Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (22 page)

 
          
Vigano
slowly turned the pages of the book. He was sitting at a wooden table in the
library of his own home, turning the pages, looking at the faces on each page.
Marty was also at the table, looking through a second book. The other books
were being studied over at a second table by everyone who’d had a look at the
guy who’d come here a month ago to ask what he should stead that Vigano would
pay two million dollars for.

 
          
The
messenger who’d brought the books down from New York was waiting in a car in
the driveway. It had cost a lot of money to get the loan of these books for the
night, and the messenger had to get them back no later than six tomorrow
morning. The books contained the official photo of every policeman currently on
active duty with the New York Police Department.

 
          
During
the day, these same books were being looked at by the employees and guards of
the stock brokerage that had been robbed. So far, according to Vigano’s
information, they hadn’t come up with anything.

 
          
Neither had Vigano.
The faces all began to blend together
after a while, all those eyebrows, hairlines, noses. Vigano was tired and
irritable, his eyes were burning, and what he really wanted to do was kick
these goddam books across the room.

 
          
If
only Marty hadn’t lost the son of a bitch the night he was here. Afterwards, it
was easy to see the thing had been a set-up, the cop at the head of the stairs
in Penn Station had to have been the first guy’s partner, but at the time there
hadn’t been any way for Marty to guess that. He hadn’t been present for the
conversation, he hadn’t known there was a possibility the guy he was following
was a cop, nor that he’d spoken about having a partner. Later on, when they’d
compared notes back here at the house, it had been easy to see what had been
done.

 
          
It
had been simple and clever, like the robbery. Whether the two of them were
really cops or not, they were fast and shrewd, and they shouldn’t be
underestimated.

 
          
Whether they were cops or not.
That was the worst of looking
through these lousy books, there was still a good chance the guy wasn’t really
a cop at all. At what point was he disguised as a cop and at what point was he
a real cop? He and his partner had been disguised in police uniforms when
they’d pulled the robbery; had his claiming to be a police officer while he was
here in this house been simply the same disguise?

 
          
All
the faces in the books looked alike. Vigano knew he wasn’t going to get
anywhere, but he believed in being thorough. He would look through all the
books, every one.

           
And so would Marty, and so would the
others. It wouldn’t do any good, but they’d do it.

 
          
One
way and another, Vigano was determined to find those two.
Cops
or no cops.

 
          
Sometimes
on the night shift Ed and I go out and do a turn around the precinct in our
Ford, rather than sit in the Detective Division squadroom and wait for the
calls to come in. The night shift is when you get most of your street crime,
and it sometimes helps to be out there and in movement; often, when a squeal
comes in, we’re already in the neighborhood, and can get to it faster with
instructions from the dispatcher than if we’d actually taken the phone call
from the complainant ourselves.

 
          
So
that’s what Ed and I were doing that night, around one in the morning. This was
nearly a week after the robbery. Joe and I hadn’t talked about the robbery at
all since the morning after in the car, and I hadn’t yet made my phone call to
Vigano. I hadn’t worked out in my own head any reasons for not calling Vigano,
I just hadn’t seemed to get around to it.

 
          
The
robbery itself had stayed hot news for three or four days. It was linked up
with some department-store holdups in Detroit from a couple of years ago that
had also involved guys wearing police uniforms but that seemed to be about the
only lead the authorities had. An interdepartmental memo had come through,
asking everybody to think back to the day of the robbery and try to remember
anything unusual they might have noticed in connection with any patrol car on
that day, or with any other member of the force. That was about the extent of
the investigation within the Police Department, but even that was too much for
the PBA. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which I must admit is very
rarely benevolent about much of anything, raised such a stink about that memo,
and the implication it contained that police officers might actually have been
involved in the crime, that the Commissioner himself called a press conference
to apologize and say the memo had been “ill-judged.” And that had been about
the last newsworthy item in connection with the robbery; for the last day or
two, there’d been nothing about it on television at all.

