COP KILLER
by
TOM PHIL BING


Fawcett Gold Medal Books by Tom Philbin:

PRECINCT: SIBERIA

UNDER COVER

COP KILLER

Tom Philbin

FAWCETT GOLD MEDAL NEW YORK

A Fawcett Gold Medal Book Published by Ballantine Books Copyright (c
1986 by Tom Philbin

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions.  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a
division of Random House, Inc."  New York, and simultaneously in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 86-91179

ISBN 0-449-12805-9

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to
actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Printed in Canada

First Edition: October 1986 For Mother and Dad

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The quality of a book is directly dependent on the quality of the
research.  Here again I have been very lucky.  I want to thank: Seaman
& Eisemann Insurance Company, Hicksville, Long Island; Tom Colleran,
Sgt. Marcia Stanton, and Connie Montamarano, all detectives NYPD; and
of course the one and only Jack Sturiano, PA, Suffolk County Medical
Examiner's Office.

CHAPTER 1..

The cop's name was Leo McGrath and everyone at Fort Siberia got a howl
out of his being the victim of a token sucker.  At first, McGrath
didn't know what happened.

"I bought a token at the booth at 183rd," he told his partner, "then I
went up to the turnstile, dropped the token in and the next thing I
know I bang into the gate, almost busting my balls in the process.

"Then I realize what happened.  I see this jig running away, and I see
the token slot is wet.  He had sucked the freakin' token right out of
the slot.

"I was going to chase him," McGrath said, "but he was moving at about a
hundred freakin' miles an hour."

His partner was very sympathetic.

"Hey," he said, adding to the merriment of the men who had gathered
while McGrath told the story, "you should know that this precinct is
overrun with token suckers."

As it happened, Sergeant Sam Turner, the roll-call man, did not mention
it at roll call, perhaps because he did not want to add to McGrath's
embarrassment.  Turner had come into the high-ceilinged, bile green
room where the roll was called at 7:45.

In the room, as usual, were forty-odd cops dressed in dark blue under
coats since it was now October-thirty-nine males, three female police
officers today, and four detectives-and at the appearance of Turner, a
tall black man who wore a pressed uniform which fit snugly on his lean
body, they quickly formed themselves into parallel lines for
inspection.  Wordlessly, he threaded his way through the lines.

He moved fairly fast through the group, but a close observer would
have seen him linger in front of three of them.

Such an observer was Joe Sweeney, a paunchy, tuddyfaced man who had
spent twenty-nine years as aPO on the streets of New York City, the
last two-a sentence for being an alcoholic for the five before-in the
Five Three.  But he did not miss much, drunk or sober.

Sweeney knew who the men--or boys-were.  They were raw recruits, fresh
from the Academy, fresh with big ideas, like he had once, of changing
the world.  They would learn quickly, he thought, that the world didn't
change so easy, especially Fort Siberia.  In fact, nothing changed,
except it got worse.  No way did the citizens respect the cops the way
they once did.

Sweeney wondered if the recruits knew what they were in for.  Unless
they were gung-ho, they would have a real hard time.  The good citizens
of Fort Siberia liked to put a test on raw recruits, see what they
could take.

Sweeney had seen a lot of kids broken, especially the ones who commuted
to the city from Long Island or Jersey and had no idea what the Fort
Siberia citizens were like.  Finding out could be a rude awakening.
Sweeney recalled one kid who had been dropped onto the corner of
Creston and 184th-deep in the area of the precinct known as Death
Valley-one sweltering July night about two years ago, and an hour after
he started he called his sergeant and said that he wanted out-not only
off his post but out of the Department.

Well, maybe, Sweeney thought, these three would make it.  Some did.  At
least they all looked human and were white, instead of the dwarf Puerto
Ricans with records, even drug busts.

God Almighty, today they allowed so much shit on the force-little girls
and puppies and illiterates.

Sweeney felt a small surge of dyspepsia.  It was more than that,
though, much more, but it added up to the same thing: the job wasn't
what it once was.  The days of pride were gone forever.  He swallowed a
belch.

Sweeney couldn't wait until he got on post and could go to his coop.

Turner, finished with his inspection, went to the front of the room
and took his clipboard off a nearby desk.  He glanced down at it, then
looked up.

"You who were here a year ago last summer will recall the archer that
was shooting dogs with a crossbow from roofs around Tiebout and 176th,
and 177th and Anthony."

A number of the officers nodded.

"He's back.  Last night he killed a dog on 177th and Clay-shot him in
the head.  He is described as being black, tall, with a huge Afro.
Consider him very dangerous, a head case.  He could just as well shoot
at you, and these crossbows shoot metal rods called bolts and are very
accurate to seventy five yards-much more accurate than a bow and
arrow.

"Narcotics is looking for any information you can get or possess on a
white Ford Thunderbird, either 1980 or '81 model.

"Robbery reports that there is an Oreo team operating in the Five Two
and Four Six.  They have stuck up three liquor stores already, and may
be coming our way.  No information on the vehicle.  Do not approach
without backup."

Turner paused for emphasis.  But no emphasis was needed.  Cops in the
Five Three knew he was a fanatic when it came to possible gunplay.
Rumor had it that he had once been shot, but since Turner never talked
with anyone and was too imposing a figure for any of the cops to just
simply ask, no one could say.

"The ME asks me to pass on a bit of advice.  Never move or even touch
the deceased at a homicide scene.  Aside from violating rules, it also
can result, the ME says, in the release of gases-depending on the
intestinal pressures-from the body that are much worse than anything a
live body can emit.  "

There were a few knowing sniggers.  Sweeney's eyes twinkled.  The death
fart, he thought, that's what they call it.  It was a hundred times
worse than a regular fart.

"Sector D," Turner said, his dark, intense eyes fuming toward officers
Juan Iglesio and Frank Mulvey, "you have a tense situation on Tiebout
near 184th.  Last night a fight broke out inside the Ortiz Funeral Home
.. ."

There was some laughter.  ' .. . and two people were knifed.  Seems the
physical configuration of the place is such that to get from one
waking room to another, you have to go through the other, disrupting
whoever might be there."  More laughter.

"That happened last night.  Take care.  There's still plenty of bad
blood there, and one of these things can start again and soon can have
an army of people wanting to kill each other.  "

Laughter erupted.

"Don't get caught in the middle."

Sometimes Turner would simply nod and leave.  Other times he would
present what had come to be known in the precinct as survival tips,
ideas Turner collected from all over the country that would better
equip the cops in Fort Siberia to survive on the street.

Today, he put his clipboard behind him on a desk.

"I have one tip today.

"It's this: never use the door of a radio car as a shield against
gunfire.  They do this on TV, but out here the bullets will go right
through the thin-gauge sheet metal it's made of with no problem."

Then he picked up his clipboard and, with his characteristic limp,
walked out of the room.  The men and women of Fort Siberia dispersed to
their posts and radio cars to start another day.

CHAPTER 2.

Today, Hugh Kerry thought, the nurse was coming.  It filled him with a
sense of embarrassment.  Of course, they had explained it at the
hospital four weeks earlier.

"When the testicles are removed in a prostate operation," the doctor
had said, "there is a wound, and we have to make sure there's no
infection.  Someone will come to look at it every week."

But no one told him it would be a female.

To remove them had been one thing; to have a woman coming every week to
look where they had been was another.

Well, a few more weeks, that was all.  Then she wouldn't come again
anymore.  He would keep telling himself that.

As usual, Kerry had awakened at around 5:00 A.M."  then made himself
some tea and ate some stale bread, chomping into it with his own teeth
(at seventy-eight, he still had twenty-seven original teeth).  He could
afford fresh bread, but eating stale bread was a habit he had developed
in-Tipperary, the town in Ireland where he was raised until he came to
the States in the early summer of 1922.  Back then, he didn't have a
choice.  He was one of ten children of a poor farmer, and stale bread
was better than nothing at all.

Getting up early was a habit from his youth too.  It was just natural
to get up early on the farm, and it was a clock inside him that had
been going all his life.

Back then, he didn't too much like to see the dawn come up, because
shortly thereafter he would be bent over, working in the potato fields.
But now, as he had gotten older, he had come to like many of the things
he had disliked when he was a youth.  He did not understand why, and
never questioned why.  He just did.

He sat in his usual spot by the front window and sipped the tea, or
tay, as he pronounced it with his still heavy Irish brogue.

Directly across the street was St.  James Park.  It had long been given
over to the beasts-the spies and niggers who had started moving into
the neighborhood ten years earlier.  Now, in mid-October, some of the
trees were in color, and leaves that had fallen blew across the vast
expanses of grass, or, more accurately, the once grassy expanse of the
park.  He felt a coldness.

To Hugh Kerry, it meant the holiday season was coming, a bad time.  His
wife, Mary, had died only two months earlier, and his one child, a son,
lived in San Francisco, and so he would be alone for the first time in
forty years.  But the holidays brought something good, too: cold and
snow and wind, which would drive all the spies and niggers into their
holes until the weather became warm again.  He didn't worry too much
about being mugged.  When he went out he always had a sap with him,
which he made from some leather and ball bearings.  If someone tried to
mug him, he would crack them across the face.

And he could.  Though old and arthritic, he still had the square,
massive shoulders-matched by a jutting, square, determined jaw-that
told you in an instant what his personality was like, and his arms
could still deliver quite a wallop.

Of course his friends-fewer and fewer each year because they kept dying
off-had warned Hugh to move.  He had the money.  He had Social Security
and a pension from his job in a paint factory and some insurance money
from when his wife died, so he could afford to live most anywhere,
Jersey or the Island, certainly a place that was cleaner and safer than
where he was now.

But Hugh would have none of it.  He told them that he was an Irishman
and that he wasn't going to let a bunch of spies and niggers drive him
out of his home, not one where he had been living for over forty-five
years.  No way.

An Irishman.  That, ultimately, was what Hugh Kerry was.  He had been
in the country over sixty years, but he still thought of himself as an
Irishman first, and though he had never gone back to Ireland, part of
his heart would always be back there in the green hills and the simple
loving life of his youth.

He left his apartment, which was on the first floor of the building, at
about 7:30.  He had his sap in his right pants pocket, and he looked
through the peephole in the front door to make sure no one was in the
dirty, dimly lit hall before he went outside.

There were only a few people on the street, and none of them looked
suspicious.  Down the block on his side of the street a colored guy was
getting into a new car.  Across the street a little PR was walking his
dog.

Kerry crossed the street, then started walking toward Fordham.

He passed the PR with the dog.  It was a shepherd, and it was taking a
big orange shit.  Kerry thought that there was no way this little spic
would clean it up, as he was supposed to.  These were people who shit
and pissed in the halls all the time; who cared about a dog?

He muttered an obscenity as he passed.  There was no response.  As he
walked, he glanced through the spiked metal fence that ran along the
park.

Somebody was running a dog in the middle grass.  An asphalt path ran
around the grass, or what was left of it, and there were also benches,
most of which were missing all or most of their slats.  On four or
five, only the concrete foundations remained.

There was a man-it looked like a man-sitting on one of the backless
benches.  He was looking in Kerry's direction.  He was dressed all in
black and .. . he wore black sunglasses.  Just the thing, Kerry thought
sarcastically, for wearing on a cloudy autumn day.

Kerry went on his way.

A half hour later, he was in Ryan's, a bar on Jerome Avenue, just off
Fordham under the El where the trains ran.

Kerry was working on his second ball and beer.  He was the only patron
in the bar, but he figured in a half hour or so, some of the regulars
would come in, including Daniel Keefe and Jim O'Brien.  Like Kerry,
they were retirees; O'Brien had been with theTA and Keefe with Sears.
Then he would have someone to talk to.  The bartender was a
moonlighting cop named Slattery.  He was a nice lad, but only in his
twenties.  He and Kerry had nothing to talk about.  He was from another
time.

After the third ball and beer, Kerry went over to the jukebox.  He
staggered a little, but his mind was sharp as a tack; that he knew, by
God.  Most of the songs were modern, or from the forties or fifties,
but there were three columns on the right side with Irish tunes, all of
the old favorites, and with a good dozen tunes by one of his favorite
groups, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

But today Hugh Kerry felt like something else.

He found the tune, dropped a quarter in the slot, pressed two buttons,
and made his way back to the bar.

The bartender, Slattery, was down at the other end of the bar doing
something.  The bar was still empty, and as the tune came on, the
clear, mellow voice of Bing Crosby filled the empty room and filled up
Hugh Kerry's heart.

"I'll take you home again, Kathleen, Far across the sea wild and wide
.. ."

And he remembered himself and Mary, walking down a narrow dirt path in
Ireland so long, long ago, when they were both so wee, and his eyes
misted and, ah, Jesus, what he wouldn't do for one more day the way it
had been when they were young, so long ago .. ..

And then, later, he left the bar and walked home, with as much dignity
as he could muster.

CHAPTER 3.

Most cops in the Five Three, Krupsek figured, hated being assigned
there.  But not Krupsek.  He had been there two years, having been
banished after IAD had unsuccessfully tried to prosecute him for
meat-eating.  For Krupsek to be in the Five Three was like a swine
living in feces.

In the first place, he dominated the spics and niggers on his post, a
stretch along Tiebout Avenue, in Sector G, which was part of a larger
section of the precinct south of Fordham Road called Death Valley. Most
of the homicides committed in the precinct-which at 1.6 homicides a
week was the highest rate in the city-were committed there.

He knew they were leery of him, because they knew he was quick to use
his baton, and quick to use his gun.  He played by the same rules they
played by.  Killing one of those lowlifes would mean as much to him as
squashing a roach.

The second thing was bread.  He was on a regular pad with two other
cops who patrolled the post-plus a piece for the sergeant-and was
putting away four hundred a month to look the other way on numbers
games and other activities.  And down here, the merchants were
especially generous if you kept an eye out for their stores.

The third was cooping.  Krupsek never worked more than a few hours a
tour, unless Bledsoe, the CO, or the lieutenant had the rag on on a
particular day.  He had a couple of apartments where he could coop.

The fourth thing was pussy.  If you had anything going for you
physically as a cop-and were thirty-five and blond and handsome and
tall and in excellent physical condition-pussy was usually available.
In a ghetto area like Fort Siberia you could fuck yourself to death.
And Krupsek tried.  During one stretch the previous summer, he had
shacked up for fifty-five of sixty straight days with fifteen different
women.  It was great, always available because you could get it
anytime.  Anytime, day or night.

Pussy was Krupsek's purpose at 4:00 A.m. after a Mondaynight tour in
October.  And to collect some referral fees.

He had put in a productive night.  After making his weekly collections,
he had gotten himself a free dinner at the Colonial Greek Restaurant on
Fordham, had taken a long shit, and then had headed out for Lola
Omega's apartment.

This Lola turned him on.  She said she was twenty, but Krupsek figured
she was about seventeen.  Didn't matter these Spanish all probably
first got laid in the cradle.  What mattered was that she was pretty
and built like a brick shithouse.  Like most Dominican women, and
unlike most Puerto Rican women-Krupsek had developed into something of
an expert on spit anatomy-she had a big juicy ass, which suited him
just fine.  Plus she was into anything.  Just like him.

The building where Lola lived was midway down the block on Tiebout
between 183rd and 184th.  As much as he dominated the post, Krupsek
took nothing for granted.  Before he entered the building, he
unfastened the safety strap on his holster.  In Siberia you never knew
when you were going to meet with some geek who would try to take you
off.

The halls were empty.  Lola's building was one of the few on Krupsek's
beat that didn't always smell of shit and piss.  Krupsek smiled.  She
was probably giving the super head.

He climbed to her floor and tapped on the door twice, paused, then
again-their signal.  The door opened.

A distinctive smell hit Krupsek when Lola opened the door: marijuana.
Marijuana mixed with the heavy perfume Lola wore.

Krupsek felt a little crawling sensation in his crotch at the sight of
Lola.

She was dressed in a red bra, red bikini pants, and a black veil-like
thing that went down to just below her ass.

"How you doin', beeg boy?"  she said.  Krupsek smiled and went past her
into the living room.  He glanced at her large, dark, heavily made-up
eyes, eyes trained on him.  The pupils were narrow.

In the living room, Krupsek took off his coat and cap and handed them
to her.  She took them out of the room.

He took off his gun belt, wrapped it around the holster, and shoved it
under the couch and sat down.

From his shirt pocket he took out a roach, lit up.  He took a deep hit.
He wondered what was taking Lola so long.

She returned a minute later, this time dressed only in the veil-like
thing and his cap.  Everything had burst free.  She smiled.  She had
bad teeth, but they looked sexy against her very red mouth and dark
skin.

He took another hit.

She knelt down in front of him and, wordlessly, unbuckled his belt and
unzipped his pants.

"So how you doing," she said.

Krupsek nodded.  Her sweet smell was coming to him.

She got everything loose and then grabbed his pants and the top of his
shorts, he lifted his ass off the couch, and she pulled everything down
to his ankles.

Wordlessly, she started to work at him with great energy, sucking and
chewing and licking and pulling.  She really knew what she was doing.

A few minutes later, they were ready.  She had taken off the veil-like
garment, leaving only his cap on.

She knelt on all fours on the carpeted floor, her ass jutting up.
Krupsek, now totally nude, came up behind her, situated himself
properly, and then drove himself into her.

It was incredibly tight.

He pumped.

"Hurt me," Lola said.  "Hurt me."

"My pleasure," he grunted.

CHAPTER 4.

Maria Perez hated shopping at the LaP az Bodega.  Andujar, the man who
owned it, was bad.  At the beginning of every month, when people got
their checks, he would raise his prices.  He didn't care nothing about
his own people.

But on this, the first Monday in October, Maria didn't have any
choice.

Every month she had her checks mailed to her Aunt Alicia who lived in
the 230th Street section of the Bronx, because in Maria's house, the
junkies constantly broke into the mailboxes.  But the check hadn't
arrived.  It would probably arrive today, but meanwhile she needed some
things-bread and milk and cereal for her daughter, Ivette, four, and
the baby, Luis, who was just under a year.  She had to shop there
because Andujar gave credit.

To make matters worse, there was no one around to watch the kids while
she went to the store.  There was a neighbor's girl, Ida, but she was
at school.  She would have to take the ninos with her.  She lived on
the fourth floor of a house on Valentine, just off Fordham.  It
wouldn't be fun pulling the carriage up and down the stairs.

She left her house around 9:00 A.M."  pushing the carriage down toward
Fordham.  Luis was in the carriage; Ivette walked beside her.

The sky was gray, and there was a stiff breeze blowing down Valentine,
which was a long, steep street lined on both sides by apartment
buildings.  She felt the cold more than most people.  She had been born
in Ponce, a city on the island of Puerto Rico where the average annual
temperature was 75 and a cold day was counted as one where the
temperature dropped to 60 The cold reminded her that winter was on its
way-an idea that chilled her deeper than the wind.

Their landlord was a typical slumlord, and for every one of the three
winters she had lived in the house there were days, even weeks, when
the boiler broke down and there was no water and it was freezing in the
apartment.  Then she would have to try to keep her kids and herself
warm like everyone else: bundle up in blankets and turn on the gas
burners and a space heater-and hope that neither she nor anyone else in
the building started a fire.

It was at times like this that she felt more alone and most angry at
Julio, her husband, who had left her six months earlier.  She had
learned that he was living with some put ana over in the rich Fordham
Plaza Apartments.  He contributed nothing to her support and didn't
care shit about her or his children.

Maria had thought about going back to Puerto Rico, but she knew she
wouldn't.  If she and her kids had a chance at all at life it would be
here, in America.  She had seen what living in Puerto Rico could do.
You were born in poverty, lived in poverty, and you died in poverty.

No, not Maria Perez, not her children.  She was only twenty-three.
Someday she would go to school, get a good job, and her kids would go
to college.  God had told her that.  He came to her in her dreams and
thoughts, and when she was in church He told her that no matter what,
someday everything would be all right.

At the bodega, she parked the carriage outside and took Ivette inside
with her.  Andujar was there, and he smiled at her when she came in.

She smiled back because she needed the credit.  But he was such an
evil-looking man.  Big and fat and greasy-looking.  Maria was small and
attractive, and Andujar had once made some comments that had double
meanings but really told her that there was a way for her to shop free.
She had heard of some customers doing that.

The day she would do that, Maria thought, was the day she would jump
off the roof.

She started down the aisles, pushing a small, battered shopping cart.
She seethed at the prices he charged.  What a mari cnn

Five minutes later Maria was outside, about to put the bag of groceries
in the carriage with Luis.

The carriage was empty.  She put her arms up, her hands on her face,
looked up and down the block, saw nothing, and then lost consciousness
before the scream that was rising up from someplace deep inside her
could come forth.

CHAPTER 5.

Sweeney's plan was the same as it was on most days.  After relieving
Krupsek, he would walk the post for an hour or so, then bug off into
the firehouse on Valentine Avenue.  He had been doing it for so long
now that he had regular partners in the bridge games they played.  He
even had a locker with his own pajamas in it for days when they didn't
play cards.

As usual, he was dropped off by a radio car at his post at around
8:00

A.M.

He looked up and down the street, which was empty, except for a garbage
truck and a guy walking a dog.  No sign of Krupsek.  Usually, Krupsek
would be on the street waiting for him.  Sweeney figured it was
probably the only time the son of a bitch was on post.  During the tour
you would have more likelihood of finding him either at one of the gin
mills in the neighborhood or shacked up.  Krupsek changed women like he
changed socks, and he had no respect for them whatsoever.  Sweeney knew
that his latest was a little Dominican whore who lived on the top floor
of 2478.

Sweeney took out a stick of gum, folded it up, and shoved it into his
mouth.  He was trying to stop smoking.

He didn't like Krupsek.  Sweeney himself was no angel, and he knew that
for all the stuff he had done-or not done down through the years, he
could be given his papers with justification.  He was probably no
better than Krupsek in that regard.  It was just that Krupsek didn't
care about anything.  He enjoyed fucking the Department; he enjoyed
fucking everybody.  Sweeney didn't.  He just didn't give a fuck, but he
always felt he was different from Krupsek in at least one way: if it
ever came to the point where he had to be a cop, he would be.  Krupsek
would turn and go the other way.  Krupsek was only for Krupsek.

Where was he?  He'd probably fallen asleep.  Krupsek had done that
before.  Maybe that had happened now.

Sweeney spit out the gum, the sweetness gone.  Feeling a little
guilty-his wife, Mae, was always on him for smoking he took a box of
Cantons out of his shirt pocket, tapped a cigarette out, and lit up. He
took a deep drag.  Or tried to.  I won't die from lung cancer, he
thought, I'll die from a fucking hernia.

He walked down the block toward 2478.  The street was flanked by gray
and red brick apartment buildings, liberally marked with graffiti.  To
brighten everybody's life, some of the buildings, which were abandoned,
had windows and doors painted on the concrete used to fill the
openings.  Real homey.

All the real windows and doors were closed, the opposite of the way it
was in summer, when everything was open, people and babies and animals
looking down on the street scene, PR and jig music vying to see which
could be louder.

Sweeney hated the summer.  Then he had to be on the post, because so
much happened so fast.  In the two years that he had been there, he had
been first on the scene of thirteen homicides.  The reason for a murder
was usually a drug deal gone sour, but sometimes husbands killed wives,
or wives husbands, or maybe wives and husbands battered one of their
kids to death.

He glanced down to the corner building and blinked.  He remembered the
time he had found the two-year-old girl who had been strangled with a
nylon stocking by what turned out to be the common-law husband of the
spic whore who lived in the apartment; but first he had had sex with
her.  It had made Sweeney weep.

Sweeney had had a chance to blow him away, and it had occurred to him
that no jury in America would make him do time, but he couldn't do it.
Later, he got satisfaction out of thinking what some of the Aryan
Brotherhood would do once the boyfriend got to Dannemora, a pycho house
upstate.  They didn't take kindly to child molesters.  They would be
using his asshole as the Holland Tunnel.

Sweeney turned into 2478, and even though it was a morning in early
fall, and the chance of anyone being in the hall with wrong notions was
very small, he became a little more alert.  It was a reflex action all
Fort Siberia cops, except the stupid and the inexperienced, had.

He entered a small filthy foyer.  There were two frosted glass doors
with no knobs.  He checked the bells.  Only three or so were there; the
rest of the panels contained holes.  Well, he thought, he would go to
the top floor and rap on doors until he found the girl's apartment and,
hopefully, Krupsek.

He pushed open one of the doors.

The hall was dim, and he was immediately hit with the smell of piss. It
would really be pungent when they turned on the heat.

He glanced down the dim hallway that ran adjacent to the stairs.  There
was a dark stain on the tile; God knew what it was.  The end of the
hall was in almost total darkness.

He dropped the cigarette on the floor, ground it out with his toe, and
started up.  By the top of the first floor he would be breathing
heavily.

He was about to turn and climb the second flight of stairs when,
looking straight down, he saw something.  He blinked, froze.  Feeling
goose bumps flash, instinctively he reached for and pulled his gun.

There was a big hand sticking out from underneath the stairs.  It
looked white.  And then he saw just how extensive the stain was and
what it was: blood.

His eyes accustomed themselves to the dimness.  The hand was sticking
out of a dark blue sleeve.  Jesus Christ, he thought.  It's a cop.  He
just knew it was Krupsek.

CHAPTER 6.

The homicide that Lawless had caught came in on the Friday before
Sweeney made his discovery.  It was of a young Hispanic female named
Loretta Sanchez.  She was found in a third-floor apartment under the El
on Jerome Avenue.  The train tumbled by loudly every five minutes or
so, making everything shake.  It was filled with roaches, the walls
pocked with holes, covered with peeling paint, without heat or hot
water, the furniture a ragamuffin collection that looked like it had
been picked up from foraging in garbage.  On the wall of the bedroom
where the body had been found was a sequin ned colorful painting of
Jesus Christ, the kind whose eyes followed you everywhere.  He had been
looking at Loretta Sanchez for three days, and the first thing that
Lawless did when he entered was to light a cigarette.  The weather had
been warm, and putrefaction was well under way.

The first thing Barbara Babalino, his fiancee and a cop who had just
got her detective's shield a week earlier, did was to visit the
bathroom, where she lost her breakfast.  Lawless comforted her, but he
was not concerned.  It happened to everyone, and it still happened to
veteran detectives.  She would be all right.

Loretta Sanchez not only smelled bad, but she had been done viciously,
and at first Lawless thought it was the work of a serial killer because
it had a detail typical of a serial killer's MO: there was something
inserted in her vagina, though inserted was hardly the word to describe
it.  The killer had rammed a wooden broom handle into her with such
ferocity that it had, Onairuts, the ME, was to say later, pierced her
lungs.

But the case was cleared within three hours.  It wasn't a serial
killer.  It was her boyfriend, a guy named Manuel Olmos, whom Lawless
and Barbara had collared in a Spanish bar two blocks away from the
crime scene.

They had learned the motive from a woman who lived next to the victim.
The woman had heard them arguing but had missed the bloody finale.

Olmos had warned the victim that he didn't want her going out with
anyone else.  She had told him she would do what the fuck she pleased,
and that she wouldn't give up any of her friends, all of whom made
Olmos's thing look like that of a little boy.

In the years he had had intimate contact with Hispanics, Lawless
figured he had learned certain truths.  One was that as a group, they
were very tough people.  And another was that if you wanted to enrage
one, cast aspersions on his machismo.  The logic, Lawless figured, was
simple: when you didn't feel you had anything, or were worth anything,
you had to make yourself think you had something that no one could
touch; you could push a clothing cart in the garment center and you
could feel like shit, but when you were fucking your woman and she was
crying for more, you had everything you ever wanted, and you were worth
something.

You didn't have to be a psychologist to figure out, Lawless thought,
the symbolic value of the broom.

It was a peaceful collar.  Lawless and Barbara took Olmos, who was very
drunk, to the station, booked him, then took him to Bronx County jail.
Some time over the weekend he would be taken to Bronx County Courthouse
and he would be arraigned.

Lawless and Barbara both had the weekend off.  Friday night they stayed
home-home for both, Barbara's basement apartment on East 73rd Street.
They had a few glasses of wine, talked a little about the murder, then
watched TV.  Barbara had gone to bed early, and though Lawless was in
the mood-he always seemed to be ready when it came to Barbara-he made
no advances.  He knew she'd need a little time to unwind.  In her five
years as a cop she had seen violence and death, but this was a rough
one by anyone's standards.  And Barbara seemed to have a bottomless
capacity to keep her feelings exposed.

Barbara had come back emotionally by Saturday.  She was nothing if not
resilient, Lawless thought, and they went out to the New Community
Cinema, a sort of avant-garde movie theater in Huntington, Long Island,
to see Z, a political thriller Barbara had first seen when she was
still a teenager.

Lawless periodically called the station house.  He ran the Felony
Section at Fort Siberia, a job guaranteed to keep you busy.

It was a very quiet weekend.  There was only one other homicide, this a
knifing of a black guy in a bar on Webster Avenue, over a drug deal.
Lawless regarded it as a grounder.  The detectives on the case would do
paperwork, a perfunctory investigation, and then put it in the drawer
forever, except for annual review, assuming they didn't collar the
peril right off.  But the fact was that no one cared about the peril or
the victim.  Both were sleazes who didn't care about anyone else; so,
in death, no one cared about them.

Sunday night Lawless and Barbara made marathon love, going at each
other until totally tired, yet feeling empty.

"God," Barbara said, lying in the darkness in Lawless's arms, "this is
the only thing I know that empties you completely yet tills you up at
the same time."

"That's a good way to describe it."

"It's not mine.  I stole it from Hemingway."

Lawless, who had been smoking, clinched his cigarette in an ashtray on
a night table on his side of the bed.  He was lying next to Barbara,
and he turned his face toward her.  On the job she wore her long dark
hair up, but now it was down, spread on the pillow, and the sheet was
down to her waist.  In the dim light he could make her out perfectly.

Life, he thought, did not get much better than this-and he could look
forward to spending even more time with her in the immediate future.
Felony crimes dropped in the precinct as it got colder, and there would
simply be more time.  He had not taken a vacation in years.  He and she
might even be able to squeeze one in in the very cold months.

He leaned himself up on one elbow and kissed her on the mouth.  He
felt her tongue, and then felt himself responding.

The last thing he thought of before being swept away into the situation
was that, yes, if things got quieter, they could definitely go away.

CHAPTER 7.

On Monday, Lawless and Barbara were working together on an
eight-to-four.  They were on their way in, on Fordham Road just past
Webster Avenue when the radio crackled with urgency:

"Attention all units.  Signal ten-thirteen, 2478 Tiebout Avenue between
183rd and 184th Streets."

The transmission was repeated, but Lawless already had the car speeding
up Fordham.

A "10-13" was NYPD signal for "Officer Needs Assistance," a signal that
was not used lightly.  It meant that a police officer was in imminent
peril, and nothing could galvanize other cops like that did.

It took two minutes to get to the scene.  People were running toward
the building, and two blue-and-whites were already there.  Lawless and
Barbara heard approaching sirens near and far way.  The block would
shortly be a madhouse.

There was a uniformed cop outside the entrance to the building.

Lawless and Barbara ran up to him.

"What have you got?"  Lawless asked.

"You know Krupsek?"

"I know him," Barbara said.

"He's been shot.  He's under the stairs."

"My God," Barbara said.

"Get some tape up," Lawless said.

They went into the building.  They had already pinned their shields
on.

The hall was dim except for the reflected light from the flashlights
cops were using to look under the stairs.  They went down the hall.
There were wet spots on the floor and walls.  "Watch the blood,"
Lawless said.

Lawless went up to the cops.  One turned toward him, a young cop.  He
had tears in his eyes.

"He's dead.  We're going to take him out."

"Wait," Lawless said.  "One minute."

On any given homicide case, the procedure was to pore over the crime
scene with the victim kept in the position found until various
technicians had gone over it.  But not usually with a cop.  Even when
other cops found a cop dead, they would take him to the hospital.  It
was a better place for relatives to come to, a better place to be
declared, and perhaps the only place where a miracle could occur-they
could bring their fallen comrade back to life.

Two of the cops knew Lawless.

Wordlessly, he looked at the cop who was named Krupsek.  He had seen
him around.  He sensed Barbara's tenseness.

"Who found him?"

"Sweeney.  "

"Where is he'?"

"He was headed toward Clark's."  It was a bar three blocks away.

Lawless took a light off one of the cops and looked at Krupsek.

Lawless played the light along Krupsek, who was on his back.

He recognized him, but hadn't known him to speak to.

He was normal in every respect except for his head.  There was a
largish pool of blood under and adjacent to it, and one eye was black.
The other was open, fixed and dilated.  The floor was littered with dog
crap.

He'd been head-shot, Lawless thought.  That explained the amount of
blood.

Lawless knelt down.  Things whacked at him, but he swallowed them.  He
had to focus, concentrate.

He felt the jaw, arms, legs.

"He's in partial rigor," he said to the group.  "He can't have been
dead long.  Let's turn him over."

The three uniformed cops did it.

Lawless shone the light along Krupsek's body, then stopped on the back
of his blond head, which was matted with coagulated blood.

Lawless got down on his haunches.  He could see a contact wound and
powder burns.

"He was shot up close, and I didn't see any exit wound.  Did anyone?"

"No," one cop answered.  No one debated it.

"I'd guess small caliber, maybe twenty-two," Lawless said, though he
couldn't see the entry wound.

"That's professional, isn't it?"  Barbara said.

"This is their classic MO," Lawless said.  "Okay, take him.  Has anyone
called the ME?"

"Yeah.  It was radioed in."

"Okay.  Make sure the tape gets up.  I don't want anyone in here until
Forensic checks it."

Carefully, lovingly, the cops picked up the body of Donald Krupsek.

"Watch the blood," Lawless said as they started to carry him out.

Barbara and Lawless followed them out into the street and watched them
put Krupsek into the back of a blue-and-white, and then they were gone,
siren screaming, on an exercise in futility and heartache.

Two more blue-and-whites pulled up.

Lawless headed back into the building.  Barbara followed.

He stood at the end, shone the light down the hallway.  Barbara stood
at his side.

He played the light along the wall.  There were spatters of blood that
had partially run down onto a graffiti that said "FUK YOU."

He looked closely.

"It's coagulated too," he said.  Then: "He was dragged."

"What?"

"There's no rear entrance," Lawless said.  "Someone had to wait for him
under the stairs.  Krupsek must have been coming out, and that someone
came up from behind, shot him in the head, then dragged him down the
hall and pushed him under the stairs."

"How can you tell?"

"A head shot bleeds-pumps blood out, right?  While he was being
dragged, the blood was literally spurting out on the wall, and dripping
onto the floor, too."  He played the light along the floor.  "There's a
line of blood all the way to under the stairs."  They stood a moment
longer, then went outside.

"I'll be back," Lawless said to cops guarding the doorway.  Other cops
were milling around.  They didn't know what to do.  It would be very
dangerous to mess with them now.

"Let's go see Sweeney," Lawless said.

As they walked, he turned to Barbara.  She looked pale.

"You okay?"

"No, but let's go."

"You said you knew Krupsek?"

"He made a pass at me."

"When was this?"

"About six months ago," Barbara said.  "I was on a twelve-to-eight.  I
had come in early.  He was on a twleve-to eight too, and he cornered me
downstairs near the lockers.  He asked me if I wanted to go out with
him.  He was very aggressive and macho.  I mean there was no attempt to
be subtle.  It was like he said, I'm the biggest stud in the world and
you'll love it.  You can imagine how I reacted."

Lawless could.  The reason why Barbara was at the Siberia was because
the CO at the Six Two where she came from had made two runs on her; the
second time she had slapped him in the face.

"No other contact?"  Lawless asked.

"He got the idea I wasn't interested."

Then they were silent.  Lawless took her hand.  Barbara couldn't
remember how gruff and aggressive and stupid Krupsek had been.  Death
was the ennobler.

CHAPTER 8.

It was the visiting nurse who found Hugh Kerry.

She had arrived at his first-floor apartment at about 4:30, as
scheduled, and when he did not open the door after repeated rings, she
was going to leave, when she tried the door and was surprised and a
little scared to find it open.

She found him on the living room floor on his back.  At first, because
his face was covered with blood and he was motionless, she thought he
was dead.  But he wasn't.

She called an ambulance, and then ministered to him.

She cut the tape that bound his hands behind him and from across his
mouth.

She couldn't tell what the internal damage was, if any, but there was
plenty showing.  Both of his eyes were blackened, his lip split, and
there was a tooth broken off inside his mouth.  His nose seemed
swollen, possibly broken.

He was conscious.  She wiped the blood from his face and then, after
taking his pressure and pulse, called 911 for an ambulance.  Then she
sat him up.

"An ambulance is on the way," she said.  "Take it easy."

Kerry looked up at the ceiling through the slits that were his eyes.

"Who did this?"  she asked.

He answered, and at first she couldn't make out what he said, but then
she did.

"A spic," he had said.

Having him stabilized, she looked around the room.  Things were in
disarray: couch and chair cushions thrown around, drawers pulled out,
carpet turned back.  From her vantage point, she could see across a
wide foyer into a bedroom which was separated from the foyer by
curtained French doors.  The doors were partially open.  There, too,
it looked like the place had been ripped apart.

For a moment the nurse, whose name was Frances Adams, felt a wave of
fear.  Maybe the person who had beaten up the old man was still in the
apartment, but she tried not to think of that now.

The EMS showed up within ten minutes, and took Kerry, who tried to say
he was all right, out of the house on a stretcher.

They wanted to admit Hugh Kerry to Morrisania, where they had taken
him, but he would have none of it.  Through his lips, now swollen to
triple their size, he said he was okay and that he wanted to go home.

Examination did not indicate any broken ribs or other internal
damage-though the welts on his upper torso indicated he had been beaten
severely.  But the examining doctor still wanted to hold him.  Besides
having elevated blood pressure and rapid pulse, he was still drunk, and
he had lost some blood.

But Hugh Kerry insisted on going home.

Before he left, though, the two uniformed cops got a statement from him
on what happened, a not simple task, considering his brogue, thick
lips, and intoxication.

As well as the cops could tell, Kerry had gone into his building and
someone had been waiting in the hall and pushed his way in behind him.
He had robbed the old man of a lot of money-two thousand dollars-and
had ripped the house apart looking for more.

Then, methodically, he had beaten Kerry with fists and feet.

Kerry identified the perp as Spanish, mid-thirties, wearing dark
clothes and sunglasses.

The cop told Kerry that a detective would be in touch with him.  Then
he drove Kerry home, and went away, after first picking up two
prescriptions for him at the local drugstore.

Hugh Kerry didn't take the medicine the doctor had prescribed.  He had
his own medicine, a fifth of Johnny Walker Red, and a half hour after
he started it he was asleep.

CHAPTER 9.

Captain Warren G. Bledsoe, commanding officer of the Five Three, looked
out the dirty, barred window of his corner office on the second floor
of the battered brick building that was the station house.  Directly
across the street, which was strewn with papers and assorted debris,
there were four cars, three late-model and one heap, and all, he knew,
without their distributor caps, which had been purposely removed by
auto squad detectives.  That was because the cars had been stolen and
recovered, but the animals who made the precinct their home would steal
them again, right in front of the station they didn't give a fuck.

Forming a backdrop to the other side of the street was an abandoned
building, which was due for demolition in the spring.  Bledsoe thought:
give it time.  The natives would take it down free of charge.

His stomach gurgled loudly.

He thought of the report which was lying on the desk behind him and
belched.  It was from the division DI, Holmdel, wondering why the Five
Three hadn't shown reduced clearance rates in any felony area the
previous month.  The figures were at most the same as September of the
previous year.

You fucker, Bledsoe thought.  It was because the sleazes in the
precinct enjoyed crime.  Secretly, he thought once, the felons in the
precinct must have statistics also.  They periodically meet to discuss
their progress-and fucking ways to improve their performance.

In fact, Bledsoe thought, his rates would have been even higher if it
wasn't for Lawless.  Making him chief of the Felony Squad rather than
just Homicide was a stroke of genius.  Bledsoe didn't like Lawless. He
was a hardhead and a ball breaker and thought he had cornered the
market on morality, but he got results.

His stomach gurgled again.  Well, he thought, he would be gone in a
year.  He was sixty-one, and at sixty-two would have thirty-five.  He
would go out at three-quarters pay.  That, plus what he had salted
away, would be more than enough.

His stomach gurgled again.  Out of the side of his eye he saw movement
on the street, and spotted Piccolo and his partner, Edmunton.  They
were crossing the street, heading toward the station.

