“Noon sharp,” the pleasant voice said.
For a moment he sat unmoving in his chair, staring across the squad room. All kinds of terrifying thoughts came pouring into his head. “Could you tell me what this is in reference to?”
“Captain Zawac will be glad to discuss that with you personally.”
Malloy told himself that it was just to discuss some routine fuck-up. Nothing serious. He looked at his watch: eleven thirty-five. Jim Delancey had been at work a little over a half hour, and he wouldn’t be coming off his shift till evening.
“Sure,” he said. “Tell the captain I’ll be there.”
“DETECTIVE MALLOY, is this yours?” With a soft snap Captain Zawac laid a small object down on his desk.
Malloy had to get up from his chair and approach the desk to see that it was a business card. He had to pick it up to see that it was one of his own. “I’d be surprised to find out it was someone else’s.”
Zawac’s remote and uncaring eyes fixed Malloy’s. “I’m not interested in what would surprise you.”
Zawac was a stocky man in his late forties, with a high, smooth forehead and a pencil mustache that didn’t quite succeed in covering the scar that bisected his upper lip. His face was square, with broad cheekbones and a determined tilt to the jaw.
“It says Carl Malloy.” Malloy shrugged and smiled. “I don’t think it’s going to be much help to a guy named John Smith.”
Zawac did not smile. “Are you implying that a person named John Smith is using your card?”
“I’m sorry. Bad joke.” Malloy laid the card back on the desk.
“Then this is your card?”
Malloy nodded. “That’s what I said.”
“That’s exactly what you did not say,” the third person in the room said. These were Assistant Deputy Commissioner Bridget Braidy’s first words since Malloy had been introduced to her, and it bothered him that she was involved in this. He sensed something happening that he could not quite penetrate, and until he could get a grasp on it, he intended to say as little as possible.
It was Captain Zawac who finally spoke. “Did you give this card to Dorothea Ng yesterday at four forty-five P.M.?”
“How do I know? I give my card out to a lot of people.”
“Why do you give your card out to a lot of people?”
“Why does anyone? So they can phone me.”
“Why do you want Dorothea Ng to phone you?”
“I don’t know Dorothea Ng.”
The captain and the commissioner exchanged glances.
“Why would you give one of your business cards to someone you didn’t know?” Zawac asked. “Do you stand around handing them out on street corners?”
Zawac’s niggling, prosecutorial tone was a bad sign. The way he’d taken back the business card, as though it were a precious relic, was another. Malloy had the feeling that he was being spectacularly set up, that the police had been ordered to offer up another sacrifice to the productivity stats of the Internal Affairs Department. “No, I do not stand around handing my card out on street corners, and yes, I sometimes give a card to someone I don’t know.”
“Why do you sometimes give a card to someone you don’t know?”
“Maybe I’m working on a case and I need a potential witness to phone me.”
“Are you working on a case at present?”
“I’m working on a lot of cases,” Malloy said. “Same as anyone else at the precinct. Matter of fact, I’m on the Society Sam task force.”
“And is Dorothea Ng a witness or potential witness in the Society Sam case?” the captain asked.
“I don’t know who the hell Dorothea Ng is, but I’m sure beginning to hate the name.”
Malloy watched Bridget Braidy’s face for a reaction: his gut told him she was the moving force behind this inquiry. Her eyes had gone soul-dead in her concrete slab of a face. They had dark circles that she had tried to hide with powder.
“Dorothea Ng runs the I Scream for Ice Cream Ice Cream Shop,” Zawac said, “and she knows you.”
“Then Dorothea’s one-up on me, because I’m drawing a blank.”
“Do you know the I Scream for Ice Cream Ice Cream Shop?”
“The name doesn’t ring any bells.”
“The shop is on Lexington and Sixty-sixth Street.”
“I guess I’ve had ice cream at that location. I never noticed it was called I Scream for anything.”
“You were observed having ice cream in the shop with a young lady, and you were observed giving this card to Dorothea Ng in lieu of payment.”
“Are you saying I stiffed the little old lady that runs that joint?”
