Thirty seconds of the thin clarinet from the stage, shouted orders at the bar, giggling girls and arch-voiced women. I thought they might be the last sounds I ever heard.
“Walter,” he said. “My name’s Walter Finch. And I think our Phyllis LeBlanc might have known what she was doing when she brought you home, Devajyoti Patil.”
“I love her,” I said, like some John in a two-penny paperback. But it didn’t feel like a stupid thing to say.
“She’s a beautiful killer—she has that effect on people.”
“She’s not a killer. She’s a woman who—I want to take her away from here.”
He laughed. “You do.”
“The way she lives—it’s destroying her.”
“Now, that’s just the human condition.” He looked at my glass, the olive crouching in the shallows at the bottom. “Let me show you something.”
He got off the stool. He walked out of the bar. I followed him. I thought he might kill me, but Finn had told me I was about to lose the case. I thought he would kill me, but if he didn’t there was a chance I could leave with her. Pea, with the bloody knives and bloody hands. Pea, with the heart like a steel trap.
(“Why do you love me?” I had asked her.
“You believe that I can be better than I am.”)
He drove us to Midtown, to a gambling parlor fronted by a mediocre Italian restaurant on West 43rd Street. The operation was headed by one Lefty Manusco, a well-connected subordinate of Lucky Luciano known for his connections to prostitution. The cops on this beat never could seem to get enough to shut him down. I pretended not to recognize it.
The back room was crowded with men and women elegantly dressed, politely pissing streams of money down Cosa Nostra’s pockets. A fair number of these women were prostitutes. Expensive ones. You could pick them out because they never bet money and they drank with professional determination.
“Let’s play craps,” Walter said. I wasn’t sure I knew how to play craps. I didn’t say so. I recognized a man at the table. He was sliding his chips across the felt like hockey pucks. Laughing with his hand on a prostitute’s ass. She didn’t bother to laugh back. He didn’t look up when we sat down. Then the whispers started and he did, but he only recognized Walter.
We worked in different precincts, but Finn had pointed him out to me as a fellow undercover—Benjamin Erenhart, a veteran of the narcotics beat. Friends in high places. Finn had made sure to tell me that, in case our paths had crossed.
“Who’s your buddy, Red Man?” Erenhart said, as he slid the last of his dwindling pile of chips to the stickman. I didn’t know how much he had started with. But for a man on a cop’s salary, he looked pretty sanguine at the prospect of losing three hundred dollars more.
“The angel’s new boyfriend,” said Walter, his voice flat. I felt the sudden stares of everyone at the table like the warm tongue of a large dog. But I matched Walter’s nonchalance. For better or worse, my relationship with Pea protected me better than any Luger ever could. And Walter had made his point: I had put myself in this world. Now he would see to it that I couldn’t get out of it easily.
Erenhart’s lips drew back from his teeth, like he had knocked back a bitter spirit. “Is he, now? And you aren’t afraid she will knife you in your sleep, boy?”
Lefty Manusco’s back room was not integrated to anyone but Walter, and friends of Walter. Still, Erenhart should have been more careful. “She’s an angel of justice. There are plenty guiltier than me for her to take care of first.”
The cop drew back. The working girl on his lap got quickly to her feet, tottered in her high heels, and stilled at a look from a man in a gray pinstripe suit, sitting by the bar.
“Is that right?” Erenhart said. His face was flushed. He was smiling. Then he laughed. “Better you than me, bud,” he said, shaking his head. When he ran out of chips a few minutes later, that man by the bar came over and told the boxman to lend him another thousand. Walter amiably lost a hundred while I watched. He seemed to think that was enough. We left a little after midnight.
“That man,” he said quietly. “Is a cop. Plainclothesman. He’s at least twenty grand in the hole with Manusco. That’s not counting the women. He killed one of them last year. They said it was an accident. Hell, I half believe them, but that’s only because Erenhart ain’t ever gentle.”
“A cop?” I felt as exposed as sunburned skin under sandpaper.
Walter Finch gave me a long look. “That’s what I said. The law in this town,” he said, “it isn’t what it used to be. Good for us, I guess.”
“Good for us.”
Vice squad never had been able to get a charge to stick to Manusco. Finn had known, of course. That’s why he’d said what he had. I’d just been too green to listen.
A week later, Pea came home smelling of French-milled soap and old pennies. She had been crying. We fucked each other for hours, until everything hurt.
“Did you know?” Finn asked me, over another bad midnight dinner of egg creams and steak fries.
“Not until she already did it.”
He lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the fries. “Off the record,” he said. “Erenhart was a bastard. He had it coming. You ever meet him?”
“No.”
“Better for you. Not that I hold with executions. But some of those bad eggs on the force … even Valentine didn’t have much to say about it … well, your lady serves a purpose.”
“I want to get her out of this. Take her upstate. I can work undercover without her.”
Finn laughed. I heard the edge, but he didn’t take it all the way out. Trent Sullivan had crawled