The word psycho immediately popped into Bledsoe's mind.  That's what
Piccolo was.  Before coming to the Five Three he had been in Harlem,
where he had worked as a decoy, "trolling for bluefish," as cops said,
and had been mugged over five hundred times.  He had been in at least
four gunfights that Bledsoe knew of, and had been shot at least three
times.  He had also collected more brutality complaints than anyone in
the city.

So they had shipped him to Siberia.  Bledsoe farted.

Occasionally, he thought, there would be a complaint in the precinct,
though no one complained much here, because they figured no one would
listen.  And they were right.  To Bledsoe the populace was mostly a
bunch of lowlife spies and niggers who had created the world they lived
in.

Bledsoe turned from his window.

Piccolo was on his way to see him, at the latter's request.  It was
always unsettling dealing with Piccolo.  Though he was a tiny man,
around five-six and weighing all of 125 pounds, Bledsoe always felt
that he was one step from going berserk.  Say the wrong thing and he
would drop into a combat stance and be firing at you.

A whack if there ever was one.

Piccolo and Edmunton were led into Bledsoe's office by Sergeant
Fletcher, Bledsoe's assistant.  Fletcher left.

Bledsoe, sitting down, smiled.  It felt as if his face was made of
plastic.

He glanced down at his desk, then up at Piccolo.

"There's a woman here named Perez who has been calling the station
about us not looking for her missing kid.  I understand you caught the
squeal four days ago.  Do you know what's going on?"

"Sure," Piccolo said.  "There's nothing fucking going on.  In the two
years since I've been here, I've caught three missing person cases.
These spies screamed bloody murder that their kids were being-
kidnapped and butt-fucked and killed.  In all three fucking cases it
turned out to be custodial interference.  This place is just no fucking
different than any place in the country, except more so."

Bledsoe blinked, not knowing what the hell Piccolo was talking about.

Piccolo elaborated.  "FBI reports that last year there were only
sixty-eight cases where kids have been actually abducted in a criminal
sense and it wasn't a spouse involved.  They get all those big numbers
from kids running away and all.  It's just a hot topic now, and a lot
of money is being made.  For fuck's sake, missing persons is becoming a
fucking industry.  So these people see the TV and right away they think
some pervert is boffing their baby in a dark alley somewhere.  Except
with these spies, they steal kids from each other all the time, more
than normal.  Plus the parents really don't give a fuck about the
kid-you know how spies feel about their kids.  I met one woman-she
looked like Jabba the fucking Hut-who had seven kids, all by a
different father and all a different fucking color.  One of them had
fucking maroon eyes and bright blond hair.  Don't worry about this
broad.  She'll scream a little and then she'll forget about it; the kid
will show up."

"Well," Bledsoe said, "this woman is screaming downtown.  I had the DI
call up here, asking what are we doing about finding her missing kid.
She says nobody's been to see her yet.  "

"Fuck her!"  Piccolo yelled.  "I got real crimes to clear.  I don't
want to waste my time on her."

"Look, Frank, you're probably right, but you got to go and at least see
her.  Take a statement.  Go through all the bullshit, then clear out.
Okay?"

Piccolo shrugged, nodded.  "Get back to me, will you?"

Piccolo said nothing.  He and Edmunton left Bledsoe's office.  Bledsoe
watched them go.  He thought again about retirement.

CHAPTER 10.

On the same day that Officer Donald Krupsek was murdered, a disturbing
squeal had come into the Five Three, which Lawless had picked up when
he stopped back at the station for a few minutes to run the MO used to
do Donald Krupsek.

An old man named Hugh Kerry had been the victim of a push-in artist who
had robbed and beaten him badly.  Though preoccupied with the Krupsek
murder, Lawless also knew he had a serious problem which might escalate
to murder, as crime against old people often did: the Kerry assault and
robbery was the same MO used on two other old people in the precinct in
recent weeks.

Lawless had not been satisfied with the work done on the first two
cases.  He had to do more.

In the squad room he poured himself and Barbara coffee.  They sat at
desks and sipped it.

"What are you thinking about?"  she said, as Lawless lit a cigarette.

"The assaults on the old people.  I have to get somebody really good on
this."

"Anybody in mind?"

Lawless nodded.  He did.

"George Benton."

"Oh," Barbara said.  "He's the guy who had some trouble.  Got sick."

Lawless nodded.  Yes, some trouble.

Lawless got up and walked to within a few feet of a big, dirty,
multi-paned window that looked out on a brick wall.

He stared through it, every now and then taking a deep drag on the
cigarette, a sip of the coffee.

It was common knowledge that Benton, known as "The Bent One," had just
recently been discharged from South Maple Psychiatric Hospital, which
specialized in the care of burned-out cops.

George Benton had been there three months.  He had begun his trip there
dramatically.

One afternoon he had been in the squad room with three or four other
detectives.  A few were on the phone; Benton was doing paperwork.

A call had come in for Benton.  He had listened wordlessly for about
thirty seconds, then abruptly dropped the phone on the desk with a
clatter, slid out of the chair onto the floor, and drew himself up into
a fetal position.

Cops rushed to him, thinking he had had a coronary or something, but
one look at his eyes told them no.  His eyes were wide open, staring,
the only sign of life tears streaming down the sides of his face.

Later, they found out what had happened.

The call had been from a California lawyer for his wife, Joyce.  She
was filing for divorce, seeking full custody of their ten-year-old
daughter, Beth.  They figured he had never expected it, of course, and
as Piccolo put it:

"The fucking amperage just burned out his circuits."

Everyone knew, too, that he had been away once before, and some
suggested that this would be a one-way trip.

Lawless and Piccolo and a few others didn't, though, and they visited
him as often as possible, and at one point something came back into his
eyes that told them that he was starting to connect again.

And he did.  Lawless told him that he was expecting him back in the
squad as soon as he was ready.

Now, here was the chance.  For all his problems, and no one ever really
talked with him that much, he was a very good detective.  Smart.  Smart
and determined.

Piccolo had summed up his skills.

"He's a fucking thinker," he once said.  "A deep thinker."

He was definitely Lawless's first choice, but he did have a vague
premonition that the case might be too much for George to catch after
three months of reassembling himself.

Barbara came up and stood next to Lawless.  Lawless knew Benson's
number by heart.  He walked back to the desk and dialed it.  "Hello.  "
"George.  It's Joe."  "How are you?"

"Not good.  We had a cop killed today.  Shot in the head in a tenement
building on Tiebout."

"Donald Krupsek.  Uniform."

"I don't know him."

Then, without further preamble, Lawless laid out the Kerry assault case
for him, giving him all the details he knew.

"A pro?"

"A possibility," Lawless said.  "I'd like you to run it."

There was a pause, a deep silence.

"I more or less decided on retiring," Benton said.

Panic stabbed Lawless's gut.  Something told him that the day George
Benton retired was the day he would start to die.

There was silence.

"I need you, George," Lawless said.  It was dramatic, but true.  "This
guy's going to do it again, you know that."

Benton, who lived on the Concourse in a second-floor apartment, was
looking at a cluster of leaves under a tree.

He knew that Lawless never dramatized things.  Or lied.  Of all the
human beings that had crossed his path in forty-two years of living,
Joe Lawless was probably the best.  The stuff, really, of which heroes
are made.  But deep down, though Benton's thinking followed a
circuitous, sometimes vague and sometimes wacky route, if always led to
one certainty: he was no good at being a detective anymore.  He had
failed at everything he had ever tried in his life, particularly love,
and he would fail at being a cop, too, the only thing, he used to
think, that he had ever succeeded at.

He felt like one of the leaves out there on the sidewalk, dried and
dead, waiting for the wind to come and blow him away.

But reason spoke to him now.  Lawless didn't lie.  Lawless said he
could do it.  It wasn't charity.  It was good sense.

And he knew, too, in some vague, undefinable way, that if he said no
the wind would come and he would be gone.

"I'll give it a whack, Joe."

"Thank you," Lawless said.  "I'll leave the complaint folders in the
top cabinet in the back.  Like I say, there's not much there.  Good
luck."

Benton hung up and stepped over to the window.  A wind came up and
silently scattered and lifted the leaves high into the sky.

Tears streamed down his face.  35

CHAPTER 11.

Piccolo and Edmunton went over to Maria Perez's house after lunch.  The
house, like most of the others in the precinct, was dilapidated and
smelly.

"This shouldn't take long, Eddie," Piccolo said as they climbed the
stairs to her apartment, which was on the fourth floor.  "Just nod a
lot."

"I got to lose some weight," Edmunton said.  "I'm huffin' like I got
fucking emphysema."

They did not know if Maria Perez was in.  Like lots of people in the
precinct, she didn't have a phone, either because it had been removed
by the phone company for nonpayment or because she couldn't afford one.
It was why the few working public phones in the precinct got heavy
use.

Piccolo wouldn't have called anyway.  Like most detectives, he liked to
surprise people.  You got better answers.

They knocked, and in a short while a pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed
woman who was six inches shorter than the short Piccolo opened the
door.

"Si?"

They showed their badges.

"I'm Piccolo.  This is Edmunton.  We're here about the kid.  "

"You find him?"  Maria Perez said.  Her brow was furrowed.

"We're here to investigate it."

The anxiety went out of her eyes.

"Just now?  Where you been?  I'm calling all the time."  She had a
noticeable Spanish accent.

"We've been busy," Piccolo said.

"What's more important than my baby, he .. ."  She caught herself.  It
was all damned up inside of her, and she wanted to keep it there.  The
detectives said nothing.

She let them into the house.  They followed her down a short hall into
a living room.  The furniture was used, but neat, clean, like
everything else.  There were religious pictures on the walls.

In the center of the room a little girl, nicely dressed and clean, was
drawing in a book.

Maria Perez went over and leaned down.  She told the girl, in English,
to leave.  For some reason, Piccolo liked that.

"What happened the day your baby disc .. . Luis disappeared.  How did
it happen?"  Piccolo asked.

"I told the detective that.  I-"We're new," Piccolo said.  "We got to
hear it again."  And, he thought, to see if the details varied
significantly.  If she was a liar, which she likely was.

She described what had happened from the point of coming to the bodega,
going in, checking little Luis from time to time, and then coming
out-and the carriage empty.

"Can you think of anyone who would do this?"  Edmunton asked.

"No."  She shook her head.

"Where's your husband'?"

"He left me."

"Would he do it?"

She bit her lower lip, and a tear squeezed out.

"He doesn't care."

If she was lying, Piccolo thought, she was doing a good job.  "Do you
know where he is?"

"Fordham Plaza apartments.  He lives with a pu .. . woman named
Goldstein."

"Who has legal custody?"

"Que?"

"Did you go to court about the kids?"  Piccolo asked.

She shook her head.

"You're still married?"

"I can't afford a divorce now."

"You work?"

"A little.  I do wash, and ironing."

"How do you support yourself?"  Edmunton asked.  "Social Services."
"Do you have a picture," Piccolo said, "of the baby?"  Maria Perez
blinked.  She went over to her pocketbook, which was on the couch, and
took out her wallet and extracted a wallet-sized picture.  She handed
it to Piccolo.  It was a studio shot.  The kid had black hair and big
eyes.  "When was this taken'?"  "Three months ago.  " "Anything more
recent'?"  "No.  But he didn't change much."  "Can I hold on to this?"
"Yes."  Without warning, Maria Perez lowered her head and put her hand
over her face.  She started to cry.  Piccolo and Edmunton remained
motionless.  They didn't know what to do.  "Do you think you can find
my baby'?"  "We'll do our best," Piccolo said.

CHAPTER 12.

The Fordham Plaza Apartments were located close to the Harlem River, as
far west as you could go.  But despite their proximity to the river,
and images summoned up by the word Harlem, the complex was actually a
quite elegant place to live.

It consisted of a series of twelve-story cream-colored brick apartment
buildings reached by a warren of wide asphalt paths that ran between
sections of well-tended lawn, complete with awninged front entrances,
doormen, and a private security service.  It was fifteen minutes from
downtown Manhattanconvenient and very expensive.

Piccolo and Edmunton were greeted by a heavyset middleaged doorman at
the inside foyer of the address that Maria Perez had given them before
they left.

"We're here to see Miss Goldstein," Piccolo said, showing his tin.

"I don't think she's in right now," the doorman said.

"Anyone else in?"  Edmunton asked.

The doorman said nothing.  His silence said it all.

"We're going up," Piccolo said.  He glanced at the intercom panel set
in a little alcove off the foyer.  "Don't announce us."

"Okay," the doorman said.

Piccolo and Edmunton rode the elevator up.

"I ain't never been in these," Piccolo said.  "How about your

Edmunton shook his head.

"You wouldn't think you'd find such an elegant fuckin' joint in the
Bronx.  Bet it's still got all its fuckin' plumbing."

Edmunton laughed.  No one on earth could make Edmunton laugh like
Frank Piccolo.  Edmunton thought he was a scream.

The Goldstein apartment was SD.  Piccolo pressed the bell button.
Inside, he heard it chiming, and he looked at Edmunton and gave him an
expression like: Well, what do you know?

No one answered.  Piccolo pressed the button again.

A minute later, he heard someone approaching the door.  There was a
peephole.  He put his left thumb over the hole.  He heard the little
latch on the peephole being swung back.

"Who?"  the voice behind the door said.

"Police," Piccolo said.  "We want to talk to you.  Open the door.  "

The door opened.  The man standing there was about six feet,
dark-haired and dark-eyed, handsome in a swarthy way.  He wore modish
clothes, including a shirt open halfway down his chest, showing kinky
chest hair.

"Yeah?"  He had a slight Spanish accent.

"Julio Perez'?"  Piccolo said, showing his tin.  Yeah."

"We're detectives from the Fifty-third Precinct.  We want to talk with
you about your kid."

Perez let them into the apartment.  They went into the living room.

It was a far cry from his wife's place.  There was a floor-to ceiling
picture window with a view of the river.  A big scow was moving north.
Everything inside the room was white and chrome.  But it smelled
green.

Piccolo turned to Perez.

"Anyone here besides you?"

"No.  "

"Mind if we take a look?"  Edmunton said, and started to walk toward an
adjacent hall.

"Where you goin'?"  Perez asked, annoyed and concerned.

"He just wants to check the rooms," Piccolo said, smiling.  "Never know
when there's some desperado in there waiting with a Uzi to blow us
away."

Perez looked at Piccolo like he was crazy.

"See your kid lately?"  Piccolo asked.

Perez shook his head.  A moment later, Edmunton emerged from the
hallway he had disappeared into a few moments before.  He said
nothing.

"You know he's missing, right?"  Piccolo watched him carefully.

"Yeah.  I was told."

"Do you have any idea where he might be?"

"No.  She's a stupid bitch to leave him outside a bodega in that
neighborhood."

Piccolo felt anger building, but he said nothing except, "When was the
last time you seen him?"

"I don't know.  Six months, maybe."

"You work'?"

"I'm between jobs."

"You live off your girlfriend?"

Perez's face flushed.

"It's none of your business," he said.

Piccolo smiled.  Then he turned, and Edmunton followed.  They let
themselves out the door.

On the elevator, Piccolo spoke for the first time since he had left the
apartment.

"That," he said, "is a fuckin' spic."

CHAPTER 13.

Piccolo and Edmunton bought a sausage pizza and some soda and brought
it up to the homicide squad room where members of the Felony Squad met.
They put the pizza on one of the battered desks and sat on opposite
sides of it.

Piccolo, who to Edmunton always seemed to be able to eat his weight in
pizza at one sitting and not gain an ounce, inhaled a half a slice of
the pizza and said, his mouth full:

"What do you think?"

Edmunton, who was on a perpetual diet-and perpetually gaining
weight-said, "I don't think he has anything to do with it."

"Neither do I. Maybe we should meet the girlfriend."

"She'd have to be involved, right?"

"Yeah."

Piccolo wiped his mouth.  "If it's not custodial interference, it's a
ray or a freak or a pervert or somebody else snatched it."

"I doubt it's a pervert," Edmunton said.  "Too young."

"I agree."

They said nothing for a moment, the only sound that of pizza being
ingested and the occasional gulp of soda being consumed.

"I sort of like her," Piccolo said.  "Maria Perez."

Edmunton nodded.

"She's not like most of these spics," Piccolo said.  "This fucking bum
pulled out on her, but she keeps a nice place and she cares about her
kids.  She's hanging in."

"What you're saying," Edmunton said, beginning a nibbling but effective
assault on his second slice, "is that she's a human."

"That's what I'm saying," Piccolo said.  "She's human."  They ate in
silence.  They had been partners only two years, but they could read
each other's minds.

"We got a lot on the plate," Edmunton said.  "If that Oreo team hits
again, Bledsoe is going to want to know why we're not on it."

"I know.  I'm going to check it with Lawless, though.  He can keep that
fuck off our ass.  This is his fucking squad, right'?"

"Correct," Edmunton said.  "We can't give it too much time, though,
right'?"

"No more than a week," Piccolo said.  "If we don't get anywhere by
then, we'll call it a day."

Piccolo inhaled slice number three; Edmunton started nibbling on
three.

"Where does it all go, Frank?"  Edmunton asked.

"Into my brain," he said.  "That's what makes me so fucking smart."  He
smiled, showing cheese, tomato, and the space between his teeth.

The pizza almost exploded from Edmunton's mouth.  Piccolo, he was a
scream.

CHAPTER 14.

George Benton had been raised in the Parkchester projects over on Purdy
Street in the Bronx, but he knew the Fordham area where Hugh Kerry
lived pretty well even before he had been transferred from the Seven
Two, which was in mid Manhattan after his first breakdown.

As he walked up Fordham Road it occurred to him that knowing the area
might mean nothing in the investigation now, but you could never tell
when it could help immeasurably.  Only time would tell.

He had called Kerry before for an appointment.  The old man had sounded
shaky.  Benton didn't feel so swift either, but he tried to project an
air of self-confidence.  It was something he had practiced at.  He had
been doing it all his life.  Once, in a rare burst of humor, he had
characterized himself as the man not in the gray flannel suit.

He had gone off the Elavil, an antidepressant which he was taking 75 mg
of a day, and it made him very shaky.  At least, he thought, he would
not be victim to one of the adverse reactions, all seventeen of which
he knew by heart.  Then again, he might have enough residue in his body
to produce an adverse reaction, such as any of five cardiovascular
accidents.

He came to the house at 2550 Creston, where Hugh Kerry lived.  It was
like five or six others on the block and faced St.  James Park,
nicknamed "The Pharmacy" by the locals.

Neither the foyer door nor the interior door had doorknobs.  Great
security.  The landlord could be sued.  The only problem would be
finding him.

He tensed a bit as he passed through a short, dimly lit hallway and up
a single flight of stairs to the battered red metal door marked 1 D.
't

He pushed the buzzer.  It was- a long time before Kerry answered, and
Benton knew why when he opened the door.

The old man had taken a hell of a beating.  Both eyes were blackened,
his lips puffy and split.  There was a gash on his knobbed brow.  His
eyes were slits.

The sight of the old man focused Benton: he was dealing with a peril
who ultimately would kill someone, as Lawless had said.  There was much
more going on than just robbery.

Kerry led him into a living room which was not unlike the kind he had
known from his own youth.  Furniture that had been reupholstered at
least once, an old rug, good solid stuff that would last long after
Hugh Kerry was gone-and no doubt George Benton.

"I was hoping the bastard would come back," Kerry said.  "This time
I'll be ready."

He held a homemade sap in a big hand.

Benton was glad he didn't have it with him when the assault occurred.
If the peril had gotten it, Kerry might be dead.

Kerry sat down slowly on one end of the couch.  Benton, at Kerry's
bidding, sat at the other end.

Benton took out a notebook.  He was going to apologize for having to
ask questions, but he sensed that an apology would be wrong.

"Would you tell me what happened the day you were assaulted?"

"I was foolish," Kerry said.  "The bastard got me when I had a few
drinks in me."

Benton said nothing.

Kerry continued.

"I was at Ryan's," he said.

"A bar on Fordham?"

"Just off Fordham, under the El.  I was down there for a few hours.
After I left there I bought a few things at the store and then came
back here."

"When was that?"

"Three or four o'clock.  He was waiting on the landing just above the
first floor.  Just waiting.  As soon as I opened the door he sneaked
down-he was wearing those athletic shoes .. . ' "Running shoes?"

"Yeah.  Blue running shoes.  And black pants, and a blue jacket.  "

"Could you describe them in detail a little more?"

"A windbreaker.  It had a zipper."

"The pants?"

"Dungarees.  "

"Gloves?"

"He wore clear plastic gloves."

"A hat?  "No "I understand you got a pretty good look at him."

"Yeah.  He was a Puerto Rican.  Curly black hair.  Little mustache."

"No mask'?"  Benton said.

"No.  The only thing he wore was sunglasses.  Black sunglasses.  "

"What happened after he pushed you into the house?"

"He grabbed me from behind.  And put a knife to my neck.  He made me
lie down.  He said if I made a sound he would cut my throat!"

Benton looked at him.  He felt a chill.  He wondered how he would have
reacted.

"Then what happened?"

"He taped my hands behind my back.  Then he wanted to know where I kept
my money.  I told him I didn't have any.  He said he would ask me the
same question again."

Kerry was blinking.  He was fighting back tears.

"I didn't tell him.  Then he put tape over my mouth."  The old man's
eyes misted.  "Then the bastard beat me.  I had to tell him," Kerry
said, "or he would have killed me.  He tore off the tape, and I told
him.  Then he put the tape back down on."

"He took two thousand dollars, right?"

"I had it hidden in the coffee can in the refrigerator."  Kerry looked
down.  A tear dropped onto the carpet.

Benton made believe he was writing in his notebook long enough for
Kerry to get his composure back.

"Do you remember seeing him at any time before the assault?  Following
you'?"

Kerry answered without looking up.

"I saw the bastard.  Across the street in the park, sitting on the last
bench on the left all the way over.  He had sunglasses on and I
wondered why he had them on.  It was cloudy."

"Which bench would that be, exactly?"  Benton asked.

Kerry got up and walked very slowly to one of the three windows that
faced the park.  He moved the blind back and pointed it out.

"That one, with two slats."

"You ever see him before that?"

"No.

"You got a good look at him, right?"

"I'll never forget his little spic face."

"You live alone here, huh?"

"Yeah, my wife passed on not too long ago."

Benton was going to suggest that he get out, but there was no way to
suggest that to this proud old man.  No doubt it had been suggested
before.

Benton got up to leave.  He promised to be in touch shortly.

"I hope he comes back," the old man said.

I don't, Benton thought.

CHAPTER 15.

Benton went back to the squad room, which was empty.  He got oui the
complaint folders of Anna Leibowitz and Charles Gates, the two other
push-ins.

He sat down at a desk, poured himself a cup of coffee, and nervously
lit a cigarette.  All through his stay at South Maple he had not
smoked, but two days after he got out he had started again.  It was
oral satisfaction or something, and though it scared him, he couldn't
stop himself.

Who knew?  he thought.  A death flower might be blooming in one of his
lungs right now.

He opened the folder of Anna Leibowitz, wrenching his mind away from an
in-depth examination of potential life threatening illnesses he might
have, and looked at it.

The complaint, or "Five," was very poorly done.  Sanchez, a detective
who had recently transferred out of the squad, had written it.  He
should get himself an EEG, Benton thought.

It was illiterate and incomplete.  Just a few phrases about what,
where, how, and why.  Not much.  Just enough to put the crime in the
pattern with Kerry and Gates.

The victim, seventy-six, lived alone.  She had been assaulted two weeks
earlier, but there were no real details except one: she had been worked
over by a small Hispanic, push-in style.  She had some jewelry and
about $300 taken.  She lived on the Concourse and Kingsbridge.

Benton wrote her number down.  He would make an appointment to see
her.

The other victim had been assaulted two weeks before Anna Leibowitz.
His name was Charles Gates.  He was seventy two and lived on Valentine
and 198th Street.

There was nothing about how much, if anything, was taken, but there
was the peril again: a small Hispanic wearing dark sunglasses.

Benton closed the folder on Charles Gates.  He finished his cigarette
and lit another.

What he was looking for was a pattern, something common to all the
cases that could give him a lead, a place to go, a bridge that would
lead him to other bridges.

Most good cops worked on what one cop called the
"Whenall-else-fails-G.O.Y.A.-and-K.O.D."  principle, which translated,
"When all else fails, get off your ass and knock on doors.  "

Benton was a believer in knocking on doors, but he was also someone who
believed in thinking about a case; probing it, examining it, looking at
it from various points of view far more than the average detective
would.  Let his brain do the walking.  His reason was simple: it
worked.

But this time there was nothing he could see, except that maybe the
assaults were getting closer together.  He needed more information,
much more than what he had.

He lit another cigarette and glanced at the pad on which he had written
the numbers of the victims.  He dialed Anna Leibowitz's number.

The phone rang once, and then there was a little musical sound that
came on followed by a robotic female voice which announced that the
number he'd called had been disconnected.

Not temporarily.  Just disconnected.

He took a drag on his cigarette-he didn't drag too deeply, therefore he
might not be at as much risk as someone who did, he had once thought
with no logic whatsoever-and then he thought for a millisecond about
what happened to the smoke when you inhaled it: it went into your lungs
blue, and came out gray-what happened to the blue?  He decided to visit
Anna Leibowitz's house to find out where she was.  After he talked with
her, he would talk with Charles Gates.

Benton hoped she was all right.  He knew his mind always looked on the
dark side of things, but life wasn't always so dark.  More important,
you had to be objective in an investigation.  Otherwise, he knew, you
tended to twist facts, ever so subtly, to suit your theories.

CHAPTER 16.

Anna Leibowitz was dead.

When Benton arrived at the building, he found that her apartment was
empty, the door open.  He went downstairs to the super, a young Puerto
Rican guy who, it turned out, had known the old lady.

He explained to Benton that one day about a week ago she had been the
victim of a hit-and-run driver.  That was about all he knew, except
that she had been buried three days earlier.

The super didn't know who her next of kin was, but he did know the name
of her doctor, Dr.  Cohen.  The super's wife had driven her to his
office on the Concourse and Tremont Avenue a few times when she
couldn't get a cab.  The super didn't know any visitors she had; he
didn't think she had any.

The old lady's death depressed Benton, and he was sorely tempted to pop
an Elavil.  But he resisted.

Benton went to see the doctor.  He was in luck.  The doctor, a general
practitioner, was just finishing with the last of his patients when
Benton showed up.  When the last patient was gone, he took Benton into
a small office where they sat on opposite sides of a desk.

Benton got good feelings about Cohen.  He was a small, balding man who
Benton made to be about seventy.  He wore a spotless white jacket and
had warm brown eyes magnified by large glasses.  The kind of doctor,
Benton thought, they didn't make too many of anymore.

Benton explained exactly why he was there.

"I don't know the details of the assault.  She was afraid to talk about
it," Cohen said.  "Just that she died as a result of the beating she
took."

"How?"  Benton said, surprised.

"There wasn't anything directly etiologically specific-excuse me-a
chain of events that led to her death; it's just that after the robbery
and beating, she was afraid to go out of the house, even to visit me-I
was treating her for a variety of things-and she became very confused
and nervous."

Cohen lowered his voice.  His eyes looked very sad.

"She was trying to come here when she died," he said.  "She got killed
crossing a street.  I understand that she just stepped out into the
street.  That's what happens to old people when they're under stress.
They can be alert most of the time, but they also become confused and
disoriented.  She was always a pretty chipper woman before that event.
But the world had changed terribly."

Benton looked at the doctor and nodded, and Benton knew that his face
showed concern and the appropriate human reaction when something sad
occurs.

But inside he felt very little.  A psychiatrist, some young woman, had
tried to probe his past-which is where, she said, the attitude came
from-but they couldn't get anywhere.  It was always, Benton thought,
one of the reasons why he was different from other people.  He was the
guy who always laughed or cried in the wrong places.

But he was still a detective.

"Did she say anything to you about the assault, Doctor?"

"A little.  It was a young Puerto Rican who did it.  He wore
sunglasses, very dark.  He told her that he knew she had money around
the house.  Knew it, and that he wanted it.  She did.  Her husband had
died some six months earlier, and though she kept most of it in the
bank, she had a few hundred hidden.  She gave him that.

"But he still beat her up.  After he taped her up, he punched her,
kicked her.  She thought she was going to die.  Maybe if she didn't
have such a strong heart, she would have.  Her pressure was elevated
for days."

"Did she say anything to you about his description?  Anything that
would isolate him from someone else?"

"No.  I just saw her once.  That's all she told me."

There was silence.

"If you think of anything," Benton said, "please call me.  "

He handed the doctor his card.

The doctor took it without looking at it.  He looked at Benton.

"It's such a terrible way to end a life," he said softly.

Benton nodded, and a few minutes later he was walking along the once
elegant Grand Concourse.

Benton thought about his ex-wife, Joyce, and his daughter, Beth.

They lived in Carmel, California, now.

When he was first separated, he had made it out to visit them three
times a year, and once they came east.

But then Joyce had grown cold, and the last year they didn't
communicate at all.

Still, hope had lingered.  Now it was gone.  She had met some guy who
manufactured wire hangers, and they'd gotten married.

It was as if George didn't exist, had never existed.

Maybe he didn't.

He thought back to the doctor, the old lady's doctor.  Had he spotted
the symptoms of a terminal disease in George?

"Oh, Mr.  Benton, one more thing I wanted to say before you go.  You'll
be dead within a month."

Benton thought of the old lady.  Look at how it had ended for her.

Steinbeck said that if we knew how our lives would end, we'd all commit
suicide.

True.

He would never clear the case.  He had nothing to go on.  Why had
Lawless picked him?  Yes, he had had some success before, but they were
all flukes.

An image: he was in a narrow shaft, its inside greased, trying to hold
himself up, bracing himself, sliding slowly down, down into the
darkness, the blackness from which all men came.

He sucked deeply on the cigarette he had lit immediately after leaving
the doctor's office.

He coughed.  Death flower blooming.

He thought of the .38 in the slim, custom-made holster, custom-made
like his suits and hats.  Just stick it in his mouth, angle it upward,
pull the trigger.

Joyce would say, That's too bad.  Beth would probably be a little Joyce
by now.  She would carry around the memory of him in her head; a bad
memory to be pitied.

He thought of Elavil, 75 mg.  A week to build up effective levels, then
surcease.

He thought of the perp.  He would strike again-no question.  It was
just George "The Bent One" Benton against him.

Lawless believed in him.

His eyes filled up.  He would try to go on.

CHAPTER 17.

Benton called Charles Gates.

He was in.  George identified himself, and asked if he might come
over.

Gates was clearly scared; his voice was a little reedy.  He told George
he just wanted to forget about it.  George told him not to do that,
because this guy was going to strike again.  "I'm moving," Gates said.
"I'll be gone."

"You never know what a guy like this could do," Benton said.  "We got
to stop him now."

George could hear a gasp on the phone.  He didn't like to do that, but
it was the only way.  And, in fact, there was no telling what the peril
would do.

Gates agreed to see him right away.

As he drove over, Benton wondered how many more victims there had been
of this guy with the sunglasses.  Had to be more.  People, especially
old people, were loathe to report crimes against themselves, and
sometimes the peril would warn them about talking to anyone.  The FBI
estimated that half of all victims of assaults didn't report the
crimes.  And even more than that didn't fight back-not that older
people could fight back that well.  They just took it.

So, then, if you extrapolated from the FBI stats, the guy had assaulted
three more people.  And there was always the possibility that someone
had been killed.  They didn't talk because they couldn't.

The area Charles Gates lived in was just south of Mosholu Parkway, the
northernmost boundary of Fort Siberia.

For some reason which Benton never could determine, Mosholu Parkway was
like a moat that the predators of Fort Siberia rarely crossed.  The
neighborhood was nowhere like it was twenty-five or thirty years ago,
Benton knew, but it had better statistics than most other areas in the
precinct.

Gates lived in one of a number of still relatively clean,
well-maintained buildings right on the corner of Valentine and Mosholu.
It was very close, he knew, to where Frank Piccolo lived.

Benton wondered what would have happened if by some miracle Piccolo
would have happened by while Gates was being assaulted.  He knew.  The
assaulter-or Piccolo-would be dead.

Benton parked on 197th Street.  Before leaving the car he activated the
safety switch, a necessity in Siberia to prevent someone from
hot-wiring it.

He went through a courtyard with only a few stray pieces of graffiti,
then through a door into a hallway that smelled of Spanish cooking.
Much different from the usual Fort Siberia hall.

Gates lived on the third floor.

As he climbed, a theory that had been starting to form evaporated.  The
apartments of both Kerry and Anna Leibowitz were located near stairs.
The peril, Benton theorized, had selected them because of locations: it
made it easy for him.  Just wait behind the stairs up on the landing
until the victim opened the door, then strike.

But Apartments 1D and 2D were not near the stairs-at least he couldn't
spot the number.  This suggested that 3D would not be either.

That was true.  When he got to the third floor, he glanced first one
way, then the other, down the hall which the stairs bisected.  Light
cast by the incandescent bulb in the center of the ceiling didn't
illuminate the ends of the hall well.  He would guess that 3D was at
one of the ends.

Benton realized that his heart was hammering.

The realization made it beat a little faster.  The next thing you know,
he thought, I'll be going into arrythmia.

No, not really.

He stood still for a while collecting himself, forcing his mind back
onto the case, feeling his heart rate slow.

He started to go down the hall to his left, and stopped.  The sequence
was wrong.  He went the other way.  3D was at the end.

After a while he sensed someone was standing at the door, though he had
not heard a sound.

"Yes, please?"  came a voice from inside.

"Mr.  Gates?  This is Detective Benton.  I talked with you on the
phone?"

The door opened a crack.  Benton showed his shield.

The small, bald-headed man who opened the door was very nervous.  He
had a black eye.

"Mr.  Gates?"

The man nodded.

"How are you?"  Benton said, trying to seem upbeat.

Gates's reaction was to glance nervously at Benton and open the door
wide so he could pass through.

They went into the living room.  There was only an old couch, a TV, one
chair, and a number of large cardboard boxes bound with twine.  The
walls were bare.

"When are you moving?"  Benton said.

"Day after tomorrow."

Benton paused.  "Could you tell me what happened that day?"

Gates inhaled deeply and started to pace.  It made Benton edgy, but he
focused on absorbing what Gates said.

"I had just returned from the dentist," he said.

Benton, who had taken out a notebook, interrupted him.  "When did you
go out?"

Gates thought a minute.  "About two, I'd say."

"Where is the dentist located?"

"On Bainbridge and 204th, three or four blocks from here."

"You walk?"

"Yes.  "

Benton felt like a cigarette, but suppressed the urge.  "What time did
you get back'?"  ,

"Three-thirty.  "

It was subtle, but there was a slight increase in Gates's anxiety
level.  Few people could detect increases.  Spend your lifetime with
anxiety, as Benton did, and you could.

Benton thought he knew why.  Gates was getting close to the assault.

"At any time when you were going to or coming from the dentist did you
sense or see someone watching you?"

"No."

"You're sure."

"This neighborhood isn't that bad, but when you get to be my age, you
watch for such things.  I didn't see anybody."

"What happened when you returned?"

"I was going to my apartment-"

"Why don't you go through it completely, from the time you entered the
building?"

"I just went into the building, checked the mail, and then went
upstairs."

Gates's eyes flicked nervously.  He was picturing what happened.

"I got off the elevator and-"

"Do you remember seeing anyone enter the building before you?"

Gates was about to say no, but he hesitated.

"Maybe," he said.  "I can't recall exactly.  But I do vaguely remember
that I was a couple of blocks away from the house when I saw someone
going toward it.  But I don't recall seeing them go in."

Benton nodded.  "Go on."

"I got off the elevator and .. . that's when I heard something behind
me.  It's dark at this end of the hall.  I turned around and he was
there.  With a knife.  I was terrified."

"What'd he look like?"

"He was silhouetted then, but later I saw him.  Kind of short, dressed
in dark clothes, and he had sunglasses on that covered his eyes
completely.  But he had black, curly hair and a mustache."

"Did he wear gloves?"

"Yes.  Plastic ones.  Clear."

"What happened then?"

"He told me to be quiet or he'd kill me."

Gates seemed a little pale.

"You want to stop for a while?"

"No," he said.  "I'm okay.  Thank you."  "What'd he sound like?"

"A very soft voice with a Spanish accent.  His breath smelled."

"Like what?"

"Garlic.  I've smelled it before.  A lot of Spanish eat garlicky
foods."

Benton nodded.

There was a silence for a moment, then Gates continued.

"He .. . he pushed me into the living room and told me to get down on
my stomach.  I did, and then he taped my hands behind me."

Gates inhaled sharply.  He excused himself, got a glass of water, and
returned.

"When he finished, he asked me-I'll never forget the words-"How are you
feeling, you old mother .. . ?"  Gates's voice trailed off.  It was not
the kind of word that found its way into his vocabulary.

"I didn't answer, I don't know if I could have.  Then he said that he
was only going to ask me once: Where's the money?  He seemed to know I
had money."

"Did you?"

"No.  Not here.  In the bank.  I only had about a hundred dollars
here."

"Do you think he was bluffing?  Making it seem like he knew you had
money?"

Gates inhaled sharply.  "Maybe.  I just didn't want to take the chance.
I told him where the money was, and he got it.  But he taped my mouth
and beat me up."

Benton looked at the old man but said nothing.

"He really seemed to enjoy it."

"Anything else?"  Benton asked.

"No," Gates said.  "Do you, do you think he'll come back?"

"It's unlikely.  When are you moving?"

"The day after tomorrow."

Benton handed him a card.

"My number is on there if you want to contact me for anything.  And I'd
appreciate your giving me your new address and phone number."

"I'm moving in with my sister," Gates said.  He got a slip of paper
and wrote out his address and number.  The address was in Queens.

"Good luck in your new place," Benton said.

CHAPTER 18.

Lawless did not get to see Sweeney until two hours after Krupsek's body
was discovered.  He and Barbara had gone to Clark's, only to discover
that Sweeney had left, and there followed a tracking of him through
three other bars before they found him.

He was pretty soused, but he had been drinking over a long enough time
that he could still think clearly.

In a booth in the back of the bar where he was, Sweeney went through
the details of finding Krupsek, but finally said he didn't really know
Krupsek that well.

"How'd you know he might be with the Dominican woman?"

"It was a possibility.  He offered me a piece of her."

"Any idea who might have shot him?"

"No, this fucking hellhole, everyone's a suspect to me."

Sweeney was a waste, Lawless thought.  Burned out, gone, too old to be
brought back.  It made him sad and angry at the same time.  But Sweeney
was not the last burnout he would see, not at all.

Lawless, accompanied by Barbara, went back to the crime scene building.
It was milling with people, despite the fact that the body had been
removed.  Violent death brought out the ghoul in people.

These were still a couple of TV crews on the scene, conducting
meaningless interviews with passersby to fill up the nightly news. They
would wring every drop of blood out of this one.

One of the stations was talking to Ray Riley, a deputy inspector who
was in full uniform for the occasion.  He would wring what he could out
of it too.

To avoid being stopped and questioned by reporters, Barbara and
Lawless went into the building adjacent to the crime scene and climbed
to the roof.  The door was open, and fortunately it was daylight.  The
roof was littered with dog and some human droppings.  Many people in
Fort Siberia kept dogs as protection, and this was where they walked
them.  Sometimes they walked themselves.  The door to the crime-scene
building was also open.  They went in, then down to SE.  They rang the
bell.  No answer.  Rang again.  Nothing.  "She's not in, I guess," said
Barbara.  "Yeah.  We'll try later.  Let's go back the same way."

They gingerly made their way across the roof, then went down the
stairs.  On the street, Lawless lit a cigarette, then made a call and
returned to Barbara.  "Feel like taking a ride?"  he said.  "Where to?"
"Morristown, New Jersey."  "How come?"  "That's where Krupsek lived."

CHAPTER 19.

Twenty minutes later, Barbara and Lawless were tooling across the
George Washington Bridge at a good clip.  At this time of the day,
traffic was very light, and they made good progress.  As they drove,
Barbara glanced at him.

This, she thought, was your basic Joe Lawless, the guy she loved and
cared about so much and wanted to marry.  He cared.  He never made a
big deal out of it, but she knew it had to have hurt him when they
banished him-as they'd banished her-to Fort Siberia.  Yet he made the
best of it.  More than the best.  He gave the job everything he had,
and though he would tell you he did the job because he was a cop, the
bottom line was that they were alike: they were both idealists, still,
and would be to the end.  Deep down, though he rarely showed it, he
cared about everything just the way she did.

