Ed Lacy - The Men From the Boys

His eyes flashed surprise as he said, “Are you kidding? What are you telling me, Marty?”

“What is sometimes known as the truth, boy. We have from three to a dozen or more girls working there, with the money filtering up to one of the most respected real-estate outfits in town. All right, I had to take the job, as it was, or no job. Now let's get to Bill Ash. When we were partners we took our share of cushion, nothing big, a gift of a shirt or a hat here, a free supper or a bottle there—you come upon a stick-up and there's a lot of bills on the floor, you pocket a few, in a ...”

“Marty, I know cops are humans, and wear badges not halos.”

“Kid, I'm trying to show you what a trap a cop's job is. The Grover is in Bill's precinct and was paying off the cops before he ever took over. Bill keeps a little hunk of the graft, the rest goes higher up. Here's your capable and decent Bill Ash—and he really is—who gets himself a fat promotion after twenty years of hard work. He knows the Grover is running a house—if he cracks down, the real-estate bigwigs with connections will have him booted out to the sticks before he can reach for his hat. Suppose Bill doesn't take the pay-off, merely shuts his eyes to things? All right, maybe he isn't being your 'good cop' then, but neither is he in the pimp business. But he can't even do that because the pimps would be jittery, never knowing when he would crack down. Of course he could bust the whole thing wide open, expose everybody from the police brass to the real-estate tycoons. In that case, I'd give odds that Bill would be framed, maybe even murdered.”

The scorn in the boy's eyes almost cut me. He said, “My God, Marty, you're sick, crazy sick!”

“Not the way you think. I merely want to show you what you're getting into. Everybody hates a cop, the crooks and the so-called honest citizens. We all have some larceny in us, so at heart we're all anti-law. You're hated and pressured and overworked and underpaid, and no matter how honest you think you are, especially the big brass, you have to play politics in one form or another to keep the job—the graft machine is too well oiled to be stopped by a single cog.”

He didn't say anything; his eyes searched the ceiling as if he didn't know I was there. Then he said, “How can you be so cynical, Marty? It sounds cheap coming from you, if you'll excuse my saying it. You, the most decorated cop on the force. I remember the time you rushed into a room with two gunmen waiting, and disarmed them. It gave me a kick to read the stories in the paper to the kids, tell them that was my dad. Tell me, why did you risk your life so often if what you say is true?”

I grinned, to hide a belch, my mouth filling with the lousy taste. “Lawrence, I did it partly because I was a fool, fell for the phony glory, my name in the paper, the jerks slapping me on the back. Maybe I was stupid-brave and maybe I wasn't such a brave joker—all the cards were marked in my favor. The average punk will rarely shoot a cop. In most cases it's when they don't know the...”

“You forget my... my father—shot down in uniform!”

I shook my head. “I said they rarely shoot, not that they never shoot. A rat will fight when he's cornered. Kid, in my book your dad was a fool. They had a gun in his back when he went for his own gun. Shooting him was almost a reflex action on the part of the hood. And according to regulations, your dad had to go for his gun. They expect you to risk your life when the odds are way against you—on what other job would you take that kind of crap? Jobs where you risk your life, normal risks, sandhog, steeplejack, high construction work, at least they pay you for the risk—here they reward you by letting you pay for your own bullets!”

“Marty, I wish you hadn't come here. I have to say this: you're old, slipping. No matter what you say, you put in many years, the best part of your life, in useful work as a cop. What's happened to you now, I don't know.”

“Lawrence, care to hear about some of the 'useful' work I did as a cop?”

He shut his eyes. “No.”

“Maybe it's what you need. Dot says I'm your ideal. Let me tell you about a few cases 'ideal' had. There's ...”

“I don't want to hear them.”

“Lawrence, remember how interested you always were in any crime case? You'll like these. There's Mrs. DeCosta. I've...”

“I'm not interested.”

“Yes, you are,” I said. “I've been dreaming about Mrs. De-Costa lately—nightmares. I don't know why. One night, at eleven-twenty, we get a call that three men are robbing a grocery store. Bill and I are due to go off duty at midnight, but we have to go over to the store. It hadn't been entered but the door is partly jimmied. We go across the street to this Mrs. DeCosta who phoned in. She was living in the basement of a private house. One of these stocky, healthy-looking blondes, about thirty-five. She was wearing a bathrobe and I remember all the nice creamy white skin of her shoulders.

