Mitchell Smith (12 page)

Nardone was sitting straight up at his desk, leafing through the reports on the Internal Affairs people.

Nardone always had tea at the morning break, never coffee, and never anything to eat, though when they went out he was liable to stop at the first Sabrett’s and buy three of the skinny, damp little hot dogs and eat them without onions or mustard-nothing to drink, either.

“What a load this stuff is,” he said. “-I don’t know why we even got this shit. Here’s a guy; his wife’s aunt says he’s a crook. Says he’s buyin’ sports cars like they’re going’ out of style. -Says she don’t want to make trouble, but it’s her taxes, too.”

“Don’t use that word taxes. Don’t use that word in my presence,”

Samuelson said, walking by. Samuelson was the biggest detective on the Squad (salt-and-pepper hair cropped in an archaic crew cut, his nose jutting from a raptor’s great heavy-boned head very like the beak of one of those high-flying hunters) and, unlike many big, powerful men, he had a hasty temper. He’d been assigned to the Squad several years before for beating up a sergeant from Traffic after that officer attempted to extort money from Samuelson’s father (whose two delivery trucks had had no option but to doublepark at his underwear business on Thirty-seventh off Seventh Avenue).

Nathan Samuelson had never been much of a businessman, but he’d been very gentle, and his huge son had loved him dearly. -Therefore the confrontation with the sergeant from Traffic, considerable of a horse himself (an ex-St. Joseph’s football player named Mike Grew).

The fight ensuing remained something of a legend in Manhattan West, occurring as it had in the public purlieus of the precinct locker room.

A row of lockers had been dented, the sergeant dented even more, and the matter had gone straight up the ladder to the Grand Hair-bags at Headquarters, had been mulled, turned and polished there, and finally adjusted and put away. The sergeant (his jaw lightly wired to heal) was told to wise up. Samuelson was transferred from Stakeout, where he had already assisted in killing two perps, to the Commissioner’s Squad, where his regular duty was to escort and safely convoy through the shoals and reefs of Manhattan a succession of visiting firemen-important and less so.

These men, small, often brown or pale orange, Samuelson usually led, ponderous and protecting, from Bruno’s Pen & Pencil to a Soho disco named Peabody’s, and finally, often, to Harriet Picunis’ large apartment on Sixty-first Street-after a precautionary call to Morals to be certain of no pending harassment. There, amid a forest of white plastic Art Deco, Samuelson would sit on the lime upholstered living-room sofa reading paperback science fiction (until sufficient customers had arrived to make up a game of gin) while his charge or charges sported with whatever Puerto Rican girls Harriet was then supplied.

Occasionally, pleased and weary, ready to go home to the Hilton, these foreigners sons of Thailand or Korea, Brazil or the Philippines-would emerge from a back bedroom (having been told of a certain confused, shy admiration held for them by a girl who’d thought herself lost to that sort of feeling forever) to discover their watchdog, mountainous in a folding chair, at play of gin with a choice selection of the City.

-Attorneys, businessmen, politicians, criminals, and an occasional officer of the Fire or Sanitation Departments.

These games, with the occasional Sanitation man already in over his head, would sometimes last till morning and the foreign visitor too timid to brave the night streets alone after so comforting a companion through the evening, found no alternative but to go to the kitchen for a sandwich and beer, and, later, to fall asleep on the sofa to a river in murmur of card talk, the masculine comforts of curses, burps, farts unrestrained, and cigar smoke whiffed from the table of play.

It was odd how good company might improve a man.

Often, by morning, that same creature who’d trotted like a spaniel behind Samuelson’s bulk the evening before, would, under the civilizing influence of women, cards, beer, and roast-beef sandwiches paved with horseradish and mayonnaise, stand revealed as not such a bad fellow at all, a man of some experience, and no fool. -And occasionally, no fool at cards.

“Taxes killed my dad,” Samuelson said, “and the fuckers are on their way to killing me’-and walked on his way. His desk was the last in the left-hand row, across from a slender, aging black detective named Murray, generally believed by the Squad to be a queer, and to have been caught at it.

It was known that Samuelson and Harriet Picunis had had a thing for a year or two, and some Squad members had bet it would destroy Samuelson’s marriage. But the thing was over, apparently, and no harm done. Nobody knew if Ruth had known about it or not. -If she had, she’d apparently decided to let it pass.

