Boldt

by Ted Lewis

  “Sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” says Draper, getting up. “And that sometimes isn’t going to be in this city, not while I’m in this job. Because I like this job, and the reason I like it is because it’s smooth. I know the state of play between us and the rest, and all we have to do is a nice, clearly defined job.” He picks up the paper. “But this, this is messy. A worry I don’t need to worry about. If this kook delivers then we’re all in for a rousting, and I’m at the top of the heap.”

  He walks around the desk and stands in front of me. “And, of course, I’m also concerned that a lunatic with a gun should not interfere with our democratic process, a process that sums up everything that made this country great.”

  He delivers this line with an expression on his face which is totally at odds with the words he is saying. Which is Draper all over.

  He leans back and props himself up on the edge of his desk. Murdock shakes a cigarette out and lights up. “You don’t seem particularly concerned that some nut with a gun might be waiting in your brother’s closet when he gets to town.”

  “Maybe I don’t think the nut means to deliver.”

  “You’re psychic, too.”

  I shrug.

  “Or maybe your brother’s where he is and you’re where you are and that kind of gets under your skin. Maybe it’s something like that.”

  Now Draper likes this kind of conversation, not just with me, with anyone. This is one of the reasons he likes his job, because it means he’s in a position to talk like this and not get whacked in the mouth.

  “It could be, sir,” I tell him. “But I wouldn’t want a full- scale investigation on it.”

  “I always wondered how it came out the way it did. In your family, I mean. The fact that he’s there and you’re here. How does it come out that way? Was he born with more of his fair- share of endowments, and you were born with what you have? Or did the folks give him preferential treatment. I mean, I can see how they would, as you came first.”

  “Whenever I’m asked,” I tell Draper, “about my brother, I say, ‘Well, there’s always a black sheep in every family,’ and then I leave it for them to figure out which one.”

  “That’s funny,” Draper says, “that’s a funny joke. If Cavett should ever have you on his show, remember that one, hey?”

  “I’ll write it down, to make sure.”

  Draper turns away and goes back behind his desk.

  “Bolan has been given this one. Bolan is in charge of all security arrangements. What he says goes and it goes with my full backing. He can tie this town up any way he likes while your brother’s circus is performing.”

  I light a cigarette and wait for Draper to get to whatever point he’s making . He could reach it any time within the next sentence or the next thirty-six hours. “Now there’ll be your brother’s regular guys but what do they know? They don’t know the town and they don’t know the people in it. All they know is how to jump on a truck after a sniper’s a million maybe two million miles away. And then what happens is it’s our guys who pick up the guy anyway. Listen, I hate what your fuck of a brother stands for, he’s out to fuck this country, but I don’t want him taken out in my town. Now Bolan is the guy who could give Fort Knox some hints, but he’s like a map of the city, all straight lines. That’s why I’m talking to you two. I want you to make silver snail tracks across Bolan’s intersections and stay on the level of the snail’s belly and sniff out anything Bolan might miss. I want you to crawl the whole square footage of this city and pick up anything Bolan might miss from his gun turret. Bolan rousts the city; you roust its foundations because that’s your level. Nobody crawls in or out you don’t know the color of his jockeys. Anybody gets a hard-on you come and tell me how big it is. Somebody planning to vacation in South America, you read his mind. All other activities, you forget about them. If the Mayor runs over thirty-five school kids and you’re driving by at the time, keep on driving. Don’t even report it; it might stop you figuring three moves ahead of this nut who sent your brother his valentine.”

  “Do we check out the letter?”

  “That’s being done. Don’t worry about it. Any information comes up, you’ll have it passed on to you. All that kind of work stays with the regular guys and if you come up with anything that needs a routine follow-up just pass it on and keep moving.”

  I light a cigarette, lean forward and drop the match in Draper’s ashtray. “So at long last our methods have been recognized at a high departmental level,” I say.

  “No crap,” Draper says. “No jokes. Just get out and make sure nobody’s staring down a telescopic sight a week from tomorrow.”

  “It’s as close as that?” Murdock says.

  “Yeah,” I say, buttoning my coat. “I’ve been counting the hours.”

