Twelve Rooms With A View Part 14

Now it was his turn to go all red. He didn't say anything for a second, like he was thinking about what to do next, and then he just shrugged. "Sorry," he said. "I apologize."

I had no idea where this was going. He wore me out, Pete Drinan, he really did. I looked up at the ceiling and noticed a fan, and while it twirled around I tried to keep focused on one of the blades and watch it spin so I could see each one individually instead of just watching them blur together. I suddenly felt so tired I thought I was going to fall over. It probably had more to do with bolting down that c.o.ke than anything else, but who's to say.

"You didn't use your phone call," Drinan finally observed, still consulting my file.

"What?"

"There was some kid in the holding tank, you called her mother, told her to come get her?"

"Yeah?"

"Why'd you do that?"

"I don't know. It was stupid."

"Yeah, it was stupid. Now you're stuck here until some useless PD shows up and gets your bail posted and calls your sister for you. And I got to be honest, Ms. Finn, you strike me as a lot of things, but I wouldn't put stupid on the list."

"Is there a question in there?"

He bit back a snappy response and tossed down the file. Then he rubbed his eyes. "Yeah, okay," he said. "Here's the question. Did the arresting officer ask you to step into the apartment before he arrested you?"

"Yeah, he did, I just told you he did!" I said, standing up finally. This whole situation was really making my head explode. "I told you-I told all of you-I-"

"Relax, Tina, just relax." He sighed. "Sit down." Then, "Are you all right?"

I really wasn't. I felt exceptionally sweaty, my tongue seemed stuck to the inside of my mouth, and fireworks were erupting in my brain. "Oh, s.h.i.t," I said, and keeled over.

12.

WHEN I CAME TO, I WAS LYING ON THE FLOOR OF THE INTERROGATION room. My sweater was off, and the Hispanic lady cop was waving her hands around my face in some strained attempt to stir up a breeze.

"What are you doing?" I asked, trying to shove her away. My arms didn't seem to work. "What happened?"

"You fainted," said Drinan's voice somewhere behind me. "Here, can you pick your head up?" A couple of hands I couldn't see lifted my head a few inches off the linoleum and cradled it briefly before shoving something that turned out to be my sweater underneath it.

"I'm okay," I said. I wanted to sit up, but I was afraid to try, and frankly I was still confused about what I was doing on the floor. "I just got hot."

"They've been working on the heat for three months, and still n.o.body knows what the problem is," the Hispanic officer said. Up close, she was kind of pretty. Her hair was pulled back too tight, but she had crazy eyebrows that looked like some sort of unusual punctuation. She was still flapping her hands in my face, but I didn't find it so annoying now; she was so matter-of-fact and determined that the fanning seemed good-natured and odd at the same time.

"Maybe we could prop the door open," Drinan suggested. The lady cop stood and went to prop open the door, and for a moment his hands came back and stroked my hair away from my forehead, even though my hair wasn't on my forehead. A breath of air moved across the floor. I hoped I didn't look too stupid, spread out on the floor like that.

"Could you get us a bottle of water?" he asked the lady cop. Then he leaned over so his face was in my line of vision. "You think you can sit up if I help you?" He didn't wait for me to answer; he just put his arm under my shoulder and lifted, then stopped carefully when I was halfway up. It was a good thing he did, because the whole room started to spin again, and I almost fell over a second time. "Hold on, hold on," he repeated, holding on. I was really having trouble with the air.

"I'm okay," I said. "Seriously, I'm okay. I just drank that c.o.ke too fast."

"Yeah, a cold can of soda, that would make anyone pa.s.s out," he observed. We sat there for a moment, while he propped me up and I leaned against his chest, trying to breathe. "When was the last time you had anything to eat?" he finally asked.

"Who knows," I said.

"They give you anything when you got here?"

"You mean like carry-out?"

"Yeah, like that," he said. "Never mind."

