The waiter materialized with tiny glasses on a crystal tray, the usual treatment. Two stingers. Ruby sipped hers, and the little buzz saw inside her head began sounding like a jackhammer. At times, she barely heard Schuyler talking.
He was saying, “Sorry, you’ll have to work with Crosby. After all, Crosby’s the one who brought in the business—”
Ruby interrupted. “Oh God, Jay!”
“But let’s look on the bright side.”
“What’s bright about it?”
“You get a big retainer up front on a consultancy contract, and then a nice paycheck every week like a regular person. Plus, you’ll be helping me out. You know we keep a thin staff. There’s nobody I can put onto a new project without looking to the outside. Might as well be you, kiddo. You should come in from the cold for a while. Don’t lie, this is something you’ve been dreaming about for months. You can’t pay your bills with that theater of yours, can you?”
“Well …”
“Look, I’ve had people go down there.”
“Market research?”
“Check. Your best night, maybe there’s twenty paying customers. Otherwise, you paper the house. So you’re flying by the seat of your pants. You need money for either one of two things: to live like a human being, or else to toss it down your arty rat hole.”
“You sweet talker.”
Schuyler smiled. “Sure, and here’s how I’ll make it even sweeter. You get Sandy, the best secretary we’ve hired in years. Also you get southeast corner office on the thirty-fifth floor.”
“I thought Foster was in there.”
“He retired.”
“You fired him.”
“I persuaded him.”
Ruby rubbed her temples. There were now at least two jackhammers at work. It was all she could do to ask, “What kind of trade did you say this was? I don’t think I can get excited about the discovery of yet another body part that needs deodorizing.”
Obviously, this was the cue for a silver pot of coffee and the pastry cart. Ruby declined the pastry.
“This business you’re going to love. I promise, it’s a long, long way from package goods.” Schuyler smiled and watched Ruby drink down a cup of black coffee. “Tomorrow morning, nine sharp. We’ll all be waiting for you in your new office.”
“All—?”
“Sandy Malreaux, that’s your secretary. Crosby and me. Also the Likhanov brothers.”
“The who?”
Schuyler waved a manicured hand. “For now, just think new world order.” He looked at his Cartier tank watch, then rose from the table, and said, “Got to scoot.” Ruby finished her coffee and stood. And the two of them left the Pool Room. At the Four Seasons, nobody but Jay Schuyler ever said check. The bill would be in the mail, and Uncle Sam would eventually be the sport. And it was back to the salt mines for Ruby Flagg.
There were two limos waiting outside. One for Ruby, one for the man with the alligator smile.
Schuyler kissed Ruby on both cheeks. She felt heat. Schuyler said, “I want to meet this policeman of yours. He’s a good guy?”
“He’s got his problems. But yes, he’s good. He’s very good.”
Chapter 2
Many other times in my life I have been without it. No big deal. But then one day I had no choice in the matter. And this felt very different, like I was walking around naked in a bad dream.
Seven weeks ago, Inspector Tomassino Neglio, my so-called friend, put me on restricted duty, which is what regular cops know as the bow-and-arrow squad. He said what they always say: It’s for your own good. Ruby even said that.
Right away, all the regular cops saw how the bulge was gone out of my jacket. Or else when I was not wearing a jacket they saw how the leather clip on my belt was empty. They would then have themselves a snorty laugh and say to me, “So, they take it away from you?”
A week of this and I started having quite a lot of blue flu. Then, thanks to my old rabbi and former socalled drinking buddy, Davy Mogaill, the body snatchers came and got me.
Short of my having to go back to wearing the bag after all my plainclothes years, I used to think the bow-and-arrow squad was as bad as it gets. But I have recently discovered that the worst of it all—short of being canceled out in the line of duty—is the body snatchers. When I complain about this where I am lately, the only commiseration I hear is this same line, over and over, “Take it one day at a time.”
