‘Sounds like you really hated him.’
She glanced sideways at him. ‘You have good hearing.’
He started the engine. ‘Let’s get some lunch,’ was all he said.
ELEVEN
It was Pinsky’s turn in court on the Bronkowsky case, so it was Tos and Neilson who went to interview the late Merrilee Trask’s partner, Steve Chin. He was a handsome, compactly built Chinese-American, with a very ready grin. His teeth were white and even, but there was one gold one in the corner of his mouth that always seemed to catch the light.
‘Man, she was one tough mama,’ he said. ‘Scared the shit out of me more than once. That’s for sure. It was like having your own private squad of marines. You know? I couldn’t believe it when they told me she was down. Must have taken six guys, I said. Or a tank. But no. Just one shot. Right?’
‘Right,’ Neilson said, mesmerised by the rhythmic appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the gold tooth as Chin spoke, grinned, and spoke again.
‘We’ve been through her records. Do you think there might be any old cons that carried a grudge against her?’
‘No particular one comes to mind,’ Chin said. ‘You think it might be someone with an old grudge that’s shooting these officers down in cold blood?’
‘We don’t know,’ Tos admitted. ‘We’re looking into every possibility. How about her personal life? Anybody there?’
Her ex-partner considered this. ‘She was a divorcee, she had a down on men, but she wasn’t a lesbian or anything like that.’
‘You sure?’ Neilson asked.
An odd expression crossed Chin’s face. ‘I’m sure,’ he said.
‘Boyfriends?’
‘No – she said she never wanted to get emotionally involved with anyone again. She was lonely, I guess – but she put everything into the job. She was studying hard for her sergeant’s exams – the job was her whole life, you know?’
‘For all the good it did her,’ Tos said, gruffly.
Chin shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe she’s not going to suddenly walk in here and yell for me to get my ass out to the car, she’s ready to roll. They tell me I still flinch when a woman shouts in the hall.’ The quick grin came and went. ‘Don’t get me wrong – she was a real great girl, and I liked her a lot. I felt terrible when they told me what had happened to her, still do. I’ll never have another partner like her again, that’s for sure.’ He had a strange look in his eyes. ‘Probably live longer, too.’
‘She took chances?’ Neilson asked.
‘Chances? She took charge, man. I mean I was senior officer by six months, but that didn’t make no never mind to her, she knew it all, she did it all.’
‘And you didn’t object?’
Chin grinned. ‘She was a lot bigger than me.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Tos said, impatiently.
Shrugging, Chin tipped his chair back and put his feet up on his desk. Around them the room was full of movement, noise, confusion, but Chin was calm and almost too quiet now. ‘Okay, okay – fact is, she made us both look good, you know? I’m not a very aggressive type, and she made up for it. I was grateful to her, in a way. Our arrest record was tops in the precinct lots of times, we got a couple of commendations . . .’
‘You got a couple of reprimands, too,’ Neilson put in.
‘Yeah, well . . .’ For the first time, Chin looked uncomfortable, his air of over-cheerful confidence slid away and he looked suddenly smaller. ‘She had a tendency, you know? She was what you might call too enthusiastic.’
‘You mean she used to beat the shit out of suspects now and again,’ Neilson said, in a flat voice. ‘Like you lost a few convictions here and there.’
Tos raised an eyebrow. ‘And it was her who did it?’
‘Yes,’ Chin said, bleakly. ‘I told you she was tough, and she was. Karate, mostly. And a short fuse. She never said, but I think her husband divorced her because she beat him up.’
‘She ever beat you up?’ Neilson asked, half-jokingly.
‘Not so it would show,’ the small man said, his skin darkening slightly.
Neilson gazed at him for a long time. ‘You’re saying she knocked you around?’ he finally asked, in a disbelieving voice.
‘You heard me,’ Chin said, the flush going even darker.
‘But why would she do that?’
Chin looked down at the floor. ‘She had high standards,’ he said, quietly. ‘She expected a lot, on and off duty.’
