I’D JUST FINISHED LOCKING up the cruiser when I heard the first reporter’s voice: “Hey, Lieutenant. Got a minute?” And the raucous, jostling pack was quickly on me, crowding me against the garage’s concrete wall. Blinking against the flash bulbs, I looked down to see a microphone. To myself, I smiled. I was used to nothing more than a single bored reporter, yawning as he scribbled in a dog-eared notebook.
By tacit consent the TV reporter had the first crack at me. Waving the small directional mike closer to my face, he asked, “Is it true, Lieutenant Hastings, that you captured the suspect in the assassination attempt single-handed?”
“No, that’s not true. There were three of us inside the building, and probably fifty men outside.”
“Why were there only three of you inside, Lieutenant?”
“It was very crowded—very cramped quarters. In a situation like that, too many men can be worse than too few.”
“But it was you that actually took him—actually struck the, ah, decisive blow.”
“Yes,” I answered shortly. “However, I—”
“Were you assigned to guard the governor, Lieutenant?”
As I considered the question, I saw Markham emerging from the elevator. Seeing me, he stood holding the elevator’s door open. Frowning, he raised his chin toward the ceiling. I was wanted upstairs. I was conscious of a small flicker of irritation. Sergeants didn’t frown at lieutenants.
“I was going out on another case,” I answered automatically. “We were already rolling, in fact, when we got the call about the assassination attempt. Since I was close to the Civic Center, Lieutenant Friedman asked me to take field command. But”—I began to push my way free—“but I’m afraid I’ll have to go. Excuse me.” As I said it, I glanced apologetically at the camera, as if I were asking its permission to leave.
Markham left me in the hallway outside the police chief’s conference room. As a uniformed patrolman opened the door for me, I saw Markham turning toward the trailing gaggle of reporters. Markham was smiling now, anticipating their questions.
Inside the richly furnished conference room, many of the men were already standing. The meeting was breaking up.
“Ah, here he is.” Chief Reynolds turned toward me with hand outstretched. “Good work, Lieutenant. Fine work.” His deep, resonant voice rumbled with good fellowship. The lines around the chief’s eyes were personably crinkled.
“Thank you, sir.” I allowed him a small victory in our brief handshaking contest.
His expression became unctuous. “The governor,” he said solemnly, “will live. The bullet passed through his upper lung. No problem. Barring complications, he could be back to work in a month or so.”
“Good.”
That duty discharged, he clapped me lightly on the shoulder as he turned me toward the others. “You know everyone, I think.”
I looked around the circle, nodding in turn to the district attorney; two assistant D.A.’s; the U.S. attorney; the FBI’s local bureau chief; Captain Kreiger, my superior officer; and Friedman. All of them greeted me with murmured congratulations. Then I saw Canelli, still seated. Canelli’s face was sweat-sheened. His dark eyes were sheepish. In that company, Canelli wasn’t enjoying his role as an essential link in the chain of evidence.
“We’re just finishing up,” the chief was saying to me, “deciding on jurisdiction and prosecution safeguards and so forth. Captain Kreiger or Lieutenant Friedman can fill you in on the particulars. But we all want you to know how pleased we are that everything went so, ah, smoothly.” As he spoke, Reynolds’ voice fell to a deeper, more melodious note. I’d always suspected that he practiced his little speeches before a bathroom mirror.
“I’ll let Friedman fill him in,” Kreiger countered. “I promised to meet with some reporters.” Kreiger’s squared-off face was stolidly resigned. As captain of Homicide, he’d gone as far up the chain of command as he cared to go. So to Kreiger, the press represented a problem, not a promise.
The meeting broke up quickly, each of the dignitaries collecting a cluster of aides and hangers-on as he bustled toward a waiting elevator. As Friedman and I waited for another elevator, I heard him exhale slowly.
“To think,” Friedman said, “that one mentally defective Latino could create all this unseemly scrambling for the spotlight. It’s incredible. The governor’ll probably end up in the White House, with all this publicity going for him. The mayor will run for governor, naturally. And Chief Reynolds will be mayor. All courtesy of Carlos Ramirez.” He pushed me into the empty elevator and punched the fourth-floor button. As we rode down in silence, I was remembering the feel of the shotgun butt as it crashed into the suspect’s skull.
“How’s Ramirez?” I asked.
Friedman unlocked his office door and gestured me to a chair inside. “He’s got a concussion, but no skull fracture. He’ll probably be all right.”
“How about his mother?”
