fic: witness statements (mad men)
witness statements
missives from manhattan’s weirdest precinct.
mad men au. peggy/stan w. ginsberg. 4860 words.
notes: IT'S THE BUDDY COP!AU!!!
wherein, it's the 1970s and Peggy and Stan are detective partners with the NYPD and Ginsberg is the medical examiner down in the morgue. THIS WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN W/O ALL THE HILARIOUS MESSAGES EXCHANGED WITH YOU, JAKK, so bless. also a scene in this was definitely ripped straight off of Top of the Lake, mainly because I couldn't prevent my imagination from going to there.
1.
“I thought you dropped that shit off at the evidence locker,” Peggy says. She shuts the door behind her and plops a stack of files down on the table.
“Most of it,” Stan says as he inhales. Peggy stares at him and the joint in his mouth, her hands braced on either hip. They’ve taken over an old empty interrogation room as their own private headquarters.
“Gimme that,” she snaps, and for a quick second, Stan looks almost guilty (though not guilty enough not to take another hit before passing it to Peggy).
She looks at him and then the joint and then raises it to her own lips, inhaling deeply.
“Hold it in your chest,” he says, and his voice has turned low, like he’s instructing her to do something else entirely with her mouth, his gaze fixed on the smoke and her lips.
“I know what I’m doing,” she says, even though she’s coughing. She takes another hit.
“If Don catches us in here, it’s all on you, buddy,” she says tightly, more smoke seeping out of her mouth.
Stan leans back in his chair, his arms folded over his chest. “Don smokes with me.”
Her mouth slips down into a frown, an exhibition of distressed surprise. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” The doubt remains on her face; Peggy has a hard time believing things she hasn’t seen for herself.
Peggy sits down at the table and passes the joint back to him. She opens a file and Stan averts his gaze from the crime scene photos. They don’t talk about that; he hasn’t gone so much soft and squeamish as he has tired.
“So. You come here often?” he teases.
“Get to work,” she says lazily, handing off a sheaf of witness statements.
He turns on the radio and starts singing along with “Midnight Train to Georgia” in an unconvincing falsetto. She tunes him out. She looks at the body instead, brushes her fingers against his when he hands her the joint again.
2.
Ginsberg talks to the radio in the basement, never the bodies.
He makes a point of making that distinction to both Stan and Peggy when they show up unexpectedly (not that much of his routine or talking points would have been altered had he known they were coming) while he’s mid-diatribe about Pinochet in Chile.
“It’s a disgrace, is what it is,” he says. Peggy nods at him, her expression mostly blank while she tries to peer at the open file on their victim. Stan looks simply bored.
“What? You two don’t follow the news? Huh? You too busy making the crime beat, that it? Buncha fascists.”
Stan holds up a hand. “Alright, man. Be cool. Everyone loves civil liberties, here, Ginzo. Everyone’s glad we aren’t living in fucking Chile. Or dying in Chile, if you’re this guy,” he points to the body on the table.
Ginsberg ignores him, plopping a tepid liver down on the scale. Peggy winces.
“I woke up this morning and I knew it was a bad day,” he says, “I just knew it. And now all this?” He shakes his head, removes the liver from the scale. “And here I am! Here I am, and I work for the police state, I know that, I’m not just finding out some great secret, I work for the enemy, I am the enemy, I AM DEATH. WE ARE ALL DEATH, and you two, I bet you two wear your guns down here with your fucking jackboots.”
Peggy and Stan wear twin expressions of amused, confused concern.
“So how’d this guy die then?” Stan asks after a beat, pointing again at the stiff on the table.
“Apathy!” Ginsberg shouts.
3.
Peggy stabs Stan by accident.
They had been investigating an abandoned tenement house, Peggy jumpier than a detective has any right to be, and as Stan had joked while they hobbled together back to the car (Peggy’s body pressed against his while she pressed a hand against the wound) at least she hadn’t gone for her gun.
Here’s the other thing: they both need to keep this off the record. Stan’s been cleared for duty by the skin of his teeth (his medical chart is thicker than even their most high profile cases; Ginsberg’s got this theory about Stan that involves him having an unspoken death wish that no one, least of all Peggy, ever talks about, and it’s probably the most interesting thing about Stan, if you ask Ginsberg) and a knife wound to the side really isn’t going to help matters on that front. And Peggy -- Peggy’s been before the review board explaining a discharged firearm more times than the public would most likely feel comfortable with; adding knifing a fellow officer to her list of police activities would only add to that sentiment.
So when Peggy asks, Ginsberg agrees to help. It’s fun, he decides, to be included. It’s also nice to get out of the morgue, and it’s even nicer to know that now both Peggy and Stan owe him.
They’ve set up improvised-emergency-room in Deputy Commanding Officer Cosgrove’s former office.
Ginsberg can hear them as he approaches. “You’re not putting me on a fucking table with a dead guy,” Stan’s saying. He can’t hear what Peggy says in response, but it makes Stan laugh.
They don’t notice Ginsberg when he pushes the door open. The office is mostly empty, just a desk (that Stan’s laying on) and a bunch of boxes full of old files. Peggy’s got a hand covering the side of Stan’s body, the space between his ribs and hip, a balled-up shirt already soaked through. There’s a shocking amount of blood. It stinks in a way the morgue never does.
“Ya didn’t say somebody gutted him,” Ginsberg says in the doorway. Both Peggy and Stan look up quickly at him.
“Nobody gutted him,” Peggy says, but the defiance in her voice is marred by an obvious attempt to stay calm and there’s a tremble to it, like try as she might, she can’t tamp those nerves down.
“Like a stuck pig,” Ginsberg mumbles as he shuts the door behind him. The room’s dark; they only flicked on the desk lamp, likely to avoid detection (hey, he could be a detective too), but he can see that Peggy’s got Stan’s blood all over her. She must have tried to push her hair out of her face because there’s blood smeared across her neck and along her jaw.
Ginsberg pushes Peggy out of the way to get a better look at the wound. It’s not all that long or all that deep, more superficial than anything, which is good. He can work with that.
