Flynn's World

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “A wrestler who loves to read history.”

  “Every good mother is a detective, Inspector Flynn.”

  “But not, surely, every good wife?”

  “So who put Jenny’s hair drier in the laundry basket this morning?”

  “I did.” Flynn laughed. “She’d left it in the sink. Actually, I just left it on the top of the hamper. It must have fallen in.”

  “Every good wife, too,” Elsbeth said.

  “You couldn’t even find the money for the doctor.”

  “I hadn’t even looked yet. I just wanted to talk to you a few moments without the sweet music of the Flynn household.”

  Flynn reviewed the sweet music of the Flynn household: scraping violins to the accompaniment of a bouncing basketball, a mewling baby, various arias to the theme of “Where’s my shirt?” “Who took my book?” . . .

  In the alcove near the fireplace, Cocky studied the chessboard.

  “But where have I seen the name Capriano lately?” Flynn mused.

  “In letters a meter high across the top of their storefront maybe?”

  “No. Someplace odder than that.”

  “If they sent you a bill, we’ve paid already. I have to get Jeff ready to go wait in the doctor’s office so he can catch a staph infection the doctor can charge us for.”

  “Be sure and look in the right boot for the money,” Flynn said. “The other boot has a live mousetrap in it.”

  “You said the left boot. The money is in the left boot, you said.”

  Flynn said, “The left boot is the right boot.”

  He hung up.

  His tea was still warm.

  “How’s your cold?” he asked Cocky.

  The weekend before, Cocky had found himself inadequately dressed and shod in the mountain snows of the Rod and Gun Club in western New England.

  As a detective and as a man he had been more than adequate.

  He had been heroic.

  “Much better.”

  Tea in hand, Flynn approached the chessboard. “Are you acquainted with a Lieutenant Detective John Kurt?”

  “Arrogant bastard. Cock-of-the-walk type. Is there a problem?”

  “Maybe. But your eyes still seem peculiarly bright this afternoon, Cocky. Glassy, I’d almost say.”

  “I had to go to a bank this morning.” Cocky grinned up at Flynn.

  “Such an excursion has been known to open many a person’s eyes. You moved your queen there? It’s a dastardly diversion!”

  “Open a savings account.” Cocky watched Flynn to see if he understood.

  “I don’t know.” Flynn fingered his black knight. “What to think.”

  Lieutenant Detective Walter Concannon, a few years before, while arresting a counterfeiter in the living room of his house, had been shot in the spine by the counterfeiter’s nine-year-old son.

  Recovered as much as he was going to, Cocky was given early retirement and half pay.

  A bachelor, whose passion was chess and whose genius was research, he attached himself to Flynn. Flynn never asked him, but he suspected Cocky had set himself up in a room somewhere in the vast, nearly empty Old Records Building, with a cot, hot plate, refrigerator within, a necessarium somewhere nearby.

  Flynn knew Cocky seldom left the building. He was there, day and night, including weekends, whenever Flynn called. Never had he accepted an invitation to Flynn’s home. His agreeing to go with Flynn to the Rod and Gun Club had been a most welcome surprise.

  Cocky’s having gone to a bank that morning therefore was news. Diverted by the chess game, Flynn’s mind was registering the fact that previously, Cocky had not had a savings account.

  “After you left Friday, Frank, I got two checks.”

  “Is that so?”

  “A check for full pay.”

  “Is that so?”

  “My first since the accident.” Cocky always referred to his being shot in the spine by a nine-year-old as “an accident.” Petey Lipton, the nine-year-old who shot him in the spine, had been institutionalized only a few months. “I guess I’m back on full pay.”

  “That’s good,” Flynn said.

  “Off the retired list!”

  “We never did accept the way the City of Boston threw away your superbly functioning brain with your slightly impaired body, did we?”

  “The second check also was from the City of Boston.”

  “Is that so?”

  “For all my back pay!”

  “Good God, Cocky! You’re rich!”

  Cocky laughed. “I’ve never seen so much money! I spent all weekend staring at the check. Figuring it out. Every penny is there from my being on half pay since the accident! Plus interest!”

