“Stop it!” I shouted.
A male voice I couldn’t place said, “Open the door. Now.”
“Oh, I’ll open it, scumbag.”
I undid the chain and four locks, and as I ripped that door open, I raised the bat to shoulder level, aiming to score a homer with this bastard’s head.
It was a guy in a gray suit and polished shoes. Sunglasses. Short hair. A wedding band on his finger that he twirled without realizing it.
“Detective Van Buren,” he said. “Remember me?”
“I’ve tried not to,” I said. “Leave me alone.”
“You want to put that bat down?”
“No,” I said.
“I can make you.”
“Have it your own way.”
He didn’t make a move. He was smart.
“What the fuck do you want, cop? You woke me up.”
“It’s two-thirty in the afternoon, Higgins. What happened to your precious job serving gruel at that hellhole on Main Street?”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“I won’t be doing that today,” he said, smirking.
“Is this what you came here for? To wake me up? To joust with me? I don’t have time for this shit.”
“I think you do,” he said. “I think you have plenty of time to talk to me.”
“Sorry, I don’t think I do.”
“We can do it here, or we can do it at the station.”
“Listen, son, I’ve been hearing that line longer than you’ve been alive, arright? Don’t give me that shit.”
“Listen, Higgins …”
“No, you listen, cop, I don’t know what you want, but you’re seriously fucking up the Zen-like flow of my day here, and you can’t really talk to a man when he’s holding a baseball bat, so get the hell off my porch.”
I went to slam the door in his face, but he put his foot in the doorway. The door bounced off of it and swung back open.
“You don’t have a porch,” Van Buren said.
“Oh, you’re cute,” I said, surprised at his audacity. “You must be handicapped, like, mentally, to pull that shit on me.”
“You scuffed my shoe, Mr. Higgins. I’m not happy with that.”
“Drop dead, lawman.”
“You’re going to hear me out whether you like it or not,” he said.
“I already don’t like it.”
“How about you let me in. We can talk like gentlemen.”
“I don’t think so. Move your foot and write me a letter. The building number’s on the door.”
I made a move like I was going to slam the door again, but his foot didn’t budge, and I wasn’t about to wail on a cop unless he swung first. So it seemed we were at an impasse, as Proust would say. I couldn’t crack his head open without feeling provoked, and he couldn’t come in or pull me out to talk to me unless he saw a table behind me covered in cocaine and plutonium. But why did he want to talk to me? Was it for something I’d done at some point? Something they suspected me of? Whatever it was, there wasn’t enough proof around for this cop to get too fresh with me.
“Arright,” I said, “I have a serious fucking headache, man.
What’s it going to take for you to go away?”
“A few minutes of your time.”
“Is this about the other night?”
“Not quite….”
“The Indian?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Let me in.”
“Fine, you fucking …”
“Now lose the bat.”
I turned and threw the bat back into the house. It landed on the couch, bounced, then rolled across the floor. I turned back to the cop.
“Happy, asshole?”
“Yes,” he said.
He looked like he was about a hundred and sixty pounds. A lightweight. Grandmothers would describe him as “slight.” If I’d ever seen him on the street, I’d have dismissed him as a twerp.
In the blink of an eye, this little bastard bum-rushed me, right in my own home, and I let him do it by ditching that damn bat. One of his hands came up quick and locked around my face. The other hand pressed into my sternum, and he ran into me and pushed me all the way back into the house. We fell into the recliner, and the recliner tipped back and over. When the dust cleared, the cop was still on top of me, and he’d somehow slipped a pair of meat hooks on me.
“You fucker,” I hissed. “Get these fucking things off of me. Now.”
“I told you I’d make you lose the bat,” he said, smiling. “Idiots like you always think the same. They expect violence because that’s all they know. How to be a goddamn brute. It’s that limitation that makes you all so fucking stupid.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s why criminals get caught.”
“Get these cuffs off me.”
“And that’s why scumbags like you always make a mistake.”
“I’m going to have your fucking shield for this, man. What the fuck is this about? What are you talking about?”
He got up, put his foot on my chest as if I were a big game trophy and someone was about to take a picture. “Pearce was my partner, Higgins.”
“Good for you!” I yelled. “What do you want? A medal?”
“We worked together for a long time.”
“This is police brutality, man.”
“That’s what this is about,” he said. “About Pearce.”
I forced myself to calm down a little, then said, “Fine.”
“Good,” he said.
“Good. Can I get off the fucking floor now?”
“No.”
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Well, fuck you, cop. You come in here, you wake me up, you attack me, you break into my home and take me fucking hostage. And now I can’t even smoke in my own home. That’s it, man. It’s on.”
He came down fast and wrapped a hand around my throat. “Shut up, you fucking worm,” he grumbled. “This isn’t your home no more, you hear me? Now shut up. You say one more word, I’ll bury that bat in your butt.”
I couldn’t answer him because he was strangling me. It was probably for the best.
“Pearce was my partner, but more than that, he was my friend.
He was my little kid’s godfather. Why? Because he was a good man. The best man in this goddamn town. I know that. Everyone that ever met him knew that. In another day and age, he would’ve been the one to nail Capone or some shit like that. He was a good man and a good cop. And now he’s dead. So I have to ask myself, if he was such a great guy, what was he doing spending time with a piece of trash like you?”
He eased up on my throat long enough for me to hack out, “Baking cookies.”
A slap across the left side of my face stunned me.
“Marlowe Higgins. I pulled your record, you know. You’re not an upstanding citizen, but there have been worse. But scumbags like you are sneaky, like worms.” He got up off me and set up the recliner. Took a seat in it. “It alarms me that there are so many gaps in your activity. So many years without paying your taxes and whatnot, without having a residence, a paper trail. What were you doing?”
“I was going door to door for the Mormons.”
“I always wondered what Pearce was doing, wasting his time with a piece of trash like you. When he told me, uh, quite a while back that you and he were acquaintances, I honestly thought he was full of shit, because, hey, everyone on the force had heard of you. You’re the guy with the mean right hook, right?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” I said.
“I followed him one night. Again, no time recently, but quite a while ago. I couldn’t even tell you when. And when I followed him, he drove right to that shitty little diner you got fired from …”
“It ain’t a fucking diner, man….”
“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up already, Higgins. You’ll have your time to talk, and with any luck, it’ll be from behind bars or over a fucking hole dug for you. He drove to that shitty diner, and, hell, he actually ordered a cup of that muck you people call coffee, and he talked to you. I could not believe what I was seeing. I have to admit, it got me worried, my partner socializing with a connie like you. Goddamn, I was worried he was taking drugs out of evidence for you, but guess what’s missing from your rap sheet?”