“You did not pay for your ice cream,” Commissioner Braidy said. “You were seen accepting it as a gratuity, and you were then seen giving your card to Dorothea Ng.”
Malloy sensed something hugely twisted in this discussion—they were coming down on the good guy, on Carl Malloy. “Who saw me?”
“I saw you, Sergeant Malloy,” Bridget Braidy said.
It was a source of joking around the force that Bridget Braidy the cop was the sister of Benedict Braidy the society writer, but it baffled Carl Malloy that the same womb could have spit out this gorgon and that butterfly. It seemed to be proof of something twisted and contradictory in the DNA that had shaped them.
A toxic calm spread across Bridget Braidy’s face. He’d seen that same calm look on the faces of nuns at parochial school the instant before they whipped your knuckles with the ruler. Iron cold locked in on his stomach. This lady was out to kick ass, and she was doing it for God.
“Did you see the guy with the boom box?” Malloy demanded. “Did you see me suggest he should take that disturbance elsewhere? Did you see how happy that old lady was to have that punk out of her place? Did you see me try to pay the old lady for the ice cream and how she fought me on it?”
“Then you’re admitting you didn’t pay for your ice cream,” Zawac said.
Malloy’s gaze went from the commissioner to the captain, and he suddenly saw them as agents in a very ancient process called career advancement. Achievement, risk-taking, effort were not required. All it took to get to the top of the police bureaucracy was ethics carved in butter and a willingness to rip up other people’s careers like junk mail.
“I’m admitting these questions bother me. Maybe I should consult a lawyer.”
“There’s no need for a lawyer at this point.” Zawac extracted a document from the folder and slid it across the desktop.
Malloy recognized the official NYPD letterhead. “What’s this?”
Zawac was holding out a gold pen. “An admission that you accepted a gratuity of ice cream worth four dollars from Dorothea Ng of the I Scream for Ice Cream Ice Cream Shop.”
“And what flavor was the ice cream?” Malloy couldn’t resist asking. Trying to lighten things.
“It was fresh peach ice cream,” the commissioner said, even more deadly serious than before. “With extra sprinkles.”
Malloy wondered if these two really believed the face of crime in New York would be changed one iota by this bullshit. “I’m not signing anything without a lawyer.”
“I’m glad to see Sergeant Malloy has a healthy sense of self-preservation. It must be the Irish in you, Sergeant. I have it too.” The commissioner rose from her chair. “Good meeting you, Sergeant. Captain, I leave this matter in your capable hands.”
Zawac threw her a salute. “It’ll get handled.”
Bridget Braidy shut the door behind her with a sharp snap. Glass rattled.
Zawac sat staring at Malloy, shaking his head. Thirty seconds went by. “Sergeant, Sergeant, you are in a serious pickle.”
“I have nothing more to say till my lawyer’s present.”
“Fuck your lawyer.” Zawac opened a drawer and placed two NYPD tumblers and a fifth of Jack Daniel’s on the desk. “And fuck that Braidy bitch.”
“Sir?”
“I hear she spent all night combin
g the roster, looking for the detective from the Twenty-second Precinct that had your face.” Zawac filled the two tumblers to the halfway mark and held one out to Malloy. “Ice cream. Can you believe it? Ice cream.”
Malloy decided to trust the contempt in Zawac’s eyes. He accepted the tumbler. “Why is she doing it, sir?”
Zawac sighed. “All I can figure is, she has her eye on politics. She wants it on her record that she busted corruption. To your health, fella.” He tipped his head back and emptied the tumbler in two gulps.
“To your health.” Malloy took a swallow. The sour mash left a burn going down his throat.
“Here’s the problem, Sergeant—how are we going to save the shield and the pension of a good cop like you? Because dumb as the charge is, soliciting and accepting any bribe is grounds for dismissal.”
“I’ll get a lawyer and I’ll fight the charge.”
“No, you won’t.” Zawac picked up the confession and ripped it in half. He walked to the wastebasket and dropped the torn sheets. “There’s not going to be a charge. There’s not going to be a hearing.”