“Who did this to you?” Ginsberg asks (his voice sort of a mix of outrage blended with intense curiosity), that detail left out when Peggy had called him.
“You’re lookin’ at her,” Stan grunts and then laughs. “She likes to stick things in me.”
Peggy rolls her eyes.
“Do you stick things in her?” Ginsberg asks. Only after he asks it does he hear the implication, but Stan’s already laughing again, grinning at Peggy and Peggy’s glaring at nothing in particular.
“Sure hope to once you stitch me up here, doc.”
“Shut up,” Peggy says while Ginsberg holds up a hand.
“I just want you to know -- I am not a licensed physician.”
“Yeah, but you sew people up all the time,” Stan says, sounding more like he’s trying to reassure himself than anyone else.
“Sure. Dead people.”
“I can fix that part for you,” Peggy says through gritted teeth and Stan smiles, even though the pain is starting to make itself known across his face.
“I think you already got your one shot for the night,” Stan says to her thickly.
Stan hisses when Ginsberg cleans the wound. It’s so different from the dead bodies Ginsberg works with. When he presses down on the wound, Stan’s face reflects that, his mouth pulling tight, eyes squeezing shut. When he presses again, it makes Stan groan. The reaction is instantaneous. It’s almost sexual in that sense. It’s fascinating.
“Are you okay?” Peggy asks sharply.
“Yeah, I’m great,” Stan says, sighing and hissing again.
Stan’s drinking straight from a bottle of Hennessy Ginsberg suspects they swiped from Draper’s office. He takes a long pull while Ginsberg dabs at the wound with a little more peroxide. Live flesh is infinitely more interesting than dead flesh, he decides.
“You’re gonna throw up,” Peggy says.
“Add that to the list of expelled bodily fluids enjoyed tonight.” She scowls at him.
While they talk, Ginsberg investigates. He’d like to open Stan up, that’s what he thinks. He’s never found Stan more interesting than he finds him right now -- how his body reacts to pain, how deep this wound might go, how the human body accommodates for that. If Ginsberg wanted, he could talk to him while he works instead of the radio, and Stan would talk back.
In fact, Stan’s talking back right now:
“Come on, man, what’s taking so long: just stitch me up.”
Stan’s words attract Peggy’s attention and she looks down at Ginsberg’s hands and Stan’s wound, now wider than when she had first helped drag Stan up onto the desk. Her eyes go wide, too. You’d think for a New York detective she’d have a stronger stomach, Ginsberg almost says.
“Are you -- what are you doing?” Peggy asks. Stan must hear the horror in her voice because for the first time since they started playing real-life Operation, Stan actually looks concerned.
Ginsberg shrugs. “I was curious.”
“Sew him up!”
“What’s he doing?” Stan practically yells, wincing when he tries to sit up and look down at Ginsberg’s handiwork.
Peggy pushes him back down with a hand spread over his face. Stan doesn’t fight her, lays back down, and Peggy distractedly drags her hand through his hair.
“Sew him up,” she says again, and Ginsberg holds a hand up in supplication before getting to work. Stan winces and grunts and Peggy swipes a sip of the cognac.
“Can you write prescriptions? Can coroners do that?” Stan mumbles.
“He deals with dead bodies. Of course he can’t.”
There’s a long gap of silence while Ginsberg works, broken when Stan says, “I’m gonna throw up.”
4.
Stan always wants her after he’s been hurt.
He ripped his stitches one time, but that didn’t stop him. Peggy pressed a hand to it, could feel his blood on her own bare stomach, hot and sticky.
That didn’t stop her either.
5.
Stan’s body is a mess. He’s got a blown-out knee, an old injury he brought with him into the police academy. His shoulder is still a wreck from that time impatience had won out and he used it to bust a front door down. Peggy remembers that; it had been one of their first cases they worked as detectives together.
“Don’t say you told me not to,” he had said that night, a bag of ice clutched to his shoulder, some of the cubes in her own glass.
Peggy kicked her feet up on his desk; his gaze had seemed rooted to her ankle for too long.
“I won’t,” she said, “because I never said that.”
“Don’t say anything!”
Stan’s been shot twice, two healed wounds to show for it.
The first time, a bullet grazed his neck, and according to Ginsberg, that doesn’t even qualify as a gunshot wound. It only needed three stitches, count ‘em, three stitches, and even though Stan had bitched through the entire “medical procedure” (Ginsberg provides the air-quotes whenever relating the epic tale of The Time Detective Stan Rizzo’s Neck Near Met With A Bullet Discharged From A Heroin-Dealing Landlord’s Gun), it still wasn’t a real gunshot wound, not really, and it wasn’t right to count it as such, to which Stan would typically arch his eyebrows and ask Ginsberg if he was willing to test that theory because he’s got the gun and he’s got some bullets and Ginsberg definitely has a neck, so it’s really just a question as to whether he’s willing to stick it out.
The second time, Stan grew a beard after -- though in his words, it wasn’t because he’d been shot. Not really. He was put on medical leave (this time, there had been no dispute as to whether his injury qualified as a gunshot wound, but instead when this event was ever discussed, a lot of emphasis was put on centimeters and internal organs, and much like the neck wound, had Stan been to his left just a little, the story would have become a story told only in dark Irish pubs at other dead cops’ drunken wakes and Peggy would have a new partner). He spent three weeks holed up in his apartment, and as a result, he grew a beard. At first he intended to read a lot of Walden, the sort of shit that stressed a man’s place in the world, self-reliance, that kind of thing. Instead he took more pain killers than recommended and when that prescription ran out (and when his doctor refused to refill it and Stan refused to press the issue because a cop with an addiction to narcotics was not only a sad thing but it was also a cliche) he started smoking more weed than usual. And he read. He read a lot of Pynchon and he read some Vonnegut and Bukowski and a whole lot of Batman.
He also ignored his phone.
Peggy had come over to inform him that he was needed. That the guy who shot him, an event that save for the persistent ache and pain radiating out from his abdomen felt as though it had happened to someone else (“someone without a beard?” Peggy had asked when he relayed this thought to her), was facing trial and they needed him to testify.
