“Oh,” said Joe. His suspicions were now confirmed. Charley’s motives were about as he’d thought; but he’d had to make sure.
Now, Charley trudging beside him, Joe carried the spotlight on its folded tripod on around the bend of the alley, where he handed it over to one of the patrolmen. Then he got into Charley’s unmarked car, which was waiting beside the police van, and shut the door. Now he would get a ride home, and maybe Charley would come in for a beer, and possibly somewhere along the line Charley would be more explicit. Quite possibly not, though. Almost certainly the subject they were almost discussing would not be brought up by Charley in front of Kate.
Joe had just been confirmed in a suspicion that had been growing in him for some time. He himself had acquired a reputation, which by now perhaps ran through the whole department, for having at least one super-exotic informant on the string, for being able now and then to come up with information a thousand miles beyond the reach of anyone else. This reputation, he knew, must rest on only two cases that had touched Joe’s professional and personal life during the last few years. Both cases had been weird and spectacular, though on the surface they were unconnected. Neither had been an experience he wanted to repeat. Nor did he want the reputation he seemed to have gained from them. It was quite accurate, as far as it went, but it was hardly even an iceberg-tip of truth.
He wondered now just how much more of the truth Charley Snider might suspect. And then he dismissed the wonder. Charley was street-smart, but he wasn’t imaginative to the point of craziness.
After Charley had come in for his beer, and had talked some about the chances of the Cubs, and had then gone on his way, Joe stood at his living room window which was open to the cool breeze, and looked down at the usual evening processions of headlights crowding their way along. The apartment was a fancier one than you would have expected an honest cop to be able to afford, a two-bedroom condo just off Lake Shore Drive on the reasonably far north side. Kate’s family had money.
“Charley seemed tired tonight,” Kate said. Blond and pretty, she was pacing back and forth in her new housecoat, with the baby over her shoulder, trying to get it to go to sleep. She had regained her slenderness quite nicely after the birth.
“He’s got a tough case. Series of cases. He was talking to me about it earlier.”
“Oh?”
“Hinting around, that I might be able to dig up some information that would help.”
Kate uttered a barely audible shh, and turned gracefully away; the kid was nodding off. She left the room, to return in a few moments unburdened and in utter silence, her eyebrows lifted to ask a question.
Her husband, arms folded, was now leaning with his back to the window. He told her: “I know who they want me to talk to.”
It took Kate only a moment to understand. “I see.”
“They don’t know who they want me to talk to.” Joe made a grim sound, like a poor actor trying to get off a laugh. “Honey, you know what I’m thinking? Maybe I’ll just pack it in. The job, the badge.”
Kate sat down on the sofa, whose rich fabric was blanket-covered now in defense against the baby. She patted the spot beside her where she wanted Joe to settle. “And what,” she asked, “will you do then?” Understanding had left her calm, and made her sympathetic; if she hadn’t actually heard this talk of quitting before, perhaps she had been expecting to one day hear it.
“We wouldn’t starve. There’s your money.”
“Of course we wouldn’t starve. But what would you do?”
Joe put down his empty beer can and sat down beside his wife. “What’s new with Judy?” he asked.
Kate accepted her younger sister’s relevance to the discussion. “She’s still going with that young man from the University of Chicago. I think things may be getting serious. If you’re planning to get in contact with someone, I don’t think asking Judy for help would be the way to go.”
“All her involvement with you-know-who is pretty well over, huh? Well, that’s good, anyway. That’s something. All right, how would I go about getting in contact now?”
“There is a certain emergency procedure, “ Kate said doubtfully. “But I doubt we ought to use that unless we’re having a real emergency.”
“If you doubt it, I sure as hell do too.”
Next day, driving through a more or less routine round of pawnshops, helping irate or discouraged robbery victims try to identify their stolen merchandise, Joe had his mind more often than not on Charley Snider’s problem. He heard no more today from Charley, who, Joe suspected was working overtime along with a lot of other people. There was a tip that a mass murderer, a crazed cultist wanted in New Orleans, might have come to Chicago. Anyway Charley had already passed along just about everything that was known or suspected about the Skid Row killings, and now he, Joe, was expected to come up with something helpful if he could. Expected at least to try. Where and how he got his information would be considered his own business if he wanted it that way. All good detectives cultivated informers whenever they had the chance, and the more valuable the source of information the more likely they would try to keep it secret. If Joe preferred to say nothing at all about his source, the whole department
would understand.
So there was no reason at all for him not to try to help, except he didn’t want to.
Joe spent a miserable day. He always gave himself a hard time when he did something other than
