The Frumious Bandersnatch (26 page)

“I'm glad you didn't,” Hawes said.

“I'm kind of glad, too,” she said. “Now,” she added.

For an instant, their eyes met over the table.

She went back to her filet mignon.

He went back to his sirloin.

They ate in silence.

“Good steak,” he said at last.

“My favorite joint in the entire city,” she said. “I cover a lot of events at CP-AM. I always come here afterwards.”

“We'll have to come here again,” he ventured.

“Whenever,” she said.

Their eyes met again.

“So…uh…what is this?” she asked.

“What is what?”

“You know. This.”

“I'm afraid to tell you.”

“Big brave policeman who got stabbed in the head?”

“Yeah, well, not
that
brave.”

“Tell me.”

“How'd you like to marry me?” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “When?”

“I may be serious.”

“Okay, so where's the ring?”

“Honey…” he said.

“Yes, Cotton?” she said, and put both elbows on the table, and cupped her chin in her hands.

“You are perhaps the most beautiful woman I've ever met in my life.”

“Perhaps?”

“You are in
fact
…”

“Too late to apologize,” she said.

Her eyes were dancing.

He said nothing for a moment.

She raised her eyebrows.

Yes? her eyebrows asked. Her eyes asked.

“If I were to offer you dessert…” he said.

“Yes?” she said.

“…would you accept?”

“Or?”

“Or would you rather we went home and watched you on television?”

“Offer me and see,” she said.

“Honey…”

“Yes, Cotton?”

“Would you care for dessert?”

“No, I would like you to take me home,” she said, and smiled as if she were still on camera. “Would
you
care for dessert?” she asked.

SEEMED
like old times.

A bright morning in the merry month of May, and the detectives of the Eight-Seven were gathered in the Loot's office for a Tuesday morning confab. The lieutenant was late. Arthur Brown was telling a drunk driver joke.

“Motorcycle cop's been hiding in the bushes all day, hoping to catch a speeder, he finally pulls over this dude doing eighty miles an hour in a convertible Jag. Grinning from ear to ear, the cop leans into the Jag and says, ‘I've been waiting for you all day long, pal.' The dude in the Jag has three sheets to the wind. He says, ‘Well, offisher, I got here as fast as I could.' ”

Brown burst out laughing.

So did the other detectives in the room.

Seven of them altogether. Six men and one woman, typical of most squadrooms in this city. Andy Parker couldn't resist trying to embarrass Eileen Burke.

“Another motorcycle cop pulls over the same drunk,” he said. “This time the cop's a female. She tells him, ‘Sir, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be held against you.' The drunk says, ‘Tits.' ”

Which Eileen guessed was better than breaking into her locker and pissing in her shoes. In fact, she thought the joke was pretty funny. After the meeting this morning, she was scheduled to interview a woman who'd been snorting cocaine since she was fifteen years old, but who was now ready to take a stand against the gang that was terrorizing her building in the projects. It was tough enough trying to quit the powder crowd. Protecting your kids against the people hoping to hook them was something else again. The woman was twenty-seven years old. She had a son of eleven who'd already been approached. Enough was enough.

“There's this guy gets stopped by a cop for speeding?” Richard Genero said tentatively. As the newest detective on the squad, he was still not too sure of himself at these weekly meetings. But the lieutenant wasn't here yet, and everyone seemed to be in a receptive mood this morning, so he was ready to venture a joke. “The cop wants to know where he's going in such a hurry, and the guy says, ‘I have to do a show in New Haven.' The cop asks, ‘What kind of show?' The speeder says, ‘I'm a juggler.' The cop is skeptical. ‘Oh yeah?' he says. ‘Let's see you juggle something.' The speeder says, ‘I'd be happy to, but all my equipment is at the theater.' Well, the cop leads him around to the back of his cruiser, and he opens the trunk and takes out three flares, which he lights and hands to the speeder. ‘Here,' he says. ‘Juggle these!' It so happens the guy really
is
a juggler, so he throws the flares into the air and is doing his little act when who should come speeding down the highway but that same drunk in the Jag! He takes one look, jams on the brakes, walks over to the cop, and says, ‘Take me to jail right now, offisher. I'll never be able to pass
that
test.' ”

Everyone was still laughing when Byrnes walked into the room. Gray-haired and bullet-headed, he walked behind his desk, said a gruff “Good morning,” and then asked, “What's so funny?”

