“I bet your arms are tired.” The slabs of his face crooked briefly into a smile so we would all know it was a joke.
“It’s by water, by running water,” the woman who looked like a New Jersey housewife said.
“Look, Captain,” I said, “I have been waiting here for three hours.”
“She has to concentrate,” the other guy, the one in the polyester plainclothes cop suit, said.
“Don’t bother me, son,” Deltchev said.
“We’re prepared to give you all the time you need,” the other guy said to Deltchev, “but not for these interruptions.”
“You hear that, you hear what the man said?” Deltchev said to me, pointing a finger somewhat smaller than a kielbasa at me. “Now desist these interruptions.”
“Don’t Wave your finger in my face …” I snapped.
The man in plainclothes stepped between us and shoved me. I didn’t want to hit a cop in a police station. There are some forms of stupidity that even I find excessive. But I did say, “If you fucking touch me again, I’ll break your fucking arm.”
Unlike Deltchev, he was pretty close to my size and I might have been able to do it.
At that point still another party entered the fray. A slim, neatly dressed black man, who I also took to be a cop, stepped between me and the pusher.
“What’s the problem?” he said calmly.
“The fucking problem …” I started to explain.
“Tillman,” Deltchev bellowed, “you take care of him. Dan, come with me. We have things to do,” and he swept into his office, the other two following in his wake, Tillman staying with me.
“Detective Tillman,” he said with the same aplomb, “what can I do for you?”
“I came down from New York to see Captain Deltchev; I had an appointment. I’ve been waiting three hours.”
“Are you from the media?” he asked.
“Media?”
“I guess not,” he said. “Who are you?”
I told him, I even gave him a card. I explained why I was there.
“Too bad you’re not from the media,” he said.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Come on into my office, I’m the one who’s really handling the Wood thing now. I’m sorry,” he said, as I followed him, “you came at a bad time. We have some little girls missing, three of them, and we found the body of a fourth. The captain’s a little preoccupied.”
He gestured me to a seat while he opened a file cabinet and took out the paperwork. I complimented him on what a good report he had written up and what thorough police work they had done.
“Is there anything,” I asked, “any dangling thread; any detail that didn’t fit, or maybe just a sense of things that didn’t find its way into that report?”
“Right now it looks a whole lot like the report reads. I’ll fill you in on a little background though. Lately, we’ve been getting a big rise in auto theft. It seems like it’s been moving out from the city, all around, over in Maryland too. They like to work shopping centers, particularly where there are restaurants. Not McDonald’s or Burger King, real restaurants. You figure a guy goes into a restaurant, you got an hour or two before he’s out. That’s time enough for the car to be good and gone and at the chop shop. It seems like it’s organized, because there’s a pattern and because they’re picky about it, BMWs, Volvos, Mercedes, Saabs, the smaller Caddies, Lincolns. The high-price spread. I’m figuring a lot of it goes straight to parts. Do you have any idea what a replacement engine for a BMW goes for?
“We had one victim, three months ago, was having dinner with his wife. He says, ‘Oh, honey, I left my wallet in the car.’ But what he really was doing was sneaking to the pay phone to call his extracurricular lady friend. But from the pay phone he sees these two perpetrators messing with his brand-new Seville. Being at the phone anyway, he calls police emergency. By then, the perps have already got his door open, which doesn’t take but a couple of seconds, so he goes tear-ass out of the restaurant screaming; they jump away from his car and they tear-ass out in the car they came in. Less than a minute later the patrol car comes into the lot, but they’re long gone, and the victim doesn’t have a license number, or even a description of the perp’s auto.”
“What about them, does he have a description of them?”
“Young, big, black, and dat’s all, folks.”
“What about muggings or assaults?”
“We have about three, real similar. Two of them hit on the head from behind. Now either we are talking about the same people, or they all went to the same training program, or if it is murder designed to look like car theft someone did their homework real well.”
The door burst open; another black cop, in uniform, charged in, saying, “I gotta talk to you, Bill.”
In his unflappable way, Tillman said, “What is it, Jimmy Lee?”
The other cop looked at me, but Tillman said, “Go on.”
“You know Nora Anne Johnson, owns the grocery place, up Davis Road?”
“Uhhuh.”
“That’s a good woman, churchgoing, hardworking. She’s in my patrol area, or what oughta be my patrol area, except that I’m down the other end of the county looking for a lightnin’-split tree near runnin’ water—yestiday it was standing water—while she is being robbed. Now Nora Anne she works hard for her nickels and dimes, she works hard. So she doesn’t want to just plain give that money away, and they done shot her. They done shot her. I have a pretty fair idea who done it to her, I do. But the Captain, he got me looking for that lightnin’-split tree, so I can’t do my real job, which is looking after the peoples in my patrol area. Now can you do something about that man!”
“Jimmy Lee,” Tillman said, his voice all patience.
“Shit, I know you can’t. I just had to go blow off steam to someone.”
“Jimmy Lee, just try to get it on the record. Make your request official. On paper.”
“You think … captain gonna have my ass.”
“Only in the short run. In the long run, if you go by the Book, the Book will stand by you. Just do it right and thank God for Civil Service.”
