Shadows Everywhere (9 page)

Day saw that the door to the lieutenant's office was open about quarter way, and he heard voices from inside. Laughter, loud talking, silence, then "Oh, sure, sure, Harry," somebody said with emphasis, and there was another laugh.

Sighing with impatience, Day leaned against the counter. The desk sergeant, old Hap Kramer, continued bringing his records up to date, hunched over the long counter as if he were oblivious to anyone else's presence. Near the other end of the room several younger, uniformed officers lounged, talking while one of them finished a report to give the clerk to type. Behind them was the door to the holdover, about half full now, because the night had barely begun.

The Eighth Precinct house was a crummy place, Day reflected. It was really an old converted four-family flat, in a crummy neighborhood among crummy people. Some of the people he had to work with were crummy too.

Day caught himself and made his mind take some other tack. It was no good thinking that way. He'd chosen this for his career, and he was a thirty-four-year-old detective now, doing well enough...under the circumstances. Still, it got to a man every so often: the squalor of the job, the unappreciative, misunderstanding, even despising public. There was the hopelessness of trying to get convictions, of long hours of hard work going for nothing–hours he knew he should be spending at home with Audrey and his boy Greg. Sam Day had risen fast enough in the department, but only to a point, it seemed. Suddenly, men with less ability, even less time on the force, began to pass him, were given more responsibility, chances to prove themselves. He adjusted the chafing shoulder strap of his holster and silently cursed the heat, and despite himself he looked around him again and wondered if it were worthwhile.

The lieutenant's door opened all the way as there was another loud laugh, and a short man with a yellow face and thin wisps of black hair walked out, smiling to himself: Jack Vectin, Twelfth Precinct alderman. Idly, Day wondered what he'd been talking about with the lieutenant. Not that it mattered.

"
Boston Eight
," Day heard the speaker near the switchboard operator blare, "
go
10538
Chambers Street and investigate a reported cutting.
"

Nothing for me,
Day thought to himself as he half listened to the patrol car's laconic reply. For the present he'd been assigned to the burglary detail.

Then Lieutenant Harold Weston appeared in the doorway to his office. A man of medium height with a deceptive smoothness to his round face, a deceptive blandness to his eyes, he was acting captain in charge of the Eighth Precinct. He placed his cigar in his mouth and waved for Day to enter.

"How you been making it?' he asked Day, as he settled himself behind his desk and motioned for Day to sit in a nearby small wooden chair.

"Good enough, I suppose, Lieutenant." Day wondered why he'd been summoned, wished the man would get to the point.

"Don't get the idea I asked you in here to chew you out," Lieutenant Weston said. "Nothing like that. More just a word of caution."

"Caution?" Day began to feel uneasy. He knew he was talking to a much smarter man than appeared on the surface to anyone.

The lieutenant looked thoughtful, chewed on his cigar. "Maybe more like advice. I learned a few hours ago that Fred Brent left town and nobody knows where he went."

Day was silent; he knew what that meant. Brent had committed a large-scale burglary at Hollman's Department Store. The police were sure he did it, and in time they would have gathered enough evidence to bring him in. Gathering that evidence was Day's job, and the fact that Brent had cut and run meant that Day had not been quite careful enough and had somehow alerted him.

"A month down the drain," Day said to the lieutenant, "unless he comes back."

"He won't be back," Lieutenant Weston said, "not Brent. Somebody tipped him you were investigating him. You asked somebody the wrong questions."

Day didn't answer. He didn't feel like saying he was sorry. He felt like telling this good cop, Lieutenant Weston, just what he could
do with the Brent case.

"You've been moving in on them too soon and too fast," the lieutenant said. "Hard as it is to get convictions these days, we've got to be sure."

"You and I both know he's guilty," Day said, and he knew as soon as he'd spoken that it was an inexcusably dumb thing to say. Lieutenant Weston stared at him.

"Sure,
we
know it, Day. But the judge doesn't, and the jury doesn't, and it doesn't matter a damn to them what we think we know. Our job isn't to decide guilt or innocence. You know that. We gather evidence we can hand to the prosecutor. We don't let personal feelings enter into what we do."

"I don't need a police academy refresher course, sir."

Lieutenant Weston laid his cigar in a brass ash tray and looked hard at Day, anger darkening his round face. "1 told you, Day, this is no chewing-out. No need to get so damn upset. Just don't do it again."

Day nodded.

The lieutenant picked up his cigar, then leaned hack and seemed to study Day. "I know it's hard," he said. "It's always been hard."

"I suppose it has, sir." Day really didn't want to argue with Lieutenant Weston. Like most of the other officers, he had respect for the man's professionalism and candor. A direct, almost crude man despite his shrewdness, Lieutenant Weston had a way of always letting you know where you stood with him.

"You've blown a few lately, Day," the lieutenant said. "You're expected to be more careful."

Again
Day nodded.

"I want you to take the
office
upstairs for the next two weeks. Handle the incoming calls while Rogers is on court duty."

"All right, sir." Day tried to keep the disappointment from his voice. The desk job he was being told to man was an empty, monotonous sort of job, with little real responsibility. It was always looked at as something of a put-down when a detective was assigned to it when Rogers was away.

The lieutenant was bent over his desk now, shuffling through some papers and ignoring Day. Day got up to leave.

"Remember," the lieutenant said as Day reached the door, "more careful, huh?"

Day walked from the precinct house, drove the unmarked car to the police garage and left it. Then he drove his own car home to his apartment on Grant Road.

