by Tim Cockey
Sammy’s Coffee Shop on Calvert Street couldn’t give a damn for the late twentieth century. It especially couldn’t give a damn for its industrial solvents and cleaning products, the ones which might have managed to eat through the decades of ground-in grit and soot sealed into its linoleum floors and tiny tabletops in a permanent dead-dishwater patina. Apparently Sammy also keeps his wait staff sealed in a time vault. Beehives in hair nets, eyeglasses on chains and faces like those repellent little troll dolls that were once so inexplicably popular. Sammy himself mans the counter, a disagreeable old guy dragged along by a toothpick. The younger version of his face, seemingly sucking the same toothpick, can be seen in the several hundred black-and-white photographs tacked up all around the place, posing with the various celebrities and politicos and mobsters who have dallied with acid indigestion at Sammy’s over the years.
Hutch pointed out Police Commissioner Alan Stuart’s photograph. It was hung on one of the side walls.
“When he wins the election, Sammy will move it nearer to the cash register. That’s your prime real estate.”
“Right up there next to Cher,” I said. “That would be peachy.”
We were seated at one of the tiny tables. I had gone to put a matchbook under one of the short legs to keep the table from wobbling and had found another matchbook there already. The Pep Boys. Manny, Moe and Jack. All your automotive accessory needs. My dad had voiced a few of their commercials way back when. Our waitress came over to take our orders. Late breakfast for each. She fetched a coffeepot that had been sitting on the burner since the Hoover administration and filled us up. I took a sip and asked Hutch how he was so sure his man was going to take the election.
“He’s it,” Hutch said. “There is no other choice. Look who the Democrats are putting up. Spencer Davis?”
“Didn’t he once have a blues band?”
“That Spencer Davis would be a better choice. At least he could keep them grooving. Nah, this guy is a noodle. He’s the district attorney. He’s got a little Kennedy complex.”
“You mean members of his family keep dying tragically in between sex scandals?”
Hutch laughed. “Not quite. But he comes from money like that. He spends all his energies propping up the poor. Thinks he’s the next Bobby. Sounds swell, I know. But we’re not electing a social worker, we’re electing a governor. Davis thinks on a single track. Flip the power from the haves to the have-lesses as often as you can and you’ve reset the balance. That’s his whole agenda. That’s not justice, it’s payback politics. It’s two wrongs make a right. But they don’t. We learned that in kindergarten. Everything you need to know, right? Spencer Davis is a good-looking rich boy, everybody’s chum. He thinks that the noblest form of political behavior is slumming. I’m sorry, but in politics especially I just don’t buy the do-gooder act. He’s pretending he’s something he’s not. Dress it up any way you like, but I still call that dishonest.”
It was quite a nice speech, except that it didn’t say anything about why Alan Stuart’s shit didn’t stink.
“And your man?” I asked. “He invented sliced bread?”
“My man invented the means of protecting it, which is ultimately just as important. Look, Alan Stuart is a tough, edgy son of a bitch, you’re not going to hear me pretend otherwise. He can turn on the charm when he wants to, just like Spencer Davis, but he rarely feels the need to. Alan likes to mix it up with people. He’s a head-knocker. Unlike Davis, you can never be sure which heads he’s going to be knocking together from one day to the next. That’s what makes him so effective. He’s multidimensional. He just wants to solve problems, period. He doesn’t want to be your friend, he just wants to solve the problem. You’ve seen what he has done as police commissioner. He gets his man. It’s pretty basic. And he instills that ethic in his soldiers. People are wary of Alan. They know that they’d better play it straight around him because he’s always carrying his big club. Spencer Davis is a dinner guest. Alan Stuart killed the steer. That’s the difference.”
Our food arrived. My two little eggs and two sausages looked sort of paltry against Police Commissioner Stuart’s fabled steer. But then I wasn’t running for governor. Hutch was emptying a bottle of ketchup onto his home fries. Without looking up he changed the subject.
“So now what’s all this about you and this Guy Fellows character again?”
I took a bite of sausage. Burned the tip of my tongue.
“It’s nothing. Like I said. He got a little unruly at his friend’s funeral and I got in the way of his fist.”
