('Perhaps he has a phone and perhaps it's in the book. You could look it up. I know you'll excuse me if I don't offer to look it up for you.') The answer was floating out there. I could very nearly reach out and touch it. But my mind wouldn't fasten onto it.
He said, 'My wife is blind.'
Chapter 17
It turned out to be a long night, although the trip to Twentieth Street was the least of it. I shared a cab down with Burton Havermeyer.
We must have talked about something en route but I can't remember what. I paid for the cab, took Havermeyer to the squad room and introduced him to Frank Fitzroy, and that was pretty much the extent of my contribution. I, after all, was not the arresting officer. I had no official connection with the case and had performed no official function.
I didn't have to be around while a stenographer took down Havermeyer's statement, nor was I called upon to make a statement of my own.
Fitzroy slipped away long enough to walk me down to the corner and buy me a drink at P. J. Reynolds.
I didn't much want to accept his invitation. I wanted a drink, but I wasn't much more inclined to drink with him than with Havermeyer. I felt closed off from everyone, locked up tight within myself where dead women and blind women couldn't get at me.
The drinks came and we drank them, and he said, 'Nice piece of work, Matt.'
'I got lucky.'
'You don't get that kind of luck. You make it. Something got you onto Havermeyer in the first place.'
'More luck. The other two cops from the Six-One were dead. He was odd man in.'
'You could have talked to him on the phone. Something made you go see him.'
'Lack of anything better to do.'
'And then you asked him enough questions so that he told a couple lies that could catch him up further down the line.'
'And I was in the right place at the right time, and the right shop sign caught my eye when the right pair of cops walked in front of me.'
'Oh, shit,' he said, and signaled the bartender. 'Put yourself down if you want.'
'I just don't think I did anything to earn a field promotion to Chief of Detectives. That's all.'
The bartender came around. Fitzroy pointed to our glasses and the bartender filled them up again. I let him pay for this round, as he had paid for the first one.
He said, 'You won't get any official recognition out of this, Matt.
You know that, don't you?'
'I'd prefer it that way.'
'What we'll tell the press is the reopening of the case with the arrest of Pinell made him conscience-stricken, and he turned himself in.
He talked it over with you, another ex-cop like himself, and decided to confess. How does that sound?'
'It sounds like the truth.'
'Just a few things left out is all. What I was saying, you won't get anything official out of it, but people around the department are gonna know better. You follow me?'
'So?'
'So you couldn't ask for a better passport back onto the force is what it sounds like to me. I was talking to Eddie Koehler over at the Sixth. You wouldn't have any trouble getting 'em to take you on again.'
'It's not what I want.'
'That's what he said you'd say. But are you sure it isn't? All right, you're a loner, you got a hard-on for the world, you hit this stuff-' he touched his glass '-a little harder than you maybe should. But you're a cop, Matt, and you didn't stop being one when you gave the badge back.'
I thought for a moment, not to consider his proposal but to weigh the words of my reply. I said,
'You're right, in a way. But in another way you're wrong, and I stopped being a cop before I handed in my shield.'
'All because of that kid that died.'
'Not just that.' I shrugged. 'People move and their lives change.'
'Well,' he said, and then he didn't say anything for a few minutes, and then we found something less unsettling to talk about. We discussed the impossibility of keeping three-card monte dealers off the street, given that the fine for the offense is seventy-five dollars and the profit somewhere between five hundred and a thousand dollars a day. 'And there's this one judge,' he said, 'who told a whole string of them he'd let
'em off without a fine if they'd promise not to do it again. 'Oh, Ah promises, yo' honah.'
To save seventy-five dollars, those assholes'd promise to grow hair on their tongues.'
We had a third round of drinks, and I let him pay for that round, too, and then he went back to the station
