“Eve’s visiting Darryl tonight, okay? He has his own apartment now.”
Smith’s face was full of a very stupid expression.
“Get it? It’s not working out with us any more.”
Chapter 16
Sergeant John Laffey and Officer Jack Clark, along with Valentine, sat crowded around a small plastic table on swivel chairs bolted to the floor. They had three plastic trays in front of them, two orange and one yellow, piled up with paper containers of pathetic little hamburgers and limp deepfried potatoes glistening with salt.
“God, we’re in the shadow of La Grenouille and look at us!” Clark said.
All three men wore jeans of variously faded hue. Clark wore boots and a wooden cap with a ball on top and a heavily scarred leather bomber jacket. Laffey and Valentine wore navy pea jackets and running shoes.
“Every time I find myself in a McDonald’s,” Clark said, “all I can think about is that movie, Soylent Green. Ever see it? Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, Paula Kelly, Edward G.
Robinson, directed by Richard Fleischer, 1973 I’m pretty sure and Robinson’s final film.”
“Jesus, the trivia! It’s amazing,” Laffey said. “If the guy knew anything useful, he might be frightening.”
“Everybody ate this stuff the government gave them to eat and the standard fare was a green thing about the size of a piece of that flat bubble gum that comes with baseball cards, only it was green instead of pink.
“So the payoff of the movie is discovering the connection between the government death factories, where people volunteered to go off themselves because the world was such a goddamn pain in the ass and the factory was a palace, and the food supply. Turns out everybody who ate soylent green, which was the whole population of New York City, was eating processed people.”
“Thanks a lot, Jack,” Laffey said. He pushed his tray away. “I’m not going to be able to eat this slop now.” “You’re better off,” Clark said. He crammed half a burger into his mouth.
Laffey opened his coffee container.
“Can you see our mope?” Clark asked him.
Laffey stole a glance from the corner of his eye in the direction of a young man on the other side of the restaurant, their “mope,” meaning that he’d been moping about a neighborhood where Laffey and Clark knew by instinct and some other fairly obvious clues he didn’t belong.
“Sure, I can see him,” Laffey said. “He’s sitting there in the corner with two quarter-pounders and three cartons of fries and he’s got a cigarette going while he’s eating.”
“What a pig.”
Laffey and Clark had been following the mope for half the morning. They picked him up at Carl Shurz Park, where they spotted him sitting on a bench, smoking and tapping his feet, a canvas bag at his side. Running shoes, warm gloves, jeans and a coat long enough to have lots of inside pockets handy for carrying burglary tools. He was a stocky Hispanic man in his mid-twenties.
The mope got up from the park bench and started scoping out the building nearby, ducking into lobbies and then reappearing in the street. He worked his way down from the park into the far East Sixties, westerly toward Third Avenue. Several times, he would spend enough time in a lobby to test a door. Then, for whatever reason, he would dash out into the street and walk around the block, seeming to be in some deep thought.
“He looks real good,” Laffey had said when he started his scoping near the park, in the Eighties. “We’ll stay on his ass awhile.”
And so they had.
Laffey would follow him a block or two, then take over in the car that Clark drove. Clark would follow for a while on foot. Then maybe Carl Trani would pick up the mope for a time, or Kathy Waters, who worked with him that day.
About noon, he headed for the McDonald’s. Laffey and Clark decided to follow him on in.
Laffey talked to Valentine, keeping an eye on the mope in the corner.
“So this is how it is a lot of the time. We’re waiting for a mope to make his move and we try to get a good look at him making that move, then we can bust him and make it stand up. These guys can be pretty cagey sometimes, though, and they’ll keep us on the walk for a whole day and we end up with nothing.
“Of course, I don’t look at what we’re doing as ‘nothing’ just because we might not come home with a collar. I mean, even if the mope makes us and acts like a wise guy with us, he’s prevented from committing a burglary, isn’t he?”
“And next to rape, burglary is the thing that bothers people the most. Rape and burglary ought to be special concerns for cops. We ought to work at preventing the crime, see?
“People don’t want to live with the fear of rape. And it’s pretty much the same thing with burglary, if you’ve ever experienced it. Your home is violated and you’re never quite the same afterward.
“I’m talking about your home, your privacy. The guy who’s had his apartment burglarized thinks, ‘My home is where I live my life, it’s where I raise my kids, it’s where I make love to my wife. And some creep just waltzes in and rips it all off.’”
Laffey stopped talking for a moment. The mope in the corner started to get up. Then he sat down and lit another cigarette.
“This guy’s looking worse and worse,” Clark said. “I don’t think he’s going to get up the balls for it today.”
“It’s only been a couple hours,” Laffey said. “Some guys take that long.”
The mope got up again. He dumped the wrappers from his tray into a trash container and walked past the table where Laffey and Clark sat.
Laffey picked up his PTP radio and talked to Trani, outside the McDonald’s in a plain green car.
“What’s he doing now?” Laffey asked.
There was no answer.
“Carl!”
Trani whispered. “Stand by.”
“Shit. Two hours and—”
Trani was back on the radio which interrupted Clark.