Though there were certainty differences.  He had a dark side, a side
that was hard and cold as stone, and he could do things, she knew, that
she could never do, and that she disliked intensely.  Yet she tried to
understand that.  He had spent many many years on the job, and year
after year after year going to homicide scenes.

She had once challenged him on why he would do something like let
Piccolo loose on a peril without any due process whatsoever, and
Lawless had simply said, "Maybe I saw too much.  It makes doing stuff
like that no problem."

"How you doin', baby?"  Barbara said.

"How you doin'?"

"Okay.  It looks like we're not dealing with a first-class citizen. "

"That's the drift," Lawless said.  "Which can make the case more
complicated.  "Why

"You remember Serge Rubenstein?"

"Didn't I read about him in a crime textbook somewhere?"

"Probably.  He was a financier in the city.  They found him one night
battered and strangled.  He was widely hated.  The cop who caught the
case said his problem was not a lack of suspects but enough to fill
Yankee Stadium."

Barbara smiled.  Then: "You think i _ ties into someone specific.  It's
not a random killing."

"I don't know.  It looks like an execution, or hit.  A textbook
execution.  Assuming it's a .22.  "

"Mafia?"

"I don't know.  There's no way I have of telling.  But it smells like
someone specific.  It's not necessarily Mafia or a professional hit man
who would do something like this.  Maybe it's someone trying to make it
seem like a h;t.  Maybe a psycho.  I don't know.  What do you think?"

"I have no idea whatsoever.  Not even the beginning of a theory.  "

Lawless glanced at her.  He was smiling.  "One of the things I love
about you," he said, "is that you're always pretending how much you
know."

Barbara laughed.

"Well," Lawless said, "it's really what I know, too."

CHAPTER 20.

They drove Route 80 west, then hung a left and headed south on Route
287.  They exited at the second Morristown exit.

"You know, Joe," Barbara said, "I remember reading about Morristown.
You have to make pretty good money to live here."

"I'm sure Krupsek managed," Lawless said.

To another person, not familiar with Lawless, the statement would have
sounded flat and factual.  Not to Barbara.  She could read the
emotional content of his utterances the way a seismograph could read an
earthquake.  His comment had dripped with irony.

They stopped in the center of the town, which looked like thousands of
other small towns across America, except that the center of it was
dominated by two immense modernistic office buildings which towered
into the sky.

Lawless stopped at a gas station and got directions to Buxton Street,
where Krupsek lived.

"Do you think anyone is there?"  Barbara asked.

"I called from the city and didn't get any answer.  According to
Personnel he lived alone.  He was divorced."

Lawless found Buxton Street without difficulty.

The house, a cedar-and-glass affair, seemed a little out of place for
the area, perhaps a little surprising, since most of the houses were
rather conservative, Victorian structures.

Yes, Barbara thought, Krupsek would manage.

Lawless parked the radio car on the street, and he and Barbara walked
up a long, curvy asphalt driveway to the front door.

After two minutes of trying the bell, it was obvious that no one was
there.

Lawless pulled out a ring of keys.

One after the other, Lawless tried the keys on the door until one
worked.  It was on things like this that she and Lawless parted
company.  She would have gotten a search warrant.  But she knew Lawless
treated every homicide as a "whodunit," a race against the clock to
solve the case, because the older it got, the colder the trail became,
the less likely it was that you'd clear it.

Still .. .

The door opened.  It was immediately obvious that Krupsek hadn't hired
an interior decorator.  It was also immediately obvious that he had put
a lot of money into the place.

The interior had a showy, glitzy feel.  The foyer they were standing in
was done in heavy, fancy red tile with heavy metallic wall covering
with fake velvet overlays.  The living room, to their left, was
separated by a wrought-iron fence, and the room was filled with fancy
furniture in different colors and statues of nude female figures on
pedestals.  The only thing missing, Barbara thought, was pink
flamingos.

"You ever toss a place?"  Lawless asked.

"Yes."

"Okay, you take the rooms on the right, I'll do the ones on the
left."

Barbara took off the light jacket she was wearing, hung it on the rail
separating foyer from living room, and began in the kitchen, which was
to her right.

All the rooms-might large ones-were on the first floor.

It was hard work.  Getting down and looking under beds, moving
furniture, taking out drawers so you could look behind and underneath,
then lifting things out of the way, moving mattresses .. .

At various points in the search, she and Lawless stopped to compare
notes on what they had found.  After an hour of searching, they had
found nothing that seemed obviously significant, though sometimes you
could find something that seemed meaningless but was crucial in the
bigger picture, like a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

Lawless found a file cabinet where Krupsek kept household records.  He
looked it over for fifteen minutes and left it all.

The phone bills were of interest, but there were only the long
distance ones.  Lawless would also get the mud sheets, the records the
phone company kept of all local calls.

Near the end of her search, Barbara, who was sweating freely and felt
she had probably dropped a couple of pounds during it, found three
matchbooks in three separate jacket pockets with the legend WILDFIRE
ctus emblazoned in red on a black background.  To Barbara they meant
nothing, but when she showed them to Lawless, he thought them worth
pursuing.  He explained that the Wildfire Club was a notorious gay
joint in the West Village by the river.  Lawless wanted to find what
connection Krupsek had with it.

Finally, they were finished searching.  Standing in the kitchen,
Lawless kissed Barbara on the mouth.

"You did a nice job, Detective," he said.  "I'll tell your squad
leader."

"Tell him I'll thank him my own way."

They laughed.

They left a few minutes later.  As they drove down the street, Barbara
turned around and watched the house disappear, blocked by other
houses.

"You forget he's dead," she said.

"I know," Lawless said.

Lawless, normally not a gregarious sort, was very quiet.

The matchbooks could have been picked up by Krupsek anywhere.  But he
doubted it.

Lawless had a special memory about the Wildfire Club and clubs like it.
He had first heard about it when he was all of twenty-three, only a
short time on the force.  He was in a bar in the East Village with a
cop, an old, cynical, and burned out German guy named Flor.  Lawless
had immediately seen that it was a queer joint, but he was puzzled by
the guys who came in.  Most of them wore dungarees, as they were called
in those days, and black leather jackets, but the most memorable detail
was that most had shaven heads.

Lawless had thought they preyed on the homos; they were motorcycle guys
come to rip them off.  He had asked Flor.

"Who are those guys in the leather with the bald heads?  Rip-off
artists?"

Flor had looked down, sipped his drink, and smiled.  "No way.  They're
all fags."

That had shocked Lawless to begin with.  They looked so manly, tough,
macho.  "You're kidding," was about all he could manage.

"They're part of the gay leather set.  They're fags who don't want to
admit they're fags.  They look down on the flaming fag set, the fags
who wear dresses.  They're too macho.  "

"They're strange," Lawless had said.

"Stranger than you think," Flor said.  "Look at their belts and their
back pockets."

From his vantage point, Lawless could only see the belt of one of the
men.  There was a heavy set of keys attached to the belt by a snap
ring. In his back pocket was a yellow handkerchief.

"That guy with the keys is what they call a top, a dominant man in an
S&M deal.  You can tell because he wears his keys on the left.  If he
wore them on the right, he'd be the submissive, the bottom.  In other
words, one guy is the pitcher and the other the catcher.  In this case
he's into golden showers, as shown by the handkerchief.  They got about
twelve different colors, each meaning that the tag does this or that,
and the keys tell if he's a pitcher or catcher.

"I don't know all the colors," Flor continued, "but as near as I can
remember, robin's egg blue is for blow jobs, brown is for hot lunch-"

"Is that what I think it is?"

"Yeah," Flor laughed.  "Bon app-a-fucking-feet.  Green is for uniforms,
black is for needles-"

"Needles?"

"Yeah, they work on each other with them.  But the one I like the most
is red, for fist-fucking."

"W hat?"

"Fist-fucking," Flor said.  "Wherein one of these dudes sticks his hand
up another's rectum."

"What?  You're kidding, of course."

"No way," Flor had said.  "The first time I learned about it was
working emergency at St.  Vincent's.  Fags used to come in there with
light bulbs, Coke bottles, you name it, up their keisters, and a couple
of times we had bowel perforations67 and peritonitis-from fisting,
which they also call it, caused by this quaint habit."  "How can a man
stick his fist up another man's ass?"  Flor had absolutely loved it.

"Very, very carefully," he said, smiling broadly.  "They don't shove
the fist up there.  They first coat the hand and part-or all-of the
forearm with Crisco, and they go in one finger at a time until they
form their hand into like a point and put the whole thing in."

Lawless had winced.  "It must be extraordinarily painful."

"I don't imagine it tickles, but you got to remember that these guys
first have training getting boffoed."

"You know what I like about you, Flor?"  Lawless had said.  "You're
such a delicate guy."

Flor had laughed.

"Listen, you want me to get gross, I'll get gross.  Doctors told me of
cases where they had one guy take a foot up there-yeah, a foot, and a
double insertion-two fucking hands-and they had another guy who nearly
died because he had bent over a table with a five-pound can of Crisco
next to him and had taken on all comers."

"Christ.  "

"Some fags have their sphincters ruined.  They walk around wearing
Kotex up their ass.  "

Lawless was silent.

"Hey," Flor had said, "that's not so shocking.  The real shocker,
you'll learn, is man's fucking inhumanity to man.  As time goes by,
that's what will really sicken you."

"Where do they do this stuff?"

"The Fisting?  Everywhere.  In private homes and clubs and in the bars
on the West Side.  They have private cubicles in the back and glory
holes."

"What?"

"Glory holes.  These are partitions in the backs of bars with holes in
them at the right heights.  You stick whatever you want-your cock, your
ass, your mouth, whatever-through the holes and make contact with
whatever is on the other side.  "

"Are these guys dangerous?"

"No."

"They look it.  It's hard to believe they're not."

"They're just fags," Flor said.  "That's all.  Fags disguised as Hell's
Angels."

"What are you thinking about?"  Barbara said as they pulled up to one
of the toll booths on the Bronx side of the George Washington Bridge.

"The Wildfire Club."

"Think there's something there?"

"I'd like to find out.  Now."

CHAPTER 21.

Once off the George Washington Bridge, Lawless got on the West Side
Highway and drove south.

Traffic was light, as it had been on the bridge, and fifteen minutes
later he was parking the car across the extra-wide street from the
Wildfire Club, one of a number of gay leather bars and clubs which
faced due west: across the street were piers, dilapidated terminal
buildings where passengers once embarked and disembarked on the great
ocean liners, and the river.

The area didn't look unusual, but it was.  It was here, in this area,
that you could get the most unusual sex the human mind could conjure.
And if you looked hard enough and carefully enough, as Lawless and
Barbara did out of sheer habit, you could see that the eyes of the
people casually walking the street outside the bars, or leaning against
the buildings, shared a common characteristic: hunger.  They were
looking to get sex, or give it.

The Wildfire Club, between 15th and 16th streets, was below street
level, beneath a bar called Bannion's; you had to go down a long set of
worn concrete stairs to reach the front door.

Lawless and Barbara did.  The club was closed.  A crude sign said it
would open at five-the next day.

"What do you want to do'?"  Barbara asked.

Lawless, looking through a door with triangles of wire embedded in it,
didn't answer for a moment.

"There's someone in there," he said finally.

"Where?"

"Near the back.  I can see a light coming from an office.  Someone's
moving around behind the door."

Lawless took out a coin and rapped the glass sharply, four times, then
again.  He waited.

"Someone's coming," he said.

The man who opened the door was built like the Russian boxer in Rocky
IV.  he had tattoos all over his arms.  He was at least six inches
taller than Lawless.  He wore a yellow undershirt, short pants,
athletic shoes, and his head was shaved.

"We're closed," he said.

"I know," Lawless said, showing his shield.  "We'd just like to talk
with you a few minutes."

At the sight of the shield the man's eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "I
got no problems with anyone.  The Health Department was here.  They
cleared us."

"It's not about AIDS," Lawless said.  "It's something else."

The man opened the door wide and let them in.

The interior of the Wildfire Club, it occurred to Barbara, resembled
nothing so much as a cave.  Even in daylight, it was dim, almost dark,
and the walls, floor, and low ceiling were made of rough cement.  The
white-painted walls were filthy, and there were big drawings of
tattooed, muscular males making it in every way imaginable.

The bar, in the center of the room, was circular.  It was quite
ordinary.

From the ceiling sprouted all kinds of harnesses, and in one corner was
a large mattress covered with black plastic.

To the rear it was darker, with three doorways that led into
pitch-black darkness.  It was probably there, Barbara thought, that
most of the sex occurred, the glory hole area.

She and Lawless followed the man out of the bar area, down a short hall
to a small office room, illuminated by a bare bulb on the ceiling.  The
walls were festooned with all kinds of pictures of men dressed in
various macho outfits cowboy cop, construction worker-or not dressed.
It embarrassed Barbara a little.

"What's your name?"  Lawless asked.

"Richard Colt."

"We had a shooting today," Lawless said to the man, who had positioned
himself behind the desk, "a murder of a police officer in the Bronx.
We believe he was known here.  His name was Donald Krupsek."  Colt's
face screwed up.  "Krupsek.  Dead.  How?"  "He got shot in the Bronx.
How do you know him?"

"He worked here as a bouncer three nights a week: Friday, Saturday, and
Sunday."

"How long has he been here?"

"About six months."

Lawless nodded.  "What did he do exactly?"

"If people got out of line, he'd throw them out.  He also kept
troublemakers out, and he sometimes collected the money at the door."

"What do you mean?"

"We have a twenty-dollar cover charge."

"When was the last time you saw him?"

Colt hesitated.  "Last night," he said.  "He left here about eleven. We
had a private party."

"Anyone with him?"  " No."

"You ever hear anyone threaten him?"

"Plenty of times," the man said.

"Who?"

"Customers.  Some people threatened to hurt him, even kill him.  "

"Why was that?"  Lawless asked.

"He was vicious.  All he needed was the slightest reason and he'd beat
up on someone.  We were thinking about getting rid of him."

"Where did you find him?"  Barbara said spontaneously.

"He was a bouncer at a bar in the East Village.  My partner met him
there one night.  Found out he was a cop."

"Was he straight?"  Barbara said.

"He said he was."

"Who's your partner?"  Lawless asked.

"Randy.  Randy Williams."

"Do you own the place?"

"No, we just manage it.  A corporation owns it."

"Who's that?"  Lawless asked.

"We were hired by Mr.  Ventimiglia."

Lawless nodded.  There were a lot of bars, both gay and straight,
owned by organized crime.

"These people who threatened Krupsek.  Do you think any of them was
serious?"

"I don't know.  I really don't."

"You have any names?"

The man shook his head.

"Would you remember their faces?"

"Maybe.  I don't know.  Probably."

"When does your partner come in?"

"He's off this week."

"Where is he?"

"A dude ranch in Colorado."

"I'd like to see him when he gets back."

"All right."  Colt did not like it.  But there was nothing he could
do.

"I'd also like to talk with the bartender.  What's his name?"

"Jake."

"What time does he come in?"

"About five tomorrow."

"You have an address?"

"No.  He just lives in one of the transient hotels around here.  "

Lawless nodded.  "I'll see him tomorrow."

"All right."

"Thanks for your help."

The man seemed hesitant.  "You're .. . you're not going to hassle us,
are you?"  His face was red.

"Why should I?"  Lawless said.  "You haven't committed any crime."

The man nodded.

On the way out, Barbara noticed a sign she hadn't seen before.  It
said:

"SUNDAY SLEAZE.  5 PM SHARP.  GOLDEN SHOWER GALA.  BRING A FULL

BLADDER."

It was so sick, she thought, and so sad.

CHAPTER 22.

Barbara had heard Lawless say more than once a variation on "The first
seventy-two hours after a homicide are the most important.  If you
don't clear it within that time, it becomes a whodunnit, and it gets
harder and harder to clear as time goes by.  Now, Barbara was seeing
Lawless live that philosophy.

After leaving the Wildfire Club, they returned once more to the crime
scene.

It was dark, and there were only a few stragglers around, but Lawless
knew that for days, even weeks, to come, there would be people checking
out the murder scene, and some would venture into the building to see
if they could spat blood.

They checked the apartment of the Dominican woman.  No answer.
Downstairs, they checked with the super-or tried to.  The young woman
with a baby on her hip who answered the door said she didn't know where
she was.  Maybe her husband did, but he hadn't been there for a few
days.

Hadn't been back in a few days, Barbara thought as they left the area.
People here so casually hurt one another.

The woman, a Mrs.  Santiago, promised to call Lawless if she saw the
woman they were looking for.  Both Barbara and Lawless knew that they
shouldn't hold their breath waiting.

When they got back to the station house, probably the busiest in the
city, it was even busier than normal.  Cops were trickling in from all
over the city to volunteer their time and effort to track the killer.
Most of the help, Lawless knew, would be unnecessary, but he would
speak to all of them and did not turn away any.  In a way it was
therapy for them, an attempt to do something in the face of a terrible
fear and sadness, the thing every cop thought about and dreaded: to be
killed in the line of duty.

Lawless talked with a dozen cops, including three recruits fresh from
the Police Academy.

He put most of them in the field, knocking on doors.  Three he assigned
to answering a special bank of phones which would handle the hundreds
of leads given by people most of whom would he better served in mental
institutions.  Others were assigned to clerical tasks.

After assigning the cops, Lawless answered his telephone messages.
There were a number from the brass, two from Bledsoe, and a couple from
snitches.

He called the snitches first.  If anyone was going to help him clear
the case, it was snitches.  In police work, they were 95 percent of the
ball game.

The snitches had nothing, just promises to get back to him and attempts
to get a dollar commitment on what the information would be worth.
Lawless was noncommittal, because he didn't know.  But he did say it
would be thousands, and that was true.

He could not reach Bledsoe.

He reached the assistant to the chief of detectives, who asked him how
it was going, if he needed any more help, et cetera.

Lawless told him he had all the help he needed and that for the moment
it just wasn't going.

Barbara called Forensic.

They were still sifting through the evidence, but so far had nothing.

She also called the ME, Onairuts, and got a physician's assistant, or
PA, who was on the insensitive side.

"Krupsek's still a canoe," he said.

CHAPTER 23.

Both sides of the street where Maria Perez's baby had been abducted
were lined with stores, inset into mostly dilapidated apartment
buildings.  Some of the stores were abandoned, and some of the
buildings.  It was not a big job for Piccolo and Edmunton to cover
them, including the "empty" ones.  Many an "abandoned" building in Fort
Siberia was occupied by squatters or junkies.

The results wee typical of door-to-door work: the reactions to your
questions would vary from smiles to outright hostility to treating you
like you just stepped off a Martian spaceship.

In sum, everyone would say no-apart from the occasional person who
couldn't bear to say no, and would lie-but the bottom line was that you
built up an accumulation of failures, and everyone and everything
seemed so pedestrian and negative that it was hard to believe that any
of it was worthwhile or that anyone would ever tell you something you
could use.

Even experienced cops would get the doldrums as they went through
building after building, but experienced ones would also tell you that
at any moment lightning could strike: somebody would have seen
something significant.  That was what kept you going.

It was part of what kept Frank Piccolo going.

He had decided that Maria Perez was a good woman, and that was also
part of it, but the main thing that kept his motor revving was the idea
that it was him, Frank Piccolo, versus the fucking bad guys, of which
there were many, and he had to do everything in his power to put them
away.  And this meant that Frank Piccolo approached the job with an
almost psychotic fervor.

All his life, he had been that way about things he believed in.  At
one point, he had told a former partner of his, Ray Lewis, "It's a
thing inside me.  I can't explain it.  It just keeps driving me, and I
don't give a fuck what happens on the way, you know what I mean.  I
mean, before I quit, I'll die."  "Aren't you afraid to die?"  Lewis had
asked him.

"I get scared sometimes," Piccolo said.  "A little.  But no, not
really.  I figure one day we're all going to fuckin' die.  So maybe
I'll just go earlier."

"Maybe you want to commit suicide."

"I don't know, but in a way I sometimes feel like I'm already dead. I'm
just going through the motions."

In the precinct, the joke was that the energy Piccolo put into a case
clearly showed that he had been bitten in his youth by a rabid dog.  Of
course, the dog died.

Now he and Edmunton were working the stores, starting at opposite ends
of the street.  No one had seen anything from the apartment houses or
the side of the street opposite the bodega; they still had the other
side of the street to work.

Piccolo came out of a store with a plate glass window that was a bar
converted into a church.  Coincidentally, Edmunton was emerging from a
laundromat.

Piccolo looked at Edmunton.

"Nada," Edmunton said.  "You?"

"I just talked with a padre with cuchifrito juice all over his shirt.
He said he'd say a prayer for us.  He should pray for another fucking
church."

Edmunton laughed.  "Back to the salt mines," he said.

Piccolo went into a Chinese-Spanish restaurant and Edmunton into a
check-cashing place.

In the check-cashing place there was a good-looking middleaged white
guy sitting behind a plastic window that looked like it could take
howitzer fire.  The metal walls in which the window was inset were
covered with all kinds of bizarre headlines from the Weekly World News
and the like such as:

"FOUR-YEAR-OLD GIVES BIRTH," "GORILLA MARRIES 25-YEAR-OLD WOMAN."

Edmunton didn't know what it all meant.  But in this precinct it fit.
He went up to the window.

The man looked up at Edmunton just as the phone rang.

"Just a moment, please," he said in cultured, melodious tones.

Edmunton watched him walk away from the window to a desk and pick up
the phone.  He was packing a .38 snub in his belt holster, and there
was a 12-gauge Remington leaning against the wall.  Nice job.

The man hung up and returned.

"Sorry for the interruption."

Edmunton showed his tin.  "I was wondering if you could help us," he
said.  "Three days ago, a baby was taken from a baby carriage in front
of the bodega across the street.  I think you can see the store from
here-I thought you might have seen something."

"I usually do notice things in this business," the man said.  "You have
to protect yourself.  Let me see.  What day was that?"

"Monday."

The man tapped a Marlboro out of a pack.  He stuck it between his lips
and lit it.

"You know," he said, "starting last Thursday, the telephone company was
working on the street.  They had a truck parked there.  That's right.
On Monday.  All day.  I couldn't see the store that day.  The truck
blocked it."

"Oh," Edmunton said.

"They left that day, and they didn't come back."

"Thanks a lot."

"Sorry I couldn't be of more help."

Edmunton left and went into an adjacent store, a butcher shop.

The people there were kind of hostile and uncooperative.  They were
probably selling dog, cat, goat, and kangaroo meat.

The owner, a small black guy, said that he didn't see nuthin'.

Piccolo was waiting for Edmunton on the street when he came out of the
butcher shop.

"Let's go," Piccolo said, and they started to cross the street.  They
didn't need to verbalize that both had struck out.

They started in a building on the corner, taking alternate floors.

It took them an hour and a half to work their way through the
building.  They were headed toward the next building when Edmunton
stopped.

"I was thinking, Frank.  There were telephone guys working on the
street near the bodega on Monday.  Maybe they saw something.  "

"Give it a whirl," Piccolo said.  "Let's get a brew."

They walked one block over into a bar called the Yellow Flame.  It was
your basic hole-in-the-wall, smelling of bathroom disinfectant, and
pot.  The bar was fairly crowded-tears did well in Fort Siberia-and it
was immediately apparent that Piccolo and Edmunton were the only people
there who were neither black nor Hispanic.  Eighteen sets of dark eyes
glommed onto them as they came in and walked up to the bar.  Though
they were an odd-looking duo, they were made right away as cops by more
than a few of the customers: if you are white and walk into a spic bar,
you are either the Man, drunk, stoned, or crazy.

Piccolo ordered a couple of beers from a Puerto Rican barmaid who had
huge, pointy tits, a flat ass, and hair on her legs.

Sweet meats, Piccolo thought, and smiled.

Edmunton, meanwhile, went to the little entrance alcove and called the
business office of the phone company from a pay phone that looked like
it had been smeared with Crisco.  A legend on the wall, in Spanish,
told him the number to call for a blow job.

It took him three calls, during which he learned that New York
Telephone was no longer part of ATT and was now known as NYNEX, and
that there had been a repair crew on Ryer Avenue "placing nine hundred
pair wire" which had as much meaning to Edmunton as the theory of
relativity.

In fact, the NYNEX employee said, the crew was still working in the
area, over on Valentine and 193rd.  "They're going to pull some six
hundred pair wire."

"This was the same crew," Edmunton said, "that was on Ryer on
Monday."

"Yes.  Walter Hartten and Frankie Vano."

Edmunton went over to where Piccolo was standing and took a gulp of
beer from a glass that was squeaky clean, a bizarre contrast to the
rest of the place.  He told Piccolo what he had learned.  "What do you
want to do?"  Piccolo said.

"Let's check 'em out now.  I'm really tired of climbing stairs.  "

They each had another bottle of beer, then left.  By this time,
everyone in the place had decided they were cops, and you could cut the
hostility with a knife.

At another time, Piccolo would have broken balls just to see what would
happen, but not anymore-or rarely anymore.  He was mellowing and
maturing, he felt.  Plus, he had a case to pursue.

They drove to Valentine and 193rd.  There was a big telephone company
truck with an immense spool of cable on it adjacent to a manhole.  The
cable was being fed off the truck into the hole, though it was not
moving now.  Little puffs of steam came from the manhole.  Otherwise,
there were no signs of life.

They went to the guardrail around the hole and looked down.  They saw
the top of a construction worker's hat and a large belly encased in a
plaid shirt sticking out beyond that.

"Hello?"  Edmunton said.

A bespectacled face looked up.  "Yeah?"

Edmunton showed his tin.  "I wonder if you could help us," he said.

The man climbed up a ladder onto the street.  He was as tall as
Edmunton and dwarfed Piccolo.  He was alert and a little scared, as
most people being interviewed by cops are.

Piccolo looked up at him.  "We understand that you and someone else
were working on a job on Ryer last Monday.  Are you Walter or
Frankie?"

"Walter.  Yeah, we were there."

"There was a baby taken from a carriage in front of a bodega across the
street from where you were working," Piccolo said.  "Do you remember
seeing the carriage there?"

The response was electrifying.

"I remember seeing the baby taken out of the carriage."

Both Edmunton and Piccolo started to ask questions at once.  Both
stopped.

"Who?  When?"  Piccolo said.

"Just after we set up a quadrant block.  I had come up to tie a winch
line, and while I was doing it, I looked across the street.  I saw this
guy walk up to the carriage real natural-I thought he came from one of
the stores-and take out the baby.  I wasn't really concentrating on it,
but I did notice that he walked down the block and got into an old car.
I didn't make anything of it."

"What did the guy look like?"

"A black guy.  Little black guy."

"You know how old?"  Piccolo asked.

"No," Walter said.  "It's hard to tell with those people."

"Where was the car?"

"Down the block, on the corner," he said and pointed.  "An old job."

"Was anyone with him?"

"There was someone in the car.  I couldn't tell who it was.  Someone
with a big bush of hair.  He-or she-was driving."

"What'd they do?"

"I don't know.  I figured they were going to come back for the
carriage.  I wondered why they had parked so far away from it if they
were going to take it in the car, and I didn't place any stock in
this."

"How come you didn't see what they were doing?"

"I went back down into the hole, and then me and Frankie stayed for a
couple of hours working down there.  I wasn't aware of anything after
that.  I mean, I heard a siren .. . but around here .. . '

"Do you remember seeing the license plate, remember any of it?"

Walter shook his head.

"What about your partner?"  Edmunton said.  "Would he remember
anything?"

"He didn't see the baby taken.  He was down in the hole the whole
time."

"What about the car?"  Piccolo said.  "Do you know the make?"

"No, it was just a big old car.  Red.  In bad shape.  Rusty and dented
and stuff.  I don't know cars.  I : .."  Walter stopped suddenly.
"Frankie would know, if he noticed it."

"Yeah?"  Piccolo said.

"He's an old-car buff.  He knows 'em all.  Drives a '64 Chevy Impala
that's in mint condition.  Not here, of course.  They'd destroy it in a
minute."

"They'd destroy a tank," Piccolo said.  "Where is he?"

"He went to get us some coffee .. ."  His voice trailed off.  "Here he
comes now."

They turned.  A light-colored late-model car had pulled into the block.
It was parked about ten yards from where the manhole was.  A tall,
young, goa teed well-built guy got out.  He was carrying a white paper
bag.

His eyes showed concern as he came up.  His eyes flicked to Piccolo and
Edmuntun, then to Walter.  "What's up?"  he said.

"These guys are cops," Walter said.  "They want to know if we can help
them with some info."

"What do you mean?"

Walter explained.  Frankie listened.  Then Walter asked him about the
car.  Piccolo and Edmunton watched him intently.

"I didn't notice the license.  But I remember that old jalopy.  That's
a "S9 Cadillac.  But this was no classic.  Just a piece of junk on
wheels."

"You're sure of the make?"

Frankie looked offended.  "Let's put it this way," he said.  "I started
collecting model cars when I was three years old.  That was
twenty-seven years ago.  Makes and models and years of cars register
with me automatically.  I don't even have to think about it."

"Okay," Piccolo said, feeling suffused with joy and energy. "Appreciate
your help very much.  Anybody give you any trouble around here--or you
remember anything else just call us day or night at this number."

Piccolo handed Walter a card.  "Talk to you later."

CHAPTER 24..

As leads in a case went, the one provided by the telephone company
workers was a solid one.  It was a bridge.  Where it led remained to be
seen.

Piccolo drove to the station house, where he dropped Edmunton off.
Edmunton went immediately to the squad room, where he placed a call to
the Motor Vehicles Bureau in Albany on a special line set up between
law enforcement units and the agency.

He got a typical MVB employee on the phone: a female who was brain
dead.  He identified himself.  Then: "I got a 1959 Cadillac.  Red," he
said.  "Like an ID on the owner."

"Plate number," the woman said in a flat, emotionless tone.

"No plate."

"Part of a plate?"

"Nothing.  Just the make and year."

"What is this concerning?"  she asked.  Edmunton knew they would only
search on a case that was important enough.

"A kidnapping."

"We'll forward the information."

"How long, you think?"

"Three days."

"You know where to send it."

"Yes.  "

Edmunton had a thought.  He wondered what she did when she was having
sex.  He wondered if her responses were as spirited.

Piccolo was in luck.  Maria Perez was home.  He stood outside her
apartment a moment before ringing the bell.  He heard her talking to
her kid.

When she opened the door and saw him, the blood drained from her
face.

He held up his hand.  "No news," he said.  "I just need to talk with
you."

"Come in."

He passed into the apartment.  The daughter was watching TV.  She said
something softly to the little girl, and she went out of the room.

"Coffee?"  she asked.

"No, that's okay," Piccolo said.

He got right into it.

He told her about the telephone truck, the phone men, how one of them
had spotted a small colored guy-he almost said nigger-take the baby.

"My God," Maria Perez said.  "Who?"

"That's what I want to ask you," Piccolo said.  "Who?  Know anyone who
looks like that?  Or has a car like that?"

She shook her head.  "No, I don't know anyone like that.  No one."

"Not the car either?"

She shook her head.  She was distracted.

"What are they going to do?"  she said, her eyes suddenlyc-brimming
with tears.  "What are they going to do?"

"I think your baby's alive," Piccolo said flatly.  "Something else is
going on.  We can strike a revenge thing against you, right?  So what's
left is either they're head cases-people sometimes steal other people's
babies because they say God or somebody told them to do it.  They have
all kinds of wacky reasons.  Or maybe there's something criminal. Maybe
they're selling your baby."

"Who?"

"There's a black market for babies.  It's a small one, but it exists.
"

"But then," she said, "they wouldn't kill the baby, would they?"  Her
lower lip was quivering.

"No," Piccolo said.  "It's money to them.  Your baby is only worth
something alive."

Piccolo stopped talking.  There were other possibilities a little less
fucking optimistic which if he got into them would put this little
woman in the hospital.  "Please find my baby," she said.  Piccolo
looked at her.  He said nothing.

CHAPTER 25..

All his life, mornings had been the best for George Benton.  He would
wake up early-6:00, usually--every day, and it didn't matter if he'd
gotten bombed the night before.  That would maybe add another hour to
his sleeping.  He'd get up at 7:00 instead of 6:00.  Some days, he
would get up at 5:00, or 4:30.

And for a while he would have no anxiety.  The mornings held such hope,
such promise.

But then, inevitably, he would start to think and worry about things,
and soon the anxiety would be with him in full force, his constant
companion, dominating his existence.

More than once, when he was in therapy, he would try to determine when
it had all begun.

"I don't really remember exactly when it started," he once told a
psychiatrist.  "I remember that when I was a kid, I used to worry a lot
about the future, what I would do and how I would survive.  But I never
really started to worry in earnest until after I was married.  And I
don't know why.  If you looked at my life, you would say I had
everything.  I had a beautiful wife, who loved me, we were making good
money, and I was on the job for a year-it was like a fulfillment of a
childhood dream to be a cop .. . wait a minute .. . I remember that I
had started to worry when I was in the Academy.  I never found the work
that difficult, but I had this overpowering sensation that I would
fail.

"I guess," George had said, "I always had that sense.  That I couldn't
make it, that I would fail at everything I would try.  I always felt so
different from other people.  They all had it so together.  You would
see them whipping through life, laughing, in full command, normal.  I
was different."

Life had proved him right, he thought.

Joyce had always had an image of him as a superman, and she was so
smart and beautiful he encouraged the illusion: he was a super cop with
an unlimited future.  He became what she wanted him to be.

But then he started developing trouble performing sexually, he started
to worry when she became pregnant and had to quit her job, and, above
all, he started to be obsessively worried about disease-dying.

Disease was everywhere.  All you had to do was look for it.

He read medical books, watched medical shows, talked medicine, and
developed severe anxiety about getting life threatening diseases.

A bloody nose meant he was hemorrhaging in the brain; a lapse in
memory, Alzheimer's; a little dizziness, a brain tumor; shortness of
breath, a death flower in the lung; the need for reading glasses, eye
tumors.

Slowly, inexorably, his life became riddled with anxiety, until he
became obsessed: obsessed with dying, and with failure.

He would go to doctors thinking that they would pronounce him fit-or en
route to the grave.  When, time after time, doctors told him that he
was okay or had only minor problems, he would thank them profusely for
what he perceived as his life, and then, halfway home, start
second-guessing them; then, at home, he would start poring through his
medical texts to see if he could diagnose the malady, catch what they
missed, render his own second opinion.

Joyce left him after nine years, announcing that he wasn't close to the
man she thought she had married, that he was an obsessive, sick
loser.

After she left, he cried, and felt more alone than he had ever felt in
his life-and there had been some very lonely times when he was
young-and all he could think was that she was right.  He was the hollow
man.

Somehow, he made it through, until that moment when her lawyer had
called from California.  He had lived on the hope that she would
return.

He had not been without female companionship during that time,
though.

There was a woman named Anne, a little older than George, with whom he
had a mostly sexual relationship.  Or at least something that could be
described as sexual: he mostly liked her to sit on his face, his face
buried in the hair and the lovely smell and her warm thighs clamped on
the sides of his head.  He knew he didn't have to be Dr.  Freud to see
what he was attempting to do.

But Anne checked out after a while.  It seemed she didn't like being
the dominant one in a relationship.  Last George heard, she had picked
up with some Greek guy who worked on her with chains and whips, and
Anne had bitterly complained to him---during a brief interlude when she
came back-that he made her "part of the apparatus."

Anne's leaving hurt George, but it didn't hospitalize him.

There were other sexual encounters, but as time had gone by, fewer and
fewer.  George disliked the idea of dying of paresis of the brain.

When AIDS reared its ugly head, he saw its potential for killing
heterosexuals right away-the encounters eventually ceased completely.
And he knew what it could do: he had seen its effect on a couple of
addicts who got it from contaminated needles.

The one pure thing, the only thing he ever really got any satisfaction
from, was his work.

He gave the job 100 percent, and it made him glow inside when someone,
such as Lawless, complimented him on a job well done.

The effect was temporary, of course.  Soon he would doubt his
achievement, doubt the ability of the complimenter.

While he was inside a case, too, he could be absorbed to such a
degree-his concentration could be ferocious and just hammer down the
anxiety he always felt-it was incredibly relaxing.  The work was his
womb.

The day after he had seen Charles Gates, George Benton sipped a cup of
black coffee at the kitchen table of his apartment and enjoyed one of
those absorbing moments.

He had a notebook spread open on the table.  Using a mechanical pencil,
he wrote across.  the top in tiny, very neat handwriting, the names:
Gates, Kerry, Leibowitz.

Then, under each name, he wrote the following words, going across the
page:

GATES KERRYLEIBOWITZ

Perp dark clothes dark clothes dark clothes Perp sunglasses sunglasses
MO elderlyelderlyelderly MO whitewhitewhite MO
afternoonafternoonafternoon Perp SpanishSpanishSpanish Perp
smallsmallsmall MO tapetapetape MO takes time takes time takes time MO
viciousviciousvicious MO knew about money?  knew about money?  knew
about money?  MO apt.  dweller apt dweller apt  dweller MO alone alone
alone

He looked at the notations.  They clearly established that it was the
work of one man.  A small HIispanic who operated in the afternoon on
old white people.  He was vicious, and might have some idea they had
money.

Could he know that?  Did he?  And in one of the cases, he didn't get a
lot of money.  He was probably bluffing, making Gates and Kerry dig out
whatever they did have.

Maybe he had access to bank records, knew that they had money, or had
withdrawn it.  Maybe he knew all three in some way.

Benton dialed Kerry's number without looking it up.  On such details,
Benton could be impressive.

It rang ten times before Kerry, out of breath, said hello.  He sounded
subdued.

"Hi, Mr.  Kerry," Benton said.  "George Benton.  I was wondering if you
could help me.  Do you have a bank account?"

"Yes.  "

"Where?"

"Same bank for forty years.  Fordham Savings."

"When did you take the money out that the perpetrator got"',

"I don't remember.  Long time ago.  I always have money on hand for an
emergency."

"Do you know Charles Gates or Anna Leibowitz?"

"Never heard of them."

"Thank you."

Benton lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, watched the blue smoke tumble,
the gray stuff mix with it as he exhaled.

He dialed Gates's number, also from memory.  Gates picked up on the
second ring.

"Hello?"  The voice was clipped, guarded.  Benton could picture him.
Small, bald, ferret-like, eyes always moving.

"George Benton.  Nothing wrong.  I just wanted to know if you have a
bank account and if so, where."

"National Mercantile," Gates said.

"Do you know anyone named Hugh Kerry or Anna Leibowitz?"

"No.  Who are they?"

"People involved in the case."  Benton paused, then: "Did you tell
anyone you kept money in the house?"

"No.  My daughter knows, but that's all."

"When are you moving?"

"Tomorrow .  "

"Good luck," Benton said.  He felt a surge of sadness.  Gates was so
old, so fragile.  Probably didn't have much time.  And he would
probably spend most of it worrying, waiting for the peril to strike
again.

Benton wished like hell he could collar him.

He looked at the entries again.

The peril asking about the money was probably a ploy, he thought.  How
could he know who had money, who didn't?  Anyway, he only got big
money.  in one of the three cases, from Kerry.

The concept drifted away.

His eyes flicked across the "alone" entries.

How did the peril know that?  He had to know, right?  He probably had
tracked them for a while, right?  That shouldn't have been too hard.
Old people had poor eyesight and were simply not as aware as younger
people.

But Kerry didn't wear glasses, and he saw the peril sitting on a bench
far across the park.

And Charles Gates had noticed someone going into his building.

In neither case could you say they had poor eyesight or were not
alert.

But how did the peril know?  Benton didn't know, but the whole thing
pointed to his having known, having selected these victims in part,
maybe, because they were alone.

He ditched his cigarette, lit another, took a deep drag, removing all
the blue from the smoke.

He reached into his desk and brought out a battered book that contained
large-scale maps of the five city boroughs and environs: portions of
New Jersey, Connecticut, upstate New York.  That was nada.  He rummaged
through the maps until he came upon one that showed the Bronx
large-scale, all the streets named and numbered.

He used a mechanical pencil to very lightly draw an X where each of the
victims lived-or had lived.  He connected the Xs with light lines.

It formed a meaningless lopsided triangle.  He calculated that the
victims lived within two miles of one another.

So what?

Benton coughed.  He thought of whether it was a deep cough or a shallow
cough.  Shallow, but he still pictured the bronchi undulating, like
underwater weeds in clear water, from the explosive vibration.

