“So okay.”
“Que puede hacer?”he asked, and shrugged.
“Nada,”she said.
I watched him as he came down the steps into the basement.
“So, Olivia,” he said. “We meet again.”
“Apparently so, Commissioner,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
“Does she know?” he asked the black man.
“Nothing,” Ambrose said.
“Then kill her,” the Commissioner said.
There was on his face a look of ineffable sadness. I could tell he felt badly, or perhap seven bad.
“It isn’t midnight yet,” I said.
“But who’s counting?”
“I am. Can you please tell me what’s going on here?”
“Well, since you’ll never be able to tell anyone else,” the Commissioner said, “I see no reason why you shouldn’t share my little secret.”
This was a line I had heard many times before in detective work, and I was surprised to hear it coming from someone as erudite, you should pardon the expression, as the Commissioner, who surely knew that if you told someone he or she would never be able to tell anyone else, then in the next thirty seconds or so he or she was going to kick you in the balls and tell everyone in the entire world.
Strengthened by this knowledge, I began working on the ties that bound me, so to speak, laboring secretly behind my back with a little razor I normally use for shaving my legs and armpits while the Commissioner began telling me what his little secret was.
It turned out that spilling red wine on his white linen suit was only the first of a series of real or imagined affronts he had suffered at my hands over the many years I’d been on the job. Never mind that this was his favorite suit, which he had bought after hearing Tom Wolfe speak at a Barnes & Noble one time long ago. Never mind that I had once crashed my motorcycle into the rear fender of his personal car, which happened to be a Mercedes-Benz—and this is not product placement, believe me; I am a police officer and above such mercantile pursuits. Never mind, too, that I had once—inadvertently—called him an asshole in the presence of several reporters, but that was when he was still only Chief of Detectives and I hadn’t known at the time that he would become the Commish. What really bothered him—
And, honestly, I don’t know how people can be so petty, I mean it.
Whatreallybothered him—it now turned out as strand by strand I worked with the razor on the ropes binding me to the chair—was that I had once turned over to the Property Clerk’s Office a large pile of so-called conflict diamonds without reporting to the Commish that I was about to do so.
This rough ice had come from rebel groups in Sierra Leone or Angola and was virtually impossible to trace, as some enterprising detective had undoubtedly figured out before he committed what was now famous in police archives as the African Connection Theft, later immortalized as a movie starring a promising young actor named Peter Coe, now serving a five-and-dime upstate for possession—but I digress.
As I was saying, or perhaps evenlikeI was saying, the Commissioner himself could have been the one who got his hands on thatpile of blood diamonds sitting on a shelf in the Property Clerk’s Office, instead of some dumb detective from a precinct in the sticks, if only I had told him I was about to turn in the recovered loot as evidence. If I had mentioned my intentions, the Commissioner would now be sipping delicious Veuve Cliquot champagne at a fine Club Med someplace—which, again, is not product placement, but exactly what he said.
“You should have filed a report to the Commissioner,” he said. “I should have been informed. If it hadn’t been for you I would right this minute be sipping delicious Veuve Cliquot champagne at a fine Club Med someplace instead of standing here about to put a bullet in your head,” which was when he pulled a nine-millimeter Glock from a shoulder holster under his jacket.
“Police! Hold it right there!” someone shouted from the stairway, and my good friend and sometime partner Margie Gannon, who got divorced every six years and shot every three, came charging down the steps with a gun in herhand.
By coincidence, it so happened that Margie had been shot almost three years ago to the day. So naturally, the Commissioner shot her once again, and she came tumbling down the stairs, yelling obscenities I won’t repeat. I was out of the chair by then, my hands free. I grabbed a convenient lug wrench sitting in a box near the furnace, and I hit the Commissioner on the head with it, God forgive me for he outranked me, and then I turned on Ambrose and Marie and said, “Okay, who’s next here?”
Nobody was next here.
It was truly all over.
About the Author
EDMCBAINis the first American to receive the Diamond Dagger, the British Crime Writers Association’s highest award. He also holds the Mystery Writers of America’s prestigious Grand Master Award. His most recent 87th Precinct novel wasMoney, Money, Money.Under his own name—Evan Hunter—he has enjoyed a writing career that has spanned almost five decades, from his first novel,The Blackboard Jungle,in 1954, to the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’sThe Birds,toCandyland,written in tandem with his alter ego, Ed McBain, toThe Moment She Was Gone,published last year.
