Out in Queens one night, Woodside or Sunnyside, after a wake for a fellow officer killed in a line-of-duty shootout. Vince had known him slightly and I’d met him once, and that seemed reason enough to show up but not to linger long. We walked a few blocks, found a bar that looked all right, and settled in to drink whiskey and talk about death.

  Other times we talked about women. A week or so before Anita and I stood up at St. Athanasius and said I do to each other, I finished typing up my report and asked Vince if he had time for a drink. We walked past our usual place and found a bar that was darker and quieter and less cop-ridden. On our way in, he nodded to a fellow at the bar and got a nod in return.

  We sat down and he said, “That guy? I arrested him once. Drunk and disorderly, and he was off the charts on both of those words. I think he did thirty days. What’s up, my friend?”

  “Day before yesterday,” I said, “I was on the phone with Anita, and she asked if I wanted her to come over, and I said I was tired.”

  “It’s like you’re married already.”

  “Well, it was a long shift.”

  “I remember.”

  “So I went home, and I was restless, and I got to thinking about one of the doors we knocked on last week.”

  There’d been an assault on Carroll Street just off Fifth Avenue, a man who’d followed a woman, knocked her down as she was getting the front door open, and was on top of her with his pants open when her screams scared him off. We took her statement and her understandably vague description of her assailant and followed up by going through the building, knocking on doors and hoping somebody had seen something.

  “The redhead,” Vince said. “Well, auburn, I guess you could call it. I saw her face and I saw yours. What did you do, go back to check if there was something she forgot to tell us?”

  That was what I’d have told her, if I’d had to, but when she opened the door she didn’t even look surprised to see me. I knew she was married and I knew her husband worked nights, she’d made a point of telling me as much, and the first thing she said once she had the door shut and bolted was, “You got some sense of timing. Ten minutes ago I was touching myself and thinking about you.”

  I quoted that line to Vince, but all I said beyond that was that I’d spent an hour with her before heading home to Garfield Place.

  Vince said there were women who lost interest in you the minute they saw you were a cop. And there were others who were wired the opposite way entirely, and thank God for them.

  I said, “I’m getting married in a week. Six days, actually.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I will, too.”

  But what did it mean? I was getting married, I loved the woman who was about to become my wife, or at least I thought I did, and we set a date because she missed her period and we figured she was pregnant, but then it turned out she was only late and she told me and said, Well, you’re off the hook, and I said No, we were going to get married sooner or later, so this just makes it sooner, and what’s wrong with that?

  “So?”

  So what the hell was I doing on Carroll Street?

  His answer waited until we had another round in front of us, and he picked up his glass and gazed into it, as if it held the answer.

  Apparently it did. “Getting some,” he said. “She made it clear it was there for you, and here’s young Matt with just a couple nights left to be a bachelor, and that’s how he spent one of them. You have a good time?”

  I had, and wasn’t that the problem? Otherwise I’d have been able to tell myself I’d just made a mistake I’d never make again, and then perform some nonreligious equivalent of ten Hail Marys on my way to undertaking the role of the faithful husband.

  He said, “A week from now, or whatever it is. Six days? You stand there and put the ring on her finger, and it changes things, and you’ll find out what changes and what doesn’t. And maybe you’ll never go to bed with anybody but your wife. That’s the way it works for some men, the ring makes that kind of a difference.”

  I waited.

  “Or not,” he said. “Or you’ll be like most men, and you’ll love your wife and the house and the kids and the family dog, the whole package, and you’ll do your drinking in bars full of cops like yourself, and the highlight of the evening will be when ‘God Bless America’ comes upon the jukebox, and everybody stands up and sings along with what’s-her-name, the fat girl.”

  “Kate Smith.”

  “From sea to shining sea. No, that’s the other one, with the fruited plains. That’s what you’ll do, and you’ll steer clear of the singles bars and tell yourself you’re comfortable living right, and every once in a while someone’ll turn up and you’ll look at her and she’ll look at you, and the hell with living right and the hell with Kate Smith and the hell with the family dog.”

  He drank and I drank, and he said, “I’m the last person to tell anyone how to be a husband. I’ve been living alone for the past four–five years, and the only reason I’m not divorced is my wife’s a whole lot more of a Catholic than I ever was. She’s got a guy who spends more nights under my roof than I ever did, but once a week she tells some priest about it and does her penance and it’s all wiped away, and she can feel good about herself and go home and start working on a new week’s worth of sins.

  “And whatever works, you know? She gets most of my paycheck to run the house and raise the kids, and it’s good I don’t have to live on what’s left of what the city pays me. And I don’t have to fill out any papers or pay a lawyer, and I got one big edge, which is that I can’t have a fit of temporary insanity and get married again, because I’m already married.

  “So we’re on a subject where you’d be crazy to pay any attention to anything I tell you. Will you be a straight-arrow husband? My guess is you won’t, but that doesn’t have to fuck up your marriage. My catting around didn’t help, but there were other factors. I was never home, and most of the time it wasn’t because I had somebody else to be with. I didn’t come home because home wasn’t where I wanted to be.