Friedman shook his head as he lowered himself gratefully into his outsize swivel chair. “She’s suffering from muscle spasms of the lower back, shock and heart palpitations. In other words, she isn’t so good. And, in fact, his mother’s problems seem to have been on Ramirez’ mind. He is all steamed up because his mother couldn’t get either help for her aching back or welfare. So naturally Ramirez decided to go out and shoot the governor.” Friedman paused thoughtfully, then said, “Come to think about it, there’s a certain rough justice in all this. His Honor was attacking welfare malingerers. And Ramirez, apparently, was making it a dialogue.”
“Have you seen Ramirez yet?”
“No.” Friedman sighed ruefully. “I’ve had my hands full, believe me, just talking to all the reporters and all the publicity-hungry, vote-grabbing politicians, by which term I mean to include Chief Reynolds. Not Kreiger. But Reynolds.” Friedman turned to study me reflectively. “You know,” he said slowly, “this little exploit of yours could mean a lot to your career. You know that, don’t you? Today you’re a bona-fide hero, with all the benefits of full TV coverage. Nationwide TV coverage, even. It’s an ambitious cop’s dream of a lifetime.”
I decided to shrug.
Friedman held my eye for a last long, speculative moment. Then he also shrugged, at the same time taking a cigar from his desk drawer.
“Those FBI guys,” he said, “could give everyone lessons on the gentle art of finessing publicity for themselves. Do you know what that meeting was about—really about?”
“I imagine that the FBI’s claiming the governor’s civil rights were violated.”
“Very good, Lieutenant.” Friedman nodded deeply. “Literally, they want to make it a federal case. And the mayor and the D.A. and Chief Reynolds, if they went along with the gag, could save the city of San Francisco a bundle in court costs alone. But, naturally, Mister Mayor won’t go along with any—”
His phone rang. As Friedman lifted the receiver, he applied a match to his cigar. He listened briefly, then gestured me to the phone as he puffed diligently on the cigar.
“This is Culligan, Lieutenant Hastings. Am I disturbing you?”
“No, it’s all right. What’ve you got?”
“Well, Judy Blake—the girl upstairs from Diane Farley—she had some information, and I thought I should get it to you.”
“Fine.” I reached for a scratch pad. Friedman supplied a pencil.
“First off,” Culligan said, “she thought she recognized the Polaroid shot of the victim. She couldn’t give me a name, but she thinks she’s seen him around—that is, hanging around Diane Farley’s apartment during the past six months. So—” Culligan paused for breath, then continued in his dry, laconic voice. “So after I got her talking a little bit, it develops that this Judy’s seen lots of men hanging around. So it’ll probably turn out that Farley’s some kind of a free-lance hooker, or something. And if that’s true, then this Judy Blake might’ve supplied a name for Farley’s pimp. She said that.”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Let’s finish with the victim. If we assume that Farley is a hooker—a call girl, probably—then the victim was a regular customer. Is that it?”
“Well,” Culligan said cautiously, “that’s what Judy Blake said. And she seems pretty sharp. But we haven’t been able to turn up a corroborating witness.”
I checked the time. “It’s almost five. Pretty soon people’ll be coming home from work.”
“Yeah.” Typically, Culligan’s voice registered no enthusiasm.
“So is that all you’ve got on the victim?”
“Well,” Culligan hesitated. “When I pressed Judy Blake a little—she’s real cagey about committing herself—it turns out that she thinks she saw the victim driving a white Mercedes sports car. A 280SL, she said. And it was parked outside Farley’s apartment last night.”
“Is she sure about the make and model?”
“Yeah. Her stepfather has one just like it, she says.”
“That could be a break. Those cars cost ten or twelve thousand dollars. There probably aren’t twenty in the whole city. Is the car missing now?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe the murderer’s driving it,” I said thoughtfully.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll get right on it. Now, what about the pimp?”
“That could be a break, too. Still according to Judy Blake, the name is Jack Winship. Caucasian. Age, approximately twenty-seven. Weight, about a hundred eighty. Height, six foot. Dress, hippie style, but not real far-out. You know—faded jeans and run-down boots and torn sweat shirts. He has scraggly, dirty dark hair that just about touches his shoulders. He wears a long mustache but no beard, although he usually needs a shave. And he wears glasses—heavy black-rimmed glasses.”
As I wrote, I said, “Judy Blake sounds like the world’s best informant.”
“Let’s hope.” Culligan sighed morosely. I could visualize his long, lantern-jawed face with its chronic smudges of fatigue in the hollows of his eyes. “This Winship drives a beat-up green VW van, with some rust spots and a small stovepipe sticking out of the roof,” Culligan continued. “So he shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
“I’ll put him on the air right now. Does Winship actually live with Diane Farley?”