 
          
It
was beginning to look as though we hadn’t made any mistakes in planning the job
or pulling it off. Now all we had to do was not make any of the normal
post-crime mistakes, such as getting drunk in public and talking about what a
sharp operator you are, or hiding the loot some place where it could be found
by the wrong person, or spending the money right away in a big spree, or
quitting our jobs and taking off to live a completely different life. We knew
all the
mistakes,
we’d seen them all from the other
side. So far, we seemed to have done all right for ourselves.

 
          
Before
the robbery, I’d thought it would be very tough to come back to work after it,
that I’d have a hard time going through the regular grind knowing I had a
million dollars salted away. But the fact was
,
I
seemed to enjoy the job more than I had in years. The robbery had been like a
vacation. It was true I didn’t actually have Vigano’s million dollars yet, but
I took it for granted I was going to get it, and I didn’t care. Except for that
morning with the hangover, I’d been actually happy to go to work every day I’d
had duty since the robbery.

 
          
Partly
I suppose it was the vacation idea; committing the robbery had been such a
total break in the routine that it gave the routine a kind of fresh lease on
life. But also, for the first time in my life I could look forward to an end of
the routine. I mean, an end other than death or retirement, neither of which
prospect had ever cheered me very much. But now the routine was going to end at
a time when I’d still be young enough to enjoy it
And
rich enough to enjoy it, too; a hell of a lot richer than I’d ever thought I
was going to be.

 
          
Who
wouldn’t be happy working six months for a salary of one million dollars?

 
          
Then
there was another thing. Weather affects crime, believe it or not. If it’s too
hot or too cold, too rainy or too snowy, a lot of crimes just don’t get
committed; the people who would have committed them stay at home and watch
television. This last week had been very hot, and my tours had been quiet and
peaceable. I’d caught up with a lot of my back paperwork, I’d relaxed, I’d
taken it easy. Even if I weren’t being paid a million dollars for it, I
wouldn’t have minded very much working this last week.

           
Which changed, all
of a sudden.
And it was a very small thing that made it change, small
and stupid. I never really entirely understood why it made such a big
difference inside my head.

 
          
It
was the night Ed and I were on the night shift, and out driving around in the
Ford. Things had been quiet for about an hour until a little after one o’clock
a call came in that somebody had been attacked over in Central Park. We were
pretty close to the park at the time, so Ed, who was driving, said, “Shall we
head on over there?”

 
          
The
squeal hadn’t been directed to us, though we’d heard it on the radio. “Sure,” I
said. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

 
          
“Fine,”
he said.

 
          
There
was no urgency, since we weren’t the primary team responding to the squeal, so
we drove over without siren or red light, and stopped near the park entrance at
West 87th Street. We got out of the car, unlimbered the pistols in our hip
holsters, left the guns holstered, and walked into the park.

 
          
We
could see the group ahead of us, down the black-top path and under one of the
old-fashioned street lights they have in there. One guy was sitting on the
black-top, and three others were standing around him. One of the standing men
was in
uniform,
all the others were in civvies.

 
          
When
we got a little closer, I could make out the faces. I didn’t know the
patrolman, but the other two standing men were detectives from my precinct; one
was named Bert and the other Walter. They were talking to the guy sitting on
the ground.

 
          
I
recognized him, too. Not individually; I mean I recognized his type. He was a
homosexual, young and slender and delicate, wearing tight pale-blue chinos and
white sandals and a white fishnet shirt. He was pretty obviously what’s called
a cruiser, a faggot who hangs around one of the gay areas of the city looking
to get picked up. They very frequently get beat up, too, and sometimes they get
killed. They also have a higher incidence of VD than any other group in the
city. I won’t say it’s a kind of life I understand.

 
          
At
the moment, this one was scared out of his mind, terrified, trembling all over.
He was so fragile-
looking,
he looked as though he
might break his own bones with all that shivering he was doing.

 
          
When
we got close enough to hear voices, it was the boy on the ground who was
talking. He could hardly speak; his voice was trembling and his throat
apparently kept closing up on him. All the time he struggled to talk, his hands
kept fluttering around. I hate to say they fluttered like butterflies, but
that’s what they reminded me of.

