The Last Nightingale (9 page)

It wasn't the labor of the job that challenged him, it was the question of what to do about his predecessor's complex web of favors and punishments in the running of the station. He already
knew quite a bit about his predecessor's private agenda, men who were owed favors, payoffs, or reprimands by the precinct. His knowledge of secret things was a clear and convincing sign that he carried a bigger than average nightstick, but how long could that faint intimidation last? If there was any hope at all of staying on in this position—an impossibility that it embarrassed him to consider—much more was going to be required of him.

Most importantly, Moses knew that it was vital to begin sending out a steady stream of authoritative signs to the rank and file. He needed to act as if he would always be the Station Chief, even if that was absurd. So far, he had only been able to put off fulfilling the old obligations because of all the chaos in the recovering city. But his honeymoon period in the new job had stretched to the maximum, and now human nature was kicking back in. If Moses were going to hang onto this awful blessing for even a little bit longer, then he needed to make himself known as a man of action. He had to send all the right signals to the brass and to the men.

The thing that galled him was that the favors were to be done for people to whom Moses owed no gratitude. The punishments were also for those whom he regarded with no malice. No doubt the people on the receiving end of those things, good or bad, were wringing their hands while they waited for a sign as to what to expect from the new management down at the precinct station. The department brass, no doubt, expected him to willingly participate in their ongoing patterns of petty evils, in the name of the greater good. For the greater good: Follow the Devil's map to Heaven. Trust what it tells you and ignore your own senses.

He glanced down at the notation for his next appointment and saw a perfect example of it all: Sergeant Randall Blackburn. Moses was aware that his predecessor had habitually handed out the contemptible assignments of the Barbary Coast district to Sergeant Blackburn, in spite of the man's excellent police work. Blackburn was a sacrifice for the rank and file. Moses saw it as a pitiful sop to all the officers who resented Blackburn's do-or-die attitude. So in-
stead of slapping the lazy and envious bastards back into discipline, somebody up in the department brass figured that it was easier to make a show out of Blackburn's career. They left him permanently on the least desired and most dangerous walking beat in order to set him up as a thing of ridicule, thereby defusing the growls and whines of a bunch of little boy cops who should have been wearing knee britches if they were that fragile.

Moses also knew about Gibbon and Mummery, the two recruits who bought their way into the station's force because their fathers were on the City Council. They drew the best assignments, turned in the worst performances, and suffered no consequence beyond an occasional verbal reprimand. Even the reprimand was performed entirely for show. They sneered their way through most of their assignments and produced results that a child could beat. And proof that there is a Devil: They had both survived the earthquakes.

There were a dozen examples, no doubt with more to come. The real job of Station Chief wasn't roll call and paperwork, it was Lord High Executioner. It was precisely that sort of power that Gregory Moses had always loathed and avoided, the power that brings out aspects of people's personalities he had never cared for at all. It was painfully ironic to him that such cynical petty evils were part of why he had effectively retreated from the dangerous human race, making it so hard for him to work in that arena now. Such things had combined to make it easy for him to give up on the outside world in the first place, to surrender to the private joys of chewing and swallowing.

On the horns of this dilemma, Moses wondered what the surviving officers
actually expected
of him. Were they looking for a signal that the status quo would go on, or did they want him to break out in some new direction?

Worst of all, if Moses tried to make a peace gesture—say, just wipe the slate clean and let it all go—could it backfire on him and send a message of weakness? If that happened, then once they re-
moved him and sent him back to Record Keeping, everyone would know that Moses had failed his golden opportunity. He would have to continue coming to work every day, to a place where contempt for Gregory Moses was going to be the rule from then on, with the safety of retirement still years away.

He concluded that no matter what lay ahead, his only hope of enduring in this position was to carry out the roster of petty evils that had been willed to him. If he did, perhaps these minor concessions to a hungry demon might be enough to let him hold on to this job, this windfall, this unexpected and undeserved boon, for just a little while longer. Because it felt so champagne smooth in those isolated moments, whenever he was alone in a room without eyeballs on him, to look into a mirror and regard himself as a worthy man. How fine would it be, to actually hold on to all of this?