“You up to it?” she asked, her hands on her hips. She had ignored the rest of the apartment. The dishes piled up next to the sink, the newspapers he collected and read and never bothered to recycle. The teetering stack of books next to the couch and littered in front of the television. She didn’t say anything about that and she didn’t say anything about the beard, not until later.
“Ginzo misses you,” she said when they walked up the steps of the courthouse, bumping his elbow with her own. “I think Don does too, if only to help wrangle our favorite medical examiner.”
“Wrangle or strangle?”
She shrugged like they were interchangeable and then stepped through the doorway.
So he’s got a whole roadmap of scars and marks he’s collected over the years on the force. For example, there’s still a faint, raised pink line that stretches under his ear a couple inches around his neck that he got that time he was near garroted in that flophouse down in the East Village.
Peggy had shot the pimp with the wire around Stan’s neck, and there was so much blood. Stan’s, the pimp’s, and for a wild, sickening second, Peggy had thought she had shot Stan instead.
When they fuck (and when they do, it always plays out like a moment of weakness, like one of them has broken and apologies will need to made), she likes to press a wet open mouth to that scar, if only because it makes him grab her that much tighter, make a sound like if he could, he’d maybe cry.
6.
“I still don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to get it.”
“If you’re going to speak in code, then I ask you to get out of my morgue.” Ginsberg catches Peggy’s smirk behind the lip of her coffeecup and the quick glance she shoots Stan’s way. He assumes it’s reciprocated because her smirk grows a little more.
“Nancy Drew here’s shacking up with her boyfriend.”
“Okay. I -- okay. So what. That means nothing to me.”
“So, said boyfriend just so happens to be a journalist who runs so far left he crashes straight into the goalpost and off the field.”
“That metaphor doesn’t make any sense,” Ginsberg says quietly, more to himself than Stan.
“Oh, please, feel free to exaggerate more,” Peggy says to Stan, one hand braced on a cocked hip.
“And what I don’t get?” Stan continues, ignoring Peggy. “Is what a guy like that is doing dating an officer of the law.”
“Maybe he’s writing a story about you, you ever think of that?” Ginsberg asks pointing a scalpel at her.
“He’s not writing a story about me.”
“I’ll write a story about you,” Stan says, and Peggy’s dispassionate glare at Stan has all the wrong heat behind it, Ginsberg thinks, completely ruined by the appreciatively amused slant her face takes on first while he blatantly looks her up and down.
“Stop flirting. There’s a body on the table.” Ginsberg gestures widely to the aforementioned table. “Show some goddamn decency.”
7.
They first met Ginsberg in the morgue.
When they got down there, he talked to them the way a shut-in might speak to a grocery store clerk or doorman or a fellow bus passenger: earnestly and embarrassingly enthusiastic. He hopped from one subject to the next, starting with his own credentials and his opinions on midtown Manhattan before leaping to disparate topics, like the release of The Godfather and the persistence of New York stereotypes and how the death of Janis Joplin still haunted him and he was glad she had died in California instead of New York because had she died in New York that might have been too much to bear. Ginsberg was, in a word, overwhelming. Peggy couldn’t decide if it was a good thing that the company he kept was silent and dead.
“You’re pretty for a cop,” Ginsberg said suddenly. “I don’t mean no offense. I’m not being forward. I just didn’t know they made them that way.”
“Pretty?”
“Female.” He turned to Stan. “She good in a clinch?”
“Better than he is,” she said dryly, and Stan had just laughed.
He didn’t mention the body until Stan asked about it. And then he wouldn’t shut up.
8.
Ginsberg hides in the bathroom a lot.
Not from the bodies or death or anything that heavy or macabre, but rather his coworkers. Pete Campbell from the DA’s Office had been in that morning, and if you asked Ginsberg (no one ever asks Ginsberg), that’s more than enough reason to spend upwards of a half hour hiding out in the bathroom on the second floor. Namely, because no one ever comes here. It’s not a nice bathroom even though it’s closer to police commissioner Cooper’s office than all the other bathrooms in the building (Ginsberg knows; he’s done his research) (in fact, his research has led him to conclude that in all likelihood, Cooper has a private bathroom attached to his office, and Ginsberg suspects that that bathroom would rank the nicest of all the bathrooms in the building).
Most of the other offices around this bathroom have been re-appropriated as storage on account of the remodel happening. Ginsberg likes to read the angry editorials in the paper at night about how pissed everyone is that their tax dollars are going to work to make the precinct more architecturally en vogue. Sometimes he cuts them out and slips them in Deputy Chief Sterling’s mailbox anonymously.
He’s thinking about that when the bathroom door slams open, bouncing off the wall loudly, followed by noisy shoes clacking against the linoleum. Female. She exhales loudly, like the start of a crying jag but it goes uncompleted, followed up by water running from the faucet instead. Cold water, Ginsberg knows; the hot don’t run in here.
The gap between the door and the stall is wide enough for Ginsberg can see through it. It’s Peggy. She’s got herself braced against the sink catching her breath like she ran straight here, and maybe also through greater Manhattan. She fills her hands with cold water, lets it seep out through the cracks of her fingers and then blots her face with her wet hands. She does that shaky exhale thing again; it’s only then that Ginsberg considers that maybe she’s mad, barking, furiously angry rather than just winded or sad or shirking her professional responsibilities (Ginsberg thinks he’s all those things too, so that makes her a kindred spirit in that regard, and not just because she chose the same bathroom he did as an oasis amidst the desert that is their midtown Manhattan precinct).
The door swings open again (so much for being the emptiest bathroom in the building) and Peggy’s head darts up. The door clicks shut and Ginsberg doesn’t have as clear a view of the door as he does Peggy. He cranes his neck a little and then finally thinks to peer through the other gap on the right side of the door.
It’s Stan. Of course it’s Stan, this is the least surprising development in his day.