It seemed to him that as the years went by, he was coughing more and
more.  He took a deep breath-to see if he could without feeling
pain-let it out, took a deep drag on the cigarette, and refocused on
the case.

He thought about the peril.

It was obvious that the motive was not, money  That was the conscious
reason.  It was something else.  "That's what you learned in therapy.
Reasons that weren't apparent and were usually absurd when you
recognized them were the reasons why people did things.

The motive was rags.  He had first realized that four years earlier
when he had helped track down-actually they said he had done it
single-handedly-a sixteen-year-old male black who had assaulted an
eighty-one-year-old woman, nothing more than a bag of bones waiting to
die.

The motive came to Benton when one of the Emergency Room doctors told
him that the old woman had been raped, and was bleeding from the
vagina; her vaginal tissue was, in nonmedical terms, desiccated.

What, Benton had asked himself then, makes a person so brutal?  And the
answer, born of experience on the street and in his own therapy, was
obvious.  The surface purpose was to rob, the unconscious one was to
hurt.

Benton's thoughts drifted to the secret of his own personality.  What
was it?  He had, really, been wondering a long time.  He was an only
child, and both parents worked, so he had lots of time alone.  He spent
them in the library, and, vaguely aware that he had problems, he would
read text after psychological text, looking for the answer.  And
sometimes he would seem to find it-namely, that he felt essentially
unloved as a child, and grew up with a terrible concept of himself.  He
had low self-esteem because his parents regarded him that way.  Bottom
line: they didn't love him.

Except they did.  They gave him everything.  He was always the
best-dressed kid on the block, always had all the latest toys and
gadgets, and they always treated him well.

It occurred to him that neither was ever around that much, that they
never gave him themselves.  That would seem to be the explanation he
would hold in his mind, bright and shimmering, like mercury; and, just
like mercury, it would be gone, and he could not understand.  Not
really.

He got up and went to a window.  Leaves scuttled across the sidewalk.
He took a deep drag on the cigarette.  ,

He wondered how Joyce was doing.  He wondered if she or Beth ever
thought of him.

His eyes misted.  He felt hollow, fragile.  He should take an Elavil.
Then he would feel good.  Good, but his mind wouldn't be able to
function.

He walked back to the table, sat down, looked at his notes again.

Maybe, he thought, there was something there.  But he was not seeing
it, not yet.

It was time to hit the streets.

He dialed Hugh Kerry's number.

"Mr.  Kerry," he said, "this is George Benton again.  Do you think you
got a good enough look at the perpetrator to describe him so we can
work up a sketch?"

"Sure," Kerry said.  "I'll never forget the bastard."

"Then maybe I could drive you to One Penn Plaza and you could meet with
me and an artist."

"Wherever you want me to go," Kerry said, "I'll go."

"I'll call you back."

He dialed the number of Jack Gagliardi, an artist he had worked with
before.  As he did he thought about Hugh Kerry.

So tough.  As tough as the land he came from.  No analysis, no nothing.
Just tough.  Bit off life and chewed it and spat it out.

Benton wished he was like Hugh Kerry.

CHAPTER 26.

Jack Gagliardi, the artist, insisted on going to Kerry's house, rather
than have the old man come all the way down to headquarters.

"I can get around better than he can," Gagliardi, who looked more like
a linebacker than an artist, said.

An hour later, Gagliardi, sketchbook and drawing pencil in hand, was
seated near Kerry on a couch in the old man's living room.  Benton sat
on an old upholstered chair nearby.

"Can you give me a general description of him first?"  Gagliardi said.
"Was his face thin, round, or something else?"

"Thin, sort of," Kerry said.

Gagliardi drew a vertical el ipse on the pad.

"Like that?"

"No, thinner."

Gagliardi made the el ipse thinner and erased the original lines.  With
one more correction by Gagliardi, the shape of the head was approved by
Kerry.

Then, Gagliardi drew the shapes of ears, was corrected a couple of
times, and then Kerry said okay.

They continued like this, and gradually the facial features were filled
in and the skin progressively darkened, following Kerry's
corrections.

The sunglasses, which fit close to the face, were added last, and as
they were, Benton could tell that Gagliardi had gotten the face right:
the old man visibly stiffened, his face became mottled, his jaw muscles
worked.  The man was on the paper, alive, and Kerry wanted to kill
him.

The face, Benton thought, was not classic Hispanic.  It was relatively
narrow, the nose and lips thinner than usual.  Benton thought he might
have a lot of Caucasian or Indian blood in him, rather than Negro.  The
only prominent Negro feature was skin color, which was fairly dark.

But the sunglasses dominated the portrait, and it reminded Benton a
little of the badass cowboy guard in Coo!  Hand Luke, who wore silvered
aviator glasses.  All you could see was part of the scene he faced
reflected tinily in the glasses, not the eyes.  The glasses made him
seem inhuman and menacing.

Benson had a fleeting thought that gripped his stomach hard: what would
he do if he came up against this peril?

"Would you like a nip?"  Kerry said when the men got up to leave.
Neither man really wanted to drink, but they said yes anyway.  Benson
figured his system was free enough of Elavil to take it.

They finished the drinks, taking them neat, and the old man wanted them
to have more, but both declined.  Benton felt sure the old man would
have lots more after they left.

He bade them goodbye at the door.

"Oh," he said, "I just hope he comes back."

The two cops looked at him.

Gagliardi and Benson talked on the corner down the block from Kerry'
house.  Benton asked him to have fifty posters of the peril made, plus
twenty wallet sizes-though he knew he wasn't going to need them all.
He'd just need one or two to show people on the street and in
buildings.

Gagliardi said he could have them ready in two days.

"Thanks, Jack," Benton said, and left.  As soon as he got the
illustrations, he would post them and then take the ID and the
G.O.Y.A.-and-K.O.D. route.  It was the only route he had.

CHAPTER 27.

The day after Krupsek was done, the post came down.  Lawless and
Barbara made some copies, which they put in a cabinet drawer devoted to
the case.  There were no surprises.

Onairuts confirmed what Lawless had suspected.  Krupsek had been shot
once in the head with a .22.  There was no exit wound, the bullet
having embedded itself in the left frontal ridge, causing the severe
hemorrhaging and swelling in that area.

Krupsek had been healthy.  He had a couple of polyps high up in the
colon, which were nonmalignant, and that was about it.

In surface appearance, it was a classic mob whack out  One shot in the
head with a .22, the bullet ballistic ally useless because it deformed
easily.

Lawless felt sure that a silencer had been used.  A .22 was relatively
quiet, but it still made a lot of noise unsilenced, and the sound would
have been magnified in a hallway.

"Why don't I run the mob angle and you go after Lola," Lawless said to
Barbara.  "I also want to talk with the bartender at the Wildfire and
look at the files."

Barbara inhaled sharply.

"It makes me a little insecure," she said.  "If she's involved, I don't
want to botch it."

Lawless, who had been sitting on one of the old chairs in front of a
battered desk, got up and put his arms around her.

"You won't," he said.

"Okay," Barbara said, and gave him a long kiss on the lips.

Barbara left the station house, while Lawless looked up and then
dialed the number of Jim Marcella, an expert on organized crime not
only in the United States but also in Sicily.

Lawless liked Marcella.  Though one of the ranking experts on organized
crime in the world, he was a low-key, unprepossessing guy with a dry
sense of humor.

Lawless smiled, remembering one of his comments: "The Mafia's no place
to work if you're looking for job security."

Beneath the humor, though, was contempt.  Jim disliked them intensely.
For one thing, they dirtied the names of all Italians.

"People assume you're in the Mafia if you're Italian," he once said.
"People laugh, but it does a lot of damage.  It's like everyone thinks
the Polish are stupid.

"The thing that really gets me is the way books and movies have
portrayed these guys.  Like folk heroes.  They're not folk heroes.
They're people who will do whatever is necessary including robbing you
of your life-to get what they want."

Lawless had nothing specific to ask Marcella.  He just wanted to lay
out what he knew of Krupsek, the details of his death, and ask what
Marcella thought.

Marcella wasn't in, but was expected the next day.  Lawless left word.
Then he called Forensic.  They said they would have a report very
shortly.

Lawless was briefly tempted to take a ride to the crime scene building.
He believed Barbara would be all right, but he wanted to help her.

He decided that he could help her most by leaving her alone.

Instead, he went to the cabinet where the reports were and took them
out.

The folders were getting very thick.  There were eight cops working day
and night, and paper had a way of piling up.

He scanned the reports, looking for he knew not what.  The
investigation simply hadn't focused.  It could be Mafia.  It could be
someone involved with the Wildfire Club.  It could be from Krupsek's
involvement with the woman.  It could be a head case.  It could be
something completely out of the blue.

It was a kind of homicide that was complicated, a puzzle that defied
solving.  A homicide, he thought, that would only seem simple once he
had the solution.

He pored over all the files, working his way through three cigarettes
and a cup and a half of coffee.

Occasionally, his concentration would be interrupted by one of the
volunteer cops who came into the squad room.

But he spoke with them, and not just to be a nice guy.  Maybe they had
learned something that they didn't realize the significance of.

It had happened to him; it could happen to anybody.

Forty-five minutes after he started, he returned the folders to the
drawer, then headed out to the Wildfire Club and, he hoped, a talk with
the bartender.

CHAPTER 28.

It was hard to believe, Barbara thought, that it was October, only a
short time to Thanksgiving and then Christmas.  It was an Indian summer
day in Fort Siberia, warm and sunny, and it made the street come
alive.

The street was filled with kids, listening to music, rapping, just
standing around, having a good time.  Down the block, men were
clustered on two corners holding bottles of rum or whiskey and canned
beer in brown paper bags.  Barbara had a crummy thought.  A lot of the
kids in front of the buildings would simply move down to the corner
when they grew up.

Her mind switched back to the case.  Her stomach fluttered a little.
She hoped Lola was in.  She hoped she did well.

She entered the building.

It was still dim in the hall.  She looked down the hall.  Bloodstains
were still on the floor and wall.  They would probably be there
forever.

She considered looking under the stairs, then decided against it.  She
climbed the stairs.

The building pulsed with life, the smell of Spanish cooking in the
halls, jabbering in Spanish, laughter on TV, a baby crying, music. Life
pulsed, life went on-but not for Krupsek.

She listened at Lola Omega's door for a moment, then knocked.  She
could hear movement behind the door.  Someone was there.

She knocked.

The door opened.

The woman standing in the doorway was shorn, dressed only in a
nightgown, the areolae on the nipples of her large breasts visible
beneath the fabric.  She was zaftig, heavily made up.  And young,
maybe eighteen.  But there was something in her eyes.  She had been
around. "Lola Ortega?"  Barbara said.

"SP"

"My name is Barbara Babalino.  I'm a police officer with the
Fifty-third precinct.  Can I talk with you a few minutes?"  " "Bout
what?"

"Donald Krapsek."

"I got nothing to do with his killin'."

"I just want to talk," Barbara said.

Lola opened the door and Barbara went in.

Barbara followed her into the living room.  She was obvious from
behind, too.

They went into a living room which had velvet Day-Glo pictures on the
walls, heavy showy furniture.  It was glitzy, not unlike Krupsek's
house.

"I understand that you used to go out with him?"

"I didn't go out with him."

"I mean that he would come up to the apartment and you'd spend some
time together."

"I got nothing to say about that," Lola said, her body shifting
slightly in defiance.

Barbara felt anger flare.  "Look," she said, "I don't think you know
what's going on here.  Krupsek was a cop.  I can't tell you how tense
that makes other cops.  All I want to know is a few things about your
relationship with him.  If you don't tell me, you'll have to tell
someone else.  Believe me, you will."

Lola looked at Barbara steadily.  Finally, she smiled.  She had bad
teeth.  "Yeah, he come up for a little fun.  Drink a little, smoke,
fuck a little, you know."

"Did he ever bring friends?"

"Sometimes.  "

"What happened?  I just want to know what you did.  I'm not with Vice,
by the way.  It's between us."

"I entertain 'em," Lola said.

"For money?"

Lola nodded.

A pimp, Barbara thought.  A beat cop who was a pimp on the side on his
own.  The wonders of Fort Siberia.

"Who are these people?"  "I don't know.  I just knew 'em by their
first names."

Barbara took a pad out of the light blue jacket she w,wearing.  "Tell
me."  "Joe .. . Ray .. . Johnny .. ."

She went through ten names.  Barbara wrote them down.

"That's all I can remember."

"Any cops'?"

"I don't know."

Lola went over to a plastic table set against one wall and picked up a
pack of cigarettes.  She lit up and walked back.

"When did you last see him alive?"  Barbara asked.

Lola shrugged.  "I don't know.  Sunday night.  The sun was coming
up."

"Did he act disturbed?"

"No."

"Did he say anything that might, uh, indicate he was worried about
anything'?"

The woman took a deep drag on her cigarette.  She hit it deep, like a
joint.

She shook her head.

"No way," Lola said.  "In fact, he was happy, in a good mood, a very
good mood the last few days."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know, maybe from last Thursday or Friday.  He acted real
happy."

"Did he say why?"

"No.  I asked him, too.  I say, How come you're so happy?  And he say,
I'm playing a new kind of game.  A game I can't lose.  "

"Anything else?"

"That's it."

"What did you take that to mean?"

"I don't know.  I have no idea."

Barbara paused.  "Do you have any idea who might have killed him?  Any
idea at all, no matter how wild it seems?"

"No.  Barbara paused again.  "Where were you the last few days?  We
couldn't get you."

"I'm around.  But I work."

"Where?"  "Marvelous Massage on Forty-fourth and Eighth."

Barbara looked at her and felt a surge of pity.  She was sure she would
meet Lola Ortega again.  She just hoped it wasn't in the morgue.

CHAPTER 29.

As it turned out, Lawless had just left the squad room when Barbara
returned, so they didn't get to talk until after Lawless returned from
the Wildfire Club.

Barbara was glad when he came in.  She had started to think about how,
basically, she had scared Lola Omega into answering her questions.
Barbara hadn't seen herself capable of such tactics, and she was
surprised and bothered a bit by it.  The incident itself was small, but
she did wonder just how far she was willing to go to get cooperation
from witnesses, perils, or suspects.

They sat on a desk, drinking coffee that Barbara had made.

"I struck out," Lawless said.  "The bartender just corroborated what
the guy we talked to said: Krupsek was a bully, a bad guy, but he
didn't have any suspects.  How about you?"

Barbara detailed what she had learned from Lola Ortega.

As she knew he would be, Lawless was interested in Krupsek's statement
about playing a new game he couldn't lose.

But Barbara had nowhere to take it for him.  It was just there,
meaningless without a context, yet meaningful-maybe.

Barbara and Lawless left for the apartment when it got dark.  They
anticipated returning to work at six or seven the following morning.

For a while, she thought Lawless was going to go around the clock, but
he disabused her of that notion.

"We'll get tired," he said, "and we could miss something."

Later, both of them lay in bed in darkness, tired but unable to sleep,
each with their own thoughts.

Lawless was thinking about Barbara.  On the one hand, he was glad she
was on the case; on the other, there was something in him that wanted
to protect her, tell her to forget homicide, to forget police work and
go into something that would not deliver so much pain, frustration, and
heartache.

But he knew he couldn't do that.  And he knew she wouldn't go along,
anyway.  Ultimately, she would do exactly what she wanted to do.  She
was her own person, and that was one reason why he was so drawn to
her.

Barbara was thinking about Donald Krupsek.

It wasn't difficult to get a sense of what kind of cop he was.  No cop
at all.

But she still mourned for him.  Not a lot, but something in her felt
for him, and she knew, just knew, that if something had been different
for him a long time ago, he would have turned out differently.  Maybe
that was what she really mourned.  Not that he was dead, but the
someone he never became.  That was a sad story she had seen so many
times in her life, and she knew she would see it again.

CHAPTER 30.

They say in the NYPD that the best time to do something criminal is the
day a cop is buried.  All the cops are at the funeral.

You'd have a better chance of succeeding at something criminal outside
New York, too, because the funeral invariably drew officers from
jurisdictions all around the New York City area, other states, even
other countries.

He was buried four days after they found him.

Donald Krupsek was given an inspector's funeral, and full treatment.

Until the cortege made its way down to where the funeral and the
ceremony began, cops smoked, played grab ass and sipped from bottles.
But then, suddenly, they were at attention, long lines of men and women
in dark blue uniforms, watching the brightly colored patrol cars and
the blue-and whites of New York.  The cops stood stiff and silent under
the sunny, powder-blue October sky, joined in comradeship to express
their love and respect, because cops were allowed to show their love on
such a day.  When the bagpipes dirged "Amazing Grace," not a few eyes
filled with tears, some men openly wiping the tears from their faces.

In his place on the street, George Benton, dressed to the nines,
watched as the flag-draped coffin was brought into the church, and in
another place, thinking their own thoughts, were Frank Piccolo and Ed
Edmunton, and Piccolo only wished that he had caught this squeal, but
with Lawless on it, he truly didn't think he could do any better.

Later, when the funeral was over and the men were dismissed, many went
into bars.

Benton went home and realized that he'd found a strange relief in
watching the funeral.  It was an event that, for a moment, however
brief, put his own life in perspective: there was pain in other lives,
too.

And, of course, he was besieged by guilt for feeling this way.

Piccolo and Edmunton also stopped for a drink, joining other cops, and
though there was laughter and more grab ass the shocking reality of
their chosen profession was there right there in a coffin soon to be
winched into a hole.

Piccolo, of course, never lost sight of this, and never cared.  But
Edmunton.  He had been on his way downhill when he hooked up with
Piccolo, and it was the hand extended to him by this mad little man
that had brought him back from wherever he was going.  Edmunton never
wanted to think about Frank Piccolo dying, and he knew, as much as
anyone could know, that if it came down to it, he would give up his own
life for that little man.  He prayed to God he wouldn't have to.

Lawless and Barbara watched from their own position, and he could read
her mind when, halfway through "Amazing Grace," she grasped his hand
and squeezed it tight.  It was profound self-awareness that they, too,
were police officers, and that they were also in love, but the stars
didn't care, and they would always face the threat of sudden
death-particularly in Fort Siberia.

Lawless tried not to live in the future.  Just now.  And now, he knew,
there was a killer on the loose, and he had to stop him--or her-before
something like this happened again.

An hour after the funeral ended, the sky grew gray and then the rain
came down hard, turning the street shiny where the cops had stood to
say goodbye to their comrade-in-arms.  It seemed a fitting end to the
day.

CHAPTER 31.

The report from Forensic was there when Barbara and Lawless got back to
the precinct.

Joe McDonald, head of the squad, had not found any usable prints.  The
bullet that killed Krupsek was recovered, but it was deformed and
ballistic ally useless-as expected from a .22.

There was lots of physical evidence, such as cigarette butts, but
nothing that could be tied specifically to the shooter.

Ninety-odd color 8 x 10s had been taken of Krupsek at the scene and
before autopsy, and of the crime scene itself.  Barbara and Lawless
went over the photos with magnifying glasses.

"The body," she had often heard Lawless say, "speaks to you."  But
after a half hour of close examination, neither of them had heard
anything.

They also showed the photos to a young, handsome, volunteer named Leo
McGurk, who was in the squad room, and whose father, Matthew, Lawless
knew; and to a middle-aged cop named Vallone.  But they saw nothing
either.

Lawless called Marcella, and this time he got him.  They made an
appointment to meet in the morning.

While most of those who had attended Krupsek's funeral were there to
pay their respects, maybe not all had been.

Killers were an odd lot.  Lots of them got special kicks coming to the
funeral of the person they did, and sometimes, if the police got lucky,
he would be a known, and maybe could be developed into a suspect.  (N
even better: a very obvious suspect would just be standing there.

Lawless had arranged with a team of police photographers headed by a
veteran detective named Eddie Meagher to shoot the crowds watching the
services and parade.

They did: from roofs, from inside stores, from hallways, and with 400
mm lenses from far away.

Meagher told Lawless he would have the prints that evening or in the
morning.  Lawless said the morning was okay.

He and Barbara then left for a luncheonette and had a bite to eat-and a
bite was almost it.  Neither was really that hungry.  Cops' funerals
did that to you, no matter whether the cop was good, bad, or
indifferent.

"So what do you think?"  Barbara said as they sipped coffee.

"I don't think we have anything to go on," Lawless said.  "I can't
really get a handle on anything.  There's too many possibilities at the
moment.  The main thing that intrigues me is what Krupsek said-this
business about playing a new game.  Then a short time later he's done.
I think there's a relationship, but I have no idea what it is."

"So you've ruled out a killing by a psychopath."

"Not completely.  Ninety-nine percent.  He was just involved in too
much ditty stuff.  Lots of times, you do that, you get killed."

"So what are we going to do?"

"I want to really start opening up his life.  Let's contact his
ex-wife, find out who he had on a pad, see if we can focus in on the
Johns.  I think that's the way to go."

"That's what I sense, too."

Lawless smiled, "Are you just trying to please the boss?"

"Sure," Barbara said.  "I always try to please the boss."

Lawless took one of her hands in his.  "You always do."

CHAPTER 32.

The zombie from the MVB was only a day late.  Edmunton and Piccolo
received the computer printout of registered owners of red 1959
Cadillacs in four days instead of three.

The envelope came directly to Edmunton at the station house.  They
examined it in the squad room.

There were seventy-seven red 1959 Cadillacs in New York State.  That
was not bad at all.  The suspect could have been a current model Chevy
or Toyota.

The first thing they did was look for owners who lived in the precinct.
A snatch most often involved the peril knowing the victim or victims in
some way, however thin, beforehand.  The reason was simple: often, the
idea for the crime would come out of some experience the peril had with
the victim.

Ideally, then, Maria Perez would know someone who owned a red
Cadillac.

There was no registered owner of a red 1959 Cadillac within the
confines of the Five Three, but there were ten registered owners in the
Bronx and fourteen in Brooklyn, Queens, and the other boroughs.  The
rest of the cars were owned by people who lived mostly in the bigger
towns and cities throughout the state, and there were a few in what
Piccolo referred to as "the sticks."  Every single one, if necessary,
would be checked out.

"Well," Piccolo said, "let's show her the list."

CHAPTER 33.

Maria Perez was not home.  Piccolo asked at a couple of adjacent
apartments, but no one knew where she was.  One older woman said she
might have gone to visit her mother.  She sometimes did that.

Piccolo and Edmunton decided to return in a couple of hours.  Piccolo
was glad.  He had been neglecting his latest pet, a parrot, and this
would give him time to go back to his apartment to look in on it.

The parrot had been a little skittery when ensconced in his cage in the
apartment.  Indeed, Rambo would have been a little skittery.  Piccolo's
four other pets were a boa, a monitor lizard, a python, and a tokay
gecko.

All were kept in glass cages, but occasionally he would let out the
gecko, the only natural enemy of the roach.

Not to go after roaches.  Just to roam.  Any roach problem in the
apartment had long since evaporated because the gecko, a
strange-looking creature with a super-talented tongue it used to clean
its lidless eyes, and a bite that could only be released by surgery,
had been let loose quite often when Piccolo first got him.

Piccolo had most recently used the pets, particularly the gecko, as
aids in the interrogation of an enforcer for a landlord who drove old
people out of their apartments, and he and Edmunton still would howl
with glee when they recalled telling him that the gecko was partial to
the kind of kielbasa he had between his legs.

The parrot was special, though.  Piccolo would spend whatever free time
he had training it, and it was a quick study.  It talked very well, and
like him.  Piccolo and Edmunton had been bowled over by his first
complete sentence.  Sounded just like Piccolo.  "Polly," the bird said,
"wanna fuckin' cracker."

Now, Piccolo and Edmunton came into the apartment.  Piccolo checked.
All the pets were fine.  Piccolo, who called the parrot "Bird" (he
didn't writhe in agony over thinking up names-the other pets were
called Rambo III, IV, V and VI), went up to the creature, who was in a
large cage near a front window.

"How you fuckin' doing?"  Piccolo asked.

"How you fuckin' doing?"  the parrot croaked.

Piccolo laughed.  He loved it.  "Polly want a fuckin' cracker?"

"Polly want a fuckin' cracker?"  the parrot mimicked.

Piccolo took a cracker from a tin on the nearby table.  "Here, here's
the fuckin' cracker."

"Fuckin' cracker," the bird said, as it started to nibble away at the
cracker.

"You're a fuckin' scream," Piccolo yelped.

"A fuckin' scream," the parrot echoed.

Behind him, Piccolo heard a choking sound.  He turned.  Edmunton was
the color of a tomato.  The parrot, Edmunton was thinking, was so
right, so fuckin' right!

Piccolo fed his pets, then he and Edmunton heated up some ravioli
Piccolo had made the night before, downed it, then went back to Maria
Perez's apartment.  It had been two hours since the first visit.

She was in.

"We came before," Piccolo said, standing in the door, "but you weren't
here."

"I was at my mother's.  Any word?"

"Not yet," Piccolo said, "but I'd like you to take a look at a list of
names.  Names of people who own a red Cadillac, 1959.  Maybe you know
someone."

"Okay," she said.  "I just have to finish serving Ivette dinner.  "

"Listen," Piccolo said, sensing a little embarrassment on Maria Perez's
part, "do it as soon as you can.  Me and Ed, we'll get a drink
downstairs and be back in a half hour.  I'll leave the list with you.
Okay?"  "Okay.  "

Piccolo and Edmunton left the apartment.

"I don't want her to feel rushed," Piccolo said as they went down the
stairs.  "Some of these people have trouble with reading English.  She
could miss something."

They went into a bar on the corner of 188th and Tiebout.  The bar at
the Plaza it was not.

It was pretty crowded with Spanish and blacks, and there was a woman
working the bar, wearing a tight sweater and stretch pants, who,
Piccolo figured, weighed a minimum of nine thousand pounds.

Hostile eyes looked them over as they took up positions at the end of
the bar near the front entrance.

The bar was typical of the neighborhood, really just like the sleaze
bucket they had been in the other day.  The smell of disinfectant mixed
with the smell of garlic and booze.

The heavyset woman glanced at Piccolo and Edmunton, but continued to
rinse out some glasses.  The look was hostile.

After a while, she approached.

She had spangled makeup on her big eyelids.  She smiled sort of
sarcastically.  There was lipstick on her teeth.  Probably, Piccolo
thought, gives blow jobs in the back room.

"Yes?"  "Dos cerveza," Piccolo said.  He smiled back.  The woman
blinked.  People always reacted when they looked in Piccolo's eyes.  He
didn't look like much until you looked in his eyes.  Then they saw
something missing, like sanity.

She lumbered away, her big gluteus maximus muscles working
hydraulically, like some kind of machine in a factory.

The detectives said nothing until she brought two bottles of beer. They
disregarded the glasses and drank from the bottles.  She sneered at
them.

"If she can't ID anybody," Piccolo said, "we'll show the mug books to
those telephone workers."

"Yeah," Edmunton said.  "I was thinking about doing that.  Also, I
think we should include sex offenders."

"Fuckin' better believe it," Piccolo said.

"We could also show the books to people on the block.  Someone's got
to have noticed them."

Piccolo nodded.

They finished the beers and ordered two more, then got in a discussion
of what they would have for dinner the next night.  Piccolo suggested
squid.  Edmunton said it sounded good, even though Piccolo had not
attempted it before.  The fact was he was a great cook.  Too great.
Edmunton, while not actually working to lose weight, had gained twenty
pounds in the last six months.

They continued to talk about food and simultaneously noticed the shift
of the glances of people sitting at the bar toward the front door.
Cops, perhaps as much as psychiatrists, always watched people's eyes,
and their body language.  It could tell them much more than what people
said.

The eyes were neither surprised nor scared; they just shifted.

Piccolo and Edmunton were surprised: Maria Perez was standing in the
door, her daughter held by one hand, and the printout in the other. Her
face was white.

They went over to her.

"I found somebody," she said, blinking furiously.  "I found somebody I
know!"

CHAPTER 34.

As they walked her back to her apartment, Maria blurted out snatches of
things, some of it in Spanish, and by the time she got to her
apartment, she was sweaty and weak.  The detectives sat her down in the
living room and got her a glass of water.

"Start from the beginning," Edmonton said when she had taken a drink
and a little color had come back into her face.

"Her name," Maria said, "is Sylvia Johnson.  When I first .. . when
Julio first left me I didn't have no money.  I wanted to go to work.  I
didn't want to go on welfare.

"I got a job in a factory in Manhattan, but I needed someone to take
care of little Luis and Ivette.  I didn't know anyone in the
neighborhood I really trust, so I call some agencies that have
professional people.

"I hire Sylvia Johnson," Maria said.  "She seem nice.  So, I go to
work.  I was doing okay.  But there was a problem.  My daughter missed
me a lot.  And then bad things started to happen with Sylvia.  It .. .
it, uh, embarrass me to say it, but once when I got home I found .. . I
saw that she had use the bed for sex."

"Found a condom or something?"  Piccolo said.

"Right," Maria said, her eyes lowered.  "I didn't say anything to her,
and she stop, but then I start to miss things.  I find out she
steal."

"How did you know that?"  Edmonton asked.

"One day I left five dollars in a drawer.  It was gone when I come
home.  I told her I didn't need her no more, and she got mad at me.
Then I told her it was because she was stealing, and she threatened me.
I told her I call police."

"What do you mean, threaten?"  Piccolo asked.

"She told me she have her boyfriend cut me."  "Who's her boyfriend?"
Piccolo asked.  "I don't know.  Someone named Candy."  "What's she look
like?"  Piccolo asked.  "Heavy.  Very heavy.  Black.  Ugly."  "Okay,"
Piccolo said.  "We'll take it from here."  "Do you think they took my
baby?"  "Yeah," Edmunton said, "we think that."  "Do you think he's all
right?"  "We're going to look into it right away," Piccolo said.

CHAPTER 35.

Sylvia Johnson had a residence address in the Southern Boulevard
section of the Bronx, an area that was as close as any precinct was to
being as crime-riddled an area as Fort Siberia.

They arrived at about 9:00 at night and parked a few blocks from the
address.  Piccolo carried a stainless steel .44 magnum-in case there
were any bull elephants in the apartment-while Edmunton sported a
shotgun under the light coat he was wearing.  Both men wore soft body
armor.

It had rained lightly prior to their coming, so there were only a few
people on the street.  The detectives walked along, avoiding eye
contact, looking for the car.

They found it.  Streetlights have a tendency to distort colors, but
there was no mistaking the big swept-up fins of the Cadillac.  It was
parked on the block where Sylvia Johnson apparently lived.

There was no way to do it secretly, so they went up to the car, Piccolo
on one side, Edmunton on the other, and looked in.  They could see
fairly well from the streetlight.

The back of the car was filled with garbage; you couldn't sit there if
you wanted to.  The window in back was open a crack.  You could smell
it, too.

The front was clear.  There was a big pair of foam dice hanging from
the rearview mirror and, on the dashboard, a plastic Jesus.

The body of the car looked like someone had worked on it for a few
minutes with a small sledgehammer.  Rust reigned supreme.

Curiously, though, the inspection certificate, like the registration,
was current.

They left and entered the building where Sylvia Johnson lived.  Only
one person, an old guy, was watching them from the sidewalk.

The hall was dark; the lights were out.  Piccolo felt excitement flow
through him.

This was where it was at.  This was real police work.  For Piccolo, it
was moments like this that he lived for.  There was nothing like a
situation where sleazoids could come at you and try to take you out.

He knew that most cops thought him crazy because of this, because most,
in potentially violent encounters, would want to pee or shit their
pants, hyperventilate, whatever.

Not Piccolo.  In a violent or potentially violent situation, he felt
like he was on some upstate lake, as smooth as glass, able to think
with clarity and swiftness.

Edmunton was not Piccolo, and there had been a time when he had been
like any other cop: afraid, but courageous despite the fear.  Now,
having been Piccolo's partner for two years, he was somewhat like the
little man.  He had drawn strength and, more importantly, learned
standards: this is the way Piccolo acts.  Edmunton should act like
Piccolo.  It was as simple as that.

During the time they had been together, they had busted down three
doors, including one where the guy inside was toting an "alley
clearer," which fired eleven separate projectiles in one blast and
which got its name from the fact that if you fired it at the top of an
alley, it would take down anyone in it.  But it didn't stop Edmunton,
because it didn't stop Piccolo.  In two of three cases, they had killed
the perils.

Sometimes, deep in the night, the kitchen filled with smoke, both of
them bombed on beer and guinea red, which Piccolo liked to drink
because, he said with a gap-toothed smile, it reminded him of his
mother, Piccolo would talk in such a way that if the job's psychiatrist
heard him he would have been summarily committed.

Piccolo's philosophy was simple.

"I'm already dead," he once said.  "Most people, when they're born,
they're alive.  But when I was born, I fuckin' died.  I know I'm alive,
but I'm really dead, or, I mean, I can't be killed because I'm already
dead.  Understand?"

Edmunton understood perfectly.

Now, a little nervous but still okay, he glanced at Piccolo as they
entered the building.

"Got the warrant?"  he whispered.

"Right between my legs."  Piccolo said.

Soon they were standing outside 3D, the woman's apartment.

Piccolo pressed his ear against the door.  He glanced at Edmunton with
a sign: someone's in here.  He pulled his .44.  It was immense.

Piccolo pressed the buzzer.  Waited.  No one came.

He tapped lightly with the muzzle of the .44.  He heard footsteps
approaching the door.  Piccolo stepped squarely in front.  Edmunton
stepped back, on the far side where he could not be seen if someone
opened the door.  Piccolo held his gun out of sight, a difficult
feat.

Locks were disassembled.  The door was opened a crack, a chain still
on.  A face with large, dark, liquid eyes, only an inch or two above
Piccolo, looked out.

"Yeah?"

Piccolo smiled, opened his lips as if to speak, and then Edmunton came
by him in a rush and all 275 pounds of him hit the door low, and it
flew back, ripping the chain off the molding and whacking the door
answerer squarely in the forehead, and then Piccolo was in behind him
and leaped over the prostrate form of the man who had been knocked
senseless and raced down a short hall and burst into a living room, gun
up, ready to squeeze off whatever it took, and there was a nigger
female who had apparently been sitting on a couch watching TV.  It was
Sylvia Johnson.  She got up off the couch and was about to speak when
Piccolo brought a vicious right hook from nowhere which landed flush on
her jaw and sent her sprawling across the chair onto the bare wood
floor, where she hit her head and lay motionless.

Piccolo turned.  Edmunton was dragging the inert form of the man into
the living room.  He dropped him there.

The entire operation had taken less than thirty seconds.

Edmunton left the room and came back within a minute.

"There's a bedroom and kitchen.  Nada," he said.

Piccolo had been looking around the room.  It looked like the stock
room of an appliance store.  Piled against one wall were unopened boxes
with names of small appliances stenciled on the sides, two
typewriters, and what looked like two large computer devices, maybe
word processors.

Stacked against the other wall, opposite the couch where the woman had
been sitting, were ten TVs, stacked five wide and two high, one of
which was on-Family Feud.

Piccolo and Edmunton sat down on the couch to watch the program.

As they did, someone knocked on the door.

"Everything okay in there?"

"Everything's fine," Piccolo said.  "Get the fuck out of here.  "

They watched Richard Dawson welcome a line of new contestants with a
kiss each.

"Someday," Piccolo said, "somebody's going to slip him the tongue."

Edmunton chuckled.  Before the contest started, the man stirred.

Piccolo looked down at him.  "How you feelin'?"  he said.

"My head aches," the man said.

"That's good," Piccolo said.  "Very good."

The man looked at Piccolo.  He had an.  angry welt on his forehead and
a laceration.  He was also on something, probably coke.

"You know why we're here?"  Piccolo asked.

The man shook his head.

"Where's the kid?"

For a moment the man's face went blank.  Surprise.  He knew.  But he
said nothing.

"Ve have vays of making you talk," Piccolo said, doing a bad Brooklyn
version of Peter Lore.

The man said nothing.

Piccolo looked at him.  Piccolo had interrogated hundreds of guys. Most
would crack.  Some you could kill and they wouldn't crack.  This was
one of the ones you'd have to kill.

Piccolo glanced at Sylvia Johnson, who had regained consciousness and
was rubbing her jaw.

"Take this hump inside," he said to Edmunton.  "Be careful."

Piccolo waited until he heard the bedroom door click shut.

"How come he's being such an asshole?"  he said to Sylvia Johnson.

"Why'd you hit me?"

"You deserved it."

She glared at Piccolo, rubbed her jaw.

"You didn't answer my question."

"I don't know."

"Yes, you fucking do," Piccolo said.  To Sylvia, Piccolo looked angry,
demented.  He was.

"He's been in the joint three times."

Piccolo understood.  Another fall would mean life.

"You been away?"  Piccolo asked.

She nodded.

"Where, how long?"

"In Greentree.  Three years."

"For what?"

"Dealing.  "

"All this shit," Piccolo said, glancing at the TVs and appliances, "is
stolen, right?"

Sylvia said nothing.

"With your record, you'll pull at least five."

She rubbed her jaw.

"Where's the kid, Sylvia?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sylvia, don't be a stupid fucking cunt.  We got witnesses to you and
your boyfriend snatching the kid.  "

Sylvia said nothing.  Piccolo sensed indecisiveness.

"If the kid's alive and you lead me to him, I'll help you.  If you
don't, or the kid's dead, you better fuckin' hope you're reincarnated.
Because that's the next time you'll be free."

"I can't think good."

"You want to snort, right?"

She said nothing.

"Where's the kid?"

She inhaled sharply.

"I don't know.  After we picked him up, we brought him to a motel near
Newark Airport.  We gave him to someone named Wanda.  She-"

Piccolo put up his hand like a traffic cop.  "Start at the beginning.
How'd you decide on the Perez kid."

"I saw him when I babysat.  Then, when I went to get a lawyer on a
little trouble I had, he proposed it.  I mean, I didn't have much
money.  He said he noticed I worked for Child Care Services, and did I
ever sit for any Spanish kids under a year old.  I said yeah.  He said
if I could get the kid for him, he'd defend me free, plus put three
grand in my pocket.  I told Candy about it.  We raised the lawyer to
five thousand, that was it."

"Who is this scum fucker "Elks Strauss.  Over on Tremont near West
Farms Square."  "What'd you do with the kid, now?"

"Strauss told us to take it to the Jetport Motel just outside Newark,
near the airport.  That there would be a woman coming in on a Sunday
named Wanda.  That she would be in all week until we got it."

"What's her last name?"

Sylvia shook her head.

"What else you know about her?"

"Nothing.  "

"What'd she look like?"

"Bleach blonde, about thirty.  Built."

"You get paid?"

She nodded.

Piccolo yelled to Edmunton to bring Candy out.

Edmunton came into the room with Candy.

"Sylvia told us everything, Candy," Piccolo said.  "You want to fucking
talk?"

Candy said nothing.  Suddenly, he lunged for Sylvia.  Piccolo was
ready.  He kicked him in the balls.  He went down and started to
vomit.

"Miranda them, Eddie."

Edmunton pronounced the standard warning, then said, "You're under
arrest, scum fuckers for kidnapping."

Sylvia's mouth dropped open.  She looked at Piccolo, her eyes
wounded.

"You .. . you said you'd help me," she choked out.

Piccolo looked at her.

Sylvia thought she had never seen harder eyes in her life.

"I didn't fucking shoot you, did I?"

CHAPTER 36.

PO Byron Weeks and his partner, PO Thomas Williams, had the foot post
in F sector of Fort Siberia, which mostly covered Webster Avenue and
ran to the Concourse.  It was the area north of Fordham Road, which was
not quite as bad as Death Valley but still had your basic Siberia
pedigree: psychos, junkies, drunks, hos, pushers, dealers, con men,
bums, abandoned buildings, buildings with people who had been
abandoned, muggers, rapists, bars, high-priced bodegas, garbage, cats,
rats, mice, roaches, and ordinary citizens.

Weeks had had the misfortune of being assigned there four weeks
earlier, his very first assignment after six months at the Academy.
His probationary period had been spent in a precinct on Central Park
South, watching how the rich lived.

Siberia would have been a scary precinct for any young man, but it was
especially bad for a twenty-three-year-old black who had been raised in
Huntington Station, Long Island, and, in fact, still lived there with
his parents, two schoolteachers.  He had long heard, with some rancor,
about how kids from the suburbs didn't know what they were getting into
when they joined the NYPD, rather than the Suffolk County Police, where
the pay was much higher and the duty much easier )r at least much
safer.

