The green elephant.

  I’d had occasional thoughts of becoming a detective ever since I got used to seeing the ones at the Seven-Eight. They were all senior to me, as one would expect, and there was an air of self-confidence and proficiency about them that made them enviable even as it put them out of reach.

  When I took the apartment on Polhemus Place, when I installed the answering machine and ordered the business cards, I was willing myself not to think of the green elephant even as I was standing there with a peanut in my hand, trying to tempt the beast. It seemed to me that the best way to become a detective was to distinguish oneself as a plainclothes police officer.

  Looking back, I’m not sure that’s true. There are a number of ways to play departmental politics, and sometimes they work. But I didn’t have the instincts or the inclination for the game. Or the time—I was busy being a cop.

  And it was working. I was developing a circle of sources, mostly but not exclusively in my home precinct. The work was paying off, and then Vince and I broke a case, and while it wasn’t exactly the French Connection, a lot of heroin was confiscated and a lot of arrests made—and, after the DA’s office did a little of the usual log-rolling and horse trading, a couple of bad guys wound up doing serious time at Green Haven. That put commendations in both our files, and some public ink to go with it; while the press focused on the detectives we handed off to, Vince and I did get our names in the paper.

  Then I killed a man, and that tipped the scales.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  If you were going to shoot someone, it would be hard to find a more suitable man than Rufe Taggart. He was from somewhere in West Virginia, and according to one newspaper account his mother could have been in the DAR; she’d had an ancestor who’d fought in Washington’s army at the Battle of Trenton.

  He was 37 when we came into each other’s lives, and he’d spent a dozen of those years in one prison or another, and killed two people that we knew about. One case fell apart when a witness disappeared—dead or in the wind, depending which rumor you believed. The other got plea-bargained down to manslaughter.

  I suppose he was a career criminal, although his wasn’t much of a career. He made ends meet with snatch-and-grab burglaries, and muggings that were the adult equivalent of taking a smaller kid’s lunch money. These ventures served to support his real passion, which was sexual predation. They didn’t start the Sex Offenders Registry until 1996, and by then he’d been dead for thirty years, but if the timing had worked out he could have been a charter member. He started with window peeping in his teens and did a little of this and a little of that, all on his way to discovering what really did it for him, which was forcible sexual relations with minors.

  Rufe liked kids—or hated them, as you prefer. He didn’t seem to care if they were black or white, male or female, which is relatively uncommon; sexual predators usually fixate on their own race, and confine themselves to the same or the opposite sex. I’ve since heard an offender described as an equal-opportunity pervert, and, all these years later, the phrase brought Rufe to mind.

  Mahaffey and I were about halfway through an evening shift, wearing our Robert Hall suits but driving around in a black and white squad car, when the radio let us know about an apparent crime in progress—screams and gunshots coming from a ground-floor apartment at an address just two blocks from us. Vince called in that we’d take it, and I got us there and we left the car double-parked. A woman was in front of the building, and she pointed us in the right direction.

  It was an abandoned building, she told us, but there were squatters in some of the apartments. We went in with guns drawn. I’d never discharged my revolver except at the firing range, and aside from infrequent cleanings I couldn’t remember the last time it had left its holster. But I had it in my hand, and it was a good thing that I did, because the first thing I saw was a man pointing a gun at me.

  He pulled the trigger and my first thought was that I’d been shot, even though I hadn’t felt anything. But I hadn’t heard anything, either, because the pistol he was firing had jammed. He said something—“Shit,” probably—and threw the gun down, and I suppose his next move would have been to raise his hands and surrender, but the message that he was no longer a threat hadn’t yet made it to my brain. I’d been in the process of returning fire, and I went on with it, and I didn’t miss.

  My shot, I learned later, could not have been improved upon, and luck, I’ve always known, had more to do with it than marksmanship. I don’t recall taking aim, just pointing, and the pull on the trigger came of its own accord. The round I fired took him in the heart and death must have been instantaneous, or close to it. For an instant or so, while the report of the gunshot bounced off the kitchen walls, I thought Vince must have fired it. Then the message got through that I was the shooter, and that the man I’d shot was dead.

  I guess I was in a state of shock. Vince got hold of me, took the gun out of my hand, returned it to my holster, grabbed a chair, got me seated on it, and kept up a stream of conversation, telling me I’d saved both of our lives, I’d done just what I was supposed to do, and just to take deep breaths and know that everything was good, everything was going to be fine.

  Meanwhile, he improved the stage set. He left Rufe Taggart where he fell, on his back, arms at his sides, as if waiting for someone to draw a chalk outline around him. The gun he’d meant to kill me with, the gun that had done me the kindness of jamming or misfiring, had skidded halfway across the room, and Vince bent over and reached for it, than thought better of it and used his foot instead. Years later I saw a little kid trying to dribble a soccer ball, and out of nowhere it reminded me of the way Vince gave the gun little nudges until he had it where he wanted it, maybe half a dozen inches from the dead man’s outstretched right hand.