  “Look, it’ll be what it is. A week from now, six days from now, I’ll be there to watch you take your vows. There’s a line in there about forsaking all others, and if you cross your fingers while you say those particular words, who’s gonna notice?”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I didn’t cross my fingers. When the day arrived I stood up there in my navy blue suit, and knocking on a door on Carroll Street, or anywhere else, was the farthest thing from my mind.

  I felt a batch of things, and it’s hard to sort them out. There was exhilaration—I was getting married, we were starting life as a couple, I could start taking myself seriously as a grown-up, and before I knew it I’d be a father and a homeowner, and how many years would it be before I fell between a couple of subway cars on the way to Canarsie?

  Just a thought. One of many, some good, some bad. I didn’t dwell on it.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  We had three days at a resort in the Poconos that billed itself as the honeymoon capital of the world, a title they earned by furnishing each suite with a heart-shaped bed and a heart-shaped tub, and by limiting their other offerings so that there was nothing to do but stay in your room. Work up a sweat in the heart-shaped bed, then take a dip in the heart-shaped tub.

  Rinse and repeat.

  On our second night there, I was restless. I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake her, and went downstairs to the cocktail lounge, which was empty except for a couple off to the side who looked as though they’d come to realize they’d just made the biggest mistake of their lives.

  The hotel bar featured the predictable line of drinks with cute names—at dinner Anita had ordered something called a Rabbit Habit, and said she liked it but left it unfinished. I’d had a highball, bourbon and soda, and now I sat at the bar and ordered bourbon again, this time on the rocks, and I stuck around long enough to have a second and a third.

  I don’t know what I was wearing, but it was probably the suit I got married in, though I wouldn’t have bothered putting on a tie. I hadn’t had to go shopping, as I’d already bought the suit and three others a couple of months earlier, right after they’d bumped us up from uniformed to plainclothes officers.

  “You need some suits,” Mahaffey told me, “and so do I, as far as that goes, and what neither of us needs is to spend a fortune on them.” He took me to Robert Hall, their Brooklyn store on Fourth Avenue, and the suits I bought were identical except for color—medium gray, dark gray, dark brown, and navy.

  A few years down the line, when they gave me my gold shield, a senior detective from Midtown North took me shopping at Finchley’s, on Fifth Avenue in the Forties. He wouldn’t let me out of there until I’d sprung for three suits and two sport jackets, and the cheapest of the jackets cost more than I’d paid for all four suits at Robert Hall.

  When I’d protested that I already had a closet full of suits, he said he knew I did, and what I did with them was my choice. “Goodwill Industries or the Salvation Army,” he said. “Entirely up to you. Matt, you’re an NYPD detective, for Christ’s sake. You want to look the part.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Getting way ahead of myself here. My mind wanders as one thought leads to another, and I follow along on the keyboard, dumping my memory onto the computer screen. For a few minutes I was in Pennsylvania, drinking bourbon in the Poconos, and trying not to stare at a pair of newlyweds on the verge of a breakup. Then for a moment I was in Finchley’s, picking out the kind of clothes that went well with a gold shield.

  Back to the bar, back to the bourbon. I can’t remember what I was thinking, but it must have been about what I’d got myself into, and I think the drink was there to dull the edge of thought. Because if I allowed myself, I’d realize it was some mix of anxiety and discontent that had got me dressed and brought me downstairs, and that somewhere inside I was in much the same place as the husband and wife on the other side of the room, stuck at the same little table and unable to look at one another.

  The bourbon did its job. It dialed down the volume of my thoughts to where I couldn’t hear them.

  That’s what it does.

  And by the time I’d finished the third drink, I was thinking how I’d have to tell Anita about my companions, Mr. and Mrs. Marital Bliss. She’d get a kick out of it. I followed the thought upstairs to our room, and this time I had no trouble falling asleep.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  As far as Vince was concerned, it was the way I wrote up our reports that got us out of uniform and into our Robert Hall suits. I always thought he was exaggerating, that nothing I did at a typewriter could have that much effect on two men and their careers. We had some cases that turned out well, and came away from them looking good, and that had to be a factor. And I was willing to believe that a good report from one or more of my instructors on East Twentieth Street would have made the rounds, leading to my partnership with Vince and following me through it.

  And, in fact, the way I put words on paper had something to do with that. There was an exercise they sprang on us where two men stormed into the room while the instructor was in the middle of a sentence. One, wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, was chasing the other, who wore a suit. He caught him and threw him up against a wall, and the guy in the suit moved as if drawing a gun from a shoulder holster, but what he had in his hand was a pen.

  And while all of this was going on, a third man entered the room, walked over to the blackboard, picked up one of the erasers, and left the room with it. And then, after the guy in the suit had slapped handcuffs onto the guy in the jeans and led him off and out of sight, the instructor told us what a few of us had begun to suspect.

  It was staged, of course, and he called it a test of our powers of observation. He gave us five minutes to write down everything we could remember having seen. What made it difficult, of course, was that for most if not all of the performance, we thought it was real—that the two men were in the room because one was in pursuit of the other, and that one was the good guy and the other the bad guy, and that someone probably ought to intervene, and why was the instructor just standing there? Why didn’t he do something?

