“It looks worse, Ned. I hope amputation is not the next step.”
“When did you get back from LA? You never showed up at that den of Sodom Friday night-not that I stuck around to wait for your appearance.
So, where have you been? Tell me now. This minute.”
“Seriously, I’m worried about your physical condition. I’d be happy to see you retire to a hot, cramped trailer in Sarasota, but I wouldn’t want to lose you by watching you slowly rot from the top down.”
He shook his head glumly. “It’s a hereditary skin condition, Slotz-Planckton’s disease. The cold weather aggravates it. It started to clear up in LA, but when I got back here it took a turn for the worse. It is aggravated by severe weather and by stress, my doctor tells me. Stress, Strachey. I am experiencing stress. Do you know why?”
“Financial problems? Worrisome moisture on your basement walls?”
“You know goddamn well it’s you and this goddamn Lenihan thing. It’s as plain as can be that everybody and his Uncle Eddie is holding out on me in this thing, and the time is close at hand when I’m going to have to start playing hardball with the likes of you. Do you catch my meaning or do I have to draw you a picture?”
“You can skip the lurid visual effects, but you can tell me who else has been holding out. I’m not admitting that I have, but who else?”
He gave me his fish eye. “You know as well as I do who else. The woman you visited in LA Friday night, before I could get there first, Mrs. Danny Lenihan. The broad went all weepy on me, which is understandable, I guess, considering, but in a full two hours of blubber and boo-hoo she didn’t tell me diddly-shit about what her son was doing out there last weekend and how come this Piatek had left her boy two and a half million, and where was the two and a half million now? So, what’d she tell you? Plenty, I’ll wager. You people all stick together, don’t you?”
“We people?”
“I’ve always figured Joanie for a lez. Or maybe I heard it somewhere. You can’t tell me she and that Tesney woman aren’t playing doctor with the shades pulled down. So, what’d she confide in you? Come on, Strachey, make this easy for the both of us, huh?”
“‘Playing doctor with the blinds pulled down.’ Ned, you’re the consummate romantic. No, she did not confide in me either. She just let loose with a lot of confused ill will toward Albany and its citizenry. She detests this place so much, she wouldn’t even set foot in it to attend her son’s funeral. It sounds as if you’d met Joan Lenihan before or know quite a lot about her.”
He looked thoughtful and said, “I was the investigating officer when Dan died. It was me who took Joanie’s statement back in-fifteen, sixteen years ago, it must be. Joanie wasn’t a bad-looking cookie back then. Great knockers, a real pretty woman even with her buck teeth. Out in LA, Jesus, she looked like she’d been through the wringer. Or maybe she’s just getting old. Hell, Joanie’s older than I am, must be closing in on sixty.
“That was a sad time for the old man, let me tell you. Danny was Pug’s only son, and while I can’t say that Dan ever did his pop proud, even so he was all Pug had left in the world-Pug’s missus passed away back in the fifties-and it was just like the bottom fell out when Dan bought the farm. I think the North End must have been draped in black for a month after that one.”
Again, I was confused. “Why were the police involved in Dan Lenihan’s death? I had the impression he’d died as a result of his alcoholism.”
Bowman shrugged mildly, as if to recite a commonplace. “Indirectly, yeah, it was the booze. What happened was, Danny froze to death on the street.
At two or three in the morning in January he passed out on the way home from Mike Shea’s tavern down on Broadway. A paper boy found him at six in the morning on Second Street across from Sacred Heart, stiff as a board.
“Of course, I think Dan was stiff as a board from the time he was about eleven. How Joan put up with him all those years, I’ll never know. They say she married him because Joanie was a drinker herself when she was a kid, and the two of them tied one on one night and ended up in Dan’s bed, and old Pug caught em and made em make it legal. The story was, Pug had pretty much given up on Danny by then, and he wanted grandchildren.
“Well, he got em. Conine’s barren and Jack was a faggot, if you’ll pardon the expression, which I know you won’t, you being one yourself. I don’t know what went wrong in that family. Pug Lenihan was one of the finest men this town ever produced, and then it all just went to hell for him. How does that happen? You tell me.”
