Cop Hater (9 page)

"Guns are easy to come by?'

"Sure. But I don't figure him for our man."

"I'd like to check him out, anyway," Carella said.

"Okay, but I want to check this other guy out first Or-diz. Luis 'Dizzy' Ordiz. Take a look at the card."

Carella pulled the conviction card closer. The card was a 4x6 white rectangle, divided into printed rectangles of various sizes and shapes.

"A hophead," Carella said.

"Yeah. Figure the hate a hophead can build hi four years' time."

"He went the distance?"

"Got out the beginning of the month," Bush said. "Cold turkey all that time. This don't build brotherly love for the cops who made the nab."

"No, it doesn't."

"Figure this, too. Take a look at his record. He was picked up in '51 on a dis cond charge. This was before he got on the junk, allegedly. But he was carrying a .45. The gun had a busted hammer, but it was still a .45. Go back to '49. Again, dis cond, fighting in a bar. Had a .45 on him, no busted hammer this time. He got off lucky that time. Suspended sentence."

"Seems to favor .45's."

"Like the guy who killed Mike and Dave. What do you say?"

"I say we take a look. Where is he?"

Bush shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine."

Danny Gimp was a man who'd had polio when he was a child. He was lucky in that it had not truly crippled him. He had come out of the disease with only a slight limp, and a nickname which would last him the rest of his life. His real surname was Nelson, but very few people knew that, and he was referred to in the neighborhood as Danny Gimp. Even his letters came addressed that way.

Danny was fifty-four years old, but it was impossible to judge his age from his face or his body. He was very small, small all over, his bones, his features, his eyes, his stature. He moved with the loose-hipped walk of an adolescent, and his voice was high and reedy, and his face bore hardly any wrinkles or other telltale signs of age.

Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon.

He was a very valuable man, and the men of the 87th Precinct called him in regularly, and Danny was always ready to comply—whenever he could. It was a rare occasion when Danny could not supply the piece of information the bulls were looking for. On these occasions, there were other stool-ies to talk to. Somewhere, somebody had the goods. It was simply a question of finding the right man at the right time.

Danny could usually be found in the third booth on the right hand side of a bar named
Andy's Pub.
He was not an alcoholic, nor did he even drink to excess. He simply used the bar as a sort of office. It was cheaper than paying rent someplace downtown, and it had the added attraction of a phone booth which he used regularly. The bar, too, was a good place to listen—and listening was one-half of Danny's business. The other half was talking.

He sat opposite Carella and Bush, and first he listened.

Then he talked.

"Dizzy Ordiz," be said. "Yeah, yeah."

"You know where he is?"

"What'd he do?"

"We don't know."

"Last I heard, he was on the state."

"He got out at the beginning of the month."

"Parole?"

"No."

"Ordiz, Ordiz. Oh, yeah. He's a junkie."

"That's right."

"Should be easy to locate. What'd he do?"

"Maybe nothing," Bush said. "Maybe a hell of a lot."

"Oh, you thinking of these cop kills?" Danny asked.

Bush shrugged.

"Not Ordiz. You're barkin' up the wrong tree."

"What makes you say so?"

Danny sipped at his beer, and then glanced up at the rotating fan. "You'd never know there was a fan going in this dump, would you? Jesus, this heat don't break soon, I'm headin' for Canada. I got a friend up there. Quebec. You ever been to Quebec?"

"No," Bush said.

"Nice there. Cool."

"What about Ordiz?"

"Take him with, me, he wants to come," Danny said, and then he began laughing at his own joke.

"He's cute today," Carella said.

"I'm cute all the time," Danny said. "I got more dames lined up outside my room than you can count on an abacus. I'm the cutest."

"We didn't know you was pimping," Bush said.

"I ain't. This is all for love."

"How much love you got for Ordiz?"

"Don't know him from a hole in the wall. Don't care to, either. Hopheads make me puke."

"Okay, then where is he?"

"I don't know yet. Give me some time."

"How much time?"

"Hour, two hours. Junkies are easy to trace. Talk to a few pushers, zing, you're in. He got out the beginning of the month, huh? That means he's back on it strong by now. This should be a cinch."

"He may have kicked it," Carella said. "It may not be such a cinch."-

"They never kick it," Danny said. "Don't pay attention to fairy tales. He was probably gettin' the stuff sneaked in even up the river. I'll find him. But if you think he knocked off your buddies, you're wrong."

"Why?"

"I seen this jerk around. He's a nowhere. A real
trom-benik,
if you dig foreign. He don't know enough to come in out of an atom bomb attack. He got one big thing hi his life. Horse. That's Ordiz. He lives for the White God. Only thing on his mind."

"Reardon and Foster sent him away," Carella said.

"So what? You think a junkie bears a grudge? All part of the game. He ain't got time for grudges. He only got time for meetin' his pusher and makin' the buy. This guy Ordiz, he was always half-blind on the stuff. He couldn't see straight enough to shoot off his own big toe. So he's gonna cool two cops? Don't be ridic."

"We'd like to see him, anyway," Bush said.

"Sure. Do I tell you how to run headquarters? Am I the commissioner? But this guy is from Squaresville, fellas, I'm telling you. He wouldn't know a .45 from a cement mixer."

"He's owned a few in his life," Carella said.

"Playing with them, playing with them. If one of them things ever went off within a hundred yards of him, he'd have diarrhea for a week. Take it from me, he don't care about nothin' but heroin. Listen, they don't call him Dizzy for nothin'. He's dizzy. He's got butterflies up here. He chases them away with H."

