By this time, without intending to, he had communicated his mood to his men; now he wasn’t the only one pacing through the rooms, hands in pockets, head lowered. The men, he noticed, were keeping their faces deliberately expressionless, but he knew they feared what he feared: the pigeon had flown.
By two o’clock he had worked out a contingency plan. If Danny Boy didn’t show within another hour, at 3:00 p.m., he’d send a uniformed officer over to the White House with a trumped-up story that the Department had received an anonymous threat against Daniel Blank. The patrolman would go up to Blank’s apartment with the doorman, and listen. If they heard Blank moving about, or if he answered his bell, they would say it was a mistake and come away. If they heard nothing, and if Blank didn’t answer his bell, then the officer would request the doorman or manager to open Blank’s apartment with the pass-keys “just to make certain everything is all right.”
It was a sleazy plan, the Captain acknowledged. There were a hundred holes in it; it might endanger the whole operation. But it was the best he could come up with; it had to be done. If Danny Boy was long gone, or dead, they couldn’t sit around watching an empty hole. He’d order it at exactly 3:00 p.m.
He was in the radio room, and at 2:48 p.m. there was a burst of static from one of the radio speakers, then it cleared. “Barbara from Bulldog One.”
“Got you, Bulldog One.”
“Fernandez,” the voice said triumphantly. “Danny Boy just came out.”
There was a sigh in the radio room; Captain Delaney realized part of it was his.
“What’s he wearing?” he asked the radioman.
The operator started to repeat the question into his mike, but Fernandez had heard the Captain’s loud voice.
“Black topcoat,” he reported. “No hat. Hands in pockets. He’s not waiting for a cab. Walking west. Looks like he’s out for a stroll. I’ll put Bulldog Three on him, far back, and two sneaks on foot. Officer LeMolle, designated Bulldog Twenty. Officer Sanchez, designated Bulldog Forty. Got that?”
“LeMolle is Bulldog Twenty, Sanchez is Forty.”
“Right. You’ll get radio checks from them as soon as possible. Danny Boy is nearing Second Avenue now, still heading west. I’m out.”
Delaney stood next to the radio table. The other men in the room closed in, heads turned, ears to the loudspeaker.
Silence for almost five minutes. One man coughed, looked apologetically at the others.
Then, almost a whisper: “Barbara from Bulldog Twenty. Read me?”
“Soft but good, Twenty.”
“Danny Boy between Second and Third on Eighty-third, heading west. Out.” It was a woman’s voice.
“Who’s Lemolle?” Delaney asked Blankenship. “Policewoman Martha LeMolle. Her cover is a housewife-shopping bag, the whole bit.”
Delaney opened his mouth to speak, but the radio crackled again.
“Barbara from Bulldog Forty. Make me?”
“Yes, Forty. Good. Where is he?”
“Turning south on Third. Out.”
Blankenship turned to Delaney without waiting for his question. “Forty is Detective second grade Ramon Sanchez. Dressed like an orthodox Jewish rabbi.”
So when Daniel G. Blank deposited the brown paper bag in the litter basket, the housewife was less than twenty feet behind him and saw him do it, and the rabbi was across the avenue and saw him do it. They both shadowed Danny Boy back to his apartment house, but by the time he arrived they had both reported he had discarded something in a litter basket, they had given the exact location (northeast corner, Third and 82nd; and, at Delaney’s command, Blankenship had an unmarked car on the way with orders to pick up the entire basket and bring it back to the brownstone. Delaney thought it might be the ice ax.
At least twenty men crowded into the kitchen when the two plainclothesmen carried in the garbage basket and set it on the linoleum.
“I always knew you’d end up in Sanitation, Tommy,” someone called. There were a few nervous laughs.
“Empty it,” Delaney ordered. “Slowly. Put the crap on the floor. Shake out every newspaper. Look into every bag.”
The two detectives pulled on their gloves. They began to snake out the sodden packages, the neatly wrapped bags, the dead rat (handled by the tip of its tail), loose garbage, a blood-soaked towel. The stench filled the room, but no one left; they had all smelled worse odors than that.
It went slowly, for almost ten minutes, as bags were pulled out, emptied onto the floor, and tied packages were cut open and unrolled. Then one of the dicks reached in, came out with a small brown paper bag, opened it, looked inside.
“Jesus Christ!”
The waiting men said nothing, but there was a tightening of the circle; Captain Delaney felt himself pressed closer until his thighs were tight against the kitchen table. Holding the bag by the bottom, the detective slowly slid the contents out onto the tabletop. Cop’s shield.
There was something: a collective moan, a gasp, something of anguish and fear. The men peered closer.
“That’s Kope’s tin,” someone cried, voice crackling with fury. “I worked with him. That’s Kope’s number. I know it.”
Someone said: “Oh, that dirty cocksucker.”
Someone said, over and over: “Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker.…”
Someone said: “Let’s get him right now. Let’s waste him.”
Delaney had been bending over, staring at the buzzer. It wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened: Daniel G. Blank had destroyed the evidence, the ID cards and rose petals flushed down the toilet or thrown into the incinerator. But this was good metal, so he figured he better ditch it. Not smart, Danny Boy.
“Let’s waste him,” someone repeated, in a louder voice.
And here was another problem, one he had hoped to avoid by keeping his knowledge of Daniel Blank’s definite guilt to himself. He knew that when a cop was killed, all cops became Sicilians. He had seen it happen: a patrolman shot down, and immediately his precinct house was flooded with cops from all over the city, wearing plaid windbreakers and business suits, shields pinned to lapels, offering to work on their own time. Was there anything they could do? Anything?
It was a mixture of fear, fury, anguish, sorrow. You couldn’t possibly understand it unless you belonged. Because it was a brotherhood, and corrupt cops, stupid cops, cowardly cops had nothing to do with it. If you were a cop, then any cop’s murder diminished you. You could not endure that.
The trouble was, Captain Edward X. Delaney acknowledged to himself, the trouble was that he could understand all this on an intellectual level without feeling the emotional involvement these men were feeling now, staring at a murdered cop’s tin. It wasn’t so much a lack in him, he assured himself, as that he looked at things differently from these furious men. To him all murders, in sanity and without conscience, demanded judgment, whether assassinated President, child thrown from rooftop, drunk knifed to death in a tavern brawl, whatever, wherever, whomever. His brotherhood was wider, larger, broader, and encompassed all, all, all…
But meanwhile, he was surrounded by a ring of blood-charged men. He knew he had only to say, “All right, let’s take him,” and they would be with him, surging, breaking down doors. Daniel G. Blank would dissolve in a million plucking bullets, torn and falling into darkness.
Captain Delaney raised his head slowly, looked around at those faces: stony, twisted, blazing.
“We’ll do it my way,” he said, keeping his voice as toneless as he could. “Blankenship, have the shield dusted. Get this mess cleaned up. Return the basket to the street corner. The rest of you men get back to your posts.”
He strode into his study, closed all the doors. He sat stolidly at his desk and listened. He heard the mutterings, shufflings of feet. He figured he had another 24 hours, no more. Then some hothead would get to Blank and gun him down. Exactly what he told Monica Gilbert he would do. But for different reasons.