The doctor was not a problem. He was in the corridor writing on a chart when he saw the four detectives. “Have at him,” the doctor said, with a toss of his perm toward the flattened figure at the far end of I.C.U. “You can’t hurt him now.”
“Is he dead, goddamnit?” Al Mackey exclaimed.
“As good as,” the doctor said, glancing up curiously. “He’s in a coma.”
“Could you guys wait here?” Al Mackey asked the robbery dicks, who nodded and headed for the coffee machine as Al Mackey and the Ferret strode toward the little man breathing the last oxygen he’d ever consume. Two nurses left them and walked into the corridor, and Al Mackey drew the curtain around the bed.
“Well, is it him?” he whispered to the Ferret.
Suddenly the Ferret discovered something extraordinary. Seeing him lying there with the I.V. and the plasma, and the oxygen mask, and the spurious expression of repose, he looked so different. The Ferret didn’t, couldn’t hate him. “He looks so small,” the Ferret said. “He looks like a little kid.”
“Goddamnit, Ferret, don’t say they all look alike! Is it him or not?”
“He looked so different when he was grinning at me.”
“Do you want me to rip off that fucking oxygen mask and make him grin?” Al Mackey said, and the Ferret looked at him and shook his head.
“It’s him,” the Ferret said. “I think.”
“Now get outa here so I can take his dying declaration,” Al Mackey said.
“A statement from him?” the Ferret said incredulously.
“Get the fuck outa here!” Al Mackey said.
The Vietnamese assassin made quite a complete dying declaration, according to Al Mackey’s report. After expressing a clear understanding that he was going to die, the assassin told the detective that he and Just Plain Bill Bozwell did indeed shoot Nigel St. Claire to death that night in the parking lot. It happened after they’d spontaneously kidnapped the hapless mogul from a street in Hollywood where Nigel St. Claire had apparently stopped to buy a newspaper. The team of robbers simply seized an opportunity, overpowered the obviously wealthy victim, took him to a lonely parking lot near Gower in Bozwell’s car, and shot him dead. They were frightened off by a passing car before they had a chance to rob the corpse.
The assassin barely got the story out before he expired. But he managed. And the Nigel St. Claire case was cleared. The sister of Loc Nguyen later told police through a translator that she knew her brother would come to no good, but she’d certainly misjudged his potential after having the police report translated for her. She’d always thought he was a dumb little thug who’d never learned more than a few words of English, yet look how beautifully he’d confessed his crimes at the end. And all in English! It just goes to show that all people have potential, she said.
There were lots of huzzahs and backslapping around the squadroom that afternoon. The captain had borrowed poor old Cal Greenberg’s electric shaver and was getting himself all gussied up for a report to a television news team on the happy ending to the Nigel St. Claire murder case. He was rehearsing several phrases upon which to end his formal statement regarding the sudden break in the murder investigation. He settled on: “He works in mysterious ways.”
And he-who-worked-in-mysterious-ways was at that moment sitting in the squadroom wondering where the hell Martin Welborn went after he returned from personnel division. Al Mackey was dictating the dying declaration to Gladys Bruckmeyer when Martin Welborn came in the door.
“Well, my son, congratulations on clearing the case.” Martin Welborn smiled.
“Where the hell you been? Why’d you go to personnel? Where’d you go after that?”
“First, I went to personnel to tell them to process my retirement papers. I’m taking a two-week vacation until my twentieth anniversary, and then …”
“You’re pulling the pin?” the Ferret said.
“Yeah, twenty years is enough.”
“I figured you for a lifer,” the Weasel said.
“Anyone who doesn’t change his mind doesn’t have one.” Martin Welborn smiled.
“Where’d you go the rest of the afternoon?” Al Mackey wanted to know. “You called in and were told about Bozwell and his pal. And you still went somewhere else!”
“Oh, I had to go see someone. The last piece of business in the Nigel St. Claire case.”
“Where?”
“I had to see Flameout Farrell.”
“For what?”
