‘Don’t do this to me.’
‘So what did you think of the resolution to the ambush?’
‘Oh, that was the best.’ Herman’s sarcasm was surprisingly light, and his face had gone suddenly sly. ‘No, wait. The best one starts in The Cabin at the Edge of the World. In the previous book, the Wichita Kid was bitten by a mad wolf. The animal was frothing at the mouth, the whole nine yards.’
‘But there was no rabies vaccine in Wichita’s century.’
‘I know that,’ said Herman, no dilettante in the field of history. ‘Rabies was a death sentence in that period.’
‘So he’s cured with a folk remedy,’ said Charles. ‘Something like that?’
The little man’s smile was coy. ‘No, that’s not it.’
‘Well, I know he’s alive in the last book, so he can’t possibly die of – ’ Charles leaned back in his chair and smiled, for he had just exposed himself as another victim of Jake Swain. ‘Touche.’
And now – a turnabout.
He spread the books over the table for all to see, then studied the lurid covers of smoke and guns and rearing horses, much to the discomfort of Anthony Herman. ‘I know someone who thought the world of these novels. She read them over and over. Now that you’ve had a chance to evaluate the lot of them – any helpful insight?’
‘Well, no.’ Herman seemed honestly mystified. ‘The only reason for reading any of them is to find out what happens next. I assure you there’s no reason to read them more than once.’
‘There has to be more to it than that.’ Charles gathered the westerns into a stack, then looked up at the book detective. ‘So what’s it all about?’
‘Ultimately,’ said Herman, ‘it’s about the redemption of the Wichita Kid.’
Riker had finished his first drink by the time he came to the end of the written interview. The detail was fanatical, right down to Alan Parris’s dirty toenails. ‘And all this conversation – this is word for word?’
‘I take shorthand.’ Deluthe sipped his beer, then tried to make his voice sound casual when he asked, ‘So what’re my chances for getting a permanent assignment to Special Crimes Unit?’
‘Today? Slim and none. You got no experience, kid.’ Only a handful of detectives were ever promoted to first-grade, and ten of them were in Special Crimes Unit. ‘We don’t take whiteshields. And you’re what – twenty-five, twenty-six? Most of the guys are in their thirties and forties. We only got one cop your age.’
‘And coincidentally Mallory is the daughter of the former commander of – ’
‘You’re out of line, Deluthe. She grew up in Special Crimes Unit. When she was still in grammar school, she logged more time on the job than you’ve got.’
‘He’s right.’ Their bartender had been introduced to Deluthe as Riker’s former partner from younger days. Peg Baily leaned into the conversation to replace Riker’s empty glass with a fresh bourbon and water. ‘That kid was our only technical support. In those days, we had crappy secondhand computers. Didn’t work half the time. The kid got the whole system up and running when she was thirteen years old.’ Peg set down a beer for Deluthe. ‘But you’re wondering how Mallory got the rank of detective first-grade. She chased down the perp who murdered her old man. Highest-priority case in New York City. That’s getting ahead the hard way.’
Peg Baily wandered down the bar to fill another glass, and Riker completed the trainee’s education, giving equal weight to every word, ‘Nobody ever questioned Mallory’s right to a place in Special Crimes.’ As he leaned toward the younger man, his face relaxed into a smile. ‘Now, as the son-in-law of a deputy commissioner, you’ve got a lot more to overcome.’
‘Suppose I divorce my wife?’
‘It’s a start.’ Riker pulled a wad of papers from the pocket of his suit jacket and slapped it on the bar. ‘This is your background check on the cops at Natalie’s crime scene. We already had this information. Mallory pulled it off the computer. Took her two minutes.’
‘So that assignment was just busywork.’
Riker ignored this statement of fact and spread the sheets flat on the bar. ‘This is only worthless because you took a computer spit-out, something a clerk gave you over the counter. Now a look at the original files – that might’ve turned up some dirt. But you can still learn a lot from the official fairy tale. I’ll teach you how to read the disappearing ink.’ He put the first sheet aside, saying, ‘There were five cops on the scene, three dicks, two uniforms. Four of them left the precinct in a group. That’s a stand-out fact.’
‘I saw that,’ said Deluthe, defensive now. ‘But it had nothing to do with the murder. That was six years later.’
‘But all in the same four-week period. That tells you Internal Affairs was all over that copshop.’
‘There are no charges on their records, nothing to say – ’
‘Deluthe, I told you this was a fairy tale. Now do you want your bedtime story, or do we call it a night?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Just drink – quietly.’ Riker’s finger moved across the lines of text. ‘So, one of the uniforms, Alan Parris, was fired for insubordination. Now that’s bogus. You’d have to shoot a sergeant to get fired on a charge like that.’ Riker turned to the next page and the next man. ‘The week before that, his partner, your boss Harvey Loman – he gets reassigned to another precinct. That tells you Loman rolled over on his partner to cut a deal with Internal Affairs.’
He moved on to another sheet. ‘Here we got one detective who resigned to take a job in the private sector. The real story? They forced him out. Not enough proof to hang him. This guy’s next job was cleaning out toilets. He drank himself to death years ago.’
Now the final sheet. ‘And here we have one more dead detective, a suicide. So, dead or alive, four out of five men leave the department at the same time. The man who shot himself was probably looking at jail time. That means he was the last one to give it up, but there was nobody left to rat on. If he hadn’t died, he would’ve been the sacrifice, the cop who went to prison.’
Of course, Riker was cheating. The nest of shakedown artists in that stationhouse had been the worst-kept secret in NYPD. ‘Your interview with Alan Parris only looks good on paper. The two witnesses – the little kids in the hall? Parris gave you a lot of convincing details, but nothing to help you find them. That story could be smoke. So Parris goes on the short list.’
‘But the FBI profiles for serial killers – ’
‘And that’s another fairy tale,’ said Riker.
The remainder of Stella Small’s night was a self-imposed blur. She was using rum concoctions to drown the image of a subway full of dead and dying flies and stampeding passengers. Another hour had ended in yet another crowd. On the next bar stool was a tourist in a T-shirt emblazoned with the city motto, ‘I love New York’.
New York sucks.
The young actress’s sinuses were clogged with cigarette smoke, and she fancied that she could still smell the insecticide from the
subway fiasco. Her head was swimming in rum, and the world swirled around her. Perhaps it had been a mistake to order drinks decorated with paper parasols. But she was not up for the humiliation of tears in a room full of out-of-towners, and the booze, so much tastier than Valium, kept her eyes dry.
One of the customers slammed into her back as he moved toward the men’s room. Stella turned to yell at him, but he was lost among a gathering of drinkers.
Damn tourist.
Another patron took advantage of her distraction to cop a feel of one breast. Stunned for a moment, she spun her stool around too late. The man who had sat beside her was gone, lost in the crowd. Stella laid her head down on the bar and knocked it twice against the wood.
Iwill not cry, I will not cry.
And she did not. She gathered up her house keys and left the bar. Haifa block down the street, she noticed a man who was definitely on a mission, marching in the perfect parade-time of a soldier. No – more like a toy soldier, so mechanical, all springs and levers. Mimicry was her art, and she employed it now, stiffening her limbs to follow the marching man.