“He hit you?”
“I got him under control.”
“And then you went off the next day and whacked him, huh?”
“That’s the whole story.”
“But seriously, the police don’t think you had anything to do with it, do they?”
“They’re just doing their job. Asked me a hundred questions. Actually, the same dozen questions a hundred times.”
“Whose funeral was it?”
“A lady friend of his. Apparently he had a lot of lady friends.”
“Is that so?”
“So I gathered.”
“Gathered? From who?” Hutch hadn’t touched his food, simply made a bloody mess out of his home fries. His fork was dangling from his clenched hands like a pendulum.
“A gardener at the country club, since you ask. But since you ask, why are you asking? I mean, why are you so interested in this, Hutch?”
Hutch shrugged, then stabbed his home fries again. “I don’t know. Just curious about you fighting with someone you’ve supposedly never met.”
“Supposedly? You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you. I’m sorry. Bad choice of words. I guess I’m jumpy. Big day. Let’s drop it.”
The waitress brought us our check. Hutch reached across the table to stop me from going for my money. “Expenses,” he said, reaching for his wallet.
“I don’t know, Hutch. Wouldn’t that suggest a tacit approval of your candidate on my part?”
“If I could buy a vote for two eggs and a coffee, I’d bring this baby in w-a-y under budget.”
“I also had two sausages,” I reminded him.
He grinned. “Pork. The politician’s lollipop.”
Hutch and I left the coffee shop to head over to City Hall Plaza. At the corner a bum was leaning against a lamppost. I didn’t know they still did that. I gave him a dollar.
“Why do you do that?” Hutch asked as we jaywalked across the street. “Don’t you believe in evolution?”
“Sure. We’re all descended from the flounder, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“I mean survival of the fittest. Rising to the challenges. Not feeding off of others who have done it.”
“Hutch, I gave a bum a buck. It doesn’t hurt me, it might help him. If Darwin were down on his luck I’d toss him a George too. The guy looked hungry.”
“You think he’s going to spend your dollar on a sandwich?”
“It’s his dollar now. I’m not going to tell him how to spend it. What am I, the State Department?”
“I just get tired of those people.”
We had reached the other side of the street. In front of us was City Hall Plaza. And we were not alone. News vans were illegally parked at odd angles, their dish antennas popping from the roofs like … well, like dish antennas. A crowd of several hundred was either gathered or milling, depending on your spin. It was the lunch hour. The weather was perfect, a deep blue sky overhead, a half dozen perfect clouds, shirtsleeve temperature. A balmy breeze was circulating through the crowd like a convival warm-up act.
Hutch led me around the periphery of the plaza, over to the steps of City Hall. This was where the speech would take place. The camera crews and the reporters were already in place, given special vantage by an arrangement of blue police barricades. I stood at the edge of the barricade while Hutch wandered off, chatting up the media folk and handing out what I assumed w
ere copies of the upcoming speech. I watched as Hutch shot the breeze for a few minutes with a small, attractive woman. It was one of our newer TV news reporters, Mimi Wigg. Ms. Wigg came over from Cleveland about a year ago, and I understand Cleveland was still pissed about it. As I heard it, Mimi Wigg was being groomed to share the anchor desk with Jeff Simons, and very possibly take it over after Simons retired. Simons was our venerable and far-and-away most popular TV news anchor. He’d been reading news off the TelePrompTer to the citizens of Baltimore for nearly twenty years. He was only in his late fifties, but he had apparently been suffering some health problems in recent months. Also, there was the issue of Simons’s recent face-lift (undertaken over the protest of station management), which in conjunction with his trademark cowlick had suddenly—literally overnight—given him the appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The public’s discomfort was showing in the ratings, which had been flaking away ever since Simons’s varnished new face made its appearance. Mimi Wigg, on the other hand, was younger by thirty years and her skin was still supple. Small looking on television, in person she was downright puny. Her shoulders were about the width you’d pull your dental floss. Her hair—which looked to be the heaviest part of her body—was a sort of cranberry-blackberry concoction. I really don’t mean any disrespect, but the woman had a noticeably large head as compared to the bird-bone frame on which it was anchored. Maybe that’s what made her so perfect for TV news. Her huge fake smile was one of her other big assets. She was thrashing Hutch with it mercilessly as he happily kissed up to her over by her news van.
