“He’s over there.”
Orange Lips the stoolie pointed with a long, bony index finger through the window of the unmarked Chevrolet. Monahan peered through the gray cloud of cigarette smoke that Orange Lips had made across a vacant lot at the corner of East Ninety-sixth Street that was strewn with used condoms and broken glass. There was a thin young black man in a knit cap in the distance. He was smoking, too. Monahan could see the circle of orange at the tip of a cigarette in the darkness of the morning. He looked as nervous as Monahan felt.
“We’ll walk it,” Monahan said. “Get out.”
“Shee-it!”
“Let’s go.”
Monahan slipped quietly out the driver’s door, shut it lightly. Orange Lips made a slamming fuss on his side. Monahan walked around the front of the car and grabbed Orange Lips by the back of his neck. He dug his thick fingers deep into Orange Lips’ skin, then pressed hard against his collarbone. He used his other hand to cover Orange Lips’ mouth.
“You don’t come along with me on this nice and quiet, pal, you’re going to get a little cop hell. You know what I mean, don’t you, Orange Lips?”
Monahan released him. He wouldn’t have any more trouble.
The two men walked across the lot, in the direction of the nervous thin man in the distance, the ASPCA Building looming behind him. The air was damp and a little chilly. Monahan hadn’t slept all night, not with Orange Lips to watch and not with the idea that he might have Kano collared in the morning.
The thin man spat the cigarette out of his lips and stepped on it when it hit the ground. Orange Lips spoke.
“This is the detective dude, man,” he said to the thin black man. To Monahan, “This is Moses.”
Neither man offered a hand.
“What do you got for me, Moses?” Monahan asked.
“Hey, Mick, you tell Moses what you got for him, understand?”
“For you, maybe I got criminal association. You know Orange Lips here and you’re violating your parole just by talking to him and I know you did because here we all are, right? So that’s enough for me to crack you on a nickel beef. You got me up out of my warm bed on this cold morning, away from my nice warm lady and standing around here with two pieces of the ugliest shit walking the streets and I’m mad, see, so maybe I’ll just do the nickel beef. What do you say?”
“Motherfuck—”
“Not a bad idea, slimeball. Where’s your mama, anyway?”
Moses cocked an arm and swung at Monahan, but Monahan knew what he was doing, knew the punch was coming, and blocked it with his right forearm. At the same time, he raised a knee into Moses’ crotch and made a dull, painful contact.
Moses fell to his knees, both hands between his legs.
“Get up,” Monahan said. He turned to Orange Lips. “You get him up, pal, or you get the same and then I’ll run you both in to that little museum we talked about.”
Orange Lips stuck out his hand and Moses used it to right himself.
“Okay, toilet cake,” Monahan said. “Let’s get it straight and short because I can’t take much more of your stink.” He reached into his breast coat pocket and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill, then slapped it into Moses’ hand. “Give it to me.”
Moses told him quick about the all-night filling station uptown, told him how Kano used it twice a week, just where he drove into the place, how long it took to fill up the Lincoln and which direction he took leaving.
“Ever anybody with him?” Monahan asked.
“Just puss.”
“All the time or some of the time?”
“Puss sometime, sometime a bimbo. You know, white-bread shit. He most always with puss one kind or another.”
“One, two? More?”
“Sometime two pusses. Least one all the time.”
“And that’s all?”
“Kano be the only cannon, if that’s what you’re sayin’. He do what he do all by his lonesome, man. He run with the players sometime,’cause he can’t keep his hands off that white shit, but he don’t run with nobody like him.”
Monahan liked it. It sounded right, like Moses wasn’t hiding anything, like he knew just what he knew and no more. Monahan almost felt sorry about kneeing Moses in the balls. He put his hands behind his back, clasped them, looked around to see if Moses had any friends nearby. Not so far as he could tell.
“How’s the family jewels?” he asked Moses.
“Fuckin’ poe-lice brutality, man!” Moses turned his head and spat on the ground defiantly. He would have spit in the cop’s face if he could and then he would have cut him and thought nothing about it. Under the circumstances, though, it was best to complain about police brutality.
“Sometimes I wonder if a turd like you could have thought up that phrase all by himself,” Monahan said.
