shoulders.”
As they backed away from him, covering their embarrassment with awkward grins, Sergeant Boyle turned and stared with cold eyes at the other pedestrians who had stopped to witness Hilda Smedley’s pathetic anguish.
“Everything snap-ass in your homes? Kids all straight-A students? Nobody banging his secretary or sneaking a few belts of whiskey before breakfast? Take care of your own lives. You heard me. Move!”
Dennis St. John tapped Sergeant Boyle on the arm and nodded with an air of gravity and importance toward Hilda Smedley.
“What we got here, Rusty?”
“What the fuck you think we’ve got?” Rusty Boyle said. “I’ll tell you what we got here. We got a fucking traffic jam here. Will you get your car off the street? Pull it into the parking lot.”
There was no reason to shout at him, Sergeant Boyle realized; St. John would probably handle this case, but the detective’s dumbness, which was annoyingly coupled to a manner of pompous self-importance, gave Boyle a pain in the ass.
“I’ll move it,” St. John said. “But I thought something was breaking. That you guys might need some muscle.”
Sergeant Boyle stared in disgust at the backed-up lines of honking automobiles. “What’s breaking are my damned eardrums,” he said.
“Come on, cool it, Sergeant,” St. John said in a petulant voice, and waddled back to his car.
Rusty Boyle noticed then that one man still stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to the parking lot. The man was forty or forty-five, Rusty Boyle judged, wearing slacks and a sweater over a sports shirt. His hair was thinning and gray, and his features were nondescript; a worthy burgher, a taxpaying Mr. Straight, Boyle thought, except there was something haunted in his eyes which were large and clear behind bifocals. He didn’t look the type, Boyle thought, to be getting his jollies at the sight of a sobbing, battered woman, but Boyle had stopped judging people by appearances ever since he collared an altar boy who had hacked a janitor into bloody pieces and then had set fire to him and, in addition to which, had seemed largely pleased by the charred wreckage he had made out of what had once been a human being.
Boyle walked over to the man and said, “Look, the lady’s been through a rough time of it. You’re not helping staring at her.”
“I want to talk to you, Officer,” the man said. “My name is Ransom, John Ransom.” He pointed at the second-story windows of an apartment which overlooked the parking lot. “I heard her scream. I looked out my window just as she was pushed out of the car.”
“You see the guy?”
“Just a glimpse. I couldn’t identify him.”
Well, that figured, Boyle thought with weary exasperation. No way would he get involved. Saw a girl being raped, took his sweet time to come down and lend a hand.
“Was he black or white?” Boyle asked him.
“I’m pretty sure he was white.”
“Any guess on his age?”
“I really couldn’t say,” Ransom said. He fished into the pocket of his slacks, removed a slip of paper with numbers on it, and handed the paper to Sergeant Boyle. “But I got the license number of his car.”
“Well, what were you planning to do? Save it for Christmas?”
“I wasn’t dressed, you see. I just had a robe on. So I had to get on some clothes. That’s why it took me so long to get down here.”
Ransom’s tone was defensive and apologetic. “I got here as soon as I could.”
“You did fine, you did just fine, sir.”
Why the hell am I chewing everybody out? Sergeant Boyle was thinking, in one of his rare but honest moments of self-criticism. First St. John and now this nice John Doe of a citizen.
“Look, sir,” he said by way of making amends. “If everybody in the city did as good as you did tonight, we could close down half our precincts.”
Sergeant Boyle gave the license number to St. John, saying in a pleasant and conciliatory tone, “I’d suggest you get Miss Smedley checked out at the hospital and bust that stud quick.”
“Thanks, Sergeant,” St. John said, staring with grave intensity at the license number. “I’ll call Motors and get a make on this plate.”
Dumb. What was the use? Where else but Motors? The dog pound?
The morgue? Macy’s basement?
“Thanks again, Sergeant,” St. John said. “I’ll get this lady checked out at the hospital and bust the stud quick. I’ll see you around.”
Let’s hope not. .
Sergeant Boyle started for his car but stopped when he noticed that Ransom was standing on the sidewalk outside the parking lot, staring at him with those haunted, pain-bright eyes.
Still feeling a bit repentant, Sergeant Boyle walked back and gave him a pat on the shoulder.
“I’ll say it again, you did beautiful tonight,” he said.
“I’ve got cancer,” Ransom then said, but so simply and unexpectedly that the words struck Sergeant Boyle like blows under his heart.
Thanks, he thought wearily, thanks a lot. I don’t get enough death and shit on this job, bodies in the river, bodies hanging from ropes, heads blown apart by crazies, but I got to have more of it handed to me by a civilian who probably thinks that’s what he pays his taxes for.
“My wife doesn’t know about it,” Ransom said, and smiled uneasily as if to indicate this was a casual oversight on his part. “I sell upholstery fabric for B. Altman, it’s part of their at-home decorator service, but a couple of months back the weight of the fabric case got too much for me. My arm and chest were hurting. I haven’t been working at all for the last three weeks, but I haven’t told my wife that either.” Ransom smiled again, and this time the nervous flicker across his lips suggested that he and the sergeant might be sharing a mild joke at Mrs. Ransom’s expense.
“Jesus,” Sergeant Boyle said, “when are you going to tell her?”
“I just don’t know,” Mr. Ransom said, with another dismissing smile. “I didn’t believe the first doctor I guess nobody does. But the second one said the same thing. I still go out every morning like I used to, and when I get home at night, I have to make up stories for her. That’s the worst part of it. I’m not much good at making things up.”
“What do you mean? Why do you have to make up stories?”
“Well, I tell her about my calls. Our daughter’s away at school, she’s in premed, so there’s just the two of us. So I tell my wife what fabrics people like and any little stories I can dream up, like some lady matching a sofa to her poodle or maybe a redheaded grandchild.
Then I sit at my desk and write up orders on sales that I pretend I made during the day.” He sighed, but his smile and manner remained oddly apologetic. “I just don’t know how to tell her,” he said. “It will be so hard on her. There’s no money for my daughter to finish college, to go on to med school. I really don’t know what to say to her either. My daughter, I mean.”
Police work had not made Detective Sergeant Boyle a fatalist; on the contrary, despite massive evidence which failed to support his view, Rusty Boyle remained an optimistic and charitable human being who detested what seemed to him a manifest unfairness in life. Here was a prime example of it.
Sergeant Boyle’s father had died when Rusty was four years old, and this had seemed a gross unfairness to him, and he had never truly got over it. But the scales had been balanced by his mother, a marvelous person, who had believed that man had no business trying to get up to the moon, but had also quoted Micheas, Chapter Six, Verse Eight, to her son, saying in her musical Irish voice, “What more does the Lord require of you, but to do just, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”
He had had all that. And he had Joyce, whose love for him and his for her was much deeper and even more significant than the riotous physical pleasure they took in each other. And he had the Gypsy to work for, while this poor bastard had a body laced and woven with pain and was staring death in the eyes and couldn’t even tell his wife about it. And on top of that, forced to write fake orders and tell her funny stories while his guts were dying
