“I can take care of myself,” Randolph said.
Fields sighed. “What are your plans for the little girl outside?”
“She’s trash,” Randolph said.
“So?”
“So what do you want? Go back to the D.D. report you were typing, Gene. I’ll handle my own prisoners.”
“Sure,” Fields said, and turned and walked to his desk.
Randolph watched his retreating back. Casually, he lighted a cigarette and then walked out into the corridor. The girl looked up as he approached. Her eyes looked very blue in the dimness of the corridor. Very blue and very frightened.
“What’s your name?” Randolph asked.
“Betty,” the girl said.
“You’re in trouble, Betty,” Randolph said flatly.
“I... I know.”
“How old are you, Betty?”
“Twenty-four.”
“You look younger.”
The girl hesitated. “That’s... that’s because I’m so skinny,” she said.
“You’re not that skinny,” Randolph said harshly. “Don’t play the poor little slum kid with me.”
“I wasn’t playing anything,” Betty said. “I am skinny. I know I am. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Her voice was very soft, the voice of a young girl, a frightened young girl. He looked at her, and he told himself, She’s a tramp, and his mind clicked shut like a trap.
“Lots of girls are skinny,” Betty said. “I know lots of girls who—”
“Let’s lay off the skinny routine,” Randolph said drily. “We already made that point.” He paused. “You’re twenty-four, huh?”
“Yes,” She nodded and a quiet smile formed on her painted mouth. “How old are you?”
“I’m thirty-two,” Randolph said before he could catch himself, and then he dropped his cigarette angrily to the floor and stepped on it. “You mind if I ask the questions?”
“I was only curious. You seem... never mind.”
“What do I seem?”
“Nothing.”
“All right, let’s get down to business. How long have you been a hooker?”
The girl looked at him blankly. “What?”
“Don’t you hear good?”
“Yes, but what does hooker mean?”
Randolph sighed heavily. “Honey,” he said, “the sooner we drop the wide-eyed innocence, the better off we’ll both be.”
“But I don’t...”
“A hooker is a prostitute!” Randolph said, his voice rising. “Now come off it!”
“Oh,” the girl said.
“Oh,” Randolph repeated sarcastically. “Now how long?”
“This... this was my first time.”
“Sure.”
“Really,” she said eagerly. “I’d... I’d never gone out looking for... for men before. This was my first time.”
“And you picked me, huh?” Randolph asked, unbelievingly. “Well, honey, you picked the wrong man for your first one.”
“I didn’t know you were a cop.”
“Now you know.”
“Yes. Now I know.”
“And you also know you’re in pretty big trouble.”
“Yes,” the girl said.
“Good,” Randolph answered, grinning.
Actually, the girl wasn’t in as much trouble as she imagined herself to be — and Randolph knew it. She had indeed stopped him on the street and asked, “Want some fun, mister?” and Randolph had immediately put the collar on her. But in the city for which Randolph worked, it would have been next to impossible to make a prostitution charge stick. Randolph conceivably had a Dis Cond case, but disorderly conduct was a dime-a-dozen misdemeanor and was hardly worth bothering with in a precinct where felonies ran wild. So Randolph knew all this, and he had known it when he collared the girl, and sat now with a grin on his face and watched her, pleased by her troubled expression, pleased with the way her hands fluttered aimlessly in her lap.
“You can get out of it,” he said softly.
“How?” the girl asked eagerly.
His voice dropped to a whisper. “If you know the right cop,” he said.
The girl stared at him blankly for a moment. “I haven’t any money,” she said at last. “I... I wouldn’t have done this if I had money.”
“There are other ways,” Randolph said.
“Oh.” She stared at him and then nodded slightly. “I see.”
“Well?”
“Yes,” she said, still nodding. “All right. Whatever you say.”
“Let’s go,” Randolph said.
He walked briskly to the railing and leaned on it. To no one in particular, he said, “I’ll be back in an hour or so.” Before he turned, he noticed the curiously sour expression on Gene Fields’ face. Briskly, he walked to the girl. “Come on,” he said.
They went down the steps to the ground floor. At the desk, a patrolman was booking a seventeen-year-old kid who was bleeding from a large cut behind his car. The blood had trailed down his neck and stained his tee-shirt a bright red. The girl gasped when she saw the boy, and then turned quickly away, heading for the steps.
“If he’s the one they’re booking,” Randolph said, “I hate to think what the other guy must look like.”
The girl didn’t answer. She began walking quickly, and Randolph fell in beside her. “Where to?” he asked.
“My house,” she said. An undisguised coldness had crept into her voice.
“Don’t take this so big,” he said. “It’s part of a working day.”
“I didn’t know that,” the girl said.
“Well, now you do.”
They walked in silence. Around them, the concrete fingers of the city poked at the October sky. The fingers were black with the soot of decades, grimy fingers covered with waste and not with the honest dirt of labour. The streets crawled with humanity. Old men and young men, kids playing stickball, kids chalking up the sidewalks, women with shopping bags, the honest citizens of the precinct — and the others. In the ten minutes it took them to walk from the precinct to the girl’s apartment, Randolph saw fourteen junkies in the streets. Some of those junkies would be mugging before the day ended. Some would be shoplifting and committing burglaries. All would be blind by nightfall.
He saw the bright green and yellow silk jackets of a teenage gang known as “The Marauders,” and he knew that the appearance of a blue and gold jacket in their territory would bring on a street bop and broken ribs and bloody heads.
He saw the hookers and the pimps and the sneak thieves and the muggers and the ex-cons and the kids holding J. D. cards and the drunks and the fences and the peddlers of hot goods — he saw them all, and they surrounded him with a feeling of filth, a feeling he wanted desperately to search out and crush because somewhere in the filth he had lost himself.
Somewhere, long ago, a young patrolman had cracked a liquor store holdup, and the patrolman had been promoted to Detective/Third Grade, and the patrolman’s name was Frank Randolph. And somewhere back there, the patrolman Frank Randolph had ceased to exist, and the detective Frank Randolph had inhabited the shell of his body. The eyes had turned hard, and the fists had turned quick, and the step had turned cautious because there was danger in these streets, and the danger awakened every animal instinct within a man, reduced him to a beast stalking blood in the narrow, dark passages of the jungle.
There was hatred within the muscular body of Frank Randolph, a hatred bred of dealing with tigers, a hatred which included the timid antelopes who also lived in the forest.
And so he walked with a young, thin girl, walked toward her apartment where he would use his shield as a wedge to enter her bed and her body. He had begun using his shield a long time ago. He was as much an addict to his shield as the junkies in the streets were addicts to the white god.
The tenement stood in a row of sombre-faced buildings, buildings that solemnly mourned the loss of their latter-day splendor. The fire escapes fronting each building were hung with the trappings of life: blankets, potted plants, pillows, empty beer cans, ash trays, guitars. Autumn had come late this year, lingering over the slow death of a hot summer, and the cliff dwellers had taken to their slum terraces, the iron-barred rectangles that gave them a piece of sky and a breath of air.