Moses looked at Orange Lips, his eyes flashing. “This poe-lice a case, man. He makin’ me awful hot.”
“Now I want you two to come along with me,” Monahan said.
“Hey, I ain’t goin’ nowheres with no nutjob pig, man!” Moses said.
“Come on, brother. We goin’ be okay if we just get the hell out of here, right?” With that, Orange Lips put a friendly grip on his pal Moses’ shoulder.
Monahan almost could have kissed Orange Lips. Almost.
He grinned at his two snitches. “Now look how good it can be when the law-abiding members of the community cooperate with their local law enforcement agents. I tell you fellows, America is a wonderful place.”
“Motherfucker’s a fuckin’ case, man!” Moses said to Orange Lips.
Dominick Salvato awoke with the usual nightmare. He sat up in bed and drew his knees up to his chest and clasped them with his arms. He trembled a little less that way. There was a roaring sound in his head, something like a subway express train barreling around a curve, somewhere beyond visibility.
It hadn’t come in a while, the nightmare. For two days, he didn’t sleep. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw it. Then everybody worked on him—Inspector Short, a psychological counselor for the department, the department lawyer, his family, his fellow officers at the Nineteenth.
It’s not your fault.… The guy was a creep, a rapist creep who took aim at you. … You did what you had to do. … He was nothing and all the people he was victimizing, including your partners, had to be protected. … You helped the innocent and the weak against this creep, this racist, this scum of the earth.
For a few hours at a time, sometimes only a few minutes, it all helped. But then Salvato could only seem to see this nobody kid, a good-looking Puerto Rican kid who no one claimed at the morgue, this kid who was buried now under the earth somewhere out on Hart Island, the Potter’s Field of New York. He saw that handsome kid, dark-eyed and wavy-haired, his face so eerily peaceful in death, lying there in the blood on the street. It was Salvato himself who first noticed that the weapon aimed at him was a pellet gun.
Dominick Salvato had gone to his priest:
It’s not a question of right or wrong, son. … There isn’t anything I can tell you that will take away your pain. … But try to understand how life-affirming your own pain is, son; it shows you’re humane and compassionate, it shows you reverence life if you feel so responsible for the death of even one of the least of us. … Don’t you see?. … Given the facts at hand, you were the man who happened to have had to do what was inevitable. … We can only work to your grace now; you and I can pray for the soul of this Miguel. …
The priest’s words helped Salvato more than he thought they would. “Everybody says that,” the priest told him. “We’re not so bad, you know, even though our mothers dressed us funny.”
The priest’s humor helped, too. But even that, along with his wisdom, was enough. Salvato began to learn what most every other cop in the same situation learns, that the power he holds is more awesome than he ever imagined—and the consequences of that power as well.
A thought popped into his head as he sat up in bed, as he pulled at his legs to keep them from shaking: Maybe I’ll go up there to Hart Island someday, to Miguel’s grave …
He learned, too, to take comfort in the occasional nightmare as the closest thing to knowing an understanding source, a friend who had gone through precisely the same experience. The nightmares, though they hurt his head, also did their part to make Salvato understand that what had happened under those streetlamps was a tragedy, not an evil.
Yet for a time, Salvato had thought his burden might be lighter if someone could find that he had been wrong, that somehow he shot the wrong person, shot when something short of deadly force would have done the job of stopping a thief. Something! Some way that punishment could be visited on him, some way that he might be made to feel he could pay for what happened.
But no one had anything for him on that order. Everyone comforted him. Salvato didn’t even have the accusation of police brutality leveled against him. If someone had told him he would have welcomed such a charge, he would have denied it. Yet he did wish he could feel punishment coming. The priest said it was his “Catholic guilt” working against him and laughed.
Everyone felt sorry for Dominick Salvato, the cop who killed the “creep,” the “rapist creep.”
Children who lived on his street in the Woodhaven section of the Bronx looked at him oddly. Salvato was the big guy who killed somebody. Watch out for Officer Salvato! Hey, Officer Salvato, are you going to shoot me?
Salvato shut his eyes. He opened them and looked toward his bedroom window, saw his reflection and didn’t recognize it. He shook again.
