Mitchell Smith (64 page)

The car’s rear door opened, and a tall, bald man in his late fifties got out. He was wearing a baggy gray suit, and had the drawn, humorless, considering face of certain Irish priests. Ellie recognized him from the Chdvez scene, up in the Bronx.

“Come here,” the bald man said to Ellie.

She took a step toward him-then, as if she’d felt it, remembered Tommy’s hand on her arm when Ambrosio had ordered her to him. “-Where you going’?” Tommy had said. She stood still.

The bald man was very intelligent, very quick; he didn’t call to her again, order her to him a second time.

He walked on over as if he’d never noticed any disobedience, had never had an order disobeyed.

“I’m Captain Connors,” he said. “-I’m commanding an M.C. and Homicide team for assigned cases … the Nardone thing.” Connors had a deep, soft, expressive voice, and a rough old-fashioned New York accent.

Friends of Ellie’s father had talked that way.

“I think I saw you up in the Bronx, Captain.”

“Yes, you did … yes, you did. ” He put a long fingered hand on Ellie’s shoulder, and turned her to walk beside him, strolling slowly down the sidewalk. The Plymouth drifted along behind them. “I should tell you,”

Captain Connors said, “-that I’ve had for many years a Soft Spot for that Italian wild man we’ve lost.”

“Yes . .

“To lose a partner is bad enough. To lose an absolutely honest police officer is infinitely worse.” He turned his head, looked down a long, long nose at Ellie as they walked. —She noticed he’d cut himself shaving—a slight nick in the soft, thin wattles at his throat. “-My people were surveilling this Perry woman. I felt her neph p ews might come to visit, believing themselves to be in trouble. Young blacks are often raised by grand mothers … aunts. -And you got her address from the clinic files? I suppose you lied to them.” They had walked almost to Cathedral Parkway when Connors, precise as a soldier, executed a to-the-rear march-Ellie turning the wrong way, stepping to catch up-and they strolled back the way they’d come. They passed the Plymouth, and the car stopped, shifted, then slowly began to back along the curb, keeping place, as it had, just behind them.

“These officers saw you go into the building-and one of them recognized you, and called me,” Connors said.

“f Ordinarily, of course, in a major case-where a police officer had stepped so far out of line as to interfere in an ongoing investigation

… to trouble a potential informant, whether from in ured pride, or personal feelings of some i sort—ordinarily I would have that officer up on Departmental charges. I’d see any person like that broken, and, if possible, dismissed.” His hand rested light as linen on Ellie’s shoulder.

She said nothing. Heard the car’s engine whine softly behind them.

“In your case, I’m inclined to make allowances-for two reasons. First, you’re a woman, and you’ve been shocked by the loss of a friend and partner. Second, you’ve been recently injured making an arrest. Where did she say those boys are … ?”

Ellie started to answer, and almost did, but her mouth seemed to seal itself-as if, open, its tongue would be endangered, “Are they still in town … ?”

Several more steps.

“Why aren’t you answering me, Eleanor?”

Ellie felt close to tears … so stupid. It was all she needed-to start crying in front of this man. “-Because I think it could have been cops. And they’re not going to get away with it.” Her mouth had opened for that.

Connors stopped walking. He looked down at her for a few moments, and said nothing. Then he started walking again, and said, “-Now, what in the world makes you think that?”

“Because Classman and Tommy were killed by disciplined men.”

“But all police officers are fingerprinted-and no records found of those prints by us—or the FBI.”

“Bullshit,” Elbe said, surprising herself, “-men like that always have their prints taken, sometime-in the service, or by the cops, or on the cops. If you don’t know that-then what the fuck do you know?” She turned away from under Connors’ hand, and started walking toward Cathedral Parkway. She didn’t look back.

“You’re in very serious trouble,” Connors called after her, raising his voice only slightly. “And that’s a shame. . .

Ellie walked down to Cathedral Parkway, across it, then down the hill to the bus stop. Her heart was thumping, and she felt a little short of breath, but otherwise O. K. -I can always paint, she thought. I can go to a little town up in New Hampshire, and get a job as a waitress, or maybe a town constable … and I can paint. She imagined herself-as she waited for the bus-a different person, divorced from the New York City Police Department, no longer wife to that swarthy, dangerous, coarse society that comfortably contained both thieving brutes like Charley Ambrosio, and the righteous Captain Connors, a blue priest.

