Mitchell Smith

by Daydreams

  “A lawyer’s trick,” she’d said, “-it makes them listen up.”

  “No . . .” Ellie said. She reached down, picked up the Siamese, and put him in her lap. “-I’m going to have some leftover rice and chili, and I’m going to sleep.

  No. -No way . . .” She listened a few moments more.

  “Yes, I will,” she said, and hung up. She stood, the cat leaping softly down, and tugged the towel from her hips as she went to the closet for her dark green robe, put it on, and walked out to the kitchen, Mayo stalking behind.

  Ellie took a can of Nine Lives from the cupboard over the counter, opened it, scooped the stuff into a saucer with a spoon, and slid the saucer just under the small kitchen table, where Mayo, safe in this shadow den, ran to it and began to eat. Ellie bent for a moment and stroked him, feeling the fragile configurations of his bones beneath her fingertips.

  Then she opened the refrigerator, took out the plastic container of cooked rice, and began to search the cabinets for a can of chili. She found one behind the can of cherry pie filling-opened it, mixed the rice and chili together in a small saucepan, added some warm water, butter, Tabasco sauce and a dollop of ketchup, and had just set it on the burner on low when the phone rang, She answered it out in the hall.

  “You cunt,” Clara said. “-Do you have somebody there?”

  “No,” Ellie said, and hung up the phone.

  When she finished her supper, she went to the hall, got her purse, and took it into the bedroom. She sat on the bed, took the .38 out, and put it on the bedside table.

  Then she took out the Bloomingdale’s package, unwrapped it, and unfolded the scarf. She sat for a while, looking at it, smoothing the blue silk and holding the material up to the light so the small white animals stood out in bold relief. Ellie stood up so she could see herself in the bureau mirror, and draped her scarf around her neck. It clashed with the bathrobe’s green, and she took it off, folded it, went to the bureau, and put it in the top right-hand drawer. Then she took off her robe, draped it over the foot of the bed, turned off the bedside lamp, tugged the covers down, and got into bed.

  Ellie lay still for some time, enjoying the darkness, then turned on her left side, stroked the soft edge of the pillowcase for a moment, and fell asleep.

  She slept, quite still, for hours-kept company by the small electric clock’s slow sweeping hands, its constant faint hum-almost below the range of hearing, and, silent now in darkness, Mayo, pacing the apartment wide awake, slipping under chairs, ranging the couch, sliding through the gloomy hall-hunting for creatures never found, of which he had no clear notion as to sight or size or scent, his superb slit pupils stretched to perfet ponds of black.

  An hour more, and Ellie woke, turned to feel a cool, smooth surface of sheet beneath her hip, and went to sleep again. She dreamed her father had called to her, and she walked and drifted from the side of the house where she’d been watching flowers, and saw him in the backyard, measuring a window frame for glass. Sheets of glass stood behind him, glittering, flashing in the sunlight.

  Ellie thought she asked him why he wasn’t working in the garage, but if she had, he didn’t hear her. He measured, then let the rule-tape retract with a flicker of white.

  “Eleanor,” he said, looking down into a sheet of glass.

  “Eleanor . . .” He turned and looked at her, smiling.

  She’d forgotten how nice-looking he was, even with his blue workshirt sweated through, a light frost of beard stubble on his face. His eyes were as gray as she remembered. His fingernails were bruised blue from his work.

  “Sugar-bear,” her father said, `-you visiting? Or going’ to stay awhile?”

  Ellie moved in some wrong way, and was in the kitchen, though she wanted to stay and talk with him. It was empty; her mother had left it clean and dark. She looked out a strange window, and saw her father talking to a man with bare feet. Her father pointed to the window, and the man turned and looked across the yard-and was able to see her, even though she stepped back into shadows. Then he began to dance, barefoot, a slow dance while he looked at her, raising his knees high, changing to a swift little sideways shuffle. She’d never seen his face before.

  Outside the apartment building, down past the western edge of the island, out across the deep, slow estuary tide, a bright knotted cord of light snaked in from the north, moving, twinkling as the East River Drive began to murmur in darkness, to hum, to tremble, to vibrate with the weight of traffic. There, more and more machines were rolling, speeding, thumping past potholes, booming over steel slab and black pavement, rushing, rushing into the shaking city.

