“Were you going to bring that pail back to him?”
“Well …” Parry hesitated. He glanced at Meyer. Meyer nodded encouragingly. “Well, no,” Parry said. “I figured if there was junk in it, maybe I could turn a quick buck, you know. There’s lots of guys in this neighborhood’ll pay for stuff like that.”
“Stuff like what?” Willis asked.
“Like what’s in the pail,” Parry said.
“Open the pail, kid,” Willis said.
“No.” Parry shook his head. “No, I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“If it’s junk, I don’t know nothing about it. And if it’s thirty G’s, I got nothing to do with it. I don’t know nothing. I don’t want to answer no more questions, that’s it.”
“That’s it, Hal,” Meyer said.
“Go on home, kid,” Willis said.
“I can go?”
“Yeah, yeah, you can go,” Willis said wearily.
Parry stood up quickly, and without looking back headed straight for the gate in the slatted railing that divided the squadroom from the corridor outside. He was down the hallway in a wink. His footfalls clattered noisily on the iron-runged steps leading to the street floor below.
“What do you think?” Willis said.
“I think we did it ass-backwards,” Hawes said. “I think we should have followed him out of the park instead of nailing him. He would have led us straight to the deaf man.”
“The lieutenant didn’t think so. The lieutenant figured nobody would be crazy enough to send a stranger after fifty thousand dollars. The lieutenant figured the guy who made the pickup had to be a member of the gang.”
“Yeah, well the lieutenant was wrong,” Hawes said.
“You know what I think?” Kling said.
“What?”
“I think the deaf man knew there’d be nothing in that lunch pail. That’s why he could risk sending a stranger for it. He knew the money wouldn’t be there, and he knew we’d pick up whoever he sent.”
“If that’s the case …” Willis started.
“He wants to kill Scanlon,” Kling said.
The detectives all looked at each other. Faulk scratched his head and said, “Well, I better be getting back across the park, unless you need me some more.”
“No, thanks a lot, Stan,” Meyer said.
“Don’t mention it,” Faulk said, and went out.
“I enjoyed the plant,” Eileen Burke said, and glanced archly at Willis, and then swiveled toward the gate and out of the squadroom.
“Can it be the breeze …” Meyer sang.
“That fills the trees …” Kling joined in.
“Go to hell,” Willis said, and then genuflected and piously added, “Sisters.”
If nobody in the entire world likes working on Saturday, even less people like working on Saturday night.
Saturday night, baby, is the night to howl. Saturday night is the night to get out there and hang ten. Saturday night is when you slip into your stain slippers and your Pucci dress, put on your shirt with the monogram on the cuff, spray your navel with cologne, and laugh too loud.
The bitch city is something different on Saturday night, sophisticated in black, scented and powdered, but somehow not as unassailable, shiveringly beautiful in a dazzle of blinking lights. Reds and oranges, electric blues and vibrant greens assault the eye incessantly, and the resultant turn-on is as sweet as a quick sharp fix in a penthouse pad, a liquid cool that conjures dreams of towering glass spires and enameled minarets. There is excitement in this city on Saturday night, but it is tempered by romantic expectancy. She is not a bitch, this city. Not on Saturday night.
Not if you will love her.
Nobody likes to work on Saturday night, and so the detectives of the 87th Squad should have been pleased when the police commissioner called Byrnes to say that he was asking the D.A.’s Squad to assume the responsibility of protecting Deputy Mayor Scanlon from harm. If they’d had any sense at all, the detectives of the 87th would have considered themselves fortunate.
But the commissioner’s cut was deeply felt, first by Byrnes, and then by every man on the squad when he related the news to them. They went their separate ways that Saturday night, some into the streets to work, others home to rest, but each of them felt a corporate sense of failure. Not one of them realized how fortunate he was.
The two detectives from the D.A.’s Squad were experienced men who had handled special assignments before. When the deputy mayor’s personal chauffeur arrived to pick them up that night, they were waiting on the sidewalk outside the Criminal Courts Building, just around the corner from the District Attorney’s office. It was exactly 8:00 P.M. The deputy mayor’s chauffeur had picked up the Cadillac sedan at the municipal garage a half-hour earlier. He had gone over the upholstery with a whisk broom, passed a dust rag over the hood, wiped the windows with a chamois cloth, and emptied all the ashtrays. He was now ready for action, and he was pleased to note that the detectives were right on time; he could not abide tardy individuals.
They drove up to Smoke Rise, which was where the deputy mayor lived, and one of the detectives got out of the car and walked to the front door, and rang the bell, and was ushered into the huge brick house by a maid in a black uniform. The deputy mayor came down the long white staircase leading to the center hall, shook hands with the detective from the D.A.’s Squad, apologized for taking up his time this way on a Saturday night, made some comment about the “damn foolishness of it all,” and then called up to his wife to tell her the car was waiting. His wife came down the steps, and the deputy mayor introduced her to the detective from the D.A.’s Squad, and then they all went to the front door.
The detective stepped outside first, scanned the bushes lining the driveway, and then led the deputy mayor and his wife to the car. He opened the door and allowed them to precede him into the automobile. The other detective was stationed on the opposite side of the car, and as soon as the deputy mayor and his wife were seated, both detectives got into the automobile and took positions facing them on the jump seats.
The dashboard clock read 8:30 P.M.
The deputy mayor’s personal chauffeur set the car in motion, and the deputy mayor made a few jokes with the detectives as they drove along the gently winding roads of exclusive Smoke Rise on the edge of the city’s northern river, and then onto the service road leading to the River Highway. It had been announced in the newspapers the week before that the deputy mayor would speak at a meeting of the B’nai Brith in the city’s largest synagogue at nine o’clock that night. The deputy mayor’s home in Smoke Rise was only fifteen minutes away from the synagogue, and so the chauffeur drove slowly and carefully while the two detectives from the D.A.’s Squad eyed the automobiles that moved past on either side of the Cadillac.
The Cadillac exploded when the dashboard clock read 8:45 P.M.
The bomb was a powerful one.
It erupted from somewhere under the hood, sending flying steel into the car, tearing off the roof like paper, blowing the doors into the highway. The car screeched out of control, lurched across two lanes, rolled onto its side like a ruptured metal beast and was suddenly ablaze.
A passing convertible tried to swerve around the flaming Cadillac.
There was a second explosion. The convertible veered wildly and crashed into the river barrier.
When the police arrived on the scene, the only person alive in either car was a bleeding seventeen-year-old girl who had gone through the windshield of the convertible.
Chapter 8