pick up. I’ll needle you once or twice about Ruth and the boys. You throw something at me, tell me what you want, and I’ll be going.”
That should have gotten him, but it didn’t. What was worse was that he turned around with a sad near-smile on his face and his scarred sausage fingers engulfing his cup. His hair was steel gray and cut short as always. His cop gut hung over his belt and his tie was loose around the collar of his size-sixteen-and-a-half neck.
“I got the word Monday,” Phil said, looking down at the dregs in his cup and shaking it around a little. “I made captain. I’m moving down the hall this afternoon.”
Four wisecracks came like shadows into my mind but I let them keep going and said, “That’s great Phil. You deserve it.”
Phil nodded in agreement. “I paid for it,” he said. “I paid.”
And so, I thought, did a stadium-load of criminals and people who just got in Phil’s way. For the first ten years of being a cop, Phil had tried to single-handedly and double-footedly smash every lawbreaker unlucky enough to come within his smell. He kicked, bent, broke, twisted bodies and the law, and gained a reputation for violence I could have told Jimmy Fiddler about when I was ten. The second ten years, after he made lieutenant, had been like the first decade but sour. Crime hadn’t stopped. It had gotten bigger and worse. If Phil had paid attention to the books our old man had given him from time to time, he would have known all this from Jaubert or the cop in
“Seidman’s moving in here,” he went on. “He’s up for lieutenant next month. Your pal Cawelti might move up too.”
“That will make me feel safer at nights,” I said.
“Enough shit,” Phil said, putting down his coffee cup and pulling his tie off. “I’m never going higher than captain. There’s no place higher for me to go. So, no more damned ties. No more fooling around.”
“You’ve been fooling around all these years?” I said, looking into a grin I didn’t like, a grin that made me feel a twinge of sympathy for the unknown offender who next came within the grasp of my brother.
“Eleanor Roosevelt,” he said, throwing the tie on the desk. I think it was a tie I had once given him, picked up as a partial payment from Hy of Hy’s Clothes For Him for finding Hy’s nephew, who had departed with Hy’s weekly cashbox and was spending it freely in a San Bernardino bar when I found him. Hy had a bad habit of losing his relatives and a worse habit of paying me off in unwanted clothes when I found them.
“Eleanor Roosevelt,” I repeated sagely.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Phil said, leaning forward, his fists on the desk. The pose was decidedly simian, I noted, an observation I managed to keep from sharing with him.
“Seidman was following her this morning,” he went on. “That’s what he was doing in that nearsighted geek’s office.”
“I’ll tell Shelly you send him your best,” I said sincerely.
Phil didn’t answer. He just stared at me with brown, wet eyes, his lower lip pushing out.
“The Secret Service doesn’t tell us anything. The FBI doesn’t tell us anything,” he continued. “It came to us from the mayor’s office, straight in here. I’m responsible. I’m on the line. I don’t think they can take captain away from me, but they can make me the captain of canned shit if this gets screwed up.”
“Well put,” I said.
“So,” he said, evenly bouncing his fists on the desk, “I’m going to ask you some questions. You are going to answer the questions. You are not going to play games because you know what I can do to people who play games. You remember Italian Mack?”
I didn’t want to remember what Phil had done to Italian Mack. What he had done to Italian Mack had probably kept him a lieutenant for an extra three years.
“Ask,” I said, back to the wall.
“What the hell is the president’s wife doing coming to your office?”
I couldn’t stop it. It came out of the little kid who lives inside me and doesn’t give a final damn about my bruised and broken body. “Looking for campaign contributions from leading citizens,” I said. But I overcame the kid and before Phil could get out from behind the desk. I soothed, “Wait, wait, hold on. She had a job for me.”
He stopped halfway around the desk. From beyond his door, a single voice shrieked out in Spanish, “No
“What kind of job could you do for her that the FBI, the Secret Service, and the L.A. police couldn’t do?” he asked. It was a reasonable question.
“Find a dog,” I said. “I swear, find a dog. A friend of hers in Los Angeles, Jack Warner’s wife, lost her dog. Mrs. Roosevelt promised to help her find it but she can’t go to you or the FBI on a personal thing like this. She’s had enough crap in the papers and on the radio without having people say she’s using the government’s time and money to find lost pets for big campaign donors.”
It sounded kind of reasonable and was a little bit true at the same time. I don’t know where it came from, but I heard it coming out of me when I needed it. It was usually like that. I was one hell of an on-the-spot liar. It was what every good private detective had to be in a world of liars. Phil, on the other hand, was a lousy liar. He didn’t have to lie. He had a cop’s badge and the gun that went with it.
“Why you?” he asked, pausing, his head cocked to the side.
“You know I used to work for Warner’s. They throw me business once in a while.”
“Warner would have had the gulls going for your liver if he had his way,” Phil said. “He hates your face.”
“We have an understanding,” I lied. “I did some work for him a few years back and-”
“Toby, how much of this is horseshit?” His hand slammed down on the desk sending a spray of pencils flying from the clay cup his son Nate had made for him five years ago. Beyond the closed door the Mexican guy seemed to be whimpering in sympathy for me.
“About half,” I said honestly, which was a lie. “Phil, it’s nothing, a missing dog, a two-bit case. No scandal, no politics, no danger for the First Lady, just a lost dog. I said I’d keep it quiet, but, okay, call Mrs. Warner, check it out. I promised I wouldn’t tell, but the hell with it. Check it out. I need the few bucks. It’s either look for a lost pooch or do the night guard shift at a defense plant, and you know how I hate uniforms.”
Phil pulled his pouting lip back in and looked at me for about half a minute while I tried on the wide-open, sincere, and slightly pathetic face I had come near perfecting by looking into the mirror on humid summer nights.
Finally he sighed, a sigh to take in all of his troubles and those of the Allies. “Get out,” he said, turning his back again. This time he put his hands behind him. “If anything happens on this, anything, I’ll come for you, Toby. I’ll come and all the bad times in the past will be Mother Goose compared to it.”
“Thanks Phil,” I said, inching for the door. “Give my best to Ruth and the kids.”
“Ruth wants you to come for dinner, Sunday,” he said gruffly.
“I’ll be there,” I said, my hand on the door knob. “And Phil, you deserve to make captain.”
Something like a laugh came from him. I couldn’t see the face that matched it, but the voice had a touch of gravel in it. “The war got me this promotion,” he said softly. “Younger guys are gone, younger lieutenants. Tojo and Hitler got this promotion for me. Without them I’d go out a lieutenant. Funny, huh?”
“You’re selling yourself short, brother,” I said.
“I’m selling myself at street prices,” he said. “I can live with that. What’s your price?”
I left without telling him I had no minimum. What I did have was a pocketful of Eleanor Roosevelt’s cash. Seidman didn’t see me leave. Across the room I saw his thin frame leaning over to finish filling his artichoke crate. Caweiti was out of sight, probably discussing current events or Goethe with the Mexican in one of the interrogation rooms down the hall. Slaughter and a uniformed kid were in earnest, head-to-head conversation with the Negro kid still handcuffed to the bench. He was nodding his head in full agreement to everything they whispered to him, probably confessing to crimes committed a century before he was born.
I almost collided with a well-dressed woman wearing a tiny black hat with a large black feather. She was about forty, maybe a little older, good-looking in a way that reminded me of my ex-wife, and perfumed heavily enough to break through the squadroom smell, at least at close range.
“Excuse me,” she said, looking around the room with obvious distaste, “can you tell me where I might find the detective in charge of providing security for bridge parties?”
“Bridge parties?” I said.
