No one knew how he did it.
It had to be some kind of miracle.
But if you were hurting, baby, Doctor Proctor could fix you. If you needed what you needed, Doctor Proctor could get it for you. Always ready to help a friend in need, that was Doctor Proctor. A confirmed junkie, and a prison dope dealer. But none of that mattered. He had a title now, which was better than either a nickname or a street name. Doctor Proctor. Who for the past two years had been on the streets again. Apparently doing burglaries again. Or perhaps worse.
His mug shot showed a round clean-shaven face, dark eyes, short blond hair.
The Ungers had described him as thin and blond and growing a mustache.
The date of birth on his records made him twenty-four last October.
The Ungers had said he was eighteen, nineteen.
The last address his parole officer had for him was 1146 Park Street, in Calm's Point. But he had long ago violated parole, probably figuring if he was going to go back to work at his old trade it certainly didn't pay to waste time with parole-officer appointments. If a man was going to break parole by stealing, then why check in with the PO? If he got caught stealing, he'd go back to prison anyway. Besides, he wasn't going to get caught.
No criminal ever thinks he's going to get caught. Only the other guy gets caught. Even criminals who've already been caught and sent to person believe they won't get caught the next time. The reason they got caught the first time was they made a little mistake. The next time, they wouldn't make any mistakes. They would never get caught again. They would never do time again.
It never occurred to a criminal that a sure way to avoid doing time was to find an honest job. But why should a man take a job paying $3.95 an hour when he could go into a grocery store with a gun and steal four thousand dollars from the cash register! Four fucking thousand dollars! forten minutes' work! Unless he got caught. If he got caught, he'd be sent up for thirty years, and when you divided the four grand by thirty, you got two hundred a year. And when you broke that down to a forty-hourweek for every week in the year, you saw that the man had earned a bit more than six cents an hour for his big holdup.
Terrific.
He marches in there with a big macho gun in his big macho fist, and he scares the shit out of Mom and Pop behind the counter, and he never once thinks, not for a minute, that what he's doing is betting thirty years against that money in the cash register - which, by the way, might turn out to be four dollars instead of four thousand.
Smart.
But who says criminals have to be brilliant?
And, anyway, he's not going to get caught.
But even if he does get caught, even if he does make another teeny-weeny little tiny mistake the second time around, and even if the judge throws the book at him because now he's a habitual criminal, he can do the time standing on his head, right? The Castleview Penitentiary SAC. Lots ofold buddies from the street in there. Hey, Jase! How ya doin', Blood? But a lot of weights in there. Shoot the shit in the Yard. Get some fish in the gym to suck your cock, your buddies standing watch and then taking their turns. Send away for correspondence courses can make you a lawyer or a judge. Shit, man, you can do the time with one hand tied behind your back.
The signs tacked up in every police precinct in this city read:
If you can't do the
TIME -
Don't do the
CRIME!
Criminals laughed at those signs.
Those signs were for amateurs.
Martin Proctor had been to prison and enjoyed it very much, thanks, and he was out again, and had at least burglarized one apartment on New Year's Eve and perhaps done something more serious than that. But the cops had an address for him. And when you had an address, that was where you started. And sometimes you got lucky.
1146 Park was in a section of Calm's Point that had once been middle-class Jewish, had gone from there to middle-class Hispanic, and was now an area of mostly abandoned tenements sparsely populated by junkies of every persuasion and color. Nobody in the building had ever heard of anyone named Proctor - Martin, Snake, Mr Sniff or even Doctor.
Sometimes you got lucky, but not too often.
* * * *
'I should be in Florida right this minute,' Fats Donner said.
He was talking to Hal Willis.
Willis had dealt with him on many a previous occasion. Willis did not like him at all. Neither did any of the cops on the Eight-Seven. That was because Donner had a penchant for young girls. In the ten- or eleven-year-old age bracket; for Donner these days, twelve was a little long in the tooth. Willis was here only because he'd worked with Donner more often than had any other cop on the squad. Donner, being such an expert ear, might have heard something about Proctor's recent whereabouts, no?
'No,' Donner said.
'Think,' Willis said.
'I already thought. I don't know anybody named Martin Proctor.'
Donner was a giant of a man, fat in the plural, fat in the extreme, Fats for sure, an obese hulk who sat in a faded blue bathrobe, his complexion as pale as the January sky outside, his fat hairless legs resting on a hassock, one obscenely plump hand plucking dates from a basket on the end table beside his easy chair, the hand moving to his mouth, his thick lips sucking the meat off the pit. Standing beside him, Willis - who was short by any standards - looked almost tiny.
'Doctor Proctor,' he said.
'No,' Donner said.
'Mr Sniff
'Four hundred people named Mr Sniff in this city, you kidding?'
'Snake.'
'Eight hundred Snakes. Give me something easy like Rambo.'
He smiled. He was making a joke. Rambo was another popular name. A piece of date clung to his front upper teeth, making it look as if one of them was missing. Willis really hated being in his presence.
'It's your burglary,' Carella had told him.
'You've worked with him before,' Meyer had said.
And was working with him again now.
Or trying to.
'You think you can listen around?' he asked.
'No,' Donner said. 'I think I can go to Florida. It's too fucking cold here now.'
'It's cold in Florida, too,' Willis said. 'But it can get hot both places.'
'Oh, look, Maude,' Donner said to the air, 'here comes the rubber hose.'
They both knew that the only reason an informer cooperated with the police was that the police had something on him that they were willing to forget temporarily. In Donner's case, the something wasn't child abuse. No cop in this city was willing to forget child abuse, even temporarily. Dope, yes. Murder, sometimes. But child abuse, never. There was a criminal adage to the effect that the only thing you couldn't fix in this city was a short-eyes rap.
The main thing the police had on Donner was the long-ago murder of a pimp. The way the police looked at it, the city was better off without pimps in general, but this did not mean that they could condone murder. Oh, no. They had the goods on Donner and could have sent him to person for a good long time. Where there were no girls, by the way. Young or otherwise. But the cops chose to work this one six ways from the middle. They didn't give a damn that the city had lost another pimp. And they wouldn't have minded sending Donner up for the crime. But they figured there were other ways to make him pay for what he'd done.
A tacit deal was struck, no handshakes sealing the bargain - you did not shake hands with murderers and especially not with child abusers - not asingle word spoken, but from that day forward Donner knew he was in the vest pocket of any cop who wanted him, and the cops knew that Donner for all his bullshit would deliver or else.