Marlene looked up from the resume. “It says here you’re working for Macy’s now. How come you want to leave?”
“I don’t much like working retail.”
“Why not?”
Wolfe shrugged and said, hesitantly and with what seemed embarrassment, “Well, you know. It’s all shoplifting, pilferage. I don’t like … I mean, the people we pick up, most of them, they’re pathetic. Some skinny teenager, they got to have the sixty-dollar bag with the logo, the right sneakers they saw on the TV. We bust ’em, they sit in the office crying, you know, what’ll my dad say, and stuff. Even the pros, you know, miserable junkies, most of them. And the-what d’you call ’em-the guys who think they’re girls-”
“Transvestites?”
“… yeah, them: I couldn’t believe it, a PR kid, a boy, trying to walk out with an eight-hundred-dollar gown. Pathetic! Anyway, I figure I’d rather, you know, protect people from, like, terrorists, wackos, and like that. And when Dane-Lonny-told me you might be looking-”
“Right. Well, as a matter of fact, we are looking for some people.” Marlene looked at Wolfe. He met her gaze, his eyes mild, neutral, a reflecting lake, willing to be liked.
“You have any problems with working for a woman, Mr. Wolfe?” she asked.
Shrug. “No. A boss is a boss, as long as they’re not, you know …”
“What?”
“A jerk. Let me do my job, and stuff.” Wolfe allowed himself a shy smile.
Marlene smiled back. One advantage of hiring cops part-time was that your backgrounders were all done for you. The chances of getting a bum or a weirdo were much reduced. On the other hand, cops already had a job, a job that always came first, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to generate the coverage Bello amp; Ciampi needed for their clients out of the constantly changing patterns of their part-time availability. Also, when some dignitary visited, or some disaster happened, they might have the bulk of their coverage yanked away without much notice.
“Okay, Mr. Wolfe, let me check these references and run your name for record, and I’ll get back to you.”
“Okay, well, ah, thanks for the interview. I, ah, hope I can work here.”
Marlene smiled and shook the proffered hand again, and Wolfe walked out. She took the resume into Harry’s office, where she found Marlon Dane waving around a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 submachine gun.
“No,” said Marlene.
“Marlene, would you just listen?” said Dane, cradling the hideous thing like a puppy.
She glared, cocking her head to fix him with the full force of her good eye. Dane was a former cop, discharged on one of those odd NYPD disability pensions that paid people half their pay forever for extremely subtle injuries. Dane had been pushed down a flight of stairs by a fugitive, producing a stiffness in his right elbow such that were he to be involved in a furious gunfight, he might not be able to out-draw the desperado. Besides that he was fine: more than that, was bursting with energy. He was a stocky man with dense brown hair, dark eyes, and a curiously lush thick-lipped mouth. Today he was dressed in his undercover outfit, a red hooded sweatshirt stained with plaster dust, faded jeans, and yellow construction boots. He looked like he was about to set a rivet with the gun.
“I don’t have to listen, Lonny,” said Marlene. “This is not open to argument. I thought I made myself clear the first time you brought it up, and also the second through fifth times, but let me restate it in simpler terms. Ready? No machine guns. None. Not one. Negatory on the machine guns. We are eighty-six as far as machine guns go. Do I have to go on, or do you get it yet?”
“Marlene, I got to say, you’re making a mistake here,” Dane persisted, ignoring this last. “All the big security firms use these. The clients expect it, especially the big shots. It looks cool too, the client gets out of the limo, we’re standing there with these babies slung under our coats …”
Marlene sighed. “But, Lonny,” she said in a controlled manner, “you know, we have very few clients who are heads of state or oil ministers. The people who try to get to our clients are jerky boyfriends and lone nuts, not gangs of international terrorists. I get nervous with some of the guys we hire carrying revolvers. They start carrying something like that, I might as well check into a psycho ward.”
“But …”
“Lonny? Please? End of discussion.”
Which it was. Dane put the weapon away in his duffel bag, and conversation turned to a report on the man Dane was watching, Donald Monto, the rejected swain of one Mary Kay Miller. Monto had been spending his evenings drinking and cruising past Ms. Miller’s Brooklyn home. Before long, Marlene had every confidence, he would be drunk enough to break down her door, as he had on two past occasions, and try to beat Ms. Miller into jelly in order to demonstrate his affection. On the next occasion, however, Dane would be there, would identify himself, and should the man fail to retreat (a reasonable expectation), Dane would, in the presence of Ms. Miller, render Monto incapable of doing anything anti-door for a good long time, perhaps indefinitely.
“That stronzo!” snapped Marlene when Dane had gone. “Fucking machine guns!”
“Muscle,” said Harry. “He does okay, though, he don’t have to do much heavy thinking. How was his friend?”
“Looks all right,” she said, tossing the resume on the desk. “More muscle. You’ll check him out. If he’s okay, let’s give him a shot. He sounds like he’s got a sympathetic heart, and he looks like he can take care of himself. This is not an everyday combo.”
“He probably likes bazookas, your luck,” said Harry. Marlene had her first serious laugh of the day.
Outside the building, the Music Lover looked up from across the street at the wide semicircular window. He could see Marlene and Harry. If she turned her head, he thought, she could look right at me. And then she would turn her head away. He was so full of delicious pleasure at the thought that he quivered, and his groin grew hot.
SIX
“You look beat,” Karp said.
“I’m totally ruined,” Marlene said. “I have to pee, and I can’t bear the thought of moving my body out of bed to the bathroom. Could you, like, do it for me?”
“I would, but I’m too tired.”
“Your trial, huh?”
Both of them were talking like zombies, lying corpse-like in bed, staring up at the ceiling with glazed eyes; it would have been amusing if either of them could have spared the energy to laugh. It was Sunday night after a weekend with no rest.
“Right,” sighed Karp. “I have to see Waley tomorrow. I thought I should know the case and the relevant law before I met him. He probably does. But I had to spend all Friday with this silly woman who screwed up a perfectly simple case, where the witnesses weren’t-”
“I don’t want to hear it,” groaned Marlene, putting her hands over her ears.
“Right, why bother? The bureau is going to go down the tubes.”
“Uh-huh. Explain to me again why it was so important for you to take this case, even though everyone told you not to.”
“It was important because I am an arrogant schmuck, and as an arrogant schmuck I naturally believe I can do things that no one else can do, like managing a major case against the best defense lawyer in the country while running a homicide bureau that handles a thousand cases a year. How’s Lucy doing?”
“Terrible. She went to bed in tears again. I feel like I’m tearing pieces of flesh from her body. She’s so ashamed of herself she can’t think straight, and I lose my temper. I am many things, but apparently a math teacher is not one of them. Why can’t she learn this shit? I’m thinking. It’s easy! And of course, it’s not easy for her for some reason, and then I think she needs to go into some kind of counseling, so she can tell someone what a bad mother I am. Anyway, it’s clear that something else is going on-it’s not intellectual deficit. I mean, for Christ’s sake, the kid speaks Chinese, she reads at the ninth-grade level … Fuck! I can’t think about it anymore. Look, could you, like, stroke my head?”