Looker

by Michael Kilian

  After Taranto’s call, she’d turned into a madwoman, shrieking and swearing at him, flushing out fifteen years of fear and anger and frustration as she railed at the police lieutenant who dared call a detective in the middle of the night and screamed at Lanham for letting him do it.

  Lanham knew what she was really saying. He knew that Pat Cassidy’s ugly death had scared her horribly, that she had gone to her pillow with her mind full of bloody images of himself lying in a bloody heap on some fire escape. Their marriage had brought endless trouble into her life and this was the worst of it.

  He’d let her rant and scream until she was weak from it. He heard stirrings from his sons’ rooms but they had not intruded. They’d been witness to this before.

  When Janice was done, she’d thrown herself back onto her pillow and rolled away from him, her stiffened back a fortification.

  Lanham had lain there, silent and still, listening to her breathing until it became that of sleep. He’d become sensitive to irony in his job, and there was some in this. Mrs. Cassidy had scarcely reacted to the news at all. She’d been drunk, as she likely had been most every night Cassidy had been alive.

  Detective First Grade Raymond Lanham had done a cowardly thing. Having volunteered to bring the dreadful tiding to the new widow, he’d first rousted out the Cassidys’ parish priest and brought him along with every intention of sticking the good Father with the entire weepy mess at the first sign of sob or tear.

  But all the bereaved Mrs. Cassidy had done was sink back into her chair, mutter some vague word of sympathy for her dead husband, and pour herself another big, sloppy drink. She’d offered Lanham and the priest some of this same solace. Lanham had declined but the priest had not. Lanham left the two of them to it.

  He’d gone to sleep with the memory of how shabby Mrs. Cassidy had looked—thin arms sticking out of a raggedy-sleeved old robe; thin white legs and knobby bare feet splayed out on the worn, dirty carpet. He remembered his own Irish mother sitting like that, looking like that, after his father died.

  In the morning, Janice didn’t speak a word to him. He was just as glad.

  On the way in, the rain came and went and came again and stayed. Lanham had a minor accident on the Queens-borough Bridge and got soaked arguing with the driver of the car that had hit him from behind—an argument that had swiftly ended when he showed the man his shield instead of a driver’s license. The damage to the police car was negligible. Lanham let the man go, leaving him to curse his broken headlight.

  The squad room was crowded with detectives who had found in the rain occasion to give sudden priority to back paperwork. Out of habit, Lanham brought a cup of scalding, steamy coffee to his desk, hanging his suit coat carefully on the back of a chair to dry and seating himself wearily. It was jungle hot and he hadn’t the energy to pick up the telephone. Petrowicz, seated opposite, was engaged in a conversation on his. He nodded toward Taranto’s office, where the lieutenant was talking to two men in big-shouldered suits Lanham didn’t recognize. Petrowicz mouthed the initials “I.A.D.,” then resumed talking to his caller.

  Gabriel and Caputo were not there. Their desks looked untouched from the previous day. A stack of newspapers was on a nearby table—that morning’s on the top.

  The New York Times played the Bad Biker Bobby debacle on the front page of its metropolitan section, using the phrase “gun battle.” The tabloids, predictably, were more flamboyant. PIMP FLEES IN SHOOTOUT, said one. TWO DIE IN COP SHOOTOUT, said another. The New York Globe had gone bananas: MODEL KILLER STRIKES AGAIN.

  Lanham swore. Petrowicz hung up his phone and looked bleakly at his partner.

  “What’s going on?” Lanham asked.

  “Nobody’s told me a fucking thing.”

  “What does the I.A.D. want?”

  “Just looking for another chance to be assholes. The assholes.”

  Taranto and the two men from Internal Affairs were still deep in serious conversation. Lanham read through the Globe story. He couldn’t find the Bad Bobby column by A.C. James that had run in the early editions. It had likely been killed when events overtook it.

  The news story that replaced it contained a lot of references to “police said” and “according to police sources,” but no police names.