Hutch finally finished his sweatless little chore and came back over to me. He handed me a copy of the speech.
“You seem to have a good rapport with the press,” I noted.
“Pretty good, yeah, for the most part. We feed each other. Or off each other, if you’re cynical. But I’ll tell you, it’s all pretty thin. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s shithead. If they catch even a whiff of something that doesn’t smell quite right, they’re on the air with it in a heartbeat holding their noses and saying ‘P-U, something stinks.’ ”
I noted that some people would call that reporting. Hutch shrugged the point away.
“The concept of objectivity is a farce.”
“That’s a pretty hard view,” I said.
“I don’t have any illusions, Hitch. Only saints and martyrs are truly objective. Take a look at our press corps over there. Do you see any saints or martyrs?”
No, I most certainly did not. I saw big guys shouldering cameras like they were bazookas and crackly crisp reporters preening in preparation for their stand-up. Mimi Wigg was on her tiptoes, looking into her news van’s door mirror and poking her fingernails into her hair as if it were a balloon she was attempting to puncture.
“We’re in the same dance,” Hutch went on. “It’s just a matter of who thinks they’re leading.”
Mimi Wigg came down off her toes. Turning in the direction of her cameraman, she threw her head back and ran her small hands down along the back of her skirt, over her cute little rear end.
“That one definitely thinks she’s leading,” Hutch remarked. He glanced down at the speech in his hands. “Look, I have to go hit a few points with Alan. You can stick around, right?”
“Sure.”
“Great. I’ll find you.”
He took off. In another few minutes, several dozen uniformed policemen and policewomen moved up into position halfway up the steps of City Hall. They formed a solid blue line on either side of a podium and stood there erect, staring off at the horizon. Two dozen police officers. Earning time and a half for the special duty. Add that to the eggs and sausage and already the Stuart campaign seemed a little fiscally flabby. And the guy hadn’t even announced yet.
Then Alan Stuart appeared at the podium and announced. I had seen him before on television, at the hospital bedsides of wounded cops or bathed in minicam lights at the scene of a shooting. Unlike many people you see from television, he actually looked larger in person, though this might have partially had to do with the placement of the podium, several steps higher than the phalanx of police officers. In any case, the man knew how to fill a suit. And he knew how to deliver a speech. He sounded very little like a seasoned politician and very much like a slightly pissed off citizen. However, he wasn’t taking the populist route. Spencer Davis had already carved out that niche. Alan Stuart came across as a solid powerful man who had grown weary of waiting for others to do the right thing.
Every good political speech includes a catchy little refrain that the candidate can come back to over and over. He (or she) needs a place where he (or she) can hammer his (or her) fists into the air and against the podium. Alan Stuart’s chant was eloquent and blunt. “Enough already!” I could already see the bumper stickers. I mean, I could literally see them. Several of Hutch’s minions were scurrying about the crowd handing out red, white and blue bumper strikers that read just that. “Enough Already/Stuart for Governor.” The candidate stood on the steps of City Hall, flanked by that impressive display of law and order, and offered himself up to get the goddamn job done. “Enough already!” he bellowed. After a few rounds he was receiving affirmative responses back from some in the crowd (though they could have been plants). It was the perfect chant. The sound bite was in the can. Hutch could be proud.
Politically speaking, I’m either jaded or apathetic, if there’s even a difference anymore. About halfway through the speech, I had had enough already. This guy was solid and square-jawed handsome, manly enough to feel comfortable using a pair of half-glasses to read his speech. Alan Stuart was well on his way to becoming William Holden. Except that something about him irritated me (William Holden never irritated me, except in Sabrina). Maybe it had something to do with Hutch and the hard slant he seemed to take about the common folk and the little people and all that. Yes. I decided that was it. Both Hutch and his candidate delivered their message with crystal clarity. The message was that their moral bulldozer was already idling off to the side and it was only a matter of fitting on their hard hats and climbing up behind the wheel. You Have Been Warned.
