Lawrence Block - Time to Murder and Create

I went downstairs for breakfast, but couldn’t manage more than a cup of coffee and a piece of toast. I bought a pack of cigarettes out of the machine and smoked three of them with my coffee. They were the first I’d had in almost two months, and I couldn’t have gotten a better hit if I’d punched them right into a vein. They made me dizzy but in a nice way. After I’d finished the three, I left the pack on the table and went outside.

I went down to Centre Street and found my way to the Auto Squad room. A pink-cheeked kid who looked to be fresh out of John Jay asked if he could help me. There were half a dozen cops in the room, and I didn’t recognize any of them. I asked if Ray Landauer was around.

“Retired a few months ago,” he said. To one of the others he called, “Hey, Jerry, when did Ray retire anyway?”

“Musta been October.”

He turned to me. “Ray retired in October,” he said. “Can I help you?”

“It was personal,” I said.

“I can find his address if you want to give me a minute.”

I told him it wasn’t important. It surprised me that Ray had packed it in. He didn’t seem old enough to retire. But he was older than me, come to think of it, and I had had fifteen years on the force and had been off it for more than five, so that made me retirement age myself.

Maybe the kid would have given me a peek at the hot-car sheet. But I would have had to tell him who I was and go through a lot of bullshit that wouldn’t be necessary with someone I knew. So I left the building and started walking toward the subway. When an empty cab came along, I changed my mind and grabbed it. I told the driver I wanted the Sixth Precinct.

He didn’t know where it was. A few years ago, if you wanted to drive a cab you had to be able to name the nearest hospital or police station or firehouse from any point in the city. I don’t know when they dropped the test, but now all you have to do is be alive.

I told him it was on West Tenth, and he got there without too much trouble. I found Eddie Koehler in his office. He was reading something in the News , and it wasn’t making him happy.

“Fucking Special Prosecutor,” he said. “What’s a guy like this accomplish except aggravate people?”

“He gets his name in the papers a lot.”

“Yeah. Figure he wants to be governor?”

I thought of Huysendahl. “Everybody wants to be governor.”

“That’s the fucking truth. Why do you figure that is?”

“You’re asking the wrong person, Eddie. I can’t figure out why anybody wants to be anything.”

His cool eyes appraised me. “Shit, you always wanted to be a cop.”

“Since I was a kid. I never wanted to be anything else, as far back as I can remember.”

“I was the same way. Always wanted to carry a badge. I wonder why. Sometimes I think it was how we were brought up, the cop on the corner, everybody respecting him. And the movies we saw as a kid. The cops were the good guys.”

“I don’t know. They always shot Cagney in the last reel.”

“Yeah, but the fucker had it coming. You’d watch and you’d be crazy about Cagney but you wanted him to buy the farm at the end. He couldn’t fucking get away with it. Sit down, Matt. I don’t see you much lately. You want some coffee?”

I shook my head but I sat down. He took a dead cigar from his ashtray and put a match to it. I took two tens and a five from my wallet and put them on his desk.

“I just earned a hat?”

“You will in a minute.”

“Just so the Special Prosecutor don’t get wind of it.”

“You don’t have anything to worry about, do you?”

“Who knows? You get a maniac like that and everybody’s got something to worry about.” He folded the bills and put them in his shirt pocket. “What can I do for you?”

I got out the slip of paper I’d written on before going to bed. “I’ve got part of a license number,” I said.

“Don’t you know anybody at Twenty-sixth Street?”

That was where the Motor Vehicle people had their offices. I said, “I do, but it’s a Jersey plate. I’m guessing the car was stolen and that you can turn it up on the G.T.A. sheet. The three letters are either LKJ or LJK. I only got a piece of the three numbers. There’s a nine and a four, possibly a nine and two fours, but I don’t even know the order.”

“That should be plenty, if it’s on the sheet. All this towing, sometimes people don’t report thefts. They just assume we towed it, and they don’t go down to the pound if they don’t happen to have the fifty bucks, and then it turns out it was stolen. Or by then the thief dumped it and we did tow it away, and they wind up paying for a tow, but not from where they parked it. Hang on, I’ll get the sheet.”

He left his cigar in the ashtray, and it was out again by the time he got back. “Grand Theft Auto,” he said. “Give me those letters again.”

“LKJ or LJK.”

“Uh-huh. You got a make and model on it?”

“Nineteen forty-nine Kaiser-Frazer.”

“Huh?”

“Late-model sedan, dark. That’s about as much as I got. They all look about the same.”

“Yeah. Nothing on the main sheet. Let’s see what came in last night. Oh, hello, LJK nine one four.”

“That sounds like it.”

“Seventy-two Impala two-door, dark green.”

“I didn’t count the doors, but that’s got to be it.”

“Belongs to a Mrs. William Raiken from Upper Montclair. She a friend of yours?”

“I don’t think so. When did she report it?”

“Let’s see. Two in the morning, it says here.”

I had left Armstrong’s around twelve thirty, so Mrs. Raiken hadn’t missed her car right away. They could have put it back and she never would have known it was gone.

“Where did it come from, Eddie?”

“Upper Montclair, I suppose.”

“I mean where did she have it parked when they swiped it?”

“Oh.” He had closed the list; now he flipped it open to the last page. “Broadway and a Hundred Fourteenth. Hey, that leads to an interesting question.”

It damn well did, but how did he know that? I asked him what question it led to.

“What was Mrs. Raiken doing on Upper Broadway at two in the morning? And did Mr. Raiken know about it?”

“You’ve got a dirty mind.”

“I shoulda been a Special Prosecutor. What’s Mrs. Raiken got to do with your missing husband?”

I looked blank, then remembered the case I’d invented to explain my interest in Spinner’s corpse. “Oh,” I said. “Nothing. I wound up telling his wife to forget it. I got a couple days’ work out of it.”

“Uh-huh. Who took the car and what did they do with it last night?”

“Destroyed public property.”

“Huh?”

“They knocked over a parking meter on Ninth Avenue, then got the hell away in a hurry.”

“And you just happened to be there, and so you just happened to catch the license number, and naturally you figured the car was stolen but you wanted to check because you’re a public-spirited citizen.”

“That’s close.”

“It’s crap. Sit down, Matt. What are you into that I oughta know about?”

“Nothing.”

“How does a stolen car tie into Spinner Jablon?”

“Spinner? Oh, the guy they took out of the river. No connection.”

“Because you were just looking for this woman’s husband.” I saw my slip then, but waited to see if he’d caught it, and he had. “It was his girlfriend looking for him last time I heard it. You’re being awful cute with me, Matt.”

I didn’t say anything. He picked his cigar out of the ashtray and studied it, then leaned over and dropped it in his wastebasket. He straightened up and looked at me, then away, then at me again.