  Far from this disturbance, the earth spun slowly to morning along the shifting sea, and the Colonel and his men flew into Kennedy out of the sun.

  “By the short hairs,” said the First Deputy Commissioner. Francis Connell was a very large man with eyes the color of pencil lead.

  “So-if they got us, we got them.” John Cherusco, an Assistant Chief and Commander of Intelligence.

  “We have shorter hairs,” said Chief of the Department Delgado.

  These three men, three lords of the New York City Police Department-Connell and Delgado rough equals, Cherusco not-sat almost at ease in the First Deputy’s large corner office, where glass walls gave the city to them on two sides, its buildings, its morning light reflecting in little in the gtass-fronted desk photographs of the First Deputy’s wife and two daughters, in the glass covering his citations and honors along the office walls-his diploma from Fordham, his honoraries from NYU and Binghamton, the group portraits with men and women of Democratic Party politics throughout the city and state.

  With all this, still he sat in service of a greater.

  “What does the P.C. say?” Cherusco-slight, fierce, dark-eyed, big-nosed, shifty-headed as a hungry bird.

  Though a respected man, he did not ordinarily spend much time in the First Deputy’s office. His two stars, enough to frighten twenty thousand lesser ranks in the Department, counted for little on this floor of Headquarters, for less in-this corner office.

  “The Commissioner,” the First Deputy spoke of his boyhood friend, his lifelong friend, only as the Commissioner, “-the Commissioner put a stop to this operation two years ago, right after he was appointed.” A comfort, as well as some slight discomfort always in speaking of his friend, who had, when both were thirteen years old and masturbating together in Mr. Kramer’s basement, said, “Oh … Frank,” and, his narrow hand at his own part traced slimly with silver, laid his handsome head for a moment into the angle of the future First Deputy’s throat and shoulder. -A memory that, now and then, still drifted though Francis Connell like a breeze, sometimes chill, sometimes warmer.

  “Stopped it four months after he was appointed.”

  Cherusco’s dark, hectoring voice had all the Bronx ground up in it.

  “The Commissioner put a complete stop to that operation as soon as he was apprised of it!” For the record, if not quite true.

  “Almost,” said Chief of the Department Delgado. The Chief, uniformed as the other two were not, his stout bulk crowded into fine dark blue, his buttons gold-plated for eternal polish, sat in the dimmest portion of the room-the corner where some architecture high above cast a long shadow through the left-side wall of glass-his familiar practice even in these airy new spaces, where most morning shadows amounted to little.

  ‘-Let’s not kid ourselves on this one. This one could be a problem.”

  “How long is this meetin’ going’ to take?” Cherusco said, not famous for deference. “—I killed three appointments for this. I got people waitin’ for me, right now.”

  “We all have people waiting for us, John,” Delgado said, reproof in the lack of any sounding.

  Cherusco closed his mouth.

  A pause in the conversation. These three men did not, as most men do, appear to fade when sitting silent. These three had, however many years before, been accustomed in line of duty to struggle physically with other determine
d and dangerous men—striking them, slugging, wrestling them down-kneeling, if necessary, on the downed man’s neck to hold and subdue him on filthy pavement while many people watched. Two had drawn and fired their revolvers in those days. One had killed a man. -These experiences, though long past, had left a coarse practicality behind, a ready knowledge of the men and women in hiding beneath clothing, behind faces—of the way this person or that would feel to the hands if struck, if seized and wrestled down, struggling, weeping, begging them to let him go … let her go.

  All three men, despite their maturity, their grand positions, were armed.

  The First Deputy’s wonderful black leather chair-a nine-hundred-dollar item in the Department’s budgetcupped and held him, for all his size, as easily and surely as a giant Negro mother might, when he leaned suddenly back from his desk as if taken faint and needing to nearly recline.

  “Whose idea was it? Who thought the damn thing up?” The First Deputy had a heavy voice, and rather loud. A firearms instructor many, many years before, he had suffered some slight hearing loss.