“Nothing important. To tell him that I thought Peggy would be safe from the movies now. That she’d helped us a lot. That sort of thing.”
“I’ll be damned!” the Ferret said. “Here we are, big-shot detectives, wrapping up the year’s hottest homicide and you’re dicking around with that little bookmaker?”
“Fathers worry about their children,” Martin Welborn said. “I wanted to reassure him.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Al Mackey said, “not having been a father.”
“Let’s go out tonight and celebrate your retirement,” Simon said.
“Hell, maybe I’ll pull the pin too. We’ll both get out of this evil place,” Al Mackey said.
“What evil place?”
“Hollywood, U.S.A.”
“Al, my son, Hollywood, California, is no more evil than Hannibal, Missouri. There’s no evil. No good. It’s all an accident.”
“Let’s go celebrate at some silk-stocking restaurant,” Schultz said. “Where all the movie stars go! Is there any place we can dance?”
“How about the dress in those places?” the Weasel asked.
“You can wear one if you want. I still won’t dance with you,” the Ferret answered.
“Come on, Marty. Come with us,” Schultz said. “The Ferret’s got the post-investigation poorlies. We gotta cheer him up. We’ll celebrate the clearing of the case and your retirement.”
“You guys go and have a drink for me,” Martin Welborn said. “I have to pack. I’m renting a cabin in the mountains for the next couple of weeks.
“What mountains?” Al Mackey asked.
“Lake Arrowhead. I’ll come back for my retirement party. You are having an official party for me, aren’t you?” Martin Welborn smiled.
“The biggest and best,” the Weasel said. “Come on, let’s get started. I say we oughtta begin with martinis at the Polo Lounge! Ferret, can we wear our Hell’s Angels jackets at the Beverly Hills Hotel?”
Martin Welborn did not give the phone number of the Lake Arrowhead cabin to anyone. When Al Mackey went to Marty’s apartment the next morning he had already gone. Al Mackey did something no one thought possible during the next two weeks. He lost more weight, thinking about Martin Welborn all alone in the mountains. And then he did something he didn’t think was possible: He screwed his socks off the night after payday.
She was Schultz’s forty-five-year-old widowed sister, Hilda. She didn’t look too much like Schultz, thankfully, but she had eaten more than her share of strudel and wiener schnitzel in her day, and she was twice the size of Al Mackey. It had started out as a favor to the big detective, whom she was visiting from Milwaukee. Schultz didn’t know what the hell to do with her after showing her Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm.
The remarkable thing was that Al Mackey only intended to take the dumpy dame to Busch Gardens (all expenses paid by Schultz) and they somehow ended up drinking lots of beer and necking by the aviaries, which led to Al Mackey’s apartment, where she made him stiff as a bat with all her good-natured hugging and kissing and flattery. She said he was the best-looking man she’d ever dated (her late husband being the only other one). She said he was sexy and fun and manly. And it straightened his whanger out. He banged Hilda three times that night even without consuming the powdered elk’s antler! He couldn’t wait for Marty to get back from his vacation so he could tell him how things were looking up.
Two days after his twentieth anniversary as a policeman, when his pension was secure for a surviving spouse, a
nd one day before his lease expired at his cabin in the mountains, Martin Welborn arose after lying in bed through the twilight. He showered and shaved and dressed himself as though he were going to work. He wore gun, badge, and handcuffs. He drove his car toward the coil of mountain road leading down from the lake.
Clouds veered. The wind screamed. As he sped toward the most perilous curve on that road, one marked by a great darkling pine and a cliff plunging one thousand feet to the canyon below, Martin Welborn began thinking of the time so long ago when a young policeman sat in St. Vibiana’s Cathedral and listened to a Gregorian choir. Though most of the others in the congregation were derelicts of skid row, where the cathedral loomed in the deadly smog, it mattered not. The old cardinal was still alive, one of the last of his breed.
As Martin Welborn pressed the accelerator he thought of that day in the cathedral when he had kissed the cardinal’s ring.
The mountain road glittered like steel in the frosty moonlight. The serpentine curve and the black void veered.
