Hardscrabble Road(42)

“Yeah,” Marbury said. “It’s our big claim to fame. If we’d realized who it was—no, that’s not true. He was behaving like a jerk. In a car. Just what you need on a city street, with cars and pedestrians everywhere.”

“The car was weaving?”

“The car was doing weird things with speeding up and slowing down,” Giametti said. “It would, like, rev up and go for a few feet and then he’d hit the brake and when he started up again, he’d inch forward. The street wasn’t packed but there were other cars, and they were getting pretty upset. You couldn’t tell what he was going to do next.”

“Yeah, and then he hit the gas pedal for serious,” Marbury said, “and just sort of shot off, right through a red light, and we decided we’d had enough. So we stopped him.”

“And then it started getting weird,” Giametti said.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Marbury said. “I mean, I know he’s famous, he does commercials, but what can I say? I’d never seen him. And I don’t listen to his radio show.”

“He expected us to recognize him, though,” Giametti said. “And he did look sort of familiar to me right from the beginning, but he was flying. I mean, he was absolutely off the wall. He was singing.”

“Benedetti said he was singing when you got him back to the precinct station,” Gregor said.

“Oh, he was singing there, too,” Marbury said. “But he was singing right off in the car, between bouts of calling us stuff I’m not supposed to say in uniform except on a witness stand. He kept saying, ‘You know how important I am? You know how important I am? John Cleese is going to play me in the movie.’ ”

“Not John Cleese,” Giametti said. “John Goodman. You know, the guy who played Roseanne’s husband on TV.”

“Whatever,” Marbury said. “We hauled him out of the car, and that was when he really started screaming at us. He kept saying, ‘You can’t arrest me. You can’t arrest me. I’ve got a deal with the city. I’ve got a deal.’ ”

“He said that?” Gregor said. “That he had a deal?”

“Yeah,” Giametti said. “Over and over again. Thing is, I think we’d have heard about it. I mean, our precinct is in this guy’s own neighborhood. If he’d cut some kind of deal with some of the beat cops, we’d have heard about it.”

“Somebody would at least have tried to warn us off him,” Marbury said.

“So what we thought was, maybe there’s some guys who just let him go when they find him because they feel sorry for him, or because they’re fans. There are a lot of conservatives on the police force. We figured he’d been stopped for behaving like an idiot a couple of times and the cop who stopped him gave him a break and let it pass. It happens, even for people who aren’t celebrities.”

“But anyway,” Marbury said, “we figured we weren’t obliged to do the same, and we didn’t want to see him on the road for another goddamned minute, so we took him out of the car, and that’s when we saw the Tupper-ware thing on the front passenger seat. It was weird because I recognized the thing. The container. My wife’s sister sells Tupperware. We have a container just like it at home. And it was full of pills.”

“The whole front of the car was full of pills,” Giametti said. “He’d been speeding up and hitting the brakes, and some of the pills had gotten loose and spilled on the floor and the seat and everywhere. Everything you could think of. OxyContin. Percoset. Darvocet. Percodan. Benzphetamine. Phentermine. Uppers, downers, you name it. All prescription.”

“There’s this thing they do on the street,” Marbury said, “called a rainbow cocktail. You take a whole bunch of pills and you pick ’em by the color, and then you down the whole thing with Scotch. That’s what we thought he’d been doing. We asked him to take a Breathalyzer test and he refused. So we handcuffed him and put him in the squad car.”

“We got the handcuffs on before he knew what we were doing,” Giametti said. “Getting him into the car wasn’t so easy. He went berserk. He kicked. He bit. He body-blocked. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he can manage one hell of a body block. He’s a big guy. He should have played football. I thought we were going to have to call for backup, but we got him in the car, and then we got back to the station as fast as we could.”

“We were hoping the drive would calm him down,” Marbury said, “and it did some. I mean, he just sat back there singing and calling us motherwhatevers every few seconds, and he wasn’t jumping around. So we got him back to the station, we start to take him out of the car, and wham, there he goes again. He slammed into me from the side with his hip hooked out and I fell on my ass, and then he started to run, and Mike had to go after him, and by that time I was calling for backup, so about thirty guys showed up just as Mike grabbed him.”