bushes bright with rain. “I came to warn you Galloway is out for blood.”
“Whose? Mine?”
“Somebody’s.” We are at the entrance to the complex, facing an out-of-control blinking red traffic light. Five or six cars are stopped uncertainly, gray water up to their hubcaps. “I hope you got good stuff in Boston on that doctor.”
“It’s good,” I say with confidence, picturing Claudia Van Hoven’s touching tears in the park.
“It better be better than good. It better be excellent.”
“It’s superlative,” I snap, annoyed. “It’s the best fucking evidence any FBI agent ever came up with in the history of the world. Why does Galloway have a hair across, anyway?”
“He’s upset about the Cuban thing — where the young girl died?”
I stare at the rain. The Cuban thing was a major fuckup by agents in our field office; a public relations fiasco that won’t go away.
“I’m screwed.”
Donnato plows ahead through the flooded intersection.
• • •
Robert Galloway has made a career of being tougher than the tough guys. He has played chicken with Mafia dons. He has gone nose to nose against the ugliest teamsters in Kennedy Airport, worked deep undercover in the heroin trade along the piers of Manhattan. During his last years as an organized-crime specialist, he was forced to move his family from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania because of death threats against them. Finally the separation from his teenage kids became too much and he reluctantly accepted the promotion to Los Angeles, although he remains a purebred New Yorker who, I suspect, still believes we’re a bunch of nuts and fruits out here.
Galloway is an action man not suited to lying, which doesn’t make him the best choice to deal with the press. Instead of sleazing his way through the Cuban thing like any other bureaucrat would have done without a second thought, Galloway feels compelled to actually answer the question, which is the following:
Why did the FBI fail to save a twenty-four-year-old former beauty queen from Iowa from being stabbed to death thirty times with an eight-inch kitchen knife by her Cuban drug-dealing boyfriend when their Hollywood apartment was under twenty-four-hour surveillance by us and the entire crime, blow by blow, scream by terrified scream, is recorded on our magnetic audiotape?
“Galloway had a press conference yesterday. It did not go well.”
We are rocketing up in the elevator and I’m leaving that warm glow in my stomach from the coffee and the muffin somewhere down around the fourth floor.
“He told them the truth? That nobody was listening to the surveillance?”
“Yes.”
“Unbelievable.”
“It was a personal embarrassment for Galloway, after that big speech he made to the Bar Association about ‘the war on drugs will be won or lost in L.A.’ ”
“I guess we know the outcome.”
“You can bet the Duane Carters of the world are nipping at Galloway’s heels like a pack of Dobermans. Still,” Donnato shrugs, “I was saying to Pumpkin in the shower this morning, nobody can expect us to actively monitor every case every minute of the day.”
Silence between us as we cross the corridor.
“Married fifteen years and you still take showers together?”
Donnato gives me one of those endearingly painful smiles.
“She was gargling at the sink, okay?”
We punch in our codes and enter the Agents Only door.
“Gee, I kind of liked picturing you all soapy and slippery.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Donnato tells me.
• • •
Duane Carter’s door is open. He and two other guys are tossing a Nerf ball into a basket.
“How was Boston?” Duane calls.
I’m not about to say I got ripped off at a stoplight by some punk. “Super!” I give a big grin and the thumbs- up sign. He returns the smile like we’re best buddies.
I barely sit down at my desk when the phone rings. It is Jayne Mason.
“They’ve got a photograph of my tits.”
“Who does?”
Hearing that familiar voice speaking directly and intimately into my ear is like seeing her suddenly appear in the bullpen — as jolting a shock as the human body can bear.
“How did they get the photograph, Ms. Mason?”
“Yesterday, if you recall, was a stunning day before it started raining like hell, and I was sunbathing in the buff by the pool when a helicopter passes overhead. I know exactly what they were after.”
“Were there any markings on the helicopter?”
“It said KTLA.”
“That’s a television station.”
“Of course it is.”
“So it’s your belief that KTLA was taking nude pictures for the six o’clock news?”
“Please respect my intelligence.” I hear ice clinking in a glass. “All these cameramen freelance on the side. On their way to cover a traffic jam they fly over the home of some perfectly innocent actress and point their sneaky little zoom lens and imagine they can make an easy ten thousand dollars.”
I let out a whistle, mocking and low. “Really? That much?”
“For the right pair.”
I have to admit that now she’s got me thinking about her breasts. Is she embarrassed because they’re old and withered, or pissed off because they’re perky and firm and
“I want the FBI involved.”
“We’re a federal agency, we only investigate federal crimes. We have no jurisdiction over something like this. I suggest you contact the local police.”
“But you’re my FBI agent.”
“Actually, I’m employed by the United States government, ma’am.”
“Oh, get off your high horse!” she says with a great deal of irritation and hangs up.
Next thing I know, Galloway, wearing a scarlet turtleneck, papers flying out of his hands, cigar askew between his teeth, grabs my arm, pulls me out of the chair, and steers me into his office.
“What have you got on the Mason case that’s so goddamn good?”
Oh, boy.
“I’ve got a former patient of Dr. Eberhardt, Claudia Van Hoven, who claims he overprescribed painkillers and got her hooked on them exactly like Jayne Mason.”
“Will she testify?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go for a warrant.”
He is reaching for the phone to call the U.S. District Attorney’s office.
“I think we should wait.”
‘Why?”
It is a hard moment. Galloway is champing at the bit. It would be easy to allow him to place the call and set a hundred wheels in motion, and lie back and take the strokes for doing my part, having completed the mission in Boston … but it would not be responsible. If he’s going to be muddled by emotion, then I’m the one who has to keep that clear head. We can’t both be running off half-cocked like my poor bank robber, Dennis Hill, tearing through