Then a thought hammered into his head. It came to mind like some half-forgotten old tune:
Too much power… too much power for any one man … maybe too much power for me.…
Later, after another hour of lying awake in his bed, Officer Dominick Salvato arose, dressed and took the subway train into Manhattan. He walked through the big, dreary lobby of the Nineteenth Precinct station and past a wall he refused to look at.
On a section of wall just outside Inspector Short’s office was a plaque proclaiming Dominick Salvato “Cop of the Month.”
Detective Joe Simon had the identification by early afternoon. “McC” was Paul McRae and was a forty-four-year-old city manager of a suburb of San Francisco, unmarried. It was easy enough. He put out the only clues he had to his counterparts in San Francisco, who in turn made the information known via California’s LEIN—Law Enforcement Information Network. Missing persons reports were checked and up popped the name Paul McRae, who never returned home from attending a wedding in New York City.
Simon got hold of the bridegroom in New York, who turned out to be a longtime friend of McRae’s who broke his pal’s heart by marrying a woman. The bridegroom gave Simon the preliminary identification he would need to put some money out on the street to anybody with a special knowledge of murky goings-on among the more discreet homosexuals living in the Nineteenth Precinct.
But he didn’t hope for much.
A few more clues had popped up in the meantime. McRae stayed on in New York for at least three days longer than he had planned, without notifying his parents back in California; he’d stayed in New York for the initially scheduled two days at the Hotel Wyndham on West Fifty-eighth Street and kept to himself, so far as anyone at the hotel knew; his lodgings were unknown after that; in New York, he knew only his old friend, no one else; he had disappeared from the site of the wedding reception without saying farewell to his friend or his friend’s bride.
There were loose ends all over the place and Simon knew it and knew there was nothing he could do about it. Just then, anyway. No detective enjoys that. It seems disrespectful and it isn’t anything like the cop television shows, shipshape little dramas that insist on the image of a cop with lots of wavy blow-combed hair with the luxury of being able to drop everything in the way of a case load when someone decides to kill someone else.
Joe Simon has a bald head and gravity has a grip on his belly and he smokes too many cigarettes. A lot of the time, especially on homicide cases, he wishes he were that TV dick. Things would be so much simpler.
She hadn’t the slightest idea who was feeding the material to the top brass, but she had always feared the worst and now her fears had come to pass. Officer Cibella Borges sat at the kitchen table of her mother’s apartment on the Lower East Side, dropped her head into her arms and sobbed. In the other room, her mother was sleeping, her mother who had been praying for days.
How would she tell her mother?
Beaver was not the only magazine for which Cibella Borges—the tabloid “Naughty Nina”—had posed. Her lawyer had telephoned.
“They’ve got the others,” he said.
He didn’t need to mention them.
She was guilty twice more. “Guilty?” she asked herself. “Guilty of what? I’ve broken no laws!”
What she had broken was the hard-line rule that no female cop in New York can break. Perhaps no other city in the country is more conservative in the matter, oddly enough. Cibella Borges had broken the rule.
She had posed nude in two erotic lesbian scenes for Pub magazine, which was selling briskly with its replated cover featuring “Naughty Nina like you’ve never seen her before,” and a crudely done lesbian skin magazine, Girls on Girls.
Cibella Borges knew she was alone. Very alone.
He had to have them paged in the lobby of the Milford Plaza, the big new Times Square hotel that advertises enormously in out-of-town magazines appealing to people from places like suburban Indianapolis who want to give their regards to Broadway by staying in a hotel that looks just like a hotel on some suburban Indianapolis freeway strip, but he got them all right. He recognized the voice of the redhead.
“Detective Lauver, Nineteenth Precinct,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve reached Angelo. He’s supposed to come in at four o’clock this afternoon, with his lawyer. Could you come by then for the identification?”
“Identification?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll do it through a two-way window. He won’t be able to see you.”
“Well … well, we—”
“What is it?”
“We’re leaving.”
“I see.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“You’ve leveled some pretty serious charges, you’ve taken up my time. What is this?”
Lauver thought he heard her crying.
“Why don’t you postpone your flight home?” he asked.
“Oh, no. Not now. We just couldn’t. Look, I’m sorry. It … Can’t we identify him from pictures or something? From back home?”
“Won’t stand up in court.”
“Oh.”
“You sure you want to leave?”
She cried, then said yes and hung up.