He stood me up very slowly. Then he led me into the hall and leaned me up against the wall. Eventually Officer Martinez of the Extraordinary Eyebrows delivered a plastic cup of lukewarm water, and Drinan watched as I dutifully took sips. The hall was something of a major thoroughfare as hallways go, and even at three in the morning, there was a good deal of foot traffic. Mostly it was the night-shift officers taking bathroom breaks in between falling asleep at their desks. But then a detective came through with a couple of younger officers dragging some perp who'd been picked up. As they cut through, the detective nodded to Drinan.

"Hey, Pete," he said. "What are you doing over here?"

"Just talking to a witness," he said.

"Out in the hallway? Some hospitality. You want to use my desk, it's free for at least twenty minutes."

"Yeah, thanks, I might do that," he said. "See you, Mitch." He looked back at me as Mitch disappeared down the hallway with his arrest. "You feeling better? You want to sit down?"

"So this isn't your precinct, huh?" I asked.

Drinan laughed. "Jesus," he said, "you don't miss a trick. How many times have you been arrested, anyway?"

"Not that many. Three."

"Is this three or four?"

"I haven't been processed yet, so I can't tell."

"Yeah, well, you're right, it's not my precinct. Come on, let's go. I'll buy you a burger."

"I'm not allowed to just leave, you moron," I said, although I didn't lean on the "moron," so it didn't actually sound that bad. "I'm under arrest."

"Thanks for explaining the rules," he said. "Now, could we get something to eat before you pa.s.s out a second time and we have to put you on an IV?"

He straightened up and took a step back, as if to show that although he was in charge and I was going to do what he said, he was also going to be a gentleman about it. "There's an all-night diner around the corner on Broadway," he said. "It doesn't look like much, but the food is okay. Burgers, omelets, fries, that sound all right?"

"Boy," I said. "Who knew that fainting was so effective?"

"Yeah," he agreed. "You figure out how to do that on cue, the world's your oyster." He put his hands in his pockets to make it look like he wasn't really in charge of this march, but he stayed just the tiniest bit behind me so there could be no question in anyone's mind. I was completely starving by this point, so I was less interested in my perpetual impulse to argue just for the h.e.l.l of it. I let him nudge me toward the front door of the precinct house.

"Can I have my sweater back?" I asked as we neared the front desk.

"You cold?" he asked.

"No, I just want my sweater."

"Then why don't you let me carry it for you." He waved to the officer manning the desk. "Hey, Randy, how's it going? Pete Drinan, we met last year at the Mets game with Jimmy Marks and Brian Cahill, you remember? They were playing the Royals, Jimmy scored those seats off some reporter he did a favor for over at the Daily News."

"Sure sure sure," Randy replied. "How's it going, Pete? What're you doing here this time of night?"

"Phil MacDowell brought in a witness on one of my cases," Drinan lied. "She's been hanging out here all night, I need to get her something to eat. Tina Finn, this is Officer Bohrman."

The guy behind the desk, a huge black man with a nice smile, stood, which made him eight times as big as me and Detective Drinan combined. "How you doing, young lady?" he asked.

"Great," I said. "Just a little hungry."

"My fault entirely," Drinan said, still the perfect gentleman. "She's been waiting for me all night. Whoa, Tina! What happened to your arm? Randy, look at this! She's covered in bruises!"

Randy glanced at Drinan, then glanced at my arm, then back at Drinan. "That is a shame," he said, cool and formal. "You need to take better care of yourself, Ms. Finn."

"Thank you, Officer, I will, I will do that," I said.

"See you, Randy," Pete said.

"You take care, Pete," the officer replied. Drinan put his hand on my back and steered me right out the front door.

"So what was that about?" I asked him twenty minutes later, when I had an enormous, dripping hamburger in my hand. Actually I had less than half a hamburger in my hand by then. I was so hungry I couldn't even talk until I had consumed most of it, in addition to two dozen enormous and fairly mediocre fries. Drinan was picking at a piece of apple pie.

"What?" he asked, pouring sugar into his second cup of what had to be truly s.h.i.tty coffee. The place he had taken me to was linoleum central. A single waitress was propped up against the fry window, and apparently another person was back there somewhere; the place was barely more populated than my apartment. But the burger was good.

