Willis was trying to explain why he hadn’t happened to notice the Dirty Panties Bandit when he entered the laundromat. They had sent down for pizza, and now they sat in the relative 1:00 A.M. silence of the squadroom, eating Papa Joe’s really pretty good combination anchovies and pepperoni and drinking Miscolo’s really pretty lousy Colombian coffee; Detective Bert Kling was sitting with them, but he wasn’t eating or saying very much.
Eileen remembered him as a man with a huge appetite, and she wondered now if he was on a diet. He looked thinner than she recalled — well, that had been several years back — and he also looked somewhat drawn and pale and, well, unkempt. His straight blond hair was growing raggedly over his shirt collar and ears, and the collar itself looked a bit frayed, and his suit looked unpressed, and there were stains on the tie he was wearing. Eileen figured he was maybe coming in off a stakeout someplace. Maybe he was supposed to look like somebody who was going to seed. And maybe those dark shadows under his eyes were all part of the role he was playing out there on the street, in which case he should get not only a commendation but an Academy Award besides.
Willis was very apologetic.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, “I figured we didn’t have a chance of our man showing. Because on the other jobs, he usually hit between ten and ten-thirty, and it was almost eleven when this guy came running out of the bar—”
“Wail a minute,” Eileen said. “What guy?”
“Came running out of the bar next door,” Willis said. “Bert, don’t you want some of this?”
“Thanks,” Kling said, and shook his head.
“Yelling, ‘Police, police,’” Willis said.
“When was this?” Eileen asked.
“I told you, a little before eleven,” Willis said. “Even so, if I thought we had a chance of our man showing I’d have said screw it, let some other cop handle whatever it is in the bar there. But I mean it, Eileen, I figured we’d had it for tonight.”
“So you went in the bar?”
“No. Well, yes. But not right away, no. I got out of the car, and I asked the guy what the trouble was, and he asked me did I see a cop anywhere because there was somebody with a knife in the bar and I told him I was a cop and he said I ought to go in there and take the knife away before somebody got cut.”
“So naturally you went right in,” Eileen said, and winked at Kling. Kling did not wink back. Kling lifted his coffee cup and sipped at it.
He seemed not to be listening to what Willis was saying. He seemed almost comatose. Eileen wondered what was wrong with him.
“No, I still gave it a bit of thought,” Willis said. “I would have rushed in immediately, of course—”
“Of course,” Eileen said.
“To disarm that guy… who by the way turned out to be a girl… but I was worried about you being all alone there in the laundromat in case Mr. Bloomers did decide to show up.”
“Mr. Bloomers!” Eileen said, and burst out laughing. She was still feeling very high after the bust, and she wished that Kling wouldn’t sit there like a zombie but would instead join in the general postmortem celebration.
“So I looked through the window,” Willis said.
“Of the bar?”
“No, the laundromat. And saw that everything was still cool, you were sitting there next to a lady reading a magazine and this other lady was carrying about seven tons of laundry into the store, so I figured you’d be safe for another minute or two while I went in there and settled the thing with the knife, especially since I didn’t think our man was going to show anyway. So I went in the bar, and there’s this very nicely dressed middle-class-looking lady wearing eyesglasses and her hair swept up on her head and a dispatch case sitting on the bar as if she’s a lawyer or an accountant who stopped in for a pink lady on the way home and she’s got an eight-foot-long switchblade in her right hand and she’s swinging it in front of her like this, back and forth, slicing the air with it, you know, and I’m surprised first of all that it’s a lady and next that it’s a switchblade she’s holding, which is not exactly a lady’s weapon. Also, I do not wish to get cut,” Willis said.
“Naturally,” Eileen said.
“Naturally,” Willis said. “In fact, I’m beginning to think I’d better go check on you again, make sure the panties nut hasn’t shown up after all. But just then the guy who came out in the street yelling ‘Police, police,’ now says to the crazy lady with the stiletto, ‘I warned you, Grace, this man is a policeman.’ Which means I now have to uphold law and order, which is the last thing on earth I wish to do.”
“What’d you do?” Eileen asked.
She was really interested now. She had never come up against a woman wielding a dangerous weapon, her line of specialty being men, of sorts. Usually she leveled her gun at a would-be rapist’s privates, figuring she’d threaten him where he lived. Tonight, she had rammed the gun into the hollow of the man’s throat. The barrel of the gun had left a bruise there, she had seen the bruise when she was putting the cuffs on him. But how do you begin taking a knife away from an angry woman? You couldn’t threaten to shoot her in the balls, could you?
“I walked over to her and I said, ‘Grace, that’s a mighty fine knife you’ve got there, I wonder if you’d mind giving it to me.’”
“That was a mistake,” Eileen said. “She might’ve given it to you, all right, she might’ve really given it to you.”
“But she didn’t,” Willis said. “Instead, she turned to the guy who’d run out of the bar—”
“The ‘Police, police’ guy?”
“Yeah, and she said, ‘Harry,’ or whatever the hell his name was, ‘Harry, how can you keep cheating on me this way?’ and then she burst into tears and handed the knife to the bartender instead of to me, and Harry took her in his arms—”
“Excuse me, huh?” Kling said, and got up from behind the desk, and walked out of the squadroom.
“Oh God,” Willis said.
“Huh?” Eileen said.
“I forgot,” Willis said. “He probably thinks I told that story on purpose. I’d better go talk to him, Excuse me, okay? I’m sorry, Eileen, excuse me.”
“Sure,” she said, puzzled, and watched while Willis went through the gate in the slatted rail divider and down the corridor after Kling. There were some things she would never in a million years understand about the guys who worked up here. Never. She picked up another slice of pizza. It was cold. And she hadn’t even got a chance to tell anyone about how absolutely brilliant and courageous and deadly forceful she’d been in that laundromat.
It was beginning to snow again. Lightly. Fat fluffy flakes drifting down lazily from the sky. Arthur Brown was driving. Bert Kling sat beside him on the front seat of the five-year-old unmarked sedan, Eileen was sitting in the back. She had still been in the squadroom when the homicide squeal came in, and she’d asked Kling if he’d mind dropping her off at the subway on his way to the scene. Kling had merely grunted. Kling was a charmer, Eileen thought.
Brown was a huge man who looked even more enormous in his bulky overcoat. The coat was gray and it had a fake black fur collar. He was wearing black leather gloves that matched the black collar. Brown was supposed to be what people nowadays called a “black” man, but Brown knew that his complexion did not match the color of either the black collar or the black gloves. Whenever he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw someone with a chocolate-colored skin looking back at him, but he did not think of himself as a “chocolate” man. Neither did he think of himself as a Negro anymore; somehow, if a black man thought of himself as a Negro, he was thinking obsequiously. Negro had become a derogatory term, God alone knew when or how. Brown’s father used to call himself “a person of color” which Brown thought was a very hoity-toity expression even when it was still okay for black men to call themselves Negroes. (Brown noticed that Ebony magazine capitalized the word Black, and he often wondered why.) He guessed he still thought of himself as colored, and he sincerely hoped there was nothing wrong with that. Nowadays, a nigger didn’t know what he was supposed to think.