“Your mope walked right up to the car and gave me a big smile, Sarge. He made us all.”
Laffey and Clark walked quickly out the door of the restaurant. The mope was at the corner. He waved to the two officers who had watched him eat his meal.
“Oh man, I thought we’d have one for sure there,” Clark said. He and Laffey walked dejectedly across the street and got into the car with Trani.
They weren’t in the car long before the 10-19 call came over the radio. Laffey called in from the booth just outside the car, then rushed back and told Trani to get to East Sixtieth and Second Avenue “quick and quiet.”
“What do we got?” Clark asked.
“Silent alarm in the building.”
“Lot of nothing sometimes,” Clark said.
“Sometimes.”
Trani pulled up in front of the building and Laffey and Clark, pulling the shields they wore attached to chains around their necks, jumped out of the car and showed them to the confused doorman. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Just got a call to help out, that’s all,” Laffey said. “Look, in case we don’t get back down here to the lobby in a few minutes, do me a favor, okay?”
“Of course.”
“There’s an officer out there, waiting in a car. See him?”
Trani waved from the car to the doorman.
“He’s with us. I want to leave him there and I want to leave you here so you can make sure nobody leaves the building for a little while. Keep them right here. Shouldn’t be too long. You have any trouble with that request, there’s a cop right there for you and you let him know. Okay?”
The doorman looked like he might faint at any moment.
Laffey and Clark took the elevator to the top floor, the twelfth, and took a walk through the corridor, inspecting the doors for signs of forced entry. They split up at either end of the corridor, each man taking a separate stairway down to the next floor, crossing paths through the corridor and taking the stairs to the next point of search.
&nb
sp; On the ninth floor, Clark came across a man waiting for the down elevator.
“You live here?” Clark asked. The man waiting seemed frightened by the question from the cop in the jeans and bomber jacket. Clark showed him his tin and relief spread across his face.
“Yes. Can I help you, Officer?” He wore a blue cashmere overcoat, a pinstriped suit and carried an attaché case. “Was it this floor?”
“Can’t tell,” Clark said. “We’re looking at everything.”
Clark saw paint chips on the floor below the doorknob near the elevator.
“What do you have in the attaché, friendly?”
“I beg your pardon?” The elevator made some clanking sounds and the man in the cashmere coat buttoned up.
“What’s in the case?”
Laffey opened the door from the stairwell and walked toward the elevator. Clark raised a hand and Laffey stayed where he was, as backup.
“Look, Officer—”
“Just open up the case, please.”
“I haven’t got the time!” the suspect said. The elevator stopped at the ninth floor and opened.
“Sure you do,” Clark said. “If we hold you up unnecessarily, I promise to get you where you’re going faster than you could make it there on your own anyway. You’ll get a police escort, okay?”
The suspect looked over his shoulder at Laffey, who was talking to Trani on the PTP.
The suspect smiled. “Nice work,” he said. “How’d you make me?”
“Just a guess,” Clark said. “The paint chips there.” He pointed to the flecks on the corridor’s carpeting.
“I’ll have to be a little neater.”
“Open up now like a good fellow.”
Laffey moved in as the suspect opened the attaché, inside of which were pry bars, skeleton keys, a box of business calling cards, loose cash, cloth bags full of other people’s jewelry and glassine packets of what appeared to be cocaine.
“Where’d the flake come from?” Clark asked him.
“From the fine, upstanding solid citizens of Apartment 9-E,” the suspect said.
Clark had a good laugh. The suspect held out his wrists while Laffey cuffed him up for the ride to the lockup and booking.
“Ever have one of those days?” the suspect asked Laffey.
“Everybody does.”
Keenan had taken a sick day, but it was his wife who needed the time off. He arranged for the girls to stay after school at a friend’s home and even talked the doctor into making a house call.
She slept now as the doctor spoke to Keenan.
“Have the two of you been fighting?” he asked Keenan. “And I mean something beyond ordinary tiffs that couples have.”
“Not fighting, exactly. More a case of not caring. Maybe that’s the worst sort of a fight.”
“Maybe, yes.”
“How is she now, really?”
The doctor made bag-packing motions. “She very nearly lost the baby,” he said. “And there’s no reason for that to be the case with her other than psychological stress and strain. She’s a healthy woman, there has never been the slightest problem with her pregnancies in the past.”
“There was the—”
“You had a baby die, that’s true. But that has nothing to do with her health, you see. No, what I’m telling you is that there are cases where women lose their babies—abort—that are entirely psychological in nature.”
Keenan’s face drained of color. “The baby she’s carrying. Is it all right?”
“I think so. The body and the brain, too, are remarkable creations for their restorative powers.”
Keenan read a book once, or maybe it was an article. The title of it played through his mind. My Enemy Grows Older. It was a story of modern marriage.
And he thought of his wife’s sensibilities, how terribly vulnerable she must be since she spent such considerable effort at presenting a controlled face to the world. Most people Keenan knew, unless they bordered on the moronic, were masses of irony when it came to determining their personalities. Most people were anything but candid. How many times had he asked his wife “What’s wrong?” when he sensed trouble. How many times had he believed her when she said “Nothing at all.” Of course that’s what she would say.