"The city eats these suburban kids alive," Weeks had heard an old-time
cop say.  "They don't know what they're getting into.  They grow up
with silver spoons in their mouths and they gotta come in and deal with
some dude whose hope ran out when he was seven.  No contest."

Horror stories about the fate of suburban kids were abundant, and many
quit before long.  But the NYPD, everyone knew, was still the best
police force in the world, and staying on it was a point of pride with
Weeks.  He was a suburban kid, not a city kid, true, but he would make
it.

Before he arrived at Siberia, he figured he had one big thing going for
him.  He was black, a brother, and blacks would treat him better than
white cops.

Not true.  The blacks in Fort Siberia saw him as blue; they looked like
they wanted to cut his heart out.  And the spies?  The spies were the
natural enemies of the blacks, like mongoose and cobra.

Luckily, though, he had Williams with him.  Williams was a heavyset
black guy who had been walking a post on Siberia for seven years, and
nobody messed with him.  One night Weeks found out just what a badass
Williams was.

While Weeks watched, Williams had collared one of the neighborhood
tough guys, a little blood named Louis who was stealing from a bodega
on 179th Street because the guy who ran it was old and couldn't chase
him.

The confrontation was in a tenement hallway.

"Listen to me, Louis," Williams said.  "I want you to stop scamming
this old dude.  If you don't, I'm going to put you under arrest and get
you convicted and they're going to ship you up to one of those psycho
houses upstate.  Louis, let me tell you, what they got up there are
guys who spend their whole day pumping iron, and you're going to end up
somebody's bitch."

The pronouncement stunned Weeks, but Louis stopped robbing.

"You've got to back up everything you say," Williams told Weeks.  "You
got to be ready to break heads, kill, whatever it takes.  You got to be
a badass your own self."

Slowly, Williams was educating Weeks on controlling the street, and it
was good training, but Weeks did not know not really-if he would make
it.  His stomach always seemed to be empty; he was always afraid
because he knew there would come a time when he was not with Williams.
He would be on his own, and then, as Williams said, he would be
tested.

"They will test you first chance they get," Williams told him.

If it was going to happen, Weeks thought, it would happen this week.
On Monday, the same day the cop had been killed, Williams had gone on
leave.

The idea of not having Williams around to watch over and instruct him
bothered Weeks.  But it was especially upsetting when the cop, Krupsek,
had been blown away.  That could happen to any of them.

Weeks wondered if the other five or six guys from the Academy assigned
to the Five Three were as afraid as he was.  They didn't seem to be,
probably weren't.  They'd all been raised in the city.

On the other hand, they could be just as nervous as he was but weren't
showing it.  Cops hardly ever showed they were afraid of anything.

To compound his problems, Weeks had the twelve-to-eight tour.

Now, on Thursday night, with the weather near freezing and a wind up,
the streets were fairly empty.  But on Friday and Saturday he would
likely be tested.

He walked along Webster, heading north toward Fordham Road, checking
for locked doors, and he kept his eyes open for street action.

Crime could be occurring, he thought, and he could miss it, stuff that
Williams would spot with ease; he just didn't have Williams's eyes
yet.

As he walked, he took the roll call sergeant's advice: he glanced up.
He didn't want anybody shooting him with a crossbow.

There were very few people on the street this late; just a few people
on corners and some people waiting for buses.

Occasionally, as he walked, Weeks would think of Sandra, his girl.  She
would be away until Friday, but then she would return.  They would
catch a movie, maybe, then go back to her place.

He felt a little surge of joy, felt a tingling in his pelvic area.

At Fordham Road, he looked both ways carefully.  In Fort Siberia,
drivers, Williams told him-probably most-didn't have insurance or
licenses or current registrations on their cars, and they didn't give a
fuck for traffic lights.  "You hear an engine roaring," Williams said,
"get out of the way, no matter you got the light or not."

He crossed Fordham at the light, and the few cars on the street did
stop.

On the other side was Scratch Park-why it was named that, no one seemed
to know-a little park next to the Metro North tracks that paralleled
Webster Avenue.  People gathered there in the summer and also walked
their dogs there.  It used to be riddled with junkies, but Williams had
driven them out.  "Let these fuckers shoot up somewhere else.  They
ain't doing it on my post."

Weeks looked up.  It was a clear, moonless night, but you couldn't see
the stars in the city, just a dull blur occasionally.  Above Huntington
Station, the stars were so bright they looked false, like the ceiling
in a planetarium.

Scratch Park scared him more than most places.  It was small, but it
was a crazy quilt of paths that ran through brush that was still pretty
dense, even now in fall.  And these were big old, gnarled trees that
bad guys could hide behind.

He was reassured that he had the heavy presence of his .38 Special on
his hip, but he wondered what he would do if push came to shove.  He
wondered how good he would be under pressure.

He was only about forty feet into the park, which seemed empty, when
the mortal danger approached him from behind, its tread silenced by
rubber running shoes, and he was thinking of what was ahead when there
was a single sharp pfft!  and a bullet burrowed through his brain, and,
as he went down, blood jetted out of his head as if a water-filled
balloon had been punctured.

CHAPTER 37.

The body of Byron Weeks was discovered a half hour after he was shot,
by a man walking his dog.  Or, rather, by the dog, a rottweiler.  The
man had let the dog off the leash at the Fordham Road entrance to the
park.  A minute later the dog returned, its snout glistening with the
blood of Byron Weeks.  Then, wagging its tail all the way, it led the
man to the body.

The man called 911, and a blue-and-white was on the scene in three
minutes.  When the 10-13 went out, cars started arriving every
minute.

Cops in the first car saw that Weeks, face down, was dead.  It looked
like all the blood from his body had run onto the path.  They took him
in their arms and loaded him in the back of the radio car and, siren
wailing, raced to Morrisania.

One cop from the first car had stayed behind, and he was joined by
others, but every fiber of their being strained to be with those on
their way to the hospital-with the deception that they could save
him-rather than here with the pool of semi-coagulated blood where the
reality was.

But the cops had to be cops.  Even in his grief and shock, before they
lifted the body of Byron Weeks, the first cop made marks where Weeks
had been for the detectives.  He observed as much as he could, his mind
operating independently of his heart, which was breaking.

Instinctively, too, without knowing it for sure, all the cops really
knew that the same killer who had done Donald Krupsek had ended the
life and career of Byron Weeks.

He was head-shot, and within two days of the first guy.  There was no
question in anyone's mind.

Rage rumbled in all the men, and fear.  Because now fear had to be
with them every step of the way: someone was killing cops.

Lawless and Barbara had just returned from dinner when the squeal came
in, passed on to them from the central switchboard at Siberia, which
had to know where Lawless was at all times.

The news made Barbara feel as if a steel fist was squeezing her guts.

Lawless beat back the human reactions that started to well up in him.
He had to think, and think clearly.

One thing was clear from the dispatcher.  The kid was probably dead,
even though he was on the way to Morrisania.  Lawless had to make a
choice.  Go to the scene or to the hospital.  Both places would be
madhouses.  The media would go wild.

As they walked out the door, he said, "Let's split up.  You take the
radio car and secure the scene.  I'm going to the hospital.  I'll see
you later."

Barbara nodded, and a moment later she was climbing into the radio car.
A few yards down the block, Lawless was getting into a cab.

When Lawless arrived, he showed his tin to the guard in the kiosk.  The
entrance of the hospital was surrounded by a razor-wire-topped Cyclone
fence.  Things were still quiet.

The emergency room, which was on the ground floor, was cordoned off on
both ends by four cops who looked like they would happily rip the head
off anyone who tried to make it through unauthorized.

They knew Lawless.

He recognized one of the older guys, whose name was Lo Bello and he
asked the question with eyes that already knew the answer.

Lo Bello shook his head.

Lawless went into the ER.

The body of Byron Weeks, stripped, was still there.  And so was Dr.
Victor J. Onairuts, the ME.

Onairuts was by a stainless steel sink, washing his hands in an
alcohol-water solution.

Lawless went up to him.  "Same MO?"

"To a T," Onairuts said.  "One shot in the head.  Probably a
twenty-two.  No exit wound, from behind.  He was ambushed, like
Krupsek."

"How long ago?"

"He was still warm," Onairuts said.

"Anybody from the family come?"

"I understand he's an only child."  Onairuts paused.

Inside, the machinery that was going inside Lawless stopped for a
moment too.

"The mother and father are on the way.  He also has a girlfriend.  "

"When are you going to do the post?"

"Right away.  I'll have it by four."

Lawless nodded.  God had blessed him with Onairuts.  He had that most
important human characteristic: he cared.

Lawless went up to Weeks.  He was lying face up on the gurney, his eyes
closed.  Blood had been washed away, Lawless could tell, so Onairuts
could examine him.

He was a good-looking kid, well built.  An athlete.  So young.  So very
young.

There was nothing to say, or do.  There he was.

Lawless went outside into the waiting room and lit a cigarette.  He
inhaled deeply three times, then sat down.  Now all he could do was
wait for the mother and father to show up-and the media and the brass
and the mayor and all the other politicians who used such events to
further their own careers.

And to think.

Lawless had felt sure he was onto something with Krupsek.

Krupsek was a dirty cop, Krupsek had enemies.  It was only a question
of determining which one had done him.  Lawless had felt sure it wasn't
a psycho-at least that's what his instinct told him.

It would just be a matter of hard intense investigation, and they would
come up with someone.

Now this.  A black kid, young, just out of the Academy.  Like
lightning, killed just like Krupsek.

What was the relationship, if any, to Krupsek?  Was it an individual
psycho?  He just didn't know.  Had no idea.  The first thing he would
have to determine was if Krupsek knew the kid.  If so, what did they
have in common?  What did they have in common as victims?  Who did they
have in common as a homicidal enemy?  He put the cigarette out, lit
another.

Through the door, the brass was approaching, led by the Chief of
Detectives, Pete Rinaldi, a short, beefy cop with a large nose and
small intense dark eyes, who was given to smoking guinea stinkers which
were great in a homicide investigation for masking the stench-except
the cigars smelled worse than the putrefaction.

Lawless thought of Rinaldi as sharp, a pragmatist, a survivor above
all.  Once, probably, he had been a very good detective.  Today he was
just a politician, though not a loathsomely bad guy like, say, Bledsoe.
But now he was strictly interested in preserving his own ass.

Rinaldi went right up to Lawless.  "Fill me in, Joe," he said.

Lawless did.

"Leads?"  "I don't know.  I haven't been to the scene yet, or talked
with anyone at all."

"Okay," Rinaldi said.  "The mayor is going to announce the formation of
a task force under me.  It's in name only.  You just keep going on it.
If you need anything else, tell me.  "

"Okay.  "

"Good luck."

"Keep in touch."

Rinaldi left.

Yes, Lawless thought, the mayor was a survivor too.

Mr.  and Mrs.  Byron Weeks, who appeared to be in their mid-fifties,
showed up about ten minutes later.

Lawless had hoped to have a word with them, but he couldn't even
introduce himself.  The police chaplain had arrived, and when the
couple saw him approaching them, Mrs.  Weeks let out a shriek that, for
a moment, froze everyone.

The chaplain did not need to say anything.  The woman was quickly gone
to grief, sobbing heavily, her head on the chest of her husband, while
tears streaked down her face, and the face of her husband.

"My baby," she kept saying softly.  "My baby, my baby..  ."

It was enough to make a stone cry.

CHAPTER 38.

Lawless could see the crime scene from far away as he drove along
Webster Avenue, going north; it was illuminated by the bright strobe
lights of the TV cameras doing meaningless interviews with passersby or
maybe a cop who didn't know enough to be quiet.

He parked a block away and entered the park from Webster.  Barbara and
the other cops had apparently been able to preserve the scene: a large
portion of a path which ran between brush and trees had been taped off,
and a number of cops stood guard on both sides.

As Lawless came in, one of the TV newsmen, who recognized him, came up.
"Hey, Joe, what have you got?"

"Nothing.  "

"You must have something."

"See the public information officer."

The newsman fairly hissed.  "I'll remember this."

Lawless kept walking until he was on the path where, apparently, the
body had been discovered.

He went up to Barbara.  "How you doing?"

"All right."

On the far side of the tape was a cluster of cops.  Lawless waved to
them.  The wave had special meaning.  The concept of comradeship was
never stronger than when a cop was killed.

They waved back.

As he talked, Lawless looked at the body outline on the asphalt
pavement.  It was the outline of a cartoon figure, not the man on the
gurney at Morrisania.  The outline stopped on both sides of a large
puddle of blood near the head.

"One of the cops who found him is over there," Barbara said, pointing
to one of the group Lawless had waved to.  "The tall one."

Lawless walked up to him.  "I'm Joe Lawless," he said.  "Any
witnesses?"

"Not so far.  A guy walking his dog called in."

"How'd you find the officer?"

"Face down, facing the tracks."  The cop was blinking.

"Who drew the outline?"

"I did."

"That's very good work."

"Did you hear anything from the hospital?"  one of the other cops
said.

Lawless nodded.  They understood.

He scanned the area around the outline, then ducked under the tape and
went up to it.  He went around to the feet, stopped, looked to his
left.

There was low brush on that side of the path.

He looked to the right.

There were trees there, large ones.  He scanned.  About five yards back
was a very large tree, more than big enough to hide a man.  Now the
scene was very bright.  But there couldn't have been much light when
Weeks entered the park.

He went over to the tree and, from a distance of a couple of yards,
carefully watching where he stepped, first on asphalt, then grass, he
walked around it.

It was a good spot for an ambush.  Weeks was coming down the path, and
the killer would have been waiting behind the tree and shifted his
position as Weeks approached so as not to be seen; or he could have
entered via the path that Byron Weeks entered from Webster.  The area
was still pretty heavy with vegetation, despite falling leaves.

Slowly, carefully, lost in concentration, he circled the tree again,
looking for footprints, anything.  He could see nothing.  But he would
alert Forensic.

Lawless went back over to Barbara, who was still standing on the
Webster Avenue side of the crime-scene tape.

"Did you happen to get the name of the dog walker?"

Barbara reached into the pocket of the light jacket she was wearing and
handed it to him.

The man lived two blocks away, a block up Webster.  His name was Jesus
Bonilla.  Before they went up there, McDonald and his forensic team
showed up.  Lawless told him about the possible ambush from the tree.

They went to Bonilla's house.  The man was shaken, but, as much as
possible, he tried to help.  The problem was, he hadn't seen
anything.

"Did you hear anything?"

"Just traffic sounds," he said.

"How about a popping sound?"

The man was about to say something when he paused.  "Maybe.  "Bout
twenty minutes before I take the dog out, I put out garbage, I think I
heard something.  A pop.  Yes, a pop, coming from the park."

"Did you look down that way?"

"Yes, I did.  I remember."

"Did you see anyone coming out of the park?"

"No.  I see no one.  I didn't think nothing of it."

Lawless and Barbara crossed the street a block north from Scratch Park
on Webster Avenue.

They walked along.

"I don't think we're going to get an ID out of here," Lawless said,
looking at the one-story buildings facing the park.  All were
businesses, Barbara had noticed earlier-auto repair, a restaurant, a
cleaners, two discount stores, a check cashing place-and all were shut
tight with corrugated panels drawn down over the fronts.

They crossed the street and walked in the grass, following the path on
which the body had been found toward the Metro North tracks, which were
separated from the park by a six foot-high spiked fence.

The path took a sweeping turn at one point, paralleling the fence.

Lawless and Barbara stepped over the short chain fence that separated
the path from the grassy area which now was only grassy in random
spots.  They made their way through some brush and assorted debris on
the ground, including a condom draped on a brush branch, to the
fence.

Across the tracks, on the other side, was a series of five story
apartment buildings, about half of which looked abandoned.

"Maybe we can knock on some doors in there," Lawless said.  "Someone
may have noticed something."

"It must have been dark."

"We're probably going through the motions, but that's what you do."
Lawless lit a cigarette with his lighter, inhaled deeply.  "I think you
should contact the railroad.  Maybe they had a train coming through
here at around the time of the killing.  Someone sitting in a train
might have got a glimpse of the peril.  "

Lawless went up to McDonald, who was squatting down between some
bushes.  "How's it going, Joe?"

"Not well," he said.

It was too late for knocking on doors, but they would start first thing
in the morning.  There was nothing much to do, except go home and get
some sleep so they could be fresh tomorrow.

But they waited an hour until McDonald was finished.  Lab work was
still to be done, but there was nothing apparent.  The tree theory
might be valid, but they had nothing hard to support it.

They took the West Side Highway downtown.

Barbara had been basically quiet for about a half hour.

"You okay?"

"How did Weeks look?"  she asked softly.

"The damage was to the back of his head."

She was quiet a moment more, then: "I used to see him around the
precinct now and then.  Nice-looking young guy.  I .. . I thought it
was so good for a black kid like that to be on the job, Siberia or not.
You see so many black kids who end up..."

She was quiet.

When it came to the loss of youth, Barbara was particularly sensitive.
She had lost her own husband, Jeff, some years earlier to drugs.  To
her, Lawless knew, it was more than a death, it was a terrible reminder
that sometimes dreams don't come true.

In the darkness of the car, he reached over and touched her hand.  She
leaned her head on his shoulder.  They drove on, the Hudson River
twinkling with the lights of the city that never slept.

CHAPTER 39.

The next morning, there was an influx of cops who wanted to be involved
in the investigation, and Lawless, just because of the sheer mechanics
of managing a lot of people, gently turned most of them away, though he
took the names and precinct numbers of everyone.  It was as if they
were on reserve.

That same morning, he arranged to have some of the cops knock on the
doors of buildings on the far side of the tracks that overlooked the
park; he also arranged for a checkpoint to be set up on Webster,
starting at 11:00 and continuing until 3:00, of anyone who might have
been driving in the area and seen anything.

Barbara, meanwhile, had gone off to Metro North to arrange for
announcements in the trains that passed the park between 1 1:00 and
2:00, such as posters and oral announcements.  Since she was involved
with the bureaucracy, Lawless did not expect to see her for the rest of
the day.

At around 10:30, he made a very hard call: to the Weeks house.  He got
Mr.  Weeks on the phone.  His voice sounded flat.  He was probably on a
sedative.

"I know this is a terrible time for you and Mrs.  Weeks," Lawless said,
"but I wondered if I could come by today to look at your son's things.
It's a necessary, even crucial part of the investigation, and we have
to do it fast."

"Hold on, please."

He went off the line.  Lawless heard distant voices, then he came
back.

"When do you want to come out?"

"This afternoon.  Okay?"  'Yes."

"I'll be there at one."

"Yes.  If we're not here, we'll leave the key under the mat.  "

Lawless was going to say, Don't do that.  But he didn't.

One of the things he had done during the Krupsek investigation was
examine the dead man's personnel jacket.  That could tell you something
about someone, and it had told him something about Krupsek: as a cop,
he was living on the edge.  He had been disciplined many times, and
there were the rneateating charges he had been brought up on.

He smelled dirty, and he was.

But the things a man owned, and where he lived, could also help define
him.  If Lawless were forced to choose between the two, he would rather
go through personal effects than a personnel jacket to get an insight
into who a man was.

And, in this case, as unlikely as it seemed, there could be something
there that could make that all-important connection to Donald
Krupsek.

Lawless arrived at the Weeks home, a nice-looking gray stone house in a
hilly area of the town of Huntington, around 1:00.  There was no car in
the driveway, and Lawless found himself hoping that they weren't home.
Later he would talk to them, have to talk with them, but not today.

The key was under the mat with a note.

He opened the note.

By's room is at the top of the stairs to the left.  Mr.  Weeks

Lawless let himself in.

The house was pleasantly and modestly furnished, a typically clean,
well-cared-for suburban home, a million miles from Fort Siberia.

He found Byron Weeks's room without difficulty, and there were two
things immediately apparent: he liked sports, particularly football,
and rock.  Posters of various players and groups adorned the walls, as
well as a few movies.

Lawless dropped to his knees, took out a light, and looked under the
bed, which was against a wall opposite a window.

Nothing.

He picked up the bed's mattress and then the box spring.  Nothing.

Slowly, he went through a large dresser adjacent to the bed.

Nothing but clean clothes and, on the very bottom, a pack of condoms.
He slipped them into his pocket.  His mother didn't need to find
them.

The closet was filled with suits and all kinds of colorful clothes, the
kind of clothing that young people went for today, and a far cry
from-and much better than-the stuff he had had available when he was
young.  Weeks had been a sharp dresser.

He went through all the pockets of every shirt, jacket, and pair of
pants, and felt along the seams.  Nothing, except in the pocket of a
jacket, two ticket stubs from a Yankees game played the previous August
8.

He examined the electrical receptacles-nothing-then went to the desk.

On the desk was the framed picture of a pretty black girl which was
signed "To By, Love, Sandra."  There was also a picture of him,
apparently when he'd graduated from high school.

Lawless opened the desk.

One thing was sure: Byron Weeks had been a neat, organized man, a good
asset for a cop.

Pencils, erasers, stationery supplies were neatly arranged and piled.

The left-hand drawers contained paper, carbons, some old schoolbooks,
and in the drawer on the bottom, about a dozen copies of Spring 3100, a
now-defunct magazine produced by cops in the Department for other
cops.

In the right side of the desk were various papers and standard forms
from the NYPD-the diploma itself was framed and mounted on the wall
above the desk.

In the next-to-the bottom drawer was a paperback biography of Alan
Ladd, and then Lawless understood one of the posters on the wall: it
was from the movie Shane, which Alan Ladd had starred in.

Lawless remembered something.  About Shane.  There was a black running
back-Freeman Mac Neil it was-who loved that picture.  Shane.  It had
always struck Lawless as odd that a black guy should like a picture
like Shane, until he found out something about Mac Neil his father had
died when he was very young.

When you thought about it, you couldn't beat Shane as a father.  A real
hero.  Lawless had loved the picture himself.

But why would Byron Weeks idolize Shane?  He had a father.

The answer was in the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk.

It was a picture album, and Lawless leafed through it quickly.  Most of
the shots showed Weeks with his parents and his girlfriend, but there
was one in the back, a faded 5 x 7, of a handsome black man in uniform.
Air Force.  Wings on the breast.

There was an inscription written across the bottom: "William Graines,
April 12, 1938-June 12, 1969.  Gone but never forgotten."

He must have been Weeks's real father, Lawless thought, and there must
have been a period in his life when he had no father.

By the time he was halfway back to the station house, Lawless had all
but dismissed the idea that Weeks had some involvement with Krupsek
that resulted in his death.  Weeks and Krupsek were two different
breeds of cat.  It had to be something else that tied them to the
killer.

CHAPTER 40.

When Lawless got back to the station house, he arranged to have an
immediate meeting with the CO, Bledsoe.

They spent fifteen minutes together, and Lawless's purpose was twofold.
First, to make sure Bledsoe didn't feel left out and start getting in
his hair, and second, to assure Bledsoe that all was as well as could
be expected; that Bledsoe's behind was in no danger of being lost.

Bledsoe swallowed it.

He was, Lawless thought, not only a mean, narrow-minded man with a
survivalist mentality-for himself only-but also really stupid.  He was
book smart, and had slain one Civil Service test after another, but he
knew nothing about the human heart, which ultimately, in Lawless's
view, made him stupid.

Bledsoe swallowed it all, and thanked Lawless for keeping him up to
date.

Fletcher, Bledsoe's aide, eyed Lawless warily.  He had a vague idea of
what Lawless was doing, because he worked Bledsoe himself.

Lawless also made a note to contact the Chief of Detectives, Rinaldi,
that evening.

There was a message waiting for him to call Marcella, the expert on the
Family.

Lawless did, from an isolated phone on the second floor of the
precinct.  As he expected, there wasn't much Marcella could add to what
Lawless already knew.

Marcella had never heard the name Krupsek.  He said that even the
people who ran the places never actually got to meet the owners.  They
were just managers and invariably had no sheets.  They were above
reproach.  They couldn't be harassed by the State Liquor Authority.  In
no way were they wiseguys.

"The guys at the top," Marcella said, "are as insulated from the
employees as big-time drug dealers are from mules."

Still, Marcella promised to send word out to see if he could come up
with anything.

Barbara had called in, and, as Lawless suspected, was embroiled with
bureaucracy-committees and indecisiveness and fear.

Lawless humorlessly recalled what humorist Alexander King had said
about the then-mayor, Robert F. Wagner.

"If he was sitting in a chair in an empty room and someone rolled in a
live grenade, he'd call a committee to find out what to do about it."

The phones in the squad room were going off the hook with calls from
head cases.  There was a rule in homicide: the more heinous the crime,
the more calls and the crazier the people.

Tops for the day was the call from one guy who said that he was Jesus
Christ, nailed to the cross, but had ripped himself free to get to the
phone to make the call to tell them who the "real killer" was-namely,
the superintendent of his building, a seventy-year-old Polish man who
really was the Devil in disguise.

Again, though, all the leads would have to be checked.  Among the
crazies could be a valid lead.

Lots of cops were calling too, of course, not only to volunteer, but to
volunteer information.  Most cops have their snitches, and they were
getting tips galore, much of it probably useless, but given anyway.
Snitches clearly realized the value of furnishing a lead that would
lead to the busting of a two-time cop killer.

Lawless spent the rest of the day sifting through the mountains of
leads that were pouring into the precinct, as well as the reports, or
Fives, done by the guys knocking on the doors.  He subsisted all day on
cigarettes and coffee.

He found the time, during the day, to look up Leo McGurk, the young
cop who had helped him examine the photos of Krupsek's post, and Don
Bradley and Roy Johnson.  They had one thing in common: all had
recently been at the Police Academy.

He questioned them carefully: Just how well did they know Weeks?  Did
they know anyone who would want to harm him'?

None of the young cops, as it turned out, knew Weeks well.  All three
had come out of the same class, but they had never been friendly.

Lawless asked them to do something for him, and they readily
agreed-namely, to view the photos taken at Krupsek's funeral.

The young cops were surprised that any had been taken, and Lawless
explained why: lots of people who killed other people, cops or whoever,
got off by attending the funeral of the victim.

Maybe they knew someone who might have to answer a question as to why
they were there.  Someone connected to Weeks and Krupsek.

They spotted no one.  Lawless thanked them and made a note to show the
pictures to Weeks's partner, Williams, when he returned to the
station.

Bradley and Johnson went home.  McGurk went back to answering calls.

Barbara returned at around 9:00 p.m.-with blood in her eye.

She whispered in Lawless's ear, "God, are they assholes."  Then she
smiled and gave her report.

Metro North officials had agreed to put posters in trains querying
whether anyone had seen something in the park near Fordham between
11:00 and 2:00 the night before.  The PBA had promised a reward, and
this incentive was to be included on the posters.

Barbara told Lawless she had arranged with the Department's printing
section to turn out the posters by the morning.  She would then bring
them to Grand Central.  They also had promised to make announcements on
the train.

"But based on the way these guys act," she said, "I'm going to
personally check every car.  God!"

They stepped out for a bite at a still-good deli on Fordham Road and,
while they both practically inhaled overstuffed sandwiches-Barbara had
not eaten all day either-Lawless gave his report.

"I have another idea," Barbara said, washing the last of her sandwich
down with a swig of diet soda.  "Why don't you show the Krupsek funeral
pictures to those guys at the Wildfire Club?  Maybe they can spot
someone who threatened Krupsek."

"Very good idea.  You game for now?"

"Why not'?"

"I'd also like to take one or two of the guys with me.  Some of these
guys, particularly this kid McGurk and Vallone, have been working real
long hours.  Maybe they'd like to get out, get closer to the action."

"There's room in the car."

As it turned out, Vallone had gone home, and McGurk said that he was
going home too, that he wasn't feeling well.

Over the next two hours, the Rocky-opponent lookalike named Richard
Colt examined the photos with a high-powered magnifying glass.  The
results were negative, though there were a few faces that looked
familiar, and on at least one occasion, Lawless thought Colt had
spotted someone.

Lawless called Rinaldi while Colt was going over the photos and gave
him a report.

"Keep in touch," Rinaldi said.

Then he and Barbara headed home.

"So what do you think, Joe?"  she said, as they drove up the West Side
Highway.

"I don't think Weeks was involved with Krupsek of his own volition, and
if it was Krupsek alone who was killed, then there would be little
doubt that it was somebody, one-on one with him.  I still think it's
that way, but I can't be sure.  I don't know."

"Still, I think our best bet is to keep with our original idea: dig
into Krupsek's life.  You know, where there's smoke, there's fire."

And then Lawless stopped talking.  His last thought about the case as
he pulled into Barbara's block was the statement of Krupsek to the
Dominican woman, Lola: "I'm playing a game I can't lose."

What did that mean?

CHAPTER 41.

The next morning, Sergeant Sam Turner conducted the inspection and
called the roll of the assembled lines of cops in front of him.

There was a new sense of seriousness you could feel coming from the
group.

As it turned out, Turner only had one thing to say in terms of a
survival tip.

"How many officers here are wearing vests?  Raise your hands.  "

Perhaps three-quarters of them raised their hands.

"That's unacceptable," he said.  "Within forty-eight hours I want every
man and woman in this room vested.  Yes," he continued, "I know how
this peril operates, but I can't read his mind for the future, can you?
Wear the vests."

Then he was gone, limping away, and the men and women hit the streets.
More than a few were very concerned about what might await them.  At
least one thought it would be best to dress like one of King Arthur's
Knights.

CHAPTER 42.

George Benton, using the drawing of the peril that Gagliardi had made,
was going door to door.  He had started with Hugh Kerry's neighborhood,
and two days of knocking on doors had gotten no positive responses.  A
bit of a cloud was settling over things.

He felt that he would never be able to find out anything, and he was a
little nervous about going up and down through the buildings of Fort
Siberia, particularly after it got dark.

He felt so stupid and inadequate.  Him, a cop, and he was afraid to go
into hallways.

Many of the people who answered their doors were uncooperative,
particularly so once they learned he was a cop.  Some were nasty.

At one point in the late afternoon, he stopped canvassing the buildings
and went across the street into St.  James Park and sat on a bench.  He
lit a cigarette.  He was practically chain-smoking now.

He looked at the drawing.

It would have been better, he thought, if the peril had shown up
without sunglasses on.  They distorted the face, focused attention on
the glasses and not the face itself.  And without eyes a face wasn't
easily recognizable.  Eyes were the window of the soul.  Dante had said
that.  Dante Alighieri.

He put the picture away and felt a little rush of anxiety.  He should
have taken the Elavil, or maybe even Valium, with him.  Just one to
tide him over.  Sure.  Just one, and maybe a little booze to wash it
down.

"What'll it be, sir?"

"I'll have a morgue cocktail."

No, he couldn't take the medication, or he wouldn't make it.

His eyes flicked to the buildings.  He had a fleeting thought that came
to him factually, without joy or any emotional recognition: he was a
born detective.

Kerry reported seeing a man in the park, watching him.  A man who
looked like he had sunglasses on.  It had to be the peril.

Benton's eyes moved slowly, down the block from Kerry's apartment to
Fordham Road, the direction Kerry had followed back from the bar.  It
was quite a long way.  The peril could have seen Kerry coming, then
quickly got up, exited the park onto Creston only five or six blocks
from Kerry's house, gotten into the building-there was no lock on
the lobby door-and waited for the old man to show up.  He just had to
hope that no one else showed up.

It was a cool day, gray, a hint of snow in the air, but Benton realized
he was sweating a little, which would make him sweat some more.

He dragged deeply on the cigarette.

He fantasized: a quick, pulverizing tightness in his chestpain
radiating outward, his left arm would go numb, he would have difficulty
breathing, and .  the earth again.

He thought of Thomas Wolfe.  That was lifted from him: the earth again.. .

He thought of his own mother and father.  He had loved them, but he had
never been able to touch them, never been able to connect.  Not
really..  It was all so sad.

He took a final deep drag on the cigarette, ditched it on the ground,
and headed back toward the building.

Night comes early in October.

It got dark around 4:30 in the afternoon, and much colder.

Benton continued to canvass the buildings until about 7:30, then headed
home.

One person-a middle-aged Hispanic-had thought she remembered seeing
someone with dark glasses in the park.

"I was out walking my dog," she explained, "and I noticed him walking
in the park.  I wondered why he was wearing sunglasses-the sun wasn't
out, but I didn't think that much of it.  In this neighborhood, you
see lots of weird things.  "

Benton had pressed her for more details, but she couldn't remember
anything.  Just that he was walking along.

Since the murder of PO Byron Weeks, the Five Three had become like
Grand Central Station, so Benton had taken the complaint folders
home.

He made himself a bowl of Campbell's chicken noodle soup, consumed half
of it, then sat down in the living room with the files.

He went through each of the folders: Anna Leibowitz, Hugh Kerry,
Charles Gates.

He took out the notes on which he had written characteristics of their
lives to compare and contrast them, to see if now, with a fresher eye,
he could find something significant.

He could see nothing.  He put the folders away.

Then he turned on the television and sat watching it.  Not that he
liked TV, but he understood its value.  It would keep him company until
he got tired enough to sleep.

CHAPTER 43.

The next day, Benton spoke to a young black woman who, for some reason,
remembered Kerry walking up the block toward his house the day he was
assaulted; she suggested he speak to the kids in the neighborhood.
Apparently it was standard practice for the kids to wait for Kerry and
hit him up for change as he wove his unsteady way home.

Around 2:30, Benton was able to locate one of the kids in St.  James
Park.  His name was Jose.  He was about ten, with brown eyes the size
of quarters.

At first, Jose was scared when he found out Benton was the Man, but
Benton quickly changed all that by giving him a buck.

Jose told him that the old man, as he called him, drank a lot, and that
he was "a good guy."  He often gave Jose and his friends change.

"How long has he been doing this?"  Benton asked.

"Since his old lady die."

"When was this?"

"Three, four months."

"Ever notice anybody following him, watching him?"

Jose shook his head.

"Maybe someone with sunglasses?"

Benton showed Jose the picture.

The kid shook his head.

"Okay," Benton said.  "Thanks a lot for your help.  Ask your friends if
they saw anybody watching the old man.  There's ten bucks in it if you
can tell me something I can use."  Benton gave Jose his card.

Jose nodded and left, first walking, then running.  Now, he would
certainly have some stories told to him, Benton thought, and it would
be up to him to determine which were true and which false.  Most of the
kids in Fort Siberia lived by their wits; telling lies was as natural
to them as breathing.  But you never knew.

Benton finished going through the last of the buildings on Creston at
around noon and stopped for lunch, a Mounds bar and a can of Diet
Pepsi.  As he consumed this repast, he looked over a notebook he had
been keeping of who was and who wasn't in the buildings he had
canvassed, and what apartments were empty, though "empty" was relative
in Fort Siberia: people often squatted in empty buildings, or used them
as shooting galleries.

He would have to check back at night, when they were more likely to be
in.  In fact, he would try Sunday night when, it seemed, 99 percent of
the population watched TV; cops always used that time to attempt a
collar.

But so far he had struck out here.

He drained the last of the Diet Pepsi and swallowed the last bit of the
Mounds bar, and then started walking north toward Charles Gates's
neighborhood.

CHAPTER 44.

Four days later, George Benton was having the same luck canvassing the
area where Charles Gates lived that he had had in Hugh Kerry's
neighborhood.  A couple of people vaguely remembered seeing a man
wearing dark sunglasses, but that was about it.  It led nowhere.

Despite not liking it, Benton had gradually increased the time he spent
going door-to-door, and for four days he had gotten home after 9:00. He
usually stopped canvassing at around 8:00.  After that, people would
get mad at him for disturbing their night and he would get no
cooperation at all.

Still, the work meant going into empty halls, many of them poorly lit,
and having to contend with his own fear of being assaulted.

To that end, he kept the safety strap on his holster unfastened.  And
before going into the really bombed-out buildings, he took his gun out
of his holster and slipped it into his suit jacket pocket where he
could get to it very fast.

A few times during his canvassing, he encountered people near or inside
buildings who eyed him carefully, but they moved on.  He guessed they
had to wonder what a welldressed middle-aged white dude was doing in an
apartment building in Fort Siberia when it was dark out.

He spent another two days canvassing Charles Gates's neighborhood with
no luck.  He was at a dead end, but he had no choice but to keep
going.

CHAPTER 45.

To some people who just met her, it seemed funny that Theresa Franconi
was still called Terry by most people.  To these people, the name Terry
carried the connotation of youth and exuberance for living that could
hardly, such people thought, be expected of a woman who had turned
eighty-one on her last birthday.-Eighty-one.  That was a long time to
walk this earth.

And yet doubters quite naturally started calling her Terryand
forgetting that she was eighty-one-after a while, because she did have
the youth and exuberance of a young woman.  Life was not there to be
served up in a nursing home for Terry Franconi; life was there to go
out through the door and grab with both hands.

Terry's husband had been the same way, but he had died four months
earlier.  Like her, he had had a young spirit in his body, which was
eighty-three when it died.

Throughout their fifty-five years of marriage one thing had gone
understood: that no matter who went first, the other would continue on
as if both were still there, to live with dignity and courage and zest.
To be as happy as possible.  That would be a fitting, living memorial
to the one who went first.

Terry didn't know for the first month after Arthur died-it had been a
coronary-whether or not she would be able to fulfill those golden
promises.  It was one thing to promise to live one's life out the way
they do in the movies; it was quite another to do it.

His death opened a huge chasm in her that she thought would never be
filled.  She just felt like giving up herself, maybe even, God
forbid---and as a Catholic God did forbid it--taking her own life so
she would meet him earlier.

Which, of course, she knew she could never do.  But it hurt her so
badly, so deeply, she knew that she would never get over his death.  He
was her golden boy, even at the end, all stooped over and wasted by the
heart disease, and by God, he could still make her pulse spurt when she
saw him coming down the block.

And then, a simple truth emerged: it was true that she would never get
over him, but it was also true that that didn't mean she had to stop
living.  It didn't mean that she couldn't live with dignity and courage
and zest.

So, by God, she would.

Surprising her supervisor, Akki, she returned to her job as a
"Fotomate" at the Fotomat booth on Fordham Road, where she worked from
9:00 to 2:00 five days a week and every other Saturday.

She started going to Bingo again every Thursday night.  She started to
visit friends again, as Arthur and she had, and had to lecture some of
them severely: it was they who made her feel like a pariah.  She told
them in no uncertain terms to treat her as they always had.  She
wanted, as much as possible, to be treated as if she were a human.

Arthur and Terry Franconi had lived in Fort Siberia, across from Poe
Park on the Grand Concourse.

There was no question in either of their minds about the neighborhood
they lived in.  It could be vicious.  You could get yourself killed
quite easily.  On the other hand, if you looked closely at the almost
unbelievable homicide rate, you'd find, as they did, that most of the
killings were over drugs.  A week did not go by when there wasn't at
least one killing-or maybe seven-eighths of a killing-over drugs
reported in the Bronx Press Review.  So most of the killings were
because of drugs, and neither Arthur nor Terry Franconi dealt cocaine
or heroin or marijuana.

So if they avoided the arena where deaths occurred, they could avoid
being killed.

On the positive side, they loved their apartment-five spacious,
well-lit rooms fronting on the Concourse-which Arthur dutifully painted
every four years, and good solid furniture; and there across the
street was Poe Park, and though vandalism had long ago restricted
access to Poe Cottage, where the tragic poet had lived in his youth,
the park itself was still there, and there were a surprising number of
old friends to hobnob with, and new black and Hispanic seniors to pass
the time of day.  And the sun didn't care if it was Fort Siberia, and
neither did the flowers or the gentle breezes or the powder-blue skies
or fleecy white clouds or the little babies in carriages that Arthur
and she liked to play with.

And neither did the Bronx, because, battered and ruined in so many
terrible ways, it was still the Bronx.  They had been born and raised
in the Bronx, and they had it in their blood as surely as oxygen.  They
were city people, born there, and they would die there.

Of course, people exhorted them to go to the suburbs, but Arthur had a
simple answer: "I don't drive, and they don't have subways."

On the other hand, Terry and Arthur Franconi were not fools.  As old
people, and as well as they got along with the neighborhood kids-who
Arthur thought respected them because they didn't run to the
suburbs-they knew that there were predators out there who viewed them
in only one way: as prey.

They didn't go out at night, they did not go out alone, their apartment
was alarmed, and they had a good metal door and an easy-to-open yet
impenetrable guard on the fire escape window.  Each carried a whistle
they could blow in the event of attack.  They kept emergency numbers
nearby.  It was a price to pay, but it was worth it.

