‘Yeah, I have.’
‘Not me. I never got smacked and I been around pigeons all my life.’
‘That makes you overdue.’
‘Which is exactly what concerns me. Forty-four years without gettin’ smacked? My time is comin’ soon. It could even be a multiple occurrence.’
Potter reached into the pocket of his overcoat and drew out a black Kangol cap which he placed on his tiny head. Amazingly, the cap was too small.
‘Forewarned is forearmed, right? I went and got me a little protection. Whatta ya think?’
‘It’s you, Linus. The real you, the one who never stopped visiting David Lodge.’
Potter’s lips came apart in what I took for a smile. His eyes, though, didn’t waver by so much as a millimeter. What he was about to tell me had been carefully thought out.
‘Davy and me were partners for about six months, right before I got promoted. We did OK together.’
‘Was he drinking then?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How’d you handle it?’
‘I told him if he showed up drunk or drank on the job, I’d shove his head so far up his bony ass, he’d be lookin’ out between his teeth.’
My turn to smile as I imagined David Lodge, knucklehead extraordinaire, cowed by Linus Potter. Potter’s back was broad enough to support a grand piano.
‘You told me you investigated the Clarence Spott murder. That must have been tough, being as Lodge was once your partner.’
‘I exaggerated.’
‘Exaggerated what?’
‘It’s four o’clock in the morning when I get a call from the lieutenant. He tells me there’s been a homicide inside the Eight-Three, a citizen. An hour later, when I arrive at the house, IAB is already working the case. So what I do, more or less, is observe the proceedings. I wasn’t even called to testify before the grand jury.’
Potter stopped long enough to drain his mug, then signal Mike for another. ‘But what I told you was true. Every piece of evidence pointed at Davy. And the consensus, at the time, was that his blackout was so much bullshit.’
‘At the time?’
‘Davy was a good cop who destroyed himself with booze. Clarence Spott was a piece of shit who deserved worse than he got.’ Potter stuck out his hand to intercept a frosted mug sliding along the length of the bar. As he grabbed the mug, beer spilled over the rim and onto his hand. He licked the beer off his fingers, then resumed. ‘I felt sorry for Lodge, so I went up to see him a couple of times a year. He really didn’t remember what happened. That much was obvious. But he also thought he was innocent, at least at the end, which wasn’t obvious. Something happened to him, though, after the last time I visited, something he remembered that made him sure.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘He wrote me a letter.’ Potter withdrew a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket. ‘I been carryin’ it around all week, figurin’ you’d show up sooner or later.’
That little voice, the rational one, spoke again, demanding that I leave well enough alone. Next thing, it insisted, you’ll be calling Adele.
I took the letter anyway, and read it through twice. It contained nothing I didn’t already know. A memory had surfaced, a fragment, and Lodge had become sure of his innocence. The nature of that memory was not described, nor was Pete Jarazelsky’s name mentioned.
‘Old news,’ I said as I returned the letter.
Potter refolded the page and stuck it back in his pocket. ‘Letters get screened goin’ in and out of prison. Phone calls get monitored. Even face-to-face visits, the guards can listen in. So what I figure is that Davy was playin’ his cards close to the vest. One thing I can say for sure: after seven years in the joint, he’d become a patient man. Took care of his body, too. Last time I was up to see him, he told me he was benchin’ three hundred pounds.’
TWENTY
I got up the next morning and fixed myself a breakfast of fried eggs and toast which I washed down with two mugs of coffee. Then I spent the next three hours cleaning my apartment. A hated job, to be sure, but one at which I’ve become more efficient over the years. As I worked, I considered a pair of options: hiring a housekeeper or living in filth. But the reality was that I couldn’t afford professional help, not while my credit card remained in deficit. And I couldn’t live with the dirt, either. Not only did I fear the chaos, but nothing diminishes the female libido like food- stained upholstery, underwear on the floor and greasy pillowcases.
I put the vacuum cleaner away around noon and went to my computer. This was another chore I didn’t look forward to. I hadn’t checked my email for a week and I knew my inbox would be choked with spam. I found thirty- five pieces of mail awaiting me. The few from individuals whose names I recognized were opened first. They’d been sent by cop friends who’d moved on to greener pastures and I archived them, intending to reply at some later date. Then I went to work on the garbage.
Instant credit. Normalize blood pressure. Obtain a university diploma. Trace anybody anywhere. Enlarge your penis. Enlarge your breasts. The kicker was the domain address of a gay porn site: weaponsofassdestruction. com.
For the most part, I was able to delete the junk without opening it, but there were a number sent by individuals whose names I didn’t recognize. It was possible (just barely) that I’d discover somebody trying to reach me on legitimate business among these.
Though each bore the name of a different sender, the first three were for a brand of septic tank cleaner. The fourth was from a gentleman who identified himself as B-Arnold. Initially, I judged the name to be a clumsy ploy designed to trick me into opening the message, but then my gaze drifted to the subject line: It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over.
For the next thirty seconds, I watched a white envelope turn round and round, like a dog chasing its tail. My primitive dial-up system was loading a photo. I can’t say I knew what was coming, but I was impatient enough to wish I’d coughed up the extra twenty bucks a month and switched to broadband. Then an image appeared on the monitor, a head-shot of Dante Russo in uniform, facing front. The full-color photo had been shot against a white background, virtually guaranteeing that it had come from Russo’s personnel file.
A few years before, on impulse, I’d purchased a digital camera, intending to pursue photography as a serious amateur. It hadn’t taken all that long, a couple of months at most, before I admitted that I was virtually without talent. By then, however, I’d grown fascinated with the processing of images and was spending most of my time at the computer, working in Photoshop.
I had two problems with Russo’s photograph, which showed him in full uniform, including a billed cap. First, I feared that citizens, shown the photo, would be drawn to the uniform and not the man. Second, as a PBA Trustee, Russo had no assigned policing duties and never wore a uniform. His job was to roam from precinct to precinct within Brooklyn North’s territory, conferring with PBA delegates, troubleshooting problems the delegates were unable to handle.
What I might have done, if I was a true artist, was remove the cap and create a hairline from scratch. But that task was beyond my abilities. The best I could do was search through my archived photos until I found an individual with a hairline similar to Russo’s, cut that hairline out, then paste it over Russo’s cap before smoothing the rough edges. Though far from perfect, the final version I printed was serviceable, a 4x6 likeness that caught Russo with his chin up, his lips compressed, his dark eyes suspicious and superior at the same time.
I sat back in the chair and allowed my thoughts to drift. Not surprisingly, they quickly settled on Adele. I was sure Russo’s photograph hadn’t come from her. Adele’s inability to manipulate was her biggest flaw. If she wanted me to look at Russo’s picture, she’d have knocked on my door and shoved it in my face.
Last night, in Sparkle’s, I’d briefly considered phoning Adele. Now I was thinking a little harder, thinking that
