I’m not easy to surprise these days. I mean, how can you be easily surprised living at a time when a body builder is the Governor of California, and when one of the most popular shows on television features people eating caterpillars?

Still, even inured to the bizarre by virtue of citizenship in new millennium America, what happens in the moments following the lights out in my trinity stretches the imagination.

I’m only a step or two from the front door and can easily reach it and let in the police without the help of lights. Unfortunately, the police don’t wait. I guess that when they see the lights go out through the windows fronting the street, they assume bad things are happening inside. Maybe really bad things, because there’s a murderer on the premises.

So they do what any self-respecting gaggle of cops would do who watch their peers in action every week on the Fox network. They use a battering ram to knock my door down. In this case, alas, after the ram succeeds in downing the door, one of the patrolmen accompanying the arresting detectives, the patrolman swinging the ram, steps back to admire his handiwork and falls into the hole that’s been dug in the street.

There’s no longer any canvas in place to check his fall so he’s immediately six feet underground and covered in mud. He naturally cries out in pain. Which inclines the other patrolman on hand to assist with the arrest, another regular Fox network viewer, to start yelling: “Cop down! Cop down!”

Ryman and Smith, the two detectives on the scene, have by this time entered my darkened trinity. The first thing they hear as they stumble and trip amid the tangle of equipment cables covering much of the floor is one of their mates yelling “Cop down!” Obliging them, of course, to draw their weapons. Then:

I’M GOING TO DO YOU LIKE A BANSHEE. SQUEEZE YOUR COCK TILL IT’S HARD AS A GIRDER...

“What the fuck,” says Ryman.

From upstairs, Mitch Bernstein cries out. “Don’t do that. Don’t. Not now. I gotta go.”

“Don’t grab the mayor’s cock, Libby” I hear Pam say distinctly. Though perhaps ‘distinctly’ isn’t the right word. It’s clear even from a distance that Pam is well and truly sloshed. Libby, for her part, sounds as if she’s having a laugh-induced, unfaked version of the sex action that’s coming through my wall.

The lights go on and off. On and off. Blinking with indecision. Until all at once they come on and stay on. I’m figuring that the cop in the hole outside is maybe blocking more water from leaking into the basement and the water level has sink just below the wiring it was shorting out. That’s one explanation. Another is that this is a divine intervention allowing a select and lucky few to witness the scene that follows.

With the lights on, everyone in the room looks around wildly to get his or her bearings and decide what to do next. Clay Mason is the first to recover his wits and go about his appointed task. I’m close enough to hear what he says as he leans over, grabs Pinkman’s shoulder in a grip that could crush a coconut, and whispers:

“You scummy, pathetic little bastard. You killed Myron and Lisa, Pinky. You ball-less, half-man. You...”

Pinkman is more angry than scared at first. I see this when the lights came on. He has to be thinking that for some crazy reason what was billed as a poetry filming has been booked next door to a bordello that’s being raided. Then Mason grabbed him. There’s a shock of pain accompanied by words that pierce like a knife.

Joe Connors follows up, leans over and whispers the coup de grace. “Mitch is going to drop you like a sack of shit, Pinky boy.” Pinkman suddenly looks about to soil himself.

Detective Smith steps outside quickly when the lights come on. She’s back in a flash and says to her partner, “That dumbass uniform just fell into a hole. He’ll be fine.”

Ryman sighs with relief. Holsters his gun. There’s already enough irregularities to explain away in his arrest report. He can do without a wounded cop.

He spots Pinkman, who has been released from Mason’s steely grip and is rising slowly from his chair. Pinkman is fluttering like a mockingbird. With fear, certainly, but also, I think, with rising anger from the realization that he’s been set up and suckered. I’m guessing there’s a strong dose of righteous self-pity in there, too, because it’s now clear that most everyone in this room is there just to nail him.

“Ronald Pinkman. You’re under arrest for the murders of Myron Hamish and Lisa Sankerson. You have the right to remain...”

Detective Ryman, who is cuffing his perp while performing the ritual rights
reading, looks up from this cuffing and is surprised to see that the man he’s putting in irons isn’t looking at him. Pinkman is staring at the spiral staircase where his employer, Mitch Bernstein, now stands. Or rather, now sways.

“Why’d you do it,” says Bernstein, His words badly slurred. What does Pam put in that flask, I’m wondering?

It’s not the words that have everyone in the room, even Ryman, looking so intently at the billionaire politician, however. Not even the rumpled suit jacket and booze spotted white shirt on a man everyone identifies with immaculate attire. It’s the bulge in his pants. A clearly defined, unmistakable woodie of tent pole dimensions.

“Myron I understand,” Bernstein slurs on. “But the girl. That little Lisa girl.”
Bernstein is almost in tears. I really have to talk to Pam about the contents of her flask.

At the second mention of the murdered girl Pinkman blows.

“Like you wouldn’t have done the same thing, you horny, hypocritical son of a bitch. Like you don’t keep your hands off the help these days only because you want to be mayor. You’re nothing, Bernstein. Nothing. Working for you would turn anyone into a killer.” A series of growling curses follow.

He stops suddenly, seeming to come to himself. “Hey. You with the camera,” he shouts. “Turn it off. You can’t shoot that. Turn it off.”

Ryman, aided by a patrolman, is pushing and pulling Pinkman toward the door. Pinkman keeps shouting over his shoulder. “Destroy that tape. This is my shoot. Destroy it.” Then he’s gone.

I see Joe Connors patting Clay Mason on the shoulder. “Nice,” he says. “This will be remembered.” He looks over at the camera and sound technicians who, as instructed, have recorded everything that’s happened here tonight. “Get it back to the station. We’ll start the editing tomorrow.”

He looks my way and winks. “We’ll talk soon, Bernie.” Then hastens to assist his boss, who appears to be having a great deal of trouble walking down the stairs.

From the second floor I hear Pam and Libby singing a chorus of “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.”

From next door comes: I SWEAR TO GOD THAT WAS THE BEST FUCK IN HUMAN HISTORY.

And from Jay Lombardi, standing by the sliding door that leads to my tiny garden, crestfallen and on the verge of tears as he watches the television crew that was supposed to immortalize him packing up its gear, I hear a soft crooning of one of his favorite poem’s. Appropriately, its biblically-inspired. “The 23rd Market Balm:”

The Fed’s at the spigot
I fear nothing.
It keeps the economy rolling along
It makes sure that inflation stays in check
It protects the dollar.

It works its magic mostly through jawboning,
Because it can.
Yea, though unemployment is currently rising
I’m cool.
Alan is out there
With his top-notch staff
Watching the store.

I know they’ll make things pan out in the long run
Even if bears eat my lunch in the near term
And they’ll finesse any oil crisis
So my car continues to runneth.

Surely, scads of easy money will be out here
Whenever I need it
And home mortgage rates will remain low.
Always

“Amen,” I intone solemnly.

*****

(End of Chapter XXVI)