Jade in Aries (17 page)

“I’ll get one, sir,” the male stenographer said, and left again.

I hadn’t moved. The brown-suited man looked at me without pleasure and said, “I’d prefer it if you’d sit.”

There was nothing to be gained by antagonizing him. I sat down, and he came around me and sat at the desk. He spent a minute or two opening and closing drawers, not so much looking for anything in particular as just settling in, making himself at home, the way a dog circles three or four times before lying down.

He did remove a pencil from the middle drawer, to play with, and played with it. Watching his fingers play with the pencil, he said, as one harassed human being to another, “I don’t know why they don’t put a phone in here.”

I didn’t say anything.

“But you know how it is,” he said, and glanced at me. “You were on the force, weren’t you?”

I nodded, and looked away from him at the window. Neither of us said anything further.

The stenographer finally came back, carrying another wooden chair, this one with all its slats. He put it in the corner behind me, and sat down. “Ready, sir.”

“Fine.” He began tapping the eraser end of the pencil on the desk, thinking about things; then said to the stenographer, “Shut those blinds, will you? I hate that wall out there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t know who keeps opening those things.”

Movement, shuffling, time-killing.

The man at the desk said to me, “We want you to make a statement. You don’t have to if you don’t want. You can request legal counsel if you want, you can make a phone call if you want.”

It was three hours since I’d been brought to the precinct, and now I’d been given the options the law guarantees me. The Supreme Court has still left slack in the line.

I said, “I don’t want to make a statement. I don’t want legal counsel. I don’t want to make a phone call.”

He studied me neutrally. “That’s up to you, of course. We would like you to answer some questions, and before you do you have the right—”

“I don’t intend to answer any questions,” I said.

He frowned. “Mr. Tobin, up to this point you’ve been cooperative. That will have some weight, of course, as to whether or not you’re ultimately charged. You haven’t been charged as yet, and now—”

“The time has come,” I said.

The frown deepened. “What time, Mr. Tobin?”

“The time to shit or get off the pot,” I said.

“Mr. Tobin, a record is being made of this conversation. Certain language should—”

“Then let the record show,” I said, “that I have been held against my will for three hours before being apprised of my rights. Let the record—”

“Against your will? Mr. Tobin, our workload here is such—”

“Complain to Centre Street, I don’t do your financing. Let the record show that I have, at”—I checked my watch—“twenty minutes to five in the afternoon on Sunday, the eighteenth of January, requested that I be either charged with a crime or released.”

“Mr. Tobin,” he said, “I’m a little surprised at your attitude. You
are
guilty of a felony. You need a break around here. Whether you are charged with that felony or not is at our discretion.”

“Then choose,” I said. “Either charge me or release me. Now. I played your game for three hours, and now I don’t want to play any more.”

“Game? Mr. Tobin, your choice of language—”

“As you pointed out,” I said, “before the record started to be taken, I used to be on the force. So I know this game, I’ve played it myself from your side, I know all about it.”

“Mr. Tobin, what you did when you were on the—”

“Was from time to time exactly what you’re doing now. Punishment on the spot. When you’ve got somebody, and you don’t like him, but for one reason or another you don’t want to go through the process of arrest and trial, you just sweat him awhile, make him remember you.”

“Your interpretation of events is up to you,” he said. “But I’ll point out that I’ve never seen you before, that you were guilty of a felony, that there are witnesses to that felony, and that it is in my power to give you a break.”

“You mean, give Manzoni a break.”

“If you mean the arresting officer, Mr. Tobin, you are making no sense.”

“The felony we keep talking about,” I said, “is operating as a private investigator without a license from the State of New York. You couldn’t charge me on that without Detective Manzoni’s handling of a couple of recent cases being eventually brought up in court. I might be jailed for a year or two, though I’d most likely just be fined. Nothing official would be done to Manzoni, but his record would from then on have a little messy spot in it, a little spot that suggested he couldn’t be relied on one hundred percent. Manzoni would have seen his last promotion, and there isn’t one of us in this building that doesn’t know it. If you’re going to give me the break you’re so proud of, do it now. If you’re going to give Detective Manzoni a black eye, do
that
now. Charge me or release me, but do it now.”

