Sergeant John Laffey and Officer Jack Clark, along with Valentine, sat crowded around a small plastic table on swivel chairs bolted to the floor. They had three plastic trays in front of them, two orange and one yellow, piled up with paper containers of pathetic little hamburgers and limp deepfried potatoes glistening with salt.
“God, we’re in the shadow of La Grenouille and look at us!” Clark said.
All three men wore jeans of variously faded hue. Clark wore boots and a wooden cap with a ball on top and a heavily scarred leather bomber jacket. Laffey and Valentine wore navy pea jackets and running shoes.
“Every time I find myself in a McDonald’s,” Clark said, “all I can think about is that movie, Soylent Green. Ever see it? Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, Paula Kelly, Edward G.
Robinson, directed by Richard Fleischer, 1973 I’m pretty sure and Robinson’s final film.”
“Jesus, the trivia! It’s amazing,” Laffey said. “If the guy knew anything useful, he might be frightening.”
“Everybody ate this stuff the government gave them to eat and the standard fare was a green thing about the size of a piece of that flat bubble gum that comes with baseball cards, only it was green instead of pink.
“So the payoff of the movie is discovering the connection between the government death factories, where people volunteered to go off themselves because the world was such a goddamn pain in the ass and the factory was a palace, and the food supply. Turns out everybody who ate soylent green, which was the whole population of New York City, was eating processed people.”
“Thanks a lot, Jack,” Laffey said. He pushed his tray away. “I’m not going to be able to eat this slop now.” “You’re better off,” Clark said. He crammed half a burger into his mouth.
Laffey opened his coffee container.
“Can you see our mope?” Clark asked him.
Laffey stole a glance from the corner of his eye in the direction of a young man on the other side of the restaurant, their “mope,” meaning that he’d been moping about a neighborhood where Laffey and Clark knew by instinct and some other fairly obvious clues he didn’t belong.
“Sure, I can see him,” Laffey said. “He’s sitting there in the corner with two quarter-pounders and three cartons of fries and he’s got a cigarette going while he’s eating.”
“What a pig.”
Laffey and Clark had been following the mope for half the morning. They picked him up at Carl Shurz Park, where they spotted him sitting on a bench, smoking and tapping his feet, a canvas bag at his side. Running shoes, warm gloves, jeans and a coat long enough to have lots of inside pockets handy for carrying burglary tools. He was a stocky Hispanic man in his mid-twenties.
The mope got up from the park bench and started scoping out the building nearby, ducking into lobbies and then reappearing in the street. He worked his way down from the park into the far East Sixties, westerly toward Third Avenue. Several times, he would spend enough time in a lobby to test a door. Then, for whatever reason, he would dash out into the street and walk around the block, seeming to be in some deep thought.
“He looks real good,” Laffey had said when he started his scoping near the park, in the Eighties. “We’ll stay on his ass awhile.”
And so they had.
Laffey would follow him a block or two, then take over in the car that Clark drove. Clark would follow for a while on foot. Then maybe Carl Trani would pick up the mope for a time, or Kathy Waters, who worked with him that day.
About noon, he headed for the McDonald’s. Laffey and Clark decided to follow him on in.
Laffey talked to Valentine, keeping an eye on the mope in the corner.
“So this is how it is a lot of the time. We’re waiting for a mope to make his move and we try to get a good look at him making that move, then we can bust him and make it stand up. These guys can be pretty cagey sometimes, though, and they’ll keep us on the walk for a whole day and we end up with nothing.
“Of course, I don’t look at what we’re doing as ‘nothing’ just because we might not come home with a collar. I mean, even if the mope makes us and acts like a wise guy with us, he’s prevented from committing a burglary, isn’t he?”
“And next to rape, burglary is the thing that bothers people the most. Rape and burglary ought to be special concerns for cops. We ought to work at preventing the crime, see?
“People don’t want to live with the fear of rape. And it’s pretty much the same thing with burglary, if you’ve ever experienced it. Your home is violated and you’re never quite the same afterward.
“I’m talking about your home, your privacy. The guy who’s had his apartment burglarized thinks, ‘My home is where I live my life, it’s where I raise my kids, it’s where I make love to my wife. And some creep just waltzes in and rips it all off.’”
Laffey stopped talking for a moment. The mope in the corner started to get up. Then he sat down and lit another cigarette.
