“You didn’t know what it was?”
“Of course I know, but that doesn’t mean I want to fucking dwell on it.” He drank some beer, put the glass down, shook his head. “Some of the guys wind up working private security. Not at the rent-a-cop level, but higher up. Guy I knew put his papers in ten years ago, went to work overseeing security at the stock exchange. Regular hours, and better money than he ever made on the job. Now he’s retired from that, and he’s got two pensions, plus his Social Security. And he’s down in Florida, playing golf and fishing.”
“You interested in something like that?”
“Florida? I already said . . . oh, the private security thing. Well, see, I carried a gold shield for a lot of years. I was a detective, and the job he had, it’s more administrative. I could do it, but I don’t know that I’d love it. Probably a fair amount of chickenshit involved, too.” He picked up his empty glass, looked at it, put it down again. Without looking at me he said, “I was thinking about a private ticket.” I’d seen this coming.
“To do it right,” I said, “you have to be a businessman, keeping records and filing reports and networking in order to get cases. That’s if you’re in business for yourself, but the other way, going to work for one of the big agencies, you’re mostly doing boring work for short money, and doing it without a badge. I don’t think it would suit you.” 6
Lawrence Block
“Neither would the reports and the record keeping. But you didn’t do all that.”
“Well, I was never very good at doing things by the book,” I said. “I worked for years without a license, and when I finally got one I didn’t hang on to it very long.”
“I remember. You got by okay without it.”
“I guess. It was hand to mouth sometimes.”
“Well, I got that pension. It’s a cushion.”
“True.”
“What I was thinking . . .”
And what he was thinking, of course, was that the two of us could work together. I had the experience on the private side, and he’d be bringing much fresher contacts within the department. I let him pitch the idea, and when he’d run through it I told him he was a few years too late.
“I’m pretty much retired,” I said. “Not formally, because there’s no need. But I don’t go looking for business, and the phone doesn’t ring very often, and when it does I usually find a reason to turn down whatever’s on offer. Do that a few times and people quit calling, and that’s okay with me. I don’t need the dough. I’ve got Social Security, plus a small monthly check from the city, and we’ve got the income from some rental property Elaine owns, plus the profits from her shop.”
“Art and antiques,” he said. “I pass it all the time, I never see anyone go in or out. Does she make any money there?”
“She’s got a good eye, and a head for business. The rent’s no bargain, and there are months she comes up short, but now and then she spots something for ten bucks at a thrift shop and sells it for a few thousand.
She could probably do the same thing on eBay and save the rent, but she likes having the shop, which is why she opened it in the first place.
And whenever I get tired of long walks and ESPN, I can take a turn behind the counter.”
“Oh, you do that?”
“Now and then.”
“You know enough about the business?”
All the Flowers Are Dying
7
“I know how to ring a sale and how to process a credit card transac-tion. I know when to tell them to come back and see the proprietor. I know how to tell when someone’s contemplating shoplifting or robbery, and how to discourage them. I can usually tell when somebody’s trying to sell me stolen goods. That’s about as much as I need to know to hold down the job.”
“I guess you don’t need a partner in the gumshoe business.”
“No, but if you’d asked me five years ago . . .” Five years ago the answer would still have been no, but I’d have had to find a different way to phrase it.
We ordered coffee, and he sat back and ran his eyes around the room. I sensed in him a mixture of disappointment and relief, which was about what I’d feel in his circumstances. And I felt some of it myself. The last thing I wanted was a partner, but there’s something about that sort of offer that makes one want to accept it. You think it’s a cure for loneliness. A lot of ill-advised partnerships start that way, and more than a few bad marriages.
The coffee came, and we talked about other things. The crime rate was still going down, and neither of us could figure out why. “There’s this moron in the state legislature,” he said, “who claims credit for it, because he helped push the death penalty through. It’s hard to figure that one out, given that the only time anybody gets a lethal injection in New York State is when he buys a bag of smack laced with rat poison.
There’s guys upstate on Death Row, but they’ll die of old age before they get the needle.”
“You figure it’s a deterrent?”
“I figure it’s a pretty good deterrent against doing it again. To tell you the truth, I don’t think anybody really gives a shit if it’s a deterrent.
There’s some guys that you’re just happier not having them breathe the same air as the rest of us. People who just ought to be dead. Terrorists, mass murderers. Serial killers. Fucking perverts who kill children. You can tell me they’re sick people, they were abused as children themselves, di dah di dah di dah, and I won’t disagree with you, but the truth is I don’t care. Let ’em be dead. I’m happier when they’re dead.”