Lately, I am obliged to live in an ugly red brick building on the wrong side of the river. During the Prohibition years, a temperamental gentleman from the Bronx named Arthur Flegenheimer, who was better known as Dutch Schultz, ran a brewery in this ugly building over here in Paterson, New Jersey. Right here at the intersection of Straight and Narrow streets. Check out the map, I am not making this up.
Everywhere I go inside the Straight and Narrow I am surrounded by pissbums from New York, a sorry and tiresome lot of humanity. It is assumed here that I myself, Detective Neil Hockaday, am likewise a pissbum. Why else would anybody go to Paterson, New Jersey?
Right now I am sitting in the day room with fifteen or twenty pissbums. This room is called Cheers, which is somebody’s bad idea of a joke. There is no radio or television set here, there are no books or magazines or newspapers. On the other hand, there are a couple of hundred different AA pamphlets, most of which I have read about ten times each.
God forbid a pissbum might see one of those slick ads for Dewar’s White Label in Newsweek or someplace, or Billy Dee Williams singing about Colt 45 malt liquor on the idiot box, or even a sweaty bottle of Budweiser painted on an outfield fence if he should want to tune in the World Series like I myself want to do. Naturally, he would go nuts from thirst.
Here at Cheers—ha-ha!—there is not even a Holy
Bible. According to the priests who run the place, the Holy Bible is risky, since it contains quite a lot of parts where people drink wine, including Jesus Christ. I suppose the good fathers should know. Maybe pissbum priests sometimes get the alky sweats from reading the consecrated word.
There are only two reasonable diversions allowed in here: pencils and steno pads. So instead of reading some AA tract for the eleventh time, or maybe playing dominos with the pissbums over in the corner, I pass the time by writing in a pad. I wish I could draw. I would draw a picture of a guy having himself a nice big double of Scotch and soda at some great bar and show it to all the pissbums and watch them go berserk.
This is how mad I am. Knowing that I am allowed to talk to Ruby on the telephone at six o’clock—which is approximately three hours, twelve minutes, eight and one-half seconds from now—is the only thing that prevents me from strangling somebody. If I hear the word denial one more time today, I will set somebody’s hair on fire.
However, I would not deny that my life has come to a godawful pass. Somehow.
Oh, but I know very well how. How is what I have been telling these chowderheads at the Straight and Narrow for six long weeks. And all they do is toss back slogans. So I do not want to go into all that. Maybe later. But since I now have about three hours, ten minutes, and four seconds to kill, I should at least get down in this steno notebook two things that happened to me recently: the morning with the department chaplain, and the night of the body snatchers.
It was Inspector Neglio who sent me to the chaplain. This was when he called me downtown to his office at One Police Plaza at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning.
Actually, he wanted me there on Monday. But I was slightly under the weather on account of a long Sunday night in a neighborhood bar and grill by the name of Angelo’s Ebb Tide. So we had to reschedule. This did not make the inspector happy.
Anyhow, it was a Tuesday morning when he took my gun away from me. For my own good. After which he told me I was all of a sudden supposed to temporarily stop working as a street detective and sit around some office typing crime statistics into some kind of computer I never heard of. Without my gun. This did not make me happy.
&nbs
p; “Okay, the chaplain’s expecting you now,” he said to me after all that. “That’d be Father Sheehan.” Inspector Neglio could no longer look me in the eye. He pressed a buzzer on his desk, and this freckle-faced uniform about the age of twelve walked in, breathing through his mouth. “Officer Neuman here, he’ll make sure you get to the counseling unit, down on the sixth floor. Good luck and get well soon, Hock.”
Go ahead, put the shackles and bracelets on me, too, why don’t you? I thought this, I did not say it. Neuman came up and took hold of my elbow with his fingertips. I hate that. I thought about shaking him off, but I know the drill. Any trouble and a lot more Neumans were likely to show up. So I went along peaceably.
