by Barry, Mike
“Did you expect anything different?” Wulff said. The evidence division, where criminal materials were checked in by police to be used later at trial had, according to the headlines which all broke about the time Wulff left the department, been about the biggest stash room in the history of the international drug trade. Pounds and pounds of uncut heroin, most of it of high quality, which had been seized by police in raids and turned in to the materials room which had the equivalent of one full-time clerk, had been found missing when the state had finally sent in some investigators. The commissioner, of course, had been acutely embarrassed by this. He promised a merciless investigation. If indeed New York City police officers could be tied to these thefts, they would be confronted by the full force and majesty of the law. In the meantime, an investigation, vigorously conducted, was in progress. The commissioner had assured the populace that if any police personnel were involved they were the exceptions to the rule, the few dishonorable men who had flawed the image of a great department…. He had no further comment. “I didn’t expect anything different,” Wulff said, thinking about all of this, the little snatches and pieces of the story he had gotten while otherwise engaged in New York and San Francisco. That stuff is lying there, not even inventoried, just logged in for years, there are a couple of part-time clerks there who may make eight thousand dollars a year, everybody on the inside knows where that room is and what’s inside…. No,” he said, “it didn’t surprise me at all. It would have been a surprise the other way, if that stuff had actually been in. Why bother? They might have figured they’d never catch up to it.”
“Just about,” Williams said softly, “but recently there’s been a little movement on this. It’s not for the press yet; you know why.”
Wulff guessed he knew why. At the beginning of the investigation suspicion had moved in on a suspended New York City detective who had promptly committed suicide, not even doing the department the favor of leaving a suicide note admitting to all before he did the job with a point thirty-eight caliber. If he had left the note that would have been a great help to everyone, condolences could have been paid and the books on the investigation closed, whereabouts of the heroin forever unknown. But the detective had left no note of any sort, which at least left open the possibility that he had been an innocent victim hounded to an unjust death. So the investigation had continued in a desultory way; the state arm kept on plugging along on it, just releasing enough to the media every now and then to indicate that the Governor somehow believed that the Mayor of New York was directly involved in the matter, probably using all of the heroin himself both for injection and distribution and in reality, the police department investigations division which was doing the only actual field work although prohibited by the commissioner from making any statements to the press at all, had kept on staggering ahead and had developed a couple of leads although no recovery of the heroin. The heroin would be long gone, of course, cut up, shipped here and there, driven into the arms of ten thousand mainliners, sniffed by half that many more experimental types. “So we turned up,” Williams said, going through all of this quickly, somehow indicating a disinterest in all of it, “or I should say they turned up about a week ago some informer who actually had a couple of bags of stuff in the original labels and everything in his apartment. They had him on a rape charge and a couple of assaults and even an unsolved murder or three they could have pinned on him, so he started to do some talking.”
“That’s a change,” Wulff said, straightening out his legs which had stiffened on the couch and from the exertion of the long drive. “In my day the informers never talked. What the hell, an informer wasn’t to give information. He was just there so you could list him on the sheets as an informer and explain why you spent three hours in a bar and what was happening to your expense account. An informer talking? It’ll break down the whole system; next time they’ll actually start to solve crimes instead of log them in and what’s going to happen then?”
“Don’t be bitter, man,” Williams said softly. “That’s the system you’re talking about and it’s the system which has given me this nice little house and this good civil service job to say nothing of my pension rights. I’m a believer.”
“I know all about the system,” Wulff said. “I’ve been all over this country and I’ve been able to see what the system has created. It doesn’t work any more. Nothing works. The only way to get anything done is to go outside of it.”
