of his. We held our chairs down. Rusty disappeared around the car and got in on the driver’s side, to roll another cigarette, I assumed.
He came up to the table and said with a crooked smile, “You’re a real bad penny, Cowboy. I see you brought the whole riot squad with you this time.”
“Captain,” I said with a nod. “This is my partner, Ski Agassi.”
Culhane pulled his sunglasses down an inch and stared over them at me. He nodded at Ski, who sat as he usually does, straight-backed, with his melon-sized hands on his knees. Culhane went to the booth and ordered a lemonade.
“It really wasn’t necessary; you made your point the other night,” he said as he came back to the table and sat down. “I owe you an apology about that. There was some… miscommunication between the boys and me. I assume you didn’t get mussed up too much, considering the outcome.”
“The one with the one eye kicks like a mule. Did he locate it, by the way?”
He nodded. “It was okay after he washed the mud off. That was some fancy footwork you showed Max and Lenny.”
“The one with two arms should have grabbed me.”
“That would be Max. Lenny hits harder.”
“Lenny hits very hard. I’ve still got a couple of very sore ribs. Out of curiosity, are all your cops walking- wounded?”
He looked over at me and said, “Lenny lost his arm and Max lost his eye in the same battle. And the reason Rusty doesn’t say much is he caught shrapnel in the throat at the same time. It missed his jugular but took out his voice box.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that so I kept my mouth shut.
“Three damn good cops nobody else will have,” he said. “There’s a couple more around. You’ll probably meet them if you make this a habit.”
“That the fight you won the Silver Star and Purple Heart in?”
“You been doing your homework.”
“It was in the Times. That’s the kind of juice they always salvage from canned resumes. Which reminds me, Max broke the car’s window with his head. It cost the city eleven bucks to fix.”
“Did you have to pay for it?”
“No, thank God. On my salary that’s a significant sum of money.”
“Two and a quarter a month plus another fifty after you put in your first ten years.”
“You been doing a little homework yourself.”
“Public record. I’m a taxpayer; they have to tell me.”
“What else do you know about me?”
“You made detective after only five years on the force and got kicked up to sergeant three years later. That says a lot about your capabilities. Got a bit of a temper, which gets you in hot water on occasion. You drive a four- year-old Olds, which cost you a hundred bucks used, live in a one-bedroom house. No debts to speak about. You’re unmarried, thirty-four years old, went to college for a coupla years, California State, then dropped out to become a cop. Why, I don’t know.”
“I ran out of money,” I said. “And got tired of slinging hash in the White House hamburger joint on Sepulveda for fifteen cents an hour when everybody else was getting rich playing the stock market.”
“They all went broke two years later.”
“Yeah. And I had a guaranteed job with a pension and a health policy.”
“Somehow I don’t think the amenities had a lot to do with it.”
“What gives you that idea?”
“I told you before, I been around cops all my life. The best and the worst. I can read ’em all. You’re the most dangerous kind.”
“Dangerous?” I laughed.
“Yeah. You’re a bulldog. When you’re on to something, you bite it in the ass and don’t let go, even when it’s the wrong something.”
“Is there supposed to be a message somewhere in all that?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
I let that go and backed up a few sentences. “Those amenities you were talking about get more and more important as time goes by,” I said.
“The way you play the game, I’d take the short-end odds you won’t be around to collect that pension.”
I gave him a long stare and said, “You keep saying things that sound like you mean something else.”
He chuckled. “Nah, just a guess. You like to play just off the edge, don’t you?”
“Like how?”
“Like coming up here, announcing your arrival, annoying a lot of leading citizens, then going right back at it after I tell you there’s nothing to be learned. You take down two boys twice your size and give me the message in a paper bag.”
“Is that why you had your boys work me over?”
He looked out over the bay and sipped his lemonade before answering.
“My friend Brett Merrill once told me I should never make a wish out loud, there are people around who might believe me and make it happen. I do that. Something happens, I get a little pissed, maybe I say something like, ‘I wish a piano would fall off a tall building on that guy,’ something like that. I don’t mean it, I’m just bitching out loud. Next thing I know, a Steinway lands on somebody.”
“Lenny hits like a Steinway.”
“You do a pretty good job taking care of yourself. Playing the edge. That’s why you’re a sergeant when most guys your age are still wearing out their shoe soles on a beat out in the boondocks somewhere. I’m not criticizing, mind you. In my book it calls for a certain amount of admiration.”
I changed the subject suddenly. “You didn’t tell me the victim in that car wreck at the overlook was Ben Gorman’s son,” I said.
He gave me the hard eye and said, “You didn’t ask.”
“It wouldn’t have occurred to me.”
“Me either. It was a car wreck. A young man we all loved was killed. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It happened the night of the Grand View massacre.”
“Well, we didn’t find the car until the next morning. Somebody coming up Cliffside spotted it.”
“That was some night.”
“It was the saddest night in my life,” he said. “I lost Buck Tallman and my godson, back-to-back.”
“He was your godson?”
“Ben Gorman is my best friend.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound…”
“Suspicious?”
“No. Unfeeling.”
“That’s a decent thought. Thank you.”
“Is that what you meant by your life changing forever on the stone bench up there?”
“Isabel and Ben never got over it. Neither did I.”
“I think we saw her about a half hour ago.”
“Isabel Gorman? Where?”
I looked up the cliffside. “Up there. Dressed to the teeth. She threw some flowers down the side.”
He stared up at the overlook for several seconds and then nodded. “She does that once a week. Has for over twenty years,” he said, and there was a deep sadness in his voice.
Ski didn’t say a word. He sat there with his hands on his knees, watching through eyes that revealed neither boredom nor interest. But he wasn’t missing a thing.
Nobody said anything now. I looked back out in the harbor. The big cruiser was tied down at the end of the pier. Gorman was nowhere to be seen. The Duesenberg was still sitting there.
“So old Ben’s going to give me the dodge again,” I said finally.
