by Howard Fast
Chapter 6
THE WONDERFUL THING about my wife is that she is almost never bored or depressed. Any trip on an airliner is as exciting as a trip to the moon, and to sit on a great 747, winging our way across the continent to Los Angeles, in a window seat, should have had her in a state of modest ecstasy. Not this time. She had managed a proper show of ebullience until we boarded the plane, and then she sank into her tourist-class seat and grunted answers to my questions. After we were properly up in the sky, the wheels raised and the seat belt sign off, I reminded her that we were supposed to mix at least a measure of pleasure with the business New York City had dispatched me on.
“Yes.”
“But you don’t want to talk about fun, do you? You want to sit there and sulk. You don’t even want to talk about that street they call Rodeo Drive, which I hear is like two blocks of Madison Avenue.”
“Oh, shut up, Harry,” she said.
“Great.”
“I have problems,” she said. “I have to think about them and sort them out.”
“You want to talk about those problems?”
She was silent for the next fifteen minutes or so, which led me to suspect that she had no great desire to discuss her problems, and then she came out of her stupor or reverie and patted my hand on the armrest, and told me that she continued to have reasonable affection for me even though she had problems. “You know, Harry,” she said, “how some Jewish mothers tell their daughters not to marry a butcher because a man who spends his life hacking away at dead flesh is likely to lose his consideration for living flesh?”
“Do they? First time I ever heard about it.”
“Well, your sainted mother, may she rest in peace, told me that.”
“Jewish mothers aren’t sainted. Irish mothers are sainted.”
“Well, my sainted mother, may she rest in peace, felt the same way about cops. She called them the unholy curse of the Irish, and she kept warning her daughters not to marry a cop, because he would only bring them grief and misery. She had a brother and two cousins who were cops, so she knew from experience. Then when I brought you home, she was delighted, because she said here you found a nice Jewish boy and he won’t beat you up and he’ll never be a cop. That’s why she almost fainted when you turned up at the door one day in uniform after four years of marriage. But, you see, I didn’t share her prejudice about cops. The Irish cops of her day have passed into the great wherever that cops pass into.”
“There are still a lot of Irish cops,” I said, thoroughly confused as to where this was leading.
“Ah, yes, and there are black cops and Italian cops and Hispanic cops and Jewish cops and Polish cops and whatever else you want to throw into the bag, and when you beat me, you don’t leave welts.”
“You shouldn’t even say that. It’s our secret.”
“Right. And you know, Harry, all those years I never really worried. You loved your home and you loved me and the kids, and you never hung out until all hours of the night with the bums at Scanlon’s place, down the street from the precinct, and you kept telling me that you never fired your gun and that was all very comforting, except that you came home one night from Scanlon’s stinking drunk, after my sainted mother told me Jewish boys don’t get drunk.”
“My God,” I said, “you are an instructor in English lit in the stately halls of Columbia University. Do you teach your students to write sentences like you talk?”
“That sentence of yours could use some tailoring, and I’m trying to be bright and amusing because I’m scared to death.” Tears welled in her eyes now. “I’m just scared to death, Harry.”
“I know.”
“The way you and Finelli tried to lay off that car thing as some kind of case of mistaken identity. Well, you didn’t put it to Courtny as a case of mistaken identity. I heard you talking to him on the phone when I was in the tub this morning, and to quote you, you said that those motherfucking bastards were trying to kill you. Thank God you don’t talk like that at home. They were trying to kill you. You know it and I know it and Finelli knows it, and Harry, I am frightened.”
“Not kill me, Fran. Frighten me, I think.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, not so crazy. If they wanted to kill me, they would have used sawed-off shotguns or a machine gun.” I leaned over and kissed her cheek. “You’re frightened, I’m frightened. In a situation like this, only a psychopath wouldn’t be frightened.”
“Great comfort.”
“All right, so it’s no damn comfort. On the other hand, we’re alive and we’re smart, and that’s what counts.”
“No more secrets, Harry. You want me to stay with you through this, then no more secrets. Otherwise, I’ll walk away. I swear I will.”
“Okay, no more secrets.”
“Good. You say we’re smart. How does that help us? I’ve read that if a determined assassin is out to kill someone, he cannot be stopped.”
“True and not true. There are degrees of determination.”
“Now tell me the truth. Are they trying to kill you?”
“I don’t think so. Dead, I might stir some sleeping dogs. But we have to face the fact that we don’t know who they are or what they are or what they want or what they don’t want—considering that there is a they. We cannot dispense with the possibility that we’re dealing with a series of coincidences that in no way relate to each other, and that we have put together a shaky structure that only exists because you and I both admired Asher Alan and had some childish notion that it was wrong for him to die like that here in this city, in our city.”
“It was wrong,” Fran insisted. “Rotten and wrong.”
“Sure, and that’s why we’re going to Los Angeles, to find out about Dr. Green and tie this thing up. That’s the only lead we have left. The business of Stanley Curtis and his wife and the drugstore is so confusing that it’s meaningless. The connection with Sanchez could be a coincidence. The killing of Sanchez happens every day in this city, and the business on the Major Deegan Highway could have been a mistake.”