Samuelson had built his family a cottage up in Otsego County-perhaps as a peace offering-and had then been struck, in those bosky environs, by a new school tax of brutal weight.

Ellie smoothed her skirt-it had been badly wrinkled across the back-and perched comfortably enough on the side of Nardone’s desk, absently enjoying the light armor of her panty hose taut around her bottom, at her knees when she crossed her legs.

“Look at this shit.” Nardone extracted another report.

(The fluorescents of the squad room seemed, when one first walked in, to pour down a flood of white-yellow light, almost bright as the day outside-but, on the surfaces of paper, this brightness turned a dull violet, difficult to read by.) Ellie bent slightly, unwrapping her bagel, and was able, holding her head at the proper angle, to make out in the dense type that a detective named Johnson had been observed by a fellow officer to enter the establishment of a bookmaker named Porfirio Cruz, pause in those premises for thirty minutes and a little more, then leave.

“Are they kidding’ us,” Nardone said, “-Or what?”

“Is that all they have?” Ellie said. The bagel had butter oozing out its edges.

“Look at this . . . ‘Officer observed. What kind of crap is that?

What are we supposed to do-surveil this Johnson? Go talk to this Cruz guy?-What the hell’s that going’ to get us?”

“That’ll get us nothing,” Ellie said, and took her first bite.

“That’s it. That’s just what it’s going’ to get us.” Nardone toot the top off his tea.

“We could talk to that witness; he could know more than Johnson just going in there.”

“Yeah, we could talk to him—if you can find his name in here.” He shook the report as if the man’s name might fall out onto his desk, might just miss his tea. “-You find that witness’s name in here, I’ll buy you lunch.”

“Why are we getting this crap?-We have a major case to work!”

Nardone’s phone rang, a minor addition to background conversations the singing of other phones throughout the squad room, the rattle and click of processor keys as two detectives across the aisle and two desks down entered and edited their previous day’s activity reports. -Second thoughts, emendations, corrections, completions. Leahy liked his file reports perfect-and provided only with those, would, more often than not, leave a man (or woman) alone.

As Nardone commenced a conversation with an old informant calling from loneliness, Ellie took a second bite of bagel, pried the top from her coffee cup, took a paper of Nardone’s sugar, tore and poured it in, then tore a creamer paper and added that. She took the thin wood stirrer from his tea-though he tried to protect it, phoning-and mixed her coffee to light tan. It tasted slightly from the Styrofoam at first, then rushed over her tongue to soak the second bite of buttered bagel, joining with that rich flavor as if two veteran lovers, soft and kissing loose, had come to lie in Ellie’s mouth.

“What about Classman?”

Nardone covered the phone’s mouthpiece. “He called me at home last night. Said Frankie Odum never met Gaither. Heard about her from some john or other, and that’s it. Didn’t know she was dead, and didn’t care one way or another.”

“Nothing.

“Nothin’.” Nardone took his hand off the. phone’s mouthpiece, and said,

“Marty, you always been straight with me-I always been straight with you. We don’t have the budget to be sendin’ you to Miami, no matter who’s down there. I don’t care what they’re doin’. Let the Miami cops sweat that out. It’s … it’s-I’m tryin’ to tell you it’s none of our business. And we couldn’t afford it, anyway. You get something’ on Midtown construction; you get some Internal guy looking’ the other way-that’s a different matter. I’ll be happy to talk to you.” Nardone sat listening while Ellie ate the rest of her bagel. It took five bites. “I’m-I’m always glad to talk to you,” Nardone said. “It’s a pleasure. Umm-humm … Right. Yeah.

Now you got it. -Hell, you don’t like those assholes any better than I do. A bunch of animals. Do you owe them anything? You sure as hell don’t owe them anything.

Umm-humm. That-that’s exactly right. Right . . .”

Nardone rolled his eyes up at Ellie, but he stayed very patiently on the phone, listening to a voice high-pitched and harsh enough so that Ellie could almost make out its words. Nardone had a reputation of being soft with his sources—overpaying them, too.

Ellie drank her coffee down, picked up the damp stirrer from the desktop and stuck it back in Nardone’s tea.

Nardone told his informant to give Jennifer a hug for him, told him to tell her to treat him right, or Nardone would be coming after her.

“She’s got a good man,” Nardone said. “-She’s got the best. She’s got a guy with some balls.” Then Nardone said, “Take it easy, Marty,” and hung up.