“What do you want?” she asks. The water’s still running and she shuts it off. The bathroom is uncomfortably quiet and he wonders what Stan did that’s got Peggy so mad. He’s still assuming she’s mad, but the way she asked what do you want? sounded more exasperated and hurt than anything else.
Peggy pushes her hair behind her ears and moves to the door, but Stan doesn’t move. He also hasn’t said a word, and if you ask Ginsberg (as already mentioned, no one ever asks Ginsberg anything) that’s the weirdest thing happening right now: Stan’s silence.
“Get out of my way,” Peggy says, quiet and mean. Stan’s still not moving, until suddenly, they’re both pushing against one another -- Peggy trying to get past him and Stan trying to hold her in place, and just as suddenly, Stan drops to his knees in front of her. Peggy freezes, and Stan’s hands are at her belt first and then the button and zip of her slacks; the word what? seems to stick in Peggy’s mouth and it hangs in the air. Stan drags her slacks and her underwear down and without any prelude whatsoever, his mouth is between her legs while Peggy’s mouth parts open and her head drops back.
Ginsberg just stares.
This might be the most surprising development of his day.
Stan’s hands keep rubbing over her hips and her bare ass (Peggy is incredibly pale, for the record) and his mouth earns a sharp gasp from Peggy, who claps her hands against the door to brace herself, her hips bucking forward against him. Everything echoes off the tile. Peggy drops one hand from the door and buries it in his hair; Stan grunts, the sound muffled, and Ginsberg can see a slight tremble to the muscles in Peggy’s thigh.
Ginsberg holds his breath -- it’s too quiet, just Peggy’s loud breathing punctuated by occasional involuntary-sounding noises (at one point, it sounds like she’s about to let loose the cry Ginsberg had thought was threatening when she first showed up in his bathroom, but she doesn’t, choosing instead to bite her bottom lip) and the sound of Stan’s mouth against her, a sound that makes Ginsberg uncomfortable (wet, it sounds wet).
Ginsberg can’t figure out if this is a normal thing that happens between them -- drive-by oral -- or if this is as strange and unexpected for them as it is for Ginsberg.
Peggy comes quickly and silently but her entire body shakes with it. Stan’s breathing as hard as Peggy and he wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand when he pulls away from her.
Neither of them are looking at each other and Ginsberg can’t stop looking at them. Stan rises all slow and creaky, like his body can’t handle the strain and Peggy pulls up her pants, her hands unsteady with her belt. Ginsberg can see them trembling.
Without a word, she pushes past Stan and she leaves.
“Fuck,” Stan says to the bathroom, and Ginsberg has to bite down on the impulse to reply.
Stan repeats the same position Peggy had before he arrived -- braced against the sink and breathing hard.
Dummies, Ginsberg shakes his head and waits for Stan to leave.
9.
They first time they fucked it was at a bar after a case had closed without a conviction.
They were in a booth together and without preamble she had crawled into his lap and bit at his neck, her mouth wet and sloppy. It wasn’t a cop bar, but his mind still lit on getting caught, someone seeing them. That didn’t stop him from kissing her, grabbing at her ass and pushing up against her when she bore down on him.
He fucked her in the bathroom. Locked the door and bent her over the sink, a band that sounded like The Doors but wasn’t The Doors playing live on the other side of the wall, only the vibrating thrum of the bass carrying through to them. It was fast and clumsy and she was practically coming before he even pushed into her.
After, Peggy had that look to her she only adopted when she felt the world was off-balance. The look she took on when a witness’s statement didn’t match with another’s, when a jury didn’t vote the way she thought they would, when she overestimated each and every person she came into contact with and wound up disappointed. She was the most idealistic and optimistic detective Stan had ever met. Scratch detective -- she was the most idealistic and optimistic person he had ever met. And because of that, her world was often rendered off-balance.
After, she washed her hands, and wouldn’t look at him.
“What, you only fuck girls in bathrooms,” she said to her hands. “Like some kind of pervert.”
When he laughed, the sound was breathless. He watched her reflection. “Funny. I didn’t seem to be alone either time.”
“You initiate it,” she said. It was her cop voice and that made him want to laugh.
“Do you want an apology or a confession?” What he wanted to say was that she was the one who crawled in his lap, that she was just as culpable as he was, but he didn’t say it. He let the band on the other side of the wall drown him out instead.
“I’m going home,” she had said after a beat. And, disappointed (with him, in herself, it was never entirely clear), she had.
10.
Stan likes to watch Peggy work. He likes to watch the way she pieces together information, the resolute look her face takes on before they enter the interrogation room (he’s good cop nine times out of ten to her bad; her temper’s got a way of snapping, her lip taking on a snarl, whereas Stan remains the steadfast trustworthy figure, unruffled and unsurprised, the one who’ll bring you coffee, light your cigarette, make small talk until Peggy throws the book at you).
He likes the rigid posture of her body when she has her gun raised and aimed. The gun never looks entirely natural in her hands. He likes that. (He thinks it looks entirely too natural when he pulls his, an easy extension of his own arm, no cautious charge to his body, not like hers; he holds a gun like it belongs there, like he was made to pull the trigger).
He likes her. How she makes their cordoned off corner of the bullpen smell like a woman. She doesn’t wear perfume, but they keep close quarters. He can tell you when she swaps out her shampoo for a new brand or trades bars of soap. He can tell you too many romanticized details about her and he doesn’t let himself bother to consider if she could do the same.
They’re tied to each other, he thinks. She smokes his cigarettes and never carries her own. She’s killed two people over the course of the job and both times were because of him; he didn’t put the gun in her hand, but he made her shoot it. He was made to pull the trigger, and he made her do the same. He took a bullet for her, and they never ever talk about that.
They never talk about any of the times Peggy has wound up with his blood staining her hands while she radioed in for back-up. The only time he saw her panic was when he was gut-shot .
That was a long time ago. That was before he had a beard and before Peggy lived with Abe. That was before she admitted to liking him, an admission that never comes with words, but still with her mouth, her hands, the way she’ll wrap herself around him and pretend it’s only because he needs it.
And he does. He needs it all the time. But then, he thinks, so does she.