“You said it wasn’t.”
“It could have been. The first thing a good cop learns is not to be sure about anything.”
“And you don’t think there could be someone on this plane who has been paid to kill us?”
I smiled. “No.”
“Well, how do you know, Harry? I’ve been looking at every face. I could pick out a dozen who look like—”
“No!” I cut her off sharply. “No one looks like a hit man! No one wears his crazed mind on his sleeve! So just stop that!”
“All right,” she said meekly.
“There’s a pattern in such things. I’ve lived with such patterns a long time. If there’s anything valid in our conjectures, they will wait for my next move. Then they’ll make their move. It’s like a game, but everything else in life is a sort of game, only this is simpler. I have never seen a criminal who was intelligent. If there was any intelligence in crime, they’d take over tomorrow. Even the big mob outfits are stupid beyond belief. You remember the Godfather books and films. They took in millions, but they lived like demented people, their lives full of agony and fear and suspicion, and everything they did was stupid. That’s the nature of the business. If they took a few of their millions and built some legitimate enterprise, it would indicate some intelligence—”
“And if they did, Harry, would you know?”
I looked at her sharply. Then I sighed and leaned back and closed my eyes. I must have dozed. When I opened my eyes, I saw that Fran was writing in her notebook. I leaned over, and there in a neat column she had written:
Stanley Curtis
Asher Alan
Richard Bell (Sanchez)
Judge Charles Fitzpatrick
She had underlined the last name, and now she turned to me with a raised brow and asked, “Another coincidence?”
“The fact that the junkie and the judge were both killed by the same gun means very little in te
rms of the rest of it.”
“Oh, no? Then why did you start panting like a hound dog when Joe Finelli told his story?”
“I was not panting like a hound dog, no, sir.”
“Come on, Harry, here’s Fran. I’ve been around you a long time. When we left the apartment to go to dinner, you had just about canceled out of the California trip.”
“Yes,” I agreed reluctantly, “it made a difference.” At that point I wanted nothing more than to drop back into that lovely state of half sleep where time vanishes. But she wouldn’t have it. She jabbed an elbow into my ribs and hissed, “Harry!”
“I must be utterly demented,” I whispered. “Here I am on official New York City police business, and I have not only got a broad with me but she happens to be my wife. If she weren’t my wife, it might be understandable—”
“Harry,” she hissed again, “there are times when you are absolutely disgusting, and if I were not married to you, I’d have nothing to do with you. You’re a male chauvinist pig, but in spite of that, instead of going to one of those nice empty seats all around us, I am going to talk and you are going to listen.”
“Yes,” I said weakly. “I’ll listen.”
“Now what do you know about Judge Fitzpatrick?”
“Federal judge and a big wheel in the Appellate Division.”
“Why not mention that he was also a man?”
“I thought it was obvious.”
“Clever!” she snorted. “Oh, why do I get mad at you, you’re such a very nice man, but smart?” She shrugged. “The word’s around that Jews are smart. Ah, well. Joe Finelli is pretty smart. I realized that listening to him last night, but like you he probably reads the crime news and the sports page and nothing else.”
“Not so. I read the front page of the Times and I read the op-ed page most of the time too.”
“The important news is always inside. Oh, I’m not trying to put anyone down, Harry, but sometimes you make me so mad. You and Finelli were so damn sure that there was no connection between Sanchez and the judge that you never even raised the possibility that there might be a connection between Judge Fitzpatrick and Santa Marina.”
“Is there?”
“Think!”
“It was two years ago—yes, of course.”
She nodded comfortably.
“Santa Marina, of course.” I thumped my forehead with my palm, the American gesture of stupidity. “Why didn’t I think of it? Do you remember?”
“More or less. Congress had finally put its back up against any more military assistance to Santa Marina. We had been pouring untold millions into Santa Marina to put down a guerrilla movement against a thoroughly vicious and corrupt government that ruled with death squads—murder squads.”
I began to recall it. Twenty-five thousand men and women murdered by these death squads in a few years.
“Well, Congress was just fed up, even many of the Republicans were fed up, but when they refused the shipment of more arms to Santa Marina, the President went over their heads and began to move the arms. Then Congress went for an injunction to halt the shipments, and Judge Fitzpatrick gave it to them. It’s more complicated, but that’s the essence of it.”
I thought about it for a while, and then I told her that while it made our flimsy puzzle more intriguing, it didn’t make it any more reasonable.
“Well, you do remember, Harry, that at the time some stories linked the judge’s death to the death-squad thing, but the FBI soon put an end to that, just as they had put an end to the incident of the ex-general hanged by terrorists, telling the world that the general had committed suicide. It’s wonderful how our great free press becomes silent when the FBI tells them that their speculations are unfounded. But when you put it together with what Finelli told us last night—”
“What do you have? The same gun killed the doper and the doper worked for Bronstein, the pharmacist, and maybe the doper had some certificate of pharmacy which may or may not have been genuine, because most of the work a pharmacist does these days is count pills, and anyway he could have worked for Bronstein without any papers at all. That’s what Bronstein told me—that he was just a clerk behind the counter.”
