Levine pulled the incomplete report from the typewriter and followed the Lieutenant into his office. The Lieutenant sat down, and motioned for Levine to do the same, then held out his hand.
“Could I see that report?” he asked.
“It isn’t finished.”
“That’s all right.”
The Lieutenant glanced at the report, and then dropped it on his desk. “Abe,” he said, “do you know what our full complement is supposed to be?”
“Twenty men, isn’t it?”
“Right. And we have fifteen. With Crawley out, fourteen. Abe, here’s your reports for the last six days. What have you been doing, man? We’re understaffed, we’re having trouble keeping up with the necessary stuff, and look what you’ve been doing. For six days you’ve been running around in circles. And for what? For a small-time punk who got a small-time punk’s end.”
“He was murdered, Lieutenant.”
“Lots of people are murdered, Abe. When we can, we find out who did the job, and we turn him over to the DA. But we don’t make an obsession out of it. Abe, for almost a week now you haven’t been pulling your weight around here. There’ve been three complaints about how long it took us to respond to urgent calls. We’re understaffed, but we’re not that understaffed.”
Barker tapped the little pile of reports. “This man Gold was a fence, and a cheap crook. He isn’t worth it, Abe. We can’t waste any more time on him. When you finish up this report, I want you to recommend we switch the case to Pending. And tomorrow I want you to get back with the team.”
“Lieutenant, I’ve got one more man to—”
“And tomorrow there’ll be one more, and the day after that one more. Abe, you’ve been working on nothing else at all. Forget it, will you? This is a cheap penny-ante bum. Even his brother doesn’t care who killed him. Let it go, Abe.”
He leaned forward over the desk. “Abe, some cases don’t get solved right away. That’s what the Pending file is for. So six weeks from now, or six months from now, or six years from now, while we’re working on something else, when the break finally does come, we can pull that case out and hit it hot and heavy again. But it’s cold now, Abe, so let it lie.”
Speeches roiled around inside Levine’s head, but they were only words so he didn’t say them. He nodded, reluctantly. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“The man was a bum,” said the Lieutenant, “pure and simple. Forget him, he isn’t worth your time.”
“Yes, sir,” said Levine.
He went back to the squadroom and finished typing the report, recommending that the Morry Gold case be switched to the Pending file. Then it was twelve o’clock, and he left the precinct and walked to the subway station. The underground platform was cold and deserted. He stood shivering on the concrete, his hands jammed deep into his pockets. He waited twenty minutes before a train came. Then it did come, crashed into the station and squealed to a stop. The doors in front of Levine slid back with no hands touching them, and he stepped aboard.
The car was empty, with a few newspapers abandoned on the seats. The doors slid shut behind him and the train started forward. He was the only one in the car. He was the only one in the car and all the seats were empty, but he didn’t sit down.
The train rocked and jolted as it hurtled through the cold hole under Brooklyn, and Abraham Levine stood swaying in the middle of the empty car, a short man, bulky in his overcoat, hulk-shouldered, crying.
After I’m Gone
Afternoon visiting hours at the hospital were from two till five, so when Detective Abraham Levine of Brooklyn’s Forty-Third Precinct got off his tour at four P.M.., he took a Rockaway Parkway bus to the hospital and spent thirty-five minutes with Detective Andy Stettin. Levine and Andy had been together when Andy was hit, a bullet high on the left side of the chest, fired through a closed door. Andy, a promising youngster, a hotshot, one of the new breed of college cops, had been close to death for a while, but was now on the mend, and very bored and impatient with hospital routine.
It wasn’t really necessary for Levine to go through this ritual every day, nor did he have that much to say to the youngster, and in fact he knew full well he was only doing it because he so much didn’t want to. There was a certain amount of guilt involved, since Levine was secretly happy that the bullet had ended his brief partnership with Andy Stettin, but in truth Andy wasn’t the main point here at all. The main point was the hospital.
To Andy Stettin, a young fellow, healthy and self-assured, the hospital was merely a nuisance and a bore. To Abraham Levine, fifty-three years of age, short and stocky, overweight and short of wind, with a tired heart that skipped the occasional beat, the hospital was a horrible presentiment, an all-too-possible future. Those sad withered men, shrunken within their maroon or brown robes, shuffling down the wide featureless corridors in their Christmas-present slippers, were a potential tomorrow that could be very close indeed. Going to the hospital every afternoon was for Levine a painful repeated confrontation with his own worst fears.
Today, a Thursday, Levine told Andy that there continued to be no break in the case of Maurice Gold, during the investigation of whose murder Andy had been shot, by a drug dealer who unfortunately was not Gold’s killer. Andy shrugged, not really interested: “Gold is gonna stay Open,” he said.
Levine had to agree. With some sort of reverse logic, when a case became inactive the Police Department phrase was that it was Opened. “Open that,” meant in reality to close it, to cease to work on it. The reason behind the Newspeak phraseology was that only an arrest could Close a case; an inactive case could always be reactivated by fresh evidence, and therefore it would remain — unto eternity, most likely — Open.
Levine and Andy also talked awhile about Levine’s regular partner, Jack Crawley, a big shambling mean-looking harness bull with whom Levine had a very easy and reassuring relationship. Crawley had just come back on duty this week after his convalescent leave-he had been, several months ago, shot in the leg-and the long spell of inactivity had made him more bristly and bad-tempered than ever. “I think he’ll arrest me pretty soon,” Levine said.
Andy laughed at that, but what he mostly wanted to talk about was a nurse he had his eye on, a pretty young thing, very short and compact, squeezed into a too-tight uniform. Both times the girl passed by while Levine was there, Andy did some elephantine flirting, very heavy-handed arch remarks that Levine found embarrassing but which the girl appeared to enjoy. The second time, after both men had watched the provocative departure of the nurse, Andy grinned and said, “The sap still rises, eh, Abe?”
“The sap also sets,” Levine told him, getting to his feet. “See you tomorrow, Andy.”
“Thanks for coming by.”
Levine was walking down the wide corridor, not meeting the eyes of the ambulatory patients, when a hand touched his elbow and a gravelly voice said, quietly, “Let’s just walk around here a while.”
Surprised, Levine looked to his right and saw a short, blocky, pugnacious-looking man of about his own age, wearing an expensive topcoat open over a rather wrinkled suit, and an old-fashioned snap-brim hat pulled low enough to make it difficult to see his eyes. Levine noticed the awkward bunchiness of the man’s tie-knot, as though he had got himself up in costume like a trick-or-treater, as though his real persona existed in some other mode.
The man gave Levine a quick sidelong glance from under his hatbrim. His hand held firmly to Levine’s elbow. “You’re a cop, right? Abraham Levine, detective. Visiting the cop in there.”