  And, after the reveal, we had to hit Instant Replay and write down what we thought we’d seen. Some of us spent most of our five minutes staring at a blank sheet of paper. My mind had been wandering early on, and the guy in the suit was up against the wall before I’d even noticed something was going on, but I filled in what I remembered with what I figured had to have happened, and I got a lot written, although I missed a lot and got some basic facts dead wrong.

  We turned in our papers, and the instructor—his name was Eugene Givens, and it seems to me he held the rank of sergeant—went out into the hall and came back with two men, one in jeans and one in a suit. They were police officers, obviously, and he introduced them, and said we should pay close attention as they reenacted their original performance. And they went out of the room, and Givens picked up a piece of chalk and stood at the blackboard with it, and the door burst open and the playlet was repeated, but this time we all knew we had to pay close attention.

  Even so, not everybody spotted the third man, the eraser thief.

  Once again, though, we had five minutes to write up what we’d seen, and—well, that’s more than anyone needs to know about that particular training exercise. It made its point, and while I certainly didn’t think of it at the time, it makes a nice sidebar to Yogi Berra’s line. You can observe a lot by watching, but only if you pay attention.

  A day or two later we got our papers back, with just enough notes to show that they’d been read, or at least looked at. Before I saw mine, I got to hear it read out loud.

  Givens picked three papers for that treatment. He didn’t identify the authors, saying there was no need to embarrass anybody, and the first one he read was clumsy and sketchy, and whoever wrote it would have had good reason to feel embarrassed. The second was all subjective—I saw this, I felt that, it was scary when this happened, and so on. You want to leave yourself out of it, he told us. You’re a camera, you’re a tape recorder, you’re reporting what you see and hear and nothing more, because it’s not about you.

  And then he read what I wrote, my second report, after we knew we were watching a skit staged for our benefit. This, he said, was the way to make a report. It was objective, it was clear, you could read it and you knew exactly what happened, almost as if you were watching it yourself. Of course the guy who wrote it got one or two facts wrong, but that could happen, which was why eyewitness testimony was never as reliable as you hoped it would be, but all the same, this was how a report should be written.

  He didn’t even glance at me while he was giving me all this anonymous praise. But later, when he cut us loose for our five minute smoke break, he said, just loud enough for me to hear, “Good job, Scudder.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I’ve thought about this now and then over the years, of course. After I’d left the job and found myself making ends meet by doing as a private citizen some of the things I’d done as a cop, one thing I made very clear was that I was done with keeping track of things and furnishing written reports. I’d act on a client’s behalf, I’d do what I could do to bring matters to a satisfactory conclusion, but he wouldn’t get a written report or a detailed account of the expenses I’d incurred. I’d sit down with him afterward, and I’d tell him what I had or hadn’t learned or accomplished, and I’d come up with a figure of what I felt he owed me, and he could pay it or not.

  That basic business plan, if we can call it that, never changed much. At one point I went to the trouble of qualifying for a Private Investigator’s license, and I held it for a while before I gave it back, and during that time I still conducted my business in the same unbusinesslike fashion. No formal reports, no expense accounts. It worked okay.

  These days I’ve been going to my desk just about every morning. I finish my breakfast and sit down at my computer, and the day’s first order of business is to spill a little more of my memory into a Word.doc file. That, along with maintaining my sobriety, is each day’s workload, and if there are days when it feels like an obligation, it is by and large one I’m grateful to have.

  But it’s curious now, when I find myself reflecting upon written reports, and how they got me into plainclothes and on my way to a detective’s gold shield, even as they were the first thing I cast aside along with that shield.

  What keeps happening: I keep thinking about Miss Rudin, my Latin teacher. Every night, working my way through Caesar’s Commentaries, I was reading one man’s matter-of-fact report and finding the English words for it.

  It probably wasn’t just Miss Rudin, I had a couple of English teachers who played a role in teaching me how to write an English sentence, but I can’t shake the feeling that Latin class was the biggest single factor.

  I once said as much to Vince Mahaffey, when he was going on about how I’d written our way out of our uniforms. He pointed out that the department was half Irish—probably a low estimate at the time—and that half of them had gone to Catholic school, and wasn’t that where they knocked themselves out teaching Latin?

  “Except you didn’t have to take it,” he said. “The ones who thought they wanted to be priests, they took it. The dumb ones, the ones who wound up on the job, stuck with Shop and Gym. So maybe you got a point.”

  What I’m writing now is essentially a report, but very different in nature from the ones I wrote at the end of a shift of police work. It’s a record of what happened, more or less, but it’s neither concise nor direct, and it’s not even trying to be objective. It’s not about you, Gene Givens had told us, but this work is intentionally about me.

  That said, I’m just as happy to give the credit to Eleanor Rudin, with an assist to Gaius Julius Caesar. They greased the skids for me when I was an up-and-coming young patrolman, and their influence is still present in the sentences I’m writing now.