Lawrence Block: In the Midst of Death

Was it always that way? It seemed to me that it wasn't. There were always cops who took, some who took a little and some who took a lot, some who didn't say no when easy money came their way, others who actually went out and hustled for it. But there were also things that nobody ever did. Nobody took murder money, and nobody took narcotics money.

But things do change.

"So you just got sick of it," I said.

"That's right. And you're the last person I should have to explain it to."

"I didn't leave the force because of corruption."

"Oh? My mistake."

I stood up and walked over to where he'd left the bourbon bottle. Ifreshened my drink and drank off half of it. Still on my feet I said, "Corruption never bothered me much. It put a lot of food on my family's table." I was talking as much to myself as to Broadfield. He didn't really care why I left the force any more than I cared whether he knew the right reason or not. "I took what came my way. I didn't walk around with my hand out and I never let a man buy his way out of something I considered a serious crime, but there was never a week when we lived on what the city paid me." I drained my glass. "You take plenty. The city didn't buy that suit."

"No question."The grin again. I didn't like that grin much. "I took plenty, Matt. No argument. But we all have certain lines we draw, right? Why did you quit, anyway?"

"I didn't like the hours."

"Seriously."

"That's serious enough."

It was as much as I felt like telling him. For all I knew he already had the whole story, or whatever the back-fence version of it sounded like these days.

What happened was simple enough. A few years back I was having a few drinks in a bar in Washington Heights. I was off duty and entitled to drink if I felt like it, and the bar was one where cops could drink on the arm, which may have constituted police corruption but which had never given me a sleepless night.

Then a couple of punks held up the place and shot the bartender dead on their way out. I chased them down the street and emptied my service revolver at them, and I killed one of the bastards and crippled the other, but one bullet didn't go where it was supposed to. It ricocheted off something or other and into the eye of a seven-year-old girl named Estrellita Rivera, and on through the eye and into the brain, and Estrellita Rivera died and so did a large part of me.

There was a departmental investigation which ended with me being completely exonerated and even awarded a commendation, and a little while after that I resigned from the force and separated from Anita and moved to my hotel on Fifty-seventh Street. I don't know how it all fits together, or if it all fits together, but what it seemed to add up to was that I hadn't enjoyed being a cop anymore. But none of this was any of Jerry Broadfield's business, and he wasn't going to hear it from me.

So I said, "I don't really know what I can do for you."

"You can do more than I can. You're not stuck in this lousy apartment."

"Who brings you your food?"

"My food? Oh. I been getting out for a bite and like that. But not much and not often. And I'm careful that nobody's watching when I leave the building or come back into it."

"Sooner or later somebody's going to tag you."

"Hell, I know that." He lit another cigarette. The gold Dunhill was just a flat sliver of metal, lost in his large hand. "I'm just trying to buy myself a couple of days," he said. "That's about all. She splashed herself all over the papers yesterday. I been here since then. I figure I can last the week if I get lucky, a quiet neighborhood like this. By then maybe you can pinch her fuse."

"Or maybe I can't do a thing."

"Will you try, Matt?"

I didn't really want to. I was running low on money, but that didn't bother me too much. It was the beginning of the month and my rent was paid through the end of the month and I had enough cash on hand to keep me in bourbon and coffee, with a little left over for luxuries like food.

I didn't like the big cocky son of a bitch. But that didn't get in the way. As a matter of fact, I generally prefer to work for men I neither like nor respect. It pains me less to give them poor value.

So it didn't matter that I didn't like Broadfield. Or that I didn't believe that more than 20 percent of what he had told me was the truth. And I wasn't even sure which 20 percent to believe.

That last may have been what made my decision for me. Because I evidently wanted to find out what was true and what was false about Jerome Broadfield. And why he had wound up in bed with Abner Prejanian, and just where Portia Carr fit into the picture, and who was setting him up, and how and why. I don't know why I wanted to know all this, but evidently I did.

"Okay," I said.

"You'll take a shot at it?"

I nodded.

"You'll want some money."

I nodded again.

"How much?"

I never know how to set a fee. It didn't sound as though it would take too much time — I'd either find a way to help him or I wouldn't, and either way I'd know soon enough. But I didn't want to price myself cheap. Because I didn't like him. Because he was slick and he wore expensive clothes and he lit his cigarettes with a gold Dunhill.

"Five hundred dollars."

He thought it seemed pretty steep. I told him he could find somebody else if he wanted. He was quick to assure me he hadn't meant anything of the sort, and he took a wallet from his inside breast pocket and counted out twenties and fifties. There was still a lot left in the wallet after he'd piled five hundred dollars on the table in front of him.

"Hope you don't mind cash," he said.

I told him cash was fine.

"Not too many people mind," he said, and he gave me the grin again. I just sat there for a minute or two looking at him. Then I leaned over and picked up the money.

Its official name is the Manhattan House of Detention for Men, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone call it that. Everybody calls it the Tombs. I don't know why. But the name somehow fits the washed-out, bottomed-out, burned-out feeling of the structure and its inhabitants.

It's on White Street at Centre, conveniently located near Police Headquarters and the Criminal Courts Building. Every once in a while it gets into the papers and the television news because there's a riot there. Then the citizenry is treated to a report on the appalling conditions, and a lot of good people sign petitions, and someone appoints an investigative commission, and a lot of politicians call press conferences, and the guards ask for a pay increase, and after a few weeks it all blows over.

I don't suppose it's much worse than most urban jails. The suicide rate is high, but that's in part a result of the propensity of Puerto Rican males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to hang themselves in their cells for no particular reason — unless you call being Puerto Rican and in a cell adequate reason to kill yourself. Blacks and whites in that age group and those circumstances also kill themselves, but the PRs have a much higher rate, and New York has more of them than most cities.

Another thing that boosts the rate is that the guards at the Tombs wouldn't lose any sleep if every Puerto Rican in America wound up swinging from the light fixtures.

I got to the Tombs around ten-thirty after spending a few hours not getting back to sleep and not coming entirely awake either. I'd grabbed some breakfast and read the Times and the News without learning anything very exciting about Broadfield or the girl he was supposed to have killed. The News at least had the story, and of course they'd given it the headline and a big splash on page three. Portia Carr had not been strangled if I was to believe the newspaper; instead someone had brained her with something heavy and then stuck her in the heart with something sharp.