Noiselessly, the man walked around the table and placed the cold black barrel to Rico’s temple. He stood there a moment. Then he pulled the trigger and blew Rico’s brains halfway across the loft.
Angelo Rocchia stared from his office window, out across the darkened, snow-frosted rooftops of lower Manhattan, feeling as he did the heat burning up his throat. The Rolaids, he thought, cursing himself for ordering the spaghetti al pesto, where did I put the Rolaids?
He turned back to his desk and started to fumble through its drawers. There was little to distinguish his office from most of the others on the detectives’ floor of Police Plaza. On his blotter was a desk set made of the shields that had marked his progress through the department-and life.
Hung from the walls were the obligatory career photos: Angelo graduating from the Police Academy, being congratulated on the four citations he had won by an assortment of commissioners, at the Columbian Society banquet the night he had been elected president of the Department’s Italian-American fraternal association. There was a portrait of Maria and one of his late wife, the black felt mourning button he had worn religiously for a year now fixed to its silver frame.
He found his tube of Rolaids, popped one into his mouth and returned to the window, waiting anxiously for the relief it would bring. They said heart attacks sometimes started this way, with the burning in the gut and all. So many of the older guys were going that way, the guys he had come in with right after the war; what with the hours, the strain, the fear, the smoking, they said your chances were a lot worse than most people’s.
He never should have eaten so much, but he wanted to take the kid out, show him Forlini’s. He had made him stick around while he typed up their fives, the supplementary investigation reports, that left every NYPD investigation, even one as critical as this, inches deep in paper. A good detective, he’d kept reminding the kid, always keeps his paper up.
Shit, what did they want to know, these kids like Rand? he suddenly asked himself. Wanted to have it all right away, they did. Learning slowly, putting it all together the hard way, they had no time for that. You saw them all over the Department now, figured they already had all the answers, didn’t have to pay their dues the way the older guys had, out there doing the horseshit jobs, getting down the routine, the routine, the routine until it was as much a part of you as your dandruff or your body odor, soaking up experience until certain things became such a natural reaction you didn’t even think about them anymore.
Angelo could see Rand now sitting opposite him in Forlini’s telling him how good the wine was, at the same time letting him know he didn’t approve of throwing guys like the pickpocket against the wall. Already so sure of himself he was just a little patronizing to the older guy.
He started at the sound of the telephone, its jangle echoing through the deserted offices.
“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get you all day.ţ
Hearing her voice, Angelo slid happily into his desk chair. “I’ve been enjoying a typical New York detective’s day. Looking for a needle in the haystack with a bunch of the boys.”
“I called you this morning, but they said everybody was off at a meeting.”
“Yeah. Got a lot of people on this.” Angelo’s voice was gruff, but the gruffness was as transparent as his office window. “I shoulda called you, Grace, but I wasn’t certain …” He hesitated. “I mean after last night and all.”
“I know. I thought a great deal about last night, too, Angelo. I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to keep the baby.”
“Grace, you don’t really mean that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You want another kid that bad?”
“I do.”
How can so much happen in twenty-four hours? Angelo wondered. How can things suddenly change so much? “Grace, if that-” he dabbed at the touch of dampness on his forehead-“if that’s what you really, honestly want, I mean, what the hell, a detective first grade’s pension doesn’t go very far these days, but I wouldn’t know what to do when I retire anyway. There was a guy a couple of months ago was talking to me about taking something in security over at American Express. What I mean is, Grace, if it’s what you really want, I’ll do the right thing by you, you know?”
“Angelo.” She pronounced his name as tenderly as she sometimes did when they were lying beside each other in the darkness of his bedroom, but there was something distant there, too, and it wasn’t just because they were speaking over the phone. “That’s a wonderful thing to say and I’ll never forget you for having said it.” He could hear her slowly inhaling her cigarette. He’d been after her to give that up, except she’d never listened. “But that’s not what I want, Angelo.”
“What do you mean, that’s not what you want?” He tried to conceal the hurt and surprise with the roughness of his voice.
“Angelo, I am not trying to force you to marry me. That’s not why I’m doing this. I tried to tell you last night. I want a child, yes. But not another marriage.”
“For Christ’s sake, Grace, you’re not going to try to bring up a kid just like that? All by yourself? Without a father?”
“I won’t be the first woman in New York to do it, Angelo.”
“Goddammit.” Rage escaped Angelo like steam hissing from a ruptured heating duct. “Grace, you can’t do this.”
“Yes, I can, Angelo. The world has changed a lot, you know.”
“And what about me? It’s my child, too, after all. What am I supposed to do? Come around once a year, pat him on the cheek and say, `Hey, kid, how you getting on? Old lady teaching you how to throw a forward pass and all?”’
“Angelo.” She sounded so quiet, so determined, that the detective’
understood just how completely her mind was made up. “One of the reasons I want this child is because I hope he-or she-will have some of those qualities I love and admire so much in you. But I’m having it for myself, because I want it and I’m ready to accept the responsibilities that go with having it. Alone. Of course, if you want to see the child, there’ll always be a place for you in his or her and my life.”
“Thanks, Grace. Thanks a lot.” As he pronounced the words, Angelo could feel the dull ache constricting his stomach. He was staring out through the windows to the city lights again. This time their edges were blurred and indistinct because Angelo Rocchia had just understood that the last love affair of his life was drawing to an end.
“I’ll call you someday and we can have a nice talk about it.”
When they had hung up, he started to unfold his portable camp bed.
Lieutenant Walsh’s Office of Civil Preparedness had passed out a bunch of them during Friday’s snow emergency and some of them had gotten lost — like the one that had happened to get lost behind Angelo’s door. He had hung up his tie and taken off his cufflinks when he saw the night desk man, Terry Keegan, in his doorway.
“Sleeping in?” Keegan asked.
“Yeah. I got to be over to Hertz Rent-A-Truck at Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, sixthirty tomorrow morning.” That, Angelo reflected, was typical of a detective’s life. Tonight you’re a hero, tomorrow you’re a hack, assigned to be an errand boy for the FBI forensic guys busting up the truck that got the barrels. “Christ, the older I get, the more I hate these early calls.”
“Me too.” Keegan laughed. “Like that ballbreaker they gave us back in ‘fifty-two when we were just breaking in up at the Tenth Precinct. You remember that one?”
“Do I?” Angelo laughed. It had been a hit and run, a leaving the scene, with the victim DOA. Every morning they had had to get out on the West Side Highway at sixthirty stopping cars in the bitter winter cold. “Excuse me, sir, do you go by this way every day? See anything that looked like an accident last Friday?” A thousand cars they must have stopped.