The room tilted. The room went black.
37
Burke placed the phone back in its cradle. He rubbed his hand roughly across his face.
“That was Reed.”
Recevo’s fingers ran around the brim of the fedora which he held in his lap.
“And?”
“He called in an hour ago to report on his progress, right after I discovered that Gearhart had booked. I told him to get over to Gearhart’s place right away.”
“He found Gearhart?”
“Not exactly. There were a bunch of cops and an ambulance out front of Gearhart’s when he got there. Reed parked, hung around, listened to some of the crowd and a couple of the blueboys jawboning about the details.”
“Reed get any dope?”
“Yeah. Gearhart’s dead.”
“Damn.” Recevo frowned in counterfeit remorse.
“A cop out of uniform took him down after Gearhart sliced the cop from top to bottom. The cop really let him have it. Reed says he saw them bring out the body. Even with the sheet, you could see it was a mess.” Burke sipped at his drink. “I shouldn’t have let Gearhart out of my sight. He panicked, I guess, went to get his things before he skipped. The thing I can’t figure out is, what was that cop doin’ at his place?”
“Hell if I know.” Recevo paused. “The cop buy it, too?”
“I don’t know if he made it or not. They had already taken him away by the time Reed got there.” Burke looked at Recevo. “What’s it to you, Joe?”
Recevo spread his hands. “Cops go bananas when you kill one of their own. They’ll be all over us—”
“True. But I don’t know if he made it or not.”
Recevo watched Reed pour from the fifth which had been full that afternoon. The bottle was nearly empty now.
“You know, Mr. Burke, no disrespect to Gearhart or anything like that, but we might want to look at this as some kind of blessing.”
“What do you mean?”
“This thing with Gearhart is over now. They can’t tie anything to us now.”
“Well, yeah. But there was that bartender, and the pimp, and that girl that Gearhart let go. Witnesses, all of them. I don’t know what he told them. We’ll never know until we talk to them. Don’t you agree?”
Recevo did not respond. He was studying the slumped posture of Burke behind his desk. He was wondering how he ever could have followed a guy like that.
“Anyway,” said Burke, “we’ll know in a couple of minutes. Reed told me he talked to the bartender and the pimp. He sounded real excited about something when we talked. Said he couldn’t wait to get in here and spill it.”
Recevo withdrew a cigarette. He lighted it, tossed the match in the ashtray in front of him. He took a drag, watched smoke settle in the room. A little while later he butted the cigarette. A door slammed from the first floor at the front of the house. Heavy footsteps ascended the stairs.
“There’s Reed,” said Burke.
Recevo said, “I know.”
Peter Karras got out of the cab, went straight into Garfield Hospital, asked the first cop he saw as to the whereabouts of Boyle. There were plenty of cops to ask. They were in the lobby and in the halls, some in uniform, some not. Uniforms or no, to Karras they all looked like cops.
Karras was told that Boyle was in recovery; he found the room, guarded out front and crawling with more cops. Karras saw Boyle’s father, frail as always, and his uncle, a detective named Dan Boyle. Karras shook the father’s hand, limped across the room to the uncle, a big man in a raincoat who was leaning against the wall, drinking coffee from a mug and dragging hard on a cigarette.
“Detective?”
Dan Boyle looked up. “Yeah.”
“Pete Karras.”
They shook hands, Dan Boyle giving Karras the hard lawman’s eye.
“Thanks for callin’ me.”
“He was askin’ for you before they put him under.”
“He gonna make it?”
“Yeah.”
Karras smiled, bit on his lip. He looked down, saw that he had been wringing his hands.
“How is he?”
“The bastard cut him bad. They got him stitched up and stable... whad’ya call that, stabilized. The main thing was he lost a lot of blood. Me and my brother — his father, I mean — we gave what they let us give. Plenty of other cops, they gave, too. Well, he ain’t gonna look so good at the beach. But he’s gonna make it all right. He’s gonna make it fine.”
“Can I look at him?”
“Come on.”
They went to a window that gave to a view of the recovery room. Karras looked in, saw Jimmy laid out with tubes going in his arm and another running beneath the sheet. He saw a couple of white-coat characters standing nearby, talking something over, and a nurse with her palm on Jimmy’s forehead.
“Those doctors,” said Karras. “They know what the hell they’re doin’?”
“I suppose.” Dan Boyle nodded. “I can get you in there for a minute if you’d like.”
“That’s all right. Just do me a favor — when he wakes up, tell him that Pete Karras sent his love.”
Boyle chuckled wryly. “What, are you two queer for each other or somethin’?”
Karras said, “Just tell him I love him, that’s all.”
Boyle studied Karras. “Jimmy told me about you. Said you’ve been friends since you were kids.”
“Yeah.”
“Funny, him havin’ friends outside the force. Me, I don’t have too many friends who aren’t cops. Even family. My own kid just got out of the academy. Hell, his kid will probably be a cop someday. It’s just in our bloodline, I guess.”
“I guess it is.”
“I sure would like to know what happened in that apartment today, though.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
Boyle shook his head. “We don’t even know why Jimmy was there. The lab boys are going over things now, and we’re interviewing everybody in the neighborhood—”
“Your nephew’s a hero,” said Karras.
“What?”
“I’m telling you, Jimmy’s a goddamn hero. That guy that he killed, the fat man?”
“Yeah?”
“He was the whore murderer you guys have been trying to nail for the last three years.”
“You don’t say.”
“I’m serious. The lard-bucket, he sliced Jimmy with a razor, right?”
“So?”
“You tell your lab boys to check out that razor. I bet they’re gonna find some traces of that hooker that bought it last Friday night.”
“What the hell are you talkin’ about?”
“Jimmy told me all about it. How he found this piece of evidence, and how he was gonna follow it through.”
“What evidence?”
“Damn if I know. You’re the detective, you figure it out. But you better get on it and phone the station real quick.”
Dan Boyle stared into Karras’s eyes. He walked away, turned once, gave Karras the eye again, kept walking to another group of men. He said something to them in a very blunt and officious manner, and two of them broke off and stepped down the hall at a fast clip.
Dan Boyle rubbed his chin. He looked over toward the recovery room window. His nephew’s friend, the cripple with the gray hair and marked face, was gone.
Reed stopped pacing for a moment to allow his audience the opportunity to absorb the drama in his account. He grinned widely, his pigs’ eyes closing completely on the action. Recevo reached across the table, tapped ash off his cigarette. Burke broke the seal on a virgin bottle of bourbon, slopped a few inches into his glass.