“You have any media friends?” Tillman asked me when the patrolman had gone.
“What is going on here?”
“The Captain has got a psychic. All the way from New Jersey. She’s got a whole scrapbook of all the bodies she has found. And that fellow that was shoving you, he is—I don’t know what he is—but he used to be a cop and now he just follows her around. You been in New Jersey; is that how they do things there?”
“It’s not something I do a lot, go to New Jersey.”
“Do you have any idea of how many man-hours he is wasting on stuff like Jimmy Lee was talking about? And how much real work does not get done? I do. I have kept track.”
“It seems to me that the mugging of Edgar Wood is a little different than the others,” I said.
“The difference is that someone died. Way it works is kids start boosting cars for joyrides. Borrow one, run it around a little, leave it like there was no harm done. Then they figure out that they can use the very same skills to do themselves a little cash good. It’s easy. No one does hard time for a first offense. They get probation. Second time they get popped, if they’re still on probation they really got something to lose. So they get caught in me act, they grab the first thing handy. It’s a piece of pipe ’stead of blackjack or sock filled with sand, and there is a dead man lying on the ground. Now that, that fits the facts. I won’t be stubborn or tight-minded, but until there is something, something, that tells me different, that’s the direction I’m running.”
His phone rang. “Yes sir … no sir … as soon as possible … I’ll get right on it,” he said to the phone. When he hung up he turned to me. “If the media was to get a good hard look at this thing, maybe we could get back to police work. I mean the real media, not the Enquirer, they already gave Captain Deltchev an interview. ‘Police Captain Amazed by Powers of Famed Psychic,’ the hea
dline is gonna say. Idiots.”
“You know that Wood was a federal witness, testifying for the SEC?”
“Yeah, I know that.”
“Do you know that the farmhouse he was in was wired for sound?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, Detective, that I went up to the farmhouse where they were keeping him, and I found a listening device which I don’t think belonged to the SEC because they would have taken it with them.”
“What were you doing up there?”
“Looking around like I’m supposed to, handing over anything I find out to the local constabulary like I’m supposed to, even when they keep me waiting half a day.”
“Where is it?”
“Are you going to do something about it? Is it the something you needed to reopen the investigation or to push it in some new directions?”
“Yes, I do believe it would be; of course our man power, the man-hours we can devote to it, is, at present, strictly limited. Due to most of our cops being assigned by cosmic forces.”
“Oh,” was all I could say.
“However, were some big-city news organization, print or television, to get ahold of the situation and put it in perspective, which is a little to the left of far out, then maybe I could do the work you and I urgently desire me to.”
“I might know some people.”
“What I’m going to do, I’m going to take it on good faith that you will try with whatever contacts you have. In the meantime, I will go on up to that house, have a look at this device you described, pull prints if I can, run a trace on the thing if I can … all of which I would do anyway, because I’m a cop and here to do a job … but because of your good intentions, I will share that information with you.”
“I have this feeling, if I can speak frankly?” I said.
“Go on. You may.”
“That when, and if, Deltchev goes, Bill Tillman might become the first black captain of detectives in Culpeper history.”
“Well, I don’t think things would move that fast, though it wouldn’t hurt. But I tell you what, whether it works that way or not, it would put a stop to something dumb. And I hate dumb. If I was ever to eradicate crime from this world, which I won’t, I would go after dumb next.”
“Ahead of racism?”
“Racism is part of dumb.”
“I think I like you, Detective,” I told him.
“Do you know where they’re from in New Jersey? The psychic and her sidekick?” he asked. “They’re from Nutley.”
10
OWSLEY LIVES
BUREAUCRATS HOLD THEIR SECRETS like bankers clutch the float. Secrets are coin of the realm, they confer status and power. They give the bureaucrat what he wants most, a sense of self-importance.
I sat in my lonely motel room. How then was I to pry secrets from this man Brodsky? The problem seemed insurmountable. Then my eye fell on the Gideon Bible. Could that text answer my question? Were solutions to the problems of today in that book? A strange feeling came over me as I reached out, as if another power were moving me. The Book came into my hands, then almost by itself it opened to this passage: “He who taketh a wife giveth hostages to fortune.” The Bible, in its wisdom, was pointing out not just the potential for blackmail, but for extortion as well.
The thing to do was videotape Brodsky in bed with a broad at the E-Z Sleaze Motel, preferably on a water bed. One thing I had learned from divorce work was that wives go extra nuts if their husbands commit their infidelities on water beds.
The other possibility was to kidnap one of his kids and trade it for the transcripts. There had been no children in my marriage, though there had been two dogs, and I stayed the entire second year for their sake. Then one night we sat down and talked. They let me know they could carry on without me. Several years later I met one of them in Central Park and he acted like he hardly knew me. It was my relationship with Wayne that had taught me how far someone will go to protect a child, and he wasn’t even mine.
If I simply walked up to Brodsky, the worst he could do was say no. I could still do something horrid afterward to change his mind.
On the off chance that he would simply say, “Yes, read ’em!” I went to the Brodsky domicile at what I assumed was after dinner. I had nothing to offer but my boyish charm and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black.
