He kicked a pizza carton out of his way as he walked to the bathroom. A nest of roaches fled the cardboard box and took refuge in another take-out container with remnants of rice and noodles. Now he stood before the mirror over the small sink where he shaved, when he shaved. He checked his eyes in the mirror. He saw dense red road maps with patches of brown where his eyes leaked through.
By nine o’clock, bits of tissue paper with bright red centers marked all the places where he had cut himself shaving.
Drunks should only be allowed to use electric razors.
When he was bereft of tissue, bleeding stopped, he dressed in his best bad suit.
“I have been given a sign that God is on my side in this,” Andrew announced to the world, via his bullhorn. And now he cast a benevolent eye on the small crowd of ant-size, badly dressed people who gathered on the sidewalk below. He had come to think of them as his parishioners, his personal flock of insects.
“He would want you all to make the most of His gifts to the world. Why do you think He created Bloomingdale’s and Bergdorf’s? Sinners, can’t you see His grand design in Tiffany’s?”
The crowd was growing larger.
Oh, thank you, Lord, fresh victims.
He sized them up in the binoculars, and couldn’t get horn to mouth fast enough.
“You! Wearing that yellow, shapeless thing that makes your skin look sallow! Most of us have to hang out at laundromats to see that peculiar shade of polyester. Sinner, you’ll find the Suit Collection on the second floor.”
And now another. “Woman with the hideous purple tights. Don’t you realize what a steady diet of champagne and cigarettes can do to the human body? I’m dying for your sins. Get thee to Women’s Sportswear, third floor.”
He addressed the larger gathering. “Remember, we are all God’s creations, and we must dedicate our lives to the greater glory of His works. Charge card applications are available on the first floor. You may cosign a card for the less fortunate.”
He lowered the binoculars and bullhorn to uncork a new bottle and sip his lunch, forgoing the amenity of a glass. There were no glasses left. One blanked-out night he must have taken up the custom of smashing them against the wall each time he emptied one. Now he surveyed his plush aerie, ignoring the shards of broken glass and the growing litter of empty bottles. Even blind drunk, his taste in goods had been unerring.
And now he flopped down on his bed of quilts and stared at the mannequin behind her altar. He wondered why God had created Aubry if He was just going to kill her that way. It was all God’s work and God’s will, wasn’t it? All of it?
Aubry the Virginal, the perfect sacrifice. How holy.
Oh, beautiful Aubry. God can be such a bastard, can’t He?
Coffey stood in front of Blakely’s desk until the chief of detectives made a guttural noise and pointed to the chair.
Now the great man deigned to lift his head and squint his small eyes at Coffey, as though trying to remember what the head of Special Crimes Section was doing here in his office.
“Well, Jack, Commissioner Beale wanted me to pass on his compliments. He’s Mallory’s number-one fan this week. Course that makes it more difficult to take Mallory off the Dean Starr murder.”
“I was hoping you’d reconsider that.”
“No, Jack, I don’t think so. I want you to call Beale. Tell him it’s your idea to pull Mallory and Riker off the case. As long as the FBI is out of the picture, he probably won’t care if you have the janitor run the investigation.”
“Mallory and Riker make a good team. I don’t want to change the assignments.”
“This is not a good time for you to be making waves, Jack. The paperwork on your promotion is sitting on my desk. You don’t want it to park here for another year, do you?”
Coffey sat in silence. He had learned this from Markowitz. “Let the bastard flap his mouth,” the old man had said. “Let him knock himself out, and then you’re still fresh when you move in to shut his mouth.
“You’d be the youngest captain on the force, Jack. Of course, Riker was the youngest captain we ever had. You didn’t know? Well, that’s not too surprising-he wasn’t a captain for very long. This was on someone else’s watch, before my time-remember that. He was just doing his job, and a good job, too. One night, he interviewed a twelve-year-old boy who gave him the license number of a limousine and a very detailed description of a man. So Riker ran the plates, and matched up the description of the perp with the owner of the car. Then he wrote up his report like the good cop he was. The kid was raped by a prince of the church.”
“So that was Riker’s case? I heard the story about the arrest, but I always figured it was like one of those legends about giant alligators in the sewers. There’s no trace of the arrest report ever-”
“You looked for it, didn’t you? All the rookies look for it. Well, Riker’s report disappeared, and as far as Riker knew, the prince went on doing little boys in the park. Riker objected to that. He received a warning from the guy who had my job-a threat’s more like it-and then he got a promotion to captain. They were hoping he would get the drift. Well, that stupid bastard didn’t have a captain’s rank for five days before he goes out and busts a prince of the church with a kid in his car. Riker brought the cardinal in handcuffed. You can guess what happened next.”
“He was busted all the way down to sergeant.”
“No. He went back to the rank of lieutenant. And he still wouldn’t stop. Then he was busted down to sergeant. By then his wife had left him, he was deep in the bottle and next to useless. The department would’ve eased him out, but Markowitz grabbed him off for Special Crimes Section and sent him to a clinic to dry out. Markowitz had more power around here than God Almighty. Nobody else could have saved Riker’s ass. By the time Riker dried out, the prince was gone, and a new prince was in power.”
“Did Riker ever try to go outside the system?”
“No, he wouldn’t do anything to hurt the department. He’s a third-generation cop, just like Markowitz was. And who was he going to go to-the cops? Maybe the newspapers? The church is a major political power in this town. He had no evidence and the kid was gone.”
“What happened to the kid?”
“Who knows? Who cares? You’ve got a great future, Jack. You could learn from Riker’s mistakes.”
“This case is small-time, compared to Riker’s.”
“Some very high-profile people could be embarrassed, Jack.”
“A senator, for instance? And what’s the old mayor doing now, running for governor, isn’t he?”
“If Riker couldn’t buck the system, what chance have you got? Call Mallory off.”
“You’d never touch Mallory, would you?”
“Of course not. Her old man and me, we had a lot of history together. I think of her as my own-”
“You can’t touch her, can you? She’s got everything the old man had. She must know where every single body is buried. Markowitz wouldn’t have left her defenseless in the shark pool.”
“Careful, Lieutenant. I think you’re bordering on insubordination here.”
“Maybe there was more to it than leaving the homicide books tidy when the mayor and the old commissioner left office.” Coffey was rising out of his chair. “Maybe they were afraid the real killer was somebody in a power position.” He turned his back on Blakely.
“That’s enough!” Blakely pounded his desk. “Come back here and sit down, Lieutenant!”
“Just call me Sergeant,” said Coffey, closing the door behind him.