  There was much Lanham needed to do in proceeding with the Wickham murder investigation that morning. He’d been compiling a list of skin magazines published in New York that might have bought or been interested in the kind of photo Lanham had found in Wickham’s apartment. He wanted to find out how far Cassidy had progressed with his computer records and fingerprint inquiries with the New York FBI and Albany. He wanted very much to talk again with Belinda St. Johns and Philippe Arbre—and with that blond ice princess, Camilla Santee.

  But he wasn’t even going to speak Molly Wickham’s name until he had talked to Taranto.

  So he turned instead to the pile of phone messages, reports, and memos that had accumulated since he had left the previous afternoon.

  The head to his decapitated “Cuppy” had been found—in a subway restroom. Better, it had already been identified. It was part of a cadaver that had been stolen the week before from a medical lab supply house on the West Side. It was high school graduation time. Maybe some kids had been having a little weird fun.

  Another Manhattan cab driver had been shot, but not fatally. The jurisdiction belonged to a different division and there was justification for sliding the taxi murders over to them.

  There was good news. A hitchhiker had been picked up on the Connecticut Turnpike who fit the description of a suspect wanted for the murder of a wino found behind the Central Park Zoo earlier that spring.

  And there was bad news. An appeals court had overturned the conviction of a Fifth Avenue jeweler Lanham had arrested for strangling his wife. It was one of the cleanest investigations and collars Lanham had ever made, with two witnesses to the man’s dumping the body, but the court found that the man was Austrian and threw out the charges because Lanham hadn’t had him Mirandized in his native tongue.

  Lanham took a sip of the hot, bitter coffee, not minding when some of it spilled on the district attorney’s advisory memo. The jeweler had probably hired Claus von Bülow’s lawyer.

  He was hungry. Janice hadn’t even left out a stale doughnut for him. In the past, even when they’d been fighting for days, she always provided him with some sort of breakfast.

  The two I.A.D. men stood up, one of them picking up a file folder and putting it in a slim briefcase. They left Taranto’s office with minimum protocol and spoke to no one walking out of the squad room. In their world, all cops were potential criminals.

  Taranto had closed his door again but Lanham walked in as though invited and took the chair directly opposite the lieutenant. He folded his hands and leaned slowly back, not speaking. Taranto’s face was full of sorrowful displeasure, but his voice was calm, even friendly.

  “Sorry to wake you last night, Ray.”

  “No big thing.” Lanham paused, then spoke very quietly. “What do we have on last night, boss?”

  Taranto raised his hands in an Italian gesture of philosophical acceptance. “We got a lot of hurry-up work done,” he said. “The complete ballistics report isn’t back yet but the postmortem’s done.”

  “So what do we have?”

  “The victim, a female Negro named”—Taranto consulted a notepad—“Joyce Ellen Henry, was DOA at the hospital. The blonde, no ID on her yet, is down at detox in Bellevue, climbing the walls. It’ll be a week before she figures out what year it is. The precinct detective, Maurice Stone, he’s gonna be okay. He’s got a broken ankle and a sprained back, but nothing worse.”

  “And Pat?”

  “Hit four times. One superficial. Three in the heart and lungs. Hamburger.”

  “Tony killed him.”

  “Or Charley, or one of the backups. Or all three. We haven’t matched all the rounds yet.”

  “And the round through the door?”
>
  “We got the slug. It’s a semi-wadcutter, from a thirty-eight special.”

  “Police issue.”

  “Pat’s gun had one round fired.”

  “He got careless or scared, and let one fly,” Lanham said. “So everyone came in firing.”

  “He had a point-one-four blood alcohol, Ray.”

  “The drink that finally cost him.”

  “There was an unidentified thirty-eight on the living room floor. No prints. Two rounds fired.”

  “One of Tony’s drop guns.”

  Taranto shrugged. “No prints.”

  “So we’ve got two people dead and all the rounds fired were from cops. Just like that Chicago Black Panther raid in sixty-nine.”