‘You saw her off duty?’
Chin looked away, picked up a pencil, inspected it, turned it around and around, dug the point into his blotter until it broke, threw it away. ‘Sometimes.’
A brief silence hung between the three of them. Tos looked blank, but there was a dawning comprehension in Neilson’s eyes. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The poor bastard, he thought. ‘I don’t think we want to go into this,’ Neilson said, finally.
‘No, I don’t think you do,’ Chin agreed, in a sad voice.
‘You sure you didn’t shoot her yourself?’
Chin sighed. ‘I thought about it.’
‘What stopped you?’
‘Nobody would have believed I objected,’ Chin said, sadly. ‘I told you, she was a good-looking woman. To most people, anyway.’
‘Jesus,’ Neilson breathed. He got the feeling that Chin was relieved to have told someone – however obliquely – of this rather unusual form of police ‘brutality’. Chin was right – there would have been plenty of cops who would have thought he’d lucked on to a good thing. And Neilson might have been one of them, if he hadn’t been sensitive enough to feel Chin’s pain from three or four feet away. There were all kinds of humiliation.
‘You weren’t with her when she was shot,’ Tos said, not quite certain he was getting any of this right. He’d have to ask Neilson about it later, he decided.
‘No – I was taking some personal time,’ Chin said. ‘An errand I had to do for my family. Someone called in an abandoned car or something, and it was on her way to where she was meeting me for lunch. She never got there, though. To lunch, I mean. When I called up the station – they told me she’d been shot. That she was dead.’
‘How’s your arrest record been, since she went down?’ Neilson asked.
Chin smiled, wryly. There was a person sitting there now, not a man in a grinning mask. ‘Lousy, thank you. But I can live with that.’
‘And you’ve got a new partner?’ Tos asked.
‘Yeah. Officer Linda Tang. That’s her over there.’ He nodded his head toward a small, Chinese-American girl who was standing by the coffee machine chatting to another woman officer. Officer Tang was petite, pretty, and had a delightful smile. ‘We’re going undercover in Chinatown next week, co-operating with an FBI investigation of the Triads,’ Chin continued. ‘We’re posing as a young married couple with money problems.’
Neilson grinned. ‘Now she’s definitely a good thing.’ Chin shook his head. ‘She won’t let me get near her,’ he said, ruefully. He looked up at Neilson, sensing his sympathy. ‘Do you understand women?’
‘I’m still at the research stage,’ Neilson said.
When they got back to the car, Toscarelli asked Neilson if he had understood the situation correctly – that Officer Merrilee Trask had sexually harassed her partner, forced him to sleep with her, in exchange for taking the lead in their street performance?
‘That’s how I read it,’ Neilson said, starting the engine and looking in the mirror to check for oncoming traffic.
‘Why didn’t I ever get a partner like that?’ Tos wondered, thinking back to the photograph of Officer Trask, a full-lipped blonde with huge blue eyes. ‘How come you get Pinsky and I get Stryker and a timid little guy like that ends up with a luscious sex-starved divorcee?’
‘We were just lucky, I gues
s,’ Neilson said.
TWELVE
They drove about a mile and parked. He came around and opened her door for her, and they left the sunshine to enter a cool and quiet darkness. The restaurant was a small one, but they’d found a booth near the back. It was apparently not a ‘police special’ for there were no uniforms among the customers, nor did any of them look like off-duty detectives. For some reason this encouraged her – it felt private here.
‘I’m sorry I interrupted your interrogation,’ Dana said, when they’d started lunch.
He shrugged, and concentrated on his salad. ‘You were probably right. It’s done now.’
She watched him cutting up the cold chicken and detected a certain savagery. ‘You don’t like me, do you?’ Dana asked.
Startled, Stryker looked up and raised an eyebrow. ‘Wow, you sure like everything up front, don’t you?’ he said.
‘That doesn’t answer my question.’
He poked his salad around the plate, hoping to discover another piece of chicken hidden under the herbage. ‘Most cops would resent federal interference on a local case.’
