Grace Gault and the three kids were waiting for us in the four-room apartment on Eighth Street just off Third Avenue. Grace introduced me to each of the kids. They shook hands and giggled. They were nice, if you like kids, but I was uncomfortable because I couldn’t think of anything to say to them.
After a while my strangeness didn’t matter. Grace chattered until dinner was ready and then talked all the way through it. She served a pot roast, with plenty of potatoes and gravy, and you could tell it was a feast. After dinner, Grace went off to put the kids in bed. Ernie and I sat in the front room, not saying anything. The silence was fine. He asked me if I wanted the TV on and I shook my head.
Ernie sighed. “Thank God. If cops really acted the way they do in that box—” he shook his head and laughed.
I looked around, wondering how soon I could get away. The dinner had been fine, but I hated the thought of another three hours of talk about kids, costs and the neighborhood. Just as I was ready to bolt Grace came back, straightening her apron.
“I had to listen to their prayers,” she said.
She was a stout woman, with dark blonde hair, a clear complexion, deep blue eyes and a look of contentment about her. She had nice ankles. I wondered mildly if either she or Ernie knew how nice her ankles were—and would it have mattered if they did.
“I’d better get along,” I said, but neither of them even heard me.
Grace sat on the divan, smiling at me. “Guess whom I saw today, Mike?”
“Rock Hudson?”
She laughed. “Peggy Walker.”
I felt the tightening in my throat. For an instant I couldn’t talk.
When I finally made it, I kept my voice even. “That so?”
I stared at the backs of my hands. I felt the old illness, the old bullet wound, the old need. The bullet wound alone had healed.
“She and I should form a Mike Ballard admiration club,” Grace said. “Ernie, did you know that Mike saved Peggy’s Earl—right out of the death house?”
“Honey, I know all about it,” Ernie said.
“She looks fine, Mike,” Grace said.
“Have they moved back here to town?”
“Oh, no. She and Earl moved away. Four years ago. Right after you got him out of prison. He’s a salesman again. They’re getting along fine. She just happened to be in town on some kind of business. I just ran into her. She looks lovely, just lovely.”
“I’m sure of it” I stared at Grace, wondering if there was any way to shut her up.
“She looks older,” Grace was saying. “She has a streak of gray in her hair, Mike. Right across from her widow’s peak. But no wonder, I say, all she went through while Earl was in the death house. It’s a wonder she isn’t completely gray.”
I stared. Grace was a nice woman. It would be a sin if someone shot her. About an inch above her eyebrows.
I thought they had me hanging on the ropes, but I didn’t know my own endurance. Grace talked for another hour, and then Ernie gave her some kind of silent signal, and she began yawning. I had to forgive her, she said. She had been up since six this morning. But I wasn’t to think about leaving. Ernie and I could have a nice long talk after she was in bed.
When Ernie and I were alone in the living room, I frowned, wondering what he and I were going to have a nice long talk about.
“Mike, I been wanting to talk to you.”
“You had a lot of competition tonight”
He smiled, sucking on a pipe. “Grace is a good girl. A hell of a lot too good for me.”
“Well, as long as you know it.”
“Mike, you ought to get married.”
“My God. That isn’t what we’re going to talk about, is it?”
“No, pal. It’s a lot more serious than that A lot more urgent”
I felt my thoughts grow tight. I searched back in my mental catalogue of debts, errors and trespasses, wondering what Ernie was going to preach to me about Ernie was his own type of cop, serious, plodding, conscientious. Lately, I hadn’t been much of any kind of cop at all, but I could never be a cop like Ernie.
“I’ve got a message for you, Mike. Tom Flynn called me into his office yesterday. Personally. We had a long talk. He asked me to use all my influence and friendship with you to make you accept an assignment with his office.”
“My God. You too?”
“What?”
“The hell with Flynn. You know better than to ask me, Ernie.”
“No, Mike, I don’t. Yesterday a taxi driver got killed when he tried to collect on numbers. A teen-age girl walked in front of a car—she was so full of dope she didn’t even know where she was. And two punks killed old man Climonte because he wouldn’t pay them protection money. Sure, Climonte lived to die in the hospital. The punks didn’t kill him. Sure, these cheap young hoods do the muscle work, but crime’s gotten to be a big business in this town, Mike, and it’s getting bigger every day. And it’s organized. It’s so damned well organized it’s reaching out into the best families, the best kids in town. They think they can wreck, and destroy and maim, if it gets them what they want. Hell, I thought we had a witness who saw the two killers shoot Climonte in his grocery. We let go of her—nothing to hold her on. When we went to look for her again, she’d never lived at the address she gave us.”
“I could have told you that.”
“Sure. You tried to. What you did tell us was that she was on dope, that she was nineteen at least, and lying all the way.”
“Wasn’t she?”
“Right down the line. The descriptions she gave us were as phony as she was.”
“Sure. They planted her in there. She was supposed to sell you a phony bill.”
“But that was no kid gang job. An organization with brains was behind it. A grown-up syndicate. Listen, Mike. You’ve still got a rep as a crooked cop. Even Tom Flynn knows by now that you’re not—but there’s nobody else in town can work into the syndicate the way you could.”
I shrugged. Ernie scowled, ready to go on with his oratory, but at that instant the phone rang. He laid his pipe aside, got up and went to answer it.
Grace came into the front room. Her hair was in rollers. She had used cream to wipe the rouge from her face and mouth. Her skin looked pasty. She wore a thick robe that she gripped in tense fists. She was barefooted. Her eyes were distended. A phone call after ten o’clock at night in this apartment meant just one thing. Trouble.
Ernie stood listening for a long time with the receiver pressed against his ear. When he replaced it in its cradle and turned around, he looked like a man in shock.
He crossed the room to the foyer, got his hat. He did not look at Grace.
He said, “You can come along, Mike. It’s your department this time. Homicide.”