Лоуренс Блок - A Time to Scatter Stones

“Mr. Lipscomb?”

“Yeah, right. He knew it wasn’t her older brother. And that means he’d been lied to, and tricked, and a hundred bucks wasn’t adequate compensation for that.”

“And you’d matched the hundred, sort of canceling it out.”

“But you know what really did it?”

“The panties?”

“Far as Henry’s concerned, that makes him a pervert. And that’s good, but it’s also not so good.”

“Oh?”

“He’s dangerous,” I said.

“Didn’t we know that?”

“Stealing her soiled panties,” I said, “right out of the hamper, with every chance he’d be observed doing so.”

“Purposely tempting fate?”

“More like too obsessed to hold himself in check. We knew he was dangerous,” I said. “We just didn’t know how dangerous.”

Ages ago, when they swore me in as a NYPD cop, I wore a uniform I’d bought at Jonas Rathburn & Sons, a cop shop around the corner from the old Centre Street headquarters. Over the years I picked up other gear there — handcuffs, a Kevlar vest, a nightstick to replace the one that disappeared one whiskey-soaked evening. Rathburn stayed put when the department relocated at One Police Plaza, which was around the time that I ended my first marriage and my first career, moving from a house in Syosset to a hotel room on West 57th Street, turning in my service revolver and my shield.

It was a gold shield by then — I’d made detective some years before the day when I realized that I was done being a husband, just as I was done being a cop. So I hadn’t worn the blue uniform in a long time. I’d packed it up, along with the gear a detective had no use for, and we stored it in the basement.

I was a few years out of the marriage and out of Syosset when Anita called to tell me a pipe had broken in the basement, and the consequent flooding had soaked my uniform and whatever else was in the carton. What did I want her to do with it?

I was surprised she still had it. Throw it out, I said. All of it? All of it.

So Thursday morning, after a night of running scenarios in my mind, I took a train downtown and found my way to The Police Building, which was the name a developer had fastened on the Beaux Arts building on Centre Street, after he’d converted it for residential use. I walked around the corner to where Rathburn & Sons had always been, and their storefront was now a Starbucks.

Nobody remembered that particular cop shop, including Google. It took me ten or fifteen minutes to walk to One Police Plaza, and I spent most of that time wondering what had led me to assume Rathburn would still be around, doing business in the same old location.

On Madison Street, I spotted a shop with a big poster in the window, Jerry Orbach as Lennie Briscoe. I went in and found where they kept the batons, picked one up, and remembered the comfort mine had provided in my early days in uniform. I’d had a.38 on my hip, a more formidable weapon than any nightstick could possibly be, but I thought of it just for show. The last thing I wanted was to have to yank it out of its holster.

I found one that had a nice balance to it and took it to the counter. The man behind it, who’d shaved his head to hide a bald spot, asked if I was on the job.

“Years ago,” I said, and smiled. “So I’m afraid I’m no longer eligible for the discount.”

“You’re not even eligible to pay full price,” he told me. “Police baton’s classified as a deadly weapon.”

Which meant he couldn’t sell it to anyone but a working police officer. I was trying to make sense out of this when he told me he bet he knew why I wanted it.

“Amateur theater,” he said. “You’re in a play, they’ve got you playing a cop, and since you used to be one it’s good casting. Am I right?”

“That’s it,” I said.

“You rented a uniform at a costume shop, or maybe you can still fit into the one you wore on the job, in which case congratulations. But what you want is one of these, and the law won’t let me sell it to you. That about right?”

“How’d you know?”

“Not because I’m psychic. I won’t say I get this all the time, but you’re not the first person ever came in here looking for a prop. I can help you out. Give me a minute.”

He went in back, came out carrying a nightstick, slapping it gently against his palm. It was a twin to the one I’d picked out, and from his smile I guess my puzzlement must have shown on my face. “Here,” he said, and began to hand it to me, then yanked it back and smacked himself full force on the crown of his hairless head.

Balsa, of course, as he explained when he finally stopped laughing at the look on my face. Perfect for film or theater, looked just like the real thing, and cheap enough to smash one over somebody’s head in every performance or dress rehearsal. Twelve bucks, and an NYPD-approved baton was over a hundred when you added on the sales tax. So how many would I like?

I said I’d have to check first with the director.

You could go online and order a dozen different kinds of ninja shit, blowguns and throwing stars and nunchucks and other things I don’t know the name of. You could walk into a gun show and walk out with an AR-15 and mow down a few dozen schoolkids. In those states with a righteous commitment to the Second Amendment, you could get yourself a mortar and a bazooka and, if you had the place to park it, a fucking cannon.

But if you were in New York City and you couldn’t show NYPD identification, they wouldn’t let you get your hands on an overpriced wooden stick.

I walked around for a few minutes, picked up a cup of coffee at a hole in the wall called Joe-2-Go, sat on a bench in a pocket park long enough to drink it.

It didn’t have to be a nightstick, I decided, or a sap, or anything else that the local authorities didn’t want me to have. What it did have to be was something I could buy that very day, over the counter and for cash.

I used my phone’s MapQuest app to orient me, tossed my Joe-2-Go cup in the trash, and followed the suggested route to the Bowery.

It used to be all flophouses and bars. The bars were dives, but of a different order of magnitude from what nowadays get called dive bars. The term of choice back then was bucket of blood, and it fit.

The flophouses were a warren of cubicles, each just large enough to accommodate a cot. They were separated from one another by partitions, their lower halves wallboard, topped with chicken wire reaching to the ceiling. The cacophony and the odor and the lack of privacy were enough to make real sleep impossible, even for men unaccustomed to quiet or fresh air or a private life. You had to be drunk enough to pass out, and when they woke you for early morning checkout, it didn’t break your heart to get out of there.

I never got down that far, and my personal history is such that I doubt it would ever have happened; I’d have been safely dead of an alcohol-induced seizure before I got all that close to the Bowery. But in various storefronts and church basements I’d heard the stories of men who’d put in their time in those bars and flophouses, or lit fires in trash cans for warmth and warmed themselves more with Night Train or Thunderbird. Some of them got sober and some of them stayed sober, and one who’d reached the early stages of Korsakoff’s syndrome, with swiss-cheese holes in his brain, had somehow wound up managing a 54-bed rehab facility in New Jersey, just outside of Trenton.

The job had taken me in and out of flophouses. That was back in my uniformed days, and I went there with a partner when a desk clerk called the precinct house to report a death. Sometimes the clerk didn’t find the body right away, or delayed making the call, and on such occasions the smell was even worse than the usual flophouse stench. But it was always awful.