“You’re curious?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, try mopery,” the cop said. “Mopery with intent to gawk. How’s that for a starter?”
“It’s better than nothing.”
He didn’t smile. “Also suspicion. That’s the official charge.”
“Suspicion of what?”
We walked into the street to join the other cop, the one who had been doing the driving. “You ask a lot of questions,” the first cop said.
“I just wondered,” I said.
“Suspicion of conspiracy,” he said. “Suspicion of conspiracy to commit a felony. It’s handy, isn’t it?”
I didn’t say anything. We crossed the street. I was still a sandwich with a slice of cop on either side.
“What it all means,” the first cop went on, “is we pick you up when we damn well please. That’s the way it works in this city. You spend much time here and you learn that. You have to live with it, Crowley.”
I didn’t answer him. We climbed the heavy stone steps. I looked at the electric bulbs in the imitation gas lamps. The glass of the lamps was flyspecked. It needed washing.
We walked inside over a bare wooden floor past a desk. They didn’t offer to book me. I didn’t insist. We climbed another flight of stairs and found an empty room on the second floor. There was one chair in the room, a straight-backed wooden one. It looked uncomfortable.
“Sit,” one of them said. I sat. The chair was uncomfortable.
For a good five minutes nobody said anything. The two cops lit cigarettes and smoked. I took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one loose, put it in my mouth. I scratched a match. The cops gave me time to take one drag. Then one of them lazily reached over and plucked the cigarette out of my mouth. He dropped it on the bare wooden floor and covered it with his foot.
“Why are you here, Crowley?”
“You told me to come. So I’m here.”
“You’re cute. Why Buffalo? What are you doing here?”
“It’s a town. I always wanted to look at Niagara Falls.”
“Who sent you, Crowley?”
“I came on my own.”
“From where?”
“Miami.”
They looked at each other, then at me. “We wired Miami,” one of them said. “Miami police. They never heard of you down there.”
“I live clean.”
“I’m sure you do. Who sent you, Crowley?”
“Nobody sent me.”
“What are you here for?”
“Laughs.”
The one who had been the driver reached over to slap my face. My head caromed off the wooden back of the chair. I didn’t say anything.
“Let’s take it from the top,” the first cop said. “You’re a tough boy, aren’t you? Hard as a rock.”
“I’m easy to get along with.”
“Uh-huh, You pounded a Canuck in a bar. A hard boy.”
“Is he pressing charges?”
“No.”
“Then why don’t we forget about him?” They gave each other long-suffering looks again. They told me to stand up. I stood up. They patted me down to see if I had a gun. I didn’t. They told me to sit down again and I sat.
“You’re not heeled. You don’t have a gun in your room. Where are you getting the gun, Crowley?”
“I’m making it with an erector set.”
I got slapped again, harder. “Where’s the gun?”
“There is no gun.”
“Who sent you? Who are you supposed to kill?”
“I’m supposed to kill the President,” I said. “I’m a Russian spy. I’m after bomb secrets.”
That rated another slap. It was a hard one. I blinked a few times while the world came back into focus.
“I don’t like you, Crowley.”
I looked at him and waited for him to tell me why he didn’t like me.
“I don’t like hoods. I especially don’t like imported hoods. We got plenty of domestic ones. We got homegrown hoods, tons of them. I don’t like them, either, but at least they belong to us. They live here. They play all the local rules. I tolerate them.”
“You’re a tolerant guy.”
“Yeah. I’m not tolerant of out-of-town talent. I don’t like new people moving in, changing things around. It bothers me.”
“Take a pill.”
I got hit again but it was only a love-tap this time around. “All right,” he said. “Let’s start at the top again. Let’s see what we can find out. We got all night, Crowley.”
The cops didn’t take all night. They took two hours and they went back and forth over the same ground until it was more a ritual than anything else. After a while they didn’t bother slapping me anymore, which was just as well. I was starting to get a little punchy. I sat there and listened to questions I didn’t answer. They milked the hard-guy routine until they managed to figure out I wasn’t impressed. Then they kept going but their hearts weren’t in it. Finally a young cop in a uniform came in and whispered something to one of them. The young cop left and my two grand inquisitors held an executive conference. They mumbled at each other, shrugged heroically and told me to get up.
We stepped into another room. I was photographed and fingerprinted. I blinked away the flashbulb image and wiped the fingerprint ink on the desk blotter. Then we left that room and walked out into the hallway and down the stairs to the main floor.
The cop who had been doing the driving the first time around found some fresh business and disappeared. The other grand inquisitor moved in for some fatherly advice. “Okay,” he said. “Get lost.”
“You’re supposed to tell me not to leave town.”
“I’ll do the opposite. Leave town, Crowley.”
“It’s such a nice town. And the cops are exceptional.”
He almost grinned. “I’m just an ordinary harness bull, Crowley.”
“Sure,” I said. “In an ordinary china shop. Take it easy.”
I walked down the big stone steps to the street. The police force wasn’t being too considerate. They drove me to headquarters but they were making me walk back on my own. I wondered how Barshter’s home town police would feel if they knew that the Buffalo cops had just released Donald Barshter. That rated a grin but the grin was painful — my face was a little sore from the slaps.
I tried to decide what was supposed to be next on the agenda. The cops had found me and the cops had grilled me and the cops had let me go. When they had picked me up I had been on my way to Cassino’s, on my way to see what would happen, to listen to three men make music and to wait for an opener. The cops had managed to toss the timetable out of kilter but Cassino’s was still open and the music was still going round and round. I headed in that direction.
Friday night made a difference. The usual quota of stool-warmers warmed barstools and the bartender polished the same glasses all over again. But there was a piano and a bass and a set of drums on the little stage with three Negroes putting them to good use. The tables near the stage weren’t empty now. About half of them were occupied, some with tweedy college types and their dates, others with older couples.
I handed the bartender a hello look and he nodded shortly at me. A handful of stool-sitters looked my way. Some of them recognized me and gave me a short nod. Others didn’t and turned back to their drinks. I passed up the bar and found a table not far from the stage. I sat down alone, found a cigarette, lit it. They hadn’t let me smoke at the police station and I hadn’t got around to lighting one up on the way over. The smoke tasted good. I took a deep drag and held it in my lungs for a few seconds, then blew a cloud at the ceiling.
The music really wasn’t bad. The drummer’s timing was fine and the bassist set up a nice run of changes in the background. The piano player stayed away from long solos and worked on some fairly complex chord progressions. The song underneath it all was “Body and Soul,” but you had to listen carefully to figure this out. I listened carefully and it was worth the effort. I liked what I heard.