Dummies, Ginsberg would say.
fin.
missives from manhattan’s weirdest precinct.
mad men au. peggy/stan w. ginsberg. 4860 words.
notes: IT'S THE BUDDY COP!AU!!!
wherein, it's the 1970s and Peggy and Stan are detective partners with the NYPD and Ginsberg is the medical examiner down in the morgue. THIS WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN W/O ALL THE HILARIOUS MESSAGES EXCHANGED WITH YOU, JAKK, so bless. also a scene in this was definitely ripped straight off of Top of the Lake, mainly because I couldn't prevent my imagination from going to there.
1.
“I thought you dropped that shit off at the evidence locker,” Peggy says. She shuts the door behind her and plops a stack of files down on the table.
“Most of it,” Stan says as he inhales. Peggy stares at him and the joint in his mouth, her hands braced on either hip. They’ve taken over an old empty interrogation room as their own private headquarters.
“Gimme that,” she snaps, and for a quick second, Stan looks almost guilty (though not guilty enough not to take another hit before passing it to Peggy).
She looks at him and then the joint and then raises it to her own lips, inhaling deeply.
“Hold it in your chest,” he says, and his voice has turned low, like he’s instructing her to do something else entirely with her mouth, his gaze fixed on the smoke and her lips.
“I know what I’m doing,” she says, even though she’s coughing. She takes another hit.
“If Don catches us in here, it’s all on you, buddy,” she says tightly, more smoke seeping out of her mouth.
Stan leans back in his chair, his arms folded over his chest. “Don smokes with me.”
Her mouth slips down into a frown, an exhibition of distressed surprise. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” The doubt remains on her face; Peggy has a hard time believing things she hasn’t seen for herself.
Peggy sits down at the table and passes the joint back to him. She opens a file and Stan averts his gaze from the crime scene photos. They don’t talk about that; he hasn’t gone so much soft and squeamish as he has tired.
“So. You come here often?” he teases.
“Get to work,” she says lazily, handing off a sheaf of witness statements.
He turns on the radio and starts singing along with “Midnight Train to Georgia” in an unconvincing falsetto. She tunes him out. She looks at the body instead, brushes her fingers against his when he hands her the joint again.
2.
Ginsberg talks to the radio in the basement, never the bodies.
He makes a point of making that distinction to both Stan and Peggy when they show up unexpectedly (not that much of his routine or talking points would have been altered had he known they were coming) while he’s mid-diatribe about Pinochet in Chile.
“It’s a disgrace, is what it is,” he says. Peggy nods at him, her expression mostly blank while she tries to peer at the open file on their victim. Stan looks simply bored.
“What? You two don’t follow the news? Huh? You too busy making the crime beat, that it? Buncha fascists.”
Stan holds up a hand. “Alright, man. Be cool. Everyone loves civil liberties, here, Ginzo. Everyone’s glad we aren’t living in fucking Chile. Or dying in Chile, if you’re this guy,” he points to the body on the table.
Ginsberg ignores him, plopping a tepid liver down on the scale. Peggy winces.
“I woke up this morning and I knew it was a bad day,” he says, “I just knew it. And now all this?” He shakes his head, removes the liver from the scale. “And here I am! Here I am, and I work for the police state, I know that, I’m not just finding out some great secret, I work for the enemy, I am the enemy, I AM DEATH. WE ARE ALL DEATH, and you two, I bet you two wear your guns down here with your fucking jackboots.”
Peggy and Stan wear twin expressions of amused, confused concern.
“So how’d this guy die then?” Stan asks after a beat, pointing again at the stiff on the table.
“Apathy!” Ginsberg shouts.
3.
Peggy stabs Stan by accident.
They had been investigating an abandoned tenement house, Peggy jumpier than a detective has any right to be, and as Stan had joked while they hobbled together back to the car (Peggy’s body pressed against his while she pressed a hand against the wound) at least she hadn’t gone for her gun.
Here’s the other thing: they both need to keep this off the record. Stan’s been cleared for duty by the skin of his teeth (his medical chart is thicker than even their most high profile cases; Ginsberg’s got this theory about Stan that involves him having an unspoken death wish that no one, least of all Peggy, ever talks about, and it’s probably the most interesting thing about Stan, if you ask Ginsberg) and a knife wound to the side really isn’t going to help matters on that front. And Peggy -- Peggy’s been before the review board explaining a discharged firearm more times than the public would most likely feel comfortable with; adding knifing a fellow officer to her list of police activities would only add to that sentiment.
So when Peggy asks, Ginsberg agrees to help. It’s fun, he decides, to be included. It’s also nice to get out of the morgue, and it’s even nicer to know that now both Peggy and Stan owe him.
They’ve set up improvised-emergency-room in Deputy Commanding Officer Cosgrove’s former office.
Ginsberg can hear them as he approaches. “You’re not putting me on a fucking table with a dead guy,” Stan’s saying. He can’t hear what Peggy says in response, but it makes Stan laugh.
They don’t notice Ginsberg when he pushes the door open. The office is mostly empty, just a desk (that Stan’s laying on) and a bunch of boxes full of old files. Peggy’s got a hand covering the side of Stan’s body, the space between his ribs and hip, a balled-up shirt already soaked through. There’s a shocking amount of blood. It stinks in a way the morgue never does.
“Ya didn’t say somebody gutted him,” Ginsberg says in the doorway. Both Peggy and Stan look up quickly at him.
“Nobody gutted him,” Peggy says, but the defiance in her voice is marred by an obvious attempt to stay calm and there’s a tremble to it, like try as she might, she can’t tamp those nerves down.
“Like a stuck pig,” Ginsberg mumbles as he shuts the door behind him. The room’s dark; they only flicked on the desk lamp, likely to avoid detection (hey, he could be a detective too), but he can see that Peggy’s got Stan’s blood all over her. She must have tried to push her hair out of her face because there’s blood smeared across her neck and along her jaw.
Ginsberg pushes Peggy out of the way to get a better look at the wound. It’s not all that long or all that deep, more superficial than anything, which is good. He can work with that.