“This guy’s looking worse and worse,” Clark said. “I don’t think he’s going to get up the balls for it today.”
“It’s only been a couple hours,” Laffey said. “Some guys take that long.”
The mope got up again. He dumped the wrappers from his tray into a trash container and walked past the table where Laffey and Clark sat.
Laffey picked up his PTP radio and talked to Trani, outside the McDonald’s in a plain green car.
“What’s he doing now?” Laffey asked.
There was no answer.
“Carl!”
Trani whispered. “Stand by.”
“Shit. Two hours and—”
Trani was back on the radio which interrupted Clark.
“Your mope walked right up to the car and gave me a big smile, Sarge. He made us all.”
Laffey and Clark walked quickly out the door of the restaurant. The mope was at the corner. He waved to the two officers who had watched him eat his meal.
“Oh man, I thought we’d have one for sure there,” Clark said. He and Laffey walked dejectedly across the street and got into the car with Trani.
They weren’t in the car long before the 10-19 call came over the radio. Laffey called in from the booth just outside the car, then rushed back and told Trani to get to East Sixtieth and Second Avenue “quick and quiet.”
“What do we got?” Clark asked.
“Silent alarm in the building.”
“Lot of nothing sometimes,” Clark said.
Trani pulled up in front of the building and Laffey and Clark, pulling the shields they wore attached to chains around their necks, jumped out of the car and showed them to the confused doorman. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Just got a call to help out, that’s all,” Laffey said. “Look, in case we don’t get back down here to the lobby in a few minutes, do me a favor, okay?”
“Of course.”
“There’s an officer out there, waiting in a car. See him?”
Trani waved from the car to the doorman.
“He’s with us. I want to leave him there and I want to leave you here so you can make sure nobody leaves the building for a little while. Keep them right here. Shouldn’t be too long. You have any trouble with that request, there’s a cop right there for you and you let him know. Okay?”
The doorman looked like he might faint at any moment.
Laffey and Clark took the elevator to the top floor, the twelfth, and took a walk through the corridor, inspecting the doors for signs of forced entry. They split up at either end of the corridor, each man taking a separate stairway down to the next floor, crossing paths through the corridor and taking the stairs to the next point of search.
On the ninth floor, Clark came across a man waiting for the down elevator.
“You live here?” Clark asked. The man waiting seemed frightened by the question from the cop in the jeans and bomber jacket. Clark showed him his tin and relief spread across his face.
“Yes. Can I help you, Officer?” He wore a blue cashmere overcoat, a pinstriped suit and carried an attaché case. “Was it this floor?”
“Can’t tell,” Clark said. “We’re looking at everything.”
Clark saw paint chips on the floor below the doorknob near the elevator.
“What do you have in the attaché, friendly?”
“I beg your pardon?” The elevator made some clanking sounds and the man in the cashmere coat buttoned up.
Laffey opened the door from the stairwell and walked toward the elevator. Clark raised a hand and Laffey stayed where he was, as backup.
“Look, Officer—”
“Just open up the case, please.”
“I haven’t got the time!” the suspect said. The elevator stopped at the ninth floor and opened.
“Sure you do,” Clark said. “If we hold you up unnecessarily, I promise to get you where you’re going faster than you could make it there on your own anyway. You’ll get a police escort, okay?”
The suspect looked over his shoulder at Laffey, who was talking to Trani on the PTP.
The suspect smiled. “Nice work,” he said. “How’d you make me?”
“Just a guess,” Clark said. “The paint chips there.” He pointed to the flecks on the corridor’s carpeting.
“I’ll have to be a little neater.”
“Open up now like a good fellow.”
Laffey moved in as the suspect opened the attaché, inside of which were pry bars, skeleton keys, a box of business calling cards, loose cash, cloth bags full of other people’s jewelry and glassine packets of what appeared to be cocaine.
“Where’d the flake come from?” Clark asked him.
“From the fine, upstanding solid citizens of Apartment 9-E,” the suspect said.
Clark had a good laugh. The suspect held out his wrists while Laffey cuffed him up for the ride to the lockup and booking.
“Ever have one of those days?” the suspect asked Laffey.
“Everybody does.”
Keenan had taken a sick day, but it was his wife who needed the time off. He arranged for the girls to stay after school at a friend’s home and even talked the doctor into making a house call.