  The question rhetorical, since the idea had been realized under the previous administration, all of four years before, and by some Captain Nobody in the Public Morals Division. That Nobody and his small crew had-when the Intelligence Division rapidly took Operation Godiva over-received promotions with alacrity, solid (if obscure) assignments, and warnings dire concerning Departmental security.

  “And why the hell did Frankenthaler let those federal people in? I thought Norm had more sense than that!”

  Frankenthaler having then been an officer in the Intelligence Division, and rising.

  “The Army people were surveillin’ that Russian; they followed him right to the woman’s apartment. -I don’t see Norm had any choice.” Cherusco glanced at Delgado to see if this was permissible utterance.

  The Chief of the Department sat still in his slight shadow, unperturbed.

  “Anyway, this thing is all cleaned up,” Cherusco said. -A long time ago.

  Took out the two-ways and mikes, plastered the wall back up and everything. Watch apartment’s been rented to some jerk for almost two years, now.”

  “Mention Costello, John,” the Chief said.

  “O.K. There’s that. Costello already got a complaint from Goodman for taking District Homicide off the Gaither thing-givin’ it to the fuckups.

  Goodman told him Major Crime is Major Crime.-And, the guy’s got a point.”

  Sad news, since George Costello, who yearned to be the next Commissioner-and was presently Chief of Detectives-posed as adamantly upright, and was a bad man to cross.

  “Who the hell is Goodman?” said the First Deputy.

  Delgado gazed through plate glass, out into mazy morning air high across Park Row to the Federal Courthouse. The rich, late-summer sun was drenching that building in gold. “-Inspector, East Division Homicide,”

  he said.

  “What is he-trying to make trouble?”

  “Goodman’s OX.,” Cherusco said. “—He was just curious. It’s not a usual thing to get a case pulled away from his guys like that.”

  “It’s not his business to be curious about Departmental decisions,” the First Deputy said. “-He sounds like a big-nose, to me.”

  “No, he’s all right,” Cherusco said, illustrating by this one of his pleasanter traits-a reluctance to do a fellow officer dirt. “He’s an O.

  K. guy. His people were wondering’ about it, that’s all. -He went to Costello . . . Costello sent him to me . . . I set him straight-told him we were givin’ the oddballs downstairs a little waltz, remind them they were detectives-plus that class whore might have been screwin’ some state senator or something’ didn’t want that in the News.”

  “Dumb,” the First Deputy said.

  “Smart,” said Delgado, entranced by the Federal Courthouse, the long, long reach of Park Row. He noted, as well, two cars doubleparked along the western side resolved to mention it the Ed Lauter6ach, Chief of Patrol.

  “I figured,” Cherusco said, “-it was better they think we’re coverin’

  small . . . nothin’ out of the ordinary.” He nodded to himself, a quick pecking motion, confirming the sense of this. “-Should be my people handlin’ it, though-not those fuckups downstairs.”

  “We want those fuckups downstairs handling it, John,” Delgado said, watching a third car doublepark-far down the block after next. Looked like a rented limo. “-We want a limited inquiry, a limited paper trail.” He turned back to the room, looking at Cherusco, blinking once at the change of light. Tapped the arm of his chair as if this —Iqqp were his office, not the First Deputy’s. “We want it all kept right here, where my man—he meant Captain Anderson—can keep his eye on it.”

  “O.K.,” Cherusco said. “-All right.”

  “We want this one to just drift away, John,” the First Deputy said. He made a gentle fluttering gesture with the fingers of his raised right hand. The hand was red, and huge, and bristled with gray-black fur, but the motions it made were rather subtle, delicate, and controlled. “-Just drift away . . .”

  “You keep out of this, John,” Delgado said, and Cherusco shrugged and spread his hands apart to show how far the Intelligence Division now stood from interfering in the matter in any way.

  “I don’t see,” he said, “why it has to be such a big deal. That particular shit was more than three years ago, for Christ’s sake! No way is anybody going’ to find out about that. -The guy was just some candidate for the Senate. -Wasn’t even elected yet! Nobody special.”

  “He’s special, now,” Delgado said.

  The First Deputy sighed and exercised his wonderful chair, swinging full forward upright without a squeak.

