I got off the Parkway at 96th Street and hit the neighborhoods again for a while. Now I was having second thoughts about telling Tom about the liquor store. Could I really trust him? What if he told somebody else, what if the word got around? Sooner or later it would reach the Captain, once it got started, and if that ever happened I was finished. The 15th Precinct had a couple of very hairy Captains for a while, guys who were in on the take, guys you could have bought off on a baby rape with a bottle of Scotch, but the boom got lowered all of a sudden, on the Captain we had at the time and also the one who’d been there before him and was assigned some place else and about to retire, and they both got their heads handed to them. Now we had a Captain who was out to make King of the Angels; spit on the sidewalk off duty and he’d write you up. Think what he’d do to a patrolman who held up a liquor store while driving his beat.
But Tom wouldn’t say anything, he’d have more sense than that. I could trust him; that’s why I’d told him. And face it, I’d had to tell somebody, I couldn’t keep it tied up inside me much longer. Sooner or later I’d have told somebody like Grace, for God’s sake, and Grace would never in a million years understand. With Tom, no matter what else he might think, I knew he’d understand.
And keep his mouth shut. Right?
Christ, I hoped so.
I was really feeling bugged. Frustrated and irritable and about ready to punch somebody in the mouth. I’d been having days like this every once in a while for the last few months, and I didn’t know what to do about them, how to deal with them. Except wait them out, wait for it all to go away, which sooner or later it always did.
Down on 72nd Street, I went over to the Parkway again. Paul had tried starting a couple of conversations, but I didn’t feel like talking. I’d come close, a few times in the last week, to telling Paul about the liquor store, but I didn’t really know Paul as well as I knew Tom, I didn’t have that same sense of closeness with him. And now that I’d told Tom, I didn’t want to tell anyone else at all. Or talk to anyone else at all. In fact, part of me was sorry I’d talked to Tom.
We got back up on the Parkway, and rolled along. The air was a little better over the river, and the motion of the car made a breeze that at least blew the stink off. My mood was picking up.
Then I spotted the white Cadillac Eldorado up ahead, moving right along. It was the same model as the one this morning, but a different color. I saw him up there, looking so cute and arrogant and rich, and all the bile came right back into me again, stronger than ever.
I eased up on him and saw he had New York plates. Good. If I gave him a ticket he couldn’t be a scofflaw, fade away into some other state and thumb his nose at me. He’d have to pay up or have a mess on his hands when it came time to renew his license.
I clocked him a mile, and he was doing fifty-four. Good enough.
“I’m taking the Caddy,” I said.
I guess Paul had been half-asleep, sitting there in the silence next to me. He sat up straighter and looked ahead and said, “The what?”
“That white Caddy.”
Paul studied the Cad, and raised his eyebrows at me. “How come?”
“I feel like it. He’s doing fifty-four.”
I hit the dome light, but not the siren. He could see me, he wouldn’t need a lot of noise. He slowed right away, and I crowded him off onto the shoulder.
Paul said, “You cut him a little close there.”
“He should of braked harder.” I looked at Paul, waiting for him to say something else, but all he did was shrug, as though to say he didn’t care, it wasn’t his business — which it wasn’t — so I got out of the car and went back to talk to the driver of the Cad.
He was about forty, with those pop-eyes called thyroid. He was wearing a suit and a tie, and when I went back to talk to him he opened his window by pushing a button. I asked to see his license and registration, and stood there a long time reading them, waiting for him to start a conversation. His name was Daniel Mossman, and he leased the Cad from a company in Tarrytown. And he didn’t have anything to say for himself at all. I said, “You know the speed limit along this stretch, Dan?”
“Fifty,” he said.
“You know what speed I clocked you at, Dan?”
“I believe I was doing about fifty-five.” There was no expression in his voice, nothing in his face, and those pop-eyes just looked at me like a fish.
I said, “What do you do for a living, Dan?”
“I’m an attorney,” he said.
An attorney. He couldn’t even say lawyer. I was twice as irritable as before. I went back to the patrol car and got behind the wheel, holding Mossman’s license and registration.
Paul looked over at me, and rubbed his thumb and finger together. “Anything?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’m giving the bastard a ticket.”
2
They co-hosted a barbecue for some friends in the neighborhood. The grill was in Tom’s backyard, so that’s where the party was, but they both pitched in for the food and drink, and both wives worked on the salads and the desserts and in setting things up. The first humid hot spell of the summer had broken the day before with one of those real drenching summer downpours, but by the morning of the barbecue the yard was almost completely dry. Also, the humidity was way down, and the temperature had dropped into the high seventies. Perfect weather for a party in the backyard.
There were four other couples invited, all from the same block, plus their kids. None of them were on the force, and in fact only one of them even worked in the city; Tom and Joe liked them all mostly because they could forget their own jobs while with them.
Before the party, they’d brought all the kitchen chairs and folding chairs out of both houses and scattered them around Tom’s yard, and set up a bar on a card table back by the grill. They had gin and vodka and scotch, plus soft drinks for the kids. Mary had put a sheet over the card table instead of a tablecloth, one of those printed sheets with a flower design all over it, and it really looked nice there.
Before dinner, Tom and Joe took turns being bartender, one serving the drinks while the other wandered around the yard playing host. But Tom was the official chef, like it said on his apron, so while he was doing the chicken quarters and the hamburgers on the outdoor grill Joe became the bartender full time. Then, after everybody had eaten, Tom became bartender again and Joe just stood around or occasionally went to one kitchen or the other for more ice. They both had ice-makers in their refrigerators, but with fifteen or twenty people all drinking iced drinks at once — and the kids mostly spilling theirs out on the grass — you can use ice faster than any refrigerator on earth can make it. It was a good thing to have two.
It was a good party, as that kind of party goes. That is, there weren’t any long uncomfortable silences, and there weren’t any fist-fights. In fact, nobody got falling down drunk, which was kind of unusual. The people on the block, mostly the men, tended to be pretty two-fisted drinkers, and the way the summertime parties usually went, the survivors carried the others home. Maybe it was because it was so early in the season, and the group wasn’t into the swing of things yet. Or maybe it was simply the nice weather after the long stretch of humidity; everybody was feeling so pleasant and comfortable that nobody wanted to spoil it with a hangover.
It was getting toward evening when Joe wandered over to the bar again and said, “How’s the ice holding out?”
“We need some.”
“No sooner said,” Joe told him, and went over to his own kitchen, and brought back a glass pitcher full of the little half-moon cubes. He worked his way through the guests to the card table, where Tom was standing with his chef’s apron still on. He didn’t have any customers right at that moment. Joe put the pitcher down and said, “There you go.”