Bomber's Law (11 page)

Brennan did not turn his head or say anything and Dell'Appa saw no reddening at the back of his neck; Brennan was ignoring him again, just as he had deliberately nonexisted him during Dell'Appa's rookie year in street clothes, when he had managed to make himself the senior non-com whose hazing Dell'Appa most despised. But now there were at least two differences: Dell'Appa, sitting with Sergeant Brennan in the Blazer three years after that first year in plain clothes, had a sergeant's badge of his own in his pocket; he had thus long since outgrown any motive, without acquiring any new inclination, to grovel for Brennan. “Any Brennan,” as he put it that night to Gayle, “or any other bastard under the rank of Detective Lieutenant Inspector. Let the word go forth from this time and this place, to all the Brennans in all the world, no matter what their names are: ‘Party-time was yesterday. Now is payback time. Fuck all you guys. Fuck all your horses. Strong letter follows. Harry.' Should've just called him an asshole right off the bat, 'stead've wastin' valuable time.”

Dell'Appa cleared his throat and selected his testimonial voice, a bit heavy on the self-important-timbre pedal but nonetheless very serviceable, not only for giving evidence to jurors assembled in poorly miked, acoustically dead courtrooms but also for goading an overbearing former tormentor in the privacy of a truck cab, when he chose to overlook whimsical changes in status made in the passage of time. “For the Uncle I'll write: ‘of the usual height, the usual weight and all that stuff. The usual hair and the usual eyes; in the usual colors, I think. Wears the usual clothes in the usual way; the usual
feet
, in the usual
shoes
, stickin' out of the plural end of the pants, the end at the bottom, you know? And the usual belt through the usual loops up at the singular end, of this very usual garment.' Dupe verbatim the same brilliant rundown for Squirrel, and then all I got left to do is rerun it just once more, for Peter. I'll be on my way home like a blue streak tonight, boy—no greased lightnin' was ever this fast.”

That did the job. It made Brennan's neck good and red. He sat back suddenly and hard in the driver's seat, turning his head to focus
on Dell'Appa the baited-bear scowl and career-threatening glare that had intimidated so many tenderfoot detectives in so many years gone by. Brennan had done more than merely overlook the years and the changes they had worked; he had nullified them by his own act of will, just as a fat man enables himself to graze comfortably out of the refrigerator by first gearing up the confidence that calories consumed while standing don't count in the day's total tally. He said:

“Just what the fuck is the matter with you, kid? The
fuck
is the matter with you? Your third week back inna real world with us, no more king of your own little hill, no one knows
what
you're doin' out there inna woods, or maybe you're just doin' nothin', and now here you come back where you'll hafta work, and you know it, and you're acting like the job's a zipper with the sharp teeth there, that we yanked up real fast and caught your cock in it. What was it, old buddy, that what it was? You can tell Bob. Bob's your old pal. Cry your heart out right here on my brotherly shoulder. You leave somethin' sweet 'n precious out there in those woods? Or maybe some sweet behind's what it was, a Little Red Ridin' Hood, maybe? Your own little Goldilocks-sweathog, all sorry and sad, all alone inna weeds, when she heard her hero was leavin'.”

Brennan shifted his tone into a whining simper. “
Poor
baby-Harry. Those big meanies called him up, and they said: ‘Okay, back to work. We need you back home-base, chop-chop. Wrap up that whipped-cream assignment you promoted for yourself, shouldn't've existed in the first place, not for a Boston-based trench-grunt, at least. A Springfield accountant, yeah, maybe, the eyeshade and pocket-protector, but no job for a genuine cop. One with all those
yew-neek
skills that you've got, that you bring to the same job we've been doing without them, pretty damned good, too, all of those years before you came. Cost the taxpayers arms and legs, too, of course, all of those
special
unique skills. But: hey, doesn't matter, not anymore, now it's all over and done with. Just get your candy ass back in here Monday morning, fit for normal duty. You've screwed around all that you're gonna now, out there inna bushes, the milkmaids.'