“Sir?”
“We’re going to help each other, Sergeant. I’m going to handle your problem, and you’re going to handle mine.”
MALLOY STEPPED OUT of One Police Plaza. Down the street he saw a blinking bar-and-grill sign.
Coming in from the daylight, he found the bar a maze of dim shadows. A jukebox was thumping:
Spilled a pint of plasma and you still don’t hurt,
’Cause your head’s in the heart of the hallelujah dirt.
He took a stool and ordered a double shot of peppermint vodka.
“You mean peppermint schnapps?” The bartender was a blond, friendly-looking fellow with huge eyes.
“Peppermint whatever.” Malloy didn’t care, so long as it was peppermint. He was already reeling from Zawac’s bottomless tumbler of Jack Daniel’s, and he didn’t want his breath giving him away.
The bartender placed a double shot glass of clear liquid in front of him, and Malloy gulped it down.
Then he stared straight ahead through the reflection of the jittering neon sign, and he could see the glass-and-poured concrete facade of One P.P. raising its beehive hulk against the blue of the sky. If you were putting up a condo on the moon, that would be the architectural style.
Hallelujah dirt that’ll do ya
That’ll do ya dirt hallelujah dirt.
Pollution made a silver haze that shimmered over the street, and Malloy could feel the alcohol loosening the cords of his anxiety. For a moment he was lifted into a timeless space where there was no yesterday to regret, no tomorrow to fear, no today to hoard. For a moment he could even ignore that jukebox.
Peace was a rare thing in Carl Malloy’s life, it was a rare thing in any cop’s life, and once he found it he liked to float around in it and savor the weightlessness.
“Bartender,” he said, and he noticed that the bartender was wearing his hair in a ponytail fastened with a single rubber band. If I was young again, Carl Malloy thought, I’d wear a ponytail and a beard and an earring and let the world fuck itself. “Hit me up again.”
TWENTY-SIX
GLORIA SPAHN LED ZACK MORROW into the bedroom and closed the door. They stood in silence for an instant. She smiled.
He reached for her, kissed her.
She pulled back. Still smiling, she took off her watch and placed it in a porcelain dish on the bedside table. She unbuttoned her blouse. She took it off and let it fall behind her.
She unhooked her skirt. She let it and her half slip fall.
He placed his shirt and his trousers over a chair.
She peeled her bra off her shoulders and then wriggled her panties down her hips. The panties had pearl-gray fringes of open-work lace.
He placed his underwear on the cushion.
She stepped out of the puddle of clothes at her feet.
They stared at each other. He could feel each of them liking the other’s body, liking the tightness, the tans, the toned, massaged cleanliness.
Without warning she knelt down before him. She rested her forehead against the hair below his belly button, as though her eyes were so heavy that they were weighing down her entire head.
For Zack it was an instant carved out of eternity, a perfect moment of knowing exactly what was going to come next.
And of not knowing.
Because after she had taken him into the unbelievably moist, soft, warm hollow of her mouth, after he had sprung to life with a teenager’s instantaneity, she rose and, holding his cock gently in one hand, led him through another door.
Light softly touched walls and floors of shrimp-pink and mango-colored breccia perniche marble. Just above the enormous, hollowed marble bathtub and flush with the wall was a platinum door. Gloria Spahn opened it.
The minirefrigerator within was stocked with atomizers of perfumes, bottles of cologne, bath salts, body oils, liquid soaps, lubricants, condoms, glassine bags of heroin and cocaine and Ecstasy, small brown vials of crack rocks.
“You seem to know the apartment,” Zack said.
Gloria Spahn smiled. “It’s a well-known apartment.” She eenie-meenied a moment before choosing two bags that had pink labels printed with the face of Betty Boop and below that the words THE RIGHT STUFF!
She laid the bags side by side on the rosewood vanity and then she opened the door above the fridge, and Zack saw that it was a microwave unit for sterilizing crack pipes and free-base kits and the syringes that lay in a Limoges porcelain quill dish painted with jonquils and nasturtiums.
