‘What the hell do you know?’ Byrnes said, and then immediately said, ‘I’m sorry, Steve,’ and washed his open hand over his face and sighed heavily. ‘I got a call from Inspector Cassidy this morning,’ he said. ‘The girl’s father—the Schneider girl—her father’s a big wheel at some temple in Calm’s Point, he’s yelling like it’s the Holocaust all over again. You think there’s an anti-Semitic angle here?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘The other girl wasn’t Jewish, was she?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Yeah, well... also the Schneider girl worked for CBS, which the newspapers figure to be a glamour job...’
‘She was a receptionist there, Pete.’
‘You think he’s planning a heist at CBS?’
‘Well ... I’ll tell you the truth, that never occurred to us.’
‘I don’t know, do they have cash laying around there?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Anyway, you get a girl working for a television network, the media automatically makes a big deal of it. Well, you’ve seen the papers, you’ve seen television.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What I’m saying is we’re getting a lot of heat on this, Steve. From departmental rank and the media. I’d like to be able to tell somebody something. And soon.’
‘We’re doing our best, Pete.’
‘Yeah, I know, I know. It’s just ... with Christmas coming...’
He let the sentence trail again.
* * * *
CHAPTER NINE
Christmas was indeed coming.
And as far as Detective Lloyd Andrew Parker was concerned, it was coming too damn soon. In fact, it started coming sooner and sooner each year. This year the stores were already decorated for Christmas a few days before Thanksgiving. You woke up one morning, it wasn’t even turkey time yet, and there was Santa Claus in the store windows.
Parker hated Christmas.
He also hated his first name. He doubted that anyone on the squad knew his first name was Lloyd. Maybe no one in the entire world knew his first name was Lloyd. He himself had almost forgotten that his first name was Lloyd. Well, maybe Miscolo in the clerical office knew because he was the one who made out the pay chits every two weeks. Lloyd was a piss-ant name. Andrew was better because Andrew was one of the twelve apostles, and anybody with a twelve-apostle name was a good guy. If you were reading a book—which Parker rarely did—and you ran across a guy named Luke, Matthew, Thomas, Peter, Paul, James, like that, you knew right off he was supposed to be a good guy. That was in books. In real life you sometimes got the scum of the earth named for apostles, criminals who’d slit your throat for a nickel.
Parker hated criminals.
He also hated being called Andy. Made him sound like fuckin’ Andy Hardy or something. Little piss-ant twerp having heart-to-heart chats with his Judge Hardy father. Parker hated judges. It was judges who let criminals go free. He would have preferred being called Andrew, which was his true and honorable middle name. Andrew had some respect attached to it. Andy sounded like a good old boy you patted on the back: Hey, Andy, how’s it goin’, Andy? Parker hated his mother for having named him, first of all, Lloyd, and then having reduced his middle name, which he’d got when he was confirmed, to Andy. Parker hated his father for not having stood up to his mother when she decided to name him first Lloyd and then Andrew. Parker was glad both his mother and his father were dead.
Parker wished Santa Claus was dead, too.
Parker wished Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer would get shot some starry Christmas Eve and be served as venison steak on Christmas Day. Or, better yet, venison stew. If he heard that dumb song on the radio one more time, he would take out his pistol and shoot the fuckin’ radio. The person Parker liked most at Christmastime was Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge would’ve made a good cop. Parker thought of himself as a good cop, but he knew most of the guys on the squad thought he was a lousy cop. He also knew they didn’t like him much. Fuck ‘em, he wasn’t running in any fuckin’ popularity contest.
The Christmas songs had started on the radio a couple of days ago, as if all the disc jockeys just couldn’t wait to start playing them. Same old songs every year. This was only the fifteenth of December, and already he’d heard all the Christmas songs a hundred times over. ‘Silent Night’ and ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ and ‘Little Drummer Boy’—he wished the little drummer boy would get shot together with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—and ‘The First Noel’ and ‘Joy to the World’ and ‘White Christmas’ and ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ and ‘Deck the Halls’ and ‘Jingle Bells’ and the worst fuckin’ Christmas song ever written in the history of the world: ‘All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.’ If Parker ever met the guy who wrote that song, he’d give him his two front teeth all right, on a platter after he knocked them out of his mouth.
Parker hated Christmas songs.
He hated everything about this city at Christmastime.
He hated the city all the time, but he hated it most at Christmastime.
All those phony Santa Clauses standing on street corners ringing bells and asking for donations. All the Salvation Army piss-ants blowing trumpets and shaking tambourines. All the fake fuckin’ beggars who crowded the sidewalks, guys with signs saying they were blind or deaf and dumb like Carella’s wife, or guys on little trolleys with signs saying they lost their legs, all of them phonies like the phony Santa Clauses. Fuckin’ phony blind man went home at night, all of a sudden he could see when he was counting the money in his tin cup. Parker hated the street musicians and the break dancers. He hated the guys selling merchandise on the sidewalks outside department stores. If he had his way, he’d lock up even the ones who had vendor’s licenses, cluttering up the sidewalks that way, most of them selling stolen merchandise. Parker hated the out-of-towners who flocked to this city before Christmas. Gee, looka the big buildings, Mama. Fuckin’ greenhorns, each and every one of them, cameras clicking, oohing and ahhing, prime targets for pickpockets, caused more trouble than they were worth. Suckers for all the guys driving horse-drawn carriages around Grover Park. He hated the way those guys decorated their carriages for the holidays, garlands of pine hanging all over them, wreaths, banners saying seasons greetings, all the phony trappings of Christmas, when all they were after was the buck, the long green. Hated horses, too. All they did was shit all over the streets, make the job harder for the sanitmen. Hated the idea that there were still some horse-mounted cops in this city, more horses to shit on the city streets, had their stable right up here in the Eight-Seven, the old armory on the corner of First and Saint Sab’s, saw them heading downtown each and every morning, a fuckin’ parade of horses in different colors, cops sitting on them like they were a fuckin’ Roman legion. Hated horses and hated mounted cops and hated tourists who should have stayed home in Elephant Shit, Iowa.
Most of all, Parker hated Alice Patricia Parker.
None of the guys on the squad knew that Parker had once been married. Fuck ‘em, it was none of their business.