“Who did this to you?” Ginsberg asks (his voice sort of a mix of outrage blended with intense curiosity), that detail left out when Peggy had called him.
“You’re lookin’ at her,” Stan grunts and then laughs. “She likes to stick things in me.”
Peggy rolls her eyes.
“Do you stick things in her?” Ginsberg asks. Only after he asks it does he hear the implication, but Stan’s already laughing again, grinning at Peggy and Peggy’s glaring at nothing in particular.
“Sure hope to once you stitch me up here, doc.”
“Shut up,” Peggy says while Ginsberg holds up a hand.
“I just want you to know -- I am not a licensed physician.”
“Yeah, but you sew people up all the time,” Stan says, sounding more like he’s trying to reassure himself than anyone else.
“Sure. Dead people.”
“I can fix that part for you,” Peggy says through gritted teeth and Stan smiles, even though the pain is starting to make itself known across his face.
“I think you already got your one shot for the night,” Stan says to her thickly.
Stan hisses when Ginsberg cleans the wound. It’s so different from the dead bodies Ginsberg works with. When he presses down on the wound, Stan’s face reflects that, his mouth pulling tight, eyes squeezing shut. When he presses again, it makes Stan groan. The reaction is instantaneous. It’s almost sexual in that sense. It’s fascinating.
“Are you okay?” Peggy asks sharply.
“Yeah, I’m great,” Stan says, sighing and hissing again.
Stan’s drinking straight from a bottle of Hennessy Ginsberg suspects they swiped from Draper’s office. He takes a long pull while Ginsberg dabs at the wound with a little more peroxide. Live flesh is infinitely more interesting than dead flesh, he decides.
“You’re gonna throw up,” Peggy says.
“Add that to the list of expelled bodily fluids enjoyed tonight.” She scowls at him.
While they talk, Ginsberg investigates. He’d like to open Stan up, that’s what he thinks. He’s never found Stan more interesting than he finds him right now -- how his body reacts to pain, how deep this wound might go, how the human body accommodates for that. If Ginsberg wanted, he could talk to him while he works instead of the radio, and Stan would talk back.
In fact, Stan’s talking back right now:
“Come on, man, what’s taking so long: just stitch me up.”
Stan’s words attract Peggy’s attention and she looks down at Ginsberg’s hands and Stan’s wound, now wider than when she had first helped drag Stan up onto the desk. Her eyes go wide, too. You’d think for a New York detective she’d have a stronger stomach, Ginsberg almost says.
“Are you -- what are you doing?” Peggy asks. Stan must hear the horror in her voice because for the first time since they started playing real-life Operation, Stan actually looks concerned.
Ginsberg shrugs. “I was curious.”
“Sew him up!”
“What’s he doing?” Stan practically yells, wincing when he tries to sit up and look down at Ginsberg’s handiwork.
Peggy pushes him back down with a hand spread over his face. Stan doesn’t fight her, lays back down, and Peggy distractedly drags her hand through his hair.
“Sew him up,” she says again, and Ginsberg holds a hand up in supplication before getting to work. Stan winces and grunts and Peggy swipes a sip of the cognac.
“Can you write prescriptions? Can coroners do that?” Stan mumbles.
“He deals with dead bodies. Of course he can’t.”
There’s a long gap of silence while Ginsberg works, broken when Stan says, “I’m gonna throw up.”
4.
Stan always wants her after he’s been hurt.
He ripped his stitches one time, but that didn’t stop him. Peggy pressed a hand to it, could feel his blood on her own bare stomach, hot and sticky.
That didn’t stop her either.
5.
Stan’s body is a mess. He’s got a blown-out knee, an old injury he brought with him into the police academy. His shoulder is still a wreck from that time impatience had won out and he used it to bust a front door down. Peggy remembers that; it had been one of their first cases they worked as detectives together.
“Don’t say you told me not to,” he had said that night, a bag of ice clutched to his shoulder, some of the cubes in her own glass.
Peggy kicked her feet up on his desk; his gaze had seemed rooted to her ankle for too long.
“I won’t,” she said, “because I never said that.”
“Don’t say anything!”
Stan’s been shot twice, two healed wounds to show for it.
The first time, a bullet grazed his neck, and according to Ginsberg, that doesn’t even qualify as a gunshot wound. It only needed three stitches, count ‘em, three stitches, and even though Stan had bitched through the entire “medical procedure” (Ginsberg provides the air-quotes whenever relating the epic tale of The Time Detective Stan Rizzo’s Neck Near Met With A Bullet Discharged From A Heroin-Dealing Landlord’s Gun), it still wasn’t a real gunshot wound, not really, and it wasn’t right to count it as such, to which Stan would typically arch his eyebrows and ask Ginsberg if he was willing to test that theory because he’s got the gun and he’s got some bullets and Ginsberg definitely has a neck, so it’s really just a question as to whether he’s willing to stick it out.
The second time, Stan grew a beard after -- though in his words, it wasn’t because he’d been shot. Not really. He was put on medical leave (this time, there had been no dispute as to whether his injury qualified as a gunshot wound, but instead when this event was ever discussed, a lot of emphasis was put on centimeters and internal organs, and much like the neck wound, had Stan been to his left just a little, the story would have become a story told only in dark Irish pubs at other dead cops’ drunken wakes and Peggy would have a new partner). He spent three weeks holed up in his apartment, and as a result, he grew a beard. At first he intended to read a lot of Walden, the sort of shit that stressed a man’s place in the world, self-reliance, that kind of thing. Instead he took more pain killers than recommended and when that prescription ran out (and when his doctor refused to refill it and Stan refused to press the issue because a cop with an addiction to narcotics was not only a sad thing but it was also a cliche) he started smoking more weed than usual. And he read. He read a lot of Pynchon and he read some Vonnegut and Bukowski and a whole lot of Batman.
He also ignored his phone.
Peggy had come over to inform him that he was needed. That the guy who shot him, an event that save for the persistent ache and pain radiating out from his abdomen felt as though it had happened to someone else (“someone without a beard?” Peggy had asked when he relayed this thought to her), was facing trial and they needed him to testify.