  “Och, well!” Flynn clapped Cocky on the shoulder. “It’s the Fiji Islands for you, isn’t it, my man, with a girl in a grass skirt on each knee!”

  “Do such girls play chess?”

  “They do! Except they spell it with a T, I think. Or is it a red sports car for you to cruise the cow paths of Boston while you tootle ‘Danny Boy’ on the horn?”

  “Not that, Flynn. I’d just get elected mayor.”

  “That you might. Well, don’t put much of your new wealth down on this particular game of chess. Even though you’ve got me as puzzled as the abbot who woke up in the forest next to a yawning abyss.”

  “Sure, you’ve got your next three moves all planned, haven’t you?”

  “To Headquarters I go.” Flynn put his topcoat back on. “To be fired summarily by Captain of Police Timothy Walsh. I admit I’ve spent very little of my life in offices, Lieutenant Walter Concannon, no-longer-Retired, and am therefore somewhat innocent of office politics. But would you say my supposition that office politics is the avocation of the vocationally incompetent approaches the truth?”

  “Today,” Cocky said, “I’d agree with you, Frank, even if you said the moon is made of our best intentions.”

  Outside his closed office door, Flynn took only a few steps before turning back and reopening the door. “‘The moon is made of our best intentions,’” he quoted. “That’s a good line, old Cockerel.”

  Cocky said, “Been around you too long, Frank.”

  Flynn took no steps before reopening his office door and sticking his head inside again.

  He said, “No. You haven’t.”

  FOUR

  “Sit down, Inspector.” The eyes of Captain Timothy Walsh were still liquid from his lunch.

  Flynn sat in a chair facing the captain’s desk.

  He had not been surprised, upon entering the office, to find Sergeant Richard T. Whelan, Flynn’s own assistant, sitting in a light chair toward the side of the office. He, too, looked a little lunch-flushed. He looked as expectant as a four-year-old on Christmas Eve.

  Flynn greatly preferred his ancient Old Records Building to Police Headquarters. Headquarters was all plastic, glass, beige and gray tin, warrens he understood were called work stations, which provided the workers with only the illusion of privacy. The proliferation of police uniforms at Headquarters discomfited Flynn. It made him feel like a fox surrounded by hounds. Computerizing records had left most of the Old Records Building empty. There were a few bright offices on the first floor. Typically the people who worked there darted about in comfortable clothes and oversized eyeglasses, maintaining and running computers, usually to the joyful noises of Mozart or Metallica. Otherwise, vast dusty wooden corridors passed by vast dusty empty rooms. Flynn’s office, on the third floor, was huge. A large arched window behind his desk overlooked Boston Harbor. There he had genuine privacy, to nap on the divan, play chess with Cocky in the alcove by the fireplace. If he ever saw a police uniform in the Old Records Building he would assume he was being raided.

  “Kind of you to suggest I make a courtesy call upon you,” Flynn said to Captain Timothy Walsh. “I admit I’m not very astute at performing these relationship duties apparently so crucial to the smooth running of all enterprises American.”

  Captain W
alsh glanced at Sergeant Whelan. “You’re not American, are you, Flynn?”

  “Neither born nor brought up here, to my grief. But I do my best to muddle along.”

  “Your best doesn’t appear to be good enough.” Captain Walsh shifted catarrh in his throat. “Tell me, Frank: how are you?”

  “Better than you, apparently.”

  “How’s your appendix?”

  “I haven’t heard from it lately.”

  “Could that be because you’ve had it removed twice? These records indicate you’ve had two leaves of absence to have your appendix removed.”

  “It keeps growing back,” Flynn said. “I’m that healthy.”

  “Several prolonged absences for colitis. Five separate absences to bury your mother. Etc. Did you have five mothers?” In fact, Flynn’s mother, and father, had been shot to death in their kitchen, executed, when Flynn was fourteen. He had discovered their bodies upon returning home from school. He had never known if, when, where they were buried. “How many more mothers do you have?”

  “You’re very kind to express such interest in my personal health and life,” Flynn said. “How’s your own mother?”

  “She’s well,” said Captain Walsh. “She lives in Dorchester.”