 
          
He
was saying, “I don’t know why he’d do it. There wasn’t any reason, there was
just—
There
wasn’t any reason. Everything was fine,
and then—” He stopped talking, and let the fluttering of his hands finish the
story.

 
          
Walter,
one of the plainclothesmen, preferred words to hands. Not sounding at all
sympathetic, he said, “Yeah?
Then what?”

 
          
The
hands fluttered to his throat. “He started to choke me.” The street-light glare
was in his face as he looked up at us, bleaching out whatever color was left in
it, reducing his face to little more than a twisting mouth and staring eyes.
With that face, and the gracefully twitching hands, he suddenly also reminded
me of pantomimists I’ve seen on television. You’ve seen them; they cover their
faces with white make-up, and wear dark clothing and white gloves, and they
pretend to be in love, or to be an airplane, or to be mixing a martini. This
one seemed to be doing a pantomime impression of terror.

 
          
Except
that he was talking. Hands still at his throat, he said again, “He choked me.
He was screaming awful things, terrible, and just choking me.” His hands
trembled at his throat.

 
          
Walter,
still not sympathetic, said, “What was he saying?”

 
          
The
expressive hands came down, flattening out. “Oh, please,” he said.
“Oh, just terrible things.
I don’t even want to remember
them.”

 
          
Walter’s
partner Bert was
grinning
a little as he watched and
listened, and now he said, “What did you say you were doing just before the
attack?”

 
          
Evasiveness
cut through the young man’s agitation. Suddenly nervous as much for his present
situation as for what had happened to him in the past, he gestured vaguely with
both hands, looked away from us all, blinked, and said, “Well—■” He
stopped, ducked his head, twisted his shoulders around. “We were just talking,
just—” He looked up at us again, looking like the heroine of a silent movie
melodrama, and said, “Everything was fine, there wasn’t any reason at all.”

 
          
“Talking,”
Bert said. He jerked his head to the right and said, “Over there in the bushes
at two in the morning.”

 
          
He
clasped his hands together. “But there wasn’t any reason to
choke
me,” he said.

 
          
I
wondered why he kept reminding me of silent things—pantomimists and silent
movies—when he was steadily talking. Of course, as much as anybody was really
listening to him, he might as well have been silent. He’d thought he’d found a
friend, and he’d been betrayed, and that was most of the pain he was showing
us. But we’d all seen it before, and we had other ways to describe it. All
Walter and Bert were hearing—and all I’d be hearing, if I was the one who’d
have to fill out the report on this— were the facts. Like that old police show
on television used to say, all we want are the facts, ma’am.

 
          
Walter
was saying now, “Can you give us any identification on him?”

 
          
“Well
...” He thought about it, sitting there in the middle of us, and said, “He, uh,
he had a tattoo.” He said it as though he were proud of having remembered, and
expected a gold star.

 
          
Ed
said, “A tattoo?” The incredulity in his voice was almost comic.

 
          
I
looked at Ed beside me, and saw he was grinning. Looking down at that poor jerk
and grinning. I thought, Ed’s a nice
guy,
he’s really
a very nice guy, decent and straight. What the hell was he doing grinning down
at some poor bastard who’s been betrayed and choked and humiliated by some
other son of a bitch?

 
          
And me, too.
I was in the ring around the guy, one of the
five cops standing around him, brought out to do our duty to protect him from
bodily harm.

 
          
I
took a step backward, as though to get out of the circle. I really didn’t
understand it myself, it was just a feeling I had,
that
I didn’t want to be a part of this any more.

 
          
The
guy on the ground was explaining about the tattoo. “On his forearm," he
said.
“His, uh, his left forearm.”
He pointed to his
own left forearm. “It was in the shape of a torpedo,” he said.

 
          
Walter
laughed, and the guy pouted at him. He was getting over his fear now, and his
normal mincing mannerisms were returning to him.

 
          
That
wasn’t the way God had made him. And none of us were the way God had made us,
either.

           
I remembered again that hippie
talking about what the city does to people, and that none of us had started
this way.

 
          
Bert
was saying, ‘"What about a name? He
give
you any
kind of name before you went off in the bushes with him?”