'Don't tell me history's repeating itself. Did someone go and blow a main fuse?'
'God. No, it's worse than that.'
'You sound shaky.'
'I'm scared to death.'
She had never been a woman who scared easy. I asked if she was still living in the same place. She said she was.
I said I'd be right over.
As I left the hotel an empty cab was cruising by on the other side of the street, heading east. I yelled at him and he stopped with a squeal of brakes and I trotted across and got in. I gave him Elaine's address and settled back in my seat, but I couldn't stay settled back. I rolled down the window and sat on the edge of the seat and looked out at the passing landscape.
Elaine was a hooker, a classy young prostitute who worked out of her own apartment and got along just fine without a pimp or a mob connection. We got to know each other back when I was a cop. I met her for the first time a couple of weeks after I made detective. I was at an after-hours in the Village, feeling
very good about the new gold shield in my pocket, and she was at a table with three European manufacturers and two other working girls.
At the time I noted that she looked a good deal less whorish than her sisters, and a lot more attractive.
A week or so after that I met her in a bar onWest Seventy-second Street called Poogan's Pub. I don't know who she was with, but she was at Danny Boy Bell's table, and I went over to say hello to Danny Boy.
He introduced me to everyone there, Elaine included. I saw her once or twice after that around town, and then one night I went to the Brasserie for a late bite and she was at a table with another girl. I joined the two of them. Somewhere down the line the other girl went off on her own, and I went home with Elaine.
For the next several years I don't suppose there was a week when I didn't see her at least once, unless one or the other of us was out of town.
We had an interesting relationship, and one which seemed to serve us both. I was a sort of protector for her, usefully supplied with cop skills and cop connections, someone she could lean on, someone who could push back hard if anybody tried to lean on her. I was, too, the closest thing she had or wanted to a boyfriend, and she was as much of a girlfriend or mistress as I could have handled. Sometimes we went out—
for a meal, to a fight at the Garden, to a bar or an after-hours. Sometimes I dropped in on her for a quick drink and a quick bounce. I didn't have to send flowers or remember her birthdays, and neither of us had to pretend we were in love.
I was married then, of course. The marriage was a mess, but I'm not sure I realized it at the time. I had a wife and two young sons living in a mortgaged house out onLong Island , and I more or less assumed the marriage would last, just as I assumed I would stay on with the NYPD
until departmental regulations forced me to retire. I was drinking with both hands in those days, and while it didn't seem to get in my way any it was having a subtler effect all along, making it remarkably easy for me to turn a blind eye on the things in my life I didn't want to look at.
Ah, well. What Elaine and I had was a nonmarriage of convenience, I suppose, and we were hardly the first cop and hooker to have found this particular way to do each other some good. Still, I doubt it would have lasted so long or suited us so well if we hadn't liked each other.
She had become my cousin Frances so that she could leave messages for me without arousing suspicion.
We didn't use the code often because there wasn't much need for it; our relationship was such that it was usually I who called her, and I could leave whatever message I wanted. When she called me, it was generally either to break a date or because of an emergency.
One such emergency had come to mind while I was talking to her, and I'd alluded to it, recalling when someone had blown a main fuse.
The someone in question had been a client, an overweight patent attorney with offices way downtown onMaiden Lane and a home up in Riverdale. He'd been a regular
john of Elaine's, showing up two or three times a month, never giving her any grief until the afternoon he picked her bed as the site for what a medical examiner later called a massive myocardial infarction.
It's high on every call girl's list of nightmares, and most of them have given a little thought to what they'll do if it happens. What Elaine did was call me at the station house, and when they said I was out she told them to get word to me, that it was a family emergency, that I should call my cousin Frances.
They couldn't reach me, but I called in myself within the half hour and they gave me the message. After I spoke with her I found an officer I could trust and we rode up to her apartment. With Elaine's help, we got the poor bastard into his clothes. He'd been wearing a three-piece suit, and we dressed him up all right, knotting his tie, tying his shoes, hooking his cuff links. My buddy and I each looped one of his arms over our shoulders, and we walked him out to the freight elevator, where one of the building's porters had the car waiting. We told him our friend had had too much to drink. I doubt that he bought it— the guy we were dragging looked a lot more like a stiff than a drunk— but he knew we were cops and he remembered the kind of tips Miss Mardell passed out at Christmas, so if he had any reservations he kept them to himself.
I was driving a department vehicle, an unmarkedPlymouth sedan. I brought it around to the service entrance and we wrestled the dead lawyer into it. By the time we had him in the car it was past five o'clock, and by the time we fought our way down to the Wall Street area the offices were closed and most of the workers on their way home. We parked across the entrance to a narrow alley offGold Street
, maybe three blocks from the man's office, and we left him in the alley.
His appointment book had the notation 'E.M.— 3:30' under that day's date. That seemed cryptic enough, so I returned the book to his breast pocket. I checked his address book, and she wasn't listed under the M's, but he had her number and address with the E's, listed by her first name only. I was going to tear out the page, but I noticed other female first names listed here and there, and I couldn't see any reason to inflict all that on the widow, so I stuck the address book in my pocket and ditched it later on.