  Going down in the elevator, Murdock tries to get me to talk about what’s just been said in Draper’s office but after a couple of openers, he gets the message. When the elevator door stops he just follows me. I walk out of the building and over to the car and I get in and he gets in and the doors slam and the dull faraway morning city roar is cut in half. Murdock sits there, lights a cigarette and waits patiently, a state of affairs he’s got used to since he and I were teamed together nearly three years ago. Not only is he good at waiting patiently for me to let go with what’s happening inside my head, he’s also good at waiting patiently for his promotion, an event which no way will occur while he’s working alongside me, a non-event he could do something about if he wanted to; but he seems to like the arrangement the way it is. Christ knows why. So there we sit in the half-quiet of the car, two middle-aged cops, defenders of mid-America and its middle-aged ways, in the middle of our declining careers, listening to the hum of the city as it travels through time towards the day’s end.

  I take my pack of cigarettes from my coat pocket but the pack is empty so I crumple it up and jam it back in my pocket. Murdock reaches for his own pack and shakes one out for me, and to save an echo of the performance, he flips a book of matches into my lap. I light the cigarette and bend the match, rolling it between my thumb and forefinger Then I say, “I lied up in Draper’s office.”

  “Oh?”

  “About the note. About not taking it seriously. Ever since the first, when I got the first breath of wind of my brother making it from state capital back to hometown to raise some nostalgic dust I had this feeling. Nothing rational. Just uneasy, nervous. Even before Draper opened the file, I knew what was laying in there. Apart from anything else, it was typical, typical of my fucking brother that he should be the one that sets something off that somebody else has to take care of, on his fucking behalf.”

  “You make it sound like it’s his fault.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s not his fault. But nothing ever was, and that knowledge makes me see things the way I do, in respect of him.”

  Murdock shrugs. “Well,” he says, “we get it, whichever way you look at it. We got the deal and all we can do is what Draper asked. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “So have you any ideas where we go from here? Because I’m as sure as the devil’s in hell I haven’t.”

  I make a face and roll the window down, looking across the city at the thickening midday haze.

  “The letter is from a political nut or just a plain nut. Now the guys we usually deal with aren’t political and not many of them are nuts They’re too interested in their ways of turning a buck to have time for either of those luxuries. We could try a few people, in particular places, but later, because only luck would give us anything from them.”

  “You mean everything else is sheer deduction?”

  For the first time since leaving Draper’s office I grin. “No, but we can start at the beginning. If somebody’s going to try and whack him, then he’s got to find himself a place to do it from. No
w my brother is arriving in the afternoon and leaving the next morning. He arrives by train and leaves from Blyth Field. He appears on Travers’s Early Show and again on Beth Cusack’s Breakfast Hour. That night he’s guest of honor at a fundraising dinner at the Norton and oh yeah, in the afternoon, before Travers’s show, he’s talking at the university; in fact he goes there before he goes to his hotel. So we have routes, and the big one is from the railroad station to the campus because that’ll have the placards and the motorcade and all the other crap. So first off we go along the route and we check it out and if nothing shows we pass on all the likely vantage points to Bolan.”

  “Surely Bolan will check that route himself?”

  “He will. All the hotels, all the frontages, he won’t leave anything out. But you’re forgetting Draper. We’ll be on our bellies. The guy we’re after might trip over us.”

  “Yeah, we might get trampled on, too; which end of the route do we start?”

  “The end he does. The railroad station.”

  Murdock switches on the ignition and backs out, sliding out of the department lot.

  The railroad station is out of keeping with the rest of the area of the city where it lies; it’s nice and neat and clean. But apart from the stockyards, the station is ringed by an industrial complex taking in everything from the manufacture of toilet bowls to the destruction of old automobiles. The only commercial area, apart from the station itself, is a block exactly opposite the station built in exactly the same style and at exactly the same time, presumably intended to balance the crisp oasis the station makes in the middle of the sunlit sprawl but instead underlining the incongruity of planning against a tide of runaway development.

  “Station Whiz,” Murdock remarks as he pulls into the station parking lot.

