Stuart Kaminsky - The Fala Factor

“Been making friends in the squadroom again?” Seidman said, sitting back against the edge of his desk in a corner. There were two small fruit crates on top of the desk. One had once been filled with Napa Sweetheart artichokes and was now piled high with papers, notes, and assorted junk.

“Early spring cleaning?” I asked, nodding at the desk.

“Moving day,” he answered, pushing away from the desk and starting forward. I followed him.

“How’s the tooth?” I said as we angled past the semiclear space near the filthy windows that tried but failed to keep out all of the sunlight. Seidman’s right cheek was definitely puffy.

“The man,” Seidman said over his shoulder, “is a butcher, an incompetent unclean quack.”

“And those are Shelly’s good traits,” I said as he opened the door marked LT. PHILIP PEVSNER.

“You’re a class act, Toby,” Seidman said emotionlessly as I moved past him. Then he whispered, “Be careful, Phil’s in a good mood.”

I stepped in and Seidman stepped out, closing the door behind me but not before I caught a glimpse of his hand reaching for his cheek. Phil was standing behind his small desk in the office, which was about the same size as my own. His bulky back was to me. He was in his rumpled gray suit looking out the grim window at the blank wall. A cup of coffee was in his hand. He didn’t turn when the door closed but I caught a movement of the shoulders that led me to believe that he wasn’t lost in some form of meditation.

“Happy birthday,” I said, resisting the temptation to sit in the chair across from his desk. I’d been trapped in that chair more than once and wound up with books in my face, a kick in the leg that led to orthopedic therapy, and a variety of lesser but equally interesting injuries, each of which was good enough for at least a fifteen-yard penalty.

Phil grunted and took another sip of coffee. He was just too fascinated by that brick wall to turn around. I couldn’t blame him. More than ten years of looking at it could not dim the fascination of its potential mysteries.

“What are you looking at?” I heard myself say, knowing that it was exactly what I shouldn’t say, at least what I shouldn’t say unless I wanted my brother to turn in murderous rage, which is probably what I did want. Old habits die hard. I had once said that to my friend Jeremy Butler. He had said, “Old habits never die. They are only repressed and come back to haunt us in disguise.” So, I had decided it was better to make friends with my bad habits than to hide them away. The result had been a lost marriage, a bad back, no money in the bank, a diet that would destroy the average Russian soldier, a brother whose fists clenched when I was within smelling range, and a few interesting encounters.

Phil did not turn around murderously. He didn’t turn around at all but answered calmly, “You know how old I’ll be at the end of this week?”

“Fifty,” I said, leaning back against the wall as far from him as I could get.

“Fifty,” he agreed, taking another sip. “Half a century. And you’re only a few years behind.”

“Physically,” I agreed.

“Physically you’re over the century mark,” he grunted. “How many times you been shot?”

“Three,” I said. “And you?”

“Four, counting the war,” he answered.

“Well,” I sighed, “it’s been nice talking about the good old days, but I’ve got a client, and some groceries to pick up. I’ll needle you once or twice about Ruth and the boys. You throw something at me, tell me what you want, and I’ll be going.”

That should have gotten him, but it didn’t. What was worse was that he turned around with a sad near-smile on his face and his scarred sausage fingers engulfing his cup. His hair was steel gray and cut short as always. His cop gut hung over his belt and his tie was loose around the collar of his size-sixteen-and-a-half neck.

“I got the word Monday,” Phil said, looking down at the dregs in his cup and shaking it around a little. “I made captain. I’m moving down the hall this afternoon.”

Four wisecracks came like shadows into my mind but I let them keep going and said, “That’s great Phil. You deserve it.”

Phil nodded in agreement. “I paid for it,” he said. “I paid.”

And so, I thought, did a stadium-load of criminals and people who just got in Phil’s way. For the first ten years of being a cop, Phil had tried to single-handedly and double-footedly smash every lawbreaker unlucky enough to come within his smell. He kicked, bent, broke, twisted bodies and the law, and gained a reputation for violence I could have told Jimmy Fiddler about when I was ten. The second ten years, after he made lieutenant, had been like the first decade but sour. Crime hadn’t stopped. It had gotten bigger and worse. If Phil had paid attention to the books our old man had given him from time to time, he would have known all this from Jaubert or the cop in Crime and Punishment , but Phil was a dreamer with a pencil-thin, overworked wife, three kids, one of whom was sick most of the time, and a mortgage.

“Seidman’s moving in here,” he went on. “He’s up for lieutenant next month. Your pal Cawelti might move up too.”

“That will make me feel safer at nights,” I said.

“Enough shit,” Phil said, putting down his coffee cup and pulling his tie off. “I’m never going higher than captain. There’s no place higher for me to go. So, no more damned ties. No more fooling around.”

“You’ve been fooling around all these years?” I said, looking into a grin I didn’t like, a grin that made me feel a twinge of sympathy for the unknown offender who next came within the grasp of my brother.

“Eleanor Roosevelt,” he said, throwing the tie on the desk. I think it was a tie I had once given him, picked up as a partial payment from Hy of Hy’s Clothes For Him for finding Hy’s nephew, who had departed with Hy’s weekly cashbox and was spending it freely in a San Bernardino bar when I found him. Hy had a bad habit of losing his relatives and a worse habit of paying me off in unwanted clothes when I found them.

“Eleanor Roosevelt,” I repeated sagely.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Phil said, leaning forward, his fists on the desk. The pose was decidedly simian, I noted, an observation I managed to keep from sharing with him.

“Seidman was following her this morning,” he went on. “That’s what he was doing in that nearsighted geek’s office.”

“I’ll tell Shelly you send him your best,” I said sincerely.

Phil didn’t answer. He just stared at me with brown, wet eyes, his lower lip pushing out.

“The Secret Service doesn’t tell us anything. The FBI doesn’t tell us anything,” he continued. “It came to us from the mayor’s office, straight in here. I’m responsible. I’m on the line. I don’t think they can take captain away from me, but they can make me the captain of canned shit if this gets screwed up.”

“Well put,” I said.

“So,” he said, evenly bouncing his fists on the desk, “I’m going to ask you some questions. You are going to answer the questions. You are not going to play games because you know what I can do to people who play games. You remember Italian Mack?”

I didn’t want to remember what Phil had done to Italian Mack. What he had done to Italian Mack had probably kept him a lieutenant for an extra three years.

“Ask,” I said, back to the wall.

“What the hell is the president’s wife doing coming to your office?”

I couldn’t stop it. It came out of the little kid who lives inside me and doesn’t give a final damn about my bruised and broken body. “Looking for campaign contributions from leading citizens,” I said. But I overcame the kid and before Phil could get out from behind the desk. I soothed, “Wait, wait, hold on. She had a job for me.”