‘I’m not interfering. At least, I’m trying not to, but—’
‘But when you see people messing up, you can’t resist the opportunity to put them right.’
‘Like Mrs Yentall?’
‘Like with everything. Whenever I do or say anything you get this superior look on your face, and I can feel your disapproval boring through the back of my neck.’
‘If you can see the look on my face, how come I can see through the back of your neck?’ she asked, amused.
He stared at her for a minute, then threw his fork down. ‘Okay, very clever, you win again.’ He looked around the room to see if he could spot the waitress and get a beer.
‘I wasn’t trying to win,’ she said, quietly. ‘I was trying to point out that you are being unreasonable.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes, you are.’
He shrugged. ‘Okay, I’m unreasonable. This case is unreasonable, dammit. Officers going down right, left, and centre, we’ve got no leads, no connections, no—’
‘One connection – Gabe Hawthorne and Phil Yentall and the man that killed them both. That’s why I’m here in the first place, remember?’ Dana looked across the table at him, and felt a tremor go through her. She was always talking about being open and honest – why not now? ‘But that’s not why I’m getting under your skin, is it?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s just drop it, okay?’
‘The problem is called sexual antagonism,’ she said, earnestly. ‘The sexual tension between us is causing a lot of problems. We really should resolve it.’
He stared at her. ‘Jesus – you are something else, you know that?’ Stryker said, shocked as much by her frankness as by the instant realisation within himself that she was absolutely right. He’d wanted to screw her from the minute she’d walked into his office. If only to shut her up.
‘It’s true, though, isn’t it?’
‘I would imagine very few men would find the prospect of going to bed with you repellent,’ he said. ‘I just don’t happen to be the kind of guy who—’
‘Don’t be pompous,’ she said. ‘I’m only trying to clarify the situation.’
‘The situation is simple – I’m in love with someone else,’ he said, stiffly.
‘I see.’
‘Tell me – do you always work like this?’ he asked. ‘Are you one of those New Women the magazines talk about – just straight out with it, wham, bam, how about it?’
‘No, I’m not. And I’m not saying “how about it”, necessarily. But working together would be so much easier if we could just get our motivations out in the open—’
‘I don’t want my motivations out in the open,’ he snapped. His voice dropped with every word, until he was speaking in a savage whisper. ‘I don’t want this kind of hassle, I don’t want complications, I don’t want to go to bed with you.’
‘Liar. I want you and you want me. That doesn’t mean we have to do anything about it, but it’s there, all the same. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know.’ She found she was whispering, too, and wondered why. They couldn’t be overheard.
‘Thanks for the compliment – but all I want is to solve this case, okay? That’s all I want.’ He was still desperately searching for the waitress. Or a waiter. Or a plumber. Or an architect. Anybody.
Dana leaned back in the booth and regarded him, coolly. ‘That wasn’t all you wanted at the hotel last night. I saw it in your eyes, I could feel it all the way_ across the room the minute you walked in. But you didn’t follow through. Why?’ She still burned with the memory of going up to her room alone, as turned on as she had ever been in her life, and as frustrated. They had talked about the case for an hour or more, and then he had left, saying he needed to sleep on the information she had brought from Washington. Didn’t the man realise the effect he had on women? Or was it just on her?
He glared at her. ‘What you felt was anger and jealousy, that’s all. I’d had an argument with Kate on the telephone and when you called I just – felt like getting out of the house.’ He flushed, looked down at his plate, at his hands clenched into fists on either side of it. Slowly he opened them. ‘Maybe you’re right. Yes, okay, you’re right. It was all there, you and the night and the music, the hotel room upstairs, the whole bit on a platter. You looked beautiful, exciting, and I wanted you. But – I couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it. Not for those reasons. I hope I’m never angry enough to hurt Kate like that.’
‘I see.’ Dana felt a little shocked at herself – but exhilarated, too. As if she’d done something very dangerous, and survived. ‘Your Kate must be quite a woman.’
