Cops and Robbers Read online

  Over by the window, Ed and the woman were talking, their voices seeming to be muffled by the sunlight, muted and indistinct, like voices in another room when you’re sick in bed in the daytime. From time to time I’d tune in on what they were saying, but I just couldn’t build up any interest. It was the room I cared about, I didn’t give a shit about the two spades that had busted in here.

  At one point, I heard Ed say, “And they came in through the service entrance?”

  “Yes,” she said. She had a voice like a prune, very offensive. “They struck my maid,” she said. “They cut the inside of her mouth, I sent her downstairs to my doctor. I could have her sent back up if you need a statement.”

  “Maybe later,” Ed said.

  “I can’t think why they struck her,” she said. “She is black, after all.”

  Ed said, “Then they came in here, is that it?”

  “No,” she said, “they never came in here at all, thank goodness. I have some rather valuable things in here. They went from the kitchen into the bedroom.”

  “Where were you?”

  On a glass coffee table was an ornate lacquered Oriental wooden box. I picked it up and opened it, and it had half a dozen cigarettes inside. Virginia Slims. The wood inside the box was a warm golden color, like imported beer.

  The woman was saying, “I was in my office. It connects with the bedroom. I heard them rummaging around, and went to the door. As soon as I saw them, of course, I realized what they were doing.”

  “Can you give me a description?”

  “I honestly didn’t—”

  I said, “How much would a thing like this cost?”

  The woman looked at me, baffled. “I beg your pardon?”

  I showed her the Oriental box. “This thing,” I said. “How much would it go for?”

  She talked down her nose at me. “I believe that was thirty-seven hundred dollars. Under four thousand.”

  What a great thing! Four thousand dollars for this little box. “To hold cigarettes in,” I said, mainly to myself, and turned away again to put it back on the coffee table.

  Behind me, the woman was being a little miffed, saying to Ed, “Where were we?”

  I looked at the things on the coffee table. It made me happy to be with them. I couldn’t help smiling.

  Joe

  I don’t know why, for some reason I’d been pissed off all day. It had started right from the time I got out of bed this morning. If Grace hadn’t avoided me, we would have had us a good old-fashioned fight, because I was really in the mood for it.

  Then the car, and the traffic, none of that helped. And the heat. It felt good telling Tom about the liquor store, a thing I’d been bottling up inside me for a couple weeks, but a little while after I told him and we’d stopped talking about it I was in a rotten mood again. Only now I had something to hook onto, because I just kept thinking about that comfortable bastard in his air-conditioned Cadillac out there on the Long Island Expressway this morning. I was sorry I hadn’t ticketed him for something; anything. I hated the idea that somebody was better off than me.

  For me, the best way to work off a mad is to drive. Not in that stop-and-go traffic like on the Expressway this morning; that just makes things worse. But in ordinary traffic, where I can move, use my skills. I get behind the wheel, I push it a little hard, win some contests, and pretty soon I feel better. So I volunteered to drive today, and my partner, Paul Goldberg, just shrugged and said it was fine with him. Which I knew he would; he has no feeling for cars, Paul. He’d rather I drove all the time, so he could sit beside me and chew gum. I never saw anybody in my life who could chew so much gum. He went through Chiclets like kids through Kleenex.

  He’s a couple years younger than me, Paul is, and slender and wiry, with more strength than he looks. His name is Goldberg, but he looks Italian. He has that curly kind of black hair, and an olive complexion, and those big brown doe eyes the chicks love so much. He’s a bachelor, and I guess he makes out pretty good with the women. He ought to, given his looks and potential. I don’t know for sure; I hinted around a couple of times, but he never talked about his personal life while we were on patrol together. Which was only fair, since I never talked about mine either.

  On the other hand, what kind of personal life does a married man with kids have to talk about?

  We did a little driving around the neighborhoods to begin with today, but it wasn’t the kind of movement I needed to unload the irritable feeling in my chest. It was also too hot for mooching along down side streets; what we needed was to be where we could move fast enough to create a breeze for ourselves, keep ourselves a little cooled off. Me, especially, keep me cooled off.

  So I headed us west over 79th Street and got on the Henry Hudson Parkway northbound. Way up ahead you could see the George Washington Bridge. On our left was the Hudson River, looking better than it really is, and across on the other side New Jersey. There were little puffs of white cloud in the blue sky, boats of different sizes were on the river, and even the city, off to our right, looked clean in the sunlight. For looking at, it was a really nice day. Of course, you can’t see humidity, or a temperature in the high eighties.

  I got off the Parkway at 96th Street and hit the neighborhoods again for a while. Now I was having second thoughts about telling Tom about the liquor store. Could I really trust him? What if he told somebody else, what if the word got around? Sooner or later it would reach the Captain, once it got started, and if that ever happened I was finished. The 15th Precinct had a couple of very hairy Captains for a while, guys who were in on the take, guys you could have bought off on a baby rape with a bottle of Scotch, but the boom got lowered all of a sudden, on the Captain we had at the time and also the one who’d been there before him and was assigned some place else and about to retire, and they both got their heads handed to them. Now we had a Captain who was out to make King of the Angels; spit on the sidewalk off duty and he’d write you up. Think what he’d do to a patrolman who held up a liquor store while driving his beat.

  But Tom wouldn’t say anything, he’d have more sense than that. I could trust him; that’s why I’d told him. And face it, I’d had to tell somebody, I couldn’t keep it tied up inside me much longer. Sooner or later I’d have told somebody like Grace, for God’s sake, and Grace would never in a million years understand. With Tom, no matter what else he might think, I knew he’d understand.

  And keep his mouth shut. Right?

  Christ, I hoped so.

  I was really feeling bugged. Frustrated and irritable and about ready to punch somebody in the mouth. I’d been having days like this every once in a while for the last few months, and I didn’t know what to do about them, how to deal with them. Except wait them out, wait for it all to go away, which sooner or later it always did.

  Down on 72nd Street, I went over to the Parkway again. Paul had tried starting a couple of conversations, but I didn’t feel like talking. I’d come close, a few times in the last week, to telling Paul about the liquor store, but I didn’t really know Paul as well as I knew Tom, I didn’t have that same sense of closeness with him. And now that I’d told Tom, I didn’t want to tell anyone else at all. Or talk to anyone else at all. In fact, part of me was sorry I’d talked to Tom.

  We got back up on the Parkway, and rolled along. The air was a little better over the river, and the motion of the car made a breeze that at least blew the stink off. My mood was picking up.

  Then I spotted the white Cadillac Eldorado up ahead, moving right along. It was the same model as the one this morning, but a different color. I saw him up there, looking so cute and arrogant and rich, and all the bile came right back into me again, stronger than ever.

  I eased up on him and saw he had New York plates. Good. If I gave him a ticket he couldn’t be a scofflaw, fade away into some other state and thumb his nose at me. He’d have to pay up or have a mess on his hands when it came time to renew his license.

  I clocked him a mile, and he was d
oing fifty-four. Good enough.

  “I’m taking the Caddy,” I said.

  I guess Paul had been half-asleep, sitting there in the silence next to me. He sat up straighter and looked ahead and said, “The what?”

  “That white Caddy.”

  Paul studied the Cad, and raised his eyebrows at me. “How come?”

  “I feel like it. He’s doing fifty-four.”

  I hit the dome light, but not the siren. He could see me, he wouldn’t need a lot of noise. He slowed right away, and I crowded him off onto the shoulder.

  Paul said, “You cut him a little close there.”

  “He should of braked harder.” I looked at Paul, waiting for him to say something else, but all he did was shrug, as though to say he didn’t care, it wasn’t his business—which it wasn’t—so I got out of the car and went back to talk to the driver of the Cad.

