Читать книгу Klick's Shorts - Milam Smith - Страница 14

I wanted to check out something from one of the police reports so I drove my Charger over to the neighborhood station on Lancaster in the East Side of Fort Worth.

Even if I hadn’t been dressed in standard jeans and tucked-in t-shirt, I would’ve gotten the ‘look-over’ when I walked inside the station. Don’t care who you are, what you look like, if you’re not a cop and you enter a police station you get stared at as if you’re face is being compared to the Most Wanted board.

At the desk - just a metal desk like the one in my office, not the big wooden podiums like in the movies - a cop as massive as the furniture he sat behind said, “Can I help you?”

“Detective Douglass, please,” I said.

His meaty hand swallowed a cell phone he picked up. His sausage-sized fingers expertly poked the numbers. He mumbled into it.

Around me cops in uniforms milled around as if they had nothing to do. Some changing shifts, maybe, some just finished filing reports and recharging their souls before venturing back onto the mean East Side streets.

The big cop said, “He’ll be back in a minute. Have a seat, if you like.” His round fat head was topped with a flat top. I’d never thought fat guys looked good with a haircut like that, but the bulging arms and thick neck…it looked fine on him.

A brutish, blond female cop kept glancing over at me as she talked to an equally brutish cop of the opposite sex. She was trying to come off like a guy, one of the boys. I wondered if she realized how silly she looked trying to act like a man. Then another lady officer - same haircut, darker hair…maybe they had a thing going with the desk officer - joined her, handed her a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee. A cop’s always got something in their hand; donut, coffee, billy club.

Hey, I used to be a cop, so I figure I’m allowed to joke about it.

More cops came into the squad room. All of them kept glancing at me. Was it my winning frown? My brown eyes in a constant squint because I won’t wear glasses? Maybe the long shaggy black hair? Well, the hair’s really brown, but so dark it looks black.

A man stepped into the room from a back hallway door. He wore olive-green slacks, white shirt with green stripes, a tweed jacket with a lot of green and black. His black shoes were as shiny as any of the uniformed officers’.

He came right at me. Not hard to figure out I wasn’t a cop.

He stuck out his hand. I took it.

“Mr. Klick?” he asked. His hair was mostly gray with a little spray of original brown here and there. His mustache was just the opposite. “How can I help you? Captain Shinn asked that I give you what I can?”

Bobby Shinn was an old friend that went way back. Just a step or two away from making Chief…as if the Fort Worth elders would ever hire a local! Shinn really believed he had a chance at it. The fact that he knew everyone in the city, and the good and bad of their lives, probably did give him a decent shot.

“Yessir. You worked a case a couple years back, family assault. McGillicutty?”

He had turned and walked back the way he’d entered, and I’d followed. We talked as we walked through a maze to the ‘dicks’ cubicles.

He didn’t say anything until we came to the interrogation rooms. He pointed at an empty room, and I went inside, sat and waited. A couple of minutes later he came in and shut the door behind him. He sat and gave me that cop look. Outside I’d seen a passle of natty detectives chattering like housewives (after pausing to give me the once-over). As they talked they were just like you and me, ordinary. Except for the eyes. Lifeless.

The ‘cop-look’ is just an extension of the flat stare of the eyes. The whole face becomes a mask of indifference, all-knowing, unbelieving, unfeeling. Never play poker with a police detective if he’s the only dick at the table. You can’t bluff them.

Douglass handed me a folder. I leafed through it, a couple of police reports, some typed notes, and the results of a polygraph test.

“I remember Ms. McGillicutty. Right off the bat I took her for a con artist. Pretty close. But, she’d claimed her husband had assaulted her. Kind of thing we look into pretty good. Claimed to have a witness. But, she waited a whole month to file the report. No signs of any physical abuse by then. That’s usually the only reason we get into a case, if there’s any trauma physically.”

He paused. I glanced at him from time-to-time as I read the guts of the folder.

“She was insistent. Loud. So, I checked it out. Her witness’s story didn’t match. I tracked down a few people that had been at the location of the incident - a day-care center - and they didn’t have the same story, either. In fact, just about the opposite of what she claimed.

“But then Mr. McGillicutty comes in on his own. Volunteers for a polygraph test. I told him not to worry, so far his wife’s claim wasn’t panning out. But he was insistent too, only much quieter. Desperate, though. So we wired him up, asked some questions. He had a list of his own questions, unrelated to the incident, but we went ahead and tossed them at him out of order.”

When he stopped I looked up at him. He almost smiled, but his facade held up.

“He passed every question.”

“So,” I asked, ” you don’t think he’s dangerous, or violent.”

“No,” he said. Then did smile. “Just a poor sap that got taken. She divorced him afterwards. From what I understand she set him up pretty good. By the time he realized what was happening, she’d picked him clean in court.” The smile vanished. “Couldn’t use the polygraph, of course. That would’ve helped him. Damn law sucks, don’t it.”

I looked at him, slid the folder across the table. “Yeah, I used to be a cop. Know exactly what you mean.”

“Yeah, Shinn vouched for you, but of course I’d heard of you. You’re sort of talked about at the academy.”

My chest puffed up with pride. Quickly deflated, though.

Douglass said, “Yeah, you come up during driving training. You’re the only cop to wreck three cars in three weeks. Sort of a legend.” His smile now was one of arrogance. Cop rubbing an ex-cop’s face in it, the fact he was an ‘ex-‘. “An example of what not to do if you want to keep your job.”

I stood, moved to the door. I turned to him. “Yeah, but you know what?”

“What?”

“At least I don’t have to wear a jacket like that every day.”

He squinted at me as I walked away. Another burned bridge. Oh well.