“Would you believe,” he said, “-that Marty B is dead drunk before noon?

We’re talkin’ about a guy there hasn’t got any liver left.”

“He’s scared.”

“And I don’t blame him,” Nardone said. “I was in his position, I’d be scared, too. I was in his shoes, I’d be terrified. -You want to go out to Queens? This Ambrosio thing?”

Charles Ambrosio was the detective accused by his wife’s aunt of buying sports cars on a salary that shouldn’t have permitted it.

Ellie read more of that report, down to the bottom of the second page.

(It was getting uncomfortable to be sitting on the edge of the desk.) There didn’t seem to be much against Ambrosio but his wife’s aunt’s accusation.

“Not much to it,” Ellie said. “The old woman probably hates him for criticizing her cooking. -I wanted to check the Gaither place again.”

“Let’s do this shit first. We’ll do Queens first, keep Leahy off our backs.” He sipped his tea. “—Marty talked this stuff cold,” he said.

“Poor guy. They’re going’ to smell the sweat on him someday, and shoot him right in the head. Then what the hell’s going’ to happen to Jennifer? -She’s damn near retarded-you know that?”

“No,” Ellie said, “I didn’t. . I knew she wasn’t very bright.”

“Who wasn’t very bright?” said Samuelson, stirring a cigar-smelling breeze as he trundled by again.

They checked out the bronze Ford in the basement garage-Ellie trying the slap-on light, Nardone, as he always did, opening the car’s trunk to be sure of the spare and tools, and to work the action of the Remington twelve-gauge, check the loads. Neither of them had ever had to use, or even brandish the big shotgun, though they’d fired it on the range to qualify.

Ellie thought it a good sign for the afternoon, that they’d gotten the old Ford. It was their usual ride, comfortable, and didn’t look as cop-ey as some of the cars.

The ford had a severe dent in the right front fender someone had hit them trying to parallel-park while they were having breakfast in Brooklyn months before. The garage boss, the king of that echoing cavern-a civilian named Ramirez-had wanted them to pay for the damage, because Ellie had told him the truth about how it happened, and no way was that line-of-duty. Maybe once-not anymore. The Department,‘pinched for cash, was now trying to save in such little ways—occasionally out of the pockets of its people.

The Ford smelled faintly of both of them, so that climbing into it was something like coming back to a small, messy home with grimy windows.

Nardone asked Ellie if she wanted to drive, and though she did (felt like gunning the sedan around) she said no, knowing that he enjoyed it, liked sitting behind the wheel in easy competence, steering through the city’s noisy tangle. The thicker, the more brutal and impatient the traffic, the more Nardone appeared to relax in it, like a wealthy businessman in a warm and tumultuous Jacuzzi.

They rode up and out into a warm and muffled afternoon (that smelled lightly of bus exhaust and some residue of garbage), the sunlight so diffused it was difficult to make out people’s faces at much more than half a block.

This haze made all New Yorkers strangers at a distance, though a friend or lover might recognize a walk, or an attitude, a manner of window-shopping, a way of looking out across an intersection before crossing.

There was a buzz in the Ford’s plastic trim, somewhere above the radio, that sounded loudest when Nardone accelerated after a stop for red; once they were cruising, the buzz faded softly away.

Ellie properly watched the right, as Nardone, while driving, watched the left. They considered the people by their ways of moving-looking, without thinking of it, for odd breaks in rhythm—sudden jolts and starts along the sidewalks, faster movements, bursts of speed, running

… people looking after the runner, mouths open in surprise.

So, Ellie and Nardone, rolling by in noisy, shifting traffic, watched the people as they passed. Ellie had, when she first became a detective, greatly enjoyed observing people, guarding them without their knowledge.

She’d thought of herself as a sheepdog (a large, pretty female, with silky white fur like a sled dog’s-powerful, sharp-toothed, and part of a greater pack of protectors trotting through the city).

She no longer thought that sort of thing, but still felt pleased, comfortable, gazing out her side window as they drove uptown. It was a long ride out to Bayside.

Just as they entered the tunnel, swinging swiftly into it (having barely beaten the light)-and were only a few yards onto the slight downslope in warm, close, thrumming air-the Colonel, in tan summer slacks and white polo shirt, sitting at an early lunch at his hotel-suite table, said,