The guy telling the story turned to face me. He was carrying a Dixie cup full of water and handed it to me. I drank it immediately.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Is it Billy or Will?” he asked me.
“Huh?”
“Your friends call you Billy, but Zelinsky calls you Will. Who are you?”
“Billy,” I said.
“All right, Billy. My name’s Detective Gagliano but you can call me Dante. We’re pretty casual here. This is my buddy Hooper.”
Hooper gave me a two-finger salute. Then he closed the door, sank into a chair, and pulled the brim of his ball cap over his face, like he was ready to take a snooze.
“You got banged up pretty bad,” Dante said, gesturing to the cut on my forehead. “Does that hurt?”
“Not really.”
“How about some more water?”
“No, thank you.”
“You’re sure? You drank that first cup pretty fast.”
I was still very thirsty. “All right,” I said. “Thank you.”
He made a big fuss of scooping up the cup and leaving the room to return to the water cooler. While he was gone, Hooper closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. I realized that I knew him from the store, I knew both of these guys from the store. They were among the regular group of cops who visited daily to receive free newspapers or razz Zelinsky about the Yankees.
Dante returned with a second cup, and I immediately drank it.
“More?” he asked.
“He’s fine!” Hooper said. He shot me a helpless, exasperated look. Then he said, “I’d like to get home before dawn, if that’s okay with you guys.”
“Sorry,” Dante said. “All right, let’s start.”
He sat in the third chair and immediately sprang up again. “Shit, I nearly forgot. I think this is yours.” He reached in his back pocket for a rolled-up Playboy magazine. “You left it in the car.”
“Is that Vanna?” Hooper asked, sitting up and snatching the magazine. “Howard Stern’s been talking up these pictures for weeks. He says they’re incredible.”
“So let’s see them already,” Dante said. “What the hell are you waiting for?”
Hooper placed the magazine in the center of the table where all of us could see it. He hesitated for just a moment, toying with us. Then he opened to the pictorial, and there she was, America’s Sweetheart, standing before an open refrigerator in black lingerie. She was facing the camera and smiling coyly, like all three of us had entered the apartment and caught her unaware. Hooper turned the pages and the lingerie fell away; Vanna rolled across her bed, whispered into a telephone, and tickled a kitten. And even though I was sitting in a police station at three in the morning, the pictures still left me breathless. In spite of all the trouble they’d caused me, you could almost argue they were worth it.
“I don’t know about you guys,” Dante said, “but this is what I call a miracle. You put that face on that body? With those legs? And that ass? There’s just no other word to describe it. Miraculous.”
“I could look at these photos all night,” Hooper agreed, then turned to me. “Unfortunately . . .”
“Right,” Dante sighed. “Duty calls.” He raised the magazine to his lips, kissing some private part of Vanna’s anatomy, then placed the magazine to the side of the table. “Let’s keep her around for good luck. You can take her when you go.”
“All right,” I said, and already I felt considerably better. These guys were obviously not like the hard-assed detectives I’d seen in movies like Dirty Harry or Cobra. Instead they were more like the cool, laidback detectives I’d seen on TV. They were like Magnum, P.I.
Hooper reached into his pocket for a small microcassette recorder. “Chief makes us do everything by the book,” he explained. “Hope you don’t mind.” He pressed Record on the device and placed it in the center of the table. “You want to call your mom again before we start?”
I shook my head. “That’s okay.”
“Anyone else you want to call? We recommend you have a grown-up for this conversation.”
“No, I’m cool. I just want to tell you guys what happened.”
Dante asked me to state my name and my address and my date of birth. “Very good,” he said. “You’re doing great, Billy. Now, we’ve already talked to Alfred and Clark, so we have a pretty good idea of what happened. But we want to hear your version. Start at the beginning and don’t leave anything out. We’d rather have too many details than too few, all right?”
I’d rehearsed my story so many times, it came out easily. I explained that we had only come for the Vanna White pictures, that we planned to act like ghosts, but Tyler and Rene had ruined everything. Dante listened attentively, but Hooper had the brim of his cap down over his eyes; I suspected he was sleeping. I finished my story by describing the escape from Zelinsky’s and the unexpected crack of the two-by-four. Then I asked if Rene was okay.
“ICU,” Dante said. “Broken back.”
“Is that serious?”
I don’t know why I said that. I knew a broken back was serious.
“Pretty serious, yeah.”
Hooper sat up and adjusted his cap. “Listen, we’re just about finished. I just need to square away a few details.”
“In case the chief asks,” Dante added.
“Sure,” I said. “I understand.”
“First question,” Hooper said. “How did you get the alarm code?”
“I saw Mary use it.”
“Mary Zelinsky?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know her?”
“She’s a friend.”
“How long have you been friends?”
“Maybe three weeks?”
“How did you meet her?”
“In the store.”
“Why were you in the store?”
“I was buying something.”
Hooper reached into his back pocket and removed a small memo pad. I recognized it from the store; it was one of those tiny spiral-bound notebooks that fit in the palm of your hand. Zelinsky sold them near the cash register for twenty-five cents a pop. “I’m going to read what your friend Alf told me,” Hooper said. “Tell me if this is right: ‘Tyler said one of us had to be nice to Mary to get the code. Flirt with her, take her to the movies, make out with her. Tyler wanted Clark to do it, but Clark said no. He thought it was too mean. But Billy said he would do it. He said he would be nice to her. He said he would screw it out of her, if he had to.’?”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said.
“But you said it?” Hooper asked.
“We were all saying crazy stuff.”
“Did you flirt with her?”
“No.”
“Did you go to the movies?”
“Well, yeah . . . but that was her idea.”
“Did you kiss her?”
“Once,” I admitted.
“To get the code,” Hooper continued.
“No,” I said.
“Then why?”
I just stared at my knees. I didn’t know how to answer.
“Do you like this girl? You want to be her boyfriend?”
I thought of Mary shoving me away. The revulsion on her face when she said I like you as a friend. My humiliation was still fresh like an open wound. I’d never tell anyone about that night; it was a secret shame I’d carry all the way to the grave.