Donald Westlake - Cops and Robbers

But I could understand why Joe hadn’t been able to stop himself from telling at least one other person about it, and I was kind of flattered I’d been the one he’d picked. I mean, we’d been friends for years, we lived next door to each other, we worked out of the same precinct, but when a guy trusts you with a secret that could put him away for maybe twenty years you know you’ve got a friend.

And a pretty wild-ass friend at that. Imagine going into a liquor store, in uniform , and pulling out a gun and just taking everything in the cash register! And he had to get away with it because who would believe a robber in a policeman’s uniform was really a policeman?

While I meditated about Joe’s Great Liquor Store Robbery, Ed drove directly over to Central Park West and turned south toward the address we wanted. He didn’t have the siren on; where we were going, the crime had already been committed and the criminals had already gotten away, so there wasn’t any sense of urgency. They were reporting the robbery because their insurance required it, and we were making a house call because they were rich.

I love Central Park West. On the one side there’s the park, green and rolling, and on the other side the apartment buildings full of rich people, rolling in green. The East Side has become more fashionable in the last few years, as the slums of Harlem have crowded down from the north and the Puerto Rican slum of Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues has crowded over from the west, but there’s still plenty of wealth to be found on Central Park West, particularly toward the southern end.

We parked in front of the address. It had a canopy and a doorman, both of which I liked. We went inside, and going up in the elevator I said, “You do the talking, okay?”

I’d already told Ed I was under the weather, so he just said, “Sure.”

It was a very expensive apartment we were headed for, on a high floor. The woman herself let us in, opening the door as though she weren’t used to that kind of manual labor. She was about forty-five, and holding time away with every pill and diet and exercise she could find. She looked expensive but old, like her apartment.

She took us into the living room, but didn’t suggest we sit down. It was a beautiful room, all golden and brown, with high windows overlooking the park. An air-conditioner hummed, and the sun shone through the windows, and you could almost hear the buzz of lazy insects. You get the idea; everything sun-dappled and rich and comfortable and beautiful and easy. It was just a great room to be in.

Ed did the talking for both of us, while I wandered around the room, digging how good it felt to be there. She had knickknacks and whatnots all over the place, in marble and onyx and different kinds of wood, and some in chrome or glass or green stone, and every one of them was just a pleasure to be with.

Over by the window, Ed and the woman were talking, their voices seeming to be muffled by the sunlight, muted and indistinct, like voices in another room when you’re sick in bed in the daytime. From time to time I’d tune in on what they were saying, but I just couldn’t build up any interest. It was the room I cared about, I didn’t give a shit about the two spades that had busted in here.

At one point, I heard Ed say, “And they came in through the service entrance?”

“Yes,” she said. She had a voice like a prune, very offensive. “They struck my maid,” she said. “They cut the inside of her mouth, I sent her downstairs to my doctor. I could have her sent back up if you need a statement.”

“Maybe later,” Ed said.

“I can’t think why they struck her,” she said. “She is black, after all.”

Ed said, “Then they came in here, is that it?”

“No,” she said, “they never came in here at all, thank goodness. I have some rather valuable things in here. They went from the kitchen into the bedroom.”

“Where were you?”

On a glass coffee table was an ornate lacquered Oriental wooden box. I picked it up and opened it, and it had half a dozen cigarettes inside. Virginia Slims. The wood inside the box was a warm golden color, like imported beer.

The woman was saying, “I was in my office. It connects with the bedroom. I heard them rummaging around, and went to the door. As soon as I saw them, of course, I realized what they were doing.”

“Can you give me a description?”

“I honestly didn’t—”

I said, “How much would a thing like this cost?”

The woman looked at me, baffled. “I beg your pardon?”

I showed her the Oriental box. “This thing,” I said. “How much would it go for?”

She talked down her nose at me. “I believe that was thirty-seven hundred dollars. Under four thousand.”

What a great thing! Four thousand dollars for this little box. “To hold cigarettes in,” I said, mainly to myself, and turned away again to put it back on the coffee table.

Behind me, the woman was being a little miffed, saying to Ed, “Where were we?”

I looked at the things on the coffee table. It made me happy to be with them. I couldn’t help smiling.

I don’t know why, for some reason I’d been pissed off all day. It had started right from the time I got out of bed this morning. If Grace hadn’t avoided me, we would have had us a good old-fashioned fight, because I was really in the mood for it.

Then the car, and the traffic, none of that helped. And the heat. It felt good telling Tom about the liquor store, a thing I’d been bottling up inside me for a couple weeks, but a little while after I told him and we’d stopped talking about it I was in a rotten mood again. Only now I had something to hook onto, because I just kept thinking about that comfortable bastard in his air-conditioned Cadillac out there on the Long Island Expressway this morning. I was sorry I hadn’t ticketed him for something; anything. I hated the idea that somebody was better off than me.

For me, the best way to work off a mad is to drive. Not in that stop-and-go traffic like on the Expressway this morning; that just makes things worse. But in ordinary traffic, where I can move, use my skills. I get behind the wheel, I push it a little hard, win some contests, and pretty soon I feel better. So I volunteered to drive today, and my partner, Paul Goldberg, just shrugged and said it was fine with him. Which I knew he would; he has no feeling for cars, Paul. He’d rather I drove all the time, so he could sit beside me and chew gum. I never saw anybody in my life who could chew so much gum. He went through Chiclets like kids through Kleenex.

He’s a couple years younger than me, Paul is, and slender and wiry, with more strength than he looks. His name is Goldberg, but he looks Italian. He has that curly kind of black hair, and an olive complexion, and those big brown doe eyes the chicks love so much. He’s a bachelor, and I guess he makes out pretty good with the women. He ought to, given his looks and potential. I don’t know for sure; I hinted around a couple of times, but he never talked about his personal life while we were on patrol together. Which was only fair, since I never talked about mine either.

On the other hand, what kind of personal life does a married man with kids have to talk about?

We did a little driving around the neighborhoods to begin with today, but it wasn’t the kind of movement I needed to unload the irritable feeling in my chest. It was also too hot for mooching along down side streets; what we needed was to be where we could move fast enough to create a breeze for ourselves, keep ourselves a little cooled off. Me, especially, keep me cooled off.

So I headed us west over 79th Street and got on the Henry Hudson Parkway northbound. Way up ahead you could see the George Washington Bridge. On our left was the Hudson River, looking better than it really is, and across on the other side New Jersey. There were little puffs of white cloud in the blue sky, boats of different sizes were on the river, and even the city, off to our right, looked clean in the sunlight. For looking at, it was a really nice day. Of course, you can’t see humidity, or a temperature in the high eighties.