Terry's anxiety increased more than a notch about being prey after
Arthur died.  She was alone, but after a while she ventured out,
carefully picking her spots, and after two months she was pretty much
back to where she had been before he died.

Still, she was chilled, as were many other older people who made it
topic number one on the benches of Poe Park, the day they first saw the
posters that George Benton had put around the area.

Terry Franconi's first contact with the danger was the day after Benton
put the posters up.  She was on her way to work when she saw a gust of
wind blow it off the telephone pole it was on.

She picked it up and held it in her hands.  It described just how the
man in the drawing worked, and one thing was clear: old people in the
area were in much more danger than before.

What Terry found particularly disconcerting was the man's eyes-or their
absence.  Just sunglasses.  These squarish black circles, though she
knew they were only sunglasses, seemed for a moment like eyes: eyes of
a monster.

Very carefully, she pressed the poster back onto the pole with a number
of thumbtacks.  And she vowed to be extra careful.

She was.  Before she would go into her apartment building, she would
wait outside for someone she knew to show up, like one of the kids who
lived in the house, and then go in wiith him and ask him to wait in the
hall until she was in her apartment.

Normally, she did not go out at night, except for a relatively rare
dinner at a friend's house or to Bingo.

A week and a half after she first became aware of the man in the
sunglasses, she was going to Bingo as usual.

She had arranged, as usual, to be driven both ways.  First to Our Lady
of Refuge Church, where the Bingo was played, then back to her house.
The driver was a fellow "Fotomate," a young woman who also usually
played Bingo at the church.

Early that afternoon, the friend, a woman named Alice Oliver, told her
that she couldn't make it.  She wasn't feeling that well.

"That's all right, darling," Terry said.  "I'll find a way to get there
and back."

Alice was sure she would.

It was a pleasant enough day, so Terry decided to walk.  She could go
across Poe Park-there would be people sitting on the benches-down 194th
and then up Briggs Avenue to the church, which was on the corner of
196th opposite P.S. 46.  And on the way back, she would follow the same
security procedures as during the day: she would wait for someone to
show up to accompany her into the house.

She had a few maladies, but nothing, she felt, that should keep her
from making the walk.  At eighty-one, she had the energy, she playfully
thought, of a seventy-year-old.

If there was any danger at all, it would be during the long walk down
Briggs, up 194th, and then across the park.  Bingo let out at 11:00. It
was late October, and there wouldn't be many people out.

Still, she knew exactly what she would do if someone tried to rob her:
she would hand over the pocketbook.  She and Arthur had long ago
decided that your money was not worth your life.

As it turned out, Terry did well at Bingo, winning eighty dollars.  It
was scheduled to go on to 12:00, but she left at around 10:30.  She had
played forty games, more than enough, and she always tried to get into
bed before 11:00.

She was a little nervous on the way home just because there were some
people on the streets.  She didn't know anyone near the area of the
church-and they didn't know her.

She was glad when she finally got to Poe Park.  There were people
sitting on some of the benches, and she could see her apartment
building.  There was traffic on the Concourse.  She started to feel
safe.  All she would have to do was wait for someone to accompany her
into the building.

At one point, halfway across the park, by the old covered bandstand
where she and Arthur used to hear all kinds of bands, she turned
abruptly and saw that there was someone walking toward her.  She could
see fairly well.  It was a man dressed in dark clothes.

It didn't really alarm her, though.  He didn't have sunglasses on.

For an old person, even one in fairly good condition, as Terry Franconi
was, crossing the Grand Concourse is not something to be taken lightly.
It's six lanes wide, and traffic moves north and south at high speed.
Lights mean nothing to some drivers, and a couple of senior citizens
had been killed trying to make it from one side to the other.

Fortunately, the lanes are divided by islands.  Terry just had to cross
one lane, stand on the divider, wait for the light to change, cross
four more lanes, stand on the other divider, and then cross one more
lane to safety.

She watched the lights and the cars as she crossed, and so preoccupied
was she that until she was on the last divider, she didn't notice the
man.  It was the same man who had been following her.  He was just
enough within the orbit of a streetlight for her to see him, and her
heart dropped.  He was wearing dark sunglasses.  "Mother of God," she
said softly.  She felt like crying.  She had to think.

She remembered: armed and considered very dangerous, the poster had
said.

She could not go into the building, even with someone; he might hurt
both of them, assuming someone showed up.  He might just force her
inside.

Please God, she thought.

The light changed.  She glanced one way, then the other, praying to see
a cop or a cop car.  All she saw was the man in the sunglasses starting
to walk toward her.

There was no question in her mind: this was the criminal.  She had to
save herself.  Please.  Please.

Halfway up the block, some kids were playing.  She did not want him to
know she knew who he was.  Her thoughts were jumbled.

She was on the sidewalk.

She paused, looking into her pocketbook as if for a key.

Maybe someone would come along.  Maybe.

He was coming closer.

Instinctively, she moved away, not even looking at him, and then she
saw it.  It was a chance, but once he realized what she was doing, he
might attack her on the street.

She headed down the block, maybe fifty yards to go.  On the other
side of the street, on the corner, was the Poe Cozy Nook, a below
street-level bar that had been there as long as she had lived there.
Its pink neon sign flickered.  It was not what it once was.  For Terry
Franconi, it could be salvation.

She did not wait for a light.  Feeling a crawling sensation in her
back, she went across, and then started down the steps.

Just before she went, she saw his reflection in the glass, motionless,
his black monster eyes watching her, ten yards away.

She opened the door.

The place was smoky, the bar lined with customers.  Some kind of
Spanish music was coming from a jukebox.

She went down the stairs and was eyed curiously.

The barmaid, a voluptuous black woman, came up.  Every eye in the place
seemed to be on her.

Terry grasped the edge of the bar.

"What can I get you, Momma?"  the barmaid said, her eyes smiling.

Terry swallowed.  "The police-and a glass of water, please.  "

CHAPTER 46.

George Benton had mixed feelings about the near-assault on Theresa
Franconi, which he had been notified of within an hour after its
occurrence.

On the one hand, he felt terrible.  The peril was on the loose and he,
Benton, was no closer to him than when he had been given the case by
Lawless.  He was failing at this, just like everything else.

On the other hand, he was happy.  The woman was alive, and he had heard
enough from the station detective who had talked to her to know that it
was because she recognized the peril that Gagliardi had drawn-at
Benton's request.  She had told the cop that she knew the assaulter was
"the man in the poster, the one with the dark sunglasses."

There was one other feeling.  A chilling one.  Since the peril hadn't
succeeded with this old lady, he would he going after someone else very
soon, assuming you based your theory of his activities, as Benton did,
not on a need for money but on a need to deliver rage.

It was up to Benton to stop him, but fast.  He was fighting against the
clock.

The thought was awesome.

"She's a tough old lady," the patrolman had told Benton over the phone.
"No hospital, no doctor, no nothing.  She just wants to go back to her
house."  That's where she was right now.

Benton had called ahead and cleared coming, but it was after midnight
by the time he stood in front of Theresa Franconi's door.  He hoped she
wasn't asleep, or hadn't changed her mind about his coming.

He rang the bell.  A few seconds later, a voice called from behind the
door, "Who is it?"

"Detective Benton," he said.  "We talked on the phone."

The door opened, the chain still on.  He showed his shield.

Theresa Franconi closed the door, released the chain, and opened it
again.

"Come in, please," she said.

Benton made her quickly.  She had to weigh all of 100 pounds and be
about five feet tall at the most.  She had makeup on, and her hair was
done up.  Any idea that she might not see him evaporated.  It was
really hard to believe that this little old lady had just recently-very
recently-escaped a vicious peril.

"It's good of you to see me," Benton said.

"Got to," Theresa Franconi said.  "Got to stop this guy, right?"

"Right," Benton said, smiling a little.  It was hard not to be caught
up in the woman's enthusiasm.

She led him into a small dining area.  It contained a fine old polished
table and chairs and, in the old manner, a tastefully upholstered
couch.

"Would you like something to drink?"  she said.

"No, I'm fine," Benton said.  "How are you?"

"I'm okay.  But if I suddenly collapse, don't be surprised."

For just a millisecond, Benton thought she was serious, but then he saw
the twinkle in her eyes.  He smiled, and she smiled with him.

"Can you tell me exactly what happened?"

"Yes," she said.  "Please sit down."

They sat down on the couch and Benton carefully took her through the
events of the night.  She remembered everything, and he was amazed at
her resiliency.  The experience would have put most people, including
himself, on heavy medication.

When she was finished, there was no doubt in Benson's mind that he was
dealing with the same peril that had assaulted Kerry, Gates, and
Leibowitz, and, quite probably, killed Leibowitz.

As Benton sat on the couch, his suit jacket opened a bit, he noticed
Theresa Franconi looking at his chest.

"You know," she said, "I see cigarettes in your pocket.  If you want
to smoke, you can."

"It won't bother you?"

"Not at all."

The old lady went out of the room and a minute later came back with an
ashtray.  She set it on the arm of the couch near Benton.  Feeling
guilty, he lit a cigarette.  But she did not watch him carefully.  He
had the feeling that he was in the presence of someone who was very un
judgmental  How rare in anyone, particularly an old person, he
thought.

Finding himself more relaxed, he focused better.

"Did you," he said, "notice anyone following you over the last few days
or weeks?"

"Well, I .. ."  Theresa paused, then went on.  "No, not really.  "

"What do you mean, "not really'?"

"My husband died not too long ago, and I haven't been out of the house
too much.  But over the last couple of months I always got the feeling
I was being watched.  I don't know why.  I just did."

"Never noticed anything, anyone?"

"No.  Just that feeling."

"Do you know anyone named Hugh Kerry?"

Terry shook her head.

"How about Charles Gates or Anna Leibowitz?"

"No.  "

Benton took a deep drag on the cigarette.  There was something there,
he thought, but he wasn't seeing it.

In his mind, he scanned the list of characteristics of the victims.
Theresa Franconi fit perfectly.

"Can I ask you a personal question?"  he said.

"Go ahead."

"Do you have much money?"

"I'm comfortable."

"Where do you keep it?"

"In the bank."

"None at home?"

"A couple of hundred dollars is all."

Benton took another deep drag.  Something was there.  Something.  He
had to unlock it.

"Did you start living any differently after your husband died?  I
mean, new friends, new places?"

"Quite the opposite.  I went into a shell.  I didn't go out for quite a
while.  I think the only visitor I had during the first two months, the
only human being I saw other than a local boy who delivered some
groceries, was a priest I know and the man who came by with the
insurance check."

"The insurance check?"

"Yes, after Arthur died, a man came out with the check for his
insurance."

"What did you do with the check, put it in the bank?"

"Yes.  As soon as I got out again.  I was really bowled over by
Arthur's passing."

"Did you tell anyone about it?"

"The check?"

"Yes.  "

Benton put out the cigarette in the ashtray.  He was tempted to light a
new one but he resisted.

"Do you have their names?"

"Yes.  "

"I'd like to have them."

Maybe, Benton thought, one of her "friends" knew the other three
victims.

"You want to take them now?  I might have to think about it.  "

"Maybe I could come back tomorrow," Benton said.

He stopped.  There was another possibility.

"What's the name of the insurance company?"

"The insurance company is CNA, but my agent is Seaman and Eisemann."

"Where are they?"

"Hicksville, Long Island."

"That's pretty far out."

"They used to be in the Bronx, but they moved after they were robbed
quite a few times.  But Arthur and I always found them to be a very
good company, so we stayed with them."

Benton read a very slight change in Theresa Franconi's face.  Very
subtle, but there.  An expression of disgust, of annoyance.

"What's wrong?"

"You're sharp," she said, smiling.  "I guess you picked up on my
memory of the man who delivered the check.  The claims manager.  A
nasty man.  He tried to sell me more insurance before he gave me the
check.  He gave me the feeling that if I didn't buy more insurance I
wouldn't get the check.  I have enough.  I have my two daughters-they
live out west-they'll be well provided for.  I almost called the
company to complain."

Benton looked at her.  "Do you have a phone?"

She nodded.

"Could I use it to make a local call?"

"You can call long distance if you want."

She led him into the kitchen, a white-walled room, which like the other
rooms was very clean.

He used the wall phone to dial the number of Hugh Kerry.

It rang ten times.  The old man was going to be pissed off at him,
calling at this time of night.

"Yah."  The voice was heavy, phlegmy, slightly inebriated, the brogue
thicker than ever.

"Mr.  Kerry, Detective Benton.  I'm very sorry to call you so late, but
I have a question I wish you'd answer."

"Yah."

"You have insurance, right?"Yup.  ,

"What's the name of your agent?"

"Seaman and Eisemann," he said, pronouncing the last word differently
than Theresa Franconi.

Benton hardly noticed.  For a moment, he was dead speechless.  His
heart pounded.  "In Hicksville?"

"Yah.  "

"You had insurance on your wife, right?"

"Yeah.  Not enough, as it turned out.  That's what I was told by the
guy who came by with the check."

"Who was that?"

"I don't remember his name."

"Hold on one second, will you, Mr.  Kerry?"

Benton held his hand over the mouthpiece.  He called to Mrs.  Franconi,
who had gone back into the sitting room after showing Benton the
phone.

"Excuse me, Mrs.  Franconi, do you remember the name of the man from
the insurance company?"

"Paul Richardson," the old lady said.

Benton went back on the phone.  "Richardson?"

"Yeah, that's it.  He told me that I didn't have enough insurance on my
life, just like my wife didn't.  He gave me a hard time with the check,
too.  I had to call a few times to get it.  I almost told him to go to
hell."

"Are you free tomorrow morning?  I'd like to see you."

"Yeah, come any time."

"I'm sorry again for calling you this late."

"You're doing your job.  If it helps catch that little spic bastard,
that's okay with me."

Benton hung up.  He went back into the sitting room.  He was totally
focused.

"Could I use the phone again?"

Benton went back inside and dialed the next number.  It rang only twice
before a woman answered.

"Yes," she said.  She sounded alarmed.

"Is Mr.  Gates there?"

"Who is this?"

"Just tell him Detective Benton."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing.  It's the officer investigating the assault on Mr.  Gates.
"

"All right."

She put down the phone and Benton could hear her walking away, then the
disoriented sound of someone coming back.

"Yes.  This is Charles Gates."

"Nothing to worry about, Mr.  Gates," Benton said.  "I was just
wondering if you could answer a couple of questions for me."

"All right."

"Did you have insurance on your wife's life?"

"Yes.  "

"With who'?"  Benton said.  He swallowed.

"Seaman and Eisemann," Gates said.

Benton's spirits soared.  The link.  The connection.  It was there.  He
had found it.  For sure.

"How long?"

"Years.  They moved from the Bronx."  "Have any problem getting the
insurance money?"  There was a pause.

"As a matter of fact, I did.  The man I dealt with wasn't very
helpful."

"Who was that?"

Gates sounded tentative.

"Richard Paul?"

"How about Paul Richardson?"

"Yes, that's it.  Paul Richardson."

"How did he give you a hard time?"

"I had understood that you were supposed to get the insurance soon
after the passing of .. . anyway, it was a few weeks before I got it. I
called him a lot.  He never returned my calls.  And when he did, he
told me I wasn't the only one who had suffered the loss of a loved one.
Plus he kept telling me that the hundred thousand I had on my life in
my children's name wasn't being fair to them.  That there should be
more.  I found it an upsetting experience."

"Could I come out and talk with you a little more tomorrow?"

Gates paused.  Benton thought: he was putting it behind him, now here
it was again.

"All right."

Benton said he'd call in the morning.  He went back into the sitting
room.

"Can you answer a few more questions?"

"I hope so."

"This man, Richardson, what does he look like?"

Theresa hesitated.  Then: "A clerk.  Bald, small, a kind of washed-out
face."

"Not Spanish in any way."

Theresa picked up on it right away.

"Oh, I see what you think," she said.  "No, the man who followed me
looked nothing like Mr.  Richardson.  They might be close to the same
height, but that was about it.  Richardson is white, small, and thin.
The man with the sunglasses is Spanish, dark, and stocky in
comparison."

"I see," Benton said, and thought: maybe he was wearing a disguise. Or
maybe there was someone else in on it.  Richardson planned it, the
other guy did it.  Not one peril.  Two.

Or none.  He was theorizing, speculating, creating scenarios without
hard evidence.  All he had now was a nasty claims guy who happened to
know two of the victims and the one potential victim.

Yes, but that was a lot.  Coincidence had its bounds.

"Did you notice," Benton said, "whether he was doing anything strange
while he was here.  Did he ask to go to the bathroom, for example?"

"No.  "You were with him all the time?"

Theresa Franconi nodded her head.

For the moment, Benton had nothing else.

"You going to be all right?"  he said.

"Yeah," the old lady said, "but I know one thing for sure.  "

"What's that?"

"I'm not going to walk home from Bingo anymore."

She smiled, her eyes twinkling.

Benton looked at her.  He stuck a cigarette in his mouth.  He wished he
was just a little like her.

CHAPTER 47.

The next morning Benton saw Kerry at about 9:00, then traveled out to
Queens and saw Charles Gates at around 10:30.

Both stated one thing for sure, in different ways: the man who attacked
each of them was definitely Spanish.

"He wasn't white," Kerry said.  "He was a spic.  He talked like a spic,
he looked like a spic, and he smelled like a spic."

And Gates: "He was Spanish.  I never saw the man before in my life."

Both admitted, however, that they had not seen Richardson for months,
and when they had seen him it was only briefly, when both were not in
the best emotional shape to notice details.

Which is one thing, Benton thought, that the peril, if it was
Richardson, might count on.

Neither man could remember whether or not they were away from
Richardson while he came to their homes.

"I want to find out if he cased it.  You know."

But they couldn't remember.

Benton also checked on Anna Leibowitz.  Through her doctor, Dr.  Cohen,
he was able to locate one of her daughters, who had been a benificiary
of her policy.

The agent: Seaman and Eisemann, Hicksville, Long Island.

CHAPTER 48.

Lawless was on the street with Barbara when Piccolo and Edmunton came
back to book the woman and Candy.  They left a note for him.  They also
told Fletcher, the CO's aide, about the development, since Bledsoe
wasn't available.

They also told Maria Perez, and she asked them, after a while, what
they thought about the fate of Luis.

"I'll tell you straight out," Piccolo said.  "I think he's alive.  They
wouldn't go through all this .. . er, crap to do him harm."

Maria's hope was renewed, and this time she cried.

Piccolo believed what he had told her.  But he did not tell her the
other possibilities that also existed of why they had snatched the
kid.

The most important consideration now was how to take down the scum
fucking lawyer, Strauss.

They knew they had to be careful.  As a group, lawyers were careful,
and when they made a move on Strauss, they had to have everything in
order.  Not only to take him down, but also to recover the Perez kid.
It was worth a lot of careful thought, but the sooner they did it, the
better.  There was no telling, ultimately, just what was happening to
the kid.

Finally they hit on something, and that night Piccolo was able to get
through to Lawless, up to his neck in homicide, to listen and give his
okay.

"You know the story, Frank," Lawless had said.  "Whatever you do, when
you make the collar, make it for the Appellate Court."

It was one of Lawless's favorite sayings, because he always wanted to
be sure that any arrest made was of such quality that it could survive
appeals.  Otherwise, it was simply no good.

CHAPTER 49.

The next morning at around 10:00, Piccolo parked his sleek black Trans
Am a few blocks from the "Law Offices" of Elks Strauss, P.C. The
offices were actually a converted grocery store, its plate glass
windows covered with big painted signs in English and Spanish: LOW-COST
AUTO INSURANCE, MALPRACTICE OUR SPECIALTY, LIFE INSURANCE, TRAVEL.  The
only thing missing was the going-out-of-business sign.

Piccolo knew just what kind of lawyer Strauss was.  He preyed on the
poor, the unlettered, the spies and niggers.  He could build a fucking
malpractice case out of an ingrown toenail.  Lawyers like him had
greedy doctors, greedy insurance people; it was all a conspiracy of
maggots fucking one another and the public.  Piccolo-and Edmunton-saw
lawyers as a group as greedier than Mexicans pulling the gold from
people's teeth after an airliner crash, but these storefront scum
fuckers were the worst of the worst.

Piccolo smiled, and tentatively entered.

The offices were strictly functional, a tile floor and two metal desks
against a floor-to-ceiling partition wall that separated front from
back.  A fat cunt sat behind one of the desks.

"May I help you?"  she said.

"Oh, yeah," Piccolo said, marveling at the texture of her old skin,
which looked like it had come off the neck of an elephant.  "I wanted
to speak to the lawyer."

"In reference to what?"

Piccolo thought: in reference to leaving a hole where his scrotum was,
but instead he said, "An operation on my old lady's toe."

"What's the problem?"

"The doctor cut off the wrong toe."

She blinked, said no more, punched the intercom, turned and whispered
something into the receiver so Piccolo couldn't hear, then hung up.

"Mr.  Strauss will be with you right away."

A moment later, the door to the partition wall opened and a big fat guy
wearing a rumpled pinstripe suit came out.  He was wearing glasses and
he had one in turned eye.  He was one ugly-looking fucker.

"Can I help you?"

"Yes," Piccolo said.

"Come in, please."  Strauss held the door open, and Piccolo passed
inside.

The rear offices were just about the same as the front.  Small wonder.
They were in the business of ripping off money, not designing
offices.

Strauss closed the door behind him.  He gestured to a seat by the
single desk.

"Please sit, Mr.  .. .."

"Puelo.  Frank Puelo."

By the time he sat down, Piccolo had read the office.  There was a
shifter in the corner, and one other door, protected by a Fox lock,
leading to a rear yard.  There was a bank of unlocked file cabinets
against one wall.

"What's the problem?"  Strauss said.  "My old lady, she went to the
hospital to gee part of her big toe cut off-she got diabetes -and they
cut off the wrong toe.  "

Piccolo could almost smell the money lust coming off Strauss.

"What hospital?"

"Montefiore.  "

Strauss nodded and went into his right-hand drawer.  He took out a
yellow legal pad.  "I'd like to ask you some questions.  "

"Oh," Piccolo said, "I don't have time right now.  I just wanted to see
if someone would handle the case."

Strauss looked like he had just smelled a rhino fart.  "You should make
a statement soon."

"I will, but not now," Piccolo said.

"When can you come in?"

"Tomorrow.  Tomorrow morning, same time."  Piccolo stood up.

"Please, wait.  Before you go," Strauss said, "I just wanted to tell
you that this case will cost you absolutely nothing.  It's all on a
contingency basis."

"Oh," Piccolo said, "that's good."

Then, Piccolo was through the partition door, boldly striding for the
front door.  He felt their eyes on his back.

At the door, he turned and waved.  Strauss was standing in his doorway;
leather-skin had stood up.  Both thought they were looking at three
million dollars.

Piccolo walked two blocks, then turned and walked east to his Trans
Am.

Edmunton was sitting in the passenger seat.

Piccolo got in and turned the key.  "The bad news," he said, "is that
it's a Fox lock.  The good news is that it's not alarmed.  "

CHAPTER 50.

At around 4:00 A.M. after the day they had seen Ellis Strauss, Piccolo
and Edmunton pulled into a space around the block from Strauss's
offices.  Shortly after dark, they had driven around the area scouting
it out.

The street where they parked was deserted, a residential area lined on
both sides with apartment buildings very much the worse for wear, but
it still didn't have the bombed-out flavor of Fort Siberia.

They got out of the car, Piccolo carrying an overnight bag, and
immediately made their way into an alley.  This led to a relatively
narrow courtyard between apartment buildings.  At the end of the
courtyard was another yard, this one raised only a few feet above the
first.  They climbed into the yard, then stepped over a short fence to
the backyard of the buildings.

They went to the rear door of Strauss's office.

Piccolo took a wire hanger from the bag, bent it into a loop.

He was hoping it would work.  The Fox lock was one of the toughest to
beat, and if he didn't beat it, he had another goody in the bag that
would do the job, a device called a slapjack that would rip the
cylinder from the door with the greatest of ease.  But he didn't want
Strauss to know he had been tossed.

He got down on his haunches and slipped the wire under the door.  He
manipulated it and within a minute heard the bar on the lock slide.

"Still got my touch," he said softly to Edmunton.

They stepped inside, closing and locking the door behind them.

The partition wall allowed no light into the back area, which meant it
would allow no light out.  They took a couple of flashlights from the
bag and flicked them on.

They went over to the cabinets and carefully started to remove and look
through the folders, scouring them for references to the name Wanda, or
any reference to the Perez kid, or any reference to kids.

Two hours later, Piccolo and Edmunton had a good idea how Ellis Strauss
made his money: through bill-collections, and overpriced auto
insurance.

But they had no idea who Wanda was, or where she was from, or anything
about her.  Or a hint of where the kid was.

Piccolo had worked up a slight sweat; Edmunton was drenched.

They closed the files and exited the building.  Just before they left,
Piccolo had an urge that lots of burglars had, to shit somewhere in the
office, like on top of Strauss's desk, then maybe prop his name in
it.

But he resisted it.

Though it was only a few degrees cooler than when they had entered the
building, it seemed much cooler outside.  They went back to the
apartment.

At the apartment, Piccolo fed his pets.  His parrot, Bird, was in fine
form-he kept croaking scum fucker a word Piccolo occasionally used-and
at another time, Piccolo would have gotten a kick out of it. But not
tonight.  Both he and Edmunton realized, as they sat at the kitchen
table sipping iced tea, that they had put a lot of money on the trip to
Strauss's office turning up a link to Wanda.

But there was none, and now, basically, they were back to scratch.
Piccolo, of course, always had his ultimate way of getting results-like
maybe putting a telephone book on Strauss's abdomen and then whacking
the book with a length of black iron pipe, or some such-but that could
be risky, particularly with a lawyer.  They both wanted to get the baby
back, but they also wanted to see Strauss go away, and getting him into
the can could be more difficult if they had to pry things out of him.

"On the other fucking hand," Piccolo said to Edmunton, "we may be
against the clock.  We really can't be sure what they're doing with
this kid."

"That's right.  Maybe we should just go in and squeeze his balls.  "

"What other way do we have?"

"We could try the motel where this Wanda stayed," Edmunton said.

"Ah, she probably wouldn't be under her own name."

"I know, but maybe we can connect it anyway."

"All right, Eddie," Piccolo said.  "Let's give it a whack."

Twenty minutes later, they were leaving the house, on their way to
Jersey.

Edmunton felt refreshed, having showered, and Piccolo felt a renewed
energy.  Maybe they would get nothing, but there was always a chance.

And both men had a good laugh just before they left.  Bird wished them
goodbye in true Piccolo fashion.

"Scumfuckers," he croaked as they went out the door.  "Motherfucking
scum fuckers

CHAPTER 51.

Someone once said that the eastern section of New Jersey, where you
enter it via the Jersey Turnpike, looked like the back of an old
radio.

It was where the gas and oil refineries and God-knew-what else kind of
factories were located, a mass of squat cylindrical tanks and steel
structures and wire.

The image is accurate, except that there are important differences
between the area and the back of a radio.  A radio doesn't emit noxious
fumes that make the eyes water or cause seventeen' kinds of sarcoma,
nor does it contain waterways and ponds that are unnatural colors like
lime green and mandingo orange.

Where there aren't factories and fumes, there are miles of empty fields
and swamps, Mafia bone orchards.

In sum, it is not a drive that will lift your spirits, unless, as one
psychologist once put it, "You have a deep-seated urge to be
depressed."

Piccolo and Edmonton were driving along the turnpike about 6:00 A.m.
They were quiet, which was about the extent to which Piccolo ever got
depressed.  To him, it was all part of the wall that he had to go over
or through, and Edmonton took his lead from Piccolo.  They were
stronger than the fucking wall.

The Jetport Motel was not too far from Newark Airport, a vast place
that runs adjacent to the turnpike and handles thousands of flights a
day.

"A very fucking convenient place, right, Eddie?"  Piccolo said.  "Just
take the kid and take a fucking hike to wherever."

"Believe it."

The motel was one of a cluster of motels side by side on a broad road
off the turnpike.  It was a double-decked U-shaped affair with parking
inside the U. The lot was about half filled.  Piccolo pulled his Trans
Am in and parked a few spaces down from the office.

They had driven past the office and were able to see into it.  There
was an old guy at the counter.

They went inside.  The old guy, who was reading a paper, looked up.

"Can I help you?"  he said.

Piccolo flashed his badge, as did Edmunton.

"We're with the Jersey City police," Piccolo said, quickly returning
his wallet to his pocket, as did Edmunton, "and we're looking for
someone who calls herself Wanda, who stayed here last week.  Monday."

"Wanda"" he said.  "That's all you know?"

Piccolo nodded.

The old man checked.  It took a while.

"Yes," he said.  "We had someone name of Wanda.  Wanda Johnson.  Room
210."

"You got a forwarding address on her?"  Piccolo asked.

"No.  "

"How did she pay?"  Edmunton asked.

"Cash.  She paid cash."

"How long was she here?"

"From nine twenty-seven to ten one."

"So she checked out on the First."

"What about calls?"  said Piccolo.  "Did she make any?"

"I don't know.  I think you'd do better if you spoke to the day man,
Jim."

"When does he come in?"  Piccolo asked.

"Seven.  He might know more than me."

They had no choice but to wait.

Jim turned out to be a college-age guy.  He looked like a sharp kid.

They sat on a couch in the reception area and talked.

"I remember her," Jim said.  "A blonde.  Bleached blonde.  She looked
like a Playboy bunny."

"Do you know where she's from?"  Piccolo asked.  "Not really," Jim
said. "You don't get to know most people, though sometimes you get to
know a few a little bit, but she always stayed in her room.  As I
remember, she went out only one night."  Piccolo looked at him.  He had
a young guy's interests.

"Did she get any calls while she was here?"  Edmunton asked.

"I don't know," Jim said.  "Maybe, but lots of calls come through
here."

"Did she make any calls?"  Piccolo asked.

"I don't know.  We can check.  I don't know.  She was just very
quiet."

"No visitors?"

"Not that I saw."

"The day she left," Edmunton said, "did you see how she left?  A cab,
limo, bus?"

"Didn't see.  People usually go directly to the airport-and that's
usually why they stay here-by cab.  But we have a lot of different cab
companies coming here.  Maybe you could find the driver."

Jim looked at Piccolo.  Piccolo thought that TV made it all seem so
easy.  A real hunt was quite fucking different.

"Could you check to see if she made any calls?"

Piccolo and Edmunton followed Jim into an office.

"I'll be right with you, Raymond."

The old man nodded.

Jim took out a sheaf of bills and leafed through them.  It took a long
time.

"Yes," he said finally, "she made one call on the last day she was
here."

"What's the number?"  Piccolo said.  "213 456-9420."

"California," Edmunton said.  "Probably Los Angeles."

"Do you have the time of the call?"

"Yeah," Jim said.  "She made it at one-eleven."

"And she checked out, you said, before two," Piccolo said.

"That's right.  I remember her paying her bill in cash."

Piccolo thought a moment.

The Perez kid was snatched at about 9:30.  So she makes a call to say
it went down.  And then the cunt is gone.

Maybe.  Maybe it wasn't even the right broad.  But it sounded like
her.

Piccolo gave the kid Jim ten bucks for his trouble.  Then, to Edmunton:
"Let's get back to the Bronx.  I think we should call this number and
see who it is at the other end.  But we got more than three hours to
wait before it's nine."

Piccolo dialed the California number, which he had meanwhile confirmed
was Los Angeles, at 9:02.

"Lawrence, Kerman, and Strauss," came the chirpy greeting.

Strauss, Piccolo thought.  Strauss.

"Oh, yes.  Is Miss Jacobsen in?"

There was a pause, the only sound like that of surf on the sea.

"We have no one here by that name, sir."

"You don't?"  Piccolo said.  "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Isn't this the firm of Lowry and Kenilworth, Architects?"

"No, sir.  This is the law firm of Lawrence, Kerman, and Strauss.  "

"Oh.  Sorry."  Piccolo hung up.

Edmunton, who had been listening on an extension phone in one of the
bedrooms, came in.

"I'll bet," he said, "that our Mr.  Strauss here is related to the one
there.  "

"I wouldn't take it," Piccolo said.

"What do you want to do?"

"I've always wanted to see Hollywood," Piccolo said.

At three the next morning, after killing a three hour delay in the
airport bar, Edmunton and Piccolo were on a 747, banking up over
Kennedy Airport, heading west.  Piccolo had the window seat.  He looked
down.

As the plane lifted, he saw the city spread wide beneath, all the
boroughs, or good hunks of them, millions of lights.

The plane dipped, and he had a view of the Bronx.  He thought about
Maria Perez.

CHAPTER 52.

Piccolo and Edmunton landed at Los Angeles International Airport at
around 6:30 California time.  The weather was raw, cloudy, and very
cool.  Each man carried a single suitcase, and neither had any weapons
with him, because they couldn't get through the anti-terrorist bugs
with them on.  It was better to go in, as Piccolo said, carte blanche;
he didn't want anyone at the station to know they were going to
California.

Once they got their bags, Piccolo went immediately to a bank of phones
and dialed a number.  Edmunton stood by.

He was referred to three different people before he was connected to
his party, a sergeant with the LAPD named Bo Colleran.

"Hey, Colleran, Piccolo."

"Frank, where are you?"

"At the airport."

"On assignment?"

"Yeah.  "

"Where are you staying?"

"I figured to go into downtown."

"Hey, fuck that, man.  You stay with me.  I got a nice place on
Wilshire in West LA."

"What about your wife.  Sue, right?"

"No, Sue is history.  It was Pat.  She's history too."

"How many fucking wives have you had?"

"Six."  "You're like Tommy Manville."

"I know, and every time I say no more.  I'm never able to keep up with
it."

"That's your fucking trouble," Piccolo said.  "You're never able to
keep it down."

Colleran laughed.  He had a deep, throaty, big-man laugh, the laugh of
a smoker.  Small wonder.  He weighed 250, was five-eight, built like a
road sweeper-wide and low to the ground-and inhaled cigars, a practice
that had produced a simple proclamation from his second wife: Stop it
or I'll divorce you.  They divorced.

"So why don't you stay there, and I'll come by and pick you up."

"Just give me the address and we'll take a cab."

"Okay.  Hey, Frank, it's going to be great seeing you.  What's it
been-four years?  You changed much?"

"I grew a fucking foot and gained a hundred pounds."

Colleran's gutter al laugh boomed over the phone so loud that a
passerby some five yards away turned his head.

"Now," Colleran said, half choking, "you'll really be dangerous.  "

They got in a cab driven by some Mexican guy and gave him the address
in West LA.

"We don't know LA," Piccolo said, "but don't take us on a grand tour.
If I find out you did, I'll come back for you."

Piccolo had been in the cab ten seconds when he said that.  The
Mexican's black eyes regarded him in the rearview mirror.  He looked
like he wanted to say something.  He decided against it.

On the way, Piccolo filled Edmunton in a little more on Bo Colleran,
whom he had first mentioned on the flight out as a possible source of
help.

"Bo stands for Boris," Piccolo said.  "But if you call him Boris, you
better know rapid-fire combat shooting."

"Where'd you first know him from?"  Edmunton asked.

"Nam.  We were in the same platoon for a while.  A very brave soldier.
He got the Silver Star, and the only reason he didn't get the big medal
was because they thought he had a couple of screws loose.  They figured
if he fucking flipped out down the road, the fact that he was a Medal
of Honor winner might come out and make everyone look bad."

"What'd he win the star for?"

"No one really knows too well.  Except there was a firefight he was in
and everybody retreated.  I asked him why he got the medal and all he
ever said was, "I didn't leave."  " "A man of few words."

"Oh, he can talk, particularly when he gets fucking soused.  He talks
about women.  That's all he ever talks about.  Women and kids.  He
wants so bad to make it work, but no one can live with him.

"I got to really know him during the fucking tunnel work.  The gooks,
they had these long narrow caves and hid in them.  They used to ask for
volunteers, what they called tunnel rats.  What they wanted you to do
was crawl into the tunnel, head first, like a worm, with a flashlight
and a forty-five, find the gooks in the darkness, shoot 'em, and drag
'em out.  It was the most intense work duty I ever did.  Colleran only
did it for a year, then he got too heavy.  He used to be half the
weight he is now."

"You got two Silver Stars, right?"  Edmunton asked.

"Yeah, but I deserved three.  I got a bronze.  Proudest moments of my
life when I got them.  That, and the day I graduated from the Academy.
Nothing like it."

"I was proud that day too.  A great day."  He paused.

"Yeah.  It was," Piccolo said.  "I wonder how that little Perez broad
is doing.  Must be tough without the kid."

"Yeah," Edmunton said.

CHAPTER 53.

When the cab carrying Piccolo and Edmunton pulled up to the address on
Wilshire Boulevard, Edmunton spotted Colleran immediately because
Piccolo's description was pinpoint accurate  He looked like a street
sweeper.  His close-cropped brown hair was atop a small bullet-shaped
head that sported a face which looked like it had been whacked, when
soft, with a flat-bladed shovel, and it had set in that
configuration.

The shoulders and arms were immense, and so was the belly, which jutted
out like Colleran was fifteen months pregnant.

Piccolo and Colleran embraced warmly, and then Piccolo introduced him
to Edmunton.  They went into the house.

It was a comfortable house, big airy rooms, the furniture clearly
indicating that Bo Colleran was not on the pad.  They went into the
living room, and pictures around the room had an American theme.

"Drink?"

"Beer," Piccolo said.

"Me too," Edmunton said.

They followed Colleran into the kitchen and watched as he got the
beers.

"So what are you here for?"

"A kid was snatched in New York.  We think we got it traced to here."

"Do tell."

They went back into the living room and sat down on the couch.

Piccolo detailed the abduction of Luis Perez to the point where he made
the call to LA-and got another Strauss.

Colleran had lit up while they talked.  He inhaled steadily.  "How can
I help?"  he asked when Piccolo had finished.

"We'll need some hardware first," Piccolo said.

"What?"

"Thirty-Bights are fine."

"No problem."

"Do you think you have the time to find out something about this
Strauss?"

"No problem."

"It might be a fucking ring," Piccolo said.  "You can take the bust
here.  We just want to get the kid if we can, and also bust a few heads
in New York.  But we got that locked.  The nigger broad, she'll give us
this Candy fuck and Ellis, I'm sure.  "

"Maybe you can turn Ellis against this other Strauss."

"It's a thought," Piccolo said.  "We'll hold it in reserve."

"What are you going to do first?"

"Take a look at the joint where this Strauss Two is."

"After that."

"Play it by ear."

"Well," Colleran said, standing up, "you guys leave when you want, do
what you want.  This joint is yours as long as you need it."

Colleran quaffed the sixteen-ounce beer as if he had no epiglottis.  He
tossed the can behind his back and across the room into a big ashcan in
a corner.  There were many other empties in it.

"One thing," he said.  "I hope you guys aren't disturbed by the sound
of lovemaking.  That goes on a lot here."

"Really?"  Piccolo said.  Then: "I was just wondering how you'd make
out now as a tunnel rat.  You'd get wedged in.  They'd have to take you
out of there with a winch."

"That's what the broads say to me," Colleran said, and then he was
laughing that booming laugh again.

CHAPTER 54.

Piccolo and Edmunton cleaned up a little, then called a cab and
traveled up Wilshire Boulevard toward the offices of Lawrence.  Kerman,
and Strauss.

Wilshire is a long road, and after a while it became apparent to
Piccolo and Edmunton that the difference between the high end of the
boulevard, which ran adjacent to Beverly Hills, and the low end were
three or four zeros at the end of one's yearly income.

The cabdriver let them off directly in front of the address given for
the firm of which Strauss was a partner.  It was perhaps fifteen
stories high, with a shimmering facade of lightly tinted tan glass. The
building was set back from the street, and in front of it were two
reflecting pools, complete with working fountains, and a frontal area
paved-Piccolo knew, being Italian-with expensive terrazzo.

But it didn't mean, Piccolo thought, that the dude inside wasn't just
as much a fucking scum fucker as the scum fucker in the storefront.

He stood still, Edmunton beside him, and suddenly felt a blast furnace
inside him open up.

He thought of the little spic woman, Perez, back there in her roach
trap, and maybe this scum fucker had robbed from her one of the only
things that mattered in her life.

Piccolo turned.  "Let's take a walk, Eddie," he said.

"How come?  Ain't we going in?"

"Not right fucking now."

Edmunton knew something was grabbing him, so he dropped it and they
walked toward Beverly Hills.

