A Welcome Haunting - Part Twenty-Four
FRIDAY MORNING
Waking up was brutally painful. My midsection was stiff and my face was bruised and swollen. The ER doctor said stitches weren’t needed for the cut on the side of my face. Butterfly bandages were sufficient. He also said it’d leave a scar. My daughter said I had grape jelly on my face.
Around nine-thirty the doorman buzzed up that a police officer was coming to see me. I waited in the hallway while holding my door open. The West-Indian fellow from the District Attorney’s squad came off the elevator, looked up and down the expanse of my floor, grunted and walked towards me. He took in my condition without remark.
“Can I make you a coffee? You want a bottle of water?” I asked him.
“Coffee’s good. Light, no sugar.”
I poured his coffee from a French Press I had made 10 minutes earlier and added some half & half I never used. The cop took the coffee, drank some on the way to the living room and gave me an appreciative nod and lift of the mug as he sat down.
“Pardon the kids’ toys,” I said, waving a hand around the room to indicate what the boy and girl had left behind while I moved stuffed animals off of my usual spot on the couch.
“Please, I have three. It’s great,” he replied.
Mentioning his children was consistent with the softer demeanor I sensed as soon as he exited the elevator, certainly less menacing than when we spoke in Albany. I suspected he wouldn’t be tapping me in the chest to make a point this time. I doubted I would be able to stay conscious if he did.
“So,” he started, “my boss says you’re no longer a suspect. In fact, he says you’re not to be bothered about anything without his express permission.”
“I don’t know how to respond to that news so I think I won’t other than to share that I hope ‘anything’ is to be construed expansively.”
“In the broadest sense possible is the tone I picked up on, though I would caution you that arrangements like this come up for review fairly often.”
He sat for a minute with his coffee and his thoughts. He was wondering how much to share with me, weighing the risk of telling too much against the value of making a new friend. Or he was just enjoying the living room. Or it was a mix of both with the domesticity vouching on some level for my decency.
“This is quite the change since we last spoke,” he went on. “There aren’t many arrangements like yours these days. I am told that there used to be more of them but as folks retire or die or move away they’re not replaced like they used to be.”
“I’m nothing special,” I confessed truthfully.
“It could be that you’re not, I don’t really know you. Maybe I will get to, maybe I won’t. That’ll be mostly up to you. But what I’m trying to say here is that the way my boss talked about you this morning is how he talks about people he needs to treat well. It’s not a friendship thing. It’s not about liking or even caring about the person. It’s more like a fact of nature, like accepting gravity or the seasons. No sense in begrudging those things, they’re just facts. Now accommodating you is one of those facts.”
“Someone very smart told me that your guy was the referee in this thing I just went through,” I shared. “He had calls to make and he made them. Please tell him no hard feelings.”
“Will do,” he said standing up. He went into the kitchen and left the coffee cup in the sink, walked over to the front door and turned to where I was still sitting.
“If you need something from our office, call me at this number.” He held up a business card in a half salute before placing it on a tea table near the door. “If I don’t pick up, just leave your name and number, never a message and never anything about what you need.”
“Thanks for coming by.”
“Any chance you’ll tell me what happened to you?” he asked.
“Tripped on one of the toys, slammed into the wall unit and then hit my head on the floor.”
“Well, call me if you think you may be tripping over any more toys or slamming into any more wall units.”
“I’ll try to.”
He pulled the door shut behind him. I heard an elevator come to take him away. I stood up stiffly and moved to look far down out the window behind the couch. My new friend exited the building and out onto the street back towards the District Attorney’s office two blocks away.
The effort required to stay focused and together for even that brief exchange left me wincing in pain and spent. I took three painkillers, grabbed my phone and headphones and set myself up on the couch, listening to a playlist of Dylan, Amy Winehouse, Townes Van Zandt, Dr. John and early Clapton. When I felt the pills kick in I settled my spine deeper into the couch and slowly drifted off.
A sober thought forced its way through the haze of narcotics and music just as I was about to fall asleep - there was something I still wasn’t seeing and I needed a fresh set of eyes to find it.