Genero said they were telling drunk driver jokes.

“This drunk comes out of a liquor store,” Byrnes said, “sees a motorcycle cop at the curb, writing a parking ticket. He staggers over to the cop, says, ‘Come on, pal, give a guy a break.' The cop keeps writing the ticket. ‘Come on,' the drunk says, ‘don't be such a friggin Nazi.' So the cop writes a second ticket for the car having bald tires. The drunk calls him an asshole, and the cop writes a third ticket for worn windshield wipers. This goes on for ten minutes, the drunk hurling abuse, the cop writing ticket after ticket. Finally, the cop closes his book, and says, ‘You satisfied now?' The drunk says, ‘I really don't give a damn, offisher.
My
car's parked aroun' the corner.' ”

The detectives laughed harder than perhaps they should have.

“Have some bagels and coffee,” Byrnes said, and turned to where Carella was standing over by the bookcases with all the legal tomes in them. “What happened last night?” he asked. Carella told him everything that had happened to him down at One Fed Square and beyond.

“And?” Byrnes said.

“I walked,” Carella said.

“Why?”

“I was there through sufferance.”

“Sufferance, huh? Well, my beamish boy, what if I told you the Commish wants us to stick with it?”

Carella looked at him.

“This is all politics,” Byrnes said. “We caught the squeal. If the Feebs crack the case, we look inept. If we're the ones who nab these guys, we come off smelling of roses.”

“The Feebs don't have anything yet. And neither do I,” Carella said.

“That's why we're here today, ain't it?” Byrnes said, and turned away and said, “You ready to listen, men?” And immediately added, “Eileen?”

“Good save, Loot,” Eileen said, and everyone laughed. Score one for the frails, she thought, and crossed her splendid legs for emphasis.

Cotton Hawes thought of Honey Blair crossing her legs last night.

“Here's what we've got,” Byrnes said. “You all know we caught this friggin kidnapping Saturday night…”

“Actually, I'm the one who caught it,” Andy Parker said.

“Bravo, you want a medal?” Byrnes asked. “The Joint Task Force moved in and the vic asked for Carella to…”

“Not the vic,” Carella corrected.

“Right, the CEO of the company that
records
the vic, you've seen her all over television. He asked for Carella on the case because he has some sort of rapport with him…”

“Must be the smile,” Meyer said.

“Must be,” Carella said, and flashed a toothy grin.

“Anyway, they get him down there and treat him like a country cousin, except when the CEO demands he go along on the ransom drop. Am I getting this right, Steve?”

“More or less,” Carella said.

“So last night, when they diss him yet again, he walks. Told Corky Corcoran…any of you know him?”

“A prick,” Brown said. “ 'Scuse me, Eileen.”

“Why?” Eileen said. “He
is
a prick.”

“Anyway, Steve told him to shove his job.”

“Good for you,” Meyer said.

“Only trouble is,” Byrnes said, “I got a call from the Commish last night, soon as he heard what happened.”

“How'd he hear?” Genero asked.

“Corcoran called him. Filed a complaint.”

“The prick,” Eileen said.

“The Commish agrees. He wants Carella—he wants
us
—to stay on it. In fact, he would like nothing better than for us to crack it. Before The Squad does.”

“Fat Chance Department,” Parker said. “They've got technology pouring out of their wahzoo.”

“Didn't help them locate the perps,” Carella said.

“What'd you learn down there, Steve?” Brown asked.

He told them about all the equipment the Feebs had set up, told them about the perps leading him and Loomis out to The Wasteland, told them about the dead Golden Retriever…

“Sons of bitches,” Parker said.

“So we'd know they're ready to kill the girl,” Carella said.

“Could've made their point another way.”

“That's what Loomis thought. He still thinks these guys are
honorable,
you know. That they'll make a deal and stick to it. They asked for two-fifty large the first time around, and when we delivered it, they came back asking for a mil. But he still seems to think…”

“A mil
more?
” Kling asked.

“No, altogether.”

“The girl's worth it,” Hawes said. “Did you see that tape of the kidnapping? I saw it on a large screen down at Channel Four,” he said, and grinned sort of goofily.

