowardice.

  Ladies and gentlemen, you have to hand it to the cops of my city. They had not, in three months, made any visible progress on apprehending Kevin’s killer. But they had their script, to deal with questions, and it flowed with such inarguable smoothness. Looked at objectively, I had no rights in this situation. I knew that. I mean, how can you force a cop to do something he doesn’t want to? He’s the cop; he has the gun, and the whole dreary edifice of the law behind him. It’s like in school. You can’t get anything done with brute force. You have to be clever. “Now, if you’ll just step this way, Addison, Sergeant Baltimore here will show you out. I’m sorry that we can’t be more helpful to you.” Huang had moved closer to me as he spoke. Not threatening. Just maybe to point out that I was on shaky ground here. He must have been about six-foot-six, and I was sitting. His suit jacket shifted as he moved, enough for me to see the brown leather of his armpit holster. Baltimore grinned in horrible and horrifying intimacy and adjusted with two fingers the crown of his green hat. I could smell their mingled colognes.

  Sometimes you have to commit yourself to a next, more atrocious step in order to escape. That was the essence of my plan. Talk my way in, and then really dig myself into the shit. You marry somebody, maybe, to avoid an unpleasant breakup conversation with them. Right? I mean, I don’t know from experience, but that doesn’t seem totally implausible. I didn’t think of it this way until much later. I mean that I’d set in motion something I had no hope of controlling. At the time I felt über-slick, like a goddamn spy. I had no intention of going back to Digger empty-handed, which she would blame me for, since I’d explained my plan to her. Some plans you need to keep quiet, because their failure will result in humiliation. Huang and Baltimore stooped like careful vultures over me, smelling of sandalwood and salt. I knew it was time to deploy the second part of my plan. I grinned. I was really about to lay something on them. They both smiled back, taking my grin for a sign of acquiescence.

  So I told them what Noel had said. To justify my presence there. Not a lie. But the repetition of what I suspected might be a lie. Where’s the harm in that, right? Right into Baltimore’s hat and Huang’s gleaming grin, right into them, I said, “I think like I may have found this guy who has something to do with the Broadus case. Like with an uninvestigated aspect. That’s kind of why I wanted to do this project. To find out. I thought maybe it could help, too.” I used the words uninvestigated aspect and case for the gloss of insider knowledge they bestowed. This immediately made things much worse than I could have imagined. Or maybe “could have admitted.” That’s a truer way of putting it.

  It did make them perk up, at least. Both of them, in perfect sync. I might have just said, “Fuck you.” Or called Baltimore THE N-WORD. Or something else unthinkable according to our social conventions. But it stunned them. Just for a second, though. Huang was the first to recover.

  “Addison. Uh, I’m going to need you to tell me a bit more about your sources on this. Do you know this guy? Lorriner? Have you seen him?”

  “Well, it’s more of a like conjecture.”

  “Well, yes, but I still need the name of the person who provided you with
this information,” Huang purred.

  “I can’t give you that. He asked me not to. He only told me because I promised to keep him out of it.” If Noel found out I had mentioned his name to the cops, he’d have David beat the shit out of me. And worse: he’d cut off my supply.

  “Okay, well, then, in that case I’m afraid we’re just going to have to treat it as useless. I’m sorry, but we can’t just accept speculation. Do you have any idea how many cranks we’ve gotten? On this case, particularly. I shouldn’t even be telling you that. But we have to have some reason to follow up. Is your friend in a position to know? And if so, why would he be?” Huang had his large, bony hands spread out now. Baltimore was looking through his papers again, sitting next to me. I could feel the small wind they kicked up as he riffled them. I had no answer. Huang kept talking.

  “Addison. I have a daughter your age, like I said. And I understand how upsetting things like this can be. But I also know how it is. I mean to be your age. You want to help. You rush into things. You’re making a very, very serious accusation here. You’re accusing someone of murder. And you won’t even tell us the name of the person who passed along this accusation to you. What are we supposed to do with this? Huh?” He was breathing a little harder now. His nostrils had gone pale, and they were contracting and dilating. I was starting to feel sort of afraid now, to be honest. But I had to go on, right? I mean, I’d started this whole thing.

  After a slurp of air, I repeated what seemed to me one of my most genius phrases: “I just wanted to offer some insight into what I think has been an uninvestigated aspect of the case.”