Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [65]
I got some marrow bones out of the fridge and put them on to boil while I changed clothes and listened to the news. I switched to the police band for the local precinct, using the crystals I wasn’t supposed to be able to buy over the counter. The radio runs into an antenna lead, and the antenna itself runs up through the useless chimney stack on the roof, protruding about a foot. I got perfect reception, but all it picked up were routine crime-in-progress calls and cops telling the desk man they were going off the air for personals, which could mean anything from a bathroom visit to a shakedown.
I used a strainer and poured the boiling water off the marrow bones to let them cool. Pansy came down from the roof, a lot calmer now—whoever had come around hadn’t come over the rooftops. I started thinking about the roof and how I’d like to have a garden up there someday—there was sure as hell enough fertilizer already in place. I could tell I was getting tired because I was starting to think like a citizen. Putting down roots, even on a city roof, is blubber-brained. Roots are nice, but a tree can’t run.
When the marrow bones cooled I gave one to Pansy and sat patting her massive head while she crunched it. Maybe real private eyes make up lists of things to do and places to go, but I like to work them out in my head—an old prison habit. Trees can’t run and people can’t Xerox your thoughts. If they could, they never would have let me out of that orphanage when I was a kid.
25
WHEN I WOKE up the next morning I was still in my chair. It didn’t look like Pansy had moved either. My watch said it was almost nine. I opened the back door to let Pansy out and went next door for a quick shower and shave. By the time Pansy trotted downstairs to supervise my work with the razor, it was just about time for my phone call. I went back into the office, picked up the receiver to check for hippie-interference, noted their usual early-morning silence, and dialed the direct line for an assistant D.A. I know in Manhattan. Toby Ringer was a real hardnose, with no political hooks, who battled his way up the bureaucracy by being willing to try cases that scared most of the other D.A.’s. You know the kind I mean—where the bad guy’s a hundred percent guilty but there’s no solid evidence and the odds are you’re going to lose it in front of a jury and get a black mark against your record. Some of those wimps won’t even touch a case unless there’s a videotaped confession and four eyewitnesses. Toby’s no cowboy—he doesn’t have fantasies of some death squad wiping out all the vermin in the city someday, but he has a genuine hate for the real slime, so we’ve been able to help each other out on occasion. He’s not State-raised, but he’s been around long enough to know how to act.
All the D.A.’s answer their phone the same way. “Mr. Ringer’s line.”
“Good morning, Toby. I got a present for you.”
“Who’s speaking?”
“Your friend from the Gonzales matter, remember? I don’t want to talk on the phone, okay? But I got a gold-plated chance for you to nail a baby-raper, and I’ll throw in a homicide to boot.”
“In exchange for what?”
“For justice. I don’t want anything—I just want to tell you something that I can’t tell the cops.”
“This is Mr. B., I presume.”
“I’m your man. Can I meet you someplace tonight?”
“My office. That’s it—no other place. Deal?”
“Deal. What time?”
“Make it around eight. Everybody’s gone home by then and the night crew will be downstairs working the Complaint Room.”
“Want me to see the man at the front desk or just bypass him?”
“Go to the desk. I’ll leave word—what name?”
“Tell him Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“You’ll see, Toby. Tonight, right?”
“Right.” And we hung up simultaneously. I keep all my calls on this phone under one minute; this one had barely qualified.
I sat down at my desk planning to compose a suitable recruitment ad for the mercenary journals.