McDougal had his wallet out and handed Keene a twenty over the sign-in counter. 'Want to go double or nothing next week?'
'We're talking my own Buffalo Bills, right?'
McDougal was appalled. 'Get real. We're talking the Niners. Who cares about the Bills?'
Logan was enjoying the exchange as well. He appeared to have a bit of a runny nose and from time to time would sniff delicately. 'Am I mistaken,' Logan asked, 'or is gambling still frowned upon in this state?'
'Absolutely,' McDougal replied with a smile.
'It's a scourge,' Keene added. 'But you know, the mafia.'
Everybody enjoyed the moment of the manly camaraderie. 'So what brings you gentlemen down here today?'
Down to business, Logan gave a small sigh and put his briefcase up on the counter. 'I'm going to trial on People v. Lawson next Monday.' He gave McDougal the case number. 'It's Inspector Keene's case here. I thought I ought to look at what the DA had actually collected before I tried to save my client's poor ass.'
McDougal shook his head in mock disbelief. 'I don't know how you do it.'
Logan looked at him questioningly. 'What?'
'Keep your clients if you don't even look at the evidence until a week before trial. Don't they get a little pissed off?'
A blustery laugh, followed by a sniffle. 'What? I tell them? Come on, get a life.' But then he back-pedaled a bit. 'I generally know what's supposed to be there. It usually is. If it isn't, I make a motion to dismiss.' He shrugged. 'It's worked out.'
Visser added his two cents. 'His real talent is making it look like he's not working. The man works all the time.'
Logan made a gracious gesture toward his private eye. 'An unsolicited testimonial from an unbiased source. Thank you, Eugene.' Sniff.
He turned to Keene. 'So, Sergeant, shall we go?'
McDougal buzzed the door for them and Logan and Keene went inside to sign the book. Visser, at the reception window, leaned in and asked how long they would be.
Logan shrugged, looked a question at Keene who did the same. 'I don't know. Fifteen, twenty? Hey, Gary, you mind letting Gene in, sit his ample posterior on a chair? We might be a minute.'
McDougal frowned at the request. He wasn't supposed to let in anyone who wasn't accompanied by a police officer, and they had to sign in to a specific case. But he wasn't supposed to gamble either, especially here on police premises. And these were pretty good guys – he knew them all. Visser had even been a homicide cop when McDougal had first come up. There was a chair he could sit in right next to his own – it wasn't as though Visser was here in the evidence lock-up to rip something off. He'd never be out of McDougal's sight. He spoke up to Keene. 'You want to sign him in on your ticket?'
From out at the window, Visser said it wasn't any big deal, he could stand.
But Keene said sure, buzz him on in.
'So what'd you guys do to pull this assignment?'
Visser was seated next to Gary McDougal in the sign-in area, making conversation with him and another young cop – the name tag read 'Bellew' – from the gun room next door. He knew that being stuck down here in the basement as records and evidence room custodian was not exactly a sought-after position among the uniforms. It wasn't quite an official, on-the-books reprimand, but neither did anybody ever mistake it for a reward.
McDougal made a face, shook his head with disgust. 'We ate a couple of donuts we didn't pay for.' The men all exchanged glances. 'I know,' McDougal continued. 'You don't have to say it.'
But Bellew felt like he did. 'It was some bullshit OMC sting to fight police corruption in the big city.' The OMC was the Office of Management and Control – formerly called Internal Affairs, the department that policed the police.
'You being an ex-cop,' McDougal said, 'you'll be amazed to hear that sometimes it's hard for us street guys to pay for coffee, snacks, like that. Seems like people we're out guarding their stores, they feel grateful sometimes. They make us a sandwich, pour us a cup, forget to ring it up.'
'I'm shocked to hear it,' Visser said. 'That's almost as bad as gambling.'
The officers both chuckled. From over by the entrance to the gun room, Bellew took it up. 'Yeah. So anyway, OMC gets a bug up their ass that guys are abusing their public trust. Taking a goddamn sandwich. So they put a couple of their guys behind counters and one son of a bitch gives us both donuts…'
McDougaclass="underline" 'Which – get this – I offer to pay for. And he says, "No, that's OK, don't worry about it.'"
'And they bust you guys for that?'
Bellew answered. 'They hit maybe twenty of us in one day, said we ought to take it as a wake-up call. Yada yada.'
'But they sent you down here?'
'Six weeks, no overtime.'
Visser took in the immediate surroundings – institutional clutter ruled here in the sign-in area. The walls were lined with green metal shelves to the ceiling. Stained and rusted metal tables sagged with the weight of cardboard boxes filled with junk that had lost its case number – confiscated cell phones, batteries, radios, bicycle tires, tools. From his time in the police department, he knew that the rest of the place was an enormous cavern, nearly a city block on a side, a home to the records and evidence in every crime committed in the city and county over the past ten years.
There were miles of case files. There was a freezer for blood, soiled clothes, the occasional body part. There was an entire room for bicycles, another for computers. A locked walk-in safe for narcotics. And the gun room, adjoining the sign-in.
'And how much time have you already put in?' he asked.
'Four weeks. Two to go, but who's counting?' McDougal stood as a homicide inspector – Marcel Lanier – appeared at the window with a yellow folder bulging with stuff. When the two men had been talking a minute, Visser leaned over the table and interrupted.
'Marcel, how you doin'?' Lanier stopped his paperwork, nodded with a question in his face, and Visser answered it. 'I'm just waiting for Dash Logan, doing some babysitting. How's the murder biz?'
'A little shaky at the moment. Glitsky had a heart attack. You hear that?'
Visser chatted about that for another minute or so, establishing still further with McDougal and Bellew that he was really in the club – buds with Keene, friendly with Lanier in homicide, familiar with Glitsky, a sympathetic guy about their beef with the OMC.
At the counter, they went back to logging in Lanier's evidence. Visser, already standing, turned to Bellew. 'That box full of pieces still here?' he asked.
'It never goes away,' Bellew answered.
'You mind if I look at it?' He turned back for a minute. 'Gary?' He pointed. 'Guns? OK?'
McDougal waved him in. 'Sure.'
Non-issue.
Like the sign-in area, the gun room was floor-to-ceiling shelves and files, packed with yellow storage envelopes identified by case numbers in black permanent marker, and each of which held a gun. Four or five hundred file drawers, with a minimum of, say, forty handguns in each one. Several of the file drawers gaped open, possibly – Visser thought – because they were too stuffed with hardware to allow closing.
On the wall behind Bellew's station, rifles and assault weapons threatened to flow over onto the floor. Another large box of rifles sat open on Bellew's table. Below the table, a wooden crate was open on the floor, half filled with assorted confiscated handguns – unloaded, of course, but fully operational, unassigned to any specific case. The police found them in the streets, in hedges, garbage cans, dumpsters and dope houses where all the occupants had fled out the back. They were destined to become manhole covers, and good riddance.
The 'piece box' had been in the same place under the table here in the evidence lock-up – albeit with a continuously changing assortment of guns – at least since Visser had started with the force twenty-some years before. And probably for a long time before that. When a gun came in, they put the serial number into 'the book', a set of records going back almost seventy-five years. And on the last day of the month, every gun was logged into the computer, dumped into a crusher and destroyed.