Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

Karp knew it was a rhetorical question, but he said, "I don't know."

She looked up at him. "Yeah, neither do I. She, I mean the social worker, Mrs. Ruffino, she said it's the unconscious. When you have kids, you take all the negative crap you haven't dealt with in your life and put it into them, and then they go and do the same to their kids. We don't like to deal with the dark stuff. We want to be nice, and we want our kids to be nice. But we're not nice, or not all nice, like we think we are. And we lay it on our spouses, too, that shadow. I can feel that Cooley stuff working in me, too. That need to be totally, like, upright, clean, that outrage at the bad guys. I don't know if I follow all of it, but it's a point of view." She laughed, that same harsh sound. "It's not the kind of thing we talked about when I was growing up."

"Me neither," said Karp. "But back to Firmo. Brendan didn't get him either, did he?"

"No. He had an informant. He was working him for nearly a year…"

"This was Cisco Lomax?"

"I didn't know his name," she said quickly. "I wasn't privy to the details. I mean this was incredibly secret. He didn't even register this guy as a CI because he thought that Firmo had some cops on the payroll, which was how Ray's case got wrecked back then. Maybe he thought I was working for Firmo, too, I don't know. He was a little nuts on the subject. But I heard him talking to Ray about it. My guy, he called him, just 'my guy.' They set up this scam, some big shipment of stolen gold watches, diamond watches. Brendan was really out on a limb with the department on it. I think Ray was backing him on it, or they never would have let him take it on. It was one of those things like the job does. If it works, great; if not, you're shafted. He couldn't sleep the week before it went down, hardly ate at all. And what happened was his guy screwed him on it. I don't have the details, but I got the impression that this informant leaked the scam to Firmo's people, and they pulled a switch at the place where Brendan expected to catch Firmo with the hot watches. Firmo didn't show, and when Brendan opened the package, the watches in it were cheap copies. The real ones were gone."

There was some more after that, and they listened. She made some coffee and they drank it. Guma and Connie talked about people they knew, the family. They heard the hiss of a bus stopping down the street, and soon after that a blond kid rushed in, a little older than the one in the picture over the mantel. He stopped short and gave the two men a hard look, then went over and stood next to his mother, who rose and put an arm around him. Karp and Guma stood, too, and made their good-byes. Connie Cooley came to the door with them.

"Nothing is going to happen to Brendan, is it?"

"I don't know, Connie," said Karp. "I'll be honest with you, like you just were with us. I think he broke the law, but I don't have anything yet I can make the case with. I may never have."

"But… if it came out, he'd be through in the cops, wouldn't he? They'd make him leave."

"Yeah, that's probably true." Karp said it because that's what she wanted to hear. That's why she had agreed to talk with them.

Back in the white limo, Guma cracked another beer and said, "Poor kid, huh?"

"Yeah, a sad story. You marry someone and they change."

"Or they don't, which is probably worse, as my second wife never got tired of pointing out. Anyway, it sort of clears up why Cooley did what he did."

"To an extent. Lomax was clearly his rat. He thought he'd turned him, but Firmo was playing Cooley for a sucker, with Lomax's help! Cooley saw him on the street that night, took off after him, and blew him up. That's clear. Probably he's killing these homeless guys to cover his ass on that."

Guma knotted his brow. "Killing…? What, you think Cooley is the bum slasher?"

"Some of the later vics, anyway. I got my guy down at the cops checking out if any of the people who died, the vics, had ties to Firmo's organization, like this kid Ramsey did, the one Marshak shot. What I think happened was there was a nut going around killing homeless, and after Cooley shot Lomax, he had to get rid of anyone who knew about his connection to Lomax, so he adopted the nut's MO. What's a few bums more or less? It fits."

"It might," said Guma, "but right now you can't even show the connection between Lomax and Cooley. If you're right that Lomax was the snitch there, you got no one to testify. The only people who knew about it are Firmo, obviously, and maybe Cooley's partner, neither of whom are going to be witnesses for you."

"There's the Canman."

"That's the bum he's been looking for, the one Lucy knows."

"Yeah, the first time she told me about Cooley looking for him, the thought crossed my mind that he might have something to do with the homeless murders."

"Why the hell would you think that?"

"I don't know. Just a vagrant thought. I knew he'd assassinated one lowlife already, and I knew he wasn't assigned to the bum-slasher task force. Why would he be looking so hard for the one homeless the cops were most interested in as a suspect? Why would he want to rough up people who the regular task-force cops just talked to? I mean it's not characteristic of Cooley. He's got absolutely no history of brutality, as you found out yourself. But now we know a little more about Brendan Cooley. We know he's a little nuts about being the perfect cop. We know his brother died protecting a snitch, and that made him change his life, become a different person. He develops a relationship with a snitch of his own, but this particular snitch betrays him. Cooley goes crazy and kills Lomax. Now he has to cover it up or his whole life is going to collapse. He takes out the homeless guys who knew the story. Maybe only one is left, Canman. According to Lucy, the Canman's a pretty smart guy. He runs all over the city with a cart full of cans, which could make him a perfect courier and stasher for a theft-and-fencing ring. We know about the connect between Cooley, Firmo, and Lomax now. What if there's one between Lomax, Cooley, and Canman? Now Cooley catches a break because the cops have Canman as a suspect in the slashings. Cooley finds the guy, and it's heroic cop shoots and kills bum slasher, case cleared and closed."

Guma rubbed his jaw and snorted. "Oh, that's a stretch."

"Maybe. But Cooley's going out of his way to find this guy, and he seems to have started just after he shot Lomax. That's significant. Maybe finding and whacking Canman is a twofer for him. He shuts up the last witness to the fact he knew Lomax and clears the other killings he's done. In any case, I'd sure as hell like to find Canman before Cooley does."

"How are you going to do that without using the cops, or cranking up Keegan? Because I can tell you right now, the Goom is not going down those tunnels looking."

"Oh, I'll think of something." Karp reached for the telephone.

Lucy's fingers snapped down on the keys, and the words snaked across the screen. Ten past three in the morning and she was pulling an all-nighter. She had heard the phrase often enough but had never actually done one herself until now. Pulling an all-nighter, a deed dense with scholastic virtue, and she felt good about it, an unexpected attainment of the new her. She was writing an essay in French on the subject of Paul Claudel's Cinq Grandes Odes. Tran had suggested the theme, somewhat ironically, as being suitable for a Catholic schoolgirl. He had, in fact, known Claudel in Paris in the late forties, if known, as he said, was not too strong a word for the relationship between a Vietnamese student busboy and a literary lion. Lucy liked the poems anyway, full as they were of homages to the glories of creation and expressions of longing for God. She loved the line about the girl in the white palace who felt no regret for home but was like a little tiger ready to spring, and whose whole heart was lifted by love and by the great force of laughter. One of the great advantages of fluency is that one has perfect access to poetry in the original. She had not thought about this much before, not being, she had thought, the kind of person who liked things that other people demanded she read, but she had to admit she had changed her mind about this. She had, almost without knowing it, become an educable person. Not quite the little tiger girl yet, and she did regret her home, but she could now see that she could become someone like that. She could be open to joy.