She slept now as the doctor spoke to Keenan.
“Have the two of you been fighting?” he asked Keenan. “And I mean something beyond ordinary tiffs that couples have.”
“Not fighting, exactly. More a case of not caring. Maybe that’s the worst sort of a fight.”
“Maybe, yes.”
“How is she now, really?”
The doctor made bag-packing motions. “She very nearly lost the baby,” he said. “And there’s no reason for that to be the case with her other than psychological stress and strain. She’s a healthy woman, there has never been the slightest problem with her pregnancies in the past.”
“There was the—”
“You had a baby die, that’s true. But that has nothing to do with her health, you see. No, what I’m telling you is that there are cases where women lose their babies—abort—that are entirely psychological in nature.”
Keenan’s face drained of color. “The baby she’s carrying. Is it all right?”
“I think so. The body and the brain, too, are remarkable creations for their restorative powers.”
Keenan read a book once, or maybe it was an article. The title of it played through his mind. My Enemy Grows Older. It was a story of modern marriage.
And he thought of his wife’s sensibilities, how terribly vulnerable she must be since she spent such considerable effort at presenting a controlled face to the world. Most people Keenan knew, unless they bordered on the moronic, were masses of irony when it came to determining their personalities. Most people were anything but candid. How many times had he asked his wife “What’s wrong?” when he sensed trouble. How many times had he believed her when she said “Nothing at all.” Of course that’s what she would say.
“Doctor, I suppose Mairead thinks her whole world is caving in because her whole world revolves around me and, well, I’ve had a lot of troubles lately.”
The doctor clucked. “What you say makes sense. If your wife wasn’t pregnant, maybe there wouldn’t be any way for us to receive the signals we’re getting. Pregnancy makes a woman’s senses more acute than they ordinarily are. Ordinarily, they’re just as dumb as us men, I’d say.”
“What can I do? I don’t want her to lose this baby. I think that would kill her.”
“From what I know of her, I would agree,” the doctor said. “Now I’m going to tell you something and I don’t want you to take it as a doctor’s advice. Hell, Tommy, you must know that medicine is an art, not a science. That’s why I want you to take my advice as something coming from a concerned friend of the family. I don’t make house calls otherwise, you know.”
The doctor stood up and prepared to unload himself of the weight of friendly advice. Keenan stood up, too, though everyone says you’re supposed to sit down at such times.
The two men walked to the door, Keenan following the doctor.
“Well?” Keenan asked when the doctor started turning the knob.
“It’s this. You’re going to have to decide whether the problems you’re having outside this house are greater than the ones you’re having inside it. You’re a good-looking young man and you have the sort of charm women like, you’re a good talker. I can guess what your problems are. What I’m telling you is that you’re in a situation, son, where you’re going to have to make absolute choices. It’s either Mairead, or it’s the other woman.”
“What about the kids?”
“Kids take care of themselves, surprisingly enough. It’s the grownups who find these things such a torment. Look around you and see if you don’t agree with me.”
The doctor pulled open the door, but he didn’t step out into the hall. “Napoleon used to say, ‘If you’re going to take Vienna, then take Vienna!’ You can’t very easily have a part-time affair, not if you’re a man with the sorts of principles that have been hammered into you. It has to be all or nothing and that goes for your wife.”
“I have to choose … between Mairead and …”
“The name’s not important. But the choice is. Yes, you have to choose. This is hardly a medical observation, like I said, but I think Mairead’s going to be sick until you make up your mind.”
“God.” Keenan cried.
“You don’t have to feel you have to choose Mairead, son. I’m just here telling you that you have to choose one of them. The thing you’re doing, and I suspect it’s just as bad for the other woman, is you’re putting lives on hold. You’re not letting Mairead live, except around the edges of your indecision. Do you see?”
Keenan nodded his head. “I don”t think I should tell her anything while she’s pregnant, though. She—”
“Aren’t you listening to me, boy?” The doctor was angry. It’s not an easy thing to confront someone and it’s more difficult still when you encounter deafness. “This is the worst possible time to keep her wondering, to keep her on the string. Can’t you see that? Or maybe you’re the most completely selfish man alive.”
“But the pregnancy.”
“Listen again. A woman’s senses are never more heightened than when she’s pregnant. She’s never weaker, she’s never stronger. She’s never more capable of handling herself, no matter what happens. If it was up to me, I’d have a nine-month presidency in this country and vote for a pregnant woman.”
