Mistress

Chapter 5

I pull my motorcycle to the side of Constitution and kill the engine.

The first reported murder of a cop was in 1792 in New York in what is now the South Bronx. The perpetrator was a guy named Ryer, from a prominent farming family, who was involved in a drunken brawl at the time. Want to hear the funny part?

“How we doing tonight?” says the cop, walking over to me. I’m illuminated by the searchlight from his car, which he’s trained on me.

The funny part is that one of the police precincts in the Bronx is located on Ryer Avenue, named after that same family.

I give him my license and registration. He probably already traced my plates. He already knows who I am.

“You wanna take off your helmet, sir?”

Actually, no, I don’t. But I do it anyway. He takes a long look in my eyes. It can’t be a pretty sight.

“Do you know why I pulled you over, Mr. Casper?”

Because you can? Because you have the power to stop, frisk, search, seize, and arrest pretty much whoever you want whenever the mood strikes you? Because you’re a constipated, impotent, Napoleonic transvestite?

“I lost control back there a bit,” I concede.

“You just about caused an accident,” he says. He has a handlebar mustache. Is this cop on loan from the Village People?

I don’t favor facial hair, but even if I did, I wouldn’t shape it like a handlebar. I’d probably go with the two-day stubble Don Johnson wore in Miami Vice. That would be cool.

“You crossed the centerline three times in one block,” he says.

I decide to exercise my right against self-incrimination. And pray that he doesn’t ask me what’s in my bag-like night-vision goggles or a used smoke alarm or some rudimentary tools. Or the body frosting I took from Diana’s closet.

I need to get home. I need time to think, to figure this out.

“Have you been drinking tonight, sir?”

He’s standing pretty close to me. One of the hazards of pulling over a motorcyclist. I could reach over in jest and grab his baton or the handcuffs on his belt, maybe his holstered weapon, before he could say doughnut. He probably wouldn’t think it’s funny.

But if he gets too inquisitive, I might not be joking. I may have mentioned that sometimes I don’t trust myself.

“Sober as a priest,” I answer. Actually, my priest when I was growing up, Father Calvin, was a raging alcoholic.

“Something upsetting you tonight?” he asks.

Well, the night started off okay, when I successfully planted surveillance equipment in the home of the woman I love. It took a turn for the worse when she later plummeted to her death. HOW DOES THAT SOUND, COP?

“Fight with my girlfriend,” I explain. “Sorry about my riding. I was just a little worked up. I’m totally sober and I’ll drive home carefully. I’m on the Hill, just five minutes away.”

I can play normal when I have to. He looks me over for a while, watches my eyes, and then tells me to sit tight. He takes my license and registration back to his vehicle. He isn’t going to find anything interesting. I don’t have a criminal record-not one that he’d find, anyway.

Ulysses S. Grant was once stopped for speeding on his horse. The fine was twenty dollars and he insisted on paying it. Franklin Pierce was once arrested for hitting an old lady with his horse, but the charges were dropped.

“You’re a reporter,” the cop informs me when he returns. “The Capital Beat. I’ve read your stuff before. Thought I recognized the name.”

Actually, I’m the White House correspondent, and I also own the company. The benefits of having a wealthy grandfather. Does that mean he won’t write me a ticket?

Nope. He cites me for reckless driving and crossing the centerline. It seems duplicative to me, but now is not the time to engage in a debate about logic. I just want him to let me go, which he’s going to do, albeit with tickets for moving violations. That’s the good news. The other good news is that, in a bizarre way, this cop has calmed me down, forced me somewhere toward normal.

The bad news is that now I’ve been placed near Diana’s building within an hour of her death.