‘She is. She could give you lessons on being a woman.’ He hadn’t meant it as unkindly as it came out.
‘I don’t want lessons on being a woman,’ she flared. ‘I was a woman for years and I didn’t like it. Women get stepped on, pushed around, and hurt. They’re always being hurt. That’s why I decided to play with the men, instead. It’s much easier that way.’
‘Is it? You don’t seem very happy about it.’
‘Why should I be happy? I just got told I’m not worth the risk.’
Stryker nodded. ‘That’s right – you’re not. But don’t you see? Nobody is, as far as Kate and I are concerned. Despite my dashing good looks and swashbuckling manner, I am actually a pretty square guy. Do you turn me on? Yes, you turn me on. Do I want to be turned on by you? No, I do not. So I get angry. I’m sorry. I have other things to do. And I have enough risks in my life as it is. I think you should think about risks, too. Men get rejected by women all the time. If you want to play from the men’s bench, you’ll just have to accept the same results. Win a few, lose a few. If this sexual antagonism stuff is going to keep us at each other’s throats, so be it. You’re right, it’s good to know about it, but now that we do know about it, can we forget the goddamn stuff? Can we get back to doing what we’re supposed to be doing and at least try to be civil to one another?’
‘I didn’t think men like you still existed,’ Dana said, in a distant voice.
‘Yeah, we exist,’ he said, wryly. ‘We call ourselves The Dumb Clucks Brigade. Maybe it’s love, maybe it’s laziness, who knows? But we turn down beautiful women all the time. Beat them off with sticks and staves, shouting “Fidelity! Fidelity!” It’s very exhausting, very hard on the nerves. Are you coming back to work, or are there several men in the restaurant you’d like to proposition first?’
To the amazement of them both, tears sprang to her eyes. ‘That was unfair,’ she said. ‘I’m not like that.’
He regarded her gravely. ‘Then I’m sorry,’ he said, after a minute. And meant it. His voice was quiet and a little sad. ‘From the way you were talking, I thought I was just another one of those things with you.’
She grabbed her handbag and slid out of the booth. ‘So did I, damn you,’ she said, and hurried toward the exit.
Back at headquarters, Tos and Neilson told Stryker about their interview with Steve Chin. ‘Merrilee Trask was completely different from the other victims,’ Tos said. ‘It makes things worse instead of better. I’m down to wondering if they all belonged to some secret organisation or something. Maybe they were all members of some cult.’
‘Anything to indicate that in other interviews?’ Stryker asked.
‘No,’ Neilson said, shaking his head. ‘Like Tos says, they were all completely different types. Randolph was an idealist, Santosa was an insecure rookie, Trask was a gung-ho eager beaver, Yentall was easy-going, and Hawthorne was a one-man band. They didn’t seem to have anything in common as far as their performance evaluations went, and they seem to have even less in common in their private lives and personalities. I say it has to be random. What else could it be?’
‘I don’t know,’ Stryker said, helplessly. ‘Jesus, I just don’t know.’
‘Why not accept that it’s random and go from there?’
‘Because there’s nowhere to go from there,’ Stryker said. ‘I think we just keep working on every possibility we can turn up until something snaps into place. Who’s handling the psycho files, again?’ He looked very harassed, and his hair was already standing on end as he ran his hands through it.
‘Jake Chase and Joe Kaminsky.’ Even as Tos spoke, there was a crash in the outer office. ‘There they are now.’
Stryker went to the door and looked out, then opened it and spoke wearily. ‘Were those the psycho files?’
A tall, dark man looked up from where he was kneeling between the desks. ‘I wasn’t anywhere near them,’ he said, in a resigned voice.
‘You don’t have to be,’ Stryker said. Chase was fated to be the centre of disasters. Small and large – if there was a problem, he was bound to be in the middle of it. Sometimes, however, that proved a very advantageous place to be, as his record of successes proved. ‘Have you come up with any possibles yet?’
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