“He comes and goes, apparently. Miss Blake says that if Diane’s ‘entertaining,’ Winship sleeps in his van. But, anyhow, he’s always around.”
“R and I might just have something on Winship.”
“Let’s hope,” Culligan said again.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. I asked Judy Blake whether she saw any one of the three—Farley, Winship or the victim—last night. And it turns out that she did. She was home all night studying. And luckily she’s got her desk right under the window, so that she can look down into the street. And she’s almost sure that she saw Diane Farley and Jack Winship leaving in Winship’s van at about six P.M. Judy Blake says that maybe they were going to dinner, which they do a lot, she says—go out to dinner, I mean. So then—” Once more he paused for breath. “So then, about nine thirty, Miss Blake sees the victim pulling up in his white Mercedes.”
“Is she sure?”
“She’s sure, all right. She won’t admit it, but she’s sure. She just doesn’t quite want to commit herself until she’s checked with her father, who’s a big shot down in Los Angeles. But, if we needed to, we could pin her down.”
“Did she see the victim enter the Farley premises?”
“She didn’t actually eyeball him, because of the angle of the building. I mean, she couldn’t see the door. But she remembers seeing the Mercedes when she went to bed. That was about ten.”
“It sounds like the victim had a key to Diane Farley’s place.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Either that, or the door was open.”
“I hope you can turn up a few more witnesses like Judy Blake.”
“Yeah.”
“All right. I’ll get things started at this end. You and Sigler keep digging.”
“Yessir.”
I gave Communications the Winship A.P.B., then buzzed the squad room.
“Is Sergeant Markham around?”
“Nosir. He’s—oh, wait. He’s talking to a reporter. Shall I get him?”
“Yes.” As I said it, I was aware of a small tic of jealousy as I thought of Markham charming the reporters with his lean, hard-eyed good looks. I fidgeted irritably through a full half-minute before Markham came on the line. I ordered him to get a list of all registered owners of Mercedes 280SL sports cars in the Bay Area, then begin checking them out against the drivers’ licenses of the registered owners, comparing physical characteristics with those of the victim. Additionally, I wanted Communications advised of the possibility that Farley and Winship could be traveling together, either in the VW van or the Mercedes. And, finally, I wanted the day’s Missing Persons reports checked against the list of 280SL owners. Remembering the half-minute delay, I issued the orders cryptically. Markham’s acknowledgment was equally cryptic.
As I hung up, I saw Friedman eying me with obvious amusement.
“One of these days,” he pronounced, “Markham could be giving you orders. Do you realize that? You. Not me.”
“Why not you?”
“Because by that time—when Kreiger retires—I’ll be retired, too. You will then be the logical choice for captain—provided that in the meantime you’ve learned enough to bestow a few judicious kisses on a few carefully selected asses. Otherwise, like I say, Markham will surely be the boss. Already, he’s jockeying for position—which is to say that he’s already beginning to probe for your weakness. Yours. Not mine.”
“Why not yours?”
“Because he knows you’re his problem—his antagonist. Both of you are big-bull-moose types, pawing the ground. Kreiger, too. But I’m just a”—Friedman spread his hands—“I’m just an overweight ex-actor. That’s the trouble with once having acted: you never quite get a fresh grip on reality. However, I’m smart, so I get by. Whereas, like I said, you’re an instinctive stud—a heavy. But you spend a lot of energy repressing the instinct. Because, really, you don’t enjoy leaning on people. Markham, of course, has no such hangups. He—”
The phone rang. Friedman puffed leisurely at his cigar through two more rings, then answered. He listened for a full minute without speaking, then hung up. He looked at the phone for a moment, then smiled inscrutably. “That was the chief,” he said. “He told me to tell you that you’re to hold yourself in readiness for a special assignment.”
“What is it?”
“Well, it seems that some network execs got together over a few martinis, or something, and decided that they’re going to do an in-depth program on the assassination attempt. They’re going to give it the ‘Violence in America’ angle. It sounds like a socko cast, with a little something for everyone. They’re going to have the governor’s wife, for the fan-mag types, and a psychologist for the intellectuals, and you for the cops-and-robbers fans. And, of course, they’ll have the chief, so that everyone’ll know we’ve got a chief who looks like a chief should look.”
“Not you.”
“No. Not me. I don’t look the part, unlike you and the chief. So I guess I’ll go home.” He got his gun out of the drawer, clipped it on, and pushed himself to his feet, grunting with the effort. “Good luck with the Diane Farley case,” he said casually, taking his hat from a filing cabinet. “It sounds like it might have a few interesting kinks. And good luck with the governor’s wife. Don’t let her upstage you. I understand she’s good at that. And whatever you do, keep your best side to the camera.”