“Fine. I’ll be leaving here pretty soon. You sound different.”
“I’ll bet I do.”
Now he was puzzled. Her voice was low, yet colder than he had ever heard it. “Marcie see what happened?”
“No, but I did.”
Raymond didn’t say anything.
“Who are they?” Carolyn said.
And now he wasn’t sure how much to tell her. “Clement picked on the wrong one this time and it snapped back at him. Why, you want to file his complaint?”
“I would like to laugh,” Carolyn said, “but my mouth hurts. Before this sounds even more like farce, why don’t we save it until you get here.”
Raymond hung up, still puzzled. He said to Norb Bryl, who was standing now, clipping several pens into his shirt pocket, “What exactly is farce?”
“It’s a used car that’s supposed to drive in a straight line,” Bryl said, “but pulls to the left. If you don’t need me I’ve got something to do.”
The door closed behind Bryl, then opened again as Hunter came in with a brown paper bag that was grease-stained and could be a bag of doughnuts. He placed it on the lieutenant’s desk, pleased. “No prints, but this is the little mother that did it. Absolutely no question.”
Raymond looked across the squadroom. He said, “Maureen, if you want to go, you can, it’s pretty late; but if you want to stay, lock the door. Okay?”
Wendell said, “How ’bout me?”
“Same thing. You want to leave, go ahead.”
Hunter said, “Shit, you got his interest now. Afraid he might miss something.”
Maureen came over, hesitantly, and sat at Bryl’s desk.
Hunter said, “How come you don’t ask me if I want to leave?”
“You’re already in it,” Raymond said. He looked at Maureen and then Wendell. “We took the gun off this guy Sweety without a search warrant. I’m not worrying it’s gonna kick back at us, that’s not what I’m getting to. I wanted to find out, you know, without typing up all the papers and pleading with some judge, if this is really the gun or not. All right, we find out it is. No question about it-our friend up in the lab checks it out without entering any names and numbers in the book-we have a murder weapon. Now… if we take it to the prosecutor at this point he says, fine, but how do we prove it’s Mansell’s gun? We say, well, if we’re very persuasive we can get this guy by the name of Sweety to cop. The prosecutor says, who’s Sweety? We tell him he’s a guy that used to run with Mansell, he’s done time and now he’s dealing drugs. The prosecutor says, Jesus Christ, that’s my witness? We say, well, we can’t help the kind of people we have to associate with in this business; he’s all we got.”
“Sandy,” Maureen said.
“Right, we’ve also got Sandy,” Raymond said, “but you can pull all her fingernails out, which she hasn’t got much of anyway, and she’ll still never say a word. Not out of loyalty, but because Clement scares the shit out of her.”
“How about if I talked to her?” Maureen said.
“Sure, why not? I’m open to suggestions. But let me review what we’ve got. An arm that could be Clement’s sticking out of a car at Hazel Park. Possibly the same car at the scene, which Sandy has the keys to and we say she gave to Clement. Clement’s lawyer, Miss Wilder, looks at us and says, ‘Yeah? Prove it.’ We can put Clement at another scene, three years ago, where slugs were dug out of a wall from a Walther P .38”-Raymond picked up the paper bag-“right here, our murder weapon. But how do we show it belongs to Clement?”
There was a silence.
Maureen said, “Wow. I think I know what you’re gonna do.”
Again a silence. Raymond was aware of the four of them sitting in an old-fashioned police office under fluorescent lights, plotting.
Hunter said, “I don’t see no other way.”
Wendell said, “You want me to talk to the brother, Mr. Sweety?”
“No, it’s my responsibility if anybody gets blamed. I’m gonna do it,” Raymond said. “At least try to arrange it. Wendell, you know Toma pretty well, the Albanians. Have a talk with him, like we’re thinking about busting him for the attempt, we’re watching him, you know, so he better not do anything dumb for the next couple days… Maureen, you want to take a shot at Sandy, go ahead. I think she wants somebody to talk to and, who knows…”
The phone rang.
“Jerry, let’s see about putting MCMU on Sweety around the clock now.”
The phone rang. Raymond laid his hand on it.
“Put a couple guys in the bar-if they can hang around without getting smashed.”
The phone rang.
Raymond picked it up. He said, “Squad Seven, Lieutenant Cruz.”
Clement’s voice said, “Hey, partner. I got a complaint I want to make. Some crazy fuckers’re trying to kill me.”
He parked behind Piper’s Alley on St. Antoine, a few blocks south of 1300, came through the kitchen with the paper bag and Charlie Meyer, the owner, said, “Raymond,” almost sadly, “you don’t bring your lunch here. This is a restaurant.”
Raymond smiled, gave him a wave and continued out into the main room, looking past plastic fern and Tiffany lamps at the booths of after-work drinkers, a swarm of them at the bar, guys and girls unwinding or winding up for the evening, either way unaware of the policeman with the paper bag who was wondering what it would be like to drop the bag on Clement’s table-sitting there, next to one of the front windows in his denim jacket-say to Clement, Here, I got something for you, and as Clement’s hand goes inside the bag say, loud enough to stop the room, DROP IT! and pull the Colt out of his sportcoat and blow him away.
Clement said, “There he is.” Grinning. “You look like a man with pussy on his mind. See something here you like?”
Raymond sat down and placed the paper bag on the table, to one side. Clement had a drink in front of him-in his denims, someone off a freighter or a trail drive-sizing up the house.
“All these boogers come in here looking for quiff, you know it? Their badges and convention tags on, they end up looking at each other, I swear. What’s in the bag, your lunch?”
“Yes, it’s my lunch,” Raymond said. “You owe me seventy-eight dollars for a new window.”
Clement grinned. “Somebody shooting at you? Listen, partner, I got people shooting at me too. I see these fellas coming across the street, I’m thinking, what’re they, undertakers? Wearing these black suits. What I don’t understand is how come I never heard of Albanians.”
“Well, they never heard of you either,” Raymond said. “But now, it’s a question of who gets you first. You want to turn yourself in, I think you’d live longer at Jackson than out on the street.”
Clement was squinting at him. “You let those fellas loose like that, shoot at people?”
“You want to file a complaint, stop in the precinct. See, we don’t get attempted or assault. Like what you did to Skender.”
“Man, you keep on top.”
“He’d have to file a charge, but they’d rather handle it themselves.”
“And you let ’em?”
“If the man doesn’t report you broke his leg, then we don’t know about it, do we?”
“Jesus-” Clement shook his head. “You want a drink?”
“No, there’s something I have to do yet.”
He watched Clement drain his glass and look around for the waitress-not quite the leisurely, laid-back Clement this evening-half-turning and putting his arm on the table, his hand, Raymond judged, about eight inches away from the paper bag. Clement raised his other hand, motioned with it and looked at Raymond again.
“Reason I called you, I want you to understand something. I’m leaving town. I’m not leaving on account of the Albanians and I’m not leaving on account of you either. But I got no reason to sit around here with my thumb up my ass, so I’m moving on.”
“When,” Raymond asked, “tonight?”
“I was-send you a postcard from Cincinnati-till I got jacked around this afternoon and by the time I got to the bank it was closed. All three banks I went to. I just want you to know, partner, I’m not running, as you know the meaning of the word. But I’m not gonna wait while you dick around and I’m not gonna exchange unpleasantries with some people I don’t even know who they are ‘cept they wear black suits… Can you tell me why they dress like that?”