  “Who is this Goodman with the mouth, complained to Costello? -Is that Buddy Goodman?” The First Deputy was a persistent man.

  “No,” Cherusco said. “He’s an Irish guy. Pat Goodman.”

  “Ah . . . I got him. He’s a brain-right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He better be careful he doesn’t get to be a nose. He’ll do a lot better when he learns to mind his own business.”

  The Commander of Intelligence decided to let it ride. -It was unlikely, now, he’d be free this afternoon in time to meet Joyce at the Hilton.

  Wouldn’t get to see those small breasts-long nipples on them, the rest of that soft meat white as cream cheese-revealed for him, trembling, when she climbed up on the bed. One big bite each-that’s all.

  And that smile-so sweet you wouldn’t think she even knew what a fuck was. You knew it when she got those skinny little legs in the air, though. Then you knew she loved it. . And there was more to the whole thing than that, even if she hadn’t said a word, give her credit. They were feeling closer and closer-and complications were coming. He knew it, and she knew it, but the little sweetheart hadn’t said a word, had never bugged him, not once. -The Department didn’t like divorces among senior officers. Showed a man couldn’t handle a problem couldn’t’t live with one, either. Both, prerequisites for high command.

  He had a weakness, of course, just like everybody did.

  He knew that. Enjoying trouble was his weakness. Dorothy would be shocked-really stunned-just like when he’d reached across the table with Jennifer watching (Jennifer four at the time) and hit her in the mouth over that high school reunion thing. Knocked a tooth out for her.

  Got her attention. -This was probably going to get her attention again.

  Would sure as shit break the monotony.

  “Costello,” the First Deputy said. “-What did he have to say?”

  “Costello said he didn’t remember talkin’ to Goodman about it… said he wouldn’t remember talkin’ to me about it… said if I ever mentioned it to him again, I’d be sorry.”

  “Smart,” said Delgado from his almost shade.

  “Too fucking smart,” the First Deputy said, who rarely used the vulgar word. The First Deputy considered Costello a threat, thou
gh still distant, to the Commissionerpreening himself as he did on his rectitude, giving news conferences. . . . Costello, who’d been a herocop—exchanging gunfire at a range of ten feet with a perpetrator who’d just killed a bank messenger-had then been adopted by a senior commander of the Tactical Division (a black man), who, years later, had become Commissioner under the city’s last white mayor. Costello (Irish on both sides) had risen with his rabbi, and was known therefore, by some white and Hispanic officers, as the Easter Eggborn of a chocolate bunny.

  “Let’s have them in,” Delgado said. ‘-I’rn due uptown at eleven.”

  The First Deputy opened the shallow center drawer in his wide mahogany desk, looked for something, and didn’t find it. “-This is not a subject for discussion at the meeting,” he said, meaning the regular executive board meeting on Tuesday afternoons, which all deputy commissioners attended—commissioners of Legal, of Depart mental Trials, of Administration, of Community Affairs, of Organized Crime Control.

  “I hope to hell not.” -Cherusco, who would not be invited to attend in any case, meaning, as did the First Deputy, particularly the Deputy Commissioner for Community Affairs, Jorge Molina, an ex-journalist and desperate police buff with wacky notions of making mayor someday. This young Hispanic, handsome as a demigod and clever at his job, had proved to have a mouth the size of the Holland Tunnel.

  “You heard what Molina did last week?” Cherusco said-the question rhetorical, since they certainly had, but their silence indicating some interest in Intelligence’s version.

  The Deputy for Community Affairs, taking advantage of his technical elevation to peace officer, though intrinsically civilian, had purchased a large military-model automatic pistol in gleaming stainless steel, and was pleased to brandish it while answering any possible call for response overheard on his limousine radio before his patrolman driver could manage to reach over and change channels. -This change too late, the call overheard in the back seat, the Deputy for Community Affairs might instantly order a response—siren yodeling, tires squealing at the turns-and would, his driver swore, have the big automatic drawn, its numerous safeties and switches clicked this way and that, its fat grip ponderous with innumerable rounds of high-speed hollow-points, its sneering muzzle swinging at times in the excited hand to cover the back of the patrolman’s head, so that he hunched lower and lower in his seat as he drove.