The Faith was impregnable then. There was peace and Perfect Order in the cathedral that day.
A hawk shadow on the moon. A sable pine loomed at the knife edge of darkness. The black needles hurtled toward him.
How perfect that moment in the cathedral had been. The majestic old cardinal wore lovely crimson slippers.
19
Flameout Farrell
Al Mackey still had not wept by the day of the funeral. He hadn’t wept when Captain Woofer woke him in the middle of the night to tell him about Marty’s car accident. He hadn’t wept when he telephoned personnel division the next day and discovered that Marty had increased his insurance to the maximum on the very day they cleared the Nigel St. Claire murder case. Marty named his two daughters as beneficiaries of the double indemnity clause for accidental death, and each girl would receive one hundred thousand dollars.
He didn’t even weep when he thought of Paula Welborn getting Marty’s pension for the rest of her life. Her delayed compensation for his stress.
But then, he knew that Marty wanted it that way. He was never one to stop loving anything once he started.
He didn’t weep when the Department’s firing squad, and the bugler blowing taps, devastated Marty’s two pretty daughters sitting at graveside, at the hideous circus that is a police funeral.
He didn’t weep when everyone said all the platitudes to him after the funeral.
“He must’ve fallen asleep at the wheel.”
“Yes, he must’ve fallen asleep,” Al Mackey would answer.
“He never knew what hit him after he went off the road.”
“No, he never knew what hit him,” Al Mackey would answer.
“At least he didn’t suffer.”
“No, he didn’t suffer,” Al Mackey would answer. “Marty didn’t suffer.”
Al Mackey saw someone at the graveside, however, whose presence came as close to making him weep as anything could. It was a man with a wan and gossamer look, and skin that was like old ivory in its translucence. A peculiar wisp of a man. Al Mackey guessed immediately who he was. And his mind swerved. He realized that he had probably known who’d killed Nigel St. Claire since that last day he’d seen Marty alive.
Later, Al Mackey waited alone for that man when he opened the door of the restaurant. The man was in his only suit, which he had respectfully worn to the funeral. Al Mackey charged through the door and, grabbing him by the necktie, dragged him back into the kitchen and spread him across the sink, knocking a pile of dishes on the floor.
“Don’t hurt me,” Flameout Farrell said.
“You dare to come to his funeral, you son of a bitch!”
“Please. Please!” Flameout Farrell said.
Al Mackey realized there was only one person who would have possessed the necessary outrage after being told of the snuff film conspiracy by Lorna Dillon. One person desperate enough to wait with a gun in the big parking lot by Griswold Weils’ apartment house. But when the black Bentley finally appeared, Bozwell/Lloyd had a stranger with him, and Bozwell/Lloyd was not a man to have been intimidated by such a pathetic gunman. Then, two frantic shots. But it was the stranger who got hit. No doubt by accident.
“Fathers worry about their children,” Marty had said that day.
“I wouldn’t know,” Al Mackey had answered, “never having been a father.”
But he had known. He’d repressed it. He could never have proved any of it. He couldn’t prove it now.
“Please, Mr. Mackey,” Flameout Farrell said.
“How do you know my name, goddamn you?”
“He told me, Mr. Mackey. He told me you might come.”
Al Mackey slapped the unresisting bookmaker across the face. “You’re lying!”
“He gave me something for you, Mr. Mackey,” Flameout Farrell gasped. “He said to give it to you if you ever came. He … he was so … decent to me when he came that day.”
That stopped Al Mackey. He released his hold on the bookmaker, whose ivory flesh bore the imprint of the detective’s hand.
Flameout Farrell hunched before Al Mackey and took his tattered wallet from his pants pocket and removed a folded note, offering it to the detective. Then the little bookmaker began weeping more brokenly than he had wept before the astonished Weasel and Ferret the night he first mentioned his daughter, Peggy.
“He … he told me …” the bookmaker sobbed, “that … killing that man wasn’t an … evil thing.”