  “That’s conjecture, Ray.”

  “Conjecture.”

  “Conjecture’s your job. You’re welcome to it. But that’s all it is.”

  “Where are the preliminary reports?”

  “Already downtown. Including my copies.”

  “What was that you gave the I.A.D. guys?”

  “I gave them what hadn’t gone downtown yet and now they’re going downtown.”

  “Are you going to put Tony on restricted duty?”

  “What?”

  “Automatic procedure. You got a dead civilian on your hands. Are you going to pull Tony’s service weapon?”

  “We don’t know who shot who yet. Anyway, it’s not up to me.”

  The two men stared at each other for a very long time. They searched each other’s eyes, but neither found what he was looking for.

  “The mayor’s holding a press conference at noon,” Taranto said. “The mayor, the commissioner, and the chief of detectives. It ought to be a hot one. The captain thinks he’s going to chew on the Globe for running that column. The big tip-off that blew the collar.”

  “We don’t even know for sure that Bad Bobby was in that apartment,” Lanham said.

  “He’s a very wanted man, Ray. We got a citywide, a three-state APB, and an FBI stop.”

  “I’ve got some other leads, boss. Good leads.”

  “I’d be real surprised if you didn’t, Ray. But Bad Bobby’s got priority.”

  What friendship there was in their eyes vanished.

  “He won’t be easy,” Lanham said.

  “The street’ll cough him up. His friends oughta know by now that we’re pretty fucking serious about this.”

  “He won’t be easy even if he’s on his own.”

  “Well, we’re not social workers.”

  Lanham drummed his fingers lightly on the edge of the desk, then thumped it, decisively.

  “I’ll take him,” he said. “If there’s a draw, if he gets run into a corner, I want to be the arresting officer.”

  Taranto smiled. His relief was visible. Black on black. The mayor would be pleased.

  “Well,” said the lieutenant. “It’s your case, isn’t it?”

  “You know how much I think this has to do with my case.”

  “Whatever you need, Ray. You got it. You got the whole department.”

  “I want him alive, boss.”

  “You run the show. Anything you want.”

  “I suppose you’ve got the squeeze put on the street, hard.”

  “We’ll have every tit and testicle on the Deuce black and blue by the end of the shift.”

  Lanham stood up. “I’ll carry a portable. Before they call a Ten Thirty-three, they call me.”

  “You got it. The mayor’s press conference is going to be live on the noon news. You want to watch it here?”

  He jerked a thumb at the cheap black and white television set on the shelf behind him.

  “No thanks.” Lanham opened the door, then paused. “Boss, tell me you weren’t serious when you said you wished Tony had killed the white girl instead.”

  “I didn’t mean to say it, Ray. I was thinking out loud. It was a screwball thought. I wish Tony hadn’t killed anyone, and I sure as hell wish nobody had killed Marjean Dorothy Wickham.”

  “Or that she was just another hooker.”

  “What?”

  “Just thinking out loud, boss. A screwball thought. Forget I said it.”

  When he got up, A.C. did the bold thing and went directly into the bathroom to confront the face that awaited him in the mirror. It was injured—bruises and crusted blood as extensive as he had expected—but not hideous.

  His looks continued to amaze him. Unlike his son, Davey, who had received a bountiful inheritance from his mother’s beauty, A.C. had not been a particularly attractive child—too skinny, gangly, and narrow of face, his long, straight nose too dominant. As a young man, he had not much improved, but with the accumulation of years, and the scars, weight, creases, and exposure to weather and experience that came with them, his face had filled and assumed a likability and character that surprised him. The wear of life had added rather than diminished. It had never occurred to him that he would one day come to look like this, that he would become as attractive to women as he had, that he would have such a remarkably satisfactory life—until now.

  Kitty was beginning to find small wrinkles gathering at the corners of her eyes, and a few fine lines about her mouth. They were nothing to him; they made her no less dear to him. But they frightened her. She had begun to speak unkindly of younger women.