  Like he never let go of it until he hit the floor, he said later. Not tampering with evidence, because the evidence was right there, telling anyone with eyes and a brain exactly what happened. But why leave room for confusion? You put the gun back where it should have wound up, you’re just making an adjustment in the interest of clarity. You could even say you’re doing what God would have done if he’d given the matter some thought.

  I stayed where I was while he went off to check out the rest of the apartment, and when he didn’t return right away I went looking for him. We needed to call it in, and I thought maybe he’d managed to find a working phone in an abandoned building, which was unlikely but not impossible.

  What he found in the bedroom was two dead bodies, a woman and a boy. A mother, 27, and her ten-year-old son, and I can summon up their names but I can’t see that anybody’s life will be richer for my writing them down here. The medical examiner would find that she’d been killed first, strangled to death, possibly after having been rendered unconscious by blows to the head.

  Taggart had kept the boy alive for quite a few hours, and found no end of ways to amuse himself. Somewhere along the way the kid died—and, everyone agreed, not a moment too soon.

  All Vince and I knew at the time, in that back bedroom, was what we saw in front of us. I don’t know how much of it I took in, or what I may have made of it; I was still hearing the echo of the shot I’d fired, standing there staring like a high school quarterback with a concussion.

  He grabbed me, took me back to the first room, the one with only one dead body in it. He said, “You ever get a voice in your head, a pain in the ass voice saying how could you do that, how could you take a human life, just remember what you saw in there. What you did, on top of saving your life and mine, is you put down a fucking monster.”

  He looked hard at me, waiting to see if I was taking it in. I said, “That woman.”

  “The kid’s mother. Gotta be.”

  “No,” I said. “The woman who steered us here, the woman who called it in. She’ll have a phone.”

  He looked at me. “Always thinking,” he said. “How about if I just go out to the car and use the two-way?”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  An exchange when he got back:

  “You should be sitting down.”

  “No, I’m fine. What I couldn’t figure out was the gun.”

  “What? You figured it out fine. You shot him before he could shoot either of us.”

  “He fired all those rounds. That’s what the other woman heard, that’s how come she called it in. But not at the mother and not at the kid, I went and checked.”

  “You went back in there?”

  “There’s shells all over the floor, same as in here. More than the gun holds, so at some point he reloaded. But no sign he shot either of them.”

  “So what the fuck was he shooting at?”

  I pointed to a darkened corner to the left of the sink.

  “Jesus, a rat?”

  “Some people are afraid of them.”

  “He emptied his gun and reloaded? All to kill one rat?”

  “He must have seen one in the bedroom, too, because there are empty shells on the floor.”

  “But no dead rat?”

  “Not that I could see. Maybe there was just the one rat, and after he missed it in the bedroom he came in here after it.”

  “And killed it, finally, and made enough noise so we got the call.” He took a closer look. “He really shot the shit out it, didn’t he? I’m no fan of rats, especially in a house with kids in it, but your average rat’s just trying to make a living, raise a family. Set traps, put out poison, fine, but I wouldn’t want to open up on one with a tommy gun.”

  “He wasn’t very good with a gun.”

  “And a good thing, too. Matt, lemme look at you. You’re all right, aren’t you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  And I was. Technically I suppose I was still in some sort of state of shock, but moving around the apartment had helped, and so did figuring out the reason for the gunshots. I had to look around and I had to think, and these were things a cop would do, so that’s what I had to be, a police officer, not some gormless kid confronted with the consequences of his own hurried action.

  Acting like a cop got me back to feeling like one. The guy was a threat, the guy was a monster, the guy was dead. Well, fuck him.

  I was fine.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Things have changed. If you fire your weapon at anything outside of the designated firing range, you can pretty much count on a couple of weeks of desk duty and a fairly elaborate investigation. If you actually kill somebody, it gets amped up accordingly, and psychiatric counseling is recommended, if not mandatory.

  This was what, close to sixty years ago? They took my gun away long enough for ballistics to establish that it had been the source of the single round that exploded the left ventricle of Rufe Taggart’s heart—and then they gave it back to me. They took my statement, oral and written, and went over it with me, and they asked me if I would be willing to see the shrink who got departmental referrals in cases like this, and I said I didn’t really feel the need but I had no objections.

  I kept my appointment. The shrink seemed ancient to me, though he was probably at least fifteen years younger than I am now. Wore owlish glasses, smoked a pipe. Diplomas on the walls, and an oil painting of a harlequin at a card table, playing solitaire.

  Funny what sticks in your mind. Not his name, nor much of our conversation. At his request, I went over what had happened at the crime scene, staying with the scenario as Vince and I had reported it—Taggart, aiming at me when I managed to shoot him first. I said a little about the state of shock I’d been in, like a kid who’d gotten his bell rung in a football game. I hadn’t said much about that previously, and something in his expression encouraged me to add that I’d been puzzled about the gunshots, and how working it out that the guy had been shooting rats—or a rat, anyway—got me back to normal.

