Free Ten Little New Yorkers by Kinky Friedman

these days. Dealing with the NYPD, of course, could drive you to drink.
    â€œLook,” I said finally to Rambam, “I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t conceal any evidence of a crime. So why do I feel just a weensy bit guilty?”
    â€œTwo reasons,” said Rambam. “One is all the pressure you’re feeling from Cooperman, and two is because you’re a fucking Jew. Quite normal, under the circumstances.”
    â€œSo I guess I just come back and face the music.”
    â€œThere’s no other option. And believe me, the music you’ll probably face is going to sound like it’s coming from a jukebox in hell. It’ll make you wish you were listening to Barry Manilow.”
    I hung up with Rambam and went back into the living room and looked at the fire. For some reason the words of an old cowboy song came into my head. “I’m Going to Leave Ol’ Texas Now / They’ve got no use for the longhorned cow / They’ve plowed and fenced my cattle range / And the people there are all so strange.”
    I walked closer to the fire and thought I might just relax a moment before I began the tedium of making last-minute plane reservations. I started to sit down, but then I realized that would not be possible. Perky was already curled up comfortably in my chair.

Fourteen
    J ust like a hospital, a bus station, or a whorehouse has its own institutionalized ambience, so, indubitably, does a cop shop. I waited in the hallway, seated in one of those ubiquitous plastic chairs in which so many troubled souls had waited before me. The real bad guys get to go right in, no doubt. It’s just the guys like me, the ones who might be on their way to becoming persons of interest, in whom the cops seem to have almost no interest at all. I thought about all of this and wished that I could still be fighting Perky for the chair by the fire.
    By this time, I’d gotten over my anger at McGovern and Winnie. To paraphrase my father, they were just people doing the best they could. Given the same set of circumstances, if I’d been in their places, I might have done the same. And besides, this was America and I had nothing to worry about because I was innocent of any crime related to murder or stolen wallets. I wasn’t totally innocent, of course. I’d let some good people down in my time. I broke some beautiful hearts that it was too late to mend. I almost ritually bought bad aloha shirts in Hawaii. (Somebody had to buy them.) I wasn’t perfect. But I wasn’t as guilty as Cooperman seemed to be making me out to be. In fact, I wasn’t guilty at all. Unless being human is being guilty. You could argue that one, of course. If you wanted to.
    While I sat there cops came and went, all on their busy little errands. Some of them glanced at me. Some of them didn’t bother. None of them said, “Good morning.” Of course it wasn’t really morning anymore. It had been when I’d gotten there. It was now a few hairs and a freckle past Gary Cooper time and I was still waiting in this fucking plastic chair. Ah well, I thought, like the Guinness slogan says: “Good things happen to those who wait.” Bad things happen, too, of course.
    At least the time I sat there gave me a chance to get my story down. My story was that Scalopini, or whatever the hell his name was, had come over with McGovern and a few other guys I didn’t know on the night before I’d left town. They were all fairly heavily monstered when they got there, and by the end of the evening I was pretty well walking on my knuckles as well. The soon-to-be-dead guy must’ve dropped his wallet on the floor at some time during the visit and was too fucked up to notice its absence. Of course, the rest of us had also been too fucked up to notice its presence. Maybe it had fallen against the counter or underneath the desk. Maybe we’d kicked it around like a soccer ball for a few hours.