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“Please call her Claire.”
I knew it was a weird thing for me to say, but weirder still was hearing Lamont refer to Claire as Ms. Parker, not that I blamed him. Victims are always Mr., Mrs., or Ms. for a detective. He was supposed to call her that. I just wasn’t ready to hear it.
“I apologize,” I said. “It’s just that—”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said with a raised palm. He understood. He got it.
“So what happened next?” I asked. “What went wrong?”
“We’re not sure, exactly. Best we can tell, she fully cooperated, didn’t put up a fight.”
That made sense. Claire might have been your prototypical “tough” New Yorker, but she was also no fool. She didn’t own anything she’d risk her life to keep. Does anyone?
No, she definitely knew the drill. Never be a statistic. If your taxi gets jacked, you do exactly as told.
“And you said the driver was knocked out, right? He didn’t hear anything?” I asked.
“Not even the gunshots,” said Lamont. “In fact, he didn’t actually regain consciousness until after the first two officers arrived at the scene.”
“Who called it in?”
“An older couple walking nearby.”
“What did they see?”
“The shooter running back to his car, which was behind the taxi. They were thirty or forty yards away; they didn’t get a good look.”
“Any other witnesses?”
“You’d think, but no. Then again, residential block … after midnight,” he said. “We’ll obviously follow up in the area tomorrow. Talk to the driver, too. He was taken to St. Luke’s before we arrived.”
I leaned back in my chair, a metal hinge somewhere below the seat creaking its age. I must have had a dozen more questions for Lamont, each one trying to get me that much closer to being in the taxi with Claire, to knowing what had really happened.
To knowing whether or not it truly was … fuckin’ random.
But I wasn’t fooling anyone. Not Lamont, and especially not myself. All I was doing was procrastinating, trying hopelessly to avoid asking the one question whose answer I was truly dreading.
I couldn’t avoid it any longer.
“FOR THE RECORD, you were never in here,” said Lamont, pausing at a closed door toward the back corner of the precinct house.
I stared at him blankly as if I were some chronic sufferer
of short-term memory loss. “In where?” I asked.
He smirked. Then he opened the door.
The windowless room I followed him into was only slightly bigger than claustrophobic. After closing the door behind us, Lamont introduced me to his partner, Detective Mike McGeary, who was at the helm of what looked like one of those video arcade games where you sit in a captain’s chair shooting at alien spaceships on a large screen. He was even holding what looked like a joystick.
McGeary, square-jawed and bald, gave Lamont a sideways glance that all but screamed, What the hell is he doing in here?
“Mr. Mann was a close acquaintance of the victim,” said Lamont. He added a slight emphasis on my last name, as if to jog his partner’s memory.
McGeary studied me in the dim light of the room until he put my face and name together. Perhaps he was remembering the cover of the New York Post a couple of years back. An Honest Mann, read the headline.
“Yeah, fine,” McGeary said finally.
It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was enough to consider the issue of my being there resolved. I could stay. I could see the recording.