  “Of course,” he said. He asked about dreams, and if I was sleeping well, and if I’d found myself drinking more. I said if I’d had any dreams I didn’t remember them, and I slept like a log. I said I generally had a beer when I got off duty, and sometimes two, and that hadn’t changed, and he nodded, because that was what he wanted to hear. He probably got to hear it a lot, and most of us who spoke the words were lucky we weren’t hooked up to a polygraph.

  He told me I sounded fine, said a delayed reaction was always a possibility, and invited me to come in if there was ever a point where I wanted to discuss anything further. Then we got into sports, and he spent the rest of the hour telling me he still couldn’t come to terms with the Dodgers having relocated to Los Angeles. “I still liked the players,” he said. “Was it their fault O’Malley sold out the people of Brooklyn? Of course not. So I liked the players but I hated the team, and how is that possible?”

  Food for thought.

  A year or two later, after the promotion, and after my marriage had gone a little further downhill, there was a moment when I had the thought of going back for another session. It was a thought that came to me but not one that I chose to entertain, because what was the point? The best I could hope for was that it might help the man sort out his feelings about the Mets.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Shooting Rufe Taggart, shooting him dead, got me the gold shield.

  There’s no way to prove that. The promotion, when it came, did so in the wake of a collar Vince and I made in Dyker Heights. A Slope resident, the suspect in a string of burglaries, was in the wind, and he’d given a woman reason to wish him ill, and she found the card I’d given her and dialed the number.

  Then she’d called him and told him what she’d done, and it was almost comic; the poor bastard was on his way out the door when we came along to knock on it. Any number of things could have happened, but all he did was say Oh shit, and managed to sound more relieved than dismayed. In the car he said, “You get tired, you know?” and that’s all he said until his lawyer got there.

  So it was a case that reflected well on us, but not the kind that gets headlines, or leads to promotions. But I’d done a good thing when I shot Rufe Taggart, that was something everybody could agree on, and perhaps more to the point I’d walked away from the whole business in an exemplary manner, and all of that must have earned me a spot on some unofficial short list.

  Then we picked up our burglar in Dyker Heights, and that’s all anybody mentioned when they made me a detective. Nobody ever said a word about Rufe Taggart.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  It’s funny. I haven’t really thought about him in ages.

  An odd process, writing all of this. This morning I started the day by reading what I’d written about him yesterday and the day before. The facts are all there, in as much detail as they need to be. Summoning up my own thoughts and feelings after all those years is not so much difficult as uncertain. I can tell myself what I thought and how I felt, but I find myself questioning the reliability of the narrator.

  The most salient single fact, it seems to me, is that until we went into that abandoned building I had never pointed a gun at anyone, unless you want to count the water pistol I got for my seventh birthday. And before we left the premises I had shot a man, and killed him.

  I’d fired at a man who had thrown down his gun. I could spend a lot of time trying to parse that. Was I simply following through on an action already in progress, pulling the trigger before I could take in the information that his hand was empty? Or did that fact register, if dimly, and did I then make a conscious or unconscious decision to gun down an unarmed man?

  As noted, I was in shock afterward. I can’t remember what thoughts may have been going through my mind, and couldn’t trust them if I did.

  Afterward, the more I found out about Taggart, who he was and what he’d done, the easier it was to brush all those questions aside. I don’t suppose many people would have contended that the world was a poorer place for his having left it.

  Every man’s death diminishes me, John Donne wrote, because I am involved with mankind. And I get the point, it’s not that elusive, but I can’t say that I ever felt diminished by the death of Rufe Taggart, or guilty for having caused it.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Back to Taggart, who seems to have more of a grip on my mind now than he ever did back in the day.

  “God doesn’t make mistakes.”

  John Donne never said that, as far as I know, although I doubt he’d argue otherwise. It’s a line I’ve heard many times over the years at AA meetings, and while it’s tempting to dismiss the people who utter it as living proof of the statement’s falsity, one does get the point.

  If God did make mistakes, Rufe Taggart would seem to be one of them. It’s easy enough to characterize him as pure evil, as I believe more than one person did in the press coverage of his death. (These were the same people who labeled me clean-cut, level-headed, and promising.)

  Pure evil. I don’t know what that is, or what it means. I know what a sociopath is, and God knows they aren’t all that thin on the ground. They know what’s good and evil, right and wrong, and don’t feel this knowledge should prevent them from acting entirely in what they see as their self-interest.

  Many of them wind up in prison. But others run corporations, or have successful careers in politics or the military.

  I suppose, to come at it from another angle, they are all of them doing the best they can.

  I suppose Taggart was doing the best he could. I suppose he had a childhood that combined with whatever was in his DNA to make him the hideous human being that he was. I suppose he was just playing out the hand he’d been dealt.

  Well, so was I.

  I want to get off this merry-go-round. I don’t owe him anything. He got me my gold shield, but I’d have wound up a detective before too long anyway, with or without his help. He was trying to kill me, and would have done so if his gun had cooperated, and instead I killed him, and I never regretted it.

  Not then and not now.

  All these words, words I have to labor over, words I write and delete and write again, for a man whose chief distinction in this context is that he was the first person I ever killed.