“There are maybe a hundred guys around with fingers like that. You must have had more to go on than that, Lieutenant.”
“I did. The heroin.”
“You recognized that, too?” I was sarcastic.
“Sure. It was the talk of the department a week ago, Hal.”
“What was?”
“The heroin. Somebody stole it right out of the Narc Squad’s own safe at headquarters.” He laughed aloud. “Can you believe it? Two kilos, packaged in four bags, just like in the picture.”
I said, “How come it wasn’t in the news?”
“You know why. It would make us look like fools.”
“Anyway, one bag of heroin looks just like every other,” I said, unconvinced.
“You didn’t see the big blowup I had made of that picture,” the lieutenant said. “A little tag on one of the bags came out real clear. You could read it.”
All at once I felt very tired. “Don’t tell me,” I said.
He told me anyway, smiling. “It said: Confiscated, such and such a date, such and such a raid, by the Grandhaven Police Department. That’s us, Hal. Remember?”
I sighed. “So you’ve turned up another crooked cop,” I said. “Believe me, I’m glad I’m out of the business, Lieutenant.”
“You’re not out of it.” Randall’s voice roughened with some emotion I couldn’t put a name to. “You’re still a cop, Hal.”
“I’m an employee of the Grandhaven Public Library.”
“Library fuzz. But still a cop.”
I shook my head.
“You helped me take a killer tonight, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Because you fed me a lot of jazz about needing somebody who didn’t smell of cop. Somebody who knew the score but could act the part of a timid greedy citizen trying his hand at blackmail for the first time.”
“Otto Schmidt’s a city cop. If I’d sent another city cop in there tonight, Otto would have recognized him immediately. That’s why I asked you to go.”
“You could have told me the facts.”
He shook his head. “Why? I thought you’d do better without knowing. And you did. The point is, though, that you did it. Helped me nail a killer at considerable risk to yourself. Even if the killer wasn’t the one you thought. You didn’t do it just for kicks, did you? Or because we found the negative in your library book, for God’s sake?”
I shrugged and stood up to leave.
“So you see what I mean?” Lieutenant Randall said. “You’re still a cop.” He grinned at me. “I’ll get the check, Hal. And thanks for the help.”
I left without even saying good night. I could feel his yellow eyes on my back all the way out of the diner.
Joyce Harrington
Blue Monday
She was dressed all in pink. As I hoarded the bus behind her, I couldn’t stop looking at her pink shoes. Up the high grimy steps they went. Cheap shoes. Flimsy sandals made to last for one summer, if that long. The feet inside them were long and lumpy, as if too many years of ill-fitting shoes had caused them to break out in bumps of protest.
I followed her into the bus, dropped my fare into the change box, and watched her walk up the aisle. The skirl of her pink dress was wrinkled. I tried to imagine where she had spent her day, all her days, the kind of office she worked in, the chair she sat in that had pressed wrinkles into the skirts of all her dresses.
Yesterday she had been all in lavender.
She sat in a window seat in the middle of the bus. As she slid into the seat her pink handbag, a long pouchy thing, swung and thumped against her hip. I walked past her, carefully averting my eyes so that she wouldn’t notice that I had been watching her, and chose a seat two rows behind her. From there I could see her shoulders, her neck and the back of her head. I opened my newspaper and settled down for the ride.
On her head she wore a scarf of some filmy material, probably nylon. It was folded into a triangle and tied under her chin. Pink. Through it her hair, arranged in some intricate and unfashionable manner, was visible as a series of knobby clusters of curls. The scarf was evidently intended to keep the knobs in place.
The bus started on its long haul to the suburbs. Normally I read the paper a little, doze a little, look out the window and take note of the small changes that occur along the familiar route and the things that remain the same.
But lately I find my eyes drifting away from the newspaper and from the window and fastening on the back of her head. I no longer doze. Each day the scarf is a different color.
She was talking to her seat companion. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Her head was turned slightly so I could see her lips moving. She wore a pink lipstick and her teeth protruded just enough to give her mouth a somewhat pouting appearance. Against her sallow skin, her mouth seemed to be a separate living organism. She spoke rapidly, interspersing her words with quick half-hearted smiles. When she did this, the side of her face creased into concentric cursed lines which would one day be permanent wrinkles. I guessed her age to be about forty.
The bus rattled on through the outlying part of town where ramshackle frame houses lean discouraged against each other down the slope toward the river. Normally I like to look out the window along this stretch of the ride. I was born in this part of town, although the house I grew up in was tom down long ago to make room for a new section of highway. If I feel a bit self-congratulatory as the bus carries me by this decayed remnant of my childhood, I feel I’ve earned it. I’ve worked long and hard to give my family a decent place to live.
Lately I have been distracted from even this pleasant satisfaction. I don’t quite understand why it should be so, but somehow her presence on the bus produces in me a vague irritability. She is a source of discomfort, and I wish she would take a different bus. I find myself watching for her at the bus stop each evening, waiting to see what her day’s color will be, and then, unconsciously at first, but quite deliberately now, taking a seat somewhere behind her so that she is never out of sight.
Let me explain that in twenty-five years of marriage I have never looked at another woman. My wife is small, quiet, and kind. She has never demanded more of me than I could give. I have worked for the same company all my life. I started as a messenger boy and now I am a division manager. A few years ago I realized that I would rise no higher in the company. But I am content.
My division runs smoothly. The typists come to me with their problems and my wife and I attend their weddings. The young men regard me as an old fogey, but they are eager to take advantage of my long experience. Some of them will rise above me in the company; others will leave. It no longer matters. In due time I will retire on full pension.
My life, like my division, has also run smoothly. My children, a boy and a girl, grew up respectful and well-mannered. My son is a science teacher in a high school on the other side of town, and my daughter is married and lives nearby. She is expecting her second child. My wife makes dresses for our three-year-old granddaughter. We have never been plagued with accident or illness, although my wife occasionally suffers from arthritis when the weather is damp.
Why, then, should I be irritated by this woman on the bus? She is nothing to me. If she chooses to dress one day entirely in pink and the next entirely in orange, and so on through the rainbow, surely that’s her affair. It needn’t concern me. Why do my thoughts persist in speculating on the probable contents of her closet? Particularly on the rows of shoes it must contain, neatly ranked in pairs of every conceivable color. I wonder if she’s married, and what her husband thinks of this color mania of hers.