Williams smiled, a tight, controlled smile that had overtones of evil in it. He never knew the man at all, Wulff thought. He knew the organization men fairly well, he thought: he could gauge what they were after and how they intended to get it, living in their large or middle-size houses off the water, picking up the phone and sending their contact men around. There was no problem in tracking out the enemy; he guessed he knew them now as well as he had ever known any class of men and yet this young black patrolman was of a different stripe altogether. He simply did not understand him. Abruptly Wulff felt uncomfortable, almost desperately so, driven by fatigue to a point where he would go out of Williams’s house and never come back, drop the whole war if necessary simply because he could no longer see things clearly … but he put that thought away carefully as he had put away so many impulses during this time. Depressive reaction. It meant absolutely nothing. You went on, you did the best you could, and he was hopelessly committed. The enemy was counting on him giving up, but he was not going to. “Don’t tell me about going outside of the system,” Williams was saying. “That’s an option you may have but I don’t. You take the system away and all of this little home is in flames, you understand that?”
“I understand a good deal,” Wulff said tiredly. He eased the cramps out of my legs by standing, putting his calves flat against the sofa and as he did so he felt the shaking for the first time since he had left Boston, all of the tension and terror of what he had gone through working through him in little rivulets. He held his stomach in tight, consciously, took slow, deep breaths and flexed his sphincter, an old combat trick until the trembling began to ease. Williams looked at him with an expression of concern.
“You’ve really been through it, haven’t you?” he said.
“First I get lectures on the system and now I get a medical checkup. Screw that,” Wulff said. He sat. “Finish,” he said. “Tell me what you’re leading up to.”
“You can crash here tonight, man. We got an extra room down the hall which is going to be for a kid someday but right now it’s filled with nothing. We can rig up a cot …”
“Just tell me,” Wulff said. “Don’t worry about sleep. I can take care of that anytime.” Now with the tension partially released he felt coming back into him the old, desperate sense of urgency. Everything was getting away from him, the enemy were so many, so clever, so far ahead of him that he was whipped before he started, could only deal with that by excesses of effort. Still, he was so tired … “get to it,” he said.
“All right,” Williams said, suddenly disengaged. “I’ll get to it. There’s a lieutenant or at least there was a lieutenant named Bill Stone who this informer tied pretty closely to that stuff. Stone’s name had been on the checkout list more than a few times—shit the investigation was the first time anyone ever read that checkout list—and the informer said that he wasn’t taking out that stuff for an appearance in court which is supposed to be the only reason for it getting out of there. He had other plans for it and he wasn’t turning back smack, he was turning in sugar. No one looked in those bags.”
“All two million dollars of it?”
“A goodly chunk,” Williams said, “a very goodly chunk. Our man who started to talk like hell once they brought some rape victims into a lineup who were very interested in him, our man thinks that Stone might himself have been tied to a million dollars of that stuff all on his own.”
“Beautiful,” Wulff said, “that’s beautiful. A new York City lieutenant, a man who could walk into that evidence room anytime, sign for it,
take it out, perfect cover, perfect disguise, turning back false samples which no one even looked at … it’s perfect,” he said. “It’s a major distribution setup.”
“That’s what they seemed to think,” Williams nodded. His eyes had begun to moisten with excitement and suddenly he did not look so implacable after all; he looked like a young cop who was chasing down a lead. “So there were a lot of people who got interested very quick in talking to Bill Stone. In fact, it could be said that for a period of about eight hours Bill Stone was the most sought-after, popular man in the history of the department.”
“Bill Stone bugged out.”
Williams nodded bleakly. “That’s exactly what he did,” he said. “He is whereabouts unknown. You’ll enjoy this one though, Wulff. Some of those state investigators, already into this, are beginning to compare your dropout with his. Both of you quite without notice, just dropped and disappeared. They’re beginning to theorize that the two of you might have been connected in some way.”
Wulff smiled although it was no such smile as any of the investigators might want to see and said, “That’s very interesting. Where’s Stone?”
“You get the point.”
“Of course I get the point. You think you’ve got a lead on Stone and you think I might be interested in looking him up.”
“Something like that,” Williams said. “You like to look up people, I’ve noticed.”
“If I’ve got a lead, then a lot of other people would have it too. Why don’t they just follow it and pick him up?”