“We got the MCU report, by the way,” Carella said. “The guy was limping.”

“What guy?”

“One of the perps. The lefthanded one.”

“Well,
there's
something,” Parker said.

“We already put out a medical alert,” Hawes said.

“Anything?” Eileen asked.

“Not so far.”

“I mean, how many limping lefthanded guys
are
there in this city?” Parker asked reasonably.

“Who's an experienced thief,” Carella said, nodding.

“How so?” Genero asked.

“Stole the Explorer he used on the night of the snatch. Also has a barrel full of stolen cell phones. So at least one of them's a thief.”

“Means a record, maybe,” Hawes said.

“Maybe for the lefthanded one.”

“Who limps, don't forget.”

“Any of you guys remember a movie called
The Fallen Sparrow?
” Byrnes asked.

They all looked at him.

“The bad guy limps. Drags his foot. Scariest scene in the movie is John Garfield waiting for him, his face all covered with sweat, and all we hear is that foot dragging down the hall, coming closer and closer.”

“Who's John Garfield?” Genero asked.

“That was
suspense,
” Byrnes said. “Nowadays, they put a lot of bullshit technology on the screen, the directors think that's suspense.”

“Think we should put out a second med alert?” Eileen asked.

“Couldn't hurt,” Brown said. “All these doctors are too busy to pay attention the first time around.”

“Too busy making money,” Hawes said.

“Too busy robbing Medicare,” Kling said.

“Come on, my uncle's a doctor,” Genero said.

“Am I the only one going to have a second bagel?” Parker asked, and pulled himself out of the only easy chair in the room and went over to the table near the windows.

“So is this ours or is it theirs, or what?” Carella asked.

“My guess?” Byrnes said.

“Good as mine, that's for sure.”

“My guess is it's ours
and
theirs.”

“A fuckin horse race,” Parker said, pouring himself another cup of coffee.

“So let's win it,” Byrnes said.

 

BACK IN THE
good old days, every Monday through Thursday morning at nine o'clock, detectives from all over this fair city pulled what was known as “Lineup Duty.” This meant that instead of reporting to work at their respective offices, two detectives from each of the city's squads trotted downtown or uptown or crosstown or across the rivers to the Headquarters building on High Street, where the Chief of Detectives presided over a parade of all the felony offenders who'd been arrested in the city the day before.

The purpose of these lineups was identification.

The Chief brought out the perps one by one, named the crimes for which they'd been arrested, recited a brief pedigree on each, and then conducted an interrogation for the next ten minutes or so. Most of these people were experienced thieves; the Chief didn't expect to get from them any information that would convict them in later trials. What he was doing was simply familiarizing his detectives with the people who were making mischief in this city. On a rotating basis, every Monday through Thursday, his detectives were able to get a good long look at troublemakers past and present, with the idea that they'd be able to recognize them in the future and prevent them from making yet more trouble.

Once a thief, always a thief.

Today, the police still had lineups (or “showups” as they were sometimes called) but their purpose was identification of another sort. Nowadays, in a room at your own precinct, you placed a suspect on a stage in a row of detectives or officers in street clothes, and you asked the vic to pick out which one of them had raped her or stabbed her or poked out her eye on the night of January fifth. Back in the old days, the headquarters gym was packed with maybe a hundred detectives from all over the city. Today, sitting behind a protective one-way glass, you had the vic, and the arresting detectives, and the lieutenant, and maybe somebody from the D.A.'s Office if you were that close to making a case. Small potatoes when you thought back to the grand old days, eh, Gertie?

But nowadays, you had computers to tell you who the bad guys were. You didn't have to eyeball all those evil-doers from a hard bench in an austere gym. You sat in your own comfy swivel chair at your own cluttered desk, and you popped the question to the computer, and hoped it came up with something good.

By that Tuesday morning, not a single one of the myriad doctors in this city had responded to the precinct's medical alert for a man who might have sustained a recent injury to the right leg. While Eileen sent out a second alert, sounding a bit more urgent this time, Carella turned to the second supposition in Detective Oswald Hooper's report on the footprints the MCU had recovered aboard the
River Princess;
he considered the possibility that the injury to the right leg had occurred sometime in the
past.