Down in counseling, I was offered a seat on a cracked orange plastic chair outside the police chaplain’s cubicle. The chair pinched the left side of my fanny whenever I shifted around. I had to wait ten minutes in that chair until this Father Sheehan was through yakking with somebody over the telephone about who was bringing what to some ordination reception for some new Jesuit priest. Neuman put a stick of spearmint gum in his mouth and stood around saying nothing with his arms crossed over his chest. I could have used another vodka and grapefruit juice eye-opener like the one I’d had about half-past seven.
Finally, this short fat-cheeked guy in a black cassock stepped out from the cubicle. He had a creamy face, a black beard that tried to hide his dimples, thick bifocals, thinning black hair with a couple of gray streaks running through it, and eyes the color of baker’s chocolate. He sounded happy enough with his pal on the telephone when the subject was carrot cake and cold cuts and strawberry punch, but talking to me his voice had all the joy of a gravedigger.
“Come in, son,” he said, sticking out a small, soft hand for me to shake. “I’m John Sheehan.”
Another plastic seat I got. This time it gave me troubles in my right-hand backside. For himself, the father had a nice padded chair behind a wooden desk loaded down with all kinds of paper. He was holding some of this paper in his hands and reading, and scowling.
“These muster reports, I just don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. He stared at me over the tops of some heavy silver-framed glasses. “You’ve been out sick. A lot. What’s the problem, Detective Hockaday?”
“Flu’s going around.”
“Really.”
“My stomach, it’s whacked.”
Now he was staring at where my jacket did not bulge anymore. He said, “So, they take it away from you?”
This was not the sort of question where I had to give an answer. The silence hung there between us for several seconds. I could hear Neuman’s breathing and chewing behind me, just outside the cubicle.
“You know what it means when they do that?” Sheehan asked, looking away from me. He inspected his fingernails.
“I guess I do.”
“But you never thought it applied to you, did you, son?”
“Does anybody?”
Sheehan laughed. He sounded like an old horse the way the air whinnied through his nose.
“I heard about what happened last April,” he said. He pulled a nail clipper from a pocket and started trimming. Little crescent moons of calcium snips spilled over his desk.
“Yeah, well it made all the papers.”
The father was referring to what I do not care to elaborate on right now, since all the time I have before I can talk to Ruby is about two hours, fifty-one minutes, and seven seconds. Briefly for the record, though, Sheehan had in mind the case of a priest friend of mine by the name of Father Timothy Kelly who had blown his brains out one Sunday only this past April in the confessional at Holy Cross Church in my own neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, and how my rabbi Davy Mogaill’s house out in Queens had blown up from a bomb right around this same time, and how this had led me overseas to Dublin and a lot of related Irish murder and treachery. Which led to my seeing my old man for the first time in my whole life, and having him and his clay feet die in my arms. All of it definitely made the papers. And I only wish it was a great load of whiskey under the bridge because that would be the kind of drinking I might have been able to forget. As it is, the whole bloody thing is still creeping my dreams.
“Made the papers!” Sheehan whinnied again. “It’s good to know you have a sense of humor.”
“Why is that?
“Because humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility, my son. Because humor can cure what ails you.”
“This day I don’t see as particularly funny.”
“Correct. Nobody’s cracking jokes with you, Detective Hockaday. Today is your official warning.”
“That’s how this bow-and-arrow thing works?”
“Captain Mogaill and Inspector Neglio, they told me you catch on very quick.”
“Did they?”
“Which is why I recommended temporary reassignment. So you can get yourself together. Which you’d better do, since I have taken a personal interest in your case.” Sheehan brushed dead fingernails off the end of his desk. Then he gave me one of those disgusted looks I used to get from the priests and brothers when I was a kid in short pants at Holy Cross and I was the one they suspected of slipping a condom into the collection plate at morning mass.
“I always wanted someone to watch over me,” I said with my smart mouth.
“Screw up the deal, Hockaday, and you’ve probably heard what comes next.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard.”
I did not right away get myself together. Meaning that during my month-long sentence typing crime stats in an office, I drank a lot of funny coffee. When I showed up, that is. So then, sure as the sun and the moon, the next thing came: the night of the body snatchers.