Keenan put out his hand. “Thanks, Doctor.”
“Let me know, will you?”
Leinau agreed to meet William W. Whitson at his office, which was atop the headquarters building of a small but highly influential investments and securities firm that did a worldwide business. The building was within the Nineteenth, as it happened, and an easy walk from the precinct house.
Besides, Leinau always enjoyed glimpses into the working life of tycoons. While he himself wore polyester suits that tended toward colors like salmon, he could enjoy being near the good taste of others.
Whitson had him wait alone in his massive office for a few minutes and Leinau didn’t mind at all. He sat with his legs outstretched in a butter-soft black leather chair near one of the three window walls, and he helped himself to the contents of a Moroccan-bound humidor on a marble side table.
Leinau freed a crisply wrapped Individualé, which he estimated at ten dollars the copy, and lit up. A steward glided across the office from a little food and beverage station. He wiped out the black onyx ashtray on the marble table and asked Leinau, “Drink?”
“Yeah, some coffee. Got espresso?”
“Very good, sir.”
Leinau liked the place very much. He liked especially the fact that there was no actual desk in the office, not the sort of imposing piece that he usually encountered, something with enough empty space to serve as a landing strip for troop transport planes, a desk designed for maximum intimidation.
That was style, Leinau thought. No desk. Just a collection of couches and side chairs, a handsome antique table roughly in the middle of the room, covered over with books. Discreet telephones here and there. And an especially interesting wardrobe against the wall, with pegs on the outside to hold Whitson’s highly distinctive cane and hat.
The door opened and Whitson walked in. The only adjective Leinau could think of was beautiful.
Whitson was roughly the same size as Leinau, six feet and one inch, but quite another shape and style. His hair was carefully tended, but not fussed over. Thick black with silver, wing-shaped temples. Maybe he was sixty, judging by the character and texture of his face, but he didn’t have the scars a man of modest means and tastes accumulates. Whitson’s belly was absolutely flat, his skin smooth and tanned, teeth gleaming white and hands that looked as if they belonged on a Greek statue.
Leinau, on the other hand, owned a haircut he hadn’t much changed since 1966, save for the length of his sideburns from year to year. He had a thin moustache that got wet every time he ate something, a nose with lots of broken veins, the inevitability of gravity around the waist of a nearly middle-aged man who watched games rather than played them and a shaving rash on a neck that betrayed a fondness for sweets. But Leinau puffed on his Individualé and delighted, without the slightest self-consciousness about it, in the aura of William W. Whitson’s good fortune and worldliness. Leinau didn’t begrudge Whitson a bit of it and there was only the slightest chance that any of it would rub off on him.
“I like the way you do business, Whitson.”
“Thanks.” He turned around when he heard the steward, who glided along with a silver tray and an espresso cup and saucer. “Ah, I see. Henry has taken care of you.”
“Yeah. Just like downtown.”
“As I understand it, ah …”
“Leinau. Detective.”
Whitson smiled and folded his hands in his lap. “Yes, Detective Leinau. As I understand it, you’ve spoken to the superintendent of my building and you’ve spoken to the maid. My wife, of course. What have you determined?” Leinau sipped half the espresso, then puffed the cigar. “I’ve determined that you’re careless about where you keep your wife’s valuable jewelry.”
“Yes, we should have had it in the bank. Or here in my office, at least. After all, I’m not very far from home.”
“So you’ve never had any trouble in your building. Is that why you were sort of lax, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so?”
“I don’t mind what you say, Detective Leinau. And you’re quite correct. To my knowledge, there has never been a robbery in my building.”
“Thought so. I didn’t bother checking with the computer. You ever see the people who run computers? All they know how to do is tell you that computers are great when they work, but they never work because people don’t know how to run them. They just claim the whole damn world is going to be a wonderful place when we have computers fouling everything up.
“Well, I digress. Anyway, I figured you didn’t have problems that way. Of course, you had insurance, I suppose. I don’t imagine I have to tell you that, do I?”
“No, sir. I try to attend to business matters as best I can.”
“Yeah, I know. I can tell. You got a swell place here, that’s for sure. You got to take care of business real good to have a spread like this. Jesus, what’s the rent here, anyway?”