  “All the luck,” said Flynn.

  “Sergeant Whelan has been assigned to you for some time now, Flynn. Repeatedly he has asked to be transferred to some other duty.”

  “I’ve encouraged every request, haven’t I, Grover? I’ve made a few requests to that point of my own.”

  Walsh said, “Every request of his has been denied. Although I’ve personally endorsed every one of them.”

  “My requests to have him removed from underfoot have been denied, too. I wonder why that is.”

  “The reason is, Frank, that you’re not a trained police officer. You did not come up through the ranks. You don’t know the protocol. You don’t even know the vocabulary.”

  “True,” admitted Flynn. “I have no imagination at all.”

  “You suddenly appeared from nowhere, were given the nonexistent rank of ‘Inspector,’ and since have been riding roughshod through police and court procedure, frequently leaving nothing short of disaster in your wake. You screw up the paperwork. You not only show no loyalty to your fellow officers, frequently you seem deliberately to make fools of them.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Sergeant Whelan has been assigned to you to keep you straight. From what he’s told me, he’s had a miserable life trying.”

  Flynn said, “My intentions are good.”

  “I have the sense, even now, talking to you, that you’re laughing at me. Are you?”

  “You must be misinterpreting my natural cheery good nature.”

  “Sergeant Whelan has provided me with a detailed report on you, Flynn.” Walsh thumbed the pages of a manuscript the size of a Ph.D. thesis. “Names. Dates. Have I said enough already about your frequent and ridiculously excused absences from work?”

  “You have.”

  “You seem to have a retired police officer working for you full-time without compensation. One Walter Concannon.”

  Flynn said, “I do not.”

  At the side of the room, Grover said, “Liar! Cocky is retired on half pay. He has no right even to be involved in police matters, investigations. He has no right even to be in the building! Let alone, tell me what to do.”

  Flynn smiled at Grover.

  “All right.” Walsh raised the palm of his hand in the air. “Tell me, Inspector, just where does Lieutenant Walter Concannon, Retired, live?”

  “I’ve never asked him.”

  “You do not know where he lives?”

  “I do not.”

  “He lives in some hole in the Old Records Building,” Grover asserted.

  “Is that true?” Walsh tried to fix his watery eyes on Flynn’s.

  “What’s truth?” Flynn asked.

  “I don’t wonder you ask.” Walsh looked back at his papers.

  “A good one,” Flynn said.

  “Sergeant Whelan reports you live in a three-story Victorian house in Winthrop overlooking Boston Harbor.”

  “And just under all the main flight patterns into and out of Logan International Airport. Terrible roarings and crashings and boomings go on all day and all night. It’s a wonder my ears are still as astute as they are.”

  “We can find no record that your home is mortgaged to a local bank.”

  Flynn said nothing.

  “That’s unusual, for a police officer, don’t you think? You have five children. Four of them attend private school. Their annual tuition, combined, about consumes your annual income from the Boston Police Department.”

  “I run an old car.”

  “That’s another thing,” Grover expostulated. “He uses me like a personal chauffeur. An errand boy! In city-owned vehicles! He makes me pick him up at his house in the morning, bring him home at night, take his kids to that damned snotty Cartwright School they go to . . .”

  “Is it true you own a farm in Ireland, Flynn?”

  “The kids have told me so,” Grover asserted. “It’s called Locked Phooey or something. Typical!”

  “How do you afford all this, Flynn?”

  “Don’t forget his girlfriend,” Grover urged. “Mrs. Fleming. The Judge’s widow.”

  “Girlfriend!” Flynn said to Walsh. “I believe you know Dr. Sarah Fleming. A professor of criminology who consults with this department?”

  Grover said, “She rides a pink motorcycle.”

  Walsh hitched his desk chair. Again he thumbed Grover’s thesis. “Then there’s a complete record of your not exactly bringing people to justice. What is it the newspapers call you? ‘Reluctant’ Flynn? Cases where Dicky tells me you have more than enough evidence to charge a suspect with crime, bring the case to court, and, for some reason, you don’t? He’s documented many such cases.”