“Because you’re right,” Williams said candidly. “The system sucks, it really does, it doesn’t work at all; it’s just that for me it’s the only thing I’ve got and I’m holding on. But by the time those clowns get coordinated and decide how they’ll go after him and when and get authorized pay vouchers or decide to turn it over to the FBI or maybe just cover it up and forget it altogether, by that time Stone can be out of the country or so far underground that they’ll never find him. I think he’s worth finding,” Williams said. “I really do.”
“I see what you mean.”
“I think Stone is big. I think he may be one of the biggest. A lieutenant with those kind of opportunities, that kind of access could be very big.”
“All right,” Wulff said, “where is he?”
“He’s somewhere in Las Vegas,” Williams said. “We know that pretty well, our informant is sure on that point. Exactly where he’s not so sure, but there are a couple of hotels owned by a man who might be tied in with Stone on one side and drugs on the other. It’s likely that he’s in one of those two hotels.”
“With maybe a million dollars worth of shit,” Wulff said.
“Or at least a lead on it. A good lead.”
Williams stared at him impassively and Wulff could feel the excitement building could feel even against his will the old anticipatory tremor. San Francisco, the quarter million in the valise, seeing Cicchini in Boston, killing the man, ripping open the Boston drug trade itself, bombing out the freighter in San Francisco—that was nothing as against what Williams was talking about now. Williams was talking about a million dollars but it was more than that, he was talking about a man, this Stone, who might or might not be a key-in to a distribution system so central, so large that it would go even beyond the Cicchinis or Marascos who, when you came right down to it, were small-time. All of them were small-time out of the big town; you had to remember that, New York might have collapsed but the city which had once been the crown of the world was still the crown of the underworld; what could not work the right way could still work the wrong. Wulff felt the breath fluttering unevenly in his chest, with an effort calmed respiration and looked at Williams who, his black man’s mask fallen, was looking at him intensely, his hands twisting. “You want him bad,” don’t you Wulff said.
“Yes. I want him very bad.”
“Why don’t you go and get him?”
“That’s not my move,” Williams said. The hands were twisting more energetically now. “Don’t you understand that? I’ve got to stay by here and play by the rules. But you don’t.”
“Go to Las Vegas and bring him in, is that it? They’ll give me a medal and pension rights back, and if they’re really feeling generous I can come back at patrolman’s pay.”
“You don’t want to bring him back,” Williams said. “If you wanted to bring him back you wouldn’t be here at all. You’d be Mr. Law and Order, still busting your ass in a blue uniform, unless they put you back in plainclothes which is a bad bet.”
“A million dollars worth of shit.”
“I’m not saying he has it,” Williams said. “I’m not saying anything about that at all; I don’t know what he’s got. That stuff probably went into veins years ago. But he’s got to have some of it left.”
A small woman appeared at the archway, delicate, her face slightly blurred now from fatigue although then again her self-possession for someone in a nightgown at three in the morning was more than Wulff would have expected. “This is my wife,” Williams said to him. “Martin Wulff, this is Henrietta. Henrietta is kind of an elegant name for a lady in St. Albans but then again there are a lot of maids named Jezebel so I guess it’s all right.”
“David,” the woman said, “David, stop it now.”
“Henrietta keeps me together,” Williams said vaguely. “It is either her or absolutely nothing; Henrietta is why I believe in the system. Henrietta is the system. Henrietta, this is Martin Wulff of whom you may have heard me talk then and again.” He stood swaying, opened his tie all the way and let the edges flap. “I’m tired,” he said. “I am going to go to bed. All of this is in your hands now, Wulff; I have nothing more to say. There’s a man out in Vegas who is worth seeing and you’re the man to see him.” He began to walk toward the archway.
“Mr. Wulff,” Henrietta said, “if you want something to eat; if you’d like to rest here …”
“Don’t bother the man,” Williams said. “Look at his attitude of dedication. He’s not a man, he’s a machine. He’s got things on his mind.”
“No man’s a machine,” Henrietta said. She walked toward him, touched his hand and Wulff felt a vague tingle, somewhere between tenderness and apprehension. “You look tired,” she said, “stay.”
“I told him that already,” Williams said, “to stay. He said he didn’t want to.”