Lauver figured as much. Something very fishy about this one, although he didn’t trouble to figure why. Maybe some of it happened, just like they said; maybe Angelo held some threat for them still, something they weren’t telling; maybe a lot of things. One thing was for sure, though. None of it was police business, no matter that Angelo was rattled enough to have taken off somewhere. Lauver had reached his brother, his partner in the small limousine business he operated, and his brother had arranged for the lawyer to call the cops. The lawyer knew Angelo’s whereabouts but wasn’t volunteering. Lauver wasn’t asking, anyway.
The taxi driver said he sure would have remembered any shots that might have gone whizzing through his cab—if it had happened like the girls said. He had a vague recollection of a black limousine that drove parallel to his cab at one point in the evening, but he paid no particular attention to it. Yes, there was a crack in one of the rear windows in his cab, but it had been there for months. He promised Lauver to have it repaired.
Angelo’s lawyer asked about the presence of the girls. Lauver didn’t answer, exactly. It didn’t take a genius lawyer to figure out that three scared girls from Indiana wanted nothing more to do with his client and it didn’t matter what had happened.
Angelo was about as likely to show up at the Nineteenth Precinct PDU for questioning and identification by complainants as the Vatican was ready to announce the Pope’s engagement.
“It’s a trap and he knows it and he’ll never show up,” Lauver said.
He stuffed all his little notes into a manila folder and shuffled it off to the side of his desk.
“That’ll be that,” Lauver said. “A million stories, like they say, and this has been one that falls apart. It happens.”
Whatever he did, Angelo got himself a gift of time. More than likely, he knew it.
Monahan sat in the unmarked Chevy with LaGravanese beside him, taking up most of the seat, what with his newspapers and his books, the “Racing Form,” a plastic bag full of cookies and apples, a crossword puzzle magazine and a thermos of coffee. LaGravanese wore a light topcoat and a hat over a shiny suit. It made him look like a man of 1948, with all the dash and taste of a man who’d spent half a career in postal management.
While LaGravanese spent the hours occupied with his food and other diversions, Monahan mostly spent the time thinking how much he hated the guy.
The hatred was an immediate thing. LaGravanese shook his head, said hello and then the very next thing out of his mouth was an insult.
“Too bad you fucked up the first time, Monahan …”
Monahan had put out a fifty to a couple of stoolies and it didn’t pan out. That’s all. It happens.
But territory is territory, boys will be boys and cops will be cops and LaGravanese, when he heard about Monahan’s early morning stakeout and how it didn’t yield Kano, was mad as hell that he wasn’t called in on the job. LaGravanese had been gunning for a guy called Kano from East Harlem for a year.
“… But look, leave us cooperate on this venture and maybe we can get somewhere together, eh?” LaGravanese smiled and made noise about it and his chins shook. Monahan didn’t have any choice in the matter. His lieutenant, like any lieutenant, liked to cooperate with the city-wide units because one day maybe he’d command one of those city-wide units because he’d cooperated so beautifully.
So Monahan and LaGravanese had picked up Moses the snitch and his pal Orange Lips, too, and sweated the two. But Moses stuck to his story and Monahan felt a little better about the situation when LaGravanese gave an approving nod later on when they were alone.
“I tole you what I know and you pay me the fifty and that’s that, man. I ain’t bargainin’ for no trouble and I don’t want your damn money, neither,” Moses said.
“Shee-it, he’s bein’ square, man,” Orange Lips said.
“So how come he didn’t show like you said?” Monahan asked.
“How the hell do I know? I’m just a no-count nigger, man, far’s you’re concerned. Hell, maybe your man knows somethin’.”
“If he knows you took a tip, Moses, we’ll bust you for being an accomplice.”
“Think I don’t know that?”
There was no point to questioning Moses further. He was dead certain that Kano used the filling station in question and seemed genuinely surprised that he hadn’t shown, since his past behavior had been so regular.
Kano was a smart son of a bitch, Monahan thought. He pays attention to the details. He uses a filling station so long as everything goes right. One thing is out of place—like the fact that Moses isn’t working there anymore—and he changes his patterns.
“All is not lost,” LaGravanese told him when they left Moses’ dump over the fish shop on East 117th Street. “I think he’s telling us straight. I believe him, just like you.”