  “Sassie Fleming, for one,” Grover said. “She murdered her husband! She murdered over a hundred people! She’s rich! She was never charged!”

  “Is that so, Flynn?”

  “He never let me charge his damned sons for knocking me down on a Cambridge street, either!”

  “Grover,” Flynn said patiently. “Cambridge is outside our jurisdiction. Another city altogether. You’ve taught me that.”

  “What was all that about, Flynn?”

  “Grover misunderstood instructions,” Flynn said. “Sometimes the lad’s enthusiasm causes him to forget the object of our exercise.”

  “My name’s not Grover!” shouted Sergeant Richard T. Whelan. Now his face was very flushed. “It’s Dick!”

  “Ah, what’s wrong with my having a pet name for you, Grover? Somehow I can’t bring myself to call you a Dick.”

  “What is a Grover?” Walsh asked.

  “A creature which travels close to the ground, I think,” Flynn said. “Seldom looks either up or to all sides of himself. Myopic, whose little legs travel him faster than he can apprehend either directions or dangers.”

  “That’s another thing,” Grover said. “He’s always sayin’ things no one understands. We’re sick of it!”

  “Is a grover some kind of a mythical character, Frank?”

  “I wish.”

  Walsh squared himself to his desk. “I went to Boston Latin School.”

  “I’m sure the old place is proud of you.”

  “Well, Frank. I’m going to give you a choice. Resign.”

  “But, Captain, you don’t understand. I am resigned.”

  “Is that another one of your jokes?”

  “Not really.”

  “Or, while you are suspended from duty, Internal Affairs will do a thorough investigation of all affairs concerning ‘Inspector’ Francis Xavier Flynn. Such an investigation will probably take months. The way you spend money, you’ll probably have to get another job, or jobs, anyway. The first thing IA will require from you are your income tax filings and financial statements for the
last seven years. Have you been in this country seven years?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Having feelings for you as a fellow police officer, of however short a duration, feelings you do not have for others, I strongly suggest you resign. If you wish to avoid an investigation, the commissioner should have your resignation on his desk tomorrow morning.”

  Grover looked as if he’d heard Santa’s sleigh land on the roof.

  Walsh asked Flynn, “What do you think of me now, Frank Flynn?”

  Flynn said, “I see you’ve never been in Afghanistan.”

  The intercom on Walsh’s desk buzzed. He pushed the button. “Yes?”

  “Captain, the commissioner called to ask Inspector Flynn to come to his office right away. He heard Inspector Flynn is in the building.”

  Grover beamed. “I sent a copy of my report to him, too.”

  Captain Walsh said into his intercom, “Tell the commissioner we’ll all be there right away.”

  “What’s this?” Police Commissioner Edward D’Esopo looked up from his desk as Inspector Francis Xavier Flynn, Captain Timothy Walsh, and Sergeant Richard T. Whelan paraded into his office. “Who sent for you guys?”

  “You did,” said Captain Walsh.

  “I did?” D’Esopo looked at his assistant, Captain Reagan, sitting in a side chair. Reagan was dressed, as always, in full parade uniform, down to brass buttons and gold braid. “What do you guys want?”

  Captain Walsh sat in a chair facing the commissioner. Grover lingered behind him.

  Flynn wandered over to the floor-to-ceiling windows fourteen stories over the city.

  “I’ve had a good discussion with Inspector Flynn,” Walsh said. “Explained his options to him: either resign or face a long and thorough investigation by Internal Affairs.”

  “You have?”

  “I have. After studying the report prepared by Sergeant Richard T. Whelan, which doubtlessly you haven’t had time to study fully.”

  “I have studied it. Fully.” D’Esopo looked at Grover. “Are you Sergeant Richard T. Whelan?”

  Grover nodded enthusiastically.

  “Flynn’s problems can be boiled down simply.” Walsh adopted the kindly manner of speech of one of his teachers at Boston Latin School, long since dead. “First, there are Inspector Flynn’s frequent, prolonged absences from work, for which he offers the most ridiculous excuses: supposedly he’s had his appendix removed twice; he’s buried his mother five times . . .”