“And so as a result now you're gonna sulk, workin' under men senior to you. Who can see if you're doin' things right, and'll
say
something to you, you're not. That what it really is, Percy? Well, tough fuckin' shit, you fresh little prick, 'f you don't like takin' orders
again. Suck it up, candy ass, then suck it in, and then if you still don't like how it actually works, go on sick days. Claim ‘nervous exhaustion.' ”

Dell'Appa did not say anything for what seemed to him like several minutes, if not several hours, being absolutely certain that if he allowed himself to reply at once to Brennan's sneering he would surely incite himself further, beyond the limits of his ability to control himself. His voice would rise into a roar to the point at which the rush of hearing himself saying what he'd wanted to do for more than a year, and wanted again to do now, would be more than enough to impel him do it. He really would haul off and break the man's jaw. He knew that, but he also knew, even more surely, that that was far more than he would want, in calmness regained later, to have to know that he had done.

So there was some relief, to find that out. Somewhere along the time-line he had passed along with birthdays a milestone of increasing genuine maturity, without even noticing it. He really did not want to emerge now from his anger to find that he had acted on it while it lasted, and had broken Bob Brennan's jaw. It was a year or three over fifty, and with the rest of Brennan it would have been pensioned off some time back, in the days before the retirement age went up to fifty-five. Most likely that jaw was dry shingle brittle, furnished with dental appliances—Dr. Morse called all dental plates and bridges “appliances,” including those he had fashioned for Harry to replace the three right upper and two lower teeth knocked loose by a sixteen-year-old Wellesley rich kid in the Mowglieh Tigers Rap Concert riot in his second year on the force (no more than two or three seconds before he had backhanded the kid with his long baton and hospitalized him with a fractured skull; the kid had recovered, after nine weeks in bed, his parents muttering about lawsuits until they heard about Dell'Appa's firm intention to reciprocate and as his lawyer put it to them: “Take your fucking house for what your druggy little bastard did.”), thus causing Harry and Gayle ever after to call them his “maytags”—that a single solid shot would easily shatter and jolt off the shrunken lower gums, ramming sharp pieces of flesh-colored tough plastic at strange angles into the soft palate, making deep, jagged entry wounds. It was good to discover that causing grave bodily harm to Bob Brennan or even somebody like him, however
delicious anger made the prospect, was no longer the sort of thing likely to be done by the kind of man Dell'Appa had always intended to be, some day; had worked hard to become, and now apparently had some reason to believe himself to be—even though it was the first thing that had come into his mind. He had already made a good start on beating Brennan senseless with his mind. There was no need to do anything more, especially if it involved risk.

During Dell'Appa's silence, Brennan breathed heavily across from him, plainly meaning to convey by means of labored, noisy inhalations and exhalations the falsehood that he too was in the mood for a fistfight. But his pale-blue eyes would not meet Dell'Appa's gaze and stay locked in, despite his efforts to steady them; their shiftiness gave him away. That was also good; it meant there was no danger Brennan would stupidly throw a sucker punch if he somehow got the erroneous idea that Dell'Appa had been distracted by something or someone outside the truck. So for Dell'Appa the appropriate tactic was therefore to find a way to occupy his mind and his time until the appearance of a subject of sufficient common interest to warrant (and also explain) total disregard of what had just happened, and open a fresh conversation.

Beyond Brennan's left shoulder, entering Dell'Appa's field of vision from the left, the sidewalk commuter procession on the other side of the roadway now presented among the almost-uniformed office-workers a man whose costume and behavior did not match the generic description. He carried an oxblood attaché case, the elegant two-inches-slim model favored by many of the other morning walkers, but he did not carry it in the same way. He flourished it in the carefree, loosey-goosey manner of an adolescent boy idly but still elaborately tricky-dribbling a basketball on his way to a playground court for a pick-up game of Horse. He swung it back and forth in patterns alternating between tight figure-eights and straight fore-and-aft arcs, each variation traveling about eighteen inches, first beyond and then behind his right knee. This required the other pedestrians to slow down and hang back to allow him to lead, or veer wide if they wanted to pass him, so that he would have plenty of room. But Dell'Appa observed no frowns of annoyance or exchanges of insults and gestures between the non-conforming man and the briefly-detouring pedestrians. Everyone involved, first in creation of
the inconvenience and then accommodation to it, seemed to find it an ordinary, unremarkable feature of the daily walk to the 7:48.