With that, it was time to deal with this business about Sergeant Blackburn. Once he did, his position would soon be widely known, traveling at the speed of gossip. Moses stepped to the door of his office and leaned out to take a look; Randall Blackburn was waiting on the long bench that lined the hallway.

Back in his office with the door closed, Moses leaned against his desk, making elaborate business out of lighting a cigar while Blackburn stood quietly, waiting. Moses sat and got settled before speaking.

“The problem, Sergeant—as I see it, at least—is that the United States Army has done an exemplary job in helping to restore order here. And I mean they did it to the point that they made us all look bad. Let us salute the Army," he added in a voice dry enough to cure meat.

“I think you'll have to salute them for me, Lieutenant. There were soldiers openly looting some of the same houses they were sent to protect in the first damn place.”

“Mm. And how do you know this?”

“I saw them.”

“Did you stop them?”

"No.”

“Did you try?”

“No. I shot over the heads of some civilian looters. Didn't do much good.”

“You didn't try to stop the soldiers?”

“I said no. Sir.”

“Sergeant! I am
not
in the Record Keeping Department anymore, in case you forgot.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your tone of voice! Regardless of how anyone feels about it, my rank is now Acting Station Chief. You need to reflect that in your attitude!”

Rlackburn calmly stared back at Moses for three or four more heartbeats. It was just long enough for Moses to decide that he needed to retake control.

“The fact is, Sergeant Rlackburn," Moses began, "the thought among our commanders is that this unrestrained behavior by U.S. soldiers—on our turf—is a blow to the reputation of the San Francisco Police Department. Publicly, we are forced to thank the Army for the help. Privately, we'd love to shoot them all in the head. And just between us, the brass have decided that we're going to settle for getting even by outshining the Army.”

“… Outshining?”

“I told you about your tone of voice, Sergeant.”

“Sir. How does it help us, to ‘outshine’ the Army?”

“It doesn't! It helps the department brass. The politicians. Maybe they're the ones we ought to shoot in the head, eh?" He looked up at Rlackburn as if it were time for two fellow conspirators to shake hands and go for a beer.

Rlackburn kept his face blank. "You could do that, but there is that other thing about hanging for it.”

Moses let out a tired sigh. "My God, Rlackburn. You're as tiresome as your reputation, I'll say that." He sat up in his chair. "Now, they appreciate that you were instrumental in keeping
down the threat of disease right after all hell broke loose and everything. But they also figure that in times like these, a month is too long for Sergeant Hero to go without doing something else impressive. Especially in the wake of your allowing the soldiers to run riot, and all.”

“I was under strict orders from Chief Dinan not to stop for any—”

“What you need to do is solve a big case for the Department. Something flashy. Say, an important murder.”

“Sir, I know The Surgeon stepped up from killing drunk sailors with this last so-called gentleman, but every street source I have is looking for—”

“No, you're not going to stick that tired old case into this discussion. We don't know for sure if the new bodies are really The Surgeon's work. Personally, I think that she died in the quakes or the fires. This new one isn't doing the castrations, and I've assured the brass that the last one was faked. No, it's a copycat.”

Moses pushed a paper-thin case file across the desk at Blackburn.

“And here's your lucky break, Sergeant—this case is solved already! All you have to do is bring back everything the District Attorney's office needs to guarantee a conviction, in less than twenty-four hours.”

Blackburn opened the file. There were only two pages inside. Most of what was there had already been in the afternoon paper. A local society gentleman, former Navy Captain Harlan Sullivan, had been killed by his mistress the night before, when she invaded his home and shot him in the upstairs bath. His nude body was found collapsed across an industrial-sized scale standing near the large claw-foot bathtub. The captain had sustained a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Witness testimony from wife Elsie Sullivan described how she came home just in time to see the mistress flee out the back. The victim was already dead when the wife got to him.