Whitson smiled benevolently and said nothing.
“Oh yeah. You don’t ask prices. What’s wrong with me, huh? Hey, you’d know if we traded places and you saw where I had to work, Mr. Whitson. What a dump!”
Whitson tilted his head back and laughed. “Like Bette Davis in the movies,” he said. “She walked into a place and said, ‘What a dump!’”
“Yeah, well, I think the writer of that line worked in the Nineteenth PDU for a spell. Say, how come it was half a day before we got the call on this anyway? Did something happen at our end, or what? Boy, if it did I’m sure sorry, Mr. Whitson. We try to stay right on top of things, you know. Man, what a delay if it was our fault! But honest to god, it was like a half day before I knew about it and I was the detective on the catch for new cases then, so I should have gotten word first thing.”
“Well,” Whitson said, his debonair coolness chipped ever so slightly, “I wanted to have a chance to take a look at things myself. I had to make sure my wife was all right, of course.”
“Oh yeah. A guy’s got to look after the little woman. Some women need a lot of care. But not yours, Mr. Whitson. She seemed pretty capable to me.”
“What?” Whitson turned away from Leinau and called for Henry. “Get me a … oh, an anisette with coffee.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Nice to get to know your undertaker long before the time comes, sir. That Henry’s going to do a bang-up job with you.”
“What?”
“Henry. The steward. The guy who moves around like an undertaker with—”
“I mean, Detective Leinau, what about my wife?”
“Oh yeah. What’s her name, anyway? I don’t think I ever got it.”
“Tildy. Short for Matilda.”
“Would that make it Bill and Tildy? I like that.”
“Detective Leinau, I’m a busy man.”
“I can well imagine, sir. I’m busy myself, so I know how it is.” Leinau smiled benevolently now.
“You said something about my wife. What did you mean?”
“When I got there, sir, I met a woman completely in charge of herself after an event I’ve seen rattle some pretty tough folks. She didn’t have a hair out of place, and I didn’t have a sense that anybody had anything to do with it but her. She’s the most self-confident person I’ve come across in a long time.”
“Tildy’s a game girl.”
“And a smart one, and completely honest, in my book.”
“She told you about this ‘Juan’ person?”
“Oh yes. She told me everything. She had it all written down, you know. Everything that everyone said, as best as she could remember it. She wrote it down right away so she wouldn’t forget. That’s what she told me.”
“Well then, I suppose it’s true.”
“If she said it?”
“Of course.”
“That’s what I thought. I pegged her honest. She can handle herself pretty well, too, from the way she described what happened. I mean, keeping that one piece of jewelry like she did.”
“The wedding band.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet you’re glad about that, eh? In the family so long and all and the sentimental value of it and everything.”
“Tildy performed magnificently. I’m sure we’re in agreement here. I’m not at all sure what we’re accomplishing with this conversation, though.” Whitson took a peek at the wristwatch beneath the french cuff on his left wrist.
“You in a hurry to get somewhere, Mr. Whitson? Am I keeping you or something?”
Whitson tried to keep cool. “Tildy told you about the situation with the maid’s boy friend, Juan?”
“Yeah, but I figure it’s nothing.”
“What?”
“I figure that’s not the angle here. You don’t think Juan has anything to do with it either, do you?”
Whitson stuttered and Leinau knew he was on the right track.
“Mr. Whitson, you’ve got some troubles here at the office that might have something to do with all this, don’t you?”
Henry glided over with Whitson’s coffee and anisette and Whitson looked very grateful. Leinau grinned at him and puffed on the Individualé.
Whitson, a quick learner, tried putting Leinau off guard. “Would you like to take one of those cigars for later, Detective Leinau? What about the rest of the squad? Any cigar smokers? These are the best, I hear. I don’t smoke them myself, but Henry here has excellent taste and tells me that this is just the thing for a man who loves truly fine tobaccos.”
“Hey, thanks a lot, sir.” Leinau opened the humidor and took three of the Individualés, which emptied the humidor, and put them into his inside breast coat pocket. He had no intention of sharing them with anyone.
“Enjoy.”
“Oh, I will, that’s for sure.” Leinau picked up the little espresso cup and finished off its contents. “Nice. You got your own machine for this back there? I’d like one for myself. Saw it in the housewares section at Bloomingdale’s once. A hundred and eighty clams! Man, I can’t afford that. I suppose you’d be willing to get it for me, though, right?”