He had grown a little red during my speech, not from embarrassment but from anger, and now he said, “The last thing you want to do, fellow, is give me orders.”

I looked at my watch again. “In sixty seconds I’m leaving this room. You can do what you want about it.”

He started to say something angry, but suddenly caught himself and gave me a bleak smile instead. “All right, Mr. Tobin,” he said. “You used to be in the system, you know how it works. Fred, stop taking notes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can leave.” But that was said to the stenographer, not to me.

We both waited while he got to his feet, closed his notebook, put his pencil away in his shirt pocket, and picked up his chair. He left, carrying the chair out of the room with him, and shut the door.

The detective said, “All right, Tobin, what’s the problem?”

“No problem,” I said. “I’ll go now.”

“Don’t hard-nose me,” he said. “What’s Manzoni into?”

“Nothing that would interest a fellow officer.”

“Forget that. If Manzoni’s heading for trouble, the captain wants to know about it.”

I looked at him. “You’re the funnel?” It happened that way, in some precincts: a captain who neither liked nor trusted his men found one of them to spy on the others for him. A funnel, with the wide end in the bullpen and the narrow end in the captain’s ear.

He said, reasonably, “What does it matter to you, Tobin? You don’t have any reason to love Manzoni.”

And yet I still had the bullpen mentality; I automatically sided with Manzoni against the captain’s stooge. I said, “I don’t have any reason to love anybody around here.”

“You won’t level with me? Just the two of us, no witnesses, off the record.”

I got to my feet. “Goodbye,” I said.

“You may want a friend some day,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want it to be you,” I said, and left the little office. I shut the door behind me.

M
ANZONI HIMSELF WAS COMING
down the corridor toward me, and I was so absorbed in my own affairs, and my reactions to the smell of precinct politics I’d just been given a whiff of, that I didn’t notice at first that he looked urgent and intense and worried. I braced myself for trouble from him, and it wasn’t until he spoke that I realized the trouble was his this time, and not mine.

He said, “Forget all that.” As though we’d already been having a conversation. His speed and intensity were the signs of the disaster that had overtaken him, whatever it was. He said, “Are you done in there?” As though it had been a physical examination at a doctor’s office; in any case, something I’d done on my own, that he’d had nothing to do with.

I said, “What now?”

“I want to talk to you. Is Carpenter still in there?” He headed for the room I’d just left. Looking back at me, he said, with irritation, “Come on, will you?” As though we were to stop playing now, something serious had come up.

Just as he reached for the doorknob—and I was trying to make up my mind whether to stick around for this or not—the door opened and Carpenter came out. He looked flustered when he saw Manzoni, and more so when he saw me. He must have thought I’d told Manzoni about him, or in any case, intended to. I didn’t; what they did to each other in here made no difference to me.

But Carpenter didn’t know that. “Hi, Aldo,” he said, and his nervousness was so intense that if Manzoni hadn’t already been caught up in this other thing, he would have understood it all right then and there, without being told by anybody. But Manzoni could see nothing right now other than his own problems, and he nodded a distracted greeting, pushed past Carpenter into the room, and gestured through the doorway irritably for me to follow.

Carpenter tried to catch my eye, to warn me to keep my mouth shut, but I wouldn’t let it be caught. I had decided I wanted to know what had happened that had so disturbed Manzoni, so I, too, stepped past Carpenter and went back into the little office, and Manzoni shut the door in Carpenter’s face.

I said, “What is it?”

Neither of us contemplated sitting down. Manzoni paced halfway to the window, turned back, gave me a tightly anguished look, said, “David Poumon’s dead.”

My immediate reaction was,
Cary Lane did it, to make the prophesy come true.
Only after that did I think,
It came true!

Manzoni had pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and was nervously poking a finger into it, trying to get at one of the last remaining cigarettes. “But it’s all right,” he said. “We got him.”

“You got who?”

“The one who did it. Another spade faggot, named Leo Ross. You’ve met him.”

