They had cashed in on all the favors they were owed, and had used all their skills as street detectives to compile a list of Dakin's abuses.
Rather than concentrating on his improprieties in the Komfeld case, Janek launched a broadside attack. Believing Dakin was obsessed with duplicity and plots, he intended to goad him until he acted out.
Dakin, preening in his virtue, was flustered by Janek's litany.
Attempting to take up each abuse in turn, he started out fairly well, then turned incoherent.
Janek let him ramble, keeping a close eye on the judges.
When he felt the moment was right, he gently interrupted.
"Everyone's against you. It's all a conspiracy. That's what you're saying, Chief-isn't it?"
Dakin, disarmed by the suggestion, which mimicked the very thoughts he was harboring, nodded fiercely and began to carve the air. He must have realized he was making a bad impression, because he suddenly sat rigid.
Then, thrusting his trembling forefinger at Timmy, his reedy voice went shrilclass="underline"
"That snake killed my witness! They're trying to get me now ' I'm on to them! Don't you see, it's a diversion, this fuckin' hearing!
That snake's a fuckin' killer!"
After his outburst Dakin clamped his jaws. Everyone in the room could hear the crunch of teeth.
Janek turned to the judges, spread his hands and shrugged: "There you are," his gestures said, "the paranoid revealed."
The judges understood. Their voices turned solicitous. When one of them offered to fetch Dakin a glass of water, Janek knew he'd won. It was, he had felt at the time, a brilliant moment, perhaps his finest as a cop.
He had successfully sandbagged The Dark One, and, at the same time, lifted suspicion from his friend.
But contrary to expectations, the cloud was not so easily raised.
Because the IA case had been rendered incomplete, Timmy's role in regard to the Metaxas note was left unresolved.
The result of the hearing was that Dakin took immediate retirement and Timmy himself retired six months later. Although both men received full pensions, their reputations were besmirched. In the end the special hearing about Dakin's overreaching only added to the cluster of rumors and ambiguities that had come to surround the original Mendoza investigation, turning it into the phenomenon known around the Department simply as Mendoza.
"Whatsa matter? Dreamin'?" Dakin stood before Janek, clutching his paper, leering. "You took me. Didn't you, Frank?"
Janek glanced into Dakin's eyes. It was the first time the chief had ever called him by his first name. Dakin, however, quickly turned away.
Then he started back toward his building, his stride awkward, urgent.
"It was right out of that damn Caine Mutiny movie. Get me up there, throw me cream puffs, then watch me destroy myself batting them down too hard. I was never a sophisticated man. I was always up front direct.
One-track mind. Eyes forward, with the blinders on. So you blind sighted me and I never even knew it until I turned around and saw the looks on the faces of those judges. Lord, that was something! Then it hit me. I was cooked. I was going down and there was nothing I could do about it.
Nothing..
"Look, I don't think we should-"
"What?" Dakin snapped. "Rehash it? Want to pretend it never happened?
We'd do better to act like a couple of old generals, crusty World War II types, shooting the bull at a reunion, finding out what the other had in mind the day of the big battle, maybe even fessing up to a few mistakes.
Be interesting, I think." Janek thought through his answer. "But we're not like two old generals. You were a chief-"
"Still am! Don't ever forget it!" -and I was and still am a lieutenant. Also, I don't think enough time's passed to heal the wounds."
Dakin nodded. "Fine, that's the way you want it. It was just my way of saying I respect you for what you did, even though I'm the one bore the brunt of it. Your job was to get me. You got me good. I don't hate you for that. The one I blame… well, never mind… "
Who the hell does he blame? Janek wondered. Some power behind me pulling my strings?
In the end, he knew, it was impossible to probe the labyrinth of a paranoid's mind. There was always one step in the thinking you couldn't make yourself, one room full of conspirators you could never find because it was hidden too deep within the maze.
But Dakin was still rambling:
"Sheehan's your buddy," he sneered. "You don't have the balls to take him down. That's the trouble with having buddies, see. A man calls you ''-he'll always expect a favor. Me, I never had any buddies and I never granted any favors. Not once! Ever! I'm proud of that.
They can carve it on my gravestone if they dare. ' buddies and no favors. ''d be pleased to rest under a stone like that. I could rest under it forever!"
Oh, Jesus!
But that wasn't the end of it-Dakin was on a heavy riff. The words continued to tumble out:
"Trouble today is everyone's forgotten the point. You got a department, you keep it clean, no matter who falls in sacrifice. A slime snake like Sheehan poisons the well, then everyone drinks from it gets sick. The Department's been drinking putrid water nine years.
Soon the venom'll kill it. Then you'll see the ruin, my friend. The blood'll flow. The city'll drown in puke and gore. It won't be long now, unless someone's got the guts to reach deep down the well and pull the vile slime snake out!"
He must always have been this way, Janek thought, and nobody noticed because they took his ravings as rhetoric. But Janek knew that it wasn't rhetoric, that what he was hearing was deeply held belief. Dakin was too honest to obfuscate. With him, what you heard was what you got.
God help us! For years we treasured this man and all that time he was a lunatic. Then he thought: Is it any wonder that so many of us end up putting our pistols in our mouths?
The Threat.
When Janek arrived at Special Squad, he found a fax on his desk. It was from an officer he didn't know named Tom Capiello, a member of the police artists unit. The message was simple and to the point: "Drop by.
I've got something to show you."
While Janek was pondering what this might mean, he received a call from his zone commander, Joe Deforest. Deforest said a man named Stephen Kane, chief of security at Sonoron Corporation, had arrived in New York and wanted a briefing on the Dietz case.
"Fine, Joe," Janek said, "send him over. He can tell us more about that stolen chip."
There was a pause at the other end, then Deforest cleared his throat.
"Seems Kane's boss, some big shot named Cavanaugh, called the mayor's office last night. Word came down from Kit. The briefing's to be held over there."
"Fine," said Janek. "I'm coming over anyway. I'll drop by early and fill you in."
When he put down the phone, he had no doubt about what had happened.
Cavanaugh, the Sonoron chairman, had posed some difficult questions to the mayor-such as, how often are visiting businessmen assassinated in their rooms at top-of-the-line Manhattan hotels? By the time this needling query reached Kit, the order was clear: Kane, Cavanaugh's security chief, was to be shown special deference, which meant don't send him over to Janek's grubby Special Squad, brief him in a plush suite in the Headquarters building.
Janek quickly gave instructions to Sue and Ray. They were to continue to show the police sketch until they got a lead on the redhead who had accompanied Dietz to his room. Leaving Aaron in charge of the office, Janek taxied downtown to Police Plaza. When he got there he went straight to the artists unit, where he asked the receptionist to point out Capiello.
She gestured across the busy room to a man sitting at a desk against the far wall. As Janek walked over he passed a row of artists working at computer terminals with witnesses.
"Now let's try some noses," he heard one say. "Was it short, long, fat or thin?"