I did not offer an opinion, which would have been uselessly inflammatory. I said, “It’s a sad history, but I’m more interested in the present state of the Lenihans. Jack in particular, who’s been bludgeoned to death. Where does the investigation stand?”
He gave me his incredulous imbecile look, which was unusually imbecilic owing to the albino squid clinging to his face. “I can’t tell you that. That is official police information. It is you, Strachey, who are in possession of information that could wrap this thing up in two days. I can smell it all over you. You reek of withheld evidence. The question is, do you give it to me voluntarily, or do I turn this simple process into something ugly and complicated for both of us? Which is it, huh?” He glared at me across his little friend.
I said, “You’re up against it, Ned, am I right? You spent seven hundred dollars of the department’s two-grand travel budget and you came up empty-handed. You’ve got nothing to show for your junket and little to go on otherwise. You’re frustrated and you think your frustration will be relieved if you beat up on me. Well, forget it. I’m not interested. I can spend my time more profitably elsewhere, and so can you.”
He remained calm, maybe at the urging of his physician. “Do you want to be dragged down to the lockup? Right now?”
“You could arrange that, I guess, but you won’t. You’re only guessing that I’ve got information pertinent to your investigation, and your guess is no legal basis for an arrest. Lock me up and I’ll be on the streets in forty-five minutes, and you’ll end up with egg on your face. I mean, if there’s room for it on there.”
He flinched, but remained seated, not moving, tight-lipped.
I said, “There is, however, a way we might be able to get together on this thing. Pool our resources in the interests of justice, civic improvement, and a nice commendation for you from the chief. As you have figured out, my aims in this case are broader than yours. I want Jack Lenihan’s killer locked up and punished, yes, but I also want Sim Kempelman’s outfit to have the two and a half million so they can run the thieves and knuckleheads out of city hall and replace them with save-the-whales, anti-nuke, ACLU goo-goos.”
Bowman gripped his desk tightly, but still he said nothing. He seemed to be losing strength.
“As it happens,” I said, “there is a way for both of us to accomplish everything we want to accomplish. With your assistance, I think I can hand you Jack Lenihan’s killer. Notice I said ‘assistance.’ What I’m saying is, I’ll take the risks and do most of the real work, and you’ll get the credit.”
After a moment, he stood calmly, walked to the door, and closed it. Seated again, he said, “I can listen. I want Lenihan’s killer tried and convicted. What do you want from me? What does this so-called assistance entail?”
“First, Ned, one thing. If we work together on this, are you willing to follow the trail wherever it leads? No matter who’s involved?”
He leaned back in his swivel chair and clutched the arms. “What the fuck are you talking about, Strachey? What’s a remark like that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not sure yet myself. Just answer the question. I know you’re a blowhard and a narrow-minded jackass, but I’ve always thought that despite your obvious limitations you were also an honest cop. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
“My entire career has been devoted to enforcing the law. You break the laws of the state of New York or the city of Albany and you reckon with Ned Bowman, whoever you
are, period.”
I knew that it got more complicated than that with Bowman, a man of his time and place. Yet he did have his own warped but sturdy personal integrity. Lacking alternatives at the time, I decided to place my trust in it. I said, “I want you to put a tail on me. A reliable, experienced team of plainclothes guys who will grab Jack Lenihan’s killer when he tries to kill me. There is reason to believe he is going to do that, probably this morning. Just prior to that, I think, his intention is to force me to lead him to the two and a half million. He’s under the impression that I’ve got it, though I don’t want to comment on that.
“My informed opinion is that this man will make his move against me in the presence of, or more likely the close proximity of, the man he’s working for, who, by the way, is a considerable personage in this town who might-I emphasize might ��� be dealing dope in a big way, though that would be out of character for him and I have deep doubts about that part.
