This time his eyes opened, bright with anticipation. “What’re you gonna do? You tell me.”
“Lay back, relax, and I’ll show you, big daddy. I just promise you one thing . . . you’ll never forget it.”
For the first time since he was a little kid, Papa Menes took an order from a woman and did what he was told. He lay back and relaxed, wondering what surprise she had waiting for him.
There wasn’t much to see from the miniature terrace outside Burke’s living room windows unless you understood the raw, primitive nature of the real New York. There was nothing aesthetic about black tarred rooftops with their ugly slanted doorwells gouged into their tops. TV antennas stood barren and angular, reminiscent of a denuded forest held together by stands of soot-dirtied clotheslines.
Here and there patches of green showed where somebody who still had a feeling for soil had tried to grow things, and empty beach chairs were bright splotches of color waiting for those who sought the sun that managed to penetrate the smog.
Even the smell was visible, rising on the heat waves from the streets below, driven upward by the artificial thermals, dancing to the heartbeat of blaring horns and heavy rumble of traffic. Darkness was coming on and when the lights winked out in the towering office buildings uptown, they blinked on again in the high rise apartments and lower silhouettes of the renovated town houses and tenements closer by.
Jet traffic made a mockery of the free sky, creating artificial clouds with their contrails and an illusion of space with their pulsating red and green false stars. Only the emerging moon was real and they had even contaminated that.
Burke said, “Let’s go back inside,” and closed the sliding doors behind them.
For a minute Helen looked back while he made fresh drinks for them, her mind spinning like a centrifuge, trying to throw out the fragments of unreality so there would be some core of true substance left.
How long had she known him? It seemed like a lifetime, but it had only been a little while. And how long had she known the others? She had been exposed to death and destruction since she had been born, had associated with the good and the evil from birth to maturity . . . so she should be able to make an evaluation herself.
Yet she was part of it all, was there enmeshed in the violence and all she could hear were those deadly words of accusation that Bill Long spoke that made him, if the words were true, the most frightening human being who ever lived.
“Unless there was justification.”
She spun around, her breath caught in her throat. “What?”
“I know what you were thinking,” Burke told her. He handed her the glass and she took it. Her hand was trembling.
“I’m sorry.”
“He made pretty good sense.”
“Gill, I’m going to ask you something. Will you answer me truthfully?”
“That’s a silly question if you think I’ve been lying to you.”
“Have you?”
“No. Do you think I have?”
“No.”
He sipped at his drink. “Good, then ask it.”
“Did you arrange for . . . or did you even know Mark Shelby would be there?” She watched his face closely.
There was no explanation. He simply said, “Nope,” and she believed him. Nothing in the world could make her disbelieve after the way he said it.
“Don’t you want to ask me some other questions?” he queried.
Helen shook her head. “No, I don’t think I do.” She got a strange look in her eyes. “Frankly, I don’t think I want to know one way or the other. Not now, anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you, Gill. In that street language you enjoy I’m so fucking much in love with you it comes out my ears and that’s all that counts.”
“Knock off that talk. You’re a lady.”
“Not around you, wild man.”
“You know what’s going to happen to you in another minute, don’t you?”
Helen smiled up at him, her tongue wetting her lips. She put her drink down and reached for the zipper at the back of her dress. In one smooth motion she let everything drop to the floor and with the second she threw away the remaining pieces of sheer nylon and stood there in shimmering, naked beauty and said, “I hope so.”
And while the darkness enveloped the city outside, shutting off the ugliness, leaving only the bright shining lights in the window they exploded together in a welter of spilled cushions and knocked-over ashtrays and the two drinks that drenched them in a refreshing bath that made the whole crazy orgasm better than it had a right to be.
They lay on the floor tracing wet lines on each other’s bodies with ice cubes that seemed to give out more heat than they drew and as the last one melted into eternity Helen looked up at him and asked, “What’s Shinola?”
“What a time to talk of shoe polish.”
“No, really.”
“It’s a standard brand shoe polish. Why?”
“It just occurred to me.”
“You’re nuts, Helen. I love you and I’m going to marry you anyway. I’m just glad I found out that you’re nuts first. I’m going to have you treated. What brought that on?”
“One day Mr. Verdun was mad and I heard him shouting. He said he couldn’t get hold of the old fart because he was probably out at Shinola doing the aye aitch bit again.”
She felt him go tight beside her and looked at his face. He wasn’t Gill Burke any longer. He was a machine, a human, thinking machine that had an advantage over any computer an engineer could build because it could initiate its own program and handle the variables any way it wanted. She didn’t know it, but he was reaching back into the recesses of a million cells, trying to resurrect a word he had come across in some obscure item a mechanical computer would never have processed into its tapes. She watched him search it out, locate it, then push himself erect until he found the phone and dialed a number. She couldn’t hear what he said, but saw him nod once, thank the person on the other end and hang up.
He started to get dressed.
“Where are you going?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She waited until he buckled on the gun, then got up and slipped back into her clothes. “You’re wrong, Gill. It does matter. What did I tell you?”
He looked at her, and looked at her, and looked at her. Finally he said, “Where Papa Menes is.”
“I’m going with you. You know that, don’t you?”
He kept looking at her until he decided, then nodded. “If you do, you might get answers to the question you haven’t asked yet.”
“Do I deserve it?”
“You deserve it.”
The ice in his eyes was far colder than the ice they had just made love with.
Downstairs they were about to get in the car when Bill Long came out of the shadows and said, “Looking for company?”
Gill Burke held the door open for him so he could slide in beside Helen. “Not especially, but as long as you’re here you’d might as well enjoy the sleigh ride.”
When they pulled out into traffic, Long asked, “Any special destination?”
