Cops and Robbers

Joe

I don’t know why, for some reason I’d been pissed off all day. It had started right from the time I got out of bed this morning. If Grace hadn’t avoided me, we would have had us a good old-fashioned fight, because I was really in the mood for it.

Then the car, and the traffic, none of that helped. And the heat. It felt good telling Tom about the liquor store, a thing I’d been bottling up inside me for a couple weeks, but a little while after I told him and we’d stopped talking about it I was in a rotten mood again. Only now I had something to hook onto, because I just kept thinking about that comfortable bastard in his air-conditioned Cadillac out there on the Long Island Expressway this morning. I was sorry I hadn’t ticketed him for something; anything. I hated the idea that somebody was better off than me.

For me, the best way to work off a mad is to drive. Not in that stop-and-go traffic like on the Expressway this morning; that just makes things worse. But in ordinary traffic, where I can move, use my skills. I get behind the wheel, I push it a little hard, win some contests, and pretty soon I feel better. So I volunteered to drive today, and my partner, Paul Goldberg, just shrugged and said it was fine with him. Which I knew he would; he has no feeling for cars, Paul. He’d rather I drove all the time, so he could sit beside me and chew gum. I never saw anybody in my life who could chew so much gum. He went through Chiclets like kids through Kleenex.

He’s a couple years younger than me, Paul is, and slender and wiry, with more strength than he looks. His name is Goldberg, but he looks Italian. He has that curly kind of black hair, and an olive complexion, and those big brown doe eyes the chicks love so much. He’s a bachelor, and I guess he makes out pretty good with the women. He ought to, given his looks and potential. I don’t know for sure; I hinted around a couple of times, but he never talked about his personal life while we were on patrol together. Which was only fair, since I never talked about mine either.

On the other hand, what kind of personal life does a married man with kids have to talk about?

We did a little driving around the neighborhoods to begin with today, but it wasn’t the kind of movement I needed to unload the irritable feeling in my chest. It was also too hot for mooching along down side streets; what we needed was to be where we could move fast enough to create a breeze for ourselves, keep ourselves a little cooled off. Me, especially, keep me cooled off.

So I headed us west over 79th Street and got on the Henry Hudson Parkway northbound. Way up ahead you could see the George Washington Bridge. On our left was the Hudson River, looking better than it really is, and across on the other side New Jersey. There were little puffs of white cloud in the blue sky, boats of different sizes were on the river, and even the city, off to our right, looked clean in the sunlight. For looking at, it was a really nice day. Of course, you can’t see humidity, or a temperature in the high eighties.

I got off the Parkway at 96th Street and hit the neighborhoods again for a while. Now I was having second thoughts about telling Tom about the liquor store. Could I really trust him? What if he told somebody else, what if the word got around? Sooner or later it would reach the Captain, once it got started, and if that ever happened I was finished. The 15th Precinct had a couple of very hairy Captains for a while, guys who were in on the take, guys you could have bought off on a baby rape with a bottle of Scotch, but the boom got lowered all of a sudden, on the Captain we had at the time and also the one who’d been there before him and was assigned some place else and about to retire, and they both got their heads handed to them. Now we had a Captain who was out to make King of the Angels; spit on the sidewalk off duty and he’d write you up. Think what he’d do to a patrolman who held up a liquor store while driving his beat.

But Tom wouldn’t say anything, he’d have more sense than that. I could trust him; that’s why I’d told him. And face it, I’d had to tell somebody, I couldn’t keep it tied up inside me much longer. Sooner or later I’d have told somebody like Grace, for God’s sake, and Grace would never in a million years understand. With Tom, no matter what else he might think, I knew he’d understand.

And keep his mouth shut. Right?

Christ, I hoped so.

I was really feeling bugged. Frustrated and irritable and about ready to punch somebody in the mouth. I’d been having days like this every once in a while for the last few months, and I didn’t know what to do about them, how to deal with them. Except wait them out, wait for it all to go away, which sooner or later it always did.

Down on 72nd Street, I went over to the Parkway again. Paul had tried starting a couple of conversations, but I didn’t feel like talking. I’d come close, a few times in the last week, to telling Paul about the liquor store, but I didn’t really know Paul as well as I knew Tom, I didn’t have that same sense of closeness with him. And now that I’d told Tom, I didn’t want to tell anyone else at all. Or talk to anyone else at all. In fact, part of me was sorry I’d talked to Tom.

We got back up on the Parkway, and rolled along. The air was a little better over the river, and the motion of the car made a breeze that at least blew the stink off. My mood was picking up.

Then I spotted the white Cadillac Eldorado up ahead, moving right along. It was the same model as the one this morning, but a different color. I saw him up there, looking so cute and arrogant and rich, and all the bile came right back into me again, stronger than ever.

I eased up on him and saw he had New York plates. Good. If I gave him a ticket he couldn’t be a scofflaw, fade away into some other state and thumb his nose at me. He’d have to pay up or have a mess on his hands when it came time to renew his license.

I clocked him a mile, and he was doing fifty-four. Good enough.

“I’m taking the Caddy,” I said.

I guess Paul had been half-asleep, sitting there in the silence next to me. He sat up straighter and looked ahead and said, “The what?”

“That white Caddy.”

Paul studied the Cad, and raised his eyebrows at me. “How come?”

“I feel like it. He’s doing fifty-four.”

I hit the dome light, but not the siren. He could see me, he wouldn’t need a lot of noise. He slowed right away, and I crowded him off onto the shoulder.

Paul said, “You cut him a little close there.”

“He should of braked harder.” I looked at Paul, waiting for him to say something else, but all he did was shrug, as though to say he didn’t care, it wasn’t his business — which it wasn’t — so I got out of the car and went back to talk to the driver of the Cad.

He was about forty, with those pop-eyes called thyroid. He was wearing a suit and a tie, and when I went back to talk to him he opened his window by pushing a button. I asked to see his license and registration, and stood there a long time reading them, waiting for him to start a conversation. His name was Daniel Mossman, and he leased the Cad from a company in Tarrytown. And he didn’t have anything to say for himself at all. I said, “You know the speed limit along this stretch, Dan?”

“Fifty,” he said.

“You know what speed I clocked you at, Dan?”

“I believe I was doing about fifty-five.” There was no expression in his voice, nothing in his face, and those pop-eyes just looked at me like a fish.

I said, “What do you do for a living, Dan?”

“I’m an attorney,” he said.

An attorney. He couldn’t even say lawyer. I was twice as irritable as before. I went back to the patrol car and got behind the wheel, holding Mossman’s license and registration.

Paul looked over at me, and rubbed his thumb and finger together. “Anything?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’m giving the bastard a ticket.”