I am writing this in the hope that it will somehow reach you before they kill me.
You will recall having met me once, Mr. Commissioner, when I received a Police Department bravery citation for having foiled, as they say, an imminent robbery at the Stillwater Trust on King Street in Rubytown, as that section of the city is called. They were giving away free toasters when the Attempted Rob occurred. I spilled a glass of red wine, do you remember? Not during the holdup attempt. I mean at the reception following the award. On your white linen suit.
I am a female police detective, twenty-nine years old, five feet, eight inches tall, and weighing one hundred and twenty-three pounds, which is slender. My hair is a sort of reddish brown, what my mother used to call auburn. I wear it cut to just above the shoulders, what my mother used to call a shag cut. My eyes are green. I look very Irish, although Watts is a British name, I think, although Olivia is Latin, which I’m not. My friends call me Livvie. I am a single woman, Mr. Commissioner; I notice from the newspapers that you are recently divorced, by the way; my condolences. My weapon is a Glock nine I carry in a tote bag, but this was taken from me along with all my identification when I was locked in here. A black woman brings me my meals. She is armed with an Uzi.
I have not been killed yet because they are waiting for orders from someone higher up. I can’t imagine why anyone would want me dead. Then again, nothing is ever simple in police work, is it, Mr. Commissioner? I guess you know that better than me. Or perhaps even better than I. I don’t even know where I am. Otherwise I would give you the address and make things really simple. But I was driven here blindfolded from the underwear factory. Which makes it somewhat complicated. So I guess I’d better take it from the top, and tell you everything that happened, and get this report out of here somehow. Then maybe for the love of God you can piece it all together and get to me in time.
Let’s start with Margie Gannon and me, or perhaps Margie and I, having an after-hours beer last Monday night in a bar called O’Malley’s a few blocks from the station house. Margie is sometimes partnered with me, although I’m known in the squadroom as “Livvie the Lone Wolverine,” which of course is the female tense of “The Lone Wolf.” Margie has blond hair she also wears short, and blue eyes, and we make a good team together, partnered or otherwise. We were sipping beer when these two detectives from the Oh-One waltzed over to join us, nice guys we worked with once on a joint narcotics bust sometime back. (I was surprised, to tell the truth, that the little police action back then hadn’t netted at leastsomebodya citation, but I know you have a lot of other things on your mind.)
Anyway, Frankie Randuzzi, who is with the Oh-One, and was on that Colombian bust I was telling you about, is getting married in June, and he was showing us this rathermodestdiamond engagement ring, I must say, but you know how much detectives are paid in this city, don’t you, even First Grades like Frankie and me. The guy with him, Jerry Aiello, anotherpaisan,couldn’t help remarking that he’d seen bigger chips than that left by cows in a pasture, to which Frankie replied it was a legit diamond and not one of these diamonds had cost some kid in Africa the loss of an arm or a leg. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, excuse the French, Commish.
Margie, it so happens, knows quite a bit about diamonds. She has been married and divorced twice and has therefore sported engagement rings of various sizes on the third finger of her left hand, more’s the pity I have not. In fact, she is fond of telling the boys around the squadroom that she gets divorced every six years and shot every three, which happens to be true. I was with her once when she took one in the left shoulder. She never wears off-the-shoulder gowns to police functions anymore, but she is very well constructed otherwise, witness the way Jerry Aiello was trying to peer down the front of her blouse.
Margie explained that there’d been a war going on forever in the Sierra Leone and in Angola, over there in Africa someplace, wherever, I always thought Angola was a max security prison in Louisiana. She said that so- called conflict diamonds were what funded the rebel groups fighting over there.
“They call themselves the RUF, which stands for the Revolutionary United Front. They’re eleven-year-old kids armed with AK-47s and machetes,” she said. “They chop off people’s arms and legs, that’s how they maintain control. But you’re wrong if you think these rocks are cheaper than a legit diamond, Frank. In fact, once this rough ice is traded and polished, it’s impossible to know where it came from. That may be one of them you’re showing us right this minute.”
I never knew Margie was so smart.
Before then, I thought she was just a good-looking babe who got shot and divorced all the time.
It just goes to show.
I did not make the acquaintance of Mercer Grant till the next day. That is not his real name. He told me right off it wasn’t his real name. He said it would be too dangerous for him to give me his real name. Grant (or Lee or Jackson or Jones or Smith or whatever his real name might have been) was a tall, light-skinned Jamaican with a neat little mustache under his nose. He came up to the squadroom around ten o’clock on that Tuesday morning in question, and he asked to talk to a police detective, of which there were only eight or nine in the squadroom that minute, it’s a wonder he didn’t trip over one of us. I signaled him over to my desk, and offered him a chair, and asked him his name.
“My name is Mercer Grant,” he said. “But that is not my real name.”
“Then what is your real name, Mr. Grant?”
“I can’t tell you my real name,” he said. “It would be too dangerous to tell you my real name.”
All of this in that sort of Jamaican lilt they have, you know? Like Harry Belafonte doing “Hey, Mr. Taliban.”
“Because, you see,” I said, “we’re required to fill in the name and address spaces on these complaint forms. Plus a lot of other information.”
“I am not making a complaint,” Mercer said.
“Then why are you here?” I asked.
“I am here because my wife is missing,” he said.
“Well, that’s a complaint,” I said.
“Not in the case ofmywife,” he said, and grinned, because he was making a joke, you see. He was saying nobody wascomplainingthat his wife was missing. He had a gold tooth in the center of his mouth. The tooth had a little diamond chip in one corner. His mouth lit up like a Christmas tree when he grinned. He thought his little joke was pretty funny. He kept grinning.
“Well,” I said, “what is yourwife’sname then?”
“I can’t tell you her name,” he said. “It would be too dangerous.”
“Then how am I supposed to find her if you won’t give me her name?” I asked reasonably.
“You’re the detective, not me,” he said reasonably. “Although I must tell you I’ve never dealt with a female detective before, and I’m not sure how happy I am about it,” the sexist pig.
“What kind of detectives have you dealt with before, Mr. Grant?”
“I have never been in trouble with the law,” he said. “I’m reporting my wife missing because it’s my duty as a citizen. My cousin Ambrose said I should report her missing.”
“Ambrose what?” I asked at once.
“Ambrose Fields. But that’s not his real name, either.”
“Does anyone in your family have a real name?”
“Yes, but these names would be too dangerous to reveal.”
“Can you tell me where you live?”
“No.”
“Can you give me your phone number?”
“No.”
“Well, Mr. Grant, let’s suppose by some weird stroke of luck—me being a female detective and all—Idofind your wife. How am I supposed to let you know I’ve got her?”
“I will stay in touch.”
“I have to tell you, you don’t sound tooeagerto find her, now do you?”
He thought this over for a moment. Then he said, “The truth is I don’t think youwillfind her.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I think she may already be dead.”
“I see.”
“Yes.”