“Yeah,” Burke told him. “Shinola.”
The word stirred something in the captain’s memory, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Burke said, “A nutty, extravagant mansion out on Long Island built by a former shoeshine boy who won and lost his shirt in the stock market. His enemies called his attempt at pretentiousness Shinola.”
Long remembered then and threw Burke an odd look. “What’s out there?”
“Papa Menes,” Burke said.
“How do you kow?”
“I told him,” Helen said.
He was going crazy. The damn dame was making him go crazy and if he didn’t come in another minute he was going to kill the bitch for teasing him this way and tear her cunt inside out. She had his nuts hard as pebbles and he was hurting in every fucking tube and gland in his withered body and she wouldn’t let it bl
ow out of him. She was stronger than he was now, depleting him with what started out to be gentle ministrations and wound up with him a quivering mass of old flesh and even though he knew she was absolutely wild about the way he had brought her on, indulging her in the perversions he absolutely loved, she was killing him with the very things he had taught her and he was loving every minute of it. He shook and trembled violently when her mouth touched him and when her fingers located the right spot and squeezed just right, his mouth opened and he gasped like a fish out of water. All he could think of was DO IT, DO IT, DO IT, but she wouldn’t let him alone. She loved him so much she was tearing him apart and he couldn’t fight back any longer. He was all hers and anything she wanted to do was all right, but just for the fucking relief of it all, DO IT, DO IT, and she still kept on with those awful things he wished that fat Jew broad he had married could have done and he knew she hadn’t even hardly begun. She was talking to him while her hands and her mouth and her legs worked against him. He could taste and feel every part of her, not because he wanted it, but because she put it there and she was telling him about how lovely it was when he was the first one to tumble her over in the attitude of abject humiliation and stick it up her ass and how wonderful it felt after the initial pain was over and the sensuality of it all began and how slippery it was and how it filled her up until she thought she would burst with pleasure and how each time it got better and better and reached the time when there was no pain at all and only pleasure that was better than anything she had ever experienced in her whole life and how it was a shame only a woman could enjoy it, but if she tried, how a man could enjoy it too and when she asked him if he wouldn’t like it the old man screamed out YES, YES, YES and she rolled him over on his stomach again and propped him on his knees with his head down between his arms.
Louise Belhander said, “This is for what Frank Verdun did to me,” and shoved four inches of the barrel of a .38 revolver up his ass and pulled the trigger.
The guard stationed outside the door heard the strangely muted sound, the horrible scream, looked inside and shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t care less. He had been paid in advance. He told the others, they shrugged too, picked up whatever they thought could be useful to them and left to go back to where they came from.
It wasn’t their jurisdiction and it wasn’t their right, but it was a different time, a new era, and circumstances had changed all the rules. They went past the place somebody had nicknamed Shinola after that long forgotten Wall Street genius, cruised it twice, looking at the lights in the windows, the open gates and the total absence of sound or motion. The only thing alive was the young blond girl getting on the interstate bus three blocks away and the guy in his pajamas walking his dog. The estate was there, waiting, looking vitally awake, yet having all the signs of death.
Burke drove up in front of the ornate, columned porch and cut the engine. For a few minutes they sat there, guns in their hands, then Bill Long and Burke got up, looked around and went up the steps.
They had been in places like this too many times before and nobody had to tell them it was all over, whatever they expected to happen had already happened. Out of force of habit they obeyed all the rules of entry, covering each other while protecting themselves, absorbing the details of what had gone on, cataloging them for future reference, correlating them for immediate use. Later the experts from the lab could come in and add their findings to the computers and the files.
When there was nothing on the lower floor left to see they walked to the staircase and went up to the second floor. The first door they pushed open was Papa Menes’ bedroom and he was still in that obscene position on his hands and knees with his head twisted backward trying to let out a scream that had died before it had been born because the bullet from the gun that was still shoved up his asshole had tunneled its way right through to his heart and he never really got a chance to remember that special thing Louise had saved for him.
Gill Burke had forgotten about Helen until she came up and took his hand. There was something satisfied in her expression when she turned and looked at Bill Long. “You said it was speculation ... just a story you were going to tell.”
It was done, completed, but it didn’t happen right at all. Logic and truth had come apart because the fickle finger of fate goosed the wrong hind ends and there was no answer any more. None at all.
The captain made a vague gesture with his shoulders and said, “Oh, shit.”
Helen didn’t let him alone. “Bill, can we hear the story again ... about the execution team ... and Gill Burke.”
The cop looked at them both, then focused on Gill for a long time, then he said, “It’s strange the way things work out. I’m glad I’m retiring. I’m glad you’re going back to Compat. I don’t want to think about these things any more because no means justifies the ends, yet here it happened and it turns out for the best. I don’t want to believe or know that any one man could be in back of all this and still walk away without a scratch on his person or his conscience. I don’t want to know that, Gill, but I do. I know it was you all the way and somehow I’m happy and somehow I’m glad. I’m just happy that I don’t know for sure and we can go on being friends even if I still have all those reservations in my mind that never will be resolved because I’m dropping the package right here.”
“Your choice, Bill.”
“Is it over?”
Burke nodded soberly. “It’s over now.”
The captain walked away and they could hear his feet echoing down the stairs, heard him pick up the phone and make the call to headquarters.
The obscenity on the bed didn’t bother her any more at all now. She glanced up at the face of Gill Burke whom she loved so much, smiled gently and asked, “Tell me, was it you?”
Suddenly he was his other self again. “Would it make any difference if it had been?”
“Not a bit.”
He smiled at her oddly. “Then what difference does it make at all?”
Helen nodded and smiled back. “Let’s go home,” she said.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
The Last Cop Out Page 23