business of being sincere. 'Look, Matt, I'm not some fuckingChrister .
I'm an angle guy, you called me on that and it's true. I know things thatAbner has trouble believing. A guy who's absolutely straight, he's never going to hear these things because the wiseguys'll dummy up when he walks into the room. But a guy like me gets a chance to hear everything.' He leaned forward.
'I'll tell you something. Maybe you don't know it, maybe it wasn't quite this bad yet when you were carrying a badge. But this whole fucking city is for sale. You can buy the police force all across the board. Straight on up to Murder One.'
'I never heard that.'Which wasn't quite true. I'd heard it. I'd just never believed it.
'Not every cop, Matt. Not hardly. But I know two cases- that's two I know for a fact- where guys got caught with their cocks on the block for homicide and they boughttheirselves out from under. And narcotics, fuck, I don't have to tell you about narcotics. That's an open secret.
Every heavy dealer keeps a couple of thou in a special pocket. He won't go out on the street without it. That's calledwalkaway money- you lay it on the cop who busts you and he lets you walk away.'
Was it always that way? It seemed to me that it wasn't. There were always cops who took, some who took a little and some who took a lot, some who didn't say no when easy money came their way, others who actually went out and hustled for it. But there were also things that nobody ever did. Nobody took murder money, and nobody took narcotics money.
But things do change.
'So you just got sick of it,' I said.
'That's right. And you're the last person I should have to explain it to.'
'I didn't leave the force because of corruption.'
'Oh?My mistake.'
I stood up and walked over to where he'd left the bourbon bottle.
Ifreshened my drink and drank off half of it. Still on my feet I said,
'Corruption never bothered me much. It put a lot of food on my family's table.' I was talking as much to myself as toBroadfield . He didn't really care why I left the force any more than I cared whether he knew the right reason or not. 'I took what came my way. I didn't walk around with my hand out and I never let a man buy his way out of something I considered a serious crime, but there was never a week when we lived on what the city paid me.' I drained my glass.
'You take plenty. The city didn't buy that suit.'
'No question.'The grin again. I didn't like that grin much. 'I took plenty, Matt. No argument. But we all have certain lines we draw, right?
Why did you quit, anyway?'
'I didn't like the hours.'
'Seriously.'
'That's serious enough.'
It was as much as I felt like telling him. For all I knew he already had the whole story, or whatever the back- fence version of it sounded like these days.
What happened was simple enough. A few years back I was having a few drinks in a bar inWashingtonHeights . I was off duty and entitled to drink if I felt like it, and the bar was one where cops could drink on the arm, which may have constituted police corruption but which had never given me a sleepless night.
Then a couple of punks held up the place and shot the bartender dead on their way out. I chased them down the street and emptied my service revolver at them, and I killed one of the bastards and crippled the other, but one bullet didn't go where it was supposed to. It ricocheted off something or other and into the eye of a seven-year-old girl namedEstrellita Rivera, and on through the eye and into the brain, andEstrellita Rivera died and so did a large part of me.
There was a departmental investigation which ended with me being completely exonerated and even awarded a commendation, and a little while after that I resigned from the force and separated from Anita and moved to my hotel onFifty-seventhStreet . I don't know how it all fits together, or if it all fits together, but what it seemed to add up to was that I hadn't enjoyed being a cop anymore. But none of this was any of JerryBroadfield's business, and he wasn't going to hear it from me.
So I said, 'I don't really know what I can do for you.'
'You can do more than I can. You're not stuck in this lousy apartment.'
'Who brings you your food?'
'My food?Oh.I been getting out for a bite and like that.But not much and not often. And I'm careful that nobody's watching when I leave the building or come back into it.'
'Sooner or later somebody's going to tag you.'
'Hell, I know that.' He lit another cigarette. The gold Dunhill was just a flat sliver of metal, lost in his large hand. 'I'm just trying to buy myself a couple of days,' he said. 'That's about all. She splashed herself all over the papers yesterday.I been here since then. I figure I can last the week if I get lucky, a quiet neighborhood like this. By then maybe you can pinch her fuse.'
'Or maybe I can't do a thing.'
'Will you try, Matt?'
I didn't really want to. I was running low on money, but that didn't bother me too much. It was the beginning of the month and my rent was paid through the end of the month and I had enough cash on hand to keep me in bourbon and coffee, with a little left over for luxuries like food.
