Two minutes later, Grace was standing by the desk of Deputy Managing Editor Art Gelb. She waited until he had finished talking to another reporter, then leaned down to him. “Art,” she whispered. “I’ve got something I’ve got to talk to you about right away. I think it may be very, very big.”
There had been six “sixty-ones;” crimes of leaving the scene of an accident, recorded on the daily crime sheets of the seventy-three precincts of the New York Police Department on Friday, December 11.
Because of the snowstorm that number was, as Angelo had guessed it would be, well above the Department’s daily average.
One of the six was a serious case under active investigation. It involved an elderly black woman knocked over by a motorcyclist on the pedestrian crossing at Broadway and Cathedral Parkway and transported to St. Luke’s Hospital with a broken hip. The five remaining cases all bore the same notation under the heading “Disposition”: “Detective McCann is assigned to this case.” To the outsider, he might well have appeared to be the busiest investigative officer in the New York Police Department.
He in fact did not exist. Detective McCann was the wastebasket. His name after each of those complaints indicated the sentiments of the NYPD toward such a minor crime as leaving the scene of an accident involving a scraped fender: a lot of paperwork for nothing.
Angelo had covered nineteen precincts and four of the recorded incidents when he called the Tenth Precinct in west midtown, the area in which he had conducted his earlymorning hunt for a hit-and-run driver years before.
“Yeah, I got a Sixty-one here,” the clerk replied. “Procter and Gamble salesman got his fender scraped.”
“OK,” Angelo said. “Read it to me.”
“Complainant M-42 indicates that between the hours of one and two P.M., Friday, December 11, his motor vehicle, a 1978 Pontiac bearing New York number plate 349271 was parked in front of 149 West Thirty-seventh Street, and when he came out he observed the fender had a crease in it. Under his windshield an unknown person or persons had left a note stating: `A yellow truck hit you and took off.’ Complainant interviewed Friday, December 11, Tenth Precinct by Officer Natale. Detective McCann assigned to this case with request it be marked closed pending a further development, at which time proper and prompt police action will be taken.”
Angelo couldn’t resist a laugh at the Department’s bureaucratese. “Tell me about that `proper and prompt police action’ you got in mind,” he remarked.
“That note really said a yellow truck?”
“Yeah.”
“OK. Give me the salesman’s name and address.”
On the other side of the United States the first warm rays of sunshine glinted off the great green rolls of Pacific surf crashing onto the Santa Monica seashore. An earlymorning jogger had just turned off the beach and headed up the cliff toward his seaside cottage. He was a hundred yards from his front door when he heard the clatter of his telephone.
Still panting, the West Coast correspondent of The New York Times grabbed the phone and instantly recognized the caller from the intense, confidential murmur rippling from his receiver. “I’ve got something very important for you,” Art Gelb told him. “Get your stringer in Reno down to Las Vegas right away. There’s a John McClintock who works in some kind of a safeguards section in the Federal Building on Highland Street there. I want your guy to find out urgently exactly what it is this guy McClintock does and call me back as soon as he’s got it.”
Angelo Rocchia eased the telephone back into its cradle, thinking hard as he did it. The Procter & Gamble salesman whose fender had been scraped was out making his calls on the West Side of Manhattan, his office had just told Angelo. He wouldn’t be phoning in before nightfall. There was no way to spot his car on the city’s streets; the Cincinnati soapmakers had long ago abandoned the practice of branding their salesmen’s vehicles with the company’s familiar trademark of a smiling man in a crescent moon against a darkblue field of stars.
The only suggestion the helpful office manager had been able to make was that if Angelo wanted to reach him in a hurry he call on De Pasquale’s Hero Sandwich Bar on West Thirty-fifth just off Ninth Avenue. The salesmen working the West Side gathered there for coffee and Danish around eleven.
He would probably be there, and if he wasn’t someone who could pin down the neighborhood where he was working probably would be.
Four hundred Hertz trucks out there, Angelo thought, and how many yellow trucks on top of that? It was a very, very wild unscientific idea. He glanced into the garage at the busy array of FBI forensic experts. Not the kind of idea they were apt to appreciate. Almost reluctantly, he heaved his heavy frame from the Hertz manager’s chair and stalked into the garage with his deceptively awkward gait.
It had been the salesman’s rear left fender that had gotten the scrape, so it would probably have been the truck’s right side that had done it. Angelo surveyed the pieces of the right side of the van lined against the wall of the garage, counting on them fourteen red circles, each one numbered, each representing a different bump or scrape. He picked up the sheaves of spectrographic analysis that corresponded to the numbers. Inconclusive, just as he had thought they’d be. They had identified positively traces of three brands of paint on the truck’s right panels, two used by General Motors, one by Ford. Together, the models that employed those three brands of paint represented just over fifty-five percent of the cars on the highway. A lot of help, Angelo mused, a real lot of help.
“Something I can do for you, Detective?”
The speaker was the agent in charge of the forensic team. His words contained, the New Yorker noted, about as much warmth as those of a bank security guard questioning a teenage Puerto Rican loitering in his lobby.
“No,” Angelo replied. “Just looking around.”
“Well, why don’t you wait out there in the manager’s office where you’ll be more comfortable? We’ll let you know if we’ve got anything for you.”
I’m about as welcome in here, Angelo thought, as an archbishop in an abortion mill. Was it because of those classified papers they’d pulled out of the files? Or just the feds’ traditional mistrust of other law-enforcement agencies?
In a corner of the garage, he noted his young partner earnestly talking to one of his colleagues. He had barely gotten the time of day from him since they arrived. No one seems to want me around here, or anyplace else for that matter, he reflected bitterly, thinking back to his telephone conversation of the night before. He strolled over to Rand and tossed a conspiratorial arm over his shoulder like a coach who’s about to send a tight end onto the field with a criticial third downplay.
“Come here, kid,” he growled, edging him away from his fellow agents. There was no question of telling him what he really had in mind. The young agent was much too procedures-conscious for that. He’d say, “Have headquarters send out someone else,” and that wasn’t Angelo’s idea at all. On the other hand, one thing you could probably count on Rand for was a sense of solidarity, the “We’re all cops together, so don’t rat to the boss” thing.
He would lose Rand’s respect, but why the hell should he care about that?
“Listen, kid,” he whispered, “Cover for me for an hour or so, will you? Your guys got nothing for me and-” he winked at the FBI agent “I got a little something over here, a little biscuit I haven’t seen for a while. I’m going to just drop in and say hello to her.”