by Dave Balcom
“Most likely, they were hired to make Jim uncomfortable enough to leave town,” he said, looking at me. “Isn’t that the gist of the threat?”
“What threat?” Sandy turned on me with dismay. “You received a threat?”
I shot a look at Hennessey, and he didn’t flinch. “Don’t blame me if you’ve been keeping secrets; that’s your problem.”
“Jim, really. Tell me.”
“Sandy, I thought it was the cops. Honestly, I did. I didn’t see any good it would do to lay that kind of bullshit on you. And then when the Hardy thing happened, I thought it was over...”
“But now when it’s over you feel ‘relieved’? That’s what you said on the phone. Why would you be ‘relieved’ if you thought it was over in the first place?”
I could see the fire in her, and tried to chide her out of it, “Hey, I was still full of adrenaline when I called; you can’t hold that against me.”
She shook her head without taking her eyes off mine, “You can play that game with Hennessey and the others, buster, but I know who you are, remember?”
My brow creased as her words hit me as “too much information” and she caught the look immediately and just as quickly backed off, “We can talk about this later, okay?” She said in a quieter voice.
“I’m sure we will,” I said with a note of resignation that made Hennessey laugh out loud.
Sandy smiled at him, seemingly as if the last few seconds had never happened, “Do you and your wife ever forget yourselves in front of friends you trust, Max?”
The detective laughed knowingly, “Well played, Sandy. Yes, I’ve had those moments and appreciate it that you and Jim think enough of me to let down your hair a bit in my presence.
“But you must know I’m no longer married.”
Sandy looked surprised. “Really, I saw your ring...”
Hennessey raised his left hand, and the gold band gleamed in the kitchen light. “I wear it still, but I’ve been divorced since nineteen seventy-six.”
“Why the ring, if you don’t mind my asking?” She said.
“I’ll tell you if you promise not to make a snap judgment about my personal behavior when you hear it.” He was smiling, and the smile had reached his eyes. I could tell he was enjoying himself.
“Okay,” she said hesitantly.
“I wear it as a defense mechanism,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I find that it seems to repel women who are looking for love in all the wrong places, has no effect on women of loose morals, and it serves as a constant reminder that I am not the marrying kind of guy.”
We watched as she processed that information, working her way through the scenario it portrayed, then as her eyes widened, he said, “You promised, remember?”
The blush started at her collar and worked its way up to her ears and was spreading to her cheeks when she put her hand to her throat, “Excuse me, guys; I’ve gotta check on the kids.” She beat a hasty retreat.
“Sorry,” he started to say to me.
“Let me pour another...”
“No, thanks, really. I’ve got to go. Another time, okay?”
“I’ll call you when I go back to work. I’m going to take a few days off from my regular duties. We can have lunch or something?”
“Count on it. Good night, and, again, I’m sorry about before...”
I put my hand on his shoulder and walked him to the door. “Good night. Thanks.”
I cleared up the kitchen, poured myself a short one, and let Hans out the back door so he could make one last patrol of the backyard. I stood on the little deck there and looked at the wind-blown clouds scudding across the sky. The city’s lights dimmed the stars, but the thin strands of clouds made the night sky look like one of the marbles we called “cat’s eyes” I had played with as a kid.
The rangy Vizsla came back to the steps and worked his way around me into the house and to his bed. I finished my last sip, and followed him.
58
I took the next three days to do pretty much nothing. I walked early, and came home in time to walk Sara to kindergarten at the elementary school one block over. One sunny morning I pushed Jeremy in a stroller to make it a “dad’s day out” for him, too.
After Sara was safely inside the school, I took my time getting the little fella back home. I shooed Sandy out of the kitchen, and we had breakfast – I ate my cereal after he had his, and by the time I had him cleaned up and changed, he was drifting off, so I put him down and went looking for his mother.
“I could get used to this, Mr. Stanton,” she said as she stretched and yawned on Wednesday morning. “Indeed, I could.”
“Me, too. If I could just figure out how to keep you in gin and bonbons without all that work stuff interfering with our fun...”
“Spoil sport!”
“I think I need to get back to work, don’t you?”
She purred a bit, and then snuggled back inside my arms, “Not just this minute, I don’t.”
Her best attempt at an evil chuckle started me laughing and I couldn’t help it, but then she shushed me with a kiss.
On Thursday, we had a quiet Thanksgiving at home. We went for a long walk to the park and back, ate roast turkey with all the trimmings, and napped to the sound of the NFL on TV – it was a restful, thankful day.
On Friday I went back to work, and found a pile of letters on my desk that had already been processed, but on top of the pile was a note from Agent Reynolds to call her ASAP upon my return.
“What’s up?” I asked when she answered.
“You’re back to work already?”
“What’s up?”
“And back to your all-business self, I see,” she was laughing. “I want you to meet with me at your earliest convenience to go over the statement that Officer Hardy made over the weekend. It may have some bearing on your adventure Monday.”
“You heard about that?”
