Jeffery Deaver - Manhattan Is My Beat

Rune reshelved a few more tapes, then, as soon as Tony left, she told Frankie she was going for coffee, then booked out of the store.

Outside, she looked around the streets of the city. Caught a glimpse of somebody who looked familiar-a young man with dark, curly hair-but she couldn't place him. His back was to her. Something familiar about the stance, his muscular build. Where'd she seen him?

Where?

But he stepped quickly into a deli, so she didn't think anything more about him. That was one thing about Greenwich Village. You were always running into people you knew. Everyone thought New York was a huge city but that wasn't true; it was a collection of small towns. A Yellow Cab cruised up the street and she flagged it down. She was in the New York Public Library in twenty minutes.

The books on general city history-there were hundreds-didn't help her much at all. The history of crime in New York… that was something else. One thing she learned was that in Manhattan there were more bank robberies per square mile than anywhere in the country-and most of them occurred on Friday. The traditional payday. So with that volume of heists, the Union Bank stickup didn't get much coverage. She found a few references to it. The only one that gave any details was in a book about the Mafia, which reported only that the Family probably wasn't involved.

The newspapers were better-though the robbery didn't get a lot of coverage because it hadn't occurred on a slow-news day. At the same time the hero cop was bargaining with the holdup man for the hostage's life, the rest of the world was following King Edward's abdication, which had filled all the city papers with features and sidebars. Rune couldn't help but read some of the articles; she decided it was the most romantic thing she'd ever heard. She studied the picture of Mrs. Simpson.

Would anybody give up a kingdom for me?

Would Richard?

She couldn't come up with a satisfactory answer to that question and turned back to the stories about the Union Bank robbery.

After the shootout was over: the robber was in the morgue and the million bucks was missing, though that didn't seem too important at first because the hostage was safe and Patrolman Samuel Davies was a hero. The only hiccup was that there was no satisfactory explanation as to how the robber passed the suitcase containing the money to his partner outside the bank before Davies started negotiating with him.

An accomplice of the deceased robber, it is suspected, secreted himself outside the bank and, in a moment of confusion while Patrolman Davies was boldly approaching the bank, seized the ill-gotten loot and absconded.

A month later the question of what had happened to the money had been answered and the newspaper stories were very different.

Hero Patrolman Indicted in Union Bank Theft- Boy Admits Hiding Cop's Loot in Mother's House-A "Shame and Disgrace," Says Commissioner.

Rune, sitting at the huge oak platform of a table, felt a queasy shiver for the cop. The story came out that he'd talked the robber into exchanging himself for the hostage, who fled from the bank. Then he'd convinced the thief to hand over his revolver.

What happened next was speculation: Davies claimed the robber had a change of mind and jumped him. There was a scuffle. The robber knocked down the cop and went for the gun. Davies tried to pull the pistol away from him. They fought. The gun went off. The robber was killed.

But a young shoeshine boy testified that he'd been hiding outside the bank, waiting for something to see, when a door above him opened and a man looked out. It was Davies, the cop.

Yes, sir, I can identify him, sir. He looks just like that man right there, sir, only that day he was wearing a uniform.

He asked for the boy's address and then handed him a suitcase, told him to take it home.

He says to me… he says that if I opened the bag, or I said anything about what happened, I'd go to reform school and get the tar beat out of me every day. I done what he said, sir.

Davies denied it all-murdering the robber, taking the money, breaking into the shoeshine boy's home in Brooklyn and stealing the suitcase, then hiding the loot somewhere. The policeman made a tearful defendant, the papers reported. But that didn't sway the jury. Davies got five to fifteen years. The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association claimed all along he was the victim of a frame-up and urged his parole. He served seven years of the sentence.

But controversy around Davies continued after his release. Only two days after he walked out the front door of Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, in 1942 he was tommy-gunned to death at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, in front of the gothic Fifth Avenue Hotel. No one knew who was behind the shooting, though it looked like a professional hit. The money was never recovered.

Nothing more about the crime appeared in the press until the tiny blurb about the movie Manhattan Is My Beat -the clipping Rune had found in Kelly's apartment.

A homeless man sat down next to her at the library table. She smelled foulness in the wake of the air around him. Like most derelicts, he managed to seem both harmless and scary at the same time. He whispered to himself, wrote on a piece of wrinkled paper in the tiniest handwriting she'd ever seen.

One of her watches seemed to be working. She glanced at it. Oh shit! It was after two. Her ten-minute break had stretched to longer than two hours. Tony could be back. She took a cab to the Village but, on impulse, had the cabbie stop at 24 Fifth Avenue, the site of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. She paced back and forth slowly, wondering where Samuel Davies was when he was gunned down-what he'd been doing, what went through his mind when he realized what was happening, if he'd seen the black gun muzzle pointed at him.

She walked in wide circles, weaving through the crowd, until a cop-a real-life cop, NYPD-who was leaning on a patrol car must have decided she was acting a little suspicious and started walking slowly in her direction. Rune looked at the menu taped in the window of the glitzy restaurant on the corner, frowned, and shook her head. She strolled toward University Place.

The cop lost interest.

Back at the store, Tony was waiting for her. He lectured her for a whