Only they took that away from you, didn’t they, I reminded myself.
I had become a public relations problem after the Simbi shooting, the cause célèbre of every anticop faction in the Twin Cities, a symbol of corruption and arrogance and everything that was wrong with police departments everywhere. Most of my fellow cops were on my side, and those that weren’t—the politicians at the top who were worried about things like image—couldn’t fire me because of the grievance procedures guaranteed in the union contract with the St. Paul Police Federation. They didn’t have grounds. I hadn’t done anything wrong; the grand jury cleared me. But I had been on the fast track toward sergeant stripes, toward a gold shield, and suddenly I was nudged into pit row, going nowhere fast. The department couldn’t be perceived as rewarding a controversial officer that many citizens called a killer. So when I found Thomas Teachwell and the millions he embezzled from a national restaurant chain, I quit the department and took the reward offered by the insurance company.
I was leaning on my elbows and moving my glass in ever widening circles, enlarging a wet smear on the dark wood, when I heard a man’s voice.
“Man, it’s hot,” he said. “I almost melted out there.”
Michael Piotrowski leaned across the bar in front of me. He was sweating.
“You lookin’ for me?” he asked.
Piotrowski was a big man, old and ugly, with a mouth twisted in a permanent frown. He had a harassed quality about him, as though he had many things to do and not enough time to do them.
I introduced myself, then asked, “Do you remember a man named Robert St. Ana? He died about—”
“Fuck yeah, I remember him. Fucker got hisself killed in a car accident and they blamed me for it just because he was drinking in my place.”
I had met plenty of people like Piotrowski when I worked the streets of St. Paul, people who loved to give me both the play-by-play and color commentary. Accident, burglary, assault—it didn’t matter. I’d ask a simple question, “What happened?” and get six pages’ worth of answer in reply. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“Fucker was sitting right where you’re sitting now, swear to God,” Piotrowski recalled. “Kept hammering those Long Island teas—that was all the rage back then, Long Islands, and he sure liked ’em. Had a half dozen easy. Now, he was a young guy, but he could handle his booze. You could tell he had been drinking illegal for years. I tell him after six, ‘Hey, you’re done.’ I cut him off. He said, ‘No problem. I’ll get a ride.’ I said, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ and he goes over to that phone, right over there”—Piotrowski pointed at the pay phone on the wall between the two restrooms—“and he makes a call, comes back, says, ‘It’s okay, I have a ride.’ Fine with me, so I keep serving. An hour later, less than an hour, a woman comes in. The two of them, they sit at a table right over there, start talkin’. I’m at the end of the bar tending to some paying customers, so I don’t get a good look, okay? But the woman is kinda young-looking and I figure I’m gonna have to card her. That’s what I need—a drunk and a’ underage drinker. But when I look up, he’s following her out the door. End of story, that’s what I’m thinking.
“Only, couple days later they find the guy dead. Drove his car off the road in a snowstorm, passed out in the car. Fucker dies of carbon monoxide. Who’s to blame? Him? Fuck no. The woman, whatever the fuck happened to her? No way. The goddamn blizzard? Uh-uh. Me.” Piotrowski poked himself in the chest. “I’m the guy. I killed him. Shit.”
During the brief pause that followed, I asked, “This was sixteen years ago. How come you remember it so well?”
“Cuz I got my ass sued, that’s why. You want another one?” He was pointing at my empty glass. I had another one.
“Bitch sued me for wrongful death,” Piotrowski continued after he poured my beer. “A kid. Fuck. A sixteen-year-old kid sued me, claimed that this St. Ana fucker was the father of her child. She’s suing me on behalf of this child wasn’t even born yet. I get pissed just thinking about it.”
“Do you remember the woman who picked up St. Ana?”
“No, it was a busy night and I wasn’t payin’ attention. Christ, it would’ve saved my ass if I knew who she was.”
“Do you remember what she looked like?”
“A looker—a looker with long dark reddish hair. That’s all I ‘member.”
“Not Merodie Davies?”
“Know what? That was my first thought, cuz the kid, she had the hair. ‘Cept my lawyers said it couldn’t be, insisted the kid didn’t even have a fucking driver’s license. I mean, shit.”