"With Randy at the front desk. 'Oh, Tina what happened to your arm?' You practically made him take a picture of it," I said.

"Are you complaining?"

"I'm asking a question."

"You want to end up in the Tombs for the rest of the week?"

"Is that what you do to people who ask questions?"

"Why didn't you call your sister? Why didn't you call your lawyer?"

"Oh, for crying out loud."

"I'm giving you an opening here, Tina. You might want to consider taking it."

"You were the one who had me arrested in the first place."

"You let yourself get arrested. You saw MacDowell standing there and you let him arrest you. Why'd you do that?"

"Maybe I wanted to see you."

"So you got your wish. Keep this up, you'll also see the inside of a jail cell for a second time tonight. Or you could go home."

This was news to me, honestly. I could tell he was feeling vaguely lousy that I had been roughed up and nearly starved to death by his friends in the local precinct, but it had not occurred to me that this might amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. But as soon as he said I could go home, I couldn't help but wonder what good a get-out-of-jail-free card is to someone who has nowhere to go.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "You look like I just killed your dog."

"I'm just surprised," I said. "So how come you arrested me if you're just going to let me go?"

"How about we pretend that I'm asking the questions for a little while, Ms. Finn. Why'd you walk into that arrest?"

"I didn't, strictly speaking," I said, going for the dregs of my c.o.ke.

"Didn't strictly speaking what," he said, waving to the waitress to refill my drink.

"Strictly speaking, I didn't know about this injunction."

"You said that before. It won't stand up; they served the papers legally."

"But they didn't tell me. I don't know why."

"I find that hard to believe."

"Look, it's what happened. You guys never make mistakes? They didn't tell me. I mean, that it was illegal, that I could get arrested. They never told me."

"Your sister never told you?"

"You think she knew?" It had not occurred to me that Lucy would know something like that and not share the information. It suddenly sounded so plausible that I turned all red. I mean, Lucy sometimes behaves in questionable ways, but would she set me up to be arrested? "Come on," I said, trying to shrug off this thought, but I sounded like I was being an idiot about the truth. "There was just a screwup somewhere."

Drinan was listening in a bored way. He reached over and took a limp fry from my plate, doused it with salt, then licked the salt off the fry and went after it again with the saltshaker.

"That is really gross," I said. "You're going to give yourself a heart attack."

"I'm touched by your concern."

"Well, what are you doing? You're acting like some wild boar at a salt lick. That's gross. Stop it," I said, slapping his hand and taking the saltshaker away.

"There's something else I'd like to know."

"I told you everything, there isn't any more." I sighed. "Come on, you've been grilling me for hours, this is stupid."

"No," he said, licking the salt off the disgusting french fry and dropping it on his plate. "Even if this was all just a technical screwup, you still haven't said why you didn't call anybody. Why spending a night or a day and a night or a week in jail is preferable to calling one of your sisters and asking her to come get you out."

He picked up the paper napkin next to his coffee cup and wiped his fingers. He looked at me hard, and his eyebrows went up just a little, like you think I'm going to let you avoid that one? I never did think that. I'm just not sure why everyone thinks you'll get what you want or need by saying the true thing that's in your heart.

"I can't," I finally admitted.

"Can't what?"

"There's no place for me. Lucy won't let me stay with her, and Alison and Daniel don't want me. So. It's like that."

He waited, like that wasn't good enough, and I was going to have to give him all of it.

"They think I'm a loser," I said. My voice was getting steadier. It didn't sound so bad, honestly, when I just said it. "They don't want me. I'm not allowed to stay in their apartments. And I don't, I don't have any money and I don't have friends here, I don't live here. Seriously. I have no place to go. So why should I call Lucy and let her come down to the precinct and make a big deal about it, like she's doing me some huge favor? Then, when she gets me out, she'll act like her s.h.i.tty couch is too good for me. Why give them the opportunity to let me know I'm some huge hideous problem that they always have to deal with? Why not just stay in jail?"