“It’s possible that when this man’s employee, an ex-con, makes his attempt on me and you nail him, you will not find direct evidence linking him to the Lenihan homicide. Once you’ve got him on the attempted-murder charge, however, it is highly probable that he’ll deal-there’s a parole violation involved as well-and he’ll implicate his employer, truly or falsely, in return for a reduced charge. The employer will then try to stick his employee with the Lenihan murderoffering, I hope, solid evidence-in order to save what’s left of his own neck. That’s all slightly chancy, but I think we can make it work. In any event, as you can see it’s me who’s taking all the real risks in this, and all you and your guys have to do is tag along and pick up the pieces, one of which will be me. Will you do it?”
He squinted across his septopus at me and drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I don’t know enough,” he said after a moment. “Tell me more. I want to hear names, places, dates.”
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
I knew that if I mentioned Pug Lenihan’s name, Bowman would choke on his own incredulity and send me back out into the cold-and possibly phone city hall the second I was out the door. The question of how much or little city hall knew was already problematic, and I wasn’t about to erase all doubt by presenting myself quite so boldly. I wanted the confusion and unanswered questions that were working to my disadvantage to work to theirs too for a little while longer.
I said, “If I told you why I can’t tell you, then you’d know what it was I couldn’t tell you. You’d understand why I couldn’t tell you it in the first place, but then it would be too late. See my problem?”
He waved that away disgustedly and thought about it some more. Beads of sweat broke out around his adhesive tape. More finger drumming and shifting about. “Twelve hours,” he said then. “I’ll cover you for twelve hours and not a minute more. You come up with a goose egg on this, Strachey, and you are a nonperson in this department. Except, of course, if you are caught committing a crime, like passing around two and a half million dollars that doesn’t belong to you. In that case, you’ll become a person again. A person in the lockup on the way to Sing Sing for so many years, you’ll only be fit for the county nursing home by the time you hobble out of there.”
I told him I appreciated his warm confidence in me, and we worked out the details. From a pay phone downstairs I called Corrine McConkey and confirmed my ten-thirty appointment with Pug Lenihan. Corrine said her grandfather sounded very eager to meet me but had stipulated that I arrive at his house alone.
NINETEEN
Under a bleached-out sun a southerly breeze had dragged the temperature up to three degrees above freezing and the city was beginning to soften and melt. Fat crescents of filthy ice dropped out of motorists’ wheel wells. Acids from midwestern power plants dripped off trees. The main roads were drying up, leaving a film of gray salt, but the side streets were ankle-deep in frigid slush. To step off a curb, or to breathe the air, was to risk pneumonia.
I didn’t want to live in it anymore and imagined half the population of the Hudson Valley arriving simultaneously at the same sensible conclusion and suddenly making a break for it, the Thruway clogged from Selkirk to the Tappan Zee Bridge with an unbroken southward stream of sullen refu-gees yearning for a place in the Sunbelt where they could dry out their socks.
It didn’t happen though. All the others must have had their own reasons for staying, and for the moment I had mine, which seemed to me quite grand.
“Quite grandiose,” Timmy would have corrected me. To make it even grander, all I had to do was stay alive.
Bowman had refused to lend me a firearm, so I drove up Washington, waded through a couple of backyards, and climbed the rear stairs to my office. The door was off its hinges again and the general disorder more general than normal. Mack Fay had been looking for his wayward luggage. I removed the loose brick from the wall where the plaster had fallen off, took my Smith amp; Wesson out of the bread bag that kept it dry and dustless, and stuck the gun in my coat pocket.
The telephone was working, so I called my friend the narc. “This is Strachey again. What else have you come up with on Mack Fay?”
“Are you about ready to let me in on this, my friend? That would be a reasonable condition for my passing on privileged information to you.”
“No, that would be an unreasonable condition. Look, don’t be offended, but I’m working with the Albany cops on this one on account of how incompetent they are. When this thing is over and the smoke clears, there’s something I want to come out of this with. You guys might be smart enough to take it away from me, but Bowman’s crew isn’t and won’t. I thought of calling you first but decided that my worthy ultimate goals in this would be jeopardized by your competence, so I went to Bowman. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, but you understand that if you violate a federal statute I’ll have to do what I’ll have to do.”