After six or seven blocks, Piccolo stopped.  He had not said anything
during that time.

"I'm okay now," he said.  "I was just thinking about things, and I
didn't want to go in there pissed.  I might have grabbed him by the
balls and thrown him out the window.  I might have gotten a handful of
balls but no kid."

They headed back toward the building.

"The way I figure it," Piccolo said, "is that he is a greedy
motherfucker, right?  I can play a tune on his greed, get a look-see
around there.  Shit, I think this broad might work for him, or at least
know him, right?  All we got to do is get a look.  "

They rode a stainless-steel elevator to the fifteenth floor, where
Lawrence, Kerman, and Strauss had their offices.

The elevator opened right into the offices, and the entire floor was
carpeted with a rug that had to have a pile an inch thick.

There was actually an entryway-an open rectangular area to one side of
which was an elegant immense wooden desk and a beautiful broad who
Piccolo guessed was looking to be a movie star sitting behind it.

But she had black hair, not blond.

Piccolo, dressed casually in a tight-fitting dark blue suit and black
shoes, his hair in the usual pompadour, approached her.  He smiled
without showing his teeth-or absence thereof.

"May I help you, sir?"

"Yes, I'd like to see someone about handling a case for me.-"What kind
of a case?"

"I'm a little ashamed of it.  I'd just like to see an attorney."

"How about Mr.  Gabriel?"

"All right.  That'll be fine."

The woman punched the intercom.

"Mr.  Gabriel, there's a client here for you."

Pause.

"Right."  She hung up.

"He'll be right out."

"Big office.  How many people work here?"

She hesitated, then: "Twelve," she said.  "That's not just the
attorneys."

"What kind of cases do you handle?"

"Everything.  "

"That's good," Piccolo said sagely.

Mr.  Gabriel made his appearance.  He looked to be about thirty-five, a
jogger, modish hair cut in a salon, his suits custom-made.  On the way
up.

Piccolo caught just a hint of derision at the Robert Hall special he
was wearing.

"I'm Mr.  Gabriel," he said, extending his hand.

"I'm Frank," Piccolo said.  "Frank Puelo."

"Will you follow me, please?"

Piccolo followed him into an office that most CEOs would have been
happy with.

Piccolo gave Gabriel the same story, essentially, that he had given to
Strauss One.

"What hospital was that?"  Gabriel asked when he finished.

"Santa Monica."  Piccolo answered.  He had called it before he and
Edmonton came over.

Before they were finished talking, Piccolo said that he didn't have the
time to answer any more questions today, he just wanted to make sure he
could get a lawyer.

Gabriel assured him he could, and tried mightily to get him to sign a
statement assigning the case to Lawrence, Kerman, and Strauss.  Piccolo
said he would the next time he came.

On his way out, Piccolo stopped in a hall and looked around.

"These are nice offices," he said.  "I help design offices.  How many
do you have?"

Gabriel, who had been cooing since he found out what the case was
about, said, "Would you like to see them?"

"Oh sure," Piccolo said, and thought, That's why I set you up, scum
fucker

The offices were impressive.  They reeked of ill-gotten gains, Piccolo
thought.

And the people in them looked, almost to a person, as if they were all
into jogging, dieting, sports, and a whole host of other now-type
activities.

All were dressed spiffily in what looked to Piccolo like the latest
designer clothes.  In fact, they all looked like they shopped at the
same store.

Piccolo was mildly shocked when he got to meet the chief rat, Morton
Strauss.  He was like the others in the joint, slim and wearing a
pinstriped suit and shoes that had to go two to three large.

The shocker was that he was a dead ringer for the sow in the Bronx,
down to the in turned eye.  They had to be fucking brothers, probably
twins.  An East Coast scumbag and a West Coast scumbag, Strauss One and
Strauss Two.

Strauss got up from behind his desk to shake Piccolo's hand while
Gabriel explained about the "tragic loss of part of his wife's foot."

Strauss nodded.  "That's terrible, Mr.  Puelo," he said.  "But there
are remedies in the courts to provide at least partial redress for such
wrongs."

Piccolo nodded.  Give me a fucking break, scum fucker he thought.

"Where are you from?"  Strauss said after a pause.  His mouth was
smiling, but his one small beady good eye-it reminded Piccolo of a
whale's eye-regarded him steadily.  It was an eye that trusted no one.
An eye that wouldn't trust his mother.

"New York City," Piccolo said.  "Came out here five years ago."

"I thought I detected a city accent," Morton Strauss said.  "I'm from
there myself.  My twin still works there."

"Oh," Piccolo said, and thought he might have made a mistake.  This guy
struck him as sharp.  If he happened to talk to his brother about
Piccolo's case it could create problems.  On the other hand, there
wasn't a fucking thing he could do about it now.  He'd just have to go
on.

Strauss seemed eager to talk some more, but Piccolo was not.  The
sooner he got out of there, the better.

"I got to go," Piccolo said.  He turned to Gabriel.  "I'll see you day
after tomorrow."

Both Strauss and Gabriel seemed disappointed.

On the way out of the offices Gabriel said, "Do you have a number where
I can reach you, Mr.  Puelo'?"

"I'll be in touch with you," he said.  " "Bye."

In the street, Piccolo summed up to Edmunton what had happened.

"I want to get something rolling," Piccolo said at the end.  "And we
have to be careful, very careful.  I got the feeling we're dealing with
a real snake."

CHAPTER 55.

Bo Colleran confirmed the concerns Piccolo and Edmunton had-and then
some.

Colleran had taken them to a local watering hole, and they sat in a
booth in the back drinking beer.

"This fuck is really wired," Colleran said.  "He's got friends
everywhere.  He was a local supervisor, he's got buddies in the
Democratic Party, and he's a big contributor to campaigns.  He calls
the mayor Lou.

"If he's involved," Colleran continued, "you're going to have to really
dot your i's to get him."

Piccolo looked at Colleran.  It was the same look Piccolo had had when,
fifteen years earlier, he was getting ready to go down into a tunnel, a
tunnel that might be filled with snakes and scorpions and hostile
gooks-it occurred to Colleran now as it had then that Piccolo was the
most dangerous thing to watch out for.

"If he's involved," Piccolo said, "he's going to take a fall."

CHAPTER 56.

Colleran, Piccolo, and Edmunton spent the rest of the evening and
night-talking about the best tack to take.

They briefly discussed trying to toss the place, but then ruled this
out.  Security would be too tight.  They probably had a guard at the
door, a hall patrol, and an alarm.  Plus, even if they got in, they
wouldn't be dealing with some file cabinets, like those at Strauss
One's; Piccolo had noticed some computer terminals around the place.
The files were probably stored in the computer.

It was decided that the only way to get anywhere was to post a
surveillance, for which they needed surveillance vehicles.

This Colleran promised to get.

"I'll be happy to go on the stakeout with you too," he said.  "We just
have to work out the shifts so that I don't go to sleep.  "

"You do," Piccolo said, "and we'll fire your ass."

Colleran too thought Piccolo was a scream.

The next morning at eight o'clock the first of what would be two
surveillance vehicles rolled into position.  This one was a brand-new
van with two-way porthole mirrors and almost all the comforts of home
inside, including a head, a refrigerator, and two cots.

The men also appeared to be blessed weatherwise-at least that day.  The
overcast, cool weather that had greeted them on their arrival was still
there.  They wouldn't get baked alive, as sometimes happened to
surveillance cops.  The inside of a van could get very uncomfortable,
and more than one cop, seeking relief from the heat, had jumped outside
for a quick stretch, or maybe a soda-and had taken a burn.  All the
surveillance work would, in that instant, go down the drain.

They decided to do the surveillance in shifts.  The van was parked a
half block from the entrance to the Strauss Two building.  If a bleach
blonde, around thirty, with a good body was spotted entering the
premises, then one of the men would get out of the van, get to the
building fast, and follow her to wherever she was going.

If she went to Strauss Two's offices, then it was likely she was the
Wanda broad, and they could then track her, close in on her, and see
what they could learn.

But if Strauss came out, they would follow him.

If the first day was any guide, Strauss Two was not very active in
court-or anywhere else.  He stayed in the building all day, even
apparently eating in, only going out to go home, a posh place on Rodeo
Drive in Beverly Hills.  Piccolo and Edmunton, who were on duty at the
time, were glad they were driving something decent looking-not always
the case--or they would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

Strauss Two went home at about 9:00, when it was dark, but Piccolo and
Edmunton decided to take off.  The Beverly Hills cops constantly
patrolled the streets, and they would be noticed right away.

They drove back to Colleran's place.  Both were tempted to stop for a
brew, but didn't.

At one point, they were circling down a road and had a pretty good view
of the city of Los Angeles, lights spread out forever.

Piccolo thought of Maria Perez.  It was midnight now back in her
apartment, and he would give you odds he knew what she was fucking
thinking about.

CHAPTER 57.

The final Forensic report was waiting for Lawless when he and Barbara
came in the day after Weeks's murder at around seven o'clock.  It held
no surprises.  Just like the preliminary one, this one was devoid of
leads or evidence of any kind.  It was as if the peril were a phantom,
a repeat of the Krupsek killing.

Barbara checked in with Metro North at around nine o'clock.  None of
the passengers had reported seeing anything, the railroad PR guy said,
and then, almost as an afterthought, said that the engineer thought he
might have seen something.

She was told that his name was Arthur Brisbane and that he came in at
around two o'clock.  She could talk to him anytime after that but
before three, when he took his first engine out.

"Do you know what he might have seen?"  Barbara asked.

"No," the PR guy said.  "Just that he thought he saw something.  You'll
have to talk with him."

Lawless told her that she could handle the meeting with the engineer
herself.  Lawless, meanwhile, was going to start reviewing all the
paperwork in the case, from the start, the report of the first
officer-Sweeney--on the scene of the Krupsek killing, up to the present
moment.

"Could you wait to do that until I come back from Metro North?" Barbara
asked.  "I have some ideas-maybe I could help.  "

"No problem," Lawless said.  "I have plenty to do."

The precinct was still a kind of organized madhouse, the phones
constantly ringing, people coming in and out of doors, people in
animated conversation.

It looked, Lawless thought, like a scene from Hill Street Blues, which
was usually as far from depicting the way a real precinct looked as
you could imagine.  A real station house was normally calm, almost
quiet, with only an occasional outburst of activity.  Except, of
course, when two cops have been killed.

Lawless decided to run through the case on the street, actually walk
through the scenes; maybe he could come up with something this time
that he'd missed before.

Before he left, he made sure that all the work had been organized and
distributed.  It was.  Cops were sort of organizing themselves.  Some
were going out on leads provided by snitches, some to check out head
cases, some to knock on doors.  Others answered phones, did paperwork,
whatever.  The work was getting done.

Every good detective, they say, has the ability to project himself into
a scene, and like a writer or actor, to live the scene, playing the
parts of the people in order to try to determine who had the means, the
motive, the opportunity to do the crime.

Lawless had this ability, and it had helped him on more than one
occasion.  He hoped it would help him now.

He waited until dark, then left the station house, walking up to 2478
Tiebout Avenue and getting there at a little after 5:00.

The day had been cool and blustery; the night was getting colder. There
were only a few people on the street.  According to interrogations done
in the area, and Sweeney, who had discovered the body, there had been
few people there then.

Lawless entered the building.

There was no light, and the light from the street hardly illuminated
things.  He took out a penlight and flashed it on the hall floor
adjacent to the tiles, then on the walls.  Donald Krupsek's blood was
still there.

He walked down the hall, the light guiding the way, then shone it under
the stairs.

The largest stain of blood was still there.  It had also recently been
used by a dog.

Lawless flicked off the light and stood in the darkness.  He could hear
sounds from above, building sounds, a TV, people talking.

How could the peril know when Krupsek was coming out of the apartment?
He would have had to wait for hours under the stairs.  Wouldn't he
worry about someone discovering him there?  He, too, had to realize
that the place was used as a john.

It just didn't make sense.

Lawless went down the hall and started to climb the stairs.

He climbed to the fourth floor and listened outside Lola Omega's door.
There was no sound.

He climbed up, remembering how he and Barbara had crossed over to
escape detection.

Then, quite suddenly, he realized how the killer had done it.  It was
really rather simple and efficient.

All he had to do was stand on the very top landing and wait for Krupsek
to come out of Lola's apartment.  Then he could follow him down the
stairs, going quietly, and intercept him on the ground floor.  If no
one was in sight, then all he had to do was shoot him.

Still, Lawless thought, Krupsek must have had his guard down to let
some one do him in a dark hall in the middle of Fort Siberia.

He was probably on something.

It took Lawless ten minutes to walk to Scratch Park.

It too was empty, and not so different than it had been the night
before.

None of the streetlights worked except one, which only gave a little
illumination.  It was not that easy to see.

Lawless thought of his first theory: someone had been waiting behind
the tree, or had sneaked into the park, gotten to the tree, and come up
behind Weeks.

Lawless lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply; the orange glow illuminated
his fingers.

Still, Weeks was here, alone in a park in Fort Siberia at night, and a
rookie to boot.  He had to have been scared, or alert at the very
least.

Lawless inhaled deeply again.

How good must this peril be, to blow away an experienced cop like
Krupsek and a maybe scared rookie like Weeks, and leave not a trace?

How did he do that?

He must have tracked them for a long time.  Got to know their
habits.

Or didn't.  Just was in the right place at the right time.

Lawless went deeper into the park.  For the first time he noticed that
he was not alone.  Leaning against a broken statue of God-knew-what was
a couple, or what looked like a couple, vaguely silhouetted.

They looked at him.  He looked back and went on his way.

He walked all the way to the fence, then turned.

The couple that had been by the statue was nowhere in sight.

Lawless had an idea.

Everything in him told him that Krupsek was the only target.  And that
could mean only tine thing: Weeks was a diversion, one of those copycat
killings meant to lead the cops astray.

If... He dropped the cigarette on the ground and walked slowly out of
the park.

Whatever it was, whatever it all meant, one thing was for sure: he had
no suspects yet, no motive, no opportunity, no nothing.

Barbara was waiting when Lawless got back to the station house.  They
met in the squad room, where there was a crowd of other cops, including
the young cop McGurk, Vallone, and a few new faces.  Normally, at this
time of day, the squad room would have one or two cops.

Lawless got all the files out and put them on a desk on one side of the
room.

He invited all the men, except those handling calls, to array
themselves in front of him.

"I used to have an old homicide sergeant who believed one thing with
all his heart and soul-that when it came to murder, the cops had the
advantage, because the average homicide had many cops assigned to it,
and many cops' heads are always better than one peril's head.

"He believed that.  I don't believe we have a clear advantage."

The men laughed.

"But we do have many heads.  And if we can't outthink him, then we
have problems.

"Before me is all the paperwork we've generated since the Krupsek
squeal came in.  What I propose we do is go through it, discuss it,
trade ideas, see what we can come up with among us.  This is going to
take a few hours, so if any of you have prior engagements or whatever,
by all means leave now, or whenever you feel like it during our
examination.  Okay?"

No one moved.

"Let's go."

Lawless started with the Fives, the complaint forms, and worked his way
through everyone there.  If a man had written a report, he was asked to
stand up and sum it up.  The others then would ask questions of him-and
each other.

The proceeding proved useful.  It helped clarify certain parts of the
investigation, people aired some gripes-about one guy doing a certain
kind of duty all day and not another, say-and there were some fresh
ideas.

Barbara nailed something that, Lawless realized when she said it, had
been bothering him.

"Do you remember," she said, "when we showed the pictures of the
Krupsek funeral to that gay leather guy, Colt?"

Lawless nodded.

"I got the feeling that he recognized someone.  His eyes flashed or
something."

"You know," Lawless said, "I did too.  I definitely did too.  "

A couple of the men wanted to know who exactly the gay leather guy was,
where the Wildfire Club was, et cetera.

Then: "You should check that out," the middle-aged guy, Vallone, said,
"shouldn't you?"

"Yeah," Lawless said, "we should.  But we have to do it in such a way
that makes sure Colt doesn't retreat to a lawyer.  "

There followed a couple of suggestions on how to approach the guy Colt,
and then they moved on to other reports.

As Lawless had promised, it was three hours before the meeting broke
up.  But a number of good ideas had emerged, and Lawless felt that the
meeting had helped the cops become more of a team.  And, Sherlock
Holmes notwithstanding, fifteen brains were better than one.

Barbara was glad when the meeting broke up, and so was Lawless.  They
both could use a few hours of solid rest, not only because it was
better to be in good shape for investigating, but because it would be
better for the day ahead.  Tomorrow Byron Weeks, late of Huntington
Station, Long Island, and the New York City Police Department, was to
be buried.

CHAPTER 58.

George Benton drove out to the Seaman and Eisemann Insurance Agency in
Hicksville the day after he saw Gates and Kerry.  He had debated with
himself whether to arrive unannounced or seek the cooperation of
someone there who, after all, might be involved with the peril-whoever
that might be.

Ultimately, he decided to seek cooperation at the top.  Since he was
working against the clock, the fastest way he had to get to the center
of what was going on was to seek cooperation.

He called the president of the company, someone with a tongue-twister
of a name Stasciak-and Stasciak agreed to see him the next morning at
9:00.  Benton did not get specific, just said that he had a matter of
some urgency and delicacy to discuss.

The Seaman and Eisemann Agency was in the heart of Hicksville, one of
the original suburbs in the USA, a place where hordes of GI's had
returned after World War II to take up residence in cookie-cutter
Levitt homes and raise their families.

He pulled into a parking space outside the flat, one-story building and
went inside.  It was ten to nine.

As he went inside, he felt the anxiety growing.  He hoped he would not
botch this.  Everything you did in an investigation was important, but
maybe some things were more important than others.

He announced himself to the receptionist, who was set up at a desk in
front of banks of file cabinets.  The cabinets served as a sort of wall
behind which were lined up desks, with people-mostly women, Benton
noted-busily working.

A minute later, a pretty young woman came out of a hall to his right.
"Mr.  Benton," she said.

"Yes."

"Please come with me."

Benton got a warm feeling, a feeling of politeness and caring.  It
helped alleviate his anxiety a bit.

He was led into the office of Robert Stasciak, the president of Seaman
and Eisemann,

Benton was surprised but, like most detectives, he was able to mask his
reactions.

Stasciak was dressed in jeans and a silk shirt.  He did not look like
an executive with an insurance company.  He looked like a guy about to
leave on a vacation.

Benton made him to be about forty-five.  He was good-looking, with
penetrating but not unfriendly eyes.  Smart.  But Benton sensed a
warmth about him.  He hoped he was not deluding himself just because he
needed help.

They shook hands.  Benton was tempted to light a cigarette, but he had
not noticed an ashtray, and this guy had the body of a twenty-year-old.
He took care of his body.  Benton swallowed the urge.

Benton sat down opposite him.

"How can I help you?"  Stasciak said.

Benton hesitated only a millisecond, and then he laid it all out. There
was no point in being coy.  He had to trust someone.

Stasciak was a cool guy, Benton sensed as he detailed the assaults on
Kerry, Gates, and the death of Anna Leibowitz; but he also sensed an
increasing agitation.

Finally, Benton wrapped it up.  Stasciak's cheeks were mottled.

"So," Benton concluded, "the finger has to point at this guy
Richardson.  "

Benton took out a print of the perp and showed it to Stasciak.

Stasciak looked at it.  "Richardson doesn't look like this," he said.
"He's not Hispanic."

"Maybe a disguise?"

Stasciak's eyes had dropped back to the print.  Now they flicked up.
There was anger in them.

"Yeah," he said, "I could see that."

"You could?"

"Sure," Stasciak said.  "I'd say there's some resemblance here-I mean
it could be a disguise, but Richardson's basic features could be there.
But I think there's something even more meaningful here."  Benton said
nothing.  "He got fired for mistreating our clients."  "When?"

"Three months ago.  We got some complaints on the phone.  From old
people.  I remember Anna Leibowitz.  She had a heavy Jewish accent. She
was in tears.  I warned Richardson once, and when I got a second
complaint he was terminated."

"Where is he now?"  Benton asked.

"He hasn't gotten a new job."

"How do you know that?"

"We pay his unemployment compensation," Stasciak said.  He paused.
"Originally, we were going to fight his getting benefits but decided
against it."

"Can you tell me where he lives?"

Stasciak pushed a button and asked his secretary if she would please
get the address of Paul Richardson.

"Did the complaints against him just start suddenly?  How long was he
with the company?"

"We just bought the company six months ago.  He had been here, I think,
four years.  There might have been complaints against him, but I can't
say.  Nothing was in his personnel file.  I checked that when he became
a problem."

"He was what you call Claims Manager, right?"

"That's right."

"What did he handle?  Just life insurance?"

"No, any claim that came in.  Life insurance was just part of it."

"Is it normal," Benton asked, "for the, uh, Claims Manager to bring the
check over to the heir, or whatever you call it?"

At his best, Benton was like a seismograph.  He could pick up the
tiniest mood changes.  He picked up annoyance.

"It's normal if the heirs don't have enough insurance.  It's a time
when the whole matter of insurance, you might say, has their attention.
I don't like it, but there it is."

"At least two of the people assaulted had enough insurance.  He went
anyway."

Stasciak nodded.

"Would you," Benton said, "have a list of any other people Richardson
handled who lost loved ones?"

"My Claims Manager would."

Benton hesitated.

Stasciak picked up on it.  "She didn't like him either."

"Okay," Benton said.

Stasciak reached for the phone but was interrupted by his secretary
bringing in Richardson's personnel folder.  She handed it to Stasciak,
who handed it, unopened, to Benton.

Benton opened it and looked at it while Stasciak called his Claims
Manager.

Benton scanned the top sheet.

Richardson was forty-two, a bachelor, and lived in Mineola, Long
Island.  He had had a series of jobs in the insurance industry.

"Can I get copies of some of these records?"  Benton asked.

"Whatever you want."

A moment later, a pretty, blond-haired woman who Benton made to be
about forty came into Stasciak's office.  Stasciak introduced her.  Her
name was Darlene Taylor.

Stasciak, with Benson's tacit approval, filled in Darlene on Paul
Richardson.

"Would you have a list of people whom he handled claims on?"

"Sure," she said.  "You want to come with me?"

Before he left Stasciak's office, Benson said; "Do you have a picture
of Richardson?"

Stasciak shook his head, then stopped.  "I may have something better,"
he said.  "See me after you're finished with Darlene.  "

Darlene was most helpful.

She showed Benton records for six months previous to the time when she
had arrived.

During that period the insurance company had paid the "proceeds" on the
"face amount," as she put it, on six cases: Charles Gates, Hugh Kerry,
Anna Leibowitz, Theresa Franconi, Homer Persons, and John Battaglia.

Like Stasciak, Darlene was sharp.

"I guess you'd want to get in touch with Persons and B att agl ia.  "

"That's right."  "Well, I have their numbers.  Both have moved."

Benton got through to both.  Battaglia, as it turned out, was in
Freehold, New Jersey, with his daughter; Homer Persons had moved to
Rockland County and was living with his son.

Both remembered Paul Richardson.

"A louse," Battaglia said.  "I found out I was supposed to get the
benefits a week after my wife's passing.  He held the check five
weeks."

After speaking with the men, Benton went outside the agency for a smoke
and thought about things.

In both cases, the checks had been mailed.

He could, he thought, go back further to see if any other people had
been threatened or assaulted, but he decided against it for the moment.
The case would seem to have started just after Richardson had been
fired, at least in a criminal sense.

Maybe, Benton thought, the firing was what triggered it.

Yes.  He probably has a deep-seated anger toward old people and then
gets bred-because of, in his mind, old people.  Then he goes into
action against them.

There was, of course, also the possibility that he would make some
money.  He knew they had gotten insurance money.  There was always the
chance that they would have some of it in the house.

Kerry did.

He ground the first cigarette out, popped another in his mouth, and
then tossed it away.  He went back inside and thanked Darlene Taylor.

"Anything else, give me a jingle."  She handed him her card.

He then went back into Stasciak's office.  Or was going to.

"Bob is in the basement," she said.  "He'd like you to go down
there."

Benton was a little puzzled, but he went down the stairs into a
basement which was misnamed: it was an open, airy place that was used
as a lunchroom.

Stasciak was at one end, setting up what looked to be a VCR.  Benton
went over.

"Last Christmas," Stasciak said, "we had a Christmas party which was
also a retirement party for some employees, and I had somebody tape
it.  We have pictures of Richardson at that party."  The two men
settled into their seats, and the tape rolled.

It was a typical party scene: shots of the Christmas tree, decorations,
people holding drinks and laughing in a festive mood.

Stasciak said, "There he is.  The bald-headed guy."

A relatively small, wiry man, conservatively dressed, and with only a
fringe of hair above his ears, walked right into the camera.  He
smiled, and though Benton thought it might be his imagination, he
thought the smile devious.

And Benton knew something else.

This was his man.

Richardson had used makeup and probably foam or something else to beef
up his body, but the Hispanic who wore the sunglasses and was
assaulting old people was Richardson.

Then, another shot, close up, and Benton knew why he wore sunglasses:
the film was in color and showed his eyes in color-light blue.  He wore
sunglasses to hide his blue eyes; blue-eyed Hispanics were rare
indeed.

Then, as he thought about it, it all opened up for Benton like a
malignant flower.  It was malevolently clever.

It would be easy for Richardson to batter and rob-and yes, his real
fucking purpose was to batter them-as a Hispanic.  Cops would never
question that it wasn't a "spic."  In Fort Siberia, that was
understood: spics and niggers did the crimes.

Benton watched, fascinated.  There was a group shot, but Richardson was
off to the side.  He turned to the camera.  It chilled Benton.

What was in his head at just that moment?

Benton watched the film again, and then, thanking Stasciak profusely,
he left.

"I hope you get him if he's guilty," Stasciak said.  And then, almost
as an afterthought: "He's a pretty tough guy.  I think he was into
karate or something like that.  What do you guys say?  Approach with
caution."

Benton nodded.

Yes, he thought, that's what we say.

CHAPTER 59.

On the way back to the city, Benton thought about his next step.

Now things were clearer.  Richard son was the peril, disguised as a
Hispanic.  He had to have a place where he changed, since he wouldn't
change in his own house.  Not in Mineola, Benton thought.  They'd
remember a Hispanic there very well.

As he drove, one thing kept coming into his mind over and over again. A
name.

Theresa Franconi.

He wondered how the old lady was.  And he worried.

Richardson had never really completed his business with her.  If he was
compelled to hurt, this would be perfect.  He had the woman scared. Now
he could come in and make all her bad dreams come true.

He had to realize, though, that the police were on it.  He had to
realize that a sun glassed Hispanic was a marked man.

Benton lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, hardly let any smoke out.  He
did not even think about lung cancer.

He thought: Richardson is clever.  He could come in another disguise.

Like, for example, an old lady.  Or an old man.  Or a cop.  Or...
Benton was driving on the Northern State Parkway.  On the side of the
road he saw a sign: TELEPHONES.  A half mile up the road he pulled off
into a cleared area, parked the car, and went up to one of the phones.
He dialed the number.

He was in luck: Lawless was in.

Quickly, he detailed what he had learned.

"That's great, George.  Nice work."

"I'm worried, though," Benton said, "about that old lady.  Can we get
a couple of guys on her until we assemble a case against Richardson.
"

"In a couple of days," Lawless said.  "These homicides are using up
people.  I might be able to get you a couple of volunteers.  Can you
handle it a couple of days yourself?"

"Sure," Benton said.  "I can do that."

"Okay," Lawless said.  "I'll get right on it."

Benton wanted to enjoy the compliment that Lawless had paid him, but he
couldn't.

For one thing, the case wasn't over.  For another, he very seriously
doubted his effectiveness as a bodyguard for the old lady.  He, who was
afraid of going through the halls late at night.

A thought: When he was young, years ago, some kid had challenged him to
a fight.  He'd backed down.  All the kids had laughed at him, and, when
he got home, he never told his mother or father.  They simply wouldn't
understand.

Still, he was the only show in town now.  Maybe his mere presence would
deter Richardson.  Furthermore, who said Richardson would try anything?
Benton said that.  Maybe he was wrong.

But his stomach continued to tell him otherwise.

Benton went directly to Theresa Franconi's apartment.

She was in-and fine.

She opened the door-it sounded like she was disassembling it-and Benton
went inside.

He sensed a strength in the old lady, so he told her the story
straight.  And he told her that he, Benton, would like to stay with her
a couple of days until they could get a regular guard and get a case
against Richardson.

There were no arguments.

"Someone like him," she said, "he has to be stopped."

Benton looked at her.  A small, eighty-one-year-old woman.  Would that
he could have lived his life like her.

CHAPTER 60.

It had been five days since Piccolo, Edmunton, and Colleran had started
the surveillance on Strauss Two, and a couple of times it had become a
bit hairy.

On one occasion they were following Strauss when suddenly he had pulled
over and parked.  Piccolo made an immediate decision to abort.  If he
was trying to burn them, it wouldn't be that time.  At least, the
fucker wouldn't figure out he was being tailed.

The other time was when, stupidly, Edmunton had gotten out of the back
of the van, which was parked a half block away from Strauss's building
and Strauss had picked just that moment to exit his building.  He
noticed Edmunton, who, if he had to be seen, should have been getting
out of the front, simply because it seemed more natural.

But nothing had come of either incident, except the cops got more
alert.

They used two vans and two private cars for the job, and after a while
got to know Strauss's patterns well.

He did not, in the five days, got to court once.

Twice he went, at lunchtime, to a men's hair salon where he got his
hair styled and his nails polished.  He was much more concerned about
his appearance than Strauss One.

At the end of each day, he would go home.  Colleran had learned that he
was married and had three grown kids who went to the best schools
around.  He had the world by the short hairs.

At the end of the sixth day he started to follow his usual pattern,
tooling along Wilshire to Beverly, but then cut off at Eucalyptus,
something he had not done, and there followed and Edmunton and Piccolo
in a van did follow-a series of circuitous roads which only made
Piccolo feel like he was trying to shake them, until they realized that
he always drove with a lead foot.

He reached his destination, a Quality Motor Inn on the outskirts of the
city, and parked the black Mercedes-he also owned a white one-in one of
the parking spaces adjacent to the office.

Piccolo and Edmunton parked the van across the lot, as much out of the
glare of light as possible, and watched the events through the two-way
glass of the rear-end porthole.

He emerged, and Piccolo got out of the van and started to walk in
Strauss's direction.  Strauss climbed the stairs to a second level of
rooms, walked along the railed path, stopped, and knocked on a door.
Someone let him in.

Piccolo went back into the van.  "What do you think?"  he asked.

"Let's sit on it."

"Right.  "

An hour later, Strauss emerged.

"There he fucking is," Piccolo said.

"What do you think?"

"Let him fucking go.  Sit on this."

"Okay.  "

Strauss got into his Mercedes, the car coughed to life, and he glided
smoothly out of the lot.

All was quiet, and Piccolo and Edmunton waited.  Waited to see if
anyone would come out the door.

Ten minutes later, someone did, and even in the dim light the sight
sent small charges of electricity through them.

It was a bleach blonde.

"It's the fucking Motel Queen," Piccolo said redundantly.

They watched her, their eyes following her like magnets as she made her
way down the stairs, walked to a red Corvette, and got in.

"No wonder that kid at the motel noticed her," Piccolo said.  "She's
built like a brick shithouse.  I wouldn't mind playing hide the salami
with her."

"Believe it."

"But only after she's fucking dead," Piccolo hissed.  And Edmunton
laughed.  Piccolo, he was a fucking scream.

They let her get to the exit before they fired up the van.  By the
time she got to Abyssinia Road, which ran by the motel, they were
twenty yards behind her.

She drove relatively slowly, nothing like Strauss Two, and they
followed her to her destination, an apartment building in downtown LA.
They watched her disappear into a parking garage.

"Looks like she's home," Piccolo said.

"Yeah."  '

Piccolo turned and smiled at Edmunton.  "Congratulations, partner," he
said.  "Let's go find Colleran."

CHAPTER 61.

The plan had occurred to Piccolo almost instantly, and when he
presented it, Colleran only had one comment.  "You're the most direct
guy I ever met," he said.

Most importantly, he agreed to go along with it.  The plan was not
without peril, but it had a very good chance of working.

At six o'clock the next morning, Piccolo and Edmunton were in another
van watching the high-rise that Wanda the bleach blonde had driven
into.  They had checked the building out, and there didn't seem to be
another entrance or exit.

The weather had changed back to standard California weather, and by
noon the van had been converted into an oven.

At 12:10, the ennui and discomfort were blown away: the fire-engine red
Corvette, Motel Queen driving, pulled up out of the garage, its glossy
finish twinkling in the sun.

Piccolo and Edmunton had parked across and down the street.  The
Corvette went growling by them.  Edmunton, driving, hung a U, and they
picked up the chase.

It was a short chase.  Five minutes after she started, Motel Queen
pulled the car into the relatively empty parking lot of an Anthony's
supermarket and got out.  She had her blond hair piled high and wore
what might have been sausage skins dyed pink.

She jiggled and bounced into the supermarket.

"We should have made fucking rape part of our plan," Piccolo said.

Edmunton laughed hard.

Twenty minutes later, Motel Queen emereged from the supermarket
carrying a bundle of groceries.  Piccolo and Edmunton had relocated
the van next to her Corvette, and they were standing near it.  She
approached the door of the Corvette.  Piccolo came up to her.  "How you
doin', baby?"

She had heavily made up green eyes.  They narrowed.  She had been
approached by males before.  But not like this.

"Don't put up a fuss," Piccolo said, "and you'll be okay.  Get in the
van."

Under pancake makeup, her face paled.  She got in a side door, which
Edmunton had politely held open for her.

Piccolo put the groceries in behind her and closed the door.  He went
around to the front, got in the driver's seat, and drove out of the
lot.  As far as he could tell, no one had seen it go down.

Within a minute her hands had been taped behind her back, her ankles
bound together, and tape drawn over her eyes.  Her mouth was left
untaped.

"Who are you," she said tremulously a few times.

Piccolo did not answer.  In fact, he drove a half hour before he
finally responded to a question she had asked four times.

"Where are you taking me?"

"To a clinic in Mexico."

Pause.  Whys

"You're scheduled for a hysterectomy," Piccolo said flatly.

"Wha .. ."  she croaked, and farted.  And farted again.

"A hysterectomy.  You know, where they take out your womb and shit."

"What .. ."

"Hey," Piccolo said, "you're a beautiful woman, but you better stop
farting or I'll have them take out your asshole, too.  "

"Please.  Who .. . what .. ."

"Let me explain," Piccolo said.  "You were involved in stealing a
little baby in New York, right?  Well, there's no way we can reach the
scum fucker who masterminded the job, but at least you're not going to
get away.  We're going to fix it so you'll never have children.  A
fucking eye for a fucking eye, a tooth for a tooth, a kid for a kid, a
life for a life."  The woman's lip turned down.  "Unless," Piccolo
said, "you help us."  "How?  How?"  "Help us get the kid back.  Help us
get Strauss."  "How?"

"Tell us everything you know.  Do a little something for us.  "

"Yes, I will."  "Take off her tape, Eddie,"

Carefully, Edmunton peeled off the tape.  But it took makeup with it,
leaving a band of white two inches wide across her face.

She blinked.

"Who are you?"  Edmunton said.  "What do you do?"

"I'm a private investigator.  I work for Strauss.  My name is Ronni
Brilliante."

"You fuck him too, right?"

"Yes.  "

"Where's the baby?"

"With the Cuestas."

"Who are they?"

"Spanish people.  They're from Madrid.  They adopted the baby.  "

"Right," Piccolo said.  "For how much?"

"Five hundred thousand dollars."

"How much did you get?"

"Ten thousand."

"Do this before?"

"No.  First time.  Mort-Strauss hadn't done it either.  But he got a
request-"

"Never did it before," Edmunton said.

"No.  But he said it's too profitable to pass up.  He may do it again.
Am I going to go to jail?"

"Not if you cooperate," Piccolo said.  "Back to the Cuestas.  Where do
they live?"

"Everywhere.  "

"What do you mean?"

"They have homes in Beverly Hills, Hawaii, Spain, the South.  "

"Where's the baby now?"

"I think in Beverly Hills."

"You give me the address, right?"  '

"Yes."  She did.  It was on Mulholland Drive.

They were quiet a minute.  A sign out the window said "TUUANA, 50
MILES."  The woman stiffened.

"Now, Ronni," Edmunton said, "all we want you to do is meet with Mr.
Strauss there in a motel and ask him some questions."

She said nothing.

"How often you meet?"

"Twice a week."

"He pay?"  Edmunton said.

"I'm not a professional."

"Okay," Piccolo said, "we'll tell you what to ask him.  Meanwhile, he's
going to be on tape."

"You're going to put a wire in a motel room?"

"That's right."

"I don't know if .. ."  She hesitated.  "All right," she said.  "I'll
try."

"Don't fuck me," Piccolo said.

"I won't," she said.

Piccolo and Edmunton believed her.

CHAPTER 62.

Piccolo and Edmunton dropped Ronni back at the supermarket parking lot,
then called Colleran, who was on day watch as they said in the LAPD. He
met them at a watering hole near his precinct at around three o'clock.
They laid it out.  "Worked like a charm," Edmunton said.

"Good," Colleran said.  "Now all we gotta do, like I explained before,
is find an honest judge who will sign the order so that we can put the
wire in the room.  The way this Strauss is connected, I worry.  We go
to the wrong judge, we're dead."

"Not really," Piccolo said.  "It just means we got to schedule more
surgery."

"What do you mean?"

"For fucking Strauss," Piccolo said.

"Christ," Colleran said, "I'd just hate to have you as an enemy."

"Don't fuck up and you won't."  Then Piccolo howled, showing his flashy
gap-toothed smile.

Three beers later, Colleran went back to the station house and Piccolo
and Edmunton, driving a sedan, went in search of Mulholland Drive and
the Cuestas.

It wasn't hard to find.  Getting in would be another matter.

From the road they could only see the top of the house, a big
orange-tiled stucco affair that was surrounded by tall trees.  Part of
a huge pool could also be seen, but there was absolutely no access
unless you were athletic enough to vault an eight-foot-high spiked
fence.

The gate was electronically controlled, and there were TV cameras
mounted on the gate and at various points along the fence.  It was
probably regularly patrolled, too, Piccolo thought.  People in
Hollywood had never really gotten over Charlie Manson and his horde.
Better overspend on security than end up dog meat

They stayed a half hour, watching the house and grounds.  The only sign
of life was the occasional expensive car which would snake past them up
Mulholland.  It was almost as if no one lived in the house; but someone
did.

Piccolo swallowed.  He thought about calling Maria Perez, decided
against it.  He would wait.

He got that sense again.  Of Maria Perez there, the Cuestas and all the
other muckymucks here.  He put the car in gear and drove away.  Inside,
he was cooking.

CHAPTER 63.

The fact was that Joe Sweeney was nervous about the cop killings and a
little fearful for himself, too.  Of course, when he was in his coop
the night before he had bullshit ted the firemen, who were pumping him
with questions about the investigation.  He could understand the Weeks
kid getting caught.  But Krupsek.  That bothered him.

It wasn't that Krupsek was a saint or anything.  He was a live fuck,
and now he was a dead fuck, though Sweeney had to admit that he felt
himself filling up a little at the funeral for God knew what reason.

No, the thing that bothered him was that Krupsek was a street-smart
cop.  He was quick and he was tough, like an animal-and that's what you
had to sort of be-like the anima les that prowled this jungle.

Yet somebody had taken him out.

Sweeney did not view himself as better or smarter than Krupsek.  No,
maybe even a little slower.

On the other hand, he had the benefit of something Krupsek didn't have:
he knew that somebody who was very, very dangerous was out there.  He
knew that the situation was combat-red all the time, worse than even
regular Siberia.

Now, on the day Byron Weeks was buried-or, more precisely, at 12:01-Joe
Sweeney was dropped off at the corner of Ryer and 185th to begin a
twelve-to-eight.

He figured, as he walked down the street, which was deserted because of
a light rain falling, that he would only be in actual danger for two
blocks-until he got to the firehouse.  Inside, he would be safe.

His route carried him past a number of buildings in which there were
alleyways where someone could stand, waiting for him to pass by.-At
least, that's the way he figured it.

He was glad to be packing a .38.  In this day and age, a lot of guys
favored the 9 mm, not only for its power but for its fourteen-shot
capacity, as opposed to six shots for a .38.

But he had seen automatics, specifically the 9 mm, jam, or cops would
forget to release their safety.  He knew of at least one California cop
who had died because of that.