That’s astonishing,
I thought. I said, “How was he gotten?”

“He made a stupid mistake. He locked himself on the roof.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Tobin, what the hell does it matter how this all happened? The point is, Poumon’s dead.”

“You’re going to fit Ross for the Dearborn killing, too?”

“Fit him?”

“I don’t mean frame. Do you think he’s it?”

Manzoni shrugged. With obvious reluctance, he said, “He probably is. We’ll have to talk to him when they bring him in.”

I said, “And Cornell, too?”

He didn’t quite meet my eye. “We’ll look into that, too.”

“Now that there’s been another death. Do you want Cornell to pay you what he was going to pay me, or will your city salary be enough?”

His anger was mostly defensive. “I followed my opinion,” he said, meeting my eye now, glaring at me. “I acted about the facts the way I read them.”

“The sad thing is,” I said, “you half-believe that. Within a week you’ll believe it all the way. What do you want with me now, Manzoni? I’m tired, I want to go home.”

“What the other one said at the hospital,” he said, reluctant, hesitating. “You know, Lane.”

“When he said Poumon would be killed?”

“It was supposed to be astrology!” he burst out peevishly, as though
he
were the one being treated unfairly. “Who’d pay any attention to that?”

I didn’t want to give Manzoni the benefit of any doubts, I disliked him too much for that, but I couldn’t help putting myself in his place and wondering how I would have reacted under the same circumstances. One murder, one attempted murder. Somebody deeply involved in the case says there’ll be a third, and gives the name of the victim. When asked the source of his information, he says astrology. (Or a Tarot deck. Or palmistry. Or ESP. Or the I Ching. Or a dream. Or whatever.) What would I do?

I would talk with him. I would not place credence in his source, but I would talk with him, I would try to find out if other things in the environment of the murder had given him hints he didn’t fully understand and had unconsciously converted to a medium he did understand; in this case, astrology. I might eventually turn away, saying there was nothing in it, just as Manzoni had done, but first I would have talked with him. Which Manzoni had not done.

But Manzoni’s question to me just now had not required an answer, and so I gave it none. He rushed on, saying, “Why obscure the issue? That doesn’t have to come up at all. You’re out of it, I’m out of it, Cornell is out of it, we’ve got the killer, so why drag in anything else?”

I said, “You’re telling me you don’t want me to mention to anybody that you were warned Poumon would be killed.”

“He said it was astrology!”

“Whatever he said it was, you don’t want me to mention it.”

His mouth moved, his hands moved, as though he would present arguments; at last he just dropped his hands to his sides, shrugged, and said, “That’s right.”

“Manzoni,” I said, “you’re the worst judge of human nature I ever met in my life.
I’m
not going to mention
anything
about this mess to
anybody.
I’m going home, and I’m going to stay there. But Ronald Cornell and Cary Lane are going to crucify you; those two faggots, as you love to call them, are going to nail you to the cross, and I couldn’t be happier about it.”

“You bastard, what right have you got to—”

“No right at all. I’ve seen cops like you before, Manzoni, I worked with some in the old days and I could never get used to them. Self-righteousness instead of brains. You’re a threat to everybody in the world who isn’t named Manzoni, and it’s a rare treat to see one of you birds become at last a threat to himself. Goodbye,” I said, and left, and went home.

K
ATE WANTED ME TO
see Cornell again, but there was no point to it, so I didn’t do it. I was still very surprised that it had turned out to be Leo Ross, but whoever it had turned out to be I wasn’t the one who’d found him, so I rated no payment. Cornell was out from under the Manzoni threat, Ross was in jail, I wasn’t going to be hassled for practicing without a license after all, and there was nothing left to be done. The whole thing was finished, as far as I was concerned. That evening, and again the next morning, I went back to work in the basement.

Except it wasn’t finished.

Kate came downstairs about three o’clock the next afternoon, Monday, to tell me Henry Koberberg was in the living room and wanted to talk to me.

I should have known he’d be along. He wasn’t a stupid man, far from it; it was only inevitable that he would come to me.