Cop in shotgun: “Too bad about that.”
“Just where are we headed, anyway?” I said.
“Newton Community Police Station.”
On impulse, I pulled out my cell and shot a text to Ephraim Freiburger, aka Double Fry, my lawyer and best bud.
headed for newton station
emergency could use your help
I stared at the cell for the rest of the ride and got no answer. I couldn’t get the image of Hawley’s gashed head out of my own head as we parked in the middle of a fleet of black-and-whites and walked into the grimmest-looking civic building on Planet Earth. And it bugged me that they dragged me along—I had already told two cops at the scene why I’d been there. But when the LAPD says ride, you ride. The station waiting room was a kind of decrepit antechamber with two very old wooden benches and an oblong standing reception desk. A cop in uniform watched me register. He said, “Please take a seat. Officer Lanterman will speak to you shortly.”
I sat on the bench. The clerk behind the desk busied himself playing Angry Birds on his cell. Beside me, a couple, homeless looking, were excoriating their toddler for having a tantrum.
“Quiet,” the father said, “you get us in trouble.”
But by the looks of them, they were in trouble enough already.
After an interminable hour, I got up and asked Mr. Angry Birds what the holdup was.
“We need to get all relevant reports before we can let anyone go. Please have a seat.”
I grumbled and returned to the bench. About a half hour later, a new officer stepped out and called me to the desk. He introduced himself as Officer Lanterman. He was tall with a razz of jet-black cropped hair, and he seemed majorly pissed off for no reason I could make out, other than maybe facing urban blight for a living.
“If you’d step inside, I can take your full report.”
“Okay,” I said. “But for the record, I just gave a full report. Isn’t it in the system?”
“We would like our own report—for our own purposes.”
“What purpose is that?”
He bristled. “Mr. Zantz, my understanding is you discovered the victim?”
“Well, yeah, and I’m happy to cooperate,” I said. “I’m just trying to, like, find out what happened to the first report I gave.”
“Do you want to spend the night in lockup for breaking and entering?”
“No, of course not, I just—” I raised hands. “Look, if I’d have done anything crazy, would I have called the police?”
“Sir, you are a material witness to a violent crime, and I’m going to need you to give us a complete deposition. Tonight.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I just want to make sure that this isn’t leading to some kind of arrest. Because if I need to call my attorney—”
As if by divine providence, in sauntered Double Fry, unshaven in a blue Marina del Rey sweatshirt, OP shorts, flip-flops, and Grateful Dead knitted yarmulke dangling off his curly-haired head.
“My client has been waiting for me,” Fry said, in bluff mode supreme. “Anything he has said prior to my presence was spoken under duress and will have to be considered inadmissible.”
Lanterman sighed the sigh of city officials. He had us pegged for a couple of hipsters, wayward arts ‘n’ culture types, and it made him sore.
“Please step inside, gentlemen. So we can all get this over with before midnight?” His slightly agitated insouciance was there to intimidate—and I was intimidated. I turned to Fry, who nodded, and we were on our way.
“What’s happening here?” Fry whispered in the hall.
“I found a guy that got brained,” I said.
“On a job?”
I didn’t have time to answer. Lanterman led us to an open office with five or six desks, all occupied by cops doing intake. As we grabbed seats and Lanterman cracked his laptop, I felt the closing off of breath, the first flashes of panic, and silently posed a question I have often asked myself: Why are some people just so naturally menacing? Why do some seethe in a way that makes you tremble without ever knowing why? Lanterman and I were about the same age, probably from the same city, the same world; we probably grew up hearing all the same songs on the radio. But unlike me, he hadn’t been taken in—not by the melodies and definitely not by the lyrics, those flighty matters of the heart. No, his grip on the facts had not been loosened.
“Ohh-kay,” he said, clicking away at some form. “Let’s start at the beginning. How do you know Mr. Hawley.”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t.”
“Ah. Then what was your business at the shop this evening.”
I looked at Fry who stared right back at me.
I spoke carefully. “I was doing a favor for a family friend. Hawley had visited this friend recently. At his nursing home. And…and Hawley promised a return visit. And when he didn’t show, my friend got worried. And wanted me to see if he was okay.”
I skipped a few details—the thirty-year-old murder case and the nine one-hundred-dollar bills in my pocket.
“I see,” Lanterman said, with a little ring of dissatisfaction. “So you were doing a favor. For an elderly person.”
I shrugged. “That’s right. A family friend.”
Lanterman’s saturnine look said he didn’t buy it. “And what is the name of this…family friend?”