  He was about forty, with those pop-eyes called thyroid. He was wearing a suit and a tie, and when I went back to talk to him he opened his window by pushing a button. I asked to see his license and registration, and stood there a long time reading them, waiting for him to start a conversation. His name was Daniel Mossman, and he leased the Cad from a company in Tarrytown. And he didn’t have anything to say for himself at all. I said, “You know the speed limit along this stretch, Dan?”

  “Fifty,” he said.

  “You know what speed I clocked you at, Dan?”

  “I believe I was doing about fifty-five.” There was no expression in his voice, nothing in his face, and those pop-eyes just looked at me like a fish.

  I said, “What do you do for a living, Dan?”

  “I’m an attorney,” he said.

  An attorney. He couldn’t even say lawyer. I was twice as irritable as before. I went back to the patrol car and got behind the wheel, holding Mossman’s license and registration.

  Paul looked over at me, and rubbed his thumb and finger together. “Anything?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’m giving the bastard a ticket.”

  2

  They co-hosted a barbecue for some friends in the neighborhood. The grill was in Tom’s backyard, so that’s where the party was, but they both pitched in for the food and drink, and both wives worked on the salads and the desserts and in setting things up. The first humid hot spell of the summer had broken the day before with one of those real drenching summer downpours, but by the morning of the barbecue the yard was almost completely dry. Also, the humidity was way down, and the temperature had dropped into the high seventies. Perfect weather for a party in the backyard.

  There were four other couples invited, all from the same block, plus their kids. None of them were on the force, and in fact only one of them even worked in the city; Tom and Joe liked them all mostly because they could forget their own jobs while with them.

  Before the party, they’d brought all the kitchen chairs and folding chairs out of both houses and scattered them around Tom’s yard, and set up a bar on a card table back by the grill. They had gin and vodka and scotch, plus soft drinks for the kids. Mary had put a sheet over the card table instead of a tablecloth, one of those printed sheets with a flower design all over it, and it really looked nice there.

  Before dinner, Tom and Joe took turns being bartender, one serving the drinks while the other wandered around the yard playing host. But Tom was the official chef, like it said on his apron, so while he was doing the chicken quarters and the hamburgers on the outdoor grill Joe became the bartender full time. Then, after everybody had eaten, Tom became bartender again and Joe just stood around or occasionally went to one kitchen or the other for more ice. They both had ice-makers in their refrigerators, but with fifteen or twenty people all drinking iced drinks at once—and the kids mostly spilling theirs out on the grass—you can use ice faster than any refrigerator on earth can make it. It was a good thing to have two.

  It was a good party, as that kind of party goes. That is, there weren’t any long uncomfortable silences, and there weren’t any fist-fights. In fact, nobody got falling down drunk, which was kind of unusual. The people on the block, mostly the men, tended to be pretty two-fisted drinkers, and the way the summertime parties usually went, the survivors carried the others home. Maybe it was because it was so early in the season, and the group wasn’t into the swing of things yet. Or maybe it was simply the nice weather after the long stretch of humidity; everybody was feeling so pleasant and comfortable that nobody wanted to spoil it with a hangover.

  It was getting toward evening when Joe wandered over to the bar again and said, “How’s the ice holding out?”

  “We need some.”

  “No sooner said,” Joe told him, and went over to his own kitchen, and brought back a glass pitcher full of the little half-moon cubes. He worked his way through the guests to the card table, where Tom was standing with his chef’s apron still on. He didn’t have any customers right at that moment. Joe put the pitcher down and said, “There you go.”

  Tom began to switch the ice cubes to his Colonial ice-bucket. Joe rooted around among all the dirty glasses on the card table, and finally said, “What did I do with my drink?”

  “I’ll make you another.”

  “Thanks.”

  Joe was drinking scotch and soda. Tom knew that wasn’t considered a summertime drink, but he’d never said anything; it was what Joe liked all year ’round, so why pester him?