“Yes he does,” Henrietta said. She held his hand and looked up at him. “David’s a very angry man,” she said, “but he doesn’t really mean to be unkind. You know that, don’t you?”
“He don’t know anything, Henrietta, except how to get to Las Vagas.”
“Leave the man alone. Will you stay?”
Wulff looked at her and something within him uncoiled slowly like a spring retracting and then going loose. “I can’t stop,” he said. “Don’t you see that? I just can’t stop. There’s no time.”
“Then a night won’t matter. If there’s no time at all what difference can a night make?” She reminded him of Marie Calvante. Somewhere within this woman the quality lurked. He felt pain and yet the pain was kind of a release. “All right,” he said, “if you want me to.”
In the corner, Williams kicked at the wall. “I wanted him to,” he said, “you should know that.”
“You don’t know how to talk to a man, David.”
“It’s an old police habit,” Williams said. Momentarily he seemed completely at odds with himself, disengaged. “The hell with it,” he said and headed out the room. “I’ll leave you the information,” he said. “I’ll write the thing down, the names of the hotels and so on. It’ll all be there in the morning. I have to pull overtime. I’m going to bed.”
“I came here in a stolen LeSabre,” Wulff heard himself saying, somewhat wildly, “a 1973 LeSabre with full power and air conditioning. Power seats, tape deck. I lifted it out of a shopping center and took it all the way in from Boston and I took it to within two blocks of Rego Park and dumped it. It’s probably on a j
oyride now.”
“You had your reasons,” the woman said.
“Did I?” he said. “Did I really? Do you want a man like that staying in your house?”
“Why not?” Henrietta said. She tugged gently on his wrist, he did not have the strength to resist her. The man who had called Cicchini struggled lightly and then yielded to the grip of a five foot woman. “Come on,” she said, “I’ll show you to the room. There’s a cot there and everything. You should be comfortable.”
“You’re kind,” he said, “you’re too kind.”
“You don’t understand,” she said and put an arm around his waist to steady him as he staggered with fatigue. “You just don’t understand.”
He tried to say that he did, he understood everything now, there was nothing that was beyond him, understanding flooded him like light but he was too tired, he felt himself spindling out of there at great speed and soon with the sheets of the bed around him, the door of the room closed, he heard nothing at all, not for ten hours or more while slowly dreams cleansed him of Boston.
The enemy had half a day’s breathing spell. After that, pity them.
II
Come seven. Stone leaned over the table, digging his hands into the furry surfaces of the mat, not conscious of the bodies around him, only dimly aware of the background of the casino itself which under the fluorescence shook with the controlled panic of men climbing out of bed at six in the morning to find their wives gone, their lives smashed. Three hundred riding on the roll; he tried to focus down his attention to its narrowest point, just a pinpoint of perception, looking at the little man shaking the cannister as if he could not let it go. The houseman smiled. The little man shook, fussed, finally let go of the throw convulsively, the dice bouncing, yanking themselves to position on the table. Eight. His point was eight. There was no way that a son of a bitch like this could come through but there he was, out the other end, the two fours on the die glinting at him. The houseman took Stone’s chips. Stone felt himself beginning to shake very subtly within his suit, little fingers of sweat running to the edges of his body, then ominously rolling in. Three hundred. Why was he sweating? It was house money, all of it house money: it wasn’t his own that he was playing with at all and, anyway, what the fuck did it matter? But it was an omen, that was all it was. It was an indication of luck rather than luck itself rolling in from this craps table. “Going to make it!” the little man said, the cannister trembling in his hand. “Going to make that point, going to break the place!” Only some used car salesman from Des Moines or a bank clerk out of New York could talk that way in front of a table, surrounded by half a hundred people under the lights but the son of a bitch had no shame, no understanding. You couldn’t lose betting against a bastard like that; if there was any right, any sense in the world you had to make money betting against them. The houseman lifted his palm, restraining the little man from throwing the cannister and called for bets, the little man’s face yanking up like a windowshade as he stopped dead, shaking, holding the cannister now as if it were a drink. Stone went into his pocket.
