Work in Progress
THE CRIME?
Well, there was a crime, but as is not unusual, we can’t figure out what it is. The only crime here is Benny Frisco’s wisecracks. Assume a crime, then.
THE INVESTIGATION
Heck, let’s just assume there was an investigation, too. You know how cops make stuff up. There are are probably thousands of people in jail now who are completely innocent of any crime, let alone misdemeanor indiscretion or venial sin.
THE ARREST
“Open up! Police!” The old NYPD cop, Benny Frisco, shouted at the door to the apartment. Not bad, this huge old apartment building on the Upper West Side, thought Benny, banging some more. High ceilings, great moldings.
“Are you going to open up?”
“Yes, I’m going to open up. Can you wait until my girl sheds her intellectual baggage and all the other paraphernalia of the mind?” There was all this muffled talking and running around on the other side of the door. Benny was reaching for his badge, came out with his heart medication instead, when the door opened suddenly. Framed in the doorway was a small diminutive old man with enormous black glasses. These days he would be called a nerd, or a geek; definitely not cool. Behind him stood a woman of the same age, old, not a girl, striking a pose with a heavy book balanced on her head. Clearly, Benny did not have to fear for his life. Right away, he got his swagger back, er, courage.
“Mr. Allen, you’re under arrest for impersonating a private investigator. We have a warrant for your arrest.” Frisco’s partner crashed into the room, and disappeared to search the apartment. Frisco was still searching for his badge.
“But, Sergeant, that was in 1975! You must be out of your mind,” forgetting that nobody ever says that to a cop.
“It’s Lieutenant. Look, Allen, or Woody. Would you rather I called you Woody? That’s funny…Woody. Like with splinters, and all? Aarggh, that’s a good one. I hate people with two first names.”
“Mr. Allen would be just fine, Captain.”
“Come to think of it, I hate people with two last names.”
“Yeah, but they’re Protestants,” offered Woody.
“Lieutenant. All right, Atwood, you probably are thinking that the statute of limitations on impersonating a private detective is long past. Well, it’s not, there were minor intelligentsia involved, and you know what that means.”
“Major?”
“No, minor.” He shuffled his warrant papers looking for details of Allen’s criminal past.
“But, Detective.”
“That’s more like it. Now, It says here you called yourself Kaiser Lupowitz. What kind of a name is that?”
“It’s really my uncle from Bessarabia.”
“An Arab?”
“He never made it over here. He got to Paris and opened a detective agency, Agence Blady, he called it. ”
“Well, it’s a good thing he didn’t, or we’d have him up on charges of some kind of impersonation too. Wearing girlie clothes.”
“But, Officer Frisco…may I call you Benny? I knew a priest once named Benny, in Woodside, California. He ran a rich boys’ school. Priests, talk about impersonation. Sheesh!”
Frisco interrupts Woody’s attempted digression. “Yeah, they really know how to extort a confession out of you. Those little interrogation rooms they got. It’s one stop shopping with them. Confession, conviction, sentencing, absolution. Very efficient. In and out.
“So you impersonated a private investigator, and then wrote a story about the case. And then you sold this cockamamie story to some magazine called…well, la-di-la, the NEW YORKER. And you passed it off as fiction. Now, we have you on two counts. Don’t you know that you can’t make this stuff up? Truth is always better than fiction.”
“Well, stranger, yes.”
“Right. Of all people, you should have known that. And the NEW YORKER should have known better than to publish it. Let’s go talk over at the 2-7, so we can find out the truth.” The detective holds Allen under the arm, and half-carries him away, leaving the old girl in the same position in the middle of the living room floor, still posing.
“What’s with the broad upstairs? You run out of conversation about existential phenomenology or did you have a premature epistemological revelation?” Frisco cackled as he pushed Allen into the back of the prowl car, taking considerate care that Allen not bash his head on the roof. “Gotta watch your phrenology, there, Woody.”
“You know, Captain, you’re pretty smart.” Allen tried to make conversation from the back of the car, just as Frisco realized his partner was missing. Sergeant Finocchio still hadn’t returned from the apartment.
“Jeesus, where is that guy? It takes him forever to empty his bladder. Every time we’re on stakeout, or trying to break somebody’s door down, Finnochio has to pee. He knows every bathroom in town. Say, did I read you your rights? Half the time I forget, and the DA gets really pissed.”
THE INTERROGATION
“Why did you do it, Woody?” Frisco screamed at Allen, while being watched through the one-way mirror by his Captain, Empatha Williams. She could see into the interrogation room without being seen; hence, a one-way mirror. Everybody says it’s a two-way mirror, but that just means a mirror on both sides. If that were true, everybody would be looking at her own reflection (don’t tell Benny I wrote that). So that wouldn’t work.
“Hey, boss, you know that was a real case back there in ’75. Didn’t you get the joke? I mean about johns who, instead of hookers for their physical pleasure, want women for their minds, or some other kind of guilty pleasure. For stimulating intellectual conversation. Get it?”
Privates investigations
“It’s Lieutenant. And, no, I don’t get it. Impersonating a private investigator is a felony. And then you lied about it, in print. Who cares about hookers anyway, brainy or not?”
At this, Empatha knocked on the mirror/glass, and Frisco stood up and left the room.
“Book him, Benny. He’s not even trying to deny it.”
THE ARRAIGNMENT
“Mr. Allen, how do you plead?” Allen, looking like the deer in the headlights with black-rimmed glasses, shrugged and opened his palms, revealing his stigmata, one of which looked like a ??? and the other a ????
“It was only a story.”
“My client pleads not guilty by reason of insanity.”
“But I’m not crazy.”
“Save your argument for the trial, counsellor. Bail recommendations?” looking over to the deputy assistant subordinate district attorney.
“Your honor, we think the defendant should be remanded without bail. He represents a considerable flight risk: London, Barcelona, Paris, now Rome. His passport should be confiscated.”
“Agreed.” The judge bangs his gavel on the desk, and leaves in a huff.
“But, your honor, my client is a father of several adopted children, a husband to one of them and a pillar of the community. This is an outrage.”
THE TRIAL
THE VERDICT