This occurred not at Angelo’s Ebb Tide, where I sometimes take Ruby and where I generally imbibe like a gentleman. No, the night of the body snatchers took place at the Flanders Bar. Which is located on the nether side of my neighborhood, and where sometimes my evil twin drinks.
The Flanders is the sort of place that takes full advantage of the New York state laws governing drinking hours. Meaning it stays awake until four in the morning, goes to sleep for a hundred-twenty minutes, then reopens at six o’clock in the very same A.M. with about twenty-five prepoured jiggers lined up on the bar for those with the shakes.
When the body snatchers got me, I was slurring my pearls before swine. By which I mean a room full of boyos who drink stuporous amounts of whiskey; after which they tell lies about their ill usage of love-starved, compliant female beauties; after which they generally engage in a lot of manly vomiting. They also for some reason spend a lot of their time complaining about faggots, which was the topic that particular night. Just to be sociable, I was regaling the house with a living legend by the name of Joe Kowalski, scourge of faggots and thus a keeper of the sort of cop justice that generally sends me straight into the warm red arms of Mr. Johnnie Walker.
“Everybody knows what to do when you need some special advance justice done,” I was saying. “Take for instance the case of some rich ballerina with a secret mean streak who falls in love with an altar boy, say, and does what he has to do. You want to run the risk of losing this creep when he’s let go on his own recognizance and his uptown lawyer takes over? No. You take the creep to Kowalski …”
I proceeded to explain.
Joseph Kowalski is the desk sergeant on the overnight trick down at the Manhattan Sex Crimes Squad. He is a man of formidable appearance. King Kong Kowalski they call him.
He has a square, packing crate body, skin with the sweaty color of pale oleomargarine, a face that looks like a shaved mastiff hound, and enormous hands with thick fingers all the same size. Those fingers of his are like rolled quarters, they do not bend. He is a few inches shy of six feet and he is pushing three hundred pounds. Because his weight is well over the department limit, Sergeant Kowalski hides in the locker room showers whenever an Internal Affairs Division snap inspection team shows up at his unit. Working the freak shift makes life easier fo
r him, since IAD types usually have enough seniority to be home by a decent hour.
The sergeant is a member in good standing of the Holy Name Society of his Queens parish, Our Lady of the Blessed Agony. He observes certain of the more severe police devotionals as well.
For instance, Kowalski reserves the traditional desk sergeant’s privilege of judging certain of the hundreds of miscreants he sees each night especially odious due to what he considers their sins against nature. On such occasions, he will step away from the desk and whatever he is eating at the moment (a Blimpie sandwich, a box of Russell Stover chocolates, Chicago-style pizza, maybe a carton of pork fried rice) to personally handle the booking and printing details.
For these private sessions, Kowalski maintains a small, sparsely furnished room beneath the central staircase of the squad station house. Actually, this is a large supply closet that he long ago commandeered from the janitor. There is a strong overhead light in this room, no windows, one chair, and a small two-drawer desk. On top of the desk is an inked stamp pad and standard FBI fingerprint forms.
Sergeant Kowalski introduces himself to the sinner by jamming a couple of his thick fingers down the back of the unfortunate’s belt, after which he bounces him up and down like he was a yo-yo. Kowalski then persuades him to come along to the special room with a hearty, “Okay, turd, it’s show time!” The cops hanging around the desk laugh, and then King Kong Kowalski goes and does what he has to do.
In the special room, Kowalski switches on the light, locks the door, and orders the now heavily perspiring perp to stand next to the desk. Sergeant Kowalski sits down in the chair behind the desk and slowly checks through the drawers. He finds the forms he needs, and he says, “We got to take your prints now. All of them. That okay by you?”
What can he say? The poor bastard goes along. Kowalski takes his left hand, inks down each fingertip and rolls them nice and easy, one at a time, into the different squares on the form. This does not seem so bad, and the guy relaxes some. Then the right hand gets it. While he is carefully inking the fingers, Kowalski will once in a while ask gently, “I’m not hurting you now, am I?”
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