“Then could he fill prescriptions?”
“He could certainly count pills with the pharmacist overseeing him, and since the labels are there, he could have typed a label with Bronstein out to lunch, or filled the bottle—hell, it would be a lead-pipe cinch with him working there in the pharmacy, but on top of that I got absolutely nothing from Mrs. Curtis, who hated her husband’s guts and is happily sailing around the world on the Queen Elizabeth.”
“And you complain about my sentences going on and on.”
“So everything is connected and everything is coincidence. You pay your money and you take your choice.”
“Still, we’re on our way to California.”
“I needed a vacation.”
“You’re a dear, funny man. I don’t think Jews should be cops. They’re too complicated.”
At the airport in Los Angeles, the sun was shining. They tell me it’s almost always shining, except when there’s too much smog or the occasional sprinkle of rain. But by March, the rain has practically stopped, and today there was little or no smog. We took a taxicab to the Beverly Crest Hotel, a small but fairly pleasant hotel on South Spalding Street in Beverly Hills, chosen by the New York City police travel service. The cab cost twenty-three dollars, all of it a legitimate expense, the room eighty dollars, fifty allocated to the NYPD, and thirty to Fran.
Fran walked around the room, grinning at the purple bedspread and the pink walls. She decided it was lovably horrible, but in all truth, the fact of being three thousand miles from New York City at this moment elevated her spirits. From our window, we could see the pastel and plastic city of Beverly Hills, defined by palm trees and lines of cars bumper to bumper, all of it rather hazy under a yellowish curtain that had been absent at the airfield. There, alongside the ocean, we had noticed no smog, but we were told that the beach was a refuge from the smog. We were not travelers. When the kids were with us, we spent our vacations at a lake in the mountains, and being here in Beverly Hills almost balanced being in Europe for two streetwise New York products. After a good look at the room, Fran threw her arms around me and said, “Harry, let’s not be killed by some nut. This is such fun.”
“I’ll keep trying,” I assured her.
After we unpacked, I called Sergeant Thomas McNulty at the Beverly Hills police force. He happened to be day sergeant at the desk, and I got through to him immediately, and he sounded pleased as punch that the one New York cop he knew was here in Beverly Hills. He asked me how I liked his city, and I said that all I had seen of it was out of our fourth-floor hotel window, but it was certainly different. He said that it grows on one, and I answered that I was happily ready to let it do just that, and that I had three days to encourage its growth.
“I owe you one, McNulty,” I said to him. “I want to take you and your wife to dinner—you are married?”
“You can count on that.”
“What’s a good place?”
“Any place will cost you a bundle.”
“Let the City of New York worry about that,” which was a lie, because Courtny would put his back up at even the thought of taking another cop and his wife to dinner and charging the city. But I figured it was worth whatever I put out.
“Okay. I know a place downtown where we can eat good and talk without putting a down payment on the place. Do you have wheels?”
“No. I don’t know my way around. I’ll use cabs.” That the city would pay for.
“Then I’ll pick you up. How long will you be here?”
“Three days.”
“Then we’d better make it tonight. I’ll pick you up at six. Where?”
“Beverly Crest.”
“Yeah. My wife’s name is Hanna.”
“Francesca—Fran.”
You talk to someone on the telephone and
you try to make a picture of them; usually the picture doesn’t define the person very well. My picture of McNulty after talking to a deep, strong voice was a sort of Clint Eastwood type, but the sergeant was something else entirely, average height, red hair, freckled round face, good-natured blue eyes, and a bit plump from eating too much of the good food we had that night.
“I hope you like Japanese food,” he said. “If you don’t we can find another place.”
We both loved it. McNulty’s wife was Japanese, or, as they call it out there, Nisei, born in America of Japanese parents. McNulty was in his middle thirties, his wife perhaps five years younger, a slender, lovely woman, with a kind of charm that was very new to me.
The restaurant was in a part of downtown Los Angeles they call “Little Tokyo,” very little, and, I imagine, not too much like Tokyo. The restaurant was small and a bit too warm, but after a while we forgot that and concentrated on stuffing ourselves with tempura, shabu-shabu, a kind of delicious Japanese fondue, pork chops teriyaki and cakes and little hot fried rolls, the name of which I cannot remember, and tea and saki. It mellowed us. It made us all lean toward the improbable, a receptive attitude for hearing my story.
I saw no reason to hide anything from McNulty, and I told him everything, the few facts, the many guesses, the coincidences, and, of course, the lack of any sense to the pattern. “Except,” I finished, “that a professional gun trailed me from my apartment and fired two bullets into the car—as I told you. That was real, too damn real.”
McNulty listened intently, and when I had finished he and the others were silent for a while.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“A damn strange story, Lieutenant.”
“That it is.”
“But if Courtny let you come here, he must have sniffed something.”
“Something. I guess so.”
“And now your mission is to find Dr. Herbert Green?”
“Right.”
“What do you figure to get from that?”
“I don’t know. I feel my way.”
“In the darkness and going nowhere,” Fran added.