“So what do we do?” Monahan asked.
“We stake him out again. I want this guy bad.”
They were agreed.
And now they waited. LaGravanese got on Monahan’s nerves.
“Know what a three-letter word for Guido’s high note is?” he asked Monahan. He held the stub of a pencil over his crossword magazine.
“Don’t ask me that stuff.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“You asking or telling?”
“I’m telling. You never know when you might want to take this up as a hobby, like me.”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?”
“No need to get tense, Monahan. How’s about a joke?”
“You married?”
“No.”
“No kidding.”
“So there’s two guys, sort of like us. Best friends, but they split up. Mike, he goes upstate and buys a little farm. And George, he stays back in the city, right?”
Monahan stared out the windshield and noticed for the four thousandth time or so that the gasoline vapors trapped between two of the pumps shimmered in purple and yellow when the light was just right.
“Years pass and Mike and George just don’t get around to seeing one another. Just Christmas cards, that sort of thing. And then one day, George decides to go on up into the country to see his old pal and how he’s made out with the farm and his wife and kids and all …”
“Is this going to take long?” Monahan asked.
“Shut the fuck up yourself. As I was saying, George decides to go upstate. So, he rents himself a car down in the city and one fine morning bright and early he takes off.
“He drives all day and into the early part of the evening, but he makes it to Mike’s farm and Mike’s just happy as hell to see him and the two old friends spend a great night in a big old country kitchen drinking and telling stories and catching up on old times, that sort of thing.
“The next morning, Mike’s wife has fixed them a big meal of sausages and eggs and potatoes and George is as happy as a guy with a foot-long rod in a convent. So Mike says to him, ‘How’s about I show you around the spread this morning?’ And George says, ‘Yeah, I’d sure like that.’
“So off they go out from the house. Mike loans George a pair of his spare boots and they’re wandering around the barnyard and Mike’s giving him the big guided tour, like his farm’s some damn Disneyland attraction.
“Then George notices this very peculiar thing coming at him. It’s a huge pig with a wooden leg.”
LaGravanese waited to see if he’d hooked Monahan yet.
“A pig with a wooden leg?” Monahan asked.
“Yeah, you heard me. So, naturally, George can’t take his eyes off this pig with the wooden leg, partly because the pig’s standing right beside him looking up at him. George starts to say something, but Mike interrupts him.
“‘Hey, pal,’ Mike says. And he’s pretty stern when he says this. ‘One thing you don’t do around here is make fun of my pig, got it? That pig has saved my life, twice. So you don’t make fun of it, okay?’
“And George says, ‘The pig saved your life? How?’
“‘Yeah, he saved my life twice,’ Mike tells him. ‘The first time, I was out on the tractor plowing up the south forty out there and what I didn’t know is that some of the bolts were coming loose under the seat, what with the strain of all that jolting up and down and pulling this big old combine hooked up to the tractor. Anyway, the seat gave way and I spilled off and as I fell down I lost control and hit the gear shift the wrong way and the tractor keels over with me. I was trapped there on the ground, in a big rut in the soil and I was half buried and my leg was broken and I could barely move and those big combine blades were coming at me and I thought it was curtains, boy.
‘“But I’m here to tell you, my pig back in the barnyard sensed danger. Don’t ask me how, but he did. So he comes running out onto the field from the barnyard and he right away sees what sort of terrible trouble I’m in and he burrows into the soil with his snout and makes a sort of tunnel for me to crawl up, and he even helps me by standing there so I can grab onto his shoulders and pull myself to safety—just in the nick of time!’
“George says, ‘And then he saved your life a second time?’
“And Mike says, ‘He sure did. It happened not long ago, in fact. We were all sound asleep, it was the middle of the night and the pig saved me and my wife and the kids. Trouble was, something was left burning on the stove and the curtains caught fire in the kitchen, and the fire just spread through the house, with the smoke and all. The pig sensed danger again and he ran to the house and he started banging his snout against the bedroom window where the wife and I were sleeping. Well, we didn’t know it then, but we were pretty overcome by smoke, so the pig had to work really hard to wake us, but he kept at it until he did.
“‘Well, he got us up and we managed to get the kids out, then the volunteer fire department came and we managed to get the fire stopped and we saved most of our things.’