“You up to it?” she asked, her hands on her hips. She had ignored the rest of the apartment. The dishes piled up next to the sink, the newspapers he collected and read and never bothered to recycle. The teetering stack of books next to the couch and littered in front of the television. She didn’t say anything about that and she didn’t say anything about the beard, not until later.
“Ginzo misses you,” she said when they walked up the steps of the courthouse, bumping his elbow with her own. “I think Don does too, if only to help wrangle our favorite medical examiner.”
“Wrangle or strangle?”
She shrugged like they were interchangeable and then stepped through the doorway.
So he’s got a whole roadmap of scars and marks he’s collected over the years on the force. For example, there’s still a faint, raised pink line that stretches under his ear a couple inches around his neck that he got that time he was near garroted in that flophouse down in the East Village.
Peggy had shot the pimp with the wire around Stan’s neck, and there was so much blood. Stan’s, the pimp’s, and for a wild, sickening second, Peggy had thought she had shot Stan instead.
When they fuck (and when they do, it always plays out like a moment of weakness, like one of them has broken and apologies will need to made), she likes to press a wet open mouth to that scar, if only because it makes him grab her that much tighter, make a sound like if he could, he’d maybe cry.
6.
“I still don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to get it.”
“If you’re going to speak in code, then I ask you to get out of my morgue.” Ginsberg catches Peggy’s smirk behind the lip of her coffeecup and the quick glance she shoots Stan’s way. He assumes it’s reciprocated because her smirk grows a little more.
“Nancy Drew here’s shacking up with her boyfriend.”
“Okay. I -- okay. So what. That means nothing to me.”
“So, said boyfriend just so happens to be a journalist who runs so far left he crashes straight into the goalpost and off the field.”
“That metaphor doesn’t make any sense,” Ginsberg says quietly, more to himself than Stan.
“Oh, please, feel free to exaggerate more,” Peggy says to Stan, one hand braced on a cocked hip.
“And what I don’t get?” Stan continues, ignoring Peggy. “Is what a guy like that is doing dating an officer of the law.”
“Maybe he’s writing a story about you, you ever think of that?” Ginsberg asks pointing a scalpel at her.
“He’s not writing a story about me.”
“I’ll write a story about you,” Stan says, and Peggy’s dispassionate glare at Stan has all the wrong heat behind it, Ginsberg thinks, completely ruined by the appreciatively amused slant her face takes on first while he blatantly looks her up and down.
“Stop flirting. There’s a body on the table.” Ginsberg gestures widely to the aforementioned table. “Show some goddamn decency.”
7.
They first met Ginsberg in the morgue.
When they got down there, he talked to them the way a shut-in might speak to a grocery store clerk or doorman or a fellow bus passenger: earnestly and embarrassingly enthusiastic. He hopped from one subject to the next, starting with his own credentials and his opinions on midtown Manhattan before leaping to disparate topics, like the release of The Godfather and the persistence of New York stereotypes and how the death of Janis Joplin still haunted him and he was glad she had died in California instead of New York because had she died in New York that might have been too much to bear. Ginsberg was, in a word, overwhelming. Peggy couldn’t decide if it was a good thing that the company he kept was silent and dead.
“You’re pretty for a cop,” Ginsberg said suddenly. “I don’t mean no offense. I’m not being forward. I just didn’t know they made them that way.”
“Pretty?”
“Female.” He turned to Stan. “She good in a clinch?”
“Better than he is,” she said dryly, and Stan had just laughed.
He didn’t mention the body until Stan asked about it. And then he wouldn’t shut up.
8.
Ginsberg hides in the bathroom a lot.
Not from the bodies or death or anything that heavy or macabre, but rather his coworkers. Pete Campbell from the DA’s Office had been in that morning, and if you asked Ginsberg (no one ever asks Ginsberg), that’s more than enough reason to spend upwards of a half hour hiding out in the bathroom on the second floor. Namely, because no one ever comes here. It’s not a nice bathroom even though it’s closer to police commissioner Cooper’s office than all the other bathrooms in the building (Ginsberg knows; he’s done his research) (in fact, his research has led him to conclude that in all likelihood, Cooper has a private bathroom attached to his office, and Ginsberg suspects that that bathroom would rank the nicest of all the bathrooms in the building).
Most of the other offices around this bathroom have been re-appropriated as storage on account of the remodel happening. Ginsberg likes to read the angry editorials in the paper at night about how pissed everyone is that their tax dollars are going to work to make the precinct more architecturally en vogue. Sometimes he cuts them out and slips them in Deputy Chief Sterling’s mailbox anonymously.
He’s thinking about that when the bathroom door slams open, bouncing off the wall loudly, followed by noisy shoes clacking against the linoleum. Female. She exhales loudly, like the start of a crying jag but it goes uncompleted, followed up by water running from the faucet instead. Cold water, Ginsberg knows; the hot don’t run in here.
The gap between the door and the stall is wide enough for Ginsberg can see through it. It’s Peggy. She’s got herself braced against the sink catching her breath like she ran straight here, and maybe also through greater Manhattan. She fills her hands with cold water, lets it seep out through the cracks of her fingers and then blots her face with her wet hands. She does that shaky exhale thing again; it’s only then that Ginsberg considers that maybe she’s mad, barking, furiously angry rather than just winded or sad or shirking her professional responsibilities (Ginsberg thinks he’s all those things too, so that makes her a kindred spirit in that regard, and not just because she chose the same bathroom he did as an oasis amidst the desert that is their midtown Manhattan precinct).
The door swings open again (so much for being the emptiest bathroom in the building) and Peggy’s head darts up. The door clicks shut and Ginsberg doesn’t have as clear a view of the door as he does Peggy. He cranes his neck a little and then finally thinks to peer through the other gap on the right side of the door.
It’s Stan. Of course it’s Stan, this is the least surprising development in his day.
“What do you want?” she asks. The water’s still running and she shuts it off. The bathroom is uncomfortably quiet and he wonders what Stan did that’s got Peggy so mad. He’s still assuming she’s mad, but the way she asked what do you want? sounded more exasperated and hurt than anything else.
