Some of them glanced at each other; a few raised an eyebrow or gave the smallest smile that lips could manage. They all meant the same thing: The fix is in, and we’re not part of it.
“Dunne!”
Cleary’s voice was a harsh bark. Everybody knew that Cleary had no use for Harry Dunne, who was a detective-sergeant but who would never get any higher so long as Cleary was in charge. Dunne had the reputation of being a plodder: his nickname from the distant past was “Never,” because he was so slow: Never Dunne. He was so careful that he never finished. And, to the other cops’ disgust, he was honest. Dunne was in his forties, gray, hefty, offering a round face in which women found warmth and reliability but no excitement.
“Dunne, you’re gonna take charge of closing this Bowery Butcher case. Take Cassidy to help out. Clear?” He looked around the room once more. More smiles and raised eyebrows: it was okay to show that they were amused by Cleary’s dumping this crap case on Never Dunne, and it was okay to be relieved that they weren’t involved. “Okay, then, that’s that. Dunne — my office. Cassidy — you too. Now.”
Cleary got down. Finn, the squad arse-kisser, whisked away the ammunition box. Men impatient to do their jobs left in a hurry; others, more in love with leisure, sat at desks and put their feet up and lit cigarettes.
In his office, Cleary sat but let Dunne and Cassidy stand in front of him while Grady, hands joined over his crotch, stood by the closed door as if he thought one of them was going to try to escape. Cassidy was a smaller, younger version of Dunne, only a plainclothes detective. He, too, to everybody’s disgust, was honest.
Cleary said the same things he had said in the squad room. Then he added, frowning at Dunne, “I don’t want you getting ideas, get me? I’m giving this job to you because you’re not pulling your weight here; you’re not closing cases. This one is all closed but the paperwork. Your job is to close it and nothing else. I’m doing you a favor. Get me?”
“Who killed her?”
Cleary looked threatening. “How the fuck would I know? It’s unsolvable. Write it up that way and put it on the shelf.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“You’re supposed to do nothing! You don’t try to identify the victim, that’s a dead duck; you don’t advertise for leads; you don’t see what your snitches say. Just do the paperwork and close it out.”
“Close it out.”
“Now you’re talking. Take Finn and the Wop.”
Dunne groaned. “If there’s nothing to be done—”
“Do like I tell you and shut up. Cassidy?”
“I get you, Lieutenant.”
Cleary pushed a brown accordion file across his desk. “Then get outta here.”
Out in the squad room, Dunne walked a few steps — enough to get where Grady couldn’t hear them through the door, because he’d be listening — and he said, “It’s fixed.”
“That’s the message I get, yeah.”
Dunne and Cassidy shared the cynicism common to all cops, plus a little extra because of what they’d learned trying to stay honest. Dunne gave Cassidy a conspirator’s smile. “So what are we going to do?”
“Can’t we get rid of the Wop?” The Wop was one of the few Italians in the force, a quiet young man named Forcella. Nobody wanted him around.
“Not if Cleary says we gotta take him.”
“He’s a fucking Dago!”
“Not as bad as a rat-faced Mick like Finn.”
“Cleary puts his hand on a fly button, Finn puckers up. He’ll carry everything we do to Cleary.”
“That’s the idea. Well…” Dunne looked around the sordid room. “We’ll have a meeting every morning to feed Finn some eyewash he can peddle to Cleary. I’ll find him something to do to keep him out of our hair — maybe send him down to the Tenth to copy all their paperwork. He’ll take at least three days just to chew the rag with his pals down there. Then he’ll take two hours for the free lunch at Shankey’s, and he’ll come back sozzled and take a nap. Hell, maybe we can make it last a week.” He grinned at Cassidy. “You ever think police work was going to be important? Like…important?”
“Ha-ha.”
Dunne shook his head. “Cleary’s got some kind of boodle going, so we gotta find out what it is. If we don’t, we’re waxed. But if we do and he knows it, we’re fucked.” He opened the accordion file. Inside were two pieces of paper, one a blank form, one a copy of the patrolman’s statement. Dunne laughed. He tucked the file under an arm and headed for the door. “I’m off to the crapper to have a think. Don’t close any cases while I’m gone.”
“Arthur?”
She felt for his warm, comforting body with her left hand. The hand got caught in the counterpane; she whimpered. She thought she was back on the ship because she felt herself pitching slowly back and forth, but sometimes it was side to side and sometimes it was end to end, a motion that made her feel as if she would be sick.
“Mrs. Doyle?”
She tried to open her eyes. They seemed to be glued together. Sleep, she thought. That’s what her mother had always called it, that stickiness that glued the eyelids together and that became granules along the eyelids when she woke—You have sleep in your eyes. She tried to move her hand to wipe her eyes but she couldn’t, and then they seemed to open all on their own, and she was frightened by what she saw — nothing.
“Mrs. Doyle? Are you awake?”
She was looking at a ceiling, of course, which was gray and dark because there was no light. No, there was light, dim light, only a kind of glow that became no more than a stain on the darkness. Leaning over her, one side made visible by the stain, was some sort of woman. Louisa tried to ask her who she was, but although her lips and her tongue moved, no sound came.
“You’ve had morphine, Mrs. Doyle. You’re in your own bed and you’ve sprained your ankle, but you’re going to be fine. Mrs. Doyle?”
In her own bed? Was she back in London? But she’d been in New York. On her way to a train. To go to Buffalo. With Arthur! Where was Arthur? She felt panic rise in her as if it were a fluid that spread from her heart, along her arteries until a great gout of it blocked her throat. She did manage to make a sound, nonetheless: “Arthur!”
“Mr. Doyle had to take a train, remember? He got on his train and you’re back in your room. Mrs. Doyle?”
If it was London, why did the woman have that incredibly nasal accent? And it wasn’t her own room; it wasn’t at all. Her own room had a ceiling papered with flowers that she’d insisted upon, even though Arthur had been shocked by them and said that other people wouldn’t understand, but she’d said that she wanted to wake to flowers, and what would other people be doing in their bedroom? She said, “Flowers.”
“Yes, sweetie, lovely flowers from Mr. Carver and Mr. Irving and, oh, lots of people! Beautiful flowers everywhere.”
Louisa tried to move her head so that she could look around and see what flowers the woman was talking about. Or was the woman mad? Had she somehow got into a room with a madwoman? She thought through what she would say and enunciated carefully, “Where am I?”
“In your room, honey. In the New Britannic Hotel.”
The hotel. But they’d left the hotel. Arthur had staged a little scene and then that pleasant man, what was his name, had got him in to see the manager, Carver—oh, Carver had sent flowers, oh, that one, the slimy one—and they’d put all the luggage into carriages, Arthur and Ethel, and— Then she remembered.