Still, he’d learned how to manage. You showed up when the box office opened, bought a ticket for a film. If there was a foreign-language feature with subtitles, you chose that, knowing that it would remain relatively deserted no matter what day it was. Failing that, you avoided any picture designed to appeal to the young. Anything animated, anything with children or animals on the poster.
If the featured performers were ones he recognized, the audience was likely to be sparse. Because that meant the actors were older than average, and so were the people who came to see them. Such films were among the more popular on weekday afternoons, when the elderly made up the greater portion of the audience. On weekends, however, when senior rates were not available, the old folks stayed home, and the young watched Brad Pitt or Scooby-Doo.
There were other useful maneuvers. The best seats, from the Carpenter’s point of view, were on either side against the wall, and at the rear of the theater. This did not put you all that far from the screen. In the old days, when screens were much larger and movie houses cavernous, it was a different matter. But you were as far away as you could get, and unless the showing was a sellout (and it wouldn’t be, unless you’d made a gross error in your film selection) there’d be no one sitting near you, neither to the side or immediately in front.
Because screens had gotten smaller along with the theaters, you might not be able to see too well from where you were, and if you’d been lucky enough to find a foreign film, well, you could forget about trying to read the subtitles. But entertainment wasn’t the point. A secure and restful environment, that was your prime consideration.
The tricky part came when the picture ended. You couldn’t just stay in your seat and wait for the next showing, because they’d clear the house and walk through the length of each row, picking up at least some of the popcorn tubs and candy wrappers left behind by the departing moviegoers. You could try saying you’d come in halfway through the picture, he supposed, but he wasn’t at all sure that would work; worse yet, it invited attention, and that was what you most wanted to avoid.
What you had to do was plan. By the time you bought your ticket, you already knew what film you’d go to after you left the first theater. Today, for example, the Carpenter had been one of the first at the box office, one of the first to take a seat — in the rear, of course, and against the right-hand wall — for a showing of a film starring Clint Eastwood. He dozed through the commercials, dozed through the coming attractions, and dozed on and off through the picture, opening his eyes each time gunfire roused him and checking his watch before drifting off again.
When one such check showed only fifteen minutes before the film was scheduled to end, the Carpenter left the theater, having to disturb only one person, a tiny little woman perched on the aisle seat. Anyone who noticed him leave at that point in the film would take him for a man who had to go to the bathroom, and the Carpenter did precisely that. Nor was the visit undertaken purely for purposes of deception; the Carpenter could have held out until the end of the film, but welcomed the opportunity to relieve himself.
Having done so, he went to the refreshment stand and bought popcorn, then headed for the theater that was next on his list, where a film based on a Henry James novel was scheduled to begin in twenty minutes. The timing was right, and he couldn’t imagine that any film based on anything by Henry James could draw a young audience. Carrying his popcorn, mingling with other people with the same destination, the Carpenter did not look like someone sneaking into a second film that he hadn’t paid for. He didn’t see how it could occur to anyone to stop him and demand a look at his ticket stub, and of course no one did.
The commercials and coming attractions were the same ones he’d seen before the first picture, and indeed ones he’d seen repeatedly in recent days. He found them comfortingly familiar. And the feature film, once it started, was wonderfully soothing, with no gunfire to rouse him, or even voices raised in anger. The interruptions had played a useful role during the Eastwood movie, but now the Carpenter was perfectly willing to doze right through to the end. Two films would provide him with all the sleep he needed.
He closed his eyes and settled in to enjoy the show.
Your two worst enemies on a stakeout were your bladder and your brain.
The first was obvious. Sit around for hours on end, and sooner or later you had to take a leak. Even if you were a camel, the time came when you had to go. If you were in a parked car, you brought a jar along, hoping when you used it that nothing happened in midstream, that you didn’t get caught in a firefight with the jar in one hand and your dick in the other. And, since things rarely happened that abruptly, and often didn’t happen at all, you were generally okay.
If you didn’t have a car to sit in, if you were in fact out in public view on a park bench, a jar wouldn’t help. You’d be better off getting on all fours and lifting a leg against a tree, hoping they’d take you for a funny-looking German shepherd. So what you had to do was desert your post, and that was acceptable when you had a partner who could watch twice as hard in your absence. When you were alone, well, it meant that for a while there was no one minding the store.
Your bladder was a problem once every hour or so, or more frequently if you’d been spending too much time at Starbucks. Your brain was dangerous every minute you were out there. Because it could get bored, and it could wander, and the thing you were waiting for could happen right in front of your eyes and you’d miss it because your mind was somewhere else.
It was a funny thing, but detectives weren’t the best choice for a stakeout. Patrolmen tended to be better, especially veterans who had never got a gold shield and never would. It wasn’t that they were stupid, or lacked ambition. What they lacked was imagination.
And imagination was the common denominator of detectives. It wasn’t enough by itself to get you a promotion, good luck and good connections played a bigger role than anyone cared to admit, but still it seemed to be part of the makeup of virtually every detective he’d known.
On stakeout, it was a curse. A sufficiently unimaginative man could stare out a car window at a front door, or crouch in a closed van listening to a wiretap, for hours on end, thinking of nothing but the job he was doing. A man with an imagination would try to do just that, but his mind would jump from one thing to another, going off on tangents, and he’d lose track of what put him there in the first place.
Again, a partner helped. The two of you could talk, and one could bring the other back to the here and now.
Alone, well, it was a problem.
Right now, for instance, he was working hard to stay on top of things. He’d peed not twenty minutes ago, at the men’s room of the café, and had resisted the urge to pick up a small bottle of Evian water at the bar on the way back. And now he was watching the crowd, keeping an eye on the approach to the Boat Basin gates. He looked at another pigeon feeder and wondered why people fed the birds, what it was they got out of it. And he started thinking about pigeons, and how you never saw a young one and rarely saw a dead one, and why was that, anyway? And was it true that kids from the Asian subcontinent, or from Central America, or from Vietnam, trapped pigeons off the street for their parents to cook in their restaurants? And hadn’t they said the same thing a generation or two ago about the Chinese? And wouldn’t they have said much the same about the Irish, but for the fact that no Irish immigrant had ever opened a restaurant, and who would have gone there if he did? And...
He caught himself, forced his mind back to business. It was going to be a long day, he thought. It felt like it had been a long day already.