maybe I should give her a warning, let her know the attack was intensifying. The charge made by Chris Tucker was not without foundation. Internal Affairs did, in fact, recruit cops while they were still at the Academy. These recruits were called field associates and their job, simply put, was to spy on their peers.
I didn’t believe that Adele was a field associate. She was too independent, too unpredictable, a born rule- breaker who could never be trusted. But the truth didn’t matter here. If Adele’s peers decided she was an IAB rat, they’d be as likely to leave her hanging as come to her defense when she needed back-up. Especially those who had something to hide.
After a brief journey into the kitchen, where I opened and closed the refrigerator door for no good reason, I decided that I couldn’t decide. The only thing Adele would want to hear from me, assuming she wanted to hear anything at all, was that I was ready to join her crusade. And I wasn’t.
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the office of my high school mentor, Conrad Stehle, at the Y on Twenty-Third Street. It was Saturday afternoon, the pool full and Conrad busy. Nevertheless, when I knocked on his door and told him, ‘I’m fucked, Conrad,’ he waved me to a chair, then listened carefully while I reviewed the events following our last meeting. When I got to the punch line, the part about Adele’s open rebellion, he nodded and smiled.
‘For me,’ I concluded, ‘the whole business is about bad choices. It’s like the deal they used to give murderers in Utah: the gas chamber, the rope, or a firing squad.’
Conrad took his little cigar from his pocket and tapped it on the cover of Swimmer’s World magazine. His eyes closed for a moment, then opened again as he smiled. ‘This business about losing no matter what you do, I have a hard time with it.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Conrad. But if there’s a clear win here, it’s somehow eluded me.’
‘What about David Lodge’s killers? Putting them in prison, which we both know is where they belong.’
‘The job’s going to punish Adele, no matter how this turns out. If I do anything to help her, I’ll be punished, too.’
‘That doesn’t answer the question.’
‘Conrad, removing bad people from the general populace is an activity that satisfies my deepest needs. That’s why I do it. But there’s a price to pay here and…’ I hesitated for a moment, sorting through the various conflicts, reducing them in scope until I finally got my thoughts around an idea that didn’t squirm out of reach. ‘I don’t want to be an asshole, a jerk,’ I explained. ‘Adele, she’s got delusions of grandeur. Her goal is to right every wrong. Me, I try not to confuse myself with cartoon superheroes. That’s because I know that when you leap off a roof, you don’t fly up into the clouds, you go splat on the concrete. Besides, I didn’t bury evidence, or look past witnesses, or try to dump the case in somebody else’s lap. I conducted an honorable investigation, committing every scrap of information to paper, until the day I was relieved. What happens next is not my business.’
Conrad looked at me for a moment, his eyes bright, his smile amused, then got up and walked over to where a small coffee maker rested on a filing cabinet. He slid a filter into the basket, added coffee, then filled the tank with water. A moment later, the coffee maker emitted a wet belch, shortly followed by a hiss, then the patter of coffee dropping into a carafe.
I sat through the process, giving Conrad plenty of time to challenge my argument. I knew we’d eventually come back to the business at hand, as I knew the timing was strictly at Conrad’s discretion. Sure enough, after serving the coffee and taking a quick sniff at the cigar in his pocket, he finally spoke.
‘Now tell me what calamity will befall Harry Corbin if he just walks away from this case. If he does nothing at all.’
‘You mean, if I desert my partner on the field of battle?’ I returned his smile. ‘That’s not too good for the old self-image.’
‘Could you live with it?’
‘You not gettin’ this, Conrad? The prize behind door number two is the same as the prize behind door number one. Yeah, I could walk away from Adele, and I wouldn’t fall apart, either. But I’d have to grow a beard.’
‘A beard? Why a beard?’
‘Because that way I won’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror.’
‘I understand,’ Conrad conceded after a moment, ‘how that might not work out.’ He filled the two mugs with coffee, then carried them over to his desk. Taken black, Conrad’s coffee was as bitter as boiled espresso.
‘The half-and-half?’ I pointed to an open container sitting next to the little computer on his desk. ‘You wouldn’t remember when you bought it, would you?’
‘Yesterday.’
I watched him lace his own coffee with two packets of sugar and a large dollop of half-and-half. When the half-and-half didn’t curdle, I took the plunge, filling my own mug to the brim. ‘There’s something else,’ I said, ‘another factor working against Adele. You spoke about punishing Lodge’s killers, about hauling the bad guys up to the bar of justice. Well, there’s no guarantee that Adele and I can close this case, not working on our own. Obvious moves, like obtaining phone records and financial documents, will be closed to us, along with access to ballistics and the crime lab. And Pete Jarazelsky, that ultimate soft target? If the job doesn’t back us, we have no way to put pressure on him, even if he’d agree to an interview.’
‘So, there’s the possibility of risking everything for nothing?’
‘I couldn’t have said it better myself. All the pain, none of the pleasure. The ultimate lose-lose situation.’ I leaned forward and cocked my head to the left. ‘In my personal experience, people who launch themselves into lose-lose situations fall into three categories. They’re either born losers, or psychotics, or both.’
‘Tell me,’ he demanded without turning around. ‘Into which category does Adele Bentibi fall? Is she the loser? Or is she the psychotic? Or is she the psychotic loser?’
TWENTY-ONE
Like any other athlete, even a pseudo-athlete, I sometimes pause to check myself out in the mirror. I’m not obsessed, not like body builders where narcissism is the whole point. Just occasionally, late at night coming from the pool, I pause before a full-length mirror in the locker room to make a quick evaluation. And why not? No one can say I haven’t worked for my body, that I haven’t put in the hours.
A single glance is usually enough to assure me that I’m holding it together as I enter my forty-first year on the planet. Only occasionally am I dissatisfied; only occasionally do I suspect that my body has tipped over the edge, that the inevitable diminishing has begun.
My features undergo a similar shift at such times, rugged somehow becoming goofy. I have the good hair, as I’ve already said, but my eyes, always narrow, have been narrowed further by fanning crows’ feet and a slight puffiness that no amount of sleep can erase. They are at different heights, as well, with the right a bit lower than the left, producing a cock-eyed look made worse by a mouth with a pronounced bias to the right and a noticeably off-center chin.
Not even in my most charitable moments would I call the face in the mirror handsome. My features are too unbalanced for that. But rugged is a tradable commodity for a middle-aged bachelor in New York, whereas goofy doesn’t work at all. I knew because that crooked smile I flashed across a crowded room sometimes produced a quick frown, shortly followed by an exaggerated rolling of the eyes. God, why do I keep attracting the losers?
I relate to my apartment — which I finally re-entered some two hours later — much as I do to my body. Mostly, I feel comfortable when I lock the door behind me. I feel at home. But there are definitely times when the place seems more like a bad joke. From the roughly finished dining table and the captain’s chairs, to the wall-to- wall Berber carpeting, to the green sectional couch and the bookcases framing the television, to the posters on the walls. Artificial is the first word that comes to mind, followed shortly by phony, then pathetic.
When I flicked on the lights that afternoon, I felt as if I’d been the unwitting victim of an apprentice decorator at a failing discount department store. Case in point, the posters on the living room walls were of extremely obscure, extremely bad movies, the kind that played rural Mississippi drive-ins in the 1950s. Captive Wild Woman (starring Acquanetta as the Gorilla Girl); Juke Joint (The Joint is Jumpin! The Jive is Jivin! The Jam is Jammin!); Girl With An Itch (Have Negligee, Will Travel!). I’d thought them clever enough when I’d accumulated them over a period of nine months, but now they seemed as superficial as the movies they were created to publicize.
