5. He could recheck his own investigations of the nine ice ax purchases and the six men in the file with a record of violent crime.
6. He could finally get to his early idea of determining if there was a magazine for mountain climbers and he could borrow their subscription list; if there was a club or society of mountain climbers and he could borrow their membership list; and if it was possible to check the local library on residents of the 251st Precinct who had withdrawn books on mountaineering.
7. If it came to it, he would personally check out every goddamn name of every goddamn New Yorker on the goddamn Outside Life mailing list. There were probably about 10,000 goddamn New Yorkers included, and he’d hunt down every goddamn one of them.
But he was just blathering, and he knew it. If he was commanding the 500 detectives in Operation Lombard he could do it, but not by himself in much less than five years. How many murder victims would there be by then? Oh?…probably not more than a thousand or so.
But all this was cheesy thinking. One thing was bothering him, and he knew what it was. When Monica called him to report that one of the ice ax purchasers in Calvin Case’s file hadn’t been included on her Outside Life mailing list, he had laughed it off as “human error.” No one is perfect. People do make mistakes, errors of commission or omission. Quite innocently, of course.
What if Calvin Case, late at night and weary, flipped by the sales check of an ice ax purchaser?
What if Christopher Langley had missed a store in the New York area that sold axes?
What if Monica Gilbert had somehow skipped a record of violent crime on one of the computer reports she noted on her file cards?
And what if he, Captain Edward X. Delaney, had the solution to the whole fucking mess right under his big, beaky nose and couldn’t see it because he was stupid, stupid, stupid?
Human errors. And professionals were just as prone to them as Delaney’s amateurs. That was why Chief Pauley sent different men back to check the same facts, why he repeated interrogations twice, sometimes three times. My God, even computers weren’t perfect. But was there anything he could do about it? No.
So the Captain read over his list of options again and tossed it aside. A lot of shit. He called Monica Gilbert.
“Monica? Edward. Am I disturbing you?”
“Oh no.”
“Do you have a few minutes?”
“Do you want to come over?”
“Oh no. I just want to talk to you. About our lunch yesterday. You said something, and I can’t remember what it was. I have a feeling it’s important, and it’s been nagging at me, and I can’t for the life of me remember it.”
“What was it?”
He broke up: a great blast of raucous laughter. Finally he spluttered, “If I knew, I wouldn’t be calling, would I? What did we talk about?”
She wasn’t offended by his laughter. “Talk about?” she said. “Let’s see…I told you about my window boxes, and you told me about your backyard. And then you spoke about your wife’s illness, and then we talked about my girls. Going out, the manager tried to pick up the check, and you wouldn’t let him. On the way home you told me about the assistant chef who was robbing him.”
“No, no,” he said impatiently. “It must have been something to do with the case. Did we discuss the case while we were eating?”
“Nooo…” she said doubtfully. “After we finished coffee you said we’d come back to my place and you’d go over the cards. Oh yes. You asked if I had finished entering all the reports on the cards, and I said I had.”
“And that’s all?”
“Yes. Edward, what is this-No, wait a minute. I was teasing you. I said something about the records from the computers just showing unsuccessful criminals, because if they were good at their jobs, they wouldn’t have any record, and you laughed and said that was so.”
He was silent a moment.
“Monica,” he said finally.
“Yes, Edward?”
“I love you,” he said, laughing and keeping it light.
' “You mean that's what you wanted?”
“That’s exactly what I wanted.”
His erratic memory flashed back now, and he recalled talking to Detective Lieutenant Jeri Fernandez on the steps leading up to the second floor of the precinct house. That was when they were breaking up the precinct detective squads.
“What did you get?” Delaney had asked.
“I drew a Safe, Loft, and Truck Division in midtown,” Fernandez had said disgustedly.
Now Delaney called Police Information, identified himself, told the operator what he wanted: the telephone number of the new Safe, Loft and Truck Division in midtown Manhattan. He was shunted twice more-it took almost five minutes-but eventually he got the number and, carefully crossing his fingers, dialed and asked for Lieutenant Fernandez. His luck was in; the detective picked up the phone after eight rings. “Lieutenant Fernandez.”
“Captain Edward X. Delaney here.”
There was a second of silence, then a jubilant, “Captain! Jesus Christ! This is great! How the hell are you, Captain?”
“Just fine, lieutenant. And you?”
“Up to my ears in shit. Captain, this new system just ain’t working. I can tell you. It’s a lot of crap. You think I know what’s going on? I don’ know what’s going on. No one knows what’s going on. We got guys in here from every precinct in town. They set us all down here, and we’re supposed to know all about the garment business. Pilferage, hijacking, fraud, arson, safecracking, the mob-the whole bit. Captain, it’s wicked. I tell you, it’s wicked/”
“Take it easy,” Delaney soothed. “Give it a little time. Maybe it’ll work out.”
“Work out my ass,” Fernandez shouted. “Yesterday two of my boys caught a spade taking packages out of the back of a U.S. Mail parcel post truck. Can you imagine that? In broad daylight. It’s parked at Thirty-fourth and Madison, and this nut is calmly dragging out two heavy packages and strolling off with them. The U.S. Mail!”
“Lieutenant,” Delaney said patiently, “the reason I called, I need some help from you.”
“Help?” Fernandez cried. “Jesus Christ, Captain, you name it you got it. You know that. What is it?”
“I remember your telling me, just before the precinct squad was broken up, that you had been working on your open files and sending them to the new detective districts, depending on the nature of the crime.”
“That’s right, Captain. Took us weeks to get cleaned out.”
“Well, what about the garbage? You know-the beef sheets, reports on squeals, tips, diaries, and so forth?”
“All the shit? Most of it was thrung out. What could we do with it? We was sent all over the city, and maybe only one or two guys would be working in the Two-five-one. It was all past history anyway-right? So I told the boys to trash the whole lot and-”
“Well, thanks very much,” Delaney said heavily. “I guess that-”
“-except for the last year,” Fernandez kept talking, ignoring the Captain’s interruption. “I figured the new stuff might mean something to somebody, so we kept the paper that came in the last year, but everything else was thrung out.”
“Oh?” Delaney said, still alive. “What did you do with it?”
“It’s down in the basement of the precinct house. You know when you go down the stairs and the locker room is off to your right and the detention cells on your left? Well, you go past the cells and past the drunk tank, then turn right. There’s this hallway that leads to a flight of stairs and the back door.”
“Yes, I remember that. We always closed off that hallway during inspections.”
“Right. Well, along that hallway is the broom closet where they keep mops and pails and all that shit, and then farther on toward the back door there’s this little storage room with a lot of crap in it. I think it used to be a torture chamber in the old days.”
“Yes,” Delaney laughed. “Probably was.”
“Sure, Captain. The walls are thick and that room’s got no windows, so who could hear the screams? Who knows how many crimes got solved in there-right? Anyways, that’s where we dumped all the garbage files. But just for the last year. That any help?”