  Tom started making the drink, and Joe turned to look at the freeloaders all over the lawn in the gloom of twilight. The men were talking with men, the women were talking with women, the kids were running around the adults like motorcycles around traffic stanchions. It occurred to Joe that of all the women currently in the backyard the only one he really wanted to ball was Mary, who was Tom’s wife. Then she turned, and he realized in the half-light he’d made a mistake and it was Grace he’d been staring at, his own wife. He grinned and shook his head, and almost turned to tell Tom what he’d just done when he realized that wouldn’t be a good idea.

  He looked around some more, and at last saw Mary way over by the house. Both women were wearing slacks with stripes, and fuzzy sweaters; Mary’s pink, Grace’s white. Because of the party they’d both gone off to the beauty parlor this morning and had come back with hairdos that sat up on top of their heads like Venusian helmets, hair styles that had absolutely nothing to do with who they really were. But that was women for you, they did that sort of thing.

  Tom said, “Joe?”

  Joe turned. “Yeah?”

  “You remember that—Here.” Tom handed over the fresh drink.

  “Thanks.”

  “You remember,” Tom said, “that thing you told me the other day about the liquor store?”

  Joe pulled at his drink, and grinned. “Sure.”

  Tom hesitated, biting his lower lip, looking worriedly at the people at the other end of the yard. Finally, all in a rush, he said, “Have you done it again?”

  Joe frowned, not sure what he was getting at. “No. Why?”

  “You thought about it?”

  With a little shrug, Joe looked away. “A couple times, I guess. I didn’t want to push my luck.”

  Tom nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  One of the guests came up then, stopping the conversation for a while. He was named George Hendricks, and he ran a supermarket over in the five towns. He was a little drunk now, not terrible, and he came up with a loose grin on his face and said, “Time for a refill.”

  “You’re a screwdriver,” Tom said, and took his glass.

  “You’re goddam right I am,” George said. He was about thirty pounds overweight, and always hinting about what a sex maniac he was. Now he said, mostly to Joe, since Tom was busy making his drink, “You two both still work in the city, huh?”

  Joe nodded. “Yeah, we do.”

  “Not me,” George said. “I’m out of that rat-race for good.” Up till a few years ago, he’d managed a Finast in Queens.

  Drunks always irr
itated Joe, even when he was off duty. Skeptical, a little bored, he said to George, “It’s that different out here?”

  “Hell, yes. You know that yourself, you moved out here.”

  “Grace and the kids are out here,” Joe said. “I’m still in the city.”

  Tom held George’s fresh drink out to him: “Here.”

  “Thanks.” George took the glass, but didn’t drink yet. He was still involved in his conversation with Joe. He said, “I don’t see how you guys stand it. The city is nothing but wall-to-wall crooks. Everybody out to chisel a dollar.”

  Joe merely shrugged, but Tom said, “It’s the way of the world, George.”

  “Not out here,” George said. He made it one of those definite, don’t-argue-with-me statements.

  “Out here,” Tom said, “just like any place else. It’s all the same.”

  “You guys,” George said, and shook his head. “You think everybody’s crooked in the whole world. It’s being in the city gives you that idea.” He gave a knowing grin, and rubbed his thumb and finger together. “Being in on it a little.”

  Joe, who’d been looking at the women again, trying without success to develop an interest in George’s wife, turned his head and gave George a flat stare. “Is that right?”

  “One hundred per cent,” George said. “I know about New York City cops.”

  “That’s the same everywhere, too,” Tom said. He wasn’t offended; he’d given up being sore about slurs like that years ago. He said, “You think the guys in the precinct out here could make it on their salaries?”

  George laughed and pointed his drink at Tom. “See what I mean? The city corrupts your mind, you think everybody in the world is a crook.”

  Suddenly irritated, Joe said, “George, you come home every night with a sack of groceries. You don’t do that on any employee discount, you just pack up those groceries and walk out of the store.”

  George was outraged. He stood up straighter, and got drunker. “I work for them!” he said, his voice loud enough to carry to the far end of the yard. “If the chain paid a man a decent salary—”