  She would certainly not speak kindly of Camilla Santee.

  A.C. got through the rest of the morning on aspirin, a couple of vitamin pills, a quick Bloody Mary, and more strength and forbearance than he’d thought he possessed. The bank people were difficult, treating him as little better than a derelict until he found a bank officer who knew him. The Western Union girl made trouble over the money order, sending it only after he’d shown her three different pieces of identification, spelled out the word “certified” for her as he held the check in front of her face, and asked to see her supervisor. “New York’s last gentleman,” Vanessa had called him. Now there were none.

  Later, it took him several phone calls to reach the right person at the Philadelphia Police Department, but finally the receipt of the money was acknowledged. They refused to bring Bailey to the phone, however. He left a message for her to call as soon as possible.

  The city room was a mirror, his injuries reflected in the curiosity, concern, and dismay of the staffers who looked up as he walked through. Vanessa was not at her desk. City Editor Pasternak was at his, and he summoned A.C. over as disdainfully as he might a copy clerk.

  “We had to kill your column,” he said. “It looked kind of out of date and stupid after the shoot-’em-up.”

  Stupid? It had been prescient, pointing to the police interest in the black pimp while the other papers had gone with the mysterious white man in the limousine. Prescient, but wrong. Having seen the photograph on Camilla’s mantelpiece, A.C. was certain that Molly Wickham’s killer was no black man.

  “No problem,” A.C. said. Those were two more words than he wished to speak to Pasternak that morning. He started to walk away, his step awkward because of his painful ribs and back.

  “What can you get us today?” Pasternak said. His voice was almost a growl.

  A.C. stopped and turned slowly. He remembered the large pile of invitations on his desk. “There’s an opening at the Whitney,” he said. “Robert Kotlowitz.”

  “Kotlowitz?”

  “He’s an artist. A famous artist.”

  “This is news?”

  “This is a column. Jackie O. may show.”

  “That’s what you always say,” said one of the news editors sitting nearby. He smiled to show it was a joke.

  “What can you do for us on the Wickham story?” Pasternak said.

  Now began a chain of lies. “Nothing. I haven’t talked to the police since yesterday. I don’t expect to anytime soon. I’ve told them all I know and I’ve told you all I know. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some work to do.”

  “You’re going to write about some dingbat artist when we’ve g
ot a murder like this? And you’re an eyewitness? And you knew the victim?”

  “I haven’t seen the victim since it happened. And the artist’s name isn’t Dingbat; it’s Kotlowitz. Please. If I hear anything, I’ll let you know. If there’s any way I can help you, I will. But right now I’d like to get on with my job.” He might have added, “While I still have it.”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “I cut myself shaving.”

  The sarcasm only provoked Pasternak, who couldn’t stand not having the last, triumphant word in any confrontation.

  “I know you’ve been putting in some bar time, A.C., but I never figured you for a brawler. They don’t have brawls at Mortimer’s, do they? They have tiffs.”

  “What they have, Mr. Pasternak, is class.”

  He left ignoring whatever it was Pasternak finally thought up as a rejoinder. The two had begun as reporters together, and had even been friends. But Pasternak hated rich people, and had hated A.C. ever since he had become one by marrying Kitty.

  Out of habit, A.C. paused at the windows of his little office. The city was unbearably dreary. Clouds obscured the tops of the high-rises and the rain-wet sidewalks were nearly as dark as the asphalt streets. Wearily, he went to his desk and pulled out the invitation to the Kotlowitz exhibit. First, he made phone calls. The Philadelphia police said Bailey had been released, but had left no message for him—adding that they were a lockup and not a message center. There was nothing on his home answering machine. There were no messages for him left with the Globe switchboard. Vanessa still had not returned.

  He clicked on his computer terminal, staring at the blinking cursor.

  A few flicks of the keys and he could have the newsroom in an uproar: “Dead Model Linked to Indicted White House Aide,” “Blond Mystery Woman Love Nest Landlord,” “Globe Columnist Beaten.”