“Don’t tell him that part,” Denise said, “just tell him about Raymond. All we want is for them to leave us alone. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with Virgil… does it?”
“I don’t know. Once I open it up…”
“Call him.” Denise reached for the phone on the counter and moved it closer to Ryan. “You know you’ll have to sooner or later.”
Ryan lit a cigarette first, getting ready, before dialing the number. He asked for Dick Speed and could hear sounds, voices in the Squad Six offices as he waited. Then Speed was on the line. They said hello and how’s it going, fine, and Ryan got to it, saying, “I want to talk to you about something. A guy tried to kill me.”
“I believe it,” Dick Speed said. “Which one?”
“You remember the two guys from Louisiana you looked up for me, Perez and a Raymond Gidre?”
“Hold on a second.”
Ryan could hear voices again, Dick Speed asking someone for a file, saying it was right there on the desk. Denise was watching him expectantly. He looked at her and shrugged. “He told me to hold on.”
“Okay,” Dick Speed said. “Perez and Gidre tried to kill you.”
“No, it was just Raymond… Gidre.”
“With what?”
“A shotgun.” Ryan told him about it briefly, the high points, the breaking glass. He didn’t mention shooting at Raymond; he’d save that.
“You reported it to the police?”
“That’s what I’m doing. Aren’t you the police?”
“The Rochester police,” Dick Speed said. “Outside Detroit I don’t give a shit who tries to kill you.”
“Look, I’m calling you because it’s kind of an involved situation,” Ryan said, “if you know what I mean. I’m not sure what all I should tell them.”
“You mean if you should tell them about the papers were stolen from room 1705, the Pontchartrain Hotel, at approximately eight-fifteen last night?”
“Jesus,” Ryan said. There was a silence.
“You still there?”
“I’m here.”
“How’d you like to go someplace with me this afternoon?” Dick Speed said. “Maybe eyeball the guy tried to shoot you. How’s that sound?”
“I don’t believe it,” Ryan said. “How could you know all that, I mean about the papers?”
“How come you know they were stolen?” Dick Speed said. “You want to answer that?”
“I told you it was complicated.”
“Isn’t it, though,” Dick Speed said. “You want to go with me or not?”
Ryan felt tired, like he hadn’t gotten enough sleep.
“I’ll go.”
He listened, nodding, then hung up the phone. Denise was waiting.
“Well?”
“Well, I talked to the police,” Ryan said.
23
“YOU MENTIONED, TALK about small worlds,” Dick Speed said. “We get Tunafish on this attempted extortion that’s very flimsy, in fact not worth a shit, but long as we’re talking to him, he’s right there, why not play let’s make a deal? Drop the beef, save him some of the best years of his life, we say, if he’ll talk to us about his brother-in-law and try and recall if Virgil was actually with Tunafish a certain night or was he visiting somebody at a hotel. Tunafish says, What hotel? It got a little confusing about hotels before Tunafish says, The man talk to you? We say yeah, he did, not knowing who the fuck he means at all. See, we’re trying to put Virgil in the hotel where Bobby Lear was shot dead and Tunafish’s talking about, it turns out, the Pontch. Says he went up there with Virgil, yeah, thinking he was gonna see a man, and so on. We say right, you haven’t done nothing. He wants you to go with him to make the drop, fine. Says carry the man’s gun, do it, what he tells you. Your soul is now spotless, free of sin.” Dick Speed looked out his side window. “They went in there at one-twenty-five. All we need now’s your other two friends.”
The bar was across the street from where they sat in Dick Speed’s unmarked Ford. A brick building with a glass-brick window and a painted sign that said Watts Club Mozambique. A smaller sign said Jazz Nightly. The place didn’t look to be open or doing business, though several people had gone in and come out during the twenty-five minutes they had been waiting. It was cold in the car, dull gray outside, the street of storefronts dirty and old-looking, a street that had been handed down, Ryan remembering it as a Jewish neighborhood, and was now nearly all black.
“Very active at night around here,” Dick Speed said. “Down at the corner of Fenkell and Livernois was where we almost had another riot last summer, you remember? The bar-owner comes out, shoots a spook in his parking lot.”
“I remember reading about it,” Ryan said.
“Very touchy for a while. A guy was pulled out of his car, going home from work, the guy didn’t even know what the fuck was going on. Some foreign guy, an ethnic you say now, gets the shit beat out of him and dies in the hospital.”
After a few moments Ryan said, “Saint Gregory’s, it’s around here somewhere. I used to play basketball there in the seventh and eighth grade. It was about maybe half black then.”
“You ever go there to Confession?”
“No, why?” Ryan looked at him and saw the dumb-innocent expression. “Oh. Yeah, I forgot. You want to hear it?”
“I already did, from the Tuna,” Dick Speed said. “He didn’t mention you in particular. I mean your name isn’t written down anywhere, but-Jesus, that’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard of a supposedly intelligent person doing. How much you pay ’em?”
“Nothing yet. Virgil was supposed to get something if we made it.”
“I asked you how much.”
“Ten grand.”
“Jesus Christ, you know what you’re talking about?”
“What’s the amount? It’s breaking and entering, isn’t it? I mean to Virgil, what’s that? Looking at it relatively. He’s taking something from a guy, he’s not taking money, information that legally belongs to somebody else.”
“You think that’s the way your lawyer’s gonna plead it?”
“I don’t know”-it was dumb and it wore Ryan out trying to make it sound rational-“I made a bad call, I admit it. Now what?”
“Now what, it’s up to Virgil and the Tuna,” Dick Speed said. “They get their ass in the cogs, and got to sweat and pray they don’t take you with ’em. We’ll see what we can do. So far you’ve been pretty lucky.”
“That I’ve got you on my side?” Ryan couldn’t help saying it. He sat there while Dick Speed gave him a grim look.
“You gonna be a smartass now?”
“No, I’ll be good,” Ryan said.
“Boy, I don’t know about you.” Dick Speed was shaking his head.
Ryan let it go and sat quietly. He didn’t know why he did things like that, antagonized people. Maybe to see their reaction. He wasn’t serious; he was kidding. Right now would be the time to tell Speed he had a gun on him, watch him go through the roof. He’d almost left it home when he stopped to change his shoes, but he reloaded it instead- thinking of Raymond, knowing he was going to see Raymond again, and Virgil-and stuck it back in his raincoat pocket. He didn’t mention it to Speed, though, or show it to him. He figured the guy had enough to think about.
They didn’t talk much after that. At two, Dick Speed said, “Okay, where are they?”
About ten after, Ryan said, “There’s one of them. Raymond Gidre.” He was coming toward them on the sidewalk. Three cars away, in front of them, he crossed the street to the bar.
“Where’s the other one?” Speed said.
By a quarter after, they were pretty sure Mr. Perez wouldn’t be taking part today.
Virgil took some time deciding where Tunafish should sit with the suitcase. Tunafish said, You making the deal, you sit with it. Virgil said no, he would be observing the transaction. The man, whoever came, would see the suitcase. He could look in it if he wanted. When the man gave him the money, Tunafish was to bring it to Virgil and then watch the man, with his hand in his pocket holding his new little Beretta. If it didn’t go down right, if the man didn’t hand Tunafish the money or if he tried to grab the suitcase and run, Virgil would step in and kill the deal. Step in from where, though?