He was off the clock. Maury Winters had given him a lot of hours, first rooting around for the writer, Creighton, and then doing some background checking on a couple of prosecution witnesses in a robbery case. The robbery case pleaded out, with a better deal resulting in part from a lead he’d developed, so he had to feel good about that, and Maury was probably feeling good about him.
But he hadn’t been able to turn the trick for Creighton.
He’d figured there was probably a limit to what he could accomplish, given that you didn’t need psychic powers to know the writer was guilty. Lady walks into a bar, walks out with a guy, and wakes up dead, you don’t reach for the tea leaves and the crystal ball. You pick up the guy, and he goes away for it.
So he’d gone through the motions, but he’d been a good cop and he was making an effort to be just as good at this racket. Before he’d been busting his ass to put bad guys in prison and now he was working almost as hard to keep them out, which seemed weird now and then, but the work itself wasn’t all that different. It was a similar mix of headwork and footwork, and he had the head for it. And the feet, although they were starting to go on him.
He’d done what he could for Creighton, coming up with a couple of witnesses who could at least blow a little smoke up the prosecution’s ass, and then the fucking Carpenter came along and opened up a whole new world of possibilities. All you had to do was link him to Fairchild and you could get Creighton off the hook.
A couple of ways it could have happened. Harbinger had been sighted in the neighborhood, he’d been confirmed buying gasoline at Thirteenth and Eighth, so he could have staked out Fairchild same as he did the one in Brooklyn, staked her out and followed her home.
Say he watched her apartment, and let himself in when she let herself out. He waited for her to come home, but when she did she had Creighton with her, two of them and one of him, and Creighton was a big guy, so the Carpenter’d be in the closet while they did a little mattress testing. Then Creighton went on home, and out pops the Carpenter, just in time for sloppy seconds. And, just to make sure nobody else comes along for thirds, he strangles her and takes off.
Or, even better, he gets his first look at her when she walks into the Kettle of Fish, and tails her when she walks out with Creighton. He gets into her brownstone — how hard is that, he times it right and Creighton holds the door for him on his own way out. Knocks on her door, says he’s back, he forgot something. Yeah, what did you forget, I’ll get it for you? You won’t be able to find it. Lemme in. And she opens the door and he says I forgot to kill you, you stupid bitch, and he does.
Maury liked that, he could sell it to a jury, hey, coulda happened, reasonable doubt, yadda yadda yadda. Put him in the Kettle, Maury said. Put him in the brownstone. Put him on the stoop of the house across the street, sharpening his dick with a whetstone. Anything, just put him in the picture, and it’s frosting on the cupcake.
Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t fucking do it, and all he was doing was following the cops around, because they’d showed the Carpenter’s picture all over the neighborhood, as if everybody hadn’t seen it enough times in the papers and on TV. Both bartenders at the Kettle, the day guy and the night guy, looked at the picture and said sure they recognized it, it was the Carpenter, and what else was new? Had they seen him before? Yeah, in the Post, in the News, on CNN, on New York One, on America’s Most Wanted, on every fucking thing but Seinfeld reruns. But up close and in person, in the bar? Nope, sorry, can’t help you out.
Great.
He went back to his apartment, thinking it hadn’t been that long ago that cops wouldn’t walk here except in pairs, and not even then if there was a way to avoid it. Now he’d had to call in favors to find a place here he could afford, and it was four flights up and not a whole lot nicer inside than when they were thrilled to get fifty-five dollars a month for it. The good part, by the time a broad climbed up four flights of stairs, she wasn’t going to change her mind. She had too much invested in the whole business.
The stairs were either keeping him in shape or killing him, and he was never sure which. He got to the top thinking he deserved a drink for that, but decided he’d collect later. Because, off the clock or not, he wondered if there wasn’t something he could do for Creighton. Had to be something nobody thought of.
He went over his notes, made a couple of calls. And sure enough, there it was. It might not go anywhere, if there was one thing he’d learned on the job it was that anything you tried had a chance of going nowhere at all. But if you tried enough things, and if you used your head and your feet, now and then something paid off.
He could have had a small one on the strength of that, too, but decided he’d wait. He locked up and went down the stairs, which was always a lot easier than going up them. Funny how it worked.
He walked across town, taking his time, and it was early afternoon when he got to Sheridan Square and walked into the Kettle of Fish. The day guy was behind the bar, which figured. Eddie Ragan was his name, same as the last president Galvin had thought much of, though twenty years later he didn’t look as good as he did back then. Bartender spelled it different, though, left the e out. With the e it was Irish, and without it who the hell knew what it was. Probably Polish, probably cut down from something with thirty zs and ws in it.
“Hey, Eddie,” he said.
“Hey, how ya doin’?” A nice easy smile, you had to say that for him. “You gonna show me that picture again?”
“You remember, huh?”
“I may not remember every last person who showed me that picture, as many as there’ve been. You I remember. Bushmill’s, right?”
“Actually it’s Jamesons.”
“Hey, close enough. Rocks or water back?”
He took it with water back, and while he sipped the water he nodded for a refill. Part of the job, on or off the clock. You go to bars, you want to get information from bartenders, you can’t sit there sipping a Coke.
And, watching Ragan do it again, he remembered that, by God, he had been drinking Bushmill’s the last time he’d come in. He’d stopped someplace else first and that was the only Irish they had, and it went down well enough, so he stayed with it at the Kettle. He thought of telling Eddie he was right after all, but why bother? What difference did it make?
“What I wanted to ask,” he said. “Forget the picture I showed you.”
“You and everybody else, but fine, I’ll be happy to forget it.”
“What I was wondering,” he said, “was if you happened to recall a fellow, probably came in here by himself...”
“I get lots of those.”
Fucking moron. “Didn’t say much,” he went on patiently. “Maybe didn’t speak at all, but he ordered a drink and then never touched it. Stood there or sat there for a while and then—”
“Walked out and left it there,” Ragan said. “Tuborg!”
“Tuborg?”
“That’s what he drank, except he didn’t. Just like you said, the sonofabitch sat there with the bottle and the glass in front of him, and next thing I knew he was gone, and he never took so much as a sip of that beer. I thought he stepped out for a minute, I thought he went to the john, I even wondered if he did a Lenny Bruce and died there. Gone, no forwarding. I never saw him again.”
“Did you ever see him before?”
“I don’t think so. I know I never saw him pull that shit before, because that I would have remembered.”