Mel himself came to me door when I buzzed. This was the first time I had seen him up close. His hair was reddish and receding. His eyes were blue. Not sky, or steely, or ice or Paul Newman blue, just blue. His skin was fair and would sear his first hour on Miami Beach. He was shorter than me and a little overweight, but he carried it pleasantly. He looked like he could smile a lot, if provoked.
I introduced myself as myself, showed real ID and asked for a few minutes of his time.
“What is this?”
“Look, Mr. Brodsky, it’s complicated. Why don’t you invite me in? If you like scotch, we can crack open this twelve-year-old and I’ll explain. Then you can throw me out if you want.”
“Mel. Who’s there?” came a voice that had to be the wife.
“A man giving away scotch,” he yelled back, and let me in.
“That’s good,” came the same voice. She walked into the foyer in slacks, a loose blouse and bare feet. I noticed for the first time that Mel was barefoot also. She was taller than him.
“A private detective,” she replied to my introduction, “how charming.”
The living room that I was led into was furnished in non-designer homey, basic comfortable combined with childproof. Mel got ice and glasses, I broke the seal.
“What’s it about?” he asked.
I stalled. Mrs. Brodsky was quick on the pickup. “Is this something that would be better if I weren’t here?”
“I don’t know,” Mel shrugged.
“Yes,” I said. When I’m about to ask a man to violate the confidentiality of his position, I prefer to do it without the ace number-one symbol of propriety, a wife, around.
“Very well then,” she said, not at all put out, “I’ll take my drink and go to bed. When you’re done with my husband, send him to me, please.” I liked her.
“Mr. Brodsky, you were taking testimony from a man named Edgar Wood.”
“Call me Mel.”
“OK. Call me Tony. There’s not a hell of a lot of point in beating about the bush. I’m investigating his death.”
“You look vaguely familiar,” he said. He looked at me, searching for a time or place to put with my face. I looked back, joining the search, and saw nothing familiar.
“The family hired me. They think the mugging was a way to cover up a deliberate murder.”
“I can’t figure out where I know you from. Are you from D.C.?”
“No,” I said.
“Hey! Did you go to law school?”
“One year, Yale.”
“Hmmmm, I went to N.Y.U. How about college?”
“Stony Brook,” and slowly came the dawn.
No way I would have recognized him. They called him “A.K.A.” and that sort of reddish receding hair had been full, curly and huge. Not an Afro, but hardly straight. It had been a tangled halo of glee around giggling eyes and a mouth that gleamed with chemical light. “A.K.A” stood for Acid King Also.
“Tony C, last of the Brooklyn greasers,” he drawled.
“Ohhh, wow!” we both said. It was really awesome. A blast from the past. It was the first time I had said “Oh wow!” since the Republican ascension of ’68.
Re-mem-mem, remember when, oh re-mem-mem, when the world was cleanly crazy and fresh to be rebaked. It was always sunrise when, walking a girl back in the afterglow, you ran into A.K.A. drifting through the trees. Or sunset when we built a bonfire on a fogbound winter night, below the sand cliff among the rocks of Long Island’s north shore. Firelight and sunlight would catch highlights of red and gold in his aura and his body would move with the awkward grace of a teddy bear that had delusions of being a wood sprite.
“You are wondering,” he said with a grin like the old grin, “how I got from there”—his hand wafted through the air pointing at some location in the ether—“to here. Since you are wondering, I will tell you.
“I had a vision. Now most folks, when they have a vision, visionize the world of the spirit. See God—with whom Tom Landry has a personal relationship. See the Cosmos. But I already had a thing going with me Cosmos, as it happens. It is it, and it am I, it’s really very pleasant. So my vision was a vision of the mundane.”
I nodded like it all made sense.
“I had dropped out of school. On the way back to the east coast from the west coast on my way to Tangiers, I found myself in Grand Central Station. Either we were to embark from there or someone had suggested that we go look at trains before they became extinct. It was rush hour, on a Thursday.
“Suddenly, as if a celestial dam had broken, they began to come in a flood. In real gray flannel suits. Remember those days, when clothes were uniforms, they made statements? They were Identity. Anyway, we were blown out on some truly righteous Purple Owsley, and suddenly I saw all these people with love. The myth was that they were oppressed gray automatons caught in the Kafka K of Amerika.
“I blew through the myth. They were people. Functioning, having homes, man-woman relating, having-raising-loving children. And I saw that hippie, soldier, gray flannelier, philosoph or coach, if you were living a human life—it was all the same.
“Suddenly I felt free. I was free. I could conform.
“I ran out of the station, through the crowds, to find the nearest Brooks Brothers. There it was, on Madison Avenue. Tripping my brains out, I made my way to the tie department, to find out if it was really true, if it was all possible. They had beautiful things, wool, silk, cotton. Some exquisitely dull. Some foolishly playful. I knew, at first glance, that on those racks was my tie, waiting.”
“Oh wow,” I said for only the second time in one and a half decades. “So you bought the tie, went straight, and gave up drugs,” I concluded for him.
“Oh no. Oh yes. Oh no,” he clarified.
“Oh no? Oh yes? Oh no?” I asked.
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