I folded Alan Stuart’s speech into a paper airplane and launched it into the cheering crowd.
Goddamn it, it flew beautifully. I believed I was looking at the next governor.
CHAPTER 10
I was late in meeting Detective Kate Zabriskie by the big blue Matisse. An emergency had come up at the office. Actually, not an emergency. A dead guy. Kind of embarrassing, really. One of those situations involving ropes and plastic bags and having sex all by yourself that is supposed to generate a simply incredible feeling. Maybe it did, but in this case it also generated a fatal oxygen loss, so on balance how good could it really have been? Anyway, I had to handle the preliminaries with the guy’s parents (you can imagine how comfortable that was) and so I was running a little late.
Kate was sitting on an oversized ottoman in the center of the gallery browsing through the museum’s pamphlet about the Cone sisters. She looked up as I approached. She looked disappointed.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t show.”
“That’s novel. A gal who wants to be stood up. You could be drummed out of the sisterhood if this gets out.”
“I was hoping you had changed your mind, that’s all.”
“Changed it for what?” I quipped.
Kate Zabriskie showed me a half-inch space between her thumb and finger. “That’s how much patience I have for your wisecracks right now.”
She stood up and waggled the pamphlet at me. “Do you know about these women? They’re fascinating.”
“The Cone girls? Yes, I know all about them. My ex-wife is a painter. She forced me to kneel at the altar of the Cones. A regular pair of fairy godmothers.”
I took the pamphlet from her and glanced at it. There was Etta Cone seated atop an elephant, looking ridiculous.
“There’s something about a woman in a pith helmet, isn’t there?”
T
he former Lady X pointed at the huge Matisse. “What do you think of that?”
It was a huge canvas, about a fifteen-foot square, ninety percent of it simply plain flat blue. A pair of black lines snaked vertically down the middle, managing to give the unmistakable impression of a woman in a gleeful dance twirl. Something most nearly resembling a fried egg appeared to be standing in for a flower. I told the lady that I was duly impressed.
“I used to come here a lot as a kid,” Kate said wistfully, still staring up at the canvas. “I grew up in Hampden, so it wasn’t much of a walk. You know Hampden, right? It’s a world away from the place.”
Small square houses, plaster elves out front, Bud in the fridge, Grandma smoking cigarettes at the backyard picnic table. Sure, I knew Hampden.
“Hampden’s okay,” I said. “Unless you’re a snob. You’re not a snob, are you, Detective?”
“You can call me Kate. And no, I’m not a snob. I’ve got nowhere to stand to be a snob from. I’m a firstgeneration Polish Jew from a rock-solid working-class neighborhood. I’ve got a name that people either misspell or laugh at, or both. My father was a world-class drunk and my mother was a world-class victim. I work at a job where half my time is spent with criminals, lowlifes and lawyers, if you can tell the difference. Now if you can figure out where I might manage to shove all that aside and find the nerve to be a snob I’ll give you five bucks and a blow job.” She added swiftly, “That’s a cop phrase, Mr. Sewell. Don’t get any ideas.”
My grin, I’m sure, was practically cracking my face. “Oh now you’re going to have to call me Hitch.”
Kate leveled me with those hot hazel eyes. “Look, I didn’t come here to talk about me.”
I stepped up to her and brushed a nonexistent piece of lint off her shoulder.
“Lady, I beg to differ.”
We left the big blue Matisse and made our way slowly though the rest of the Cone sisters’ modernist acquisitions: Gauguin’s Woman With A Mango, Degas’s bronze ballerina, Picasso’s various crooked people … The Monday night crowd was fairly sparse. A few students from the Maryland Institute of Art sat cross-legged on the floor in front of Monet’s nearsighted studies of cathedrals, sketching in their notebooks; couples walked slowly around the galleries, muttering softly to each other; there was a colorless man in a gray suit who appeared to have gotten glued to the floor in front of one of Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings. The rooms were climate controlled, completely without shadows and hermetically quiet. The security guards rocked on their heels and stared off into the middle distance.
