Hanged for a Lamb

Same old rumors, but what to do about it?

Originally published in the zine Nightlight, a slash Starsky and Hutch anthology edited by April Valentine in 1986.

Hutch had paused for a drink at the fountain in the hall, so he was still some twenty feet behind when his partner opened the door to the squad room. He heard the rattle of conversation that drifted out, and the spatter of laughter that followed it, but he didn’t pick up any of the actual words.

Starsky evidently did.

The squad room door completed its opening swing with an impact that rattled glass. “You want to repeat that, Spears? To my face?” Starsky leaned over the joker’s desk, bristling like a terrier in a rat pit.

The object of his attentions froze for a moment, then summoned up an uneasy grin. “Actually, no,” he drawled in reply, tilting back in his chair and thus putting a bit more distance between himself and the threatening storm. “My horoscope advised against suicide today,” he added, with a look that invited the rest of the room to appreciate this morsel of tension-relieving wit.

It had no noticeable effect on Starsky. “You can stuff the horoscope. And I’ll help.”

“Oh, yeah?” Spears riposted brilliantly. “You and who el…uh, scratch that.”

Hutch had caught up. He was leaning casually in the doorway, ignorant of the details and studiously uninvolved in the altercation, but there.

Spears folded. “Hey, it was a joke. Not even a very funny one, either. I take it back, okay?”

Starsky straightened, frustrated. It wasn’t okay, but that was obviously all he was going to get unless he pushed, and the cheap shot wasn’t really worth the additional time and effort. He turned and shoved out of the room, jostling an obstacle in the doorway that had neglected to move out of his way with sufficient haste.

Said obstacle glanced around at the silent, slightly red-faced audience. He considered asking what had started the ruckus and decided not to. Closing the door quietly behind him, he followed his partner’s wake.
Sounding angry, the Torino was idling at the curb. Hutch slid into the passenger side, snatching at the door as the car peeled out. The following corner was rounded on fewer wheels than the average driver would have considered prudent, and the take-off from the next traffic signal left the pavement behind them smoking.

Hutch swallowed a nearly automatic protest. If Starsky was determined to make an ass of himself he was doing it on purpose; he didn’t need anyone to inform him of the fact. As though in response to the unspoken comment, Starsky glanced over at his partner, sighed, and slowed to a generous approximation of the speed limit.

Hutch unlocked his fingers from the dashboard. “We had reports to do,” he remarked.

Starsky shrugged. “Tomorrow.”

Minutes passed. “You going to tell me?”

“No.”

More minutes. Starsky sighed again. “You know. More of the same.”

“What I thought.”

Hutch stared out the windshield for a while, then looked over at his partner. “We could still stop it, you know.”

Starsky didn’t answer.

Hutch pushed it. “We could go back to Internal Affairs. Make the statements they asked us for. Take the damned lie detector test, like they wanted. We could do that.”

“Yeah? What about your big grandstand play? ‘Matter of principle,’ you said. ‘Invasion of privacy,’ you said. ‘Responding to impertinent questions only legitimizes IA’s fraudulent assumption of the right to ask them,’ you said.” Starsky grinned. “I heard all about it. Just wish I’d been there!”

“Sure. My grand gesture. Only it backfired. It was supposed to be an empty gesture, you know. Not cost us anything. I just assumed your statement would get us both off the hook. Stupid, huh? Never crossed my mind that you might balk, too.” Hutch paused, looked at his partner closely. “Why did you? I’ve been wondering. I heard what you told them—eloquent and to the point. Not very informative, though. Couldn’t be, I guess, in just two words.”

“Whatsa matter, you think I can’t have principles?”

Hutch threw up his hands. “Okay. You don’t have to tell me.”

“That’s not it. I mean, it’s not that I mind telling you, and you probably already know anyway. It’s just kind of hard to put into words.”

The Torino followed its familiar route without apparent guidance. Starsky was staring straight ahead, but didn’t seem to be focusing.

“It’s just that, if I had said those things, what they wanted me to say, it woulda sounded like there was one thing in the world, even one thing, that I didn’t love you enough for. And that—no matter how the stupid machine called it—that would be a lie.”

Starsky drove on in silence, now concentrating very carefully on the road ahead.

Hutch scrunched down in the seat, leaned his head back, closed his eyes and digested that. Even disregarding certain implications, it was a fragile and precious truth his partner had just handed him, and it deserved better than platitudes in reply. It deserved repayment in kind.

“All that stuff I told IA—it was bullshit, you know.”

“What?”

“Oh, I don’t mean it wasn’t true. Those were all true reasons, good reasons, for not answering their damned questions. It’s just that they weren’t any of them my reasons. Not really.”

Long silence.

“Well, you gonna tell me?”

“I am telling you. It’s just…I wouldn’t answer them…because I couldn’t.” Hutch squirmed in his seat. “Civilians don’t think about it some times, but that damned thing is misnamed. A polygraph isn’t a lie detector. It doesn’t know shit about truth or lies or what is fact or what isn’t. It measures people—changes in heart rate and respiration and temperature and skin conductivity and a lot of other stuff like that. It detects how your body responds to what you’re thinking, what you feel about what you’re thinking.

“I knew what they were going to ask me. About you. And I know what I feel when I think about that, because I’ve thought about it and felt it before. I knew how I would respond; I can’t help it. No matter what I said, no matter what the truth really was, that machine was going to say I was lying.”

And Starsky had to take a while to digest that.

Suddenly he laughed. “What a farce! I didn’t want to tell a lie that would look like the truth, and you couldn’t tell the truth because it would look like a lie!”

“So what are we gonna do?”

“Do? About IA? Nothing. We done it. Nothing’s changed. They don’t like it, they can sit on it. We never were their favorite team and no way are we gonna start now.

“About the talk, the snide remarks? Same as always, I guess—laugh them off when we can, punch somebody out when we can’t. What else is there to do?”

That’s not what I meant, Hutch was thinking. What are we gonna do…about us?

Starsky was not looking at him, taking care not to look at him, but again he seemed to pick up the thought out of mid-air.

“Sometimes I think…you know? Doesn’t make any difference what we do, they’re gonna think what they want. And it doesn’t make any difference what they think, we can do what we want. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”

Starsky spun the wheel, looking only at the road. The Torino slid around the corner into the block where it lived. They were almost home.