"I don't follow you."
"Your buddy Ballou. This got anything to do with him?"
"Of course not."
"You sure of that?"
"He's out of the country," I said. "He's been gone for over a month and I don't know when he's coming back. And he's never been big on raping women and leaving them in the middle of the fairway."
"I know, he's a gentleman, he replaces all divots. They're looking to put together a RICO case against him, but I suppose you already knew that."
"I heard something about it."
"I hope they make it stick, tuck him away in a federal joint for the next twenty years. But I suppose you feel differently."
"He's a friend of mine."
"Yeah, so I've been told."
"Anyway, he's got nothing to do with this matter." He just looked at me, and I said, "I have a client whose wife disappeared. The MO
looks similar to the Woodhaven incident."
"She was abducted?"
"It looks that way."
"He report it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I guess he had his reasons."
"That's not good enough, Matt."
"Suppose he's in the country illegally."
"Half the city's in the country illegally. You think we catch a kidnap case, the first thing we do is turn the victim over to the INS? And who is this guy, he can't swing a green card but he's got the money for a private investigator? Sounds to me like he's got to be dirty."
"Whatever you say."
"Whatever I say, huh?" He put out the cigarette and frowned at me.
"The woman dead?"
"It's beginning to look that way. If it's the same people—"
"Yeah, but why would it be the same people? What's the connection, the MO of the abduction?" When I didn't say anything he picked up the check, glanced at it, and tossed it across the table to me.
"Here,"
he said. "Your treat. You still at the same number? I'll call you this afternoon."
"Thanks Joe."
"No, don't thank me. I have to figure out if there's any way this is going to come back and haunt me. If not I'll make the call. Otherwise forget it."
I WENT to the noon meeting at Fireside, then back to my room.
There was nothing from Durkin, but a message slip indicated that I'd had a call from TJ. Just that— no number, no further message. I crumpled the slip and tossed it.
TJ is a black teenager I met about a year and a half ago on Times Square. That's his street name, and if he has another name he's kept it to himself. I'd found him breezy and saucy and irreverent, a breath of fresh air in the fetid swamp of Forty-second Street, and the two of us had hit it off together. I let him do some minor legwork on a case a little later on with a Times Square handle on it, and since then he'd kept in infrequent contact. Every couple of weeks there would be a call or a series of calls from him. He never left a number and I had no way of getting in touch with him, so his messages were just a way of letting me know he was thinking of me. If he really wanted to contact me he'd keep calling until he caught me at home.
When he did, we sometimes talked until his quarter ran out, or sometimes we would meet in his neighborhood or mine and I would buy him a meal. Twice I'd given him little jobs to do in connection with cases I was working, and he seemed to get a kick out of the work that couldn't be explained by the small sums I paid him.
I went to my room and called Elaine. "Danny Boy says hello," I said. "And Joe Durkin says you're a good influence on me."
"Of course I am," she said. "But how does he know?"
"He says I'm better dressed since we started keeping company."
"I told you that new suit is special."
"That's not what I was wearing."
"Oh."
"I was wearing my blazer. I've had the damn thing forever."
"Well, it still looks nice. Gray slacks with it? Which shirt and tie?"
I told her, and she said, "Well, that's a nice outfit."
"Pretty ordinary, though. I saw a zoot suit last night."
"Honestly?"
"With a drape shape and a reet pleat, according to Danny Boy."
"Danny Boy wasn't wearing a zoot suit."
"No, it was an associate of his named— well, it doesn't matter what his name was. He was also wearing a straw hat with a shocking-pink band. Now if I'd worn something like that to Durkin's office—"
"He would have been impressed. Maybe it's something in your stance, honey, maybe it's an attitude thing that Durkin's picking up on.
You're wearing your clothes with more authority."
"Because my heart is pure."
"That must be it."
We kibitzed a little more. She had a class that night and we talked about getting together afterward but decided against it. "Tomorrow's better," she said. "Maybe a movie? Except I hate to go on the weekend, everything decent is mobbed. I know, maybe an afternoon movie and dinner after it, assuming you're not working." I told her that sounded good.
I hung up and the man on the desk rang to say I'd had a call while I was on the phone with Elaine.
They've changed the phone system a few times since I've been at the Northwestern. Originally all calls had to go through the switchboard.
Then they fixed it so you could dial out directly, but incoming calls were still routed through the board. Now I have a direct line for making or receiving calls, but if I don't pick up after four rings it gets transferred downstairs. I get my own bill from NYNEX, the hotel doesn't impose any charges, and I come out of it with a free answering service.
The call was from Durkin, and I rang him back. "You left something here," he said. "You want to pick it up or should I toss it?"
I said I'd be right over.
He was on the phone when I got to the squad room. He had his chair tilted back and he was smoking a cigarette while another one burned up in the ashtray. At the desk next to his, a detective named Bellamy was peering over the tops of his eyeglasses at the screen of his computer.
Joe covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said, "I think that's your envelope there, it's got your name on it. You left it when you were here earlier."
Without waiting for a reply he went back to his conversation. I reached over his shoulder and picked up a nine-by-twelve manila clasp envelope with my name on it. Behind me, Bellamy told the computer,
"Well, that makes no fucking sense at all."
I didn't argue the point.
Chapter 6
Back in my room I spread a sheaf of curling fax copies on my bed.
They had evidently faxed the whole file, thirty-six pages of it. Some of them only had a few lines on them, but others were densely packed with information.
Shuffling through them, it struck me what a different proposition all this would have been in my own cop days. We didn't have copying machines, let alone fax. The only way to see Marie Gotteskind's file would have required traipsing out to Queens and going through it on the spot, with some anxious cop looking over your shoulder and trying to hurry you along.
Nowadays you just fed everything into a fax transmitter and it came out by sheer magic five or ten miles away— or on the other side of the world, for that matter. The original file never left the office where it was kept, and no unauthorized person snuck in for a peek at it, so nobody had to get uptight about a breach in security.
And I had all the time I needed to pore over the Gottes-kind file.
It's just as well I did because I had no clear idea what I was looking for. One thing that hasn't changed a bit since I got out of the Police Academy is the amount of paperwork the job entails. Whatever kind of cop you are, you spend less time doing things than you do establishing a record on paper of what you've done. Some of this is the usual bureaucratic horseshit and some comes under the general heading of covering your ass, but much of it is probably inescapable. Police work is a collective effort, with a variety of people contributing to even the simpler sort of investigation, and if it's not all written down somewhere nobody can get an overview of it and figure out what it amounts to.