“Who the hell installed all this stuff?” he said.
“Does it matter?” She looked at him. “Have you ever freebased Ecstasy?”
He shook his head.
“Want to try?”
He looked at her and his eyes narrowed and yesses and noes battled in his head and then he thought, There’s no point going with it if you don’t go with it all the way. He nodded slowly.
Gloria Spahn loaded a pipe with the contents of the two envelopes. She moved with great sureness. He could sense her bursting with know-how, full of living and doing and planning that didn’t ask anyone’s permission or dread anyone’s frown.
She filled a glass bulb with water from the gold swan-shaped Hot faucet of the sink.
She connected the bulb and pipe and handed them to Zack.
As he inhaled on the pipe she played the narrow blue hissing flame of a small Cartier butane torch back and forth across the bulb. In less than ten seconds the water was bubbling, and Zack felt a whoosh go into him. Suddenly his head was five feet higher than his lungs.
They took turns, passing the pipe back and forth.
And then the bowl was empty.
“Lie down.” She pushed him down onto the cranberry-colored pillows on the terry cloth-covered sofa. “Shut your eyes.”
He shut his eyes. Something warm stroked the soles of his feet, and it took him a moment to realize it was her tongue.
Eighteen minutes later Zack Morrow and Gloria Spahn climaxed together.
My God, he was thinking. I love this woman. I need this woman. I want this woman. I want to have sex like this every afternoon of my life.
After a moment he heard her laugh beside him. “It’s true,” she said. “Rich people really do have better orgasms.”
“I’ve got to see you again,” he said.
“Next week.”
“Sooner. Tomorrow.”
She placed a finger across his lips. “We don’t want to use a good thing up.”
“Annie doesn’t mind lending us the apartment.”
“I don’t mean Annie. I mean us. We want us to last and we won’t if we overdo it. I’ll phone.”
“I JUST HAD A CALL from Bridget Braidy,” Tom Reilly said. “She tells me there’s a problem with Malloy. He’s being investigated by IAD.”
“What’s the problem?” Cardozo said. “IAD investigates a lot of cops. That’s how they goose their
productivity stats.”
“It doesn’t look good, a man on a task force who’s under suspicion.”
“Suspicion of what?”
They were sitting in Reilly’s office. It was one of those days when the whole precinct creaked, when the support beams of the old building made distress sounds as though they were having aneurysms in the walls.
“Corruption,” Reilly said. “Soliciting a bribe.”
“How large? Who from?”
“Malloy accepted ice cream from a shopkeeper without paying for it.”
“One or two scoops?”
“As you’re aware, Vince, it’s not the quantity that counts when we’re talking ethics.”
“Who’s the witness?”
“Bridget Braidy.”
“That loudmouth isn’t even IAD.”
There was the beginning of a reaction on Tom Reilly’s face, cut short. “Any citizen can bring a complaint.”
Cardozo’s hands wanted to murder. “With all due respect, sir, the assistant deputy commissioner for public relations is not any citizen. This looks like a setup to me, and a damned stupid one. IAD needs to prove they’re keeping the force clean. Which, by the way, they’re not. And I’m not handing over one of my men for a burnt offering. Malloy is a good cop, and I want him on my task force until he gets what he’s entitled to—a fair hearing.”
Tom Reilly wasn’t there; his eyes were glassy, he was holding a cigarette with a three-inch ash about to fall. If he was seeing anything, it was a test pattern in his mind. “Bridget Braidy’s a powerful woman. She’s helped your task force.”
“She helped herself. That was a ploy to get her face on the evening news.”
“She can be a useful friend.”
Cardozo breathed in slowly through his mouth. “Not after she filed that charge. The only person she could be useful to now is the neighborhood crack dealer.”
Reilly sighed. “Vince, why do you have to go to the brink over a bullshit bureaucratic wrangle?”
“Because IAD and the assistant deputy commissioner for public relations are going to the brink over ice cream and that’s the real bullshit and someone’s got to say no to the bullshitters.”
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