Belzer isn't a cop; he just plays one on TV

Richard Belzer, who has played the role of Detective John Munch on "Law & Order" for ten seasons, blends fact and fiction in his debut mystery, "I Am Not a Cop." An excerpt.

Chapter one
I am not a cop. Really.

I've just been playing one on television so long that people get a little confused sometimes. It's understandable. I've been at this game for a bunch of years, looking at corpses and bruised runaways all over New York and Baltimore, trying to ask the right questions, trying to find the right bad guy. Or girl, if that's the case.

Of course, when I'm through studying the corpse, somebody yells "Cut," and the body gets up and joins the rest of us on the way to the catering tent for a lunch break.

But it isn't just the general public that gets my role and my life mixed up. Sometimes when I leave the set after a long week's shoot, I'll hit the street and hope to catch a cab. A lot of times, a patrol car will pull over instead and offer to take me where I want to go.

"Mr. Belzer, or should I say 'Detective'?" the cop will say. "Need a lift?"

And hey, I'm not too proud to take the guys up on it, especially when it's raining and cabs are hard to find. Sometimes I even do ride-alongs with the NYPD and sit around precinct houses to soak up the atmosphere, learn the vernacular, and get the moves right.

So, as a consequence, between the cops who consult on the series, the cops I talk with in my everyday life, and the people I work with who act like cops, I sometimes feel like I've slipped into some kind of law enforcement twilight zone — a place where the role I play and the person I am threaten to overlap. Poor old Rod Serling would be proud of me, though. I think I remember an episode like that from when I was a kid. I loved that show.

But I digress. Now, where was I? Oh, the twilight zone of law enforcement, where make-believe and reality overlap.

Take that whole thing that happened in Brighton Beach, for instance ... 

I left the set Friday night in late September to meet a friend for dinner. (Harlee, my lovely wife, was across the pond at our house in France with our adored dogs Django, a border collie-Beauceron mix, and Bebe, a poodle-fox terrier mix who rescued me in France. My wife is a master gardener who loves to toil in the soil, an interior decorator of supreme taste, and an astounding cook, among many other things for which I am eternally grateful.) Having some empty time to fill, I figured I might catch up with an old buddy.

The guy I was meeting was a soon-to-be former medical examiner, a Russian immigrant named Rudy Markovich. I'd met him a few years ago when he visited our set as a consultant for a morgue scene. He looked things over and promptly turned to this young director, who thought he was a hotshot, and said with a thick Russian accent, "Dat is not how ve do it."

I liked Rudy immediately.

He was rather short and had a squarish physique. Very European-looking. I figured him for his late forties, but his hair had gone totally gray. He wore it short and had bright blue eyes and a contagious smile. After the scene I walked up to him and said, "Zdravstvujtye," one of the few Russian greetings I knew. I had had to learn them a few years ago for a part in a Commie spy movie that never got filmed. But the phrases stayed with me. I have a very good memory. Some people describe it as photographic, but I prefer the term closet genius, if asked.

Rudy was delighted and started rattling off sentences so fast I had to hold up my hands and say, "Whoa." I explained that I'd already just about exhausted my entire Russian vocabulary, and he said, "Never mind, I speak five languages. That's enough for both of us."

He proceeded to prove it too, as I took him over to the tent for a cup of coffee.

I got a thumbnail sketch of Rudy's life. He'd emigrated from the then Soviet Union as a young doctor and found work cutting open the dead in the Big Apple, then worked his way up in the medical examiner's office; he started listing some of the famous cases he'd handled. In his day, Rudy had autopsied lots of high-profile dead guys for the City of New York. Everybody from politicians to Broadway royalty to business tycoons. His work had helped New York's finest, for whom I have nothing but respect, crack some really tough cases. As we had coffee that day, he told me some real amusing stories about the good old days, and some even better ones about the bad ones. His depth of knowledge about so many more subjects than medicine made him a great conversationalist. We became fast friends, and I got the impression he was a man on the move, so it didn't surprise me when I later read that he had been considered the front-runner to replace the current chief medical examiner. I know he sure helped our actors sound better and made our scenes much more realistic.

But apparently some things in his life had recently changed. Rudy had sworn off dead people and announced his resignation two days before that Friday in September. It was effective at month's end, and he'd told the reporters he was going into private practice. I guessed that maybe he thought it might be easier when his patients could talk back, but hell, the dead ones could never disagree with a diagnosis or sue him for malpractice. It seemed a strange move to me — going from being a towering expert in one field of medicine in the Manhattan ME's office to possibly starting over as a general practitioner in someplace like a Brighton Beach strip mall. But I figured it was his call to make.

Still, I wondered how long his enthusiasm for patient/physician repartee was going to last. I had a sneaking suspicion the novelty would wear off soon enough. The dead may not talk, but they don't lie either. That's the big plus in having corpses as patients: the dead have no interest in hiding the truth.

Rudy called me right after the announcement and asked if we could meet up and talk about a few things.

I'd said sure, and he'd invited me over for dinner in his neighborhood — a little ethnic place called Dimitri's, where the menus are printedtwice, once in Russian and once in English. It's a great place for borscht, not to mention fine Ossetra caviar on savory little blini with a dollop of sour cream. Man, I couldn't wait.

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