To the responding officers, she revealed that she and her husband had an "arrangement," and that his mistresses were tolerated by her, so long as he kept them out of her life. She assured the officer that her husband had always followed the arrangement. All she could confirm was that he had somehow lost interest in this latest one and tried to break it off with her. But unlike other mistresses in the past, this one refused to be left behind.

The head butler finally caved in under strong questioning. As the majordomo, he knew everything about the house, and they pressed him hard. He was a strapping man, barely of middle age, but he proved easy to frighten. After a few solid kidney punches, he admitted knowing all about this mistress, and that the husband had recently broken it off with her. When police asked him if it were possible that the wife somehow did it out of jealousy, he laughed out loud; the couple's living arrangement was an open secret. Elsie Sullivan loved the daily banquet of her privileged life. She would never, the majordomo assured them, risk prison for the likes of Mr. Sullivan.

“We arrested the mistress this morning," Moses broke in on Blackburn's reading. "Her name's Marietta Pairo, twenty-nine, very nice looking. They found the murder weapon under her mattress. Not your usual whore, I should think.”

“Was he paying her?" Blackburn asked.

“I don't know.”

“If she's a prostitute, she has to get paid.”

“Sergeant, I don't happen to know
or
care if she—”

“I just mean that a mistress isn't necessarily a whore. She might be blamed for participating in adultery, but sometimes the other woman isn't paid anything at all and really does love—”

“And at twenty-nine," Moses rode over him, "she seems a bit long in the tooth for this sort of work, eh? Anyway, we had to take her in, after killing one of our most prominent citizens and being spotted by his equally prominent wife. So now we have her, we've
got the murder weapon, we know she did it. But since we can only hold her for three days, we've got to get her charged, and the brass wants to bring in an unbeatable case.”

Moses decided to look directly at Blackburn while he delivered his order, instead of casting his eyes downward the way he usually did. He squinted to get his focus, then used his most direct and authoritative voice.

“You need to return with a solid piece of evidence or some great witness testimony, by tomorrow at noon. This case has all the elements of an open-and-shut deal: important society people, wife pressing for a conviction. Naturally, the suspect claims innocence. You just put the story in a nice box for the prosecution, that's all.”

Blackburn stared at the little file, incredulous. There was no official statement from the suspect, no testimony from anyone besides the wife. They had a pistol and one witness. But they "knew" that the mistress did it?

“Lieutenant." Bandall Blackburn spoke in low tones. "Do you mind telling me where this order is coming from?”

Ordinarily, Moses would have dropped his gaze under such a direct challenge. Nothing in the life of the Department's official Becord Keeper prepared him to go man-to-man with a cop who boxed ten rounds with the local toughs every time he went to work. But this time Moses returned the gaze. He even leaned forward while he replied, "Much higher up than either of
us,
you can bet on that.”

It felt good to lie so boldly. The sense of power was wonderful. In that moment Moses became aware of the warmth of his penis lying against his thigh. He continued with added energy.

“You know Blackburn, it seems like you take some kind of pride in being the lone wolf.’ Except I think you forget that
nobody likes
the lone wolf! Understand?" Moses realized that this last line was dangerously close to how he felt about himself, so he didn't wait for an answer.

"You get away with it because you turn in good results. But since it
has
been a month since your last big moment, you need to bring this one home, and fast.”

He ended in feigned innocence. "At least, that's how the word comes down to me. So just go ahead and walk the Barbary Coast beat tonight, but follow any leads you develop, then stay on to work this case until noon. Put in for the overtime.”

Moses deliberately capped the order with a shrug, but somehow it didn't feel right. Easy gestures of casual authority were a form of arrogance that Moses had yet to master. With a rush of self-consciousness, he realized that his fake shrug most likely resembled the involuntary spasm of a man who just sat down on a cold toilet.