“Very impressive; those two guys have a long and dismal record of the kind of things they had in mind for you. I’d like to see some of that t’ai chi in action.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Marcia. They slipped and I took advantage, nothing more and nothing less.”
“Right. So, when can we meet?”
“Where do you want to meet?”
“Your office will work; I can be there by lunch. Let the U.S. Government buy you a sandwich after we meet in your office?”
“That’ll work. Just ask for me and I’ll come and meet you.”
Which she did. As we walked back to my office, she stopped to look around the newsroom. “It’s very quiet in here, almost like a library.”
“The place lost a lot of its charm when the old teletype machine with its constant chattering and occasional bells was replaced with a direct and silent feed to computers.”
“No, I was wondering where the people are?”
“Well, for one thing, on Friday we’re a split shift. We put out one paper this morning, and another tonight. In addition, many of our staff arrived before six, so in the middle of the day troops can be scarce in here. The desk folks are all at lunch right now, but they’ll be back shortly.”
We went into my office and I closed the door. She put a tape machine on the little conference table and hit Play.
A voice I didn’t recognize introduced the tape as a voluntary statement being made by Derek George Hardy with the time, date, and the names of the witnesses, and then I heard Hardy clear his throat and introduce himself.
I listened intently as, in a quiet and hesitant voice, Hardy explained his actions that led to my arrest. He told the investigators that he had been on routine patrol when he received a call on his radio and was told to tune to a tactical channel, which he did. There he was instructed to intercept a potentially dangerous situation involving a drunk driver leaving Silva’s Restaurant. He was given a description of my vehicle, including license plate, and was instructed to follow the driver into the city before initiating a proactiv
e arrest. He said the radio message included the driver’s last name, Stanton, and the fact that he was a suspected drug dealer. He was about a mile from the restaurant when he received the call, and, just as he started to rush to Silva’s, the transmission ended with a caution that Stanton was known to be violent, had a weapon concealed in his car seat at all times, and he should use extreme caution.
He described how he had watched as I left the restaurant and saw me pull away from the parking lot and head into town. “I thought this was going to be my big break,” he said into the tape, his voice breaking up a bit; “Honest to God, you gotta know I was just following orders.”
He then went on to describe the incident, “I saw him fumbling down below the window, and I thought he was going for the gun, so I got the drop on him. I opened the door and yanked him out, I was a bit rough, but I thought he was trying to kill me, you know? I followed protocol to the letter, cuffed him, read him his rights, and secured him in my vehicle.
“Then I went back to his car, and sure enough, there was a handgun wedged behind the cushion of his seat. I had no idea about where it came from, I just found the gun, you know?
“Then I just kept on the protocol, I opened the trunk; looked inside a box that was in there; and, lo and behold, there’s the junk. It turned out to be coke, you know? I figured, ‘hot damn, finally, I’m catching a break, finally, I’m going to get a bust that will push me up the ladder,’ you know?”
I could hear the tears in his voice; the loss and heartbreak in his words.
“What do you make of that?” I asked Reynolds.
“Pushing eight years and only a patrolman three? Daddy a local big shot and the boy can’t earn a promotion as a city cop? I think Deke suffers from terminal stupid, that’s what I make of it.”
“Pretty harsh, don’t you think?”
“Harsh? Not coming from a career law enforcement officer, it’s not. That officer had never received a tactical frequency call in his life, and then he gets one and never questions why just him? Tactical call-outs are big deals, Stanton. They don’t happen often, and they’re never isolated to one cop.”
“So who used him?”
“That’s the real mystery here. Nobody in the radio room remembers the original call or the tactical call. They’re studying the tapes at the station.”
“He made this all up?”
“Oh, no; they’re recorded on his car system, just like his arrest and comments to you were recorded. There’s video of him yanking you out of the car, and, frankly, it looks like you were drunk and stumbled.
“No, Hardy’s telling it like it happened; we just don’t know how it happened.”
I sat thinking and she let the silence settle in around us until finally she started putting the tape back into her brief case. “You ready for lunch?”
I shook myself out of my thoughts, “Sure. But, first, who could transmit a message to a police car? What kind of knowledge and technology would it take?”
She paused, “I’m not sure, but we have folks who could answer that, and they’re working on it. You know the regular frequencies are public knowledge; that’s how all the scanner freaks keep track of what’s going on outside their dreary little lives.”
I nodded toward the newsroom. “We monitor all the frequencies all the time.”
“And how often do you hear something like “Roger, so-and-so, tune to Tac Two?”
I thought about working the Friday or Saturday night desk with the scanner a constant background noise. “Not all that often, I guess.”
“Did you ever give it a thought?”
“Only if it came after a call-out or “all cars” blast... you know, something outside the routine.”
“Exactly; the same thing is going on at the station. They hear car-to-car chatter and as long as it doesn’t get racy or out of order, it doesn’t register there, either.”
“You found the instruction to change the channel on the master tape, didn’t you?”