He parked behind the apartment building and got out of the car to go upstairs. A tall, dark-haired man with blue eyes and a boyish face, he looked like anything but a detective, and right now he was wondering if he were a detective. More and more lately, the dream of police work was conflicting sharply with the reality.

At least he'd work fairly regular hours on Rogers' job, he figured, as he opened his front door. Audrey would be glad to hear that.

Day's four-year-old son Greg ran to him when he came in. Grinning, Day turned the small boy away and slapped his rear with mock viciousness. After wrestling for a few minutes, Greg playfully ran off to his room.

Audrey was in the kitchen, setting the timer on the oven. "I heard you come in," she said.

Day smiled. "I guess you couldn't help but hear it."

He looked at her, slim and beautiful in slacks and a sleeveless white blouse; but the lines about her eyes and about the corners of her mouth were new and didn't look as if they belonged. Day blamed himself for those lines.

"I'll have a desk job for a few weeks," he said, hoping to make her smile. "Daytime hours for sure. I was lucky to get it."

She didn't smile, only nodded and gave whatever she'd placed in the oven a final check.

"I thought maybe we'd eat out tonight," Day said.

"Too late for that. You should have called."

"Too busy," Day lied.

"Anyway," Audrey said, "I've got a roast in. That's your favorite." "Have a decent day today?"

"Good enough," she said.

"Greg behave?"

"Good enough."

Day turned away in discomfort. This was the kind of conversation they were having lately: trivial, circling conversations.

After supper that evening Day played with Greg, then watched TV for a while–news, followed by a program about some kids who solved crimes–but he couldn't keep his eyes away from Audrey, from the deepening lines in the smooth flesh of her face. She was only thirty-one. He wondered what she'd look like at thirty-five. At forty.

Things seemed to go better at home during the first week of the desk job, but work was a dull stretch of time that caused a backache. Nothing seemed to break the monotony, and Day wondered how it would be to have a steady desk job. Probably Lieutenant Weston wanted him to wonder that.

Then one clear morning, as he was driving away from the apartment on his way to work, something registered in Day's mind.

The small, tan foreign car behind him had been behind him yesterday morning, and there were other times he'd seen it in his rearview mirror during the past week or so. His memory was jarred by the slightly bent aerial on the car's fender, the dented grill.

Without moving his head, Day kept an eye on the car in his mirror as he drove. The driver of the car was alone, but he never drew near enough for Day to make out his features. When Day was a block from the entrance to the precinct parking lot, he saw the little tan sedan turn a corner behind him, so that it was impossible for him to glimpse the license plate.

During the rest of the week Day noticed the tan car only once more, one day as he was driving to a restaurant for lunch. He didn't waste time thinking too much about the tan car because he really didn't have enough information to think about, but in the back of Day's mind was the knowledge that the car turning up so often behind him was more than a coincidence of someone happening to drive the same routes as he did, and at about the same times.

That Saturday afternoon he was at the Quick Foods supermarket down the street from his apartment, looking for barbecue sauce,
when he happened to glance through the wide windows past the checkout counters. The tan car was parked next to a line of empty grocery carts.

The driver was almost certainly in the store, but Day wasn't going to bother searching for him. He knew he wouldn't have to.

"Detective Sergeant Sam Day?"

The voice behind him was low and even, with a sarcasm in it that never quite surfaced.

Day turned around. The man who'd spoken was of average height and build, wearing expensive slacks and a sport shirt. He had a face to match his voice, regular features, rather long nose, and a mouth that was almost curved in a sarcastic smile. Sam knew the face but couldn't match it with a name or place.

The man took care of that for him. "Bill Grindle's my name," he said. "And you've probably seen me around."

Now Day remembered where he'd seen the face. "The only place I can remember seeing you is in your mug shots," he said. "Burglary, isn't it?"

Grindle nodded. "Three arrests, one conviction."

"I have noticed your car, though," Day said. "You've been following me for about a week. I would now like to know why."

Now Grindle did smile, but his eyes never blinked. "That's why I came here, to let you know. It so happens I've got something to tell you."

That surprised Day. Grindle had never been known to be a police informer.

"I've been watching you, Sergeant Day. You haven't been doing too well at your job, work's getting you down, like it gets a lot of them. A smart man eventually realizes what's going on."

"Going on?"

"In the department, I mean. The way most of the higher-ups got to where they are."

Day felt the anger come alive in his stomach and stepped forward. "Are you making me a proposition, Grindle?"

Grindle showed not the slightest sign of fear. "Now, Sergeant, I know you're a dedicated man, an idealist, but it's time to combine idealism with practicality. I wouldn't suggest anything to you that your superiors on the force hadn't done to get where they are. They realized earlier than you what they needed to do to be more efficient police officers. They knew they had to have their contacts on the other side to find out things for them."

Day still hadn't made out Grindle's game. It sounded now as if the man might want to sell some information, but that didn't quite add up.

A woman pushing a loaded cart came down the aisle, stopping to pick out a jar of pickles, and the two men waited until she'd gone.

"How would you like to solve a burglary next week, Sergeant?" Grindle asked in his soft voice.

"You know the answer to that," Day said irritably. "Keep talking."

"There's an estate out in the south end that's going to be burglarized sometime next week by two men, both old pros. Arresting either one of them would mean solving a lot of burglaries that have happened in the past year or so, a real cleanup that makes for better statistics."

"And you want money for telling me when and where," Day said.