“I’d get it. What?”
“An espresso machine. You’d get it for me, right?”
“Well, I might.” Whitson grew very red in the face.
“Tell you what would be even cheaper for you, as if that’s not cheap enough,” Leinau said. “Just come clean for me.”
Whitson shook his head. “You win.” He stood up, slapping his long supple thighs as he did so. He walked toward the antique table in the center of the office and slid open a long drawer. He removed a bundle of letters and smacked them against the palm of his hand as he returned to the window where Leinau was waiting for the plain truth.
“You ought to come work for me, Detective Leinau. I could make it quite worth your while. You’re quite good at maneuvering a conversation. That’s what you’d need with the access I’d give you.”
“I’m a cop, Mr. Whitson. It’s like being an actor, I think. It’s in your blood.” He thought of all the times he threatened to take early retirement, open a bait shop on the Sound.
“You could leave for a while.”
“What? And quit show business?”
Whitson laughed and sat down. “All right, all right. See these?” He handed Leinau the bundle of letters. “They’re demands that I pay up a million dollars.”
“What’s the point of the shakedown?” Leinau started opening up the letters, all of them, he noticed, postmarked New York.
“The usual.”
“Giving the old tap, tap, tap to somebody besides the wife?”
“God, man, you could have some understanding.”
“I do.”
Whitson sipped the coffee while Leinau looked at the letters. “How did you know about them?” he asked Leinau.
“I didn’t. You told me.”
“But you knew something.”
“Your wife. Tildy. She told me that she thought something was troubling you for a long time. You never had any trouble in the building before, the business with Juan was just too pat. It didn’t look to me like the two guys who robbed your wife just waltzed in and knocked on anybody’s door.
“There’s something more than meets the eye, see. That’s why there’s us detectives. The only thing I could figure that couldn’t be nailed down was your wife’s feeling that there was some sort of trouble with you. That and the fact that there was no way in hell that they could have gotten into your building without the super being involved, right? I mean, you’ve got half the Third Reich fugitives working that building as security.
“So, usually, you find connections between inside jobs and unseen trouble. I thought your wife’s intuition was pretty sound and I figured right away maybe you pulled the strings yourself as an insurance scam. It’s that time of year, you know. All over this neighborhood, people are reporting lots of burglaries and robberies and whatnot and getting the little police reports we make out and then making a date with their insurance agents. Helps with the old cash flow.”
“But that’s not the case.”
“Yeah, I can see now. You’re being shook.”
“They threatened me with a show of force if I didn’t come through and this is it.”
“You should have come to us a long time ago, Mr. Whitson.
Whitson didn’t say anything for a while. Leinau read, once in a while chuckling.
“Detective Leinau, just when did my wife tell you what you say she did? I think she would have told me about such a conversation.”
“Oh,” Leinau said, raising his head and smiling. “I talked to her on the telephone from the lobby of your building, just before I came up. You don’t think I’d want you to be tipped, do you?”
Whitson shook his head. “Amazing. Come work for me.”
Leinau said he’d think about it when he was through with the case, but he didn’t mean it. He pored through the letters, finished every one of them, and then returned to the latest, dated just a week earlier.
“The writer here says he wants a meeting. Says he’ll show you what sort of evidence he’s got, what you’d stand to lose in a divorce proceeding.”
“Yes.”
Leinau looked at the wardrobe against the far wall, distant enough so that a man’s features would be blurred, close enough so that his general outline would be recognizable.
“Mr. Whitson, I’m going to ask you to do a favor for me.”
“You want the espresso machine after all?”
“Maybe later. Right now, would you just walk over to that clothes rack or whatever?”
“Sure.” Whitson rose and walked to the wardrobe. When he got there, he turned to Leinau and said, “All right?”
“Put on the hat.”
Whitson put on the black felt homburg. He pitched it so that it nearly covered his left eye.
“Okay, now pick up the cane and hold it like you’re standing somewhere waiting for your mistress or somebody like that.”
Whitson ignored what might have been insolence from a man he couldn’t respect. He respected Leinau immensely, and if he ever came out of this alive, he’d buy him an espresso machine for every day of the year.
“Turn around.”
Whitson turned around. He spent the next ten minutes taking poses while Leinau considered his next move.