“Mike is just standing there in the barnyard looking down lovingly at his pig with the wooden leg—”
Monahan stopped him by slamming an arm across his wide chest. “Hey! He’s coming!”
Across the street from where Monahan and LaGravanese were staked, a white Lincoln Continental driven by a dark-skinned Hispanic pulled into the filling station. There was a woman in the passenger side of the car.
Monahan’s shoulder dipped as he reached for the ignition key to start up the Chevy. LaGravanese reached for the radio mike.
The two cops had barely moved. But Kano saw it and was alerted.
He saw it and he made them.
The Lincoln’s huge back tires bit down hard into the pavement as Kano floored the accelerator. The big car roared out of the filling station apron like a fighter jet leaving the deck of an aircraft carrier.
“Some machine,” Monahan shouted. “Jesus Christ, how in hell are we going to nail him?”
He jerked the Chevrolet into gear, stalled it and restarted it. Slamming a fist into the dashboard, Monahan cursed at the top of his lungs, bouncing up and down on the seat as the police Chevy sped after Kano’s Lincoln.
LaGravanese picked up the battery-powered cherry top flasher and rolled down a window to fasten the magnetic plate to the top of the Chevy. Then he picked up the microphone and held it to his face for several seconds, before turning to Monahan, red-faced and still cursing.
“I keep forgetting the damn Ten Code!” LaGravanese said.
“Never mind the fucking code!” Monahan sped past a taxicab and the driver shouted an unintelligible curse at him, waving his fist. “Just say what you mean!”
“Okay,” LaGravanese said.
“Go ahead, Special Unit Five-Nineteen,” the dispatcher’s voice said.
“We’re in hot pursuit of a white Lincoln Continental, New York plates, no numbers available, east from Lexington Avenue on 118th Street in the Two-Three, out of sight. Request uniform backup, all eyes of anticrime units. Over.”
The Lincoln had fully three blocks’ lead distance on the unmarked Chevy with the flashing red light. Kano was some smart operator, Monahan muttered. He knew full well he wouldn’t have to move fast beyond a quick exit from the filling station. He knew he could rely on the fact that at some time in the recent past, New York City motorists became largely unconcerned about the matter of emergency vehicles, blithely ignoring sirens that signaled them to pull off to the side of the street so that a squad car in hot pursuit—or even a fire truck—could travel at maximum speed through a crowded city.
If a guy like Kano, who knew he had to be careful in his travels, simply did a little minimal planning in terms of sticking to efficient routes, he could proceed calmly through traffic without arousing anyone’s attention.
Of course, it was supposed to be the other way around. A police car with a flashing red light once upon a time parted traffic like a hot knife through butter. No longer. Private cars simply don’t bother yielding and precious seconds are lost this way.
Monahan was pushing the Chevy hard and it was sometimes all he could do to keep the front wheels under control as the car slammed over potholes up First Avenue. The sweat was pouring off Monahan’s brow as he stayed with the patch of white he tried to keep in view, way up the avenue. He said about a hundred Hail Marys as he alternately pumped the gas pedal, then the brakes, hoping to God he wouldn’t cut down some innocent pedestrian or slam into another car.
A couple of blue-and-whites, lights flashing and sirens screaming, appeared nearby and Monahan’s grip tightened on the wheel. The marked cars would run the interference for him. He had a real chance.
“There he is!” Monahan shouted.
About four blocks up the avenue, the flash of white made a fast, squealing turn onto an eastbound side street. Monahan jumped up and down on the seat and ground his foot into the accelerator. His head hit the ceiling of the Chevy. “We got him!” he shouted. “He’s got nowhere but the river to hit from here!”
Monahan weaved his way through the sparse traffic of First Avenue in the 130s, infuriated by drivers of private cars who wouldn’t move fast enough—or at all. It seemed like hours before he reached the corner where he thought he spotted Kano turn, though it was only a few minutes.
Then the flash of white again as Monahan turned.
The front of a car nosed past a parked mail truck, screeched to a halt as the Chevrolet roared toward it. Monahan very nearly smashed the Chevy into the fender of a white Plymouth.
“Damn!” Monahan shouted.
He looked into the rearview mirror. Four blue-and-whites were behind him, all of them doing the best they could to keep from colliding with parked vehicles and curbside piles of garbage as they skidded to a halt.