She waited at the stop on the lower edge of Harlem, as any white person might stand at the border of another, darker country, and didn’t envy white and Hispanic policemen their patrols up there. Perpetual strangers, all of them, no matter that a few, she;d heard, loved black women, and married them, and lived buried in those blocks; it wouldn’t be their country. -In that country, she supposed, a policeman had better be either brute or priest. Reason would have little place.

The bus came, and Ellie climbed aboard, showed her shield, then went to the first empty double seat on the left, and sat by the window to watch the park go by. The seat just behind her-she’d seen them before she sat down-was occupied by a beautifully dressed woman in a beige suede suit, sitting with her three-or four-year-old son. Mother and son had gleaming hair, so light a gold as to be nearly silver. Something dreadful had happened to the woman’s face-a traffic accident (Ellie thought of her trotting deaths, pacing the thruways) or perhaps a fire.

—Or a disease that had destroyed her bones. This tall, slender lady, a wife, and almost certainly rich, had the round monstrous face of an owl, the nose beak the only protruSion out of a deep, scooped, boneless dish of skin-the eyes, very separate, dark, round, liquid. Ellie had seen this face that wasn’t-had looked away much too fast, she felt sure, for the woman to have caught her staring, then had taken her seat before them, under the owl’s gaze, if the owl that had been a woman chose to do it. -Braver than I am, Ellie thought. -Braver even than Tommy, to have combed out, spun out her splendid hair, to have dressed in her beautiful suit, called her handsome little son downstairs, and gone for a ride on the Fifth Avenue bus, to do some shopping. -Which bus, bearing Ellie, this brave woman and her boy, sighed, waddled, and farted its way along the top of the park, then made the sweeping turn downtown at Frawley Circle, and heaved through traffic a mile down Fifth.

At Eighty-third, Ellie got up, went to the rear door without looking at the woman and her son, and got off.

She walked down to the Metropolitan Museum, climbed the steps to its front doors, went in, and found phones on the right. New Jersey Information showed several DiNunzios in Vineland, but only one DiNunzio Produce.

Ellie called that number, and a young woman answered, “Garden Delights .

. .”

“Sorry to trouble you, but I’m a friend of Maurice Garrison’s. I heard he was working there. . . .”

“Oh, that’s all right,” the young woman said. “Maurice isn’t here, though. He’s up in Tuxedo, delivering.”

“Well, it’s nothing important. Is he going to be back this afternoon

… ?”

“More like tonight, late,” the young woman said. “He may just come in Saturday morning.”

“Do me a favor … don’t tell him I called. -O.K.?

We’re old friends. I thought I’d drive over and surprise him.”

“All right. Sure … I won’t tell him.”

“I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.”

“O.K.”

“Bye-bye .

There was a chance, of course, that Mrs. Perry had already had second thoughts, and made a call of her own. -A chance, then, he’d decide never to come back from Tuxedo. But if he did, and came in on Saturday, Ellie saw no problem driving out there early enough-to be there waiting for him. The problem was-what then?

She’d have no standing in New Jersey. No paper to bring any material witness in. . . .

She walked through a scattered crowd across the great, airy, marble space, past the central information desk to the ticket booths, lined up, and when it came her turn, gave the girl a dollar for a small tin button, colored pumpkin. Then she walked back into the hall, turned right, past a huge vase of leopard-spot lilies, then a gift shop, on through a large rectangular room where the heads of Roman emperors-variously noble, dopey, snarling like vicious dogs-were set on their small columns

… and through that down a long, wide corridor, lined on either side with early Greek statuary, all the figures bearing elaborately braided hairdos and slight smiles.

Ellie thought they’d had that smile carved into them so people would think these lifelike things friendly, not awful and full of curses. In the old days, -she’d read, the statues had been painted . . . skin sun-brown edlacquered, maybe, for the gloss of sweat and oil. Hair, beards painted black or reddish brown, depending on the tribe. And the eyes . . . pitch-bitumen, cochineal, beetlewing blue. The smile faintly lipsticked. Breechclouts, yellow. Sandals, leather-brown.