The unusual man also tried to walk with the loose-jointed gait that gifted young athletes either possess from birth or acquire by considerable practice, but he couldn't bring it off, despite all his obvious planning and effort and someone's fairly considerable expense. He wore premium-grade high-top sneakers. Dell'Appa recognized them as a brand of footgear he had seen aggressively and repeatedly advertised by relatively-young and highly-muscular, to-him-generic celebrities, during prime-time network telecasts of professional sports. They wore the sneakers and pretended to glide through heavy workouts while shouting provocatively, superciliously, or contemptuously at each another and also anyone who might be watching.

Those lithe people on TV mildly annoyed Dell'Appa. They were apparently known and admired so widely and well (though not by Dell'Appa or any one of his friends; Gayle said he had only to be patient, predicting that when Roy was a year or two older, he would update Harry's education much more thoroughly and often than he could possibly wish, “at eighty or a hundred bucks' tuition per pair,” she said, “every time his feet grow another half-size or some kid who's two years taller takes a rebound away from him”) that their full names, cavalierly unstated in the ads, had obviously been deemed superfluous by the sneaker-maker and his advertising outfit. This meant that the advertising people had talked the manufacturer into paying the performers truly enormous sums of money for the antic services filmed for the ads that in turn cost so much to broadcast. And those combined expenses of production and broadcast exposure explained why the sneakers had to be priced at retail out of the reach of anyone except celebrities so recognizably richly-famous (except by Dell'Appa and his friends) that they didn't have to buy them; according to the sports pages in the newspaper, the sneaker-manufacturers who hired the scintillating people to make the ads also gave them carload-lots of the footwear for nothing.

Which in turn meant that Harry was right and the whole exercise was a charade. The manufacturers had no reason to care at all what sort of people wore the sneakers out into the real world, what they did once they were out in it, or even if anyone actually did put on those fancy shoes and go out. For the manufacturers it would be
perfectly all right if all the flashy damned things that were purchased for real money, or shoplifted out of heavily-insured inventories, remained forever thereafter in the gaudy boxes, shoved 'way to the backs of darkened shameful closets, so long as the well-funded escapees from reality and normally-functioning sanity in sufficient numbers first underwent mood aberrations sufficiently severe and persisting long enough to cause them to march in columns of bunches into mall-stores and cough up the listed prices that not only paid for the stars and the ads, but made the sneaker-people very rich indeed.

So, while the man on the Dockett Street bridge wearing that particular pair on that pale, bright November morning certainly would not have been one of the typical buyers projected to the maker by the media-buy people who devised the TV-ad campaigns; would plainly never be able to enjoy whatever wonderful athletic advantages the maker had engineered into the footgear; and looked like a pathetic fool wearing it in public, all of that would have been a matter of complete indifference to the sneaker-maker. Either the feckless man himself had gullibly purchased the shoes, or someone whose reason had been overcome by generous love for the sneakered man (unless it was weariness of his wheedling and pleading) had paid over the cash for those cruel shoes, supplying the props for a pitiable show and at the same time making the charade a rousing triumph by giving the maker his profit.

The unusual man lacked style. That would have been entirely bad enough if he had not been able to perceive it when he saw it, but he had an additional misfortune: he was just bright enough to recognize style, to notice grace and study easy confidence, so that in time he had come to believe that if he could learn to display those gifts in the same careless manner as the blessed who possessed them, he would then have the gifts themselves—and then he would not be
different
, at least not in the bad way, anymore. So he was trying to fake it that morning, as he had on many others and would on many more, and he was failing, as he always had and always would.

He wore black, heavy-gauge, cotton-twill pants, baggy in the seat, and a blousy, bulky, black, tanker jacket showing a neckband teaser of neon-scarlet sateen, most likely a reliable indication that the jacket
was reversible to red-flag to the whole world any in-your-face mood that might overcome its wearer. But Dell'Appa, his anger at Brennan now having receded sufficiently to permit him to think rationally about matters other (and more complex) than bashing Brennan in the teeth; having instantly perceived that this man, his short black hair graying at the temples under the White Sox black-wool cap shielding his happy face, was too white and too old ever to have been prudently allowed, “pastly, presently, or futurely” (as Dennison liked to say when split-infinitively-importuned “to just at least
think
, okay?” about a transparently-stupid, cockeyed course of action he had quite rightly just summarily rejected—by saying: “not a chance”—and would never authorize, “unless first overtaken by a fit”), by anyone who loved him to risk having any mood like that in a public place, now gradually and belatedly realized that the man was too flat-out handicapped as well.