Monahan pounded the dashboard with both fists. Then he wheeled the Chevy around and headed back out to First Avenue and sped further uptown, knowing full well he’d lost Kano again.
Kano and the Lincoln had simply disappeared. Somehow, Kano had found a way.
No doubt, Kano would have the Lincoln repainted and replated and he would start using a different filling station. And no one in whatever blocks Kano had managed to pull off his miraculous escape would have seen anything.
Monahan and LaGravanese both pounded the dashboard. Both knew what it would have meant if they’d been able to run down Kano. Commendation. Promotion. Maybe a command of their own just before they put in for retirement.
They headed back downtown, below the Ninety-sixth Street line between the Twenty-third and Nineteenth precincts, immersed in the blackest cop gloom. They’d had their man in sight, they lost him and that was that for now; they’d done all they could. So why did they feel like a couple of flatfeet in a Mack Sennett movie?
LaGravanese grunted and started chewing an apple. “This fucking frustration gets to be as familiar as your Jockey shorts after a while, you know?”
Monahan knew. He had to get LaGravanese off that noisy apple or he’d go a little nuts. “Say, what about the end of the joke?”
“Oh yeah,” LaGravanese said. “Where were we?”
“The pig with the wooden leg had just saved the guy with the place in the country for the second time.”
“Yeah, that’s right. So anyway, there they are, the two friends standing in the barnyard with that pig that had the wooden leg. So George, the guy from the city, says, ‘Look, I wasn’t going to insult your pig or anything. And I certainly never would, now that I know about the incredible things he’s done for you. I was just curious, that’s all, about why he has that wooden leg.’
“Well, Mike just stands there with sort of a dumb look on his face like his friend George is supposed to understand. He says to George, ‘Well, a great pig like that—you don’t want to eat him all at once.”’
Jimmy O’Brien drove his car everywhere. He didn’t used to, but now he was afraid to leave it out on the street near his home in Eastchester, the Bronx. He hadn’t made payments on it in six months and the bank was telephoning his wife every day and threatening letters from an attorney came every week without fail.
A city marshal had come by the house one day to impound the car, but O’Brien had enough cash on hand to make a bargain and he kept the car. Long enough, that is, to get it over to a shop in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he’d had it painted red and where he’d managed to buy license plates from Illinois with counterfeit stickers.
Jimmy O’Brien felt safe enough to ignore several more payments. He kept the car parked in a different neighborhood, just to make sure.
The phone calls and the lawyer’s letters started up again. And O’Brien had lately seen the city marshal snooping around his neighborhood.
Both men knew how the game was played now. O’Brien had to keep the car out of sight. The marshal had to find it, wherever it was, impound it and return it to the bank’s lawyer to collect his fee.
The marshal was a small black man with a nasty mouth and an authoritarian personality. He was a man who seemed to enjoy rooting about in people’s private troubles. Every day, he saw the raw anxieties that so many people try so hard to hide; every day, he, Marshal Royal Billings, dealt with tenants being evicted by their landlords and people like Jim O’Brien.
The more a guy like O’Brien resisted, the more Royal Billings enjoyed the challenge of his job, which was taking away the things people needed but couldn’t afford and returning them to big banks and landlords for fairly brisk fees. Royal Billings was doing the right thing, of course, and it was a nasty job.
But the way he did it made otherwise gentle folks listen to their more violent angels.
Jimmy O’Brien sat in a saloon on Lexington Avenue near East Eighty-fourth Street, the only bar on the Upper East Side that serves shots and beers and the only bar in the Nineteenth Precinct where every last customer seems to be wearing a twill work shirt with his first name embroidered on the pocket.
O’Brien looked out the window. His car was safe and sound, good for the next hour at the meter just outside.
He downed a second shot and then started on a second Budweiser chaser. O’Brien shut his eyes for a moment and listened to the sounds of Crystal Gayle singing about cheating on the juke, the voices of the other men in the bar—most of them white and Southern or border state, just like him—and he breathed deeply of the muzzy beer smell of the place.
For one brief second of longing, Jimmy O’Brien was transported back home. To a simpler place and time, when no white man had to take any lip from some uppity coon.
“That nigger’s going to get his,” O’Brien said aloud.