She nodded, and I directed her to the employee exit and the parking lot. “I know a great Italian hoagie place, Reynolds, and I for one could use a grilled sausage, peppers and onions. I’ll drive.”
“Not much of an in-dining place,” she said looking around. I could see the doubt.
“You’ve never had a better sandwich than you could have here, Agent. I promise.”
“Not much of a veggie menu, though.”
“You can pull the salami out of your salad, or you could go bonkers over the sauce on your pasta.”
She rolled her eyes, “As if my Italian restaurants in Buffalo aren’t special, much less the restaurants of my youth in Brooklyn...”
After we had ordered, we took our sodas to the only booth in Michael’s Take-Out. “I figured we could talk here without fearing big ears,” I said with a smile.
I could see she was dubious about my choice of lunch space, but she changed her tune when her meal arrived and she got her first whiff of the garlic, oregano and wine that made the sauce so memorable.
I watched as she deftly used her spoon to twirl a mouthful of sauce-covered spaghetti onto her fork and filled her mouth. Her eyes changed in celebration of the experience.
“I take it all back,” she whispered after her first swallow. “Now, if we just had some Chianti Classico Reserva, this would be fine dining!”
“And, in this place, with the wine, you’d be paying, oh, I don’t know, six bucks a plate?”
“You have no idea of how well you have it in this town, Stanton.”
“Oh, I do, Agent Reynolds. I really do.”
“So, will you stay here long?”
“I have no idea. I have a lot of work to do here, but I don’t know what I don’t know, and that seems to keep me always on the lookout for new challenges, new places. I don’t have a plan that I’m following. Right now, this is the place for me, and I appreciate it for all it is, and I try not to blame it for what it isn’t.”
“Really?”
“I try my damnedest.”
“I find that funny because Max Hennessey said much the same thing the other day.”
“You and Max getting to know each other?” I asked with a smile.
“Oh, I’ve known Max, or at least the ‘prototype Max’ since I was about twelve,” she said after another mouthful of spaghetti. “I’ve lost count of the Maxes who’ve offered to take me under their wing and show me the ropes. Working for the FBI as a field agent in the backwaters, I end up in lots of little towns where there’s a Max on the force who would like to redefine the term “liaison.’”
“Max hit on you?” I was surprised.
“No, he’s much too cool for that, but he wears that fake wedding ring like a seat belt. If a girl decides to ignore it, she’s proceeding at her own risk if you know what I mean. But, no, we worked late and Segura and I went to dinner with him – Silva’s is really good, but their sauce doesn’t compare to this.”
“They have to make it in quantities too large is all. Here they make about a gallon at a time, and it takes days. I got the kitchen tour once; one of our graphic artists is a relative. There are four pots making sauce in constant rotation back there.”
“I’d kill for the recipe,” she said with her mouth full.
“You’d have to; Mama would die and she’d let all her children die before she talked.”
“Really?”
“There is no recipe. That’s the fact. She just knows what she knows. It’s not cooking as I understand it, but Sandy calls it kitchen craft – and you can’t teach it; you can only learn.”
We enjoyed our meal in silence, and then I asked her, “You know that Max is no longer married, don’t you?”
“Of course. He told me that it hadn’t worked out, and they were divorced when he first started in police work in Bishop, California. He said it was difficult – you know, living in that small town while your ex lived there? – so he started looking to move, and then he got the job in Cincinnati...”
“He was in Bishop?” I interrupted her.
“Yes, he was working for the sheriff... What are you thinking?”
“I don’t want to say it out loud.”
We finished our lunch in silence. She offered to pay with her credit card, and I started laughing again. “No?” She asked.
“I’ll get it,” I said reaching for my wallet. “This is strictly a cash or credit business. I could sign for it with my home address, and settle up at the end of the month. Or I can pay cash. Anything else and you’ll be doing dishes...
As I drove back to the office, I asked, “What’s next?”
“With Hardy?”
“Yes...”
“Or Max?”
“Hardy first.”
“He’s going to serve a thirty-day suspension without pay for ‘conduct unbecoming.’ In that time he has to do some community service and he has to apologize to you. Then he’ll be reinstated to his position on one year of probation. If he keeps his nose clean, he’ll suffer no career-ending penalties for his involvement.”
“What about Max?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’d like you to use your FBI resources to get the details on Max; where did he come from, how long he stayed there... I’d like to see how Max fits into the timeline I gave you.”
She looked at me for nearly a minute without responding. “You think...?”
“I don’t want to think; but Bishop, California? How many people have you met who used to live there?”
“I see what you mean. I’ll keep in touch. Thanks for lunch. Next time we’ll invite Sandy and I’ll take you to Silva’s.”
“She would love that. Be careful out there.”
She nodded and left me sitting in my car, wondering.
59
I didn’t have to wonder long. I had just finished reading to Sara and put her to bed when the phone in the kitchen rang and it was Reynolds.
“Sorry to call so late,” she started, obviously talking to me while doing something else with her hands. I could hear paper rustling in the background of her speakerphone.