It was unmistakably Marty’s handwriting. And finally Al Mackey wept. He wept when he read it, and when he ran out of the restaurant. He wept all the way back to Hollywood Station. He could hardly see the street for the tears. The note said:
Aloysius, my boy:
You’ve already cleared the case. Go home.
It’s over. Have a drink for me sometime.
Luv,
MARTY
20
Apple Valley
By the time Al Mackey got himself sufficiently pulled together to enter the squadroom, the others had returned from the funeral. Some were already back to police business. Some were not. Schultz was sitting at the homicide table with his head down. He looked up and his eyes were raw.
The giant detective looked at Al Mackey and said, “Marty was a nice man.”
Captain Woofer strode out of his office just then, all business, and shouted, “Ferret! You and the Weasel get in here!”
Captain Woofer didn’t even bother to close the door of his office as he railed at the two narcs, who were still wearing the ill-fitting suits and greasy neckties they’d donned for the funeral.
Captain Woofer was bitching and moaning about all the dopers and dealers the Ferret and Weasel hadn’t arrested all the time they’d been screwing around on the Nigel St. Claire case where they hadn’t really been needed anyway. And there was an implied threat to whack their balls and knock their dicks down if they didn’t produce some results up on the boulevard. Pronto.
The Ferret and Weasel were grim and determined when they came out of Captain Woofer’s office. The narcs immediately began stripping off the neckties and suit coats and they whispered furiously as the squadroom settled back into the routine of the day.
Captain Woofer, ever since the sabotage of his briar pipe, was very careful what he smoked around here. In fact, Lieutenant Fossback, a nonsmoker, had gamely taken up pipe smoking upon the captain’s recommendation. Captain Woofer was careful to observe Lieutenant Fossback’s symptoms before he ever lit up a load of his own from the same humidor. So far, Lieutenant Fossback was only intermittently chartreuse, like the cookie bandit. They all said that Captain Woofer and Lieutenant Fossback were like the Borgias at dinner. It would have been impossible for anyone to slip another load of dope into Captain Woofer’s pipe without going through his lieutenant.
But while Gladys Bruckmeyer busied herself with a fresh pot of coffee to help Captain Woofer out of his bad mood, she received some unexpected help from the friendly Ferret, who wipe
d the captain’s cup and helped her pour.
It was Gladys Bruckmeyer herself who took the captain’s afternoon coffee to him, and trembled when he took a sip saying, “Goddamn, Gladys, this coffee’s bitter! I told you it’s not economical to make it too strong!”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” the old dame said. She was only six months from the pension and Apple Valley. She trembled at everything these days.
While the captain grumbled and drank his bitter coffee, the Weasel and Ferret went to their lockers and switched back to their street garb before returning to the squadroom.
Even as the two narcs reentered the squadroom the rest of the detectives knew that something was very wrong with Captain Woofer. He had begun a loud and angry conversation in his office. And he was alone.
All the detectives and Gladys Bruckmeyer stopped doing business and listened as the captain cackled hysterically at a joke the nonexistent visitor just told.
“Something’s wrong with the captain!” Gladys Bruckmeyer cried out.
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” said the Weasel, sounding just like Clark Gable.
“Round up the usual suspects,” said the Ferret, sounding just like Claude Rains.
Then the Weasel and Ferret exited, not even bothering to stay for the finale, when the captain got sick and tired of arguing with his phantom friend and walked unsteadily out of his office and glared, with pupils like double-aught buckshot, at the roomful of expectant detectives.
Just before he pitched forward into the lap of poor old Cal Greenberg, who was waiting this time like a catcher for a knuckle-ball, Captain Woofer pointed a wrathful finger at quivering Gladys Bruckmeyer and said: “YOU, GLADYS BRUCKMEYER. YOU LET THE LADYBUGS LOOSE IN THE CASTLE!”
This time Gladys Bruckmeyer didn’t even bother to admit her guilt and ask for another chance. She just sat back and trembled and was grateful that she hadn’t jumped up reflexively and torn her pantyhose again. She was down to her last pair. Apple Valley seemed an eternity away.
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