“Show me.” He took me back inside with him. The hunting knife had disappeared; when I pointed to the spot on the floor where I’d dropped it, the cop said, “That’s where I found this,” and held up the steak knife again. “Are you sure this isn’t it?”
“Of course I’m sure,” I said, annoyed. “The janitor must have hidden the real knife before he came outside.” Then I remembered the toolbox: “Wait a minute…This way!”
I led him into the garage and around to the back of the van. “In there,” I said. “You’ll probably need his keys…” But the van’s back doors were unlocked now. The cop pulled them open.
“So,” he said, “what am I supposed to be looking at?”
The back of the van was empty. No blanket, no plastic sheeting, no luggage straps, no toolbox.
“Damn it!” I said. “He must have hidden this stuff, too.”
“What stuff?”
“His kidnapping equipment.”
“Equipment, huh?” The cop’s expression changed, in a way I didn’t like. “And you think he gathered up this…equipment…and hid it away just as we were arriving?”
“The stuff was here before, and now it’s gone. So yeah. What’s your problem?”
“No problem. It’s just, he must have been moving awfully fast, don’t you think?”
“Look, I’m not making this up.”
“I didn’t say you were making it up. Why would I think you were making it up?”
I should have just shut my mouth then. The thing was, he was right—the janitor would have had to move quickly, which meant he couldn’t have hidden the stuff very well. I’m sure I could have found it.
But the cop was giving me the same I-see-through-your-bullshit look that Officer Friendly had—only not, you know, so friendly—so not only did I keep on running my mouth, but I immediately brought up the one subject you never mention when you’re trying to get somebody to believe you.
“Take a whiff,” I said.
“A whiff?”
“Inside the van. Smell it.”
He leaned in and sniffed. “Air freshener?”
“Pot.”
His eyebrows went up. “Marijuana?”
“The janitor smokes it.”
“Really. You’d never guess that, looking at him.”
“Not to get high,” I said. “I mean, that too, but he smokes it to excite himself. Before…”
“Oh! Before he uses his kidnapping equipment, you mean…And you’re familiar with the smell of marijuana, are you?”
It was a fast trip downhill from there. The more skeptical he became, the more I talked—when he asked me what had put me on to the janitor in the first place, I actually told the truth, or at least enough of it to make myself sound like a complete idiot. “Monkey noises, eh? Well, I can see why you’d be suspicious of a man who made noises like a monkey…”
To complete my humiliation, he brought me back outside and asked Carlotta whether she knew anything about these monkey noises. “Monkey what?” said Carlotta.
“That’s what I thought,” said the cop, and told his buddies to turn the janitor loose.
My mouth wouldn’t stop running: “You’re letting him go?”
“You should be worried about whether I’m going to let you go,” the cop said. “If this gentleman wants to press charges against you for trespassing, I’ll be only too happy to run you in.”
But the janitor, still playing the innocent, said he didn’t want to press charges—he just wanted to know what was going on.
“Just a big misunderstanding, sir,” the cop told him. He shot me a look: “One that had better not happen again.”