Peggy pushes her hair behind her ears and moves to the door, but Stan doesn’t move. He also hasn’t said a word, and if you ask Ginsberg (as already mentioned, no one ever asks Ginsberg anything) that’s the weirdest thing happening right now: Stan’s silence.
“Get out of my way,” Peggy says, quiet and mean. Stan’s still not moving, until suddenly, they’re both pushing against one another -- Peggy trying to get past him and Stan trying to hold her in place, and just as suddenly, Stan drops to his knees in front of her. Peggy freezes, and Stan’s hands are at her belt first and then the button and zip of her slacks; the word what? seems to stick in Peggy’s mouth and it hangs in the air. Stan drags her slacks and her underwear down and without any prelude whatsoever, his mouth is between her legs while Peggy’s mouth parts open and her head drops back.
Ginsberg just stares.
This might be the most surprising development of his day.
Stan’s hands keep rubbing over her hips and her bare ass (Peggy is incredibly pale, for the record) and his mouth earns a sharp gasp from Peggy, who claps her hands against the door to brace herself, her hips bucking forward against him. Everything echoes off the tile. Peggy drops one hand from the door and buries it in his hair; Stan grunts, the sound muffled, and Ginsberg can see a slight tremble to the muscles in Peggy’s thigh.
Ginsberg holds his breath -- it’s too quiet, just Peggy’s loud breathing punctuated by occasional involuntary-sounding noises (at one point, it sounds like she’s about to let loose the cry Ginsberg had thought was threatening when she first showed up in his bathroom, but she doesn’t, choosing instead to bite her bottom lip) and the sound of Stan’s mouth against her, a sound that makes Ginsberg uncomfortable (wet, it sounds wet).
Ginsberg can’t figure out if this is a normal thing that happens between them -- drive-by oral -- or if this is as strange and unexpected for them as it is for Ginsberg.
Peggy comes quickly and silently but her entire body shakes with it. Stan’s breathing as hard as Peggy and he wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand when he pulls away from her.
Neither of them are looking at each other and Ginsberg can’t stop looking at them. Stan rises all slow and creaky, like his body can’t handle the strain and Peggy pulls up her pants, her hands unsteady with her belt. Ginsberg can see them trembling.
Without a word, she pushes past Stan and she leaves.
“Fuck,” Stan says to the bathroom, and Ginsberg has to bite down on the impulse to reply.
Stan repeats the same position Peggy had before he arrived -- braced against the sink and breathing hard.
Dummies, Ginsberg shakes his head and waits for Stan to leave.
9.
They first time they fucked it was at a bar after a case had closed without a conviction.
They were in a booth together and without preamble she had crawled into his lap and bit at his neck, her mouth wet and sloppy. It wasn’t a cop bar, but his mind still lit on getting caught, someone seeing them. That didn’t stop him from kissing her, grabbing at her ass and pushing up against her when she bore down on him.
He fucked her in the bathroom. Locked the door and bent her over the sink, a band that sounded like The Doors but wasn’t The Doors playing live on the other side of the wall, only the vibrating thrum of the bass carrying through to them. It was fast and clumsy and she was practically coming before he even pushed into her.
After, Peggy had that look to her she only adopted when she felt the world was off-balance. The look she took on when a witness’s statement didn’t match with another’s, when a jury didn’t vote the way she thought they would, when she overestimated each and every person she came into contact with and wound up disappointed. She was the most idealistic and optimistic detective Stan had ever met. Scratch detective -- she was the most idealistic and optimistic person he had ever met. And because of that, her world was often rendered off-balance.
After, she washed her hands, and wouldn’t look at him.
“What, you only fuck girls in bathrooms,” she said to her hands. “Like some kind of pervert.”
When he laughed, the sound was breathless. He watched her reflection. “Funny. I didn’t seem to be alone either time.”
“You initiate it,” she said. It was her cop voice and that made him want to laugh.
“Do you want an apology or a confession?” What he wanted to say was that she was the one who crawled in his lap, that she was just as culpable as he was, but he didn’t say it. He let the band on the other side of the wall drown him out instead.
“I’m going home,” she had said after a beat. And, disappointed (with him, in herself, it was never entirely clear), she had.
10.
Stan likes to watch Peggy work. He likes to watch the way she pieces together information, the resolute look her face takes on before they enter the interrogation room (he’s good cop nine times out of ten to her bad; her temper’s got a way of snapping, her lip taking on a snarl, whereas Stan remains the steadfast trustworthy figure, unruffled and unsurprised, the one who’ll bring you coffee, light your cigarette, make small talk until Peggy throws the book at you).
He likes the rigid posture of her body when she has her gun raised and aimed. The gun never looks entirely natural in her hands. He likes that. (He thinks it looks entirely too natural when he pulls his, an easy extension of his own arm, no cautious charge to his body, not like hers; he holds a gun like it belongs there, like he was made to pull the trigger).
He likes her. How she makes their cordoned off corner of the bullpen smell like a woman. She doesn’t wear perfume, but they keep close quarters. He can tell you when she swaps out her shampoo for a new brand or trades bars of soap. He can tell you too many romanticized details about her and he doesn’t let himself bother to consider if she could do the same.
They’re tied to each other, he thinks. She smokes his cigarettes and never carries her own. She’s killed two people over the course of the job and both times were because of him; he didn’t put the gun in her hand, but he made her shoot it. He was made to pull the trigger, and he made her do the same. He took a bullet for her, and they never ever talk about that.
They never talk about any of the times Peggy has wound up with his blood staining her hands while she radioed in for back-up. The only time he saw her panic was when he was gut-shot .
That was a long time ago. That was before he had a beard and before Peggy lived with Abe. That was before she admitted to liking him, an admission that never comes with words, but still with her mouth, her hands, the way she’ll wrap herself around him and pretend it’s only because he needs it.
And he does. He needs it all the time. But then, he thinks, so does she.
Dummies, Ginsberg would say.
fin.