She moved closer to him, so close he could feel her warmth. She leaned over him and her breasts touched his chest. She brushed her lips across his eyelids. It made him tremble.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re very special to me. You’ve been very good to me and I know what makes you happy, Victor. I want our last private meeting together to make you happier than you’ve ever been before. A very special night. Tonight you will come to my apartment at eight o’clock and I’ll give you your farewell present, mui bita?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand.’ He sighed, staring at her open blouse, at the tinted edges of her nipples, feeling her perfume hypnotizing his senses. Her fingers moved lightly across his neck and drew his head to her, his cheek against her breast.
‘And why are we waiting until tonight?’ he asked, his voice trembling.
‘Because,’ she said, and her voice was a husky, inviting, ageless whisper, ‘I want you to think about it. All day long. It will be much sweeter that way.’
He closed his eyes, turning his head so her dress fell away from her breast, and he was tasting the tartness of her hardened nipple.
‘You are a masterpiece,’ he whispered. ‘On Ipanema, you would steal the beach away from the sea.’
‘You should have been a poet, Victor,’ she said softly. ‘You are a poet, my dear.’ But even at that moment the old fear crawled back inside him again and the horror of what had to be done was like an angry voice hissing in his ear. And he could not ignore it.
Chapter Four
The Vice Squad was located deep in the bowels of the
Barney Friscoe sat in a closet of an office, a short, chunky lieutenant with eternal five o’clock shadow and thinning brown hair, dressed in chinos, Adidas, a Wings Over America tee-shirt, and a yellow windbreaker. His cluttered desk looked like a combat zone. As Sharky entered the cubbyhole, he stood up, peering over the reading glasses that were perched halfway down his nose and smiling in a row of crooked, off-colour teeth. He offered Sharky a hairy paw.
‘Welcome to Friscoe’s Inferno,’ he said. ‘You’re Sharky, right? One o’clock, right on time. I hardly recognize you without all that hair on your face. Grab a chair there, throw that shit on the floor. You had lunch?’
Sharky shook his head, nodded yes to the question, and moved a pile of debris from one of the two battered chairs in the small room.
‘Jesus,’ Sharky said, ‘what’d you do to deserve this?
‘Dirtiest digs for the dirtiest squad. Oh, well, nobody gives a shit. We don’t spend any time around here anyhow.’ He waved outside the office at the bullpen where half a dozen desks were jammed together in a space hardly big enough for four. On the corner of one was an antiquated coffeemaker. Sugar and powdered milk formed pools around it and a dirty communal spoon lay forgotten nearby.
There were two men in the outer office. One of them, a hard-looking black man in his forties with a deep scar over his left eye and streaks Of grey in his tight-cropped afro, wore a tan corduroy three-piece suit. The vest was open and his tie was pulled down to his collarbone. He stared coldly at Sharky then turned back to a battered Royal typewriter and began pecking out a report with two fingers. The other, an older man built like a refrigerator, was on the phone.
‘That’s Livingston and Papadopolis out there,’ Friscoe said. ‘Livingston’s the one with the tan.’
‘He got something against me?’ Sharky asked.
‘Not that I know of,’ Friscoe said. ‘The Bat sent your sheet down. Looks like you got the shit stick handed to you. That was a nice machine you had workin’ there until that dimwit Tully fucked it up for you. He was down here a while. You cut off his head, he wouldn’t be any dumber than he is with it on.’
‘I’ve been told to forget it.’
‘Probably the best thing to do. What’s gonna happen with Tully, Tully’s gonna end with his toes up one of these days. He’s too stupid to stay alive. It’s still tough, y’know. Nobody likes to take the gas pipe when they been workin’ a thing as long as you were. Anyways, I got something down here you can maybe get your dick into. So far what we got is odds and ends, see? Nothing ties together yet. But it’s lookin’ pretty good. Here and there.’
‘You’re a little vague,’ Sharky said.
‘Paranoid,’ Friscoe said.
‘Oh,’ Sharky said and laughed at Friscoe’s candour.
‘What it is, every once in a while one of my boys turns up something sounds interesting. Not the usual stink finger, hands-up bulishit but something maybe we can make a little mileage outa. What happens, I don’t wanna give anything away, see what I mean? What I don’t want, 1 don’t want Homicide or Bunco or some lace dolie outfit workin’ special for the chief stealin’ my melons, okay? Fuck that skit. I figure it starts here, I wanna keep it here. The other thing, I don’t make a habit, see, of goin’ down to the DA with my dick in my hand. Unless we make a heavy case, we don’t nail it down, I flush it. We got a machine goin’ and we can’t put it together, it goes down the toilet.’
He slurped coffee and kept talking. Sharky found himself breathing for him.
‘Just so’s you know the territory down here, let me tell you, here’s how I feel about Vice. I got sixteen years in, almost seventeen. I been on foot in the boondocks. Did a two-year trick in a blue-and-white. Had one partner snuffed out from under me and another one, he tried to drive through a warehouse wall, ended up in a wheelchair. I got out lucky with a bad back. I been in Bunco, six years in Robbery, I did a short tour in Homicide and I was in the IA for about two minutes before I ended up here.’
Sharky laughed. He could just see Friscoe in Internal Affairs in his sneakers and sweatshirt, investigating complaints against his fellow officers.
