B. Bad News
Eventually I reached the outskirts of the U, with its handsome progressive neighborhood, integrated since early in the century, its bookstores and vague bohemian air. U Inn was at the corner of Calvert and University, and I did a long tour of the parking lot, then jogged right through the front door, waving to the doorman, playing today's role as another hotel guest, a traveling business type living on snacks from the mini-bar and morning aerobics. I ran all the way to the elevator, hopped in with a fat woman who was whistling to herself, and rode up to 6.
Room 622 was quiet. I stuck my ear to the door and rattled the knob. As I figured, there were not going to be any of Pigeyes's tricks in a mid-city hotel. The doors were reinforced and the locks had been replaced with those solid-state electronic gizmos, little brass boxes with lights that required sliding in some plastic card they give you these days instead of a key. I knocked hard. Nothing doing. A suspect fellow in a lizard-skin jacket came by and I kept my eye on him until he got some ice and disappeared under the exit sign at the other end of the dim hall. The hotel corridor was quiet, except for the whine of a vacuum inside one of the rooms.
I'd planned the next move. The guy on the phone had told me nobody here knew Kam on sight. I had some second thoughts, but I had to count on sliding by. That was the point of leading a perilous life. I needed to find what in the hell Bert'd been up to. And I'd be a lot better off sneaking up on him than announcing myself. I took the Kam Roberts credit card out of my wallet.
At the reception desk in the lobby, I talked to a cute blonde, a student, I imagined, like many of the employees.
'I'm Mr Roberts in 622. I went out for a little trot and like a fool I grabbed my credit card when I left instead of my room pass.' I showed her the credit card casually, tapping an edge on the counter. 'If you could just get me another.'
She disappeared in back. This was frankly a pretty rummy place, especially after the big-bucks life where you get used to going first class. The shabbiness of course was excused by a convenient location — there wasn't another hotel within a mile of the university — and an atmosphere of self-conscious boosterism. The U Inn, as you would expect, is pretty rah-rah. Everything was roped in U colors, vermilion and white, and near the desk there were pennants and pom-poms and U sweatshirts tacked to the walls. The Hands basketball schedule, a cardboard poster featuring a color photo of Bobby Adair, this year's wannabe star, was pinned up on either side of the desk, and as I studied it I realized that a Hands basketball game probably would have brought Bert back to town no matter what.
But there was none today. Not even last night. Or tomorrow. In fact, a lot of things didn't fit. The home games were set on the schedule in vermilion, the away games in black. I didn't have Kam's bank card bill with me, but I'd been staring holes in it for eighteen hours and I was pretty sure that I had committed most of the entries to memory. What bothered me was that the days didn't match. December 18, the last time Kam was here, the Hands were at home. But according to the schedule, they'd been in Bloomington and Lafayette and Kalamazoo since then, and on different dates than the ones when Kam had rung up charges in the same towns.
'Mr Roberts?' The blonde had returned. 'Can I see your credit card again for a moment?' I'd kept it out and she removed it from my hand. I had some instinct to start running, but the girl looked like she'd rolled in off a haywagon, with those sweet eyes the color of cornflowers. One of America's twenty million blondes with looks too standard to conceal any scam. She disappeared again into the office, but was gone just a second.
'Mr Roberts,' she said when she returned, 'Mr Trilby would like to see you for one minute in back.' She opened a door for me and pointed to the small rear office, but I hung on the threshold, heart fluttering like a moth.
'Is there a problem?'
'I think he said he had a message.'
Ah yes. Me old bud Mack Malloy had called. A perceptive fellow, Trilby probably wanted to tell me that Mack sounded like a phony. There were three men in back, a black man behind a desk who I took to be Trilby and the wormy-looking guy I'd seen upstairs in the hall. The third one turned to face me last.
Pigeyes.
I was in deep.
C. Would You Care If Your Partners Did This to You?
This is not an especially pretty story, Elaine. Pigeyes and I worked tac nearly two years, life and death and plenty of whiskey, lots of laughs, I'm the former college-boy art student, wet behind the ears, he's the guy who's been street-smart since he was seven. I'm talking out loud about Edward Hopper and Edvard Munch when we drive down city streets at night and he's feeling up every hooker. Some team.
Working with this guy was always an adventure. Pigeyes was one of those cops in the old style, who think parents take care of kids, you go to church and pray to God to save your soul, and everything after that sort of depends on where you stand, how you look at it, right and wrong, you know, sometimes you have to squint. I'd been riding with him about eighteen months when we hit a dope house, just a small packaging factory in a dismal apartment building. We had followed some little shitbum off the street, pretty sure we'd seen him swapping packages, and then, afraid we'd got made, decided to go through the door in the name of hot pursuit before any backup arrived. Pigeyes was always that kind of cowboy — he thought he was in the movies, strung out on the rush of danger as bad as if he were sticking a spike in his arm.
Anyway, you've seen the next scene at the Odeon: We come through with guns drawn, a lot of yelling and carrying on in two or three different languages, people jumping out the windows and onto the fire escapes, and some poor bastard running first one way, then the other with a seal-a-meal under one arm and a scale under the other. I kick in the door of the John and there's a gal sitting on the can with her print skirt around her belly, holding a baby in one hand, using the other to push a baggy full of powder up herself.
We got four people facedown on the floor. Pigeyes did his usual raging, sticking his service revolver in their ears and saying various terrible things until somebody whimpered or literally shit their trousers, then he turned his attention to a little card table in the corner of the living room which was covered with money, I mean a lot, lying there in heaps like it was just paper. Pigeyes had radioed for the narcs to come help us with the arrest, but without skipping a beat he counted out two piles of bills, three or four grand each, and handed me one. I took it but handed the money back in the car, after Narcotics had shown up.
'What's this?' he asked.
'I'm goin to law school.' I'd been accepted by then. 'So?'
'So I shouldn't be doin this shit.'
'Hey, get real.' He read me out then. He beat me up with the truth. Did I think the narc guys wouldn't take a nibble out of this? What were we supposed to do, leave it in a nice pile so that the shitface beaners could have it all back when Judge Nowinski decided we weren't in hot pursuit? Were we gonna wait around and hope that the mopes in the Forfeiture Unit actually took some time off from the golf course to try to get a writ, in which case the cash'd get lost in the clerk's office or maybe in some judge's chambers? Did I think the beaners were gonna say something? Every one of them didn't know nothin, man. They were wet and waitin for a trip across the river. 'Or do you just want to be able to go tell Momma?' he asked.
'Hey, give me a break.' We'd sort of been down this pass before. What he did, he did, I figured, he wasn't the only one and he made some effort not to involve me. Now he wanted me aboard. 'You do what you wanna, I'll do what I wanna. I got a rest-of-my-life to think about. That's all.'
He sat there watching me, a nasty-looking fellow normally, with a sullen face going to jowls and those little whiteless eyes, his expression now slackened and mistrustful. This was what they call a delicate situation. Like being with the Yakuza. You got to cut off a finger to prove you're in. What was he up to? I think, in retrospect, he had a point to make, that before I departed for the world I ought to know that there's no judging, that everybody has their moments. So I brought the money home and showed it to my wife and, after leaving it in my sock drawer for three weeks, gave it to my sister for St Bridget's. Yeah, Elaine, that's where it came from, it wasn't, like I said, a stationhouse collection. I got a note back from the eighth-grade class president which I've kept for all these years, a pointless thing to do, since I wasn't going to tell anyone the real story, inasmuch as I was a policeman who was supposed to arrest Pigeyes's unlawful ass right on the spot, not sing 'Que Sera, Sera', or make a charitable donation of what was, in law, money I'd stolen.