“No, you won’t. You could, but you won’t have to. You’ve told me yourself discretionary blindness is a major federal crime-fighting tool. The smelliest sleazebags in North America get a pat on the back and a trip to the Bahamas if they help you convict a major doper. So don’t give me a hard time on this. Next to most of the people you do business with, I’m Mother Theresa.”
“Strachey, you are missing the point entirely. The point is, what have you done for me lately?”
“Nothing yet, that’s true. But soon. I can’t elaborate. Trust me.”
He didn’t hesitate. His organization had a $290 billion annual budget and a trillion-dollar deficit, so he felt confident making decisions. He said he’d give me another day or two, and then he reeled off the information I had asked him for. “Mack Fay, I am reliably informed, was not close to Robert Milius and the rest of the Albany narcotics crowd at Sing Sing. They may have known each other, but they were in no way tight.”
“They weren’t?”
“Fay’s best buddy was a Terry Clert, paroled in October after doing seven years of a twelve-to-fifteen for armed robbery and assault with intent to kill.
He held up a liquor store in Syracuse in ‘77 and shot the manager who, lucky for Clert, lived. Clert now resides in this area.” He gave me the address on Third Street in the North End of Albany. “It’s interesting that Fay and Clert are both in the area. Clert’s originally from Gloversville and never lived in Albany be-fore.”
More confusion. “Are you telling me there aren’t any narcotics in either Clert’s or Fay’s background? And they weren’t hooked up in any way with the Albany dopers in Sing Sing?”
“That’s the information I have. I’m willing to bet that it’s good.”
I thanked him and said I’d be in touch, though now I wasn’t so sure anymore. The only thing I was certain of was that I was about to call on a man up to his aged neck in criminally minded Fays and Clerts, whose connection with him was unlikely to turn out to be a funny coincidence.
At 10:10 I passed through the intersection of State and Pea
rl and turned north. A blue Dodge parked in a bus stop edged in behind me and tagged along. Two blocks later a second Dodge joined the procession, and I thought about skimming off a small bundle of the money in the suitcases to pick up a block of Chrysler stock. At 10:25 I turned up Walter Street and parked. The two unmarked cop cars drove on by.
Dreadful Ed answered the door at the McConkeys. I could hear The $25,000
Pyramid squealing in the background, and McConkey seemed put out that I had interrupted his morning leisure. He had beer on his breath. He testily informed me that I was to proceed to Dad Lenihan’s house on my own, that Mrs. Clert was expecting me. I drove around the block to Pug Lenihan’s cottage on Pearl and parked. The two Dodges maneuvered this way and that, one of them ending up thirty yards down the block, the other one around the corner on Second Street.
The Pontiac I’d seen in Lenihan’s driveway a week earlier was back. I walked up to the front porch, stamped the slush off my feet, and rang the bell. The door was opened almost immediately by a plump round-faced woman in a pale pink pants suit. She studied me with cool gray eyes and flashed a practiced institutional smile.
“Are you Mr. Strachey?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’m Miriam Clert. It’s nice of you to drop by and see Dad. Come right in, please.”
“Thank you.”
I wiped my feet on the worn welcome mat and followed her through the bare front hall into a small, low-ceilinged living room with lace curtains and a threadbare brown rug. The furnishings consisted of what used to be called a “living room suit”-squat tan easy chair and couch to match, with shiny acrylic pillows, their manufacturer’s tags unremoved under penalty of law. Arranged atop a table by the front window was an assortment of framed photographs showing various members of the Lenihan family in formal poses and tinted to the point of herpes zoster. In the one non-studio shot, Jack, Corrine, Joan, and a puffy-faced man I took to be Dan Lenihan were standing on a lawn in what must have been their Easter finery, circa 1963. Their smiles were forced and wan, and no one was touching anyone else. Except for the daffodils in the background, it could have been a police lineup.
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