“I don’t know.”
She shook her head. “He told you, Charlie, about a crooked cop, what he called the liaison between the organization and the police force. Charlie, he’s sure to think we’re on our way to kill Mahoney.”
“Oh,” I said.
“If we do find him,” she told me, “we’ll probably find Trask and Slade right along with him.”
“They can’t be everywhere at once,” I said, though by now I wasn’t so sure.
“All they have to be,” she pointed out, “is where you are.”
I shook my head. “Well, I’ve got nothing else to do. Mahoney’s the man I’ve got to see next, that’s all.”
“All right, fine. You’re in charge. Yeah, there’s Grand Central.”
Grand Central is a parkway. Chloe tooled the mighty Packard around the long curve down from the street we’d been on, and joined the rest of the night traffic streaming toward the city.
One question Chloe hadn’t brought up, but I’d been thinking about anyway, was how we were going to find Patrick Mahoney. All I knew about him was that he was a policeman. He could be a uniformed cop, or a detective in plainclothes. He could be stationed in a precinct in any one of the boroughs, or he could work out of the main Headquarters on Centre Street in Manhattan.
Although, come to think of it, the odds were pretty good he was well up there in the police hierarchy. A uniformed cop on a beat somewhere was hardly in a position to be what Gross had called the “liaison” between the organization and the police force. It seemed to me likeliest that Mahoney was some sort of wheel and would most likely be found at Centre Street.
But how to find out for sure, that was the problem.
A patrol car passed us, exceeding the posted speed limit, and I gazed after it wistfully, wishing we could catch up with it and flag it down and just ask the cop driving it if he could tell us who Patrick Mahoney was and how to—
Ah hah!
I said it aloud: “Ah hah!”
Chloe jerked, and the Packard lunged into another lane. “Don’t do that!” she said.
“Canarsie,” I told her. “Never mind Manhattan, drive to Canarsie.”
“Canarsie? Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding. Drive to Canarsie.”
“I couldn’t find Canarsie,” she told me, “with a troop of Boy Scouts to help.”
“I could. Stop the car and let me drive.”
“You sure you know how to drive this kind of car?”
Coming from her, that was an insult. But I let it pass. “Yes,” I said simply. “Pull over to the side.”
She did, and we switched places, she sliding over and me running around the front of the car. It was a very large car, with a very long front and a very high hood. I got behind the wheel and immediately felt like a member of Patton’s Third Army Tanks, you know.
What a dream that car was to drive! It was like driving a big old mohair sofa, equipped with a lot of tiny highly oiled ball bearings. It was the first time in my life I ever wished I smoked cigars. I can see why gangsters and little old ladies are assumed to drive cars like this; such a car gives a gangster a feeling of power and importance he can’t possibly get in, say, a Cadillac you can barely tell apart from some minor hood’s Chevrolet, and a lot of time at the wheel of this sort of car would surely keep the bloom of youth in the cheeks of any reasonably hip little old lady.
“No wonder we got away from those guys,” I said, as we rolled merrily along. “This car has too much self-respect to be caught by some four-eyed piece of tin with plastic seat covers.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Chloe.
“The driver helped, too,” I assured her, but I only said it to be polite.
Chapter 18
I found Patrolman Ziccatta walking along East 101st Street, practicing with his nightstick. He wasn’t doing too well tonight, so I heard him before I saw him: Clatter, and, “Damn!”
We’d been driving around the neighborhood for fifteen minutes, moving very slowly with all the windows open. It was heading toward midnight and all Canarsie was, as usual, comatose. My competition, the other two neighborhood bars, were both open, of course, their windows full of red neon, but if they were not comatose they were at least somnolent. My own bar, the ROCK GRILL, was comatose; it was strange to drive by and see it closed and empty. How I wished I could get out of the car and go in there and open the place up, light it up, turn on the TV, put my apron on, maybe have a little small-talk with a customer or two, assuming a customer or two might come by.
The late show tonight, I remembered all at once, was Kiss of Death, where Victor Mature wants to go straight and Richard Widmark won’t let him and pushes the old lady down the stairs in the wheelchair. And the late late show was going to be It’s a Gift, the old W.C. Fields comedy, where Fields buys the orange grove in California.
That was an awful lot of good television to be missing, all on account of somebody making a stupid mistake some place.
So anyway, we drove around the neighborhood about fifteen minutes before the clatter and damn told me I’d found Patrolman Ziccatta. I stuck my head out the window and, keeping my voice down as much as possible, said, “Hoy!”
“Eh?” I could see him on the sidewalk, in the darkness midway between two streetlights, bending over to pick up his nightstick. Staying bent over, he swayed this way and that, like somebody involved in a religious ritual of some kind, looking around to see who’d called him.
“Over here,” I said. “It’s me, Charlie Poole.”
I’d meanwhile brought the Packard up to the left-hand curb, near him. Patrolman Ziccatta looked over at me, finally found me and recognized me, said, “Oh! It’s you, Charlie,” picked up his nightstick, straightened, and came over to the car. “You buy this?” he asked.
“What? Oh, the car. No, I just borrowed it.”
“I noticed the place closed before,” he said. “I was wondering were you maybe sick or something.”
“I had things I had to do,” I said. “I can’t talk about it right now, if you don’t mind. No offense.”
“Not at all,” he said. “Why should I stick my nose in your private business?” And he bent forward again to smile past me at Chloe and raise his uniform hat. “Good evening,” he said.
She smiled back, and nodded her head, and said, “Good evening.”
“Patrolman Ziccatta,” I said, going through the amenities although my heart wasn’t in it, “this is Chloe — uh—”
“Shapiro,” she said.
“Shapiro,” I said. “Chloe Shapiro. Chloe, this is Patrolman Ziccatta.”
They both said, “How do you do?”
I was beginning to feel impatient. Any minute we’d be serving tea and chocolate-chip cookies. I said, “Patrolman Ziccatta, there’s a question I wanted to ask you.”
“Sure, Charlie. Name it.”
“In confidence,” I said. “And I can’t tell you why I have to ask this question.”
He put his left hand on his badge, though I guess he meant the gesture to be hand on heart, and said, “I don’t snoop, Charlie, I don’t pry. Why should I be a nosy parker?”
I said, “Fine. What I want to know is, there’s a man somewhere on the police force named Patrick Mahoney, and what I—”
“I’d be surprised if there wasn’t,” said Patrolman Ziccatta, and laughed. He bent forward again, and looked twinkle-eyed at Chloe, and said, “Wouldn’t you, miss? Be surprised if there wasn’t?”
The smile she gave him this time was perfunctory, I’m happy to report. I said, “This is serious, Patrolman Ziccatta, it really is.”
He sobered immediately, and straightened till he was practically standing at attention. “Sorry, Charlie,” he said. “It just struck me funny, that’s all. You can see that.”