  “What?”

  “Always reminds me of Station Whiz,” he says. “Remember in Captain Marvel? Billy Batson? The radio station he peddled his papers outside of? Station Whiz.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “Station Whiz.”

  We get out of the car and walk around to the main entrance, through the automatic glass doors and into the cool church-like atmosphere of the lobby where the floor is conveniently swept by a four-wheeled vacuum tractor driven by a miserable-looking spade, defiantly whistling different tunes in a different key to the ones on the background tapes. We cross the wide open spaces until we’re beyond the ticket windows and then we flash our badges at the barrier and start to walk along the platform immediately in front of us.

  As we wander along Murdock asks, “What happens when the train draws in? The usual Panavision smiling?”

  “Yeah, the arrival’ll be covered. But Bolan will have taken care of that. Nobody’ll be on the platform he won’t know about. Nor in the station building. And there’s no way from beyond the other side of the train a man could get a clear target. I guess it would have to be pretty stupid for the guy to figure this was the best place in the world for what he plans to do.”

  “If he was a bomber, it wouldn’t be so difficult.”

  “Yeah, but he’d never get out again.”

  Murdock shrugs. “Some of them don’t want to.”

  “He’d still have to get in with whatever he planned to use, past Bolan’s security.”

  “Well,” says Murdock, “that’s true, but I wouldn’t write off this place yet.”

  “The only time I write anything off is when my brother leaves Blyth Field for Washington. I don’t want his boyish charm telling me I told you so in front of the T.V. cameras.”

  We walk around the station platforms for a quarter of an hour or so, then we go back through the main hall and cross the road and approach the station’s twin block. In the center of the development is the Chandler Hotel flanked on the left by a would-be high class apartment building called the Chandler Arms. At floor level, on either side of the two buildings, are the shops with four stories of apartments, going right and left to each end of the block. And beyond each end of this desirable lump of real estate are the humming, clanking fringes of the industrial area.

  We walk into the lobby of the Chandler Hotel and it’s not exactly as if they’ve got three conventions going on at the same time. A couple of old birds are sitting together on a long low divan, suitcases stacked in front of them, staring straight ahead, straight-backed, as though somehow it wouldn’t have been seemly for them to relax and enjoy the plush comfort of the divan. Over at the reception desk, a tall guy in a flecked suit and dove grey shoes is trying to talk his wife out of making the most of a dispute with the clerk over some details on the bill and the clerk is getting to the point where he’s pissed off enough to hand it over to the manager. So I say to Murdock, “The bar. We got to check it out. Maybe even a sniper’s got to drink.”

  “The bar,” Murdock agrees, and we go to the bar.

  The bar is not quite as lively as the lobby. The air conditioning is pretty rowdy and the noise we make on the thick piled carpet as we cross to the bar is quite spectacular. The bartender shifts from one elbow to the other as we approach. The bar is all dark stained paneling and green leather, so that if the guys who drop into the bar want to, they can pretend for an hour or two that they’re the Lord of the Manor with a couple of lurchers stretched out in front of the fake log gas fire. Even at this hour of the day, the bar has an after-dinner atmosphere, with its dimmed candelabras and mounted tartan cloths centered on the wood paneling. We slide onto the stools and the bartender strolls toward us at just the right pace to allow us to make our minds up about what we’re going to have. Murdock decides on scotch whisky—which isn’t much of a decision because he never drinks anything else. I ask for a vodka (?) rocks with lemon and the bartender, even though he knows we’re cops, is polite and good and quick with the drinks. He’s in his mid-forties, tall, a little overweight, but he moves like a dancer, well-groomed, the kind of guy who always looks as though he’s only recently stepped out of the bathtub. When he’s set the drinks down in front of us, he wanders away to leave us alone without looking as though that’s what he’s doing.

  “You know,” I say to Murdock, “this place wasn’t even built last time I saw my brother.”

  “It had Florian behind it.”

  “Yeah, and look at it now. A beautifully designed tax loss. As if he needs one, legitimate, I mean. His mattresses are stuffed with thousand dollar bills.”