But the .38 had no safety.  You pulled it and squeezed the trigger,
bang, bang, bang.  That was it.  That was the kind of gun Joe Sweeney
wanted to carry.

He crossed the street between the first and second blocks, his eyes
constantly scanning.

He was halfway down the second block when he sensed something behind
him.  Not in the alley, on the street.  He stopped and turned.  Someone
was walking toward him.  He tensed.

CHAPTER 64.

The funeral for Byron Weeks was a gruesome replay of the one for
Krupsek, and while one might assume the men were inured to it, they
weren't: it was like pouring salt in the proverbial open wound.

A lot of bars were busy when it was over, and a lot of wives would not
see their husbands until very late.  Some worried terribly about the
madman who was roaming the streets.  It was one thing worrying about
your husband doing normal cop duties, and another when someone might be
stalking him.

Barbara and Lawless spent a minimum amount of time at the funeral and
then went their separate ways.  Barbara went to Morristown to start
checking with neighbors and others out there to get a better fix on
Krupsek.

Lawless, for his part, was engulfed with paperwork, trying to keep
track as much as possible of the madhouse the precinct had turned
into.

But, above all, he tried to keep his eye on the ball.  There was a
killer out there, a killer who, in some way, was tied to Donald
Krupsek.

So Lawless managed to sandwich in a visit to James Flanagan, a clerical
man who worked in personnel down at One Police Plaza.

Lawless spent an hour with him, and accomplished more in learning about
Donald Krupsek during that time than he could have in three days going
through channels, even granted the high priority of the killings.

After learning more about Krupsek, Lawless thought that the man seemed
to like one thing more than all others: problems.  He had compiled
what could be called an unenviable record.

His ex-wife had complained about him twice-for battering her, and for
not making alimony payments.  He was brought up on the carpet both
times, and managed to escape.

He also had four brutality complaints, two from Harlem and two from the
Sixth, the Village precinct he had been assigned to before Harlem.

In one of the Village cases it was reported that he had almost beaten
some gay guy to death in a men's room in a gay bar on Jane Street.

He survived them all, though he could easily have been given a
departmental trial, which, based on the conviction rata-99
percent-would have amounted to dismissal.

His folder was also peppered with various complaints from superior
officers, ranging from being out of uniform to being off post.  Still,
he survived.

But one of the most telling indicators of Donald Krupsek's personality
came not off Flanagan's terminal but from Flanagan himself.

"I had heard of Krupsek," he said near the end of the time Lawless was
with him.  "He had compiled a record which people notice around here.
So one day about a year ago we-I mean Toby, one of the guys who works
here-gets a call from what turns out to be a funeral director in
Morristown.  He says that he was contacted by the boyfriend of
Krupsek's only child, a sixteen-year-old girl.  The boy says that the
daughter overdosed, and they were trying to get in touch with her
father, who they knew was a cop.

"Toby knew the name Krupsek, so he got right through to him-he was at
the Five Three--and tells him that he'd like to see him right away.
Krupsek agreed, and they met in a bar not too far from here.

"It's then that Toby breaks the news about his daughter."

Flanagan looked at Lawless.  His eyes were hard.

"You know what this guy says to Toby: "Hey, she's been on her own for
years.  She's a little whore-like her mother and a junkie.  I got
nothing to do with her anymore."

"Toby almost took a swing at him.  Made him cry.  The guys took up a
collection, and we buried her.  Christ, see her in the coffin, Joe,
looked like a little girl--break your heart.

"Naturally, Krupsek didn't come to the funeral.  Neither did the
ex-wife."

Every now and then, Lawless thought, as he left One Police Plaza,
someone like Krupsek would get on the job.  It was bad for the cops,
but how much worse was it for the kids who started out life with
fathers-and mothers--like the Krupsek kid had gotten.  Bad.  Barbara
always said that the entire life of a child was decided in the first
seven years of life, and that the causes of all criminal acts could be
traced back to a kid's upbringing.

Lawless wasn't too sure of that, and he could not overly concern
himself with the ultimate reasons why.  He had to come into the arena
when they were what they were, and he sensed that if he ever asked
himself too much why someone did something, he would stop being a
cop.

None of the neighbors knew much about Donald Krupsek, Barbara learned,
except that he seemed to have a lot of girlfriends.  Neighbors reported
seeing him enter the house at all hours with different women.

No one seemed to be able to establish for certain when he started this,
but he had been divorced about four years earlier, and some of the
neighbors seemed to remember that that was when he went native, at
least from their point of view.

After very little discussion Barbara and Lawless decided that the best
person to visit Richard Colt and talk with him about the funeral photos
was Barbara.  She would be the least threatening.  As soon as she got
back from Morristown, she was going to go to the club and talk with
him.  She felt sure-or reasonably sure-that she'd be able to get
results.

CHAPTER 65.

Barbara made it over to the Wildfire Club late-because of one thing and
another she did not get there until around 11:30.

She was surprised to find it closed.  There was a sign on the door that
said, "Closed.  Call 567-0987 for information."

She went up on the street and dialed the number.  A strange voice
answered on the second ring.  An older voice.  Gruff.  Brooklyn,
probably developing a throat cancer.

"Ventimiglia.  "

"I saw the club was closed.  I was hoping to talk to Mr.  Colt.  "

"Who are you?"

"I'm Barbara Babalino.  A friend of a friend."  He just didn't have the
manner of a guy who would cooperate with cops.

"Yeah.  Well, I got some bad news.  Colt was murdered today."  ,

"What?".

"Yeah.  Killed in his apartment."

"My god."  She paused.  "Where does he live?"  "405 West Thirteenth."
Pause.  "Hey, don't you know?  I thought he was a friend of yours."

Barbara said thanks and hung up.  She went up the stairs quickly, got
into the radio car she was driving, and headed toward the West
Village.

Colt had lived in a nice-looking five-story building on a clean,
pleasant street.  A very good neighborhood.  It was easy to tell which
building-more than a few people were standing in clusters on the
sidewalk, and there was a cop car parked outside.

A uniformed cop guarded the door.  Barbara showed her badge, then
pinned it to her chest.  "Whose squeal?"  she asked.

"Pete Largo."

"What precinct?"

"Tenth.  "

Barbara went up the stairs.  The apartment was easy to find.  It was on
the third floor.  The door was open.  There was no smell.

The door was guarded too.  She asked to see Pete Largo.

A moment later, Largo appeared.  He was a big cop with a florid face
and a beer belly.  You could tell he wasn't a beginner.

"Hi, I'm Barbara Babalino.  From the Five Three.  This might be
connected to those cop killings."

Largo's attention to Barbara was suddenly total.

"Is the body still here?"  she asked.

"No.  It was taken a couple of hours ago.  He was killed about six
o'clock maybe."

"How?  Twenty-two?"

"No, stabbed.  We found him in the bedroom.  Typical overkill.  He was
stabbed at least forty times, mostly in the face.  We found the knife
in his eye socket jammed in so hard we couldn't pull it out.  And, of
course, his male member was cut off."

Her theory started to fly out the window.  She had figured Colt had
seen somebody in the photos; maybe that somebody knew Colt knew of a
relationship to Krupsek and had killed him to silence him.  She was
reaching.  This was a classic gay murder.  She remembered hearing about
such murders in John Jay College.  "Overkill," the instructor had told
them, "is a characteristic of gay murders.  When one or two knife
thrusts will do, they'll use fifty.  It's like they try to destroy the
person, not only kill them."

Largo was saying something.  For a moment, Barbara had been
distracted.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"You look as if your theory got shot down."

Barbara nodded.  "Do you have any suspects?"  she asked.

"Not really.  We got his boyfriend, Randy, over at the station, but I
don't think he did it."

"Can I talk with him?"

"He's in pretty bad shape."

"I won't take long.  I just want to ask him one thing."

"Okay," Largo said.  "I'm going to hang in here.  See Bassett in the
squad room and tell him I cleared it.  Any problems, tell him to call
me here."

"Thanks.  "

Barbara found Randy sitting on a bench outside the squad room.  She had
asked for and received permission to talk to him alone.

His physical appearance was in stark contrast to Colt.  As big as Colt
was, Randy was small, a cute little guy with black curly hair.

His eyes were very red.  Most people, most cops, thought that gays,
Russians, and a whole host of other groups weren't human, didn't cry,
didn't bleed, didn't anything.  But Barbara knew.  They were like
anybody else, and this Randy was feeling the loss of his lover
terribly.

Barbara sat down on the bench next to him.  She introduced herself.
"I'm terribly sorry," she said.  "Do you have someplace to go
tonight?"

He looked at her.  His eyes were large and soft.  "Who would do this?"
he said.  "He was a gentle man.  A gentle giant.  "

Then, he was crying again, and Barbara reached over and put her hand on
his hand.  "Take it easy," she said.

He cried for what seemed like a long time, and then the tears
stopped.

"Are you up to answering a few questions for me?"  Barbara asked.

"I'll try."

"This is unrelated to the tragedy today, but I was wondering if Richard
ever said anything to you about a picture he looked at for us.  We had
shown him a picture-pictures of a crowd-and were trying to find out if
he recognized anyone in the picture as someone who had threatened the
bouncer, Donald Krupsek.  To ford out, you know, if someone hated
Krupsek enough to kill him."

Randy looked at her.  Barbara got the feeling he knew something.  It
was now or never.

"I thought Richard knew someone from the way he reacted," Barbara said,
"but he didn't tell us.  It would be very important for us to know, but
if you know-if he said something-I'll understand your not saying
anything."

Randy blinked.  He took a deep breath.

"Richard did tell me he recognized someone, and why he didn't want to
say anything."

"Why was that, Randy?"

"He was a cop.  "

Barbara was confused.  "You mean Krupsek?"

"No, he didn't recognize anyone in the crowd.  But in one of the lines
of cops he saw someone who used to regularly come into the club."

Barbara could not speak.  Her mind was racing.  It was as though there
was a puzzle that you could never solve, and now someone had given you
the missing piece.  It was starting to come together.

She held her breath.  "Did he tell you a name?"

"Yes.  Leo.  He said he was a tall handsome cop with curly red hair."

Something screamed inside Barbara Babalino's head.  A name: Leo.  Leo
McGurk.

With willpower she forced herself to be calm.

"Thank you," she said.  "Thank you very much.  Don't worry about
becoming involved.  That was what Richard was afraid of, wasn't it?"

"You never like to get on the wrong side of a cop," Randy said.

Barbara called Lawless from a phone in one of the offices in the Tenth.
She got Naomi Warren, a civilian employee who worked the switchboard.

He wasn't there but was expected back shortly.

"Is Leo McGurk there?"

"The rookie?"

"Yeah."

"No.  He's off."  "Would you have his address, Naomi?"  "I'll get it
if I can."

A minute later Naomi came back on the line.  "It's 1960 Westchester
Road in the Bronx."

"Thanks.  Will you tell Joe to meet me there as soon as possible?"

"You got it."

CHAPTER 66.

Barbara drove toward the Bronx, and it started to fall into place even
more.

She had a good memory, and she remembered the day she made the
suggestion that the photos of the Krupsek funeral be shown to Richard
Colt.  McGurk was there, and he was asked if he wanted to go down to
the club.  He seemed such a dedicated cop.  But no, he didn't want to
go.  He wasn't feeling well.  Real reason: he had been there and would
have been recognized.

And just the other day, when she suggested that Colt had maybe
recogized someone, she could remember McGurk sitting there within
earshot.  He wasn't looking her way, but he'd heard it.

He was afraid that this time Colt would say something because surely
Colt knew him-and to stop him, stop that, he'd killed him.  Yes. Killed
him and made it look like a gay killing.

More: the killings of the cops themselves.  Krupsek, Weeks.  Another
cop would know where they were going to be, how to track them, how to
kill them.

A chill passed through Barbara.  In her mind's eye she saw the blood of
Donald Krupsek, the blood of Byron Weeks.

And then, the thing she knew so deeply, so well: Leo McGurk had to be
insane, and probably gay.

But why?  Why did he kill Krupsek?  Why Weeks?  Those were the
questions that had no answers.

Her mind searched.

Didn't Lawless tell her-yes, he did-that Leo had two brothers on the
force, that his father was Matthew McGurk, whose nickname was "Steel
Scrotum" and who was an old-time Irish cop with all that meant?  And
who was also Chief of Operations for the Patrol Force?  What could have
happened to Leo McGurk?

1960 Westchester Road was a nice apartment building in a clean, Italian
neighborhood.  It reminded Barbara very much of her own old
neighborhood in Brighton Beach.

She parked across the street to wait for Joe Lawless to show up.

CHAPTER 67.

Bo Colleran, Piccolo, and Edmunton were able to convince Judge Myra
Taplinger of Chula Vista that Morton Strauss was a no-good son of a
bitch as well as a kidnapper, and that not one but three wires should
be placed where they would do the most good.

The judge was not so convinced as to allow the wires to be placed for
more than a week.  If nothing was forthcoming after that, the wires
were to be lifted.

Armed with this, Piccolo contacted Ronni Brilliante and told her to set
up a meeting with Strauss.

"What will I say?"

"I'll tell you later," Piccolo said.

The next day, the meeting was set.  Ronni was to have a soiree at the
Quality Inn the next evening at six o'clock.

"I'll try to get the same room," she told Piccolo.

"What people won't do," Piccolo told Edmunton, "to keep their
reproductive organs."

Ronni got the same room and moved into it at around four o'clock, a
little nervous at the prospect of failing-or succeeding.  Piccolo and
Edmunton were in the room at ten after and had it wired-the transmitter
was secured to the back of the bed's headboard.

"Our thanks to the LAPD for this stuff," Piccolo told Colleran.

Then, all three men proceeded to school Ronni in the art of getting
damaging admissions from someone.

"The idea," Piccolo said, "is never to ask a direct question.  Let the
stuff you want come up as a matter of course.  Okay?"

"Okay.  "

"What we need to have him say," Edmunton said, "is that he was a
conspirator in kidnapping the baby.  If you can get him to say
something about his brother, that would be good too.  "

"How am I going to get him talking about this?  We don't talk about
this."

"Gently complain about the money you got, the risk you had to take."  "
Right," Piccolo said.

"And that you think you deserve more."

"And when the meeting is over," Colleran said, "don't tell him it's all
on tape.  He'll find out soon enough."

"What about me?  You're going to give me a break, right?"

"That's right," Piccolo said.  "That's right."

Strauss arrived promptly at six o'clock, and by ten after the equipment
had affirmed itself as top quality.  It picked up even the most
intimate wet sucking sounds.

"Hey," Colleran said at one point.  "You want to turn that off awhile
or you want to fight me off?"

Piccolo and Edmunton thought Colleran was a scream.

The voices carried beautifully.  Indeed, it sounded like Ronni and
Strauss were in the van with them.

Ronni, they all decided, was good.

"Hey, Mort, I was thinking that I went through an awful lot on that kid
caper.  But I didn't get much money."

"You got ten thousand dollars."

"Yeah, but God, that was kidnapping.  If I ever got caught."

"But you didn't."  "I could have."

"So could I. We all took risks."

"Except the Cuestas.  What risk did they take?"

"They could have been subject to criminal charges.  They took risks,
and they paid."

There was a silence.

"Why are we talking about this now?"  he asked.

In the van you could hear a pin drop.

"Okay, forget it."

"I guess we're too cheap for another."

"You got another?"  "I'm thinking about one.  I could sweeten your end
a bit."  " W ho?"

"I'm not ready to talk about it yet."  Pause.  "Hey, let's stop talking
about this and show me your secret of taking chrome off a trailer
hitch."

Konni did, perhaps in appreciation for Strauss's mouth.

CHAPTER 68.

They played the recording at Colleran's house, and toasted its success
with three Coors.

"You better turn it off," Colleran said, "it's turning me on again. "

Piccolo and Edmunton got a kick out of the way he said that.

They worked their way through a few more beers.  Then a few more.  Then
Piccolo went out of the room for a minute and returned with something.
A picture.

"This is the kid, right?  Luis.  Got a birthmark right here on his neck
that looks like Florida.  There would be no problem making him, if we
could locate him.  Then, once we do that, we could take him-or not take
him.  That's what we have to decide tonight."

"If we don't take him," Edmunton said, "then we run a risk of this
snake beating us somehow.  He'll probably get on the horn right away to
warn the Cuestas.  He might not, but we have to assume he would."

"If we take him," Piccolo said, "I can't see anybody coming after us.
At least not through legal channels.  How they going to come after us
legally-try to recover a baby that was kidnapped?"

"You don't care about the Cuestas as far as prosecution goes?" Colleran
asked.

"Not really.  Just Strausses One and Two, and anyone else involved. "

"Ronni?"

"Let the prosecutor decide," Piccolo said.

"Okay," Colleran said, "getting back to the baby.  If we take him,
what are we going to have to prove he was taken?  The baby will be
gone."

Piccolo took a long drink on the beer, put it down, and lit a
cigarette.

"Look," he said, "this is getting too fucking complicated.  Here's how
I see it.  Number one, we take the kid if we can.  That's the main
thing.  Number two, we deep-fry anyone we can for the crime.  Okay?"

"Okay," Colleran said.  "Let's do it."

"Let's," Edmunton said.

Then they drank for the rest of the night, planning the "how."  Not
once did anyone say that the enterprise could make them ex-cops with
the greatest of ease.  That was understood.

CHAPTER 69.

If Piccolo was familiar with the word ironic, he would have said that
the final plan was just that: ironic.

For three days, going in shifts, Piccolo, Edmunton, and Colleran, when
he was available, watched the Cuesta mansion.

One of those days was rainy, and nothing much happened.  There were
many more cars going into the place than coming out.

But on the two nice days, a station wagon left the premises and stopped
a few miles away in MacArthur Park.

The station wagon was driven by a black woman who looked like a
nursemaid of some sort.  At any rate, on both occasions she had taken a
carriage from the back of the vehicle, and something else: a baby,
which she had deposited in the carriage and proceeded to walk.

If the fourth day was nice-it was a Friday-then the plan they had
conceived would go into effect.  Hopefully, like clockwork.

At 11:30 that morning, Edmunton and Colleran were in position in a van
across the street from the house.

At 12:20 the gates opened electronically and the station wagon
appeared.  It was the nursemaid.

She drove to MacArthur Park.  Edmunton and Colleran followed.

"Keep your fingers crossed," Colleran said.

The woman parked in approximately the same spot as she had the other
days, took out the carriage, put the baby in it, locked the car, and
proceeded to walk the baby.

The three cops had decided on a direct approach.

Edmunton got out of the van and started walking down the same narrow
asphalt path, flanked by grass, as the woman.  He was abreast of her
within a minute.

She glanced up at him as he walked beside her.  She didn't know quite
how to react.

Edmunton said, "Cute baby."

"Yes," the woman said.

He leaned over and looked closer: on the baby's neck was the map of
Florida.  Luis Perez in a baby carnage 3,500 miles from home.

Edmunton turned to the woman.

"Don't get excited," he said, "but I'm going to take the baby because
it's stolen."

"Say what?"  She went faster.  She was surprised and fearful.

"Stop the fucking carriage."

The woman stopped.  Edmunton reached in and gently picked up the baby.
He glanced at the woman.  She seemed on the verge of getting
hysterical.

"Don't yell," Edmunton said.  "Don't fucking cry out.  You tell the
Cuestas that the baby is going back to its natural mother."

Edmunton started to walk away, at any moment expecting the woman to
start screaming.

Once, he turned.  She seemed turned to stone.

He moved quickly, the baby cradled against his chest.  It was as light
as a feather.

He moved faster.  He was getting out without a hassle.  He followed the
path around until he was out of sight behind some trees, then he
started to run the last thirty yards to the van.

Then he was in and Colleran had the car moving out of the parking lot,
taking a route so the woman couldn't stop the van.  In the distance,
they heard a yell.

But they were gone.  Colleran tooled along.  Edmunton put the baby in a
small box between them.  Colleran stole a glance at the baby.  The baby
had curly black hair and enormous, dark black eyes.

"Jeez," he said, "he is one cute little sucker."

Edmunton started to laugh, lightly at first, then more than a
chuckle.

Colleran looked at him.  Edmunton opened his coat.  There was a small
wet spot on his shirt.

Edmunton looked down at Luis Perez.  "Is that the way you thank me, you
little fucker?"

Colleran laughed heartily.

Three blocks later, Colleran pulled the van to the side of the road. He
glanced around, then stripped the plates that had been taped in place,
exposing the real plates.

He went to a phone and tapped out his own home number.

Frank Piccolo picked up on the first ring.

"Hello.  "

"We got him, Frank.  Good luck."

Piccolo hung up.

CHAPTER 70.

Piccolo was in the back of a cab tooling up Wilshire.

Strauss Two, he thought, was an evil scum fucker and must be brought
down.  So was Strauss One, and anybody who would take a fucking baby
from someone.

Now, he knew, he needed just a little luck for the operation to be a
total success.  Just a little luck.

He started to ask, "What if .. ."  and cut himself off.  You couldn't
ask "if" once the operation was going down.  You'd get yourself all
fucked up.  You just hoped that you had luck.  You did your homework,
you gave it your best, you hoped for luck.

He should be nervous now.  He wasn't.  He was alive.  There he was
again, high up on the wire in Madison Square Garden with old man
Wallenda.  "Life is the wire," the old man had once said.  "All else is
waiting."

Today, Piccolo was carrying a .357, which was all Colleran could get
him for the occasion.  But Piccolo doubted he'd have to use it. Strauss
Two was the kind of snake who worked in the dark, stabbing you in the
back.

Ten minutes later he was stepping off the elevator into the offices of
Lawrence, Kerman, and Strauss.

The broad at the reception desk gave him a big smile, a smile meant for
the three-million-dollar man.

"How are you, Mr.  Puelo?"

"Fine.  Is Mr.  Strauss in?"

Just a hint of annoyance crossed her pretty face.  "Let me see.  "

She punched the futuristic console on her big desk, spoke softly into
it.

A half minute later, Strauss's secretary came out.  "Please come in,
Mr.  Puelo."

Piccolo went in.  Strauss came around the desk to shake his hand.

But suddenly, Piccolo had turned and closed the door behind him.  He
held up a cautionary hand, like a traffic cop.

"Just a fucking minute, Morty," he said.  "I got something to tell you.
My name ain't Puelo.  It's Piccolo, and I'm a private eye.  I tracked
you and your scumbag conspirators out here.  "

He stepped into the room and strode to in front of Strauss's desk.
Strauss had to be shook, but you could tell from his eyes that he was
thinking.  He was dangerous.

Piccolo wagged a forefinger.  "I know you kidnapped a kid and sold it
to the Cuestas.  Let me make this clean and simple.  I want two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars in used twenties and fifties, and I want it
by three o'clock tomorrow afternoon.  If I get it, I'll tell the people
who hired me that I couldn't find the kid.  If I don't, I'll make a
call to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California."

"Who hired you?"  Strauss said.  His face was pale, but his bean was
still working.

"That's it," Piccolo said.  "It's your fucking choice.  Good day.  "

"Wait," Strauss said.  But Piccolo was out the door, striding toward
the elevator, and, as if by signal, the elevator opened as soon as he
got to it: he didn't have to break stride and he was in it, the doors
closed, and he was gone out of Strauss's day.

The elevator took Piccolo downward.  Now, only time would tell if
they'd have a little luck.

CHAPTER 71.

Lady luck shone on Piccolo, Edmunton, and Colleran.

As they had devoutly hoped, Strauss Two took one of the logical courses
available to him: He called Strauss One in New York, and thereafter
engaged in an animated conversation about the little psycho private
dick that had shown up, and what were they going to do, and they
tentatively decided on blowing this Piccolo away.  So, in addition to
talking about their roles in the kidnapping, they also were cooking up
a conspiracy to murder.

Piccolo loved it.  Reason: a friend of Colleran's named McGinnis had
put a wire on the telephone block in the equipment room of Strauss
Two's building.  They had the entire conversation on tape.

"We got 'em," Piccolo said, "all of them, and right by the fucking
stones."

They dropped both tapes-the one of Ronni Brilliante and Strauss Two and
Strauss Two with Strauss One-off with the feds, then took off for the
airport.  Only time would tell if their luck would continue to hold.

They had a few brews with Colleran before the plane left.

"Hey, Bo," Piccolo said, "whatever, wherever we are, this New Year's
Eve we raise a toast to this caper, huh?  At midnight.  Midnight your
time, midnight our time.  Two toasts."

"You got it," Colleran said, "if we can afford it."

Then, Piccolo and Edmunton were gone down one of the long passageways
toward the plane.

Colleran was glad they'd only had a few.  Christ, the last thing they
needed was for Piccolo, who insisted on carrying the baby, to drop
him.

They took the red-eye, and it was just dawn when the big 747 touched
down at Kennedy.

They took a cab to Maria Perez's house, with Piccolo first issuing his
customary warning, this time to some Taiwanese driver who reminded him
of a thousand different guys who'd tried to kill him in Nam.

"Hey," he said, "take us straight there, okay?  We're city boys.  "

The sun was up, and it was going to be a beautiful day.

Piccolo, carrying little Luis, and Edmunton, wheezing all the way,
climbed the stairs to Maria Perez's apartment.

They stood for a moment outside the door.  They could hear activity
inside.

Piccolo knocked.

"Que?"  came the voice of Maria Perez.

"It's Piccolo, and Edmunton, the police officers."

Maria Perez opened the door.  She saw her baby and blinked.

Piccolo handed him to her.  "We got him back," he said.

Softly, slowly, she took the little boy in her arms and pulled him
toward her.  It was the most elemental, moving thing Piccolo had ever
seen in his life, except for Wallenda getting back on the wire after he
almost died.

Tears ran down her face.

Piccolo and Edmunton swallowed.

Piccolo smiled his gap-toothed smile.

"Hey, next time don't leave him outside no fu .. . no bodega."

Maria Perez looked at him, then Edmunton.  She kissed Piccolo, then
Edmunton, softly on the lips.  She held her throat.  She could not
talk.

They turned and went down the stairs.  Outside, they walked along the
street in the bright sunshine.  They couldn't talk either.

CHAPTER 72.

Barbara was getting tired of waiting for Lawless.  Where was he?

Maybe, she thought, she could go up there alone to see if McGurk was
there.

No, that would be stupid, and probably dangerous.

But god, where was Joe?

She got out of the car again and went to a corner phone booth.  She
dialed Fort Siberia.  Busy.  She waited a few minutes, dialed it again.
Still busy.

Christ, she thought, walking back toward the car.  He should have been
here by now.  Maybe he never received the message.

Maybe he had become preoccupied with something.  But he should have
known her message was important too.

Barbara did not go back to the car.  Why not, she thought, just go
inside the building?  I don't need to even go near his apartment.  He
probably isn't in anyway.  But I'll just go crazy sitting in the car.

And: what if he was out, right now, stalking another cop?  If he was
out, maybe she should forget Joe and get something on the radio about
Leo.

She angled toward the building.

She pushed her way through a glass door and checked the bells.
McGurk,

4-F.

So innocent-looking.  But he was a mad dog, a mad-dog cop killer she
was sure of it.

So, she thought, she'd go back to the car.

Instead, she rang a random bell and pushed her way into the lobby when
the buzz allowed her to open the door.

The elevator was directly opposite the front door.  Then she saw a
sign: "OUT

OF ORDER.  USE STAIRS."

Great.  She wondered what to do.  If Lawless showed up .. . yes, he
would see her car and know where she was-or at least where she was
headed.

The stairs, broad concrete ones painted gray, were not well lit.
Barbara went up them quickly.

The fourth-floor hallway, long and narrow, was dim, but she could hear
the sound of TVs, of people talking.

If he was in, she'd love to know what he listened to, the little
details of his life that defined the man.

She found 4-F.  She realized her heart was pounding as she pressed her
ear against the door.  She realized he could be looking at her at that
very instant through the peephole in the door.  It was a chilling
thought.

He wasn't.  He was looking at her down the length of the hall.

She saw the movement out of the peripheral vision of her right eye, but
by the time she turned and saw it was him, he was only twenty feet
away.  Her arms were suddenly covered with gooseflesh.

She fought the panic.  She realized he hadn't been following her.  He
had just come up the stairs and was wearing sneakers; that's why she
hadn't heard him.

She wondered about her gun, which was in a belt holster beneath the
jacket she had on.  If she tried and didn't make it... She decided to
bluff it.

He came up and stood three feet from her and looked down.  His face was
smiling, but his eyes were flat, inhuman.

"What are you doing here?"  he said.

"Oh, I was coming to get you.  Joe wanted to see you but couldn't get
through.  Something wrong with your phone?"

He shook his head.

Joe, she thought, where are you?

"Come on in," he said.

Play it out, play it out, she thought.

He used a key to open the lock, then pushed the door open ahead of her.
She was to walk in first.

She did, and for the few moments when he was walking behind her, the
back of her head felt so raw, exposed.

The place, a one-room apartment, was an incredible mess.

There was clothing, used food wrappers, canned goods, books,
magazines-it reminded her of so many teenagers' rooms she had seen,
like something had exploded in the room and then everything had settled
everywhere.

It was such a far cry from his impeccable personal appearance.

She had the feeling she was looking at an indication of what the real
Leo McGurk was like.

She stood among the debris, watched as he went to a table-maybe she
could pull her gun now-and unearthed the phone.  He picked up the
receiver, listened, and replaced it on the cradle.

He looked at her.

She smiled.  It felt like her face was plastic.

He sat on a couch.

"Have a seat," he said.

She sat on a straight-back chair.  He sat among the debris on a couch
that had stuffing coming out of it.

"Why didn't he come himself?"  he asked.

It was all a charade, she thought.  He knew.  He knew she knew.

"I don't know."

He turned his head.  She thought there was something behind him.  There
was.  He pulled it out from beneath debris: a .22, long, with silencer.
It seemed endlessly big.

He pointed it at her.  It had a small, wicked muzzle.

She froze, then felt like crying.  Then she thought of Joe.

Where are you?

She thought of Baumann, the psycho she had faced.  She could not
survive twice.

"You were nice," McGurk said.  And Barbara was aware he was speaking of
her in the past tense.  "I always saw you around the precinct.  You
were good.  You didn't care what anyone was.  I'm sorry."

The barrel tipped up a half inch toward her head.

"Wait!"  she said.  "Wait!  Let me say something."

The idea had struggled through the ooze of fear enveloping her: talk.
Get a psychopath talking.  It was her only chance.

"Don't you know," she said, "that people know I came here?  Joe Lawless
knows.  Turner knows.  The dispatcher knows.  You're going to be found
out.  Why don't you just forget this, turn yourself in, get into
someplace where you can be helped?"  "I don't believe you," he said.

"You don't?  How do you think I got here.  Why do you think I'm here.
Someone told me.  Richard Colt.  You killed him.  His lover told me
Colt spotted you in the photos.  So you killed Colt.  But you didn't
kill his lover.  And if you kill him, who else are you going to kill to
stop it?  Answer me this: if I didn't know you were the killer, why am
I here?"

Leo McGurk blinked.

"You can kill me," she said, "but you can be sure that everyone is
going to find out-and they're going to find out whatever it is you're
trying to hide."

He was wavering.  Oh Jesus, he was wavering.  He did believe her.

"I could help you.  I could help you.  What is it that you're trying to
hide?  That you're gay?  Is that it?  Is that what you're afraid of?
You shouldn't be.  There are plenty of people in this world who are
gay, plenty of great people.

"Or are you trying to hide it from someone else.  Is .. ."

Barbara almost stopped talking, because the change that came over
McGurk's face was startling.  It was a look of fear and pain.  She had
hit home.

The barrel lowered ever so slightly.  But she was aware that she was
talking out of her guts, out of her instinct.  One mistake and he could
still pull the trigger.

She had an idea.  Maybe.

"Is it your father you're afraid of?  Steel Scrotum McGurk?"

A look of what could only be described as abject terror passed across
his face.  Barbara sensed that her next comment could mean life or
death for her.

"Whether you kill me or not, he has to find out.  It's only a matter of
time."

McGurk blinked furiously.

She was in the heart of darkness.

McGurk looked at her; then his eyes flicked away.

"I was always terrified of him," he said softly.

"Why was that?"

"He was always cold.  He hit me and my brothers a lot.  I ..  . all ..
. You know," he said, "in all the years I saw him with my mother, I
never saw him kiss her once."

Barbara was living a Frankenstein movie.  But compassion, very real
compassion surged through the fear.

"That's so sad."

"Yeah.  It was.  She drank herself to death.  Died when I was
thirteen."

His eyes glistened.

"She never wanted me to be anything special.  Just be what I was.  Oh,
I remember so many long, wonderful days she spent with me when my
father .. . being a cop, he didn't come home much, and he was on his
way up."

Tears suddenly welled in his eyes and ran down his face.

"You know what she died of?  You know?  They say it was the bottle.  It
wasn't!  It fucking wasn't.  It was a lack of love!  A lack of love
killed her.  She drank to give herself what that bastard never
could."

He paused, got control of himself.  The barrel had dipped way down.

She let him talk.

"And then, when she died, he told us that we weren't to cry.  I was
thirteen, and my brothers fifteen and sixteen, and we didn't cry.  I
cried alone.  I've never stopped crying.  Isn't that sad?"

Barbara nodded.  Jesus, it was.

"When did you find out you were gay?"  she asked.

"Ten or eleven."

"So you hid it?"

"Yeah, I've spent my whole life being something I'm not, being
something that somebody else wanted me to be.  Another in the line of
steel scrotums."

She almost laughed.

"What happened with Krupsek?"  she asked.

"Very simple.  He was on the door at the Wildfire Club and knew me as
gay for a long time.  I used to go there when I was in the Academy.
Then I was assigned to the Five Three and I was in uniform and so was
he and we met .. and he started to blackmail me.  Used me too.

"Was he gay?"

"Who knows?  But he just liked to hurt people.  I was giving him half
my salary a week or he said he'd tell everyone."

"Why the others?"

"It was part of my plan.  I know how cops work.  I wanted to do
everyone all at once, but I couldn't get to Weeks in time.  I figured
do 'em all together and Lawless-I knew Lawless would catch it-would
look for a pattern.  But I decided to follow it out anyway.  Sweeney
was to be the last."

"Sweeney?"

McGurk looked at her and said nothing.  Barbara hoped the horror she
was feeling wasn't reflected in her face.  Sweeney was dead.

McGurk put the gun on the couch.

"You're right," he said very calmly.  "I have to stop somewhere.  He'll
have to find out.  Have to know.  But it will work out.  Will you help
me?"

"Yes," Barbara said, "I will.  I'll help you."

He picked up the gun by the silencer and handed it to her.

"I feel calm now," he said.  "Calmer than I've ever felt in my life."

Barbara looked at him.

"What do you want me to do?"  he asked.

"Come with me," she said.  She held the gun, but with the barrel
pointed down.

McGurk nodded.  "I better get some toiletries.  I don't think I'm
coming back."

He stood up.

Barbara stood up.

He went into the bathroom.

Maybe, she thought, she should call backup.  Maybe in the next instant
he would change, become homicidal again.

But she doubted it, she-It was as if a bomb had gone off in the
bathroom, but Barbara knew instantly, and horribly, from the terrific
concussive force, exactly what it was.  It was a shotgun.

She found the phone, picked it up, called EMS, hung up, sat down on the
couch, and started to cry.  She could not bring herself to go into the
bathroom.

CHAPTER 73.

George Benton had really gotten to like and admire Theresa Franconi.

In the two days he had spent with her he had marveled at her ability to
enjoy life.  Despite her advanced years she never spoke about there
being no tomorrow.  She always spoke as if all the plans she made for
next year or next month were going to happen.  George was usually
wondering if he would be alive the next day.

And she had space between her and the world.  Here was Terry Franceni-
and after a while that was the only name that fit-and here was the
world.  She enjoyed things, savored them, felt that wonderful space
between her and them.

And George.  George didn't even see things-except when he was on a
case.  He usually was playing his own brand of internal porno picture
starring him and his various maladies and deficiencies.

For moments with her, though, he got outside himself.  As he
accompanied her to shopping, to the park, to other places, they talked
about movies, literature, and she was very interested in police work.

George was actually enjoying himself.

Of course, he was also alert to the possible appearance of Richardson
in one disguise or another.  It vitiated his enjoyment to some
degree.

Lawless had promised an around-the-clock for her the next day.  Now, as
he and Terry walked along the Concourse to her apartment house-he
carrying her bundles-she was talking about, of all things, ants.  It
was fascinating.

George listened, his eyes scanning all the while.

They went into the apartment building and up to the second floor.
Benton had the retaining strap off his belt holster, and he hoped that
if Richardson were in the area he would see this aggressive action and
decide not to strike.  Sure.

They went into the apartment.  Benton relaxed.  He told himself that he
could and would handle Richardson if he showed up.  But when there was
danger, he suspected he would feel differently.

He helped Terry put the groceries away, then went into the bedroom to
hang up his own coat.

He stripped off his coat as he went through the door and his eyes
flicked to the window where the fire escape was.  He saw that the lock
holding the guard shut had been severed.

He stood, puzzled for a moment, and then in the mirror of a chest of
drawers he saw something coming out at him and he knew Richardson or
someone was inside the house.  Inside.  Oh God.

For one crazy millisecond he thought of running.  He started to go for
his gun, and then he was terrified, but this old lady depended on him,
and he managed to scream, "Run!"  before he took the first blow across
the head.  It made him see stars, and then he , saw Richardson without
the disguise, his body coiled in karate fashion, and he was going to
hit him again and he couldn't get to his gun and Benton realized one
thing and one thing only: he would try to stay alive or conscious or
whatever long enough so the old lady could get out of the house.  This
was his moment.  He was not afraid, not really.  He was George Benton,
star of The Short Happy Life of George Benton.  The moment that he
lived with courage.

He tried to fight back.  He took a tremendous kick in the abdomen, and
a smash across his nose-he felt it break-and then he was down and
Richardson, his eyes gleaming, was on him, and a chain was around
Benton's neck and he tried to stop it, to pull those powerful hands
apart, stop the chain that was causing the world to go alternately
black and white, and he knew he was gone and all he could think of now
was that Terry Franconi had gotten out, and could live another day
because of George Benton, and .. .

It was all black, and then the light came on and Benton was aware he
was on the floor, choking, and he turned his head and there was
Richardson next to him, unconscious or dead, blood all over his
forehead, and Benton looked up and there was Terry Franconi, standing
above them, her hands around the narrow part of what looked like a
brass lamp.  "Are you all right?"  she said.  "Are you all right,
George?"

CHAPTER 74.

In the end, Piccolo, Colleran, and Edmunton had good luck.  Lawless
knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in the U.S. Attorney's office
in Los Angeles, and everything was smoothed over, and found to be
perfectly legal.

A good sign of this was that Strauss One turned on Strauss Two.

"The maggots have started eating each other," is the way Piccolo put
it.

On Thanksgiving Day, Piccolo and Edmunton paid a visit to Maria Perez
with some toys and a turkey which, based on its size and the size of
her family, would last to next July.

Barbara finally found out where Joe Lawless was the night she faced
McGurk.  He was out investigating the death of Joe Sweeney.

The full details of the McGurk case-insofar as newspapers ever provide
detailed accounts-were laid out luridly for the public.  It was said
that "Steel Scrotum" McGurk was a steel scrotum all the way.  He
refused to retire, refused to give interviews, and only said one thing:
"He stopped being my son the day he stopped being a man."

If Barbara hadn't understood before, she understood then what Leo
McGurk had gone through.

Theresa Franconi wrote a beautiful five-page letter about Detective
George Benton to the PC, and one day, in front of the entire detective
squad, Lawless read it out loud.

Then everyone went to a bar and got smashed.

Benton had something to look forward to.  He had set some dates to see
Terry again; and, when Lawless had finished reading the letter, he had
said something that Benton knew he would remember all his life: "They
don't come any better, any way you look at it, than George Benton."  He
would always have that, and he would have the letter.

On New Year's Eve, Piccolo and Edmunton, in their apartment in the
Bronx, celebrated New Year's twice.  Once at midnight New York time,
the other three hours later-California time.

The second time they did it they were out to lunch on guinea red, and
they held the glasses toward one another, weaving, and Piccolo said,
"Happy New Year, Bo Colleran.  And Happy New Year, Eddie Edmunton.  And
Happy New Year, Maria Perez.  And many more to come."

"Ditto," said Edmunton.

"And Happy New Year, scum fuckers croaked the parrot.