Hercules, in the other room, would wear his lion hide tinted tawny.

Light olive-brown, clear as tea, for his club.

Ellie waited in line at the cafeteria, regretting the lost fountain pool, its water dancers—selected a tuna salad, milk (for calcium to keep her from getting a hump), and a piece of cheese cake for the hell of it. She took her tray-an expensive lunch, for not being much-and sat along the west side, at a table for two beside the railing for the absent pool.

Ellie sat and rested . . . had a long lunch. Sat and watched the people walking by. She thought of talking to Leahy before Connors called Anderson, as she assumed he would. -Perhaps they’d let her go to New Jersey . . .

arrange extradition for Maurice, if he didn’t want to come back with her. . . .

And maybe pigs could fly, too—if they lost weight, and grew wings. . .

. You’re in serious trouble. Ellie supposed she was. Tommy had thought a lot of Connors-thought he was very clever. . . .

When she finished her cheese cake, Ellie got up and went to get a cup of coffee. Her feet didn’t hurt at all.

Her arm was still a little bit stiff, right there where she was cut.

-But not on the surface. Underneath. It felt as though right under there, down in the muscle, was where it was stiff. She hoped that Chinese doctor hadn’t made a mistake, and left her with that for the rest of her life….

It was a luxury to have the whole afternoon off when it wasn’t scheduled

. . . and knowing the rest of the Squad was working, keying in reports, or out driving some jerk in from the airport, or talking to consulate people, or P

U.N. people, or out talking to dealers or sharks or bookmakers, trying to make a case of negligence against some Internal guy. -It would be so much more pleasant to work for the museum . . . restoring, or something. Just a regular job amid all this strenuous and complete art.

No gallery bullshit. -Most of this had been through all that centuries and centuries ago . . . all the begging, and scheming and stealing.

The years had washed most of that away, as the sea scrubbed a beach, and left above tide a perfect blue-green dish, a sword blade fine as ice, a wrought-iron wall lacy as falling water Quietly working, doing her job (and staying out of the office politics), liked by the people here, loved by a shy, handsome man-a scholar, curator of Middle Eastern art.

Settled into a safe life—surrounded every day by the best that men and women had ever been able to do . . .

no one knowing that she painted. Until-for the modern American collection in the American Wing-they bought a new painter, Klein, no one considering that Klein might be Ellie.

Her lover would discover it … would go with a number of people on the museum staff to watch the painting hung-her traffic triptych? Maybe something else, maybe a garden . . . paintings of a garden. A garden of flowers never seen before, and seen now by different light. A garden on another planet, but immediate, imperfect, existent. Only the odd shadow of the gardener, seen against nearly roses. . . . Her lover would see this garden, hung in its separate panels against a wide crearnsilk wall. Would see it, and standing in the crowd of people-all important, knowledgeable, almost all gentle-would know, would say “Ellie

. . .” out loud. And the only one who noticed would be the curator of modern art-fat, nasty, brilliant, who in that instant would also know, and love her till the day he died.

Their Ellie would become Klein.

Her life would be changed . . . her quiet life would be over. From hero detective, she would have changed as if from some ferocious larval stage into a cocooned creature, quiet, restful, valuable-and from that to a thing that flew, iridescent . . . famous. She -and the curator of Middle Eastern art would live in Connecticut. -They would give her an office in the museum, though. People would recognize her, sometimes, when she walked through the halls… cashmere sweater, tweed skirt, black Javanese pearls… her face as severe, lovely, perfect, her blue eyes as brilliant as her work….

Ellie finished her coffee, and walked back up the long corridor of smiles, then through the room where the emperor’s heads sat as they had sat for their sculptors, vain, calm or impatient in uncomfortable chairs set in clear shade off sunny porticoes, their guards standing still in summer-warm armor, red kilts, badges and medallions for Headquarters Service, flies buzzing over a silver bowl of fruit . . . the artist smelling, beneath perfume, the personal odors of the Lord of the World-That-Mattered sweat, oil, garlic, fried mushrooms . . . snowy cotton, bleached with sun and urine. . . .