The docks were cluttered, as always, badly lit by widely spaced yellow bug lights. Out in the water, anchor lights shone off the masts of a half-dozen anchored boats. Here and there, lights showed at portholes, and a light breeze banged halyards against aluminum masts, a pleasant whipping tinkle like wind chimes. The smell of marijuana hovered around a small Capri daysailer and a man was giggling inside the tiny cabin. She walked out of the marijuana stink into the river smell, compounded of mud and decaying fish.
"Lily." Kennett's voice came out of the dark as she approached the Lestrade. He was sitting behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette. "I was wondering if you'd come."
"You know about Bekker?"
"Yeah. And that I've been cut out of the loop."
Lily stepped into the cockpit, sat down, staring at him. His face was flat, solemn; he was looking steadily back. "You're Robin Hood," she said.
"Robin Hood, bullshit," he said wearily. He flicked the cigarette into the water.
"I'm not wearing a wire," she said.
"Stand up, turn around." She stood up and Kennett ran his hands down her, between her legs. "Gimme the purse."
He opened the purse, clicked on an electric light that hung from the backstay, looked inside. After poking inside, he took the.45 out of its holder, dropped the magazine and shucked the shells out into the water. Then he jacked the slide, to eject the shell in the chamber. The chamber was empty, and he shook his head. "You oughta carry one under the hammer."
"I'm not here to talk about guns," she said. "I'm here to talk about you being Robin Hood. About using me as a dummy to spy on O'Dell. About killing Walt Petty."
"I didn't use you as a dummy," he said flatly. "I got with you because I liked you and I'm falling in love with you. You're beautiful and you're smart and you're a cop, and there aren't many women around I can talk to."
"I don't doubt that you like me," she said, squaring off with him. "But that didn't keep you from running me. On the way up here, I was remembering when we'd lie down below there, in the berth, and you running those goddamn fantasies about what O'Dell did for sex. Do you remember that? You must've scripted those things, to get me talking about O'Dell. And before that, talking about Walt. When I think of the things I told you, because I felt secure. Because you were a lover and a brother cop. Jesus Christ, every time we got into bed, you were pumping me for information."
"Christ, Lily… Lily, if you told me anything about O'Dell or Petty… it was by-product. I wasn't sleeping with you to get information. Jesus, Lily…"
"Shut up," Lily said. She reached overhead and pulled the chain on the backstay light and they were plunged into the dark again. "I want to know some shit. We've got Jeese and Clemson, Davenport got them, and we know about Copland…"
"I knew Davenport was dangerous," Kennett said quietly. "I really didn't underestimate him. I knew he was a really dangerous sonofabitch when he looked up Gauguin, about the necktie. And I couldn't help liking him."
"Is that why your guys tried to beat him up, instead of just whacking him?"
Kennett grinned: she could see his teeth. Not a happy smile, a rueful one. "Another mistake," he said. "You start feeling that everything in New York is more. That a small-town guy could never hold off a couple of real New York pros. So we were just gonna break a few ribs, maybe. Something that'd take him off the street for a month. They said he was quick as a pro fighter. They were pissed, said that if they'd been a half-inch slower, he'd of blown them up, he'd of had his.45 out…"
"They were lucky," Lily said. "Why didn't you try again?"
Kennett shrugged. "At that point, we figured it was either kill him or forget him. He didn't seem… close enough… to kill. And I don't know if the guys would've done it anyway. Petty was already hard to stomach. Davenport's message to O'Dell, the one Copland picked up. That was fake?"
"Not completely. It was Davenport who found Bekker, all right. He was feeding the message to O'Dell to see if any hitters showed up. They did, but I was with O'Dell the whole time. He didn't make any calls. So I started thinking about it."
"God damn it. I thought about skipping Bekker."
"You should have."
"Couldn't. Didn't know what he'd say about…" He stopped, remembering.
"About the guys he saw hit Walt. Jeese and Clemson. Thick and Thin."
"No," Kennett said evenly. "It wasn't them."
"Bullshit," she flared. "They fit."
"No. It wasn't."
"Who, then?"
"I won't tell you, but Jeese and Clemson, no." He pulled at his lip. "Old Copland. A good guy. What happens to him?"
"O'Dell will think of something… How many of you are there? And how many people have you done?"
Kennett shook his head. "There are… several. Some singles, some two-man teams. None of them knows the others, and I won't tell you who they are."
"We can put Jeese and Clemson in Attica if we want-assault on a police officer with a firearm. And if O'Dell wants to fix it, I'm sure we can find a problem with Copland's pension. He'll spend his last twenty years sitting on a park bench. Or rolled in an army blanket on a sidewalk."
"Don't fuckin' do that," Kennett whispered.
"That's what happens when you lose," Lily said, her voice like ice.
"We were doing right," Kennett said. "I'll call it off. Walk away, and I'll call it off. I'll quit the force, if you want."
"What, so you can write for the Times? You'd be a bigger danger there than where you are now," Lily said.
"So what do you want from me?"
"I want the goddamned names."
Kennett shook his head. "No. Never happen. If I gave you the names, only two things could happen: a lot of good guys would get ripped off, or O'Dell would set up his own little force of stormtroopers. I'm not going to let any fat, puling, alcoholic fixer do that, I won't…" His voice grew cold as he said it. He bared his teeth and added, "I really like you. But the worst thing you do is, the worst thing about you, is that you associate with that… that… cunt O'Dell."
"I'm the cunt," Lily said. "I'm the one you rolled for information."
"Fuck you, then," Kennett said, and turned away. "You want to make something out of it, make it in court. I'll tear you up. Now take your ass off my boat."
"I've got another question before I go."
"What?"
"Why Walt?"
Kennett stared at her a moment, then dug in his shirt, found a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, lit it with a match. Tossed the match overboard: they heard it hit, the hiss hanging in the damp air.
"Had to," he said. "Him and his fucking computers. When I started this, nobody really knew about computers and what they could do. They were like electric filing cabinets. Looking in a computer was like snooping through papers on somebody's desk. We didn't know that every time we went into a file, we left tracks. Petty nailed us down. We had to have time to get into the machines, to fix things. We did that. The information's gone now." He looked downriver, at the Manhattan glittering along the river, the arcs of the bridges. "Listen, Lily. If you could take five hundred or a thousand people out of Manhattan, you could make it eighty percent safer. You could make it a paradise."
"Not a thousand," she said. "Maybe ten thousand."
"No. No, not really. A thousand would do it. We couldn't take down a thousand people, probably, but we could make a difference. Arvin Davies. You look at him? Was he one of the people…"
"Yes."
"We think… intelligence estimates… that he committed up to a hundred crimes, all sorts: assaults, burglaries, rapes, murder. He could have done a hundred more. Now he won't."
"You can't make that decision."
"Sure I can. And somebody has to," Kennett said, looking at her. "Your average junkie does fifty or a hundred burglaries for every time he gets caught, and for small burglaries, chances are he'll be right back out on the street. Plea-bargains out, or he'll do thirty days or six months or something. Not enough. If we let all the onetime passion killers out of prison and put all the junkies inside, Manhattan would be a garden spot. Even the ones we took off… Christ, we knocked down a thousand violent crimes a year, just the ones we took down."