  Murdock calls the bartender again and orders the same. The bartender gives it to us and Murdock takes his in one go.

  “How’s your brother-in-law?” I ask him.

  Murdock puts his glass down on the counter.

  “My brother-in-law’s fine,” Murdock says. “He’s great, as always. He uses me as practice for the Elks. He makes one of his speeches last night. He says, ‘Look, do you realize what a strain your presence is putting on our marriage?’ Christ, Jean hates his fucking guts; she likes having me around so he can make his speeches at me instead of her for a change. So he goes on, he says, ‘You realize Jean is likely to break down if you’re here much longer?’ So I say, ‘Fine, I’ll get out now. If you loan me the kind of money they’re asking for apartments these days, then I’ll walk straight out the door.’ So then he says, ‘Why not move back in with Joyce, on a business basis? You’re both adults. Until you’re settled,’ he says. I’m about to tell him that Joyce has got tanks in the driveway in case of any such eventuality when Jean comes out of the bathroom where she must have been listening, and she lays into the prick and reminds him of where the money came from for the down payment on their place. He says, well that’s not exactly the point -- he didn’t expect me as part of the interest, and she says, ‘The man I married, Mr. Wonderful.’ He asks her to cut out the crap but before he’s halfway through telling her, she hauls him one and he goes like stone, you know, like Buster Keaton? He holds the pose for a minute or two, then swings around and goes out the door and
out of the house, and Jean looks at me and I look at her and she bursts out laughing and so do I. Then she says, ‘I hope the bum never comes back. But he’ll be back,’ she says, and of course he is, about one A.M. just in nice time to wake the whole fucking household. Of course he’s tanked, and him and Jean slug it out on the landing. The kids wake up and start crying, so I go onto the landing and drag him off Jean and give him a couple of neat ones that send him straight to dreamland. Then Jean tries to pacify the kids who’ve seen the whole fucking affair and then after that she, of course, turns on me, because I’m standing there, and says why did I do a thing like that, laying out her old man with the kids looking on. So I go into the bedroom and pick up my stuff and bye-bye.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Yeats. I got a room with Yeats.”

  “Yeats? Jesus, why’d you go to Yeats?”

  “It’s not so bad. I get the room free. I don’t even have to tell him I’m getting the room free, he’s so fucking scared when I show up.”

  “It’s a wonder you didn’t empty the place. I mean, just by showing up.”

  “I told him, I wasn’t interested in the other patrons. Just a room, I tell him, and coffee in the morning, then I’ll go away.”

  “Why didn’t you call me? You could have come over to my place.”

  “It was only for one night. It was two A.M. by the time I left Jean’s.”

  “You could still have phoned.”

  “I see you the rest of the time.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “I may go back. My stuff’s still there.”

  “Move in with me.”

  Murdock shakes his head.

  “No, I may go to the Westerby for a few days. The manager thinks I know something about him. I would have gone there last night if it’d been earlier. I’ll go there tonight.”

  Murdock taps the counter with his glass and the bartender makes up two more. While he’s doing that, there is the sound of voices behind us, and as I look into the mirror beyond the bar, I’m faced with a charming scene--- a double date. It’s perfection, straight out of a Coke ad. The girls first, they’re marvelous. Fashion marches on, but after all, fashion only reflects life and in the case of these two girls, life 1966 style is as far as they want to go. Now today, if they were dressing like everyone else their age, they’d be in long skirts and the charcoal tops and the crinkle-cut hair and they wouldn’t be laughing—not in the way they’re laughing, anyway. With these two there’s no smell of musk, no feeling that they change their underwear maybe once a week, no feeling that makeup has been put on top of makeup. Sure, they’re in a certain kind of fashion, a fashion acceptable to whoever might be employing them; they’ve got leather and they’ve got cheesecloth but it’s conservative and even the one with the bubble-cut wouldn’t look out of place in a Disneyland outfit. And they look clean; you can almost smell the talcum, and they’re not anonymous broads from the campus. They’re like daughters, like you imagine daughters ought to be like. Through them you can almost visualize the kind of parents they might have, the kind of love, rightly or wrongly guided, those parents might have given these girls.