"I don't trust junkies," Bush said.

"Neither do I," Danny answered. "But this guy ain't a killer, take it from me. He don't even know how to kill time."

"Do us a favor," Carella said.

"Sure."

"Find him for us. You know our number." "Sure. I'll buzz you in an hour or so. This is gonna be a cinch. Hopheads are a cinch."

Chapter NINE

the heat
on that July 26th reached a high of 95.6 at twelve noon. At the precinct house, two fans circulated the soggy air that crawled past the open windows and the grilles behind them. Everything in the Detective Squad Room seemed to wilt under the steady, malignant pressure of the heat. Only the file cabinets and the desks stood at strict attention. Reports, file cards, carbon paper, envelopes, memos, all of these were damp and sticky to the touch, clinging to wherever they were dropped, clinging with a moist limpidity.

The men in the Squad Room worked in their shirt sleeves. Their shirts were stained with perspiration, large dark amoeba blots which nibbled at the cloth, spreading from beneath the armpits, spreading from the hollow of the spinal column. The fans did not help the heat at all. The fans circulated the suffocating breath of the city, and the men sucked in the breath and typed up their reports in triplicate, and checked their worksheets, and dreamt of Summers in the White Mountains, or Summers in Atlantic City with the ocean slapping their faces. They called complainants, and they called suspects, and their hands sweated on the black plastic of the phone, and they could feel Heat like a living thing which invaded their bodies and seared them with a million white-hot daggers.

Lieutenant Byrnes was as hot as any man in the Squad Room. His office was just to the left of the slatted dividing railing, and it had a large corner window, but the window was wide open and not a breath of a breeze came through it. The reporter sitting opposite him looked cool. The reporter's name was Savage, and the reporter was wearing a blue seersucker suit and a dark blue Panama, and the reporter was smoking a cigarette and casually puffing the smoke up at the ceiling where the heat held it in a solid blue-grey mass.

"There's nothing more I can tell you," Byrnes said. The reporter annoyed him immensely. He did not for a moment believe that any man on this earth had been born with a name like "Savage." He further did not believe that any man on this earth, on this day, could actually be as cool as Savage pretended he was.

"Nothing more, Lieutenant?" Savage asked, his voice very soft. He was a handsome man with close-cropped blond hair and a straight, almost-feminine nose. His eyes were grey, cool. Cool.

"Nothing," the Lieutenant said. "What the hell did you expect? If we knew who did it, we'd have him in here, don't you think?"

"I should imagine so," Savage said. "Suspects?"

"We're working on it."

"Suspects?" Savage repeated.

"A few. The suspects are our business. You splash them on your front page, and they'll head for Europe."

"Think a kid did it?"

"What do you mean, a kid?"

"A teen-ager."

"Anybody could've done it," Byrnes said. "For all I know,
you
did it."

Savage smiled, exposing bright white teeth. "Lots of teenage gangs in this precinct, aren't there?"

"We've got the gangs under control. This precinct isn't the garden spot of the city, Savage, but we like to feel we're doing the best job possible here. Now I realize your newspaper may take offense at that, but we really try, Savage, we honestly try to do our little jobs."

"Do I detect sarcasm in your voice, Lieutenant?" Savage asked.

"Sarcasm is a weapon of the intellectual, Savage. Everybody, especially your newspaper, knows that cops are just stupid, plodding beasts of burden."

"My paper never said that, Lieutenant."

"No?" Byrnes shrugged. "Well, you can use it in tomorrow's edition."

"We're trying to help," Savage said. "We don't like cops getting killed anymore than you do." Savage paused. "What about the teen-age gang idea?"

"We haven't even considered it This isn't the way those gangs operate. Why the hell do you guys try to pin everything that happens in this city on the teen-agers? My son is a teenager, and he doesn't go around killing cops."

"That's encouraging," Savage said.

"The gang phenomenon is a peculiar one to understand," Byrnes said. "I'm not saying we've got it licked, but we do have it under control. If we've stopped the street tumbles, and the knifings and shootings, then the gangs have become nothing more than social clubs. As long as they stay that way, I'm happy."

"Your outlook is a strangely optimistic one," Savage said coolly. "My newspaper doesn't happen to believe the street rumbles have stopped. My newspaper is of the opinion that the death of those two cops may be traced directly to these 'social clubs.'"

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"So what the hell do you want me to do about it? Round up every kid in the city and shake him down? So your goddamn newspaper can sell another million copies?"

"No. But we're going ahead with our own investigation. And if we crack this, it won't make the 87th Precinct look too good."

"It won't make Homicide North look too good, either. And it won't make the Police Commissioner look good. It'll make everybody in the department look like amateurs as contrasted with the super-sleuths of your newspaper."

"Yes, it might," Savage agreed.

"I have a few words of advice for you, Savage."

"Yes?"

"The kids around here don't like questions asked. You're not dealing with Snob Hill teen-agers who tie on a doozy by drinking a few cans of beer. You're dealing with kids whose code is entirely different from yours or mine. Don't get yourself killed."

"I won't," Savage said, smiling resplendently.

"And one other thing."

"Yes?"

"Don't foul up my precinct. I got enough headaches without you and your half-assed reporters stirring up more trouble."

"What's
  
more
 
important
 
to
 
you,
  
Lieutenant?"
  
Savage

asked. "My not fouling up your precinct—or my not getting killed?"

Byrnes smiled and then began filling his pipe. "They both amount to about the same thing," he said.

The call from Danny Gimp came in fifty minutes. The desk Sergeant took the call, and then plugged it in to Carella's line.