As they undressed in the darkness, she couldn’t resist. “Why garters?”
“You don’t have to wear them if you don’t want to.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
“Well—”
He touched her bare skin and all her doubts dissolved.
Afterward, with him on top and panting, she said, “We forgot the garters.”
He caressed her thighs. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re a pretty good lover, y’know. For a pervert.”
He kissed her.
“Really, be honest about the garters. I want to know.”
“You mean that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve found that women sometimes change their minds. Yet if I give them something innocuous to think about, it takes their minds off sex and I get laid more often.”
“Oooh … youuu …”
“Now admit it, you were so busy thinking about the garters that you forgot to have second thoughts. Isn’t that so?”
Tish bucked once and pushed and he flopped off onto the floor with a thud. She closed the office door and flipped on the lights. It took several seconds for her eyes to adjust. Yocke was on his back amid the boxes, looking a little dazed.
She found the garters and pulled them on. Then she stood beside him on one leg and used the other foot to rub his chest and stomach.
“Do you like?”
“Gawd almighty,” Jack Yocke said.
Evansville, Indiana, patrolman Harrison Ronald Ford, alias Sammy Z, watched the fat white man stroll down the sidewalk looking neither left nor right. Watching him, you would have thought he owned the sidewalk and all the houses and was out collecting rent. Everything about him said he was the man.
Harrison Ronald shifted his buttocks on the cold concrete stoop where he was perched and watched the man check house numbers. When he arrived in the dim glow of the nearby streetlight, he glanced at Ford, then started up the steps on which Ford was sitting.
“Going somewhere, Fatty?”
“Got an appointment.”
“Great. I’ll bet you got a name too.”
“Tony Anselmo.”
“Why don’t you wait down there on the sidewalk and I’ll check inside. Okay?”
As Anselmo retreated to the sidewalk, Harrison Ronald checked the street again. No traffic. No one in the parked cars. No strollers or tourists other than the guards posted on each of the corners. Although the guards weren’t armed, each of them was within ten feet of a concealed Uzi. Except for the guards, this appeared to be a typical lower-middle-class black neighborhood. No crack was sold here.
Everything appeared normal to Ford’s practiced eyes.
Harrison rapped on the door and disappeared through it when it opened.
Inside the hallway sat another guard with an Uzi on his lap. He nodded as Harrison walked by. The second man locked and bolted the door behind him.
Freeman McNally was in the kitchen eating cake, drinking milk, and reading a newspaper. He was twenty pounds or so overweight and had a hairline in full retreat. Still, encased within the fat was muscle. When he moved he was light on his feet. As Ford entered he looked up from the paper.
“Guy named Tony Anselmo says he has an appointment.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Fat honkey, about fifty or so. Prosperous.”
“Let him in. After you frisk him, go on back out front.”
“Sure, Freeman.”
Out on the sidewalk, Ford said, “They heard of you. Go on in.” He followed Anselmo up the stairs.
Inside, the guard with the Uzi centered it on Anselmo’s ample middle. “Against the wall and spread ’em.”
Ford quickly patted him down, checked his belt front and back, his crotch, and his ankles. “You do that like a cop,” Anselmo rumbled.
“He’s clean,” Ford told the guard, then went back out onto the stoop and resumed his seat.
Harrison Ronald had heard of Fat Tony Anselmo. Sitting on the stoop smoking a cigarette and listening to the noises of the city at night, he tried to recall what he had read in the police intelligence briefing books. Anselmo was a soldier for a New York crime family, the Zubin Costello outfit. Bernie Shapiro was one of the three or four key lieutenants, and Anselmo was supposed to work for him. Suspected of a dozen or so hits in his younger days, Tony Anselmo had once plea-bargained a murder charge down to carrying a concealed weapon and was back on the street after six months in the can. That was the only time he had ever been in jail.
It would have been nice, Ford mused, if Freeman had invited him to remain. Sooner or later, if he lived long enough, but not yet.
As he sat on the stoop smoking, Ford speculated on whether Anselmo had asked for this meeting or Freeman had. And he formed various tentative hypotheses about the business being discussed. Certainly not the purchase of raw product: Freeman got all he could handle from the West Coast.
Money, Ford decided. They were probably doing a deal to wash or invest money. Ford assumed the Costello family had a lot of experience in both activities.
Or perhaps bribery of public officials. That was certainly a possibility.
When the glowing tip of the cigarette reached the filter, Ford lit another one from the stub. He automatically checked the street-corner guards yet again, then watched the smoke swirl on the gentle breeze.
Cold. Tonight was going to be cold. Harrison Ronald turned up the collar of his leather jacket and glanced at his watch.
“Why a bookstore?” Jack Yocke asked.
He and Tish were lying on the couch in the bookstore office in the darkness with Yocke’s coat thrown over them. She was still wearing the garters.
“It sounds silly now,” she said. “But I had to make a living at something, and I like books, so I drove around until I found a spot without a bookstore for two miles in any direction, and I rented that spot.”
“Sensible approach.”
“I thought I was very conservative. I love books. I was so certain the store would be a surefire hit. Ha! I’m barely eating. Still, two years in the business and I’m current on all my bills. That’s something.”
“Indeed it is. A lot of people can’t say that.”
“Now tell me, why a newspaper?”
“Oh, amazingly enough, in spite of the hours, in spite of the deadlines and the editors, I thought I’d like it. Talk about optimism! Sometimes I feel like a mortician. Or a minister. All the shattered lives. I spend my days galloping from tragedy to tragedy. ‘Who what when where why, ma’am, and can you spell the perpetrator’s name one more time?’ I see as much blood as an ambulance driver. I ask the kinds of questions the morticians and chaplains don’t have to ask. ‘Why do you think your husband stabbed you, Ms. Butcher?’ ‘What did the gunman say before he shot you, Mr. Target?’ ‘After he raped, mutilated, and murdered her, why do you keep insisting he’s such a good boy, Mrs. Spock?’ ”
“It must be challenging.”
“It would be,” Jack Yocke agreed, “if you had enough time to do it right, to write it right. You never do. You look at the blood — when you can get to the scene before they cart out the bodies — telephone everyone you can think of, then write six hundred words for the first edition which the editor chops in half or doesn’t like at all. Then wait, wait, check, check. Up one blind alley after another. Finally you get a good story, only to get buried under a human wave attack of other reporters as some editor finally decides that there really is a good story here on Yocke’s supposed beat but Yocke can’t cover it all by himself.”
“So why do you do it?”
“I don’t know.” He really didn’t. At night he went home to his apartment either completely drained or completely frustrated. The stories, when he got some, were never good enough. The black ink on the newsprint never captured the insanity, the fear, the terror, the grief, the desperation of the people who live the lives that make police news. The waste, the future smeared all over the floor — he could never get that into the stories.