“Doctor, I suppose Mairead thinks her whole world is caving in because her whole world revolves around me and, well, I’ve had a lot of troubles lately.”
The doctor clucked. “What you say makes sense. If your wife wasn’t pregnant, maybe there wouldn’t be any way for us to receive the signals we’re getting. Pregnancy makes a woman’s senses more acute than they ordinarily are. Ordinarily, they’re just as dumb as us men, I’d say.”
“What can I do? I don’t want her to lose this baby. I think that would kill her.”
“From what I know of her, I would agree,” the doctor said. “Now I’m going to tell you something and I don’t want you to take it as a doctor’s advice. Hell, Tommy, you must know that medicine is an art, not a science. That’s why I want you to take my advice as something coming from a concerned friend of the family. I don’t make house calls otherwise, you know.”
The doctor stood up and prepared to unload himself of the weight of friendly advice. Keenan stood up, too, though everyone says you’re supposed to sit down at such times.
The two men walked to the door, Keenan following the doctor.
“Well?” Keenan asked when the doctor started turning the knob.
“It’s this. You’re going to have to decide whether the problems you’re having outside this house are greater than the ones you’re having inside it. You’re a good-looking young man and you have the sort of charm women like, you’re a good talker. I can guess what your problems are. What I’m telling you is that you’re in a situation, son, where you’re going to have to make absolute choices. It’s either Mairead, or it’s the other woman.”
“What about the kids?”
“Kids take care of themselves, surprisingly enough. It’s the grownups who find these things such a torment. Look around you and see if you don’t agree with me.”
The doctor pulled open the door, but he didn’t step out into the hall. “Napoleon used to say, ‘If you’re going to take Vienna, then take Vienna!’ You can’t very easily have a part-time affair, not if you’re a man with the sorts of principles that have been hammered into you. It has to be all or nothing and that goes for your wife.”
“I have to choose … between Mairead and …”
“The name’s not important. But the choice is. Yes, you have to choose. This is hardly a medical observation, like I said, but I think Mairead’s going to be sick until you make up your mind.”
“God.” Keenan cried.
“You don’t have to feel you have to choose Mairead, son. I’m just here telling you that you have to choose one of them. The thing you’re doing, and I suspect it’s just as bad for the other woman, is you’re putting lives on hold. You’re not letting Mairead live, except around the edges of your indecision. Do you see?”
Keenan nodded his head. “I don”t think I should tell her anything while she’s pregnant, though. She—”
“Aren’t you listening to me, boy?” The doctor was angry. It’s not an easy thing to confront someone and it’s more difficult still when you encounter deafness. “This is the worst possible time to keep her wondering, to keep her on the string. Can’t you see that? Or maybe you’re the most completely selfish man alive.”
“But the pregnancy.”
“Listen again. A woman’s senses are never more heightened than when she’s pregnant. She’s never weaker, she’s never stronger. She’s never more capable of handling herself, no matter what happens. If it was up to me, I’d have a nine-month presidency in this country and vote for a pregnant woman.”
Keenan put out his hand. “Thanks, Doctor.”
“Let me know, will you?”
Leinau agreed to meet William W. Whitson at his office, which was atop the headquarters
building of a small but highly influential investments and securities firm that did a worldwide business. The building was within the Nineteenth, as it happened, and an easy walk from the precinct house.
Besides, Leinau always enjoyed glimpses into the working life of tycoons. While he himself wore polyester suits that tended toward colors like salmon, he could enjoy being near the good taste of others.
Whitson had him wait alone in his massive office for a few minutes and Leinau didn’t mind at all. He sat with his legs outstretched in a butter-soft black leather chair near one of the three window walls, and he helped himself to the contents of a Moroccan-bound humidor on a marble side table.
Leinau freed a crisply wrapped Individualé, which he estimated at ten dollars the copy, and lit up. A steward glided across the office from a little food and beverage station. He wiped out the black onyx ashtray on the marble table and asked Leinau, “Drink?”
“Yeah, some coffee. Got espresso?”
“Very good, sir.”
Leinau liked the place very much. He liked especially the fact that there was no actual desk in the office, not the sort of imposing piece that he usually encountered, something with enough empty space to serve as a landing strip for troop transport planes, a desk designed for maximum intimidation.
That was style, Leinau thought. No desk. Just a collection of couches and side chairs, a handsome antique table roughly in the middle of the room, covered over with books. Discreet telephones here and there. And an especially interesting wardrobe against the wall, with pegs on the outside to hold Whitson’s highly distinctive cane and hat.
The door opened and Whitson walked in. The only adjective Leinau could think of was beautiful.
Whitson was roughly the same size as Leinau, six feet and one inch, but quite another shape and style. His hair was carefully tended, but not fussed over. Thick black with silver, wing-shaped temples. Maybe he was sixty, judging by the character and texture of his face, but he didn’t have the scars a man of modest means and tastes accumulates. Whitson’s belly was absolutely flat, his skin smooth and tanned, teeth gleaming white and hands that looked as if they belonged on a Greek statue.
Precinct 19 Page 25