“She says as she was getting ready for bed she glanced across the street, saw three young guys trying to force the door of the store. Says they ran as soon as our car turned into the block. All right, by now it's almost midnight and I'm stuck on this lousy case. So I'm pretty sore, in a rush. Dot was playing bridge, expected me to call for her at ten after midnight—we didn't like to leave you alone much. One of the troubles of being a cop, never sure when you'll be off, can't make even ordinary plans.”

The kid still had his eyes closed and I wondered if he was sleeping. Then he ran his tongue over his dry lips and I knew he was listening. I told him, “I run out and scout the block. On the corner I come on three wops, although one of them turned out to be a Jew. All a little juiced. In this business one rule you can go by is that nine times out of ten the guy nearest the crime did it. That's common sense. I flashed my badge, took the kids back to the DeCosta apartment for her to identify them. She says it was too dark to make out anybody's face and she doesn't think it's these three because two of the three she saw only had shirts on while all of these guys are wearing jackets. Of course she has to blab this out in front of them and they start smiling.

“By now it's near one and I'm getting no place. The three ginzos of course deny everything, even though one of them has a big screwdriver in his pocket that could be used as a jimmy. Bill even pulls the roper line about he's a witness, not a dick, keeps saying, 'That's them, all right. I'm positive,' but the lice don't admit a thing. All right, three kids tried busting into a store, three kids are found within a block of the place. I bang them in the gut a couple of times—to scare them—when this DeCosta dame gets hysterical and shouts, 'What are you beating them for? I told you I can't identify them!'

“She's making a racket and from a curtained bedroom off the living room I'll be damned if a skinny colored guy in pajamas don't come limping into the living room, walking with canes. It turned out the guy was a spick, but to me they're all black, all dinges. He asks what's going on and the blonde says he's her husband. All right, maybe to your way of thinking it was none of my business, but I was tired and sore, and she had all that nice white bosom.... You see the way things add up, work out? I ain't got time to sit down, work by the book, question these monkeys. I belted one of the ginzos in the gut, flattened him. When the blonde opens her yap I told her to shut up. This crippled guy starts with, 'See here, you can't talk to...'

“He moved one of his canes and I thought he was going to slug me and... Oh, hell that's a crock—I was damn sore at him for laying this fine white stuff so I slapped him. When he fell he did swing at me with a cane and I kicked him in the side. The blonde came at me and I let her have it across the face—what she deserved. The...”

“Marty Bond, cop, judge, brute, and little god!” Lawrence said suddenly, his voice so cold and sharp it made me jump.

“Somebody beat you to the punch tonight, called me a lout. And I only asked for money due me but... All right, kid, I'm not saying aye nor nay at the moment, only telling you what the 'useful' years were like. This DeCosta babe screams at me, 'You thug with a badge!' Told you, been dreaming about that, hearing the words lately, first time in years. To cut this short, the wops get scared and try making a run for it and for a second I'm belting everybody. We never had a chance to pin a thing on them, not even resisting arrest.”

“Are you done?”

“No, I want to give you the complete picture, the full dose. Turns out the spick was an artist and a ship's radio officer who'd been hurt in a wreck. When I kicked him I knocked his spine out of whack. The blonde was a buyer for a department store, a big job. She sues the city for a hundred grand. Downtown had to back me up and we started giving her the works. First she lost her good job when the store found out she was married to a brown boy. It took over a year before the case reached court and we visited her every week, pleading, threatening. We got to her lawyer, threatened her landlord with violations, and he had them move. No papers would give them any publicity except the radical rags. The net result was the case never came up because she had a breakdown and was sent to an institution.”

He opened his eyes, hard eyes. “What's the moral, Marty?” he asked bitterly. “When you see a robbery don't call the police?”

“I don't know what the moral is—I'm only telling you about one Marty Bond, the toughest cop out. The trouble with you, you think police work is like in the movies, clever, smart, and...”

“You're the movie cop, taking a short cut, belting the 'truth' out of everybody! Marty Bond's version of old lady justice, a left to the gut!” His eyes were glaring at me, angry eyes.

“Maybe my version is the right one. You know me—the most decorated cop, the hero of small boys.”

“Why don't you leave me alone?”

“I will. You see, Lawrence, I never thought of myself as a... a... bad guy, not even a nasty joker. But I suppose I was. After the DeCosta mess, Dot wouldn't have anything to do with me. Guess I wasn't her 'ideal' cop any longer. What she didn't understand is, I wasn't punch-happy—it's simply when you're going good you want to keep going at a fast clip. And most times I was right. Usually a person mixed up in a crime, no matter how, usually he's guilty. Take that Rogers-Graham case that got me bounced. I was...”

He tried to turn his head away and couldn't; his eyes filled with pain. “I don't want to hear about it.”

“I want you to hear about it. And I want to talk—makes me feel better. You see, boy, something happened to me a few days ago that set me to thinking about my life, my past.”

“But I know all about that case—you made a mistake.”

“I sure did. Only what you don't know is this: that Rogers bastard claimed I was out to get him. Well, that's the truth. You see he was one of these smart black boys. A young snot working as a delivery boy for a hardware store. Here's what you don't know about the case—about seven months before the mugging, I was called to Central Park West on a purse snatching. At ten in the morning some rich old biddy is on her way to the subway when she's knocked over by a guy in blue denim work pants—that's all she saw—and her purse is taken. She had ninety dollars in it. I got there a few minutes after it happened and there's Rogers, in blue dungarees, coming out of an apartment delivery entrance. I frisk him and he has a wad of seventy dollars on him—gave me some bull about a horse coming in for him. I curled him once and he stopped talking and I booked him. The biddy couldn't say if it was a white or colored guy who knocked her over, but she was sure of one lousy thing, the time—ten o'clock on the nose. So ...”

“Please, Marty, I don't...”

“Shut up, and listen! You always liked to hear crime cases. This snotty Rogers don't deny anything but when he's arraigned in night court he calls the wife of a big magazine publisher who swears Rogers came up with a delivery and was repairing her baby carriage from nine-thirty till ten-fifteen. She's positive about the time because she had an appointment with the baby doctor at eleven and kept telling Rogers to hurry. The wise guy couldn't tell me that, made me look like a fool. The judge bawls me out, to make an impression on the publisher, and I told Rogers I'd get him. Months later when the guy was mugged and killed in the park, I went right over to the hardware store, found Rogers was out on a delivery near the park. I worked a confession out of him before we reached the station house, and even the one witness backed me up—all colored look alike. I got a tough break when they picked up Graham a year later and he started confessing to everything—including this killing. Papers played it up big and you know the rest—the department gave me a break, retired me fast. But I still think Rogers had something to do with the...”

His eyes almost popped. “Marty, please, please—shut up!”

“I haven't even told you about some of my other cases, the...”

He yelled, or maybe it was a sort of scream. A nurse came rushing in, along with the cop on duty. Lawrence said, “Get him out of here!”

The cop grabbed my arm and I jerked it away, walked out of the room. The cop followed me, asking, “What you trying to do?”

“What are you going to do about it?” Suddenly I felt too tired to care. There was a funky taste in my mouth and I went over to the water fountain, then hit the sidewalk.

Along with a breath of cool air I got this sure feeling I was being tailed as I walked down Seventh Avenue. I stopped for a couple of hamburgers, some Java, and a slice of watermelon. The taste of the onions on the hamburgers stayed with me as I rode back to the Grover.

As I came in, Kenny the bellhop called me over, said, “Been waiting for you, Marty. Some guy in shorts and a knapsack, one of them health nuts, registered this afternoon. Two more clowns in shorts went up to visit him, walked up— that was several hours ago.”

Dewey came over. “They're in 419. Registered as a single.”

“All right, I'll go up.”

I knocked on 419 and didn't get any answer, so I used my pass key and almost stumbled over two jokers sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags.

They were all kids, under twenty, and the one on the bed, a crew-cut blond, said, “What is this? My friends are merely resting and...”

“Cut it, chum. You got this room as a single for two and a half. Your friends want to rest, let them register, or pay another two and a half each.”

The three kids were blushing and finally the one on the bed said, “Look, mister, we're hosteling, and we haven't much money. It's only one night. Can't you give us a break?”