“No? Why not?”
“Because you’ll brood. I know you that well; when you’re alone and upset, you brood.”
“I won’t brood.”
“Then you don’t want me to stay?”
“No. I need to be alone.”
“Just tonight? Or don’t you want to see me at all?”
“I didn’t say that. You said that six weeks ago, remember?”
“Yes,” she said in a small voice, “I remember.”
I felt bad for her again. “Kerry, look, I’m not shutting you out. I’m glad you care for me, I’m glad you want to be with me; maybe there’s still something for us after all. But too much has happened to me, too fast. I’ve got to come to terms with it and I’ve got to do it my own way. You’ve already given me what I need from you — being there, caring. Keep on being there, okay?”
“I will,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. But it didn’t happen. Her face smoothed and she put on a smile. Then she took my good hand, held it in both of hers; her fingers were very strong and very cold.
We did not say much to each other after that, but it was a good kind of silence. She left at four, saying she would call tomorrow, come by if I wanted her to. When she was gone I felt relieved and sorry at the same time, the way I had each time she’d left my room at the hospital.
I sat and stared at the walls. Made myself some more coffee. Stared at the walls again until the room itself began to bother me. It was just too neat, too clean; I hated it this way, it wasn’t mine any longer. I got up and went into the bedroom and took some clothes out of the dresser and scattered them around in there and in the living room. I took a handful of pulps off the shelves that flanked the bay window, scattered those around. I found some mildewed cheese in the refrigerator, put it on a plate and put the plate on the coffee table next to the dirty cups. I was breathing heavily when I was finished. The place looked better then, it looked all right. Familiar. Mine again.
The phone rang at seven o’clock. Newspaper reporter, wanting an interview; I banged the receiver down in the middle of his pitch, so hard I almost knocked the thing off the nightstand.
The anger was still there an hour later, when I struggled out of my clothes and got into bed. It was always there now; it had not left me for a minute since Monday. Living and growing in my body, sometimes burning hot and sometimes banked, clinging to me and making me cling to it — a symbiotic thing that was both friend and enemy.
Sunday.
I was awake before dawn, with pain pulsing in my shoulder because I had shifted somehow in my sleep and wrenched the arm. I got up and took one of the pills Abrams had given me. In the bathroom I looked at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Beard stubble, but not enough to make me want to shave again; I had shaved yesterday before leaving the hospital. My eyes looked dark, sunken. But the anger was not visible in them, at least not to me. Windows with the blinds drawn tight behind them.
When the pain diminished I took my left arm out of the sling and spent several minutes trying to flex it. I could not quite get it straightened out all the way; the pain came back, sharp stabs of it, whenever I tried to lock the elbow. The fingers moved all right, unbent into horizontal planes, but when I went to pick up a glass I couldn’t close them around it.
The whole time I kept thinking about Eberhardt. He had been in a coma one week, seven days, 160 hours. How long could he hang on that way, balanced on the thin edge between life and death? Weeks, months? Years? I had heard of cases where people lay in a coma for two, three, four years, little more than vegetables kept breathing by life-support equipment. If that happened to Eberhardt...
Restlessly, I went back into the bedroom and called the Hall of Justice. Neither Marcus nor Klein was in, and nobody else would tell me anything, even when I explained who I was. I ended the call by jamming down the handset. Damn the cops; I was beginning to hate the Department. A few individuals like Klein and Marcus were all right, but it was not being run the way it had been in the old days. The damn brass all seemed to have political ties and ambitions; they went around yelling about public relations, the police image, the war on crime. And yet they were also close-mouthed, secretive, unyielding, like a bunch of neo-fascists. The chief had yanked my license because I was too good a cop myself, because I made waves and showed them up and undercut their authority. A victim of a goddamn fascist purge, that was what I was when you boiled it down.
Out in the kitchen I banged some pots and pans around, making coffee and frying a couple of eggs for breakfast. It was awkward trying to cook with one hand; I spilled coffee on the counter, broke both egg yolks, spattered hot butter on myself. By the time I scooped the eggs out onto a plate, I was growling again and spewing blasphemy all over the kitchen.
The telephone rang. I went and hauled up the receiver and barked a hello. A whiny male voice said my name questioningly, and as soon as I heard it my hand went tight around the receiver.
It was an Oriental voice — Chinese.
I said, “Yes. What is it?”
“I having something to tell you. About shooting, you and Lieutenant Eb-hardt.”
I eased down on the bed. “Who is this?”
“No. Not giving my name.”
“What do you want to tell me?”
“Man who do shooting — Mau Yee.”
“Mau Yee? That’s his name?”
“No. Mau Yee.”
“I don’t understand...”
“You finding out. Mau Yee. That’s all.”
I thought he was going to hang up. “Wait a minute! Why call me about this? Why didn’t you call the police?”
“No police,” he said.
“Why not? If you have information...”
“No police. You lieutenant’s friend, you getting shot too. Maybe you understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Reason for shooting.”
“No. Why did this Mau Yee shoot Eberhardt?”
“You not knowing?”
“I’m asking you, man. Why?”
Hesitation. And then he said, “Bribe. Big bribe.”
“What!”
“Yes. Big bribe. You understand now?”
“Hell, no, I don’t understand. Are you trying to tell me Eberhardt was taking bribes from somebody in Chinatown?”
“Not in Chinatown. Somebody else.”
“That’s a frigging lie!”
“No lie. You see why I not calling police? You lieutenant’s friend, you find out.”
“Goddamn it, who are you? What do you know? Talk to me!”
The line clicked and went dead.
I sat holding the receiver, shaking a little. Then I cradled it, carefully, to keep the impulse for violence bottled up, and went out into the living room and took a couple of hard turns around it.
No, I thought, not Eberhardt. Dirty? Him? No. He was an honest cop; I’d known him for thirty years, I’d worked with him, I’d listened to the hatred in his voice when he talked about police officers on the take. He wasn’t dirty, he couldn’t be.
Crank call, I thought. But it hadn’t sounded like a crank call. And Chinese weren’t prone to that kind of thing; of all the cranks who annoyed police and other people, almost none of them were Orientals.
Mau Yee, I thought. Who the hell is Mau Yee?
And who the hell is the man on the phone?
Big bribe. Not in Chinatown. Somebody else.
It just wasn’t possible that Eberhardt was taking. And yet he’d been shot by a Chinese gunman, and the caller had been Chinese, and Mau Yee was a Chinese name or phrase. All of that fit together; why would the man have lied about the other thing?
You see why I not calling police? You lieutenant’s friend, you find out.