Archer Mayor - Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

Maxine Paroddy-ax-handle thin and highly efficient-was perched on her rolling secretary’s stool, gliding across the dispatch room’s polished floor to answer the radio, a phone nestled in the crook of her neck. She acknowledged the short message on her microphone, gave me a wink and a be-with-you-in-a-second gesture. Then she rolled back across the room, pulled a file from a drawer, and read from its contents into the phone, all with the grace of a dancer.

“What’s up?” she asked, after she’d hung up. You did not sit down to chat with Maxine. It was a waste of her time.

“Al Santos?”

She gave me a quick smile and pointed to the radio. “That was him checking in. He should be pulling into the parking lot right about now.”

Santos was our New York City Police Department transplant, on the payroll for years by now but still boasting a trenchant Bronx accent and a big-city union man’s ingrained prejudice that rank, like class, should have strictly defined boundaries. I didn’t give him the chance to get out of his cruiser once he’d cut the engine, but slid into the passenger seat next to him.

“Hey, Lieutenant. How’s it goin’?” His grin looked disarmingly bright beneath his thick black mustache, but his eyes watched me carefully. “I was sorry to hear about your girlfriend.”

I didn’t bother responding, both because I was tiring of it and because I knew he didn’t much care one way or the other. While we’d always been cordial to one another and had never crossed swords, his approach to me over the years had made it clear I was a “suit” first and foremost, and where he came from, suits were annoying, baffling, highly capricious creatures.

“I heard you threw Jason Ryan out of a selectmen’s meeting the other day.”

Santos chuckled easily, his eyes unchanged. “Yeah-and he was somethin’ pissed about it, too. Kept bitching about his constitutional rights; called me a Nazi.” His voice darkened suddenly, the suspicion briefly rising within view. “He suing us or somethin’?”

“Not that I know of. What was he so worked up about?”

He relaxed slightly, one potential bomb defused. “Dunno-they just called me once they got sick of him.”

“Was he angry at anyone in particular?”

Santos thought back a moment, and then he looked at me with his eyes wide, abruptly comprehending. “Holy shit-he was laying it on your old lady pretty… I mean, he was real mad at Gail Zigman. You thinking he did it to her?”

“I don’t know, Al. I’m just fishing around. What did you actually hear him say?”

He looked at me silently for a moment, and I was surprised by the renewed look of distaste on his face. It occurred to me that something in my tone had pushed one of his rank-conscious buttons-as if I were looking for answers without divulging my reasons-a typical “suit” stunt.

“You know the mouth he has on him,” he finally replied evenly.

I was impressed how irritated I was by that answer, and his attitude in general. I expected better from a fellow officer, especially during a major investigation, and the passing references to “girlfriend” and “old lady” returned to me with less innocence.

“Did he say anything threatening, either in their presence or when you were alone with him?”

“Nothing he hasn’t said before-called her a ‘flatlander dyke,’ and said the board was pussy-whipped.” He hesitated, perhaps worried that he’d overplayed his nonchalance, and tried for a shortcut, “Well, you know.”

I smiled good-naturedly, disguising my growing anger. “Yeah-nothing new there. And I suppose Gail handed it right back to him?”

He took my reaction at face value and smiled back. “Hey-you know how it gets sometimes.”

It was a neutral enough response, but I had my suspicions. My interest in Ryan temporarily faded. “Give a woman a title and a gavel, right?”

He rose to my expectations of him. “Yeah, right.”

“So Ryan was just blowing off steam?”

“Pretty much; I mean, he was disrupting the place. They did right to call me.”

“But what he was saying didn’t amount to much-in your book?”

“Not really.” Santos stole a glance at his watch.

“Just out of curiosity, did he suggest taking her down a few pegs while you were escorting him outside?”

Santos shifted slightly in his seat, perhaps sensing something unusual in my persistence. “Don’t take this personally, Lieutenant, but he did say something about a good fuck setting her right.”

I could feel the pressure building on my temples, but I kept my voice level. “You didn’t fill out a report on it, did you?”

“Didn’t see the point,” he admitted. I turned to face him, feeling free at last to vent some of my rage.

“How about now that she got her good fuck? Were you thinking about filing a report now?”

He looked both surprised and angry that he’d been set up, predictably missing the point. “It was the local nut case shooting his mouth off, Lieutenant-it didn’t mean anything.”

I threw the door open and swung out, welcoming the fresh air on my face. I leaned back inside the car where Santos was sitting stiffly, his eyes straight ahead like an adolescent wishing all adults would vanish. “You know that for a fact, do you?”

“Yes, I do.” His voice was barely audible.

“You better hope you’re right, Al, or we’ll talk again with more company. Don’t ever pull this kind of shit again.”

My fury grew exponentially as I walked back to the office-not just at Santos, whose error had been no worse than Billy’s laxity, but as much at myself. Instead of immediately seizing Al’s information as the possible lead it was, I’d used his procedural sloppiness, and his predictable sexism, as a target for my own frustration. Knowing what Santos and his buddies would later make of this episode made me feel exposed and did nothing for the professional demeanor I was struggling to maintain.

I headed back to the squad room reluctantly, wishing I could invent some excuse that would keep me on the street, at least for the rest of the day. What had happened to Gail was just a few hours old-a fresh crime with fresh leads. Statistically, that gave it “quick to solve” potential. People’s memories would be sharp; any covering up would be either ongoing or slipshod; and the combination of Gail’s status and the SA’s political needs would allow for a no-expenses-spared, all-out investigation. That was the good news.

The downside was all inside me and had been building steam since Tony had pulled up to my place this morning. That part of me didn’t want to work around the clock, finding the man who’d turned Gail’s life upside down. It just wanted to spend time with her, helping her to rebuild her equilibrium. I could rationalize that one role fulfilled the other-I was on the case, after all, at Gail’s insistence. And I knew that giving her psychological “space” was not only sound, it was out of my hands. But none of that addressed my own emotional needs.

Nevertheless, as I reentered the Municipal Building, I began feeling slightly better-or at least more in control.

Harriet Fritter, not surprisingly, seemed to sense some of what was chewing at me. The even-tempered matriarch of an enormous gaggle of children, grandchildren, and at least one great-grandchild, she was a veteran observer of us all, and her sympathetic smile as I walked in was enough to move me up a few more notches.

“I got hold of Lou Biddle at Probation-he’s calling a special intelligence meeting at Rescue, Inc. in forty-five minutes. He thought it might be more efficient for you to brief the whole group, instead of relying on phone calls or faxes.”

The intelligence meeting was normally a monthly arrangement-a gathering of law-enforcement representatives from all the surrounding jurisdictions. It had operated discreetly for years, meeting on neutral ground, and served as an informational conduit that both cut the red tape and made for less formal relations among the participating agencies. That Lou had called them together-and in no time flat-was testimony to the support we could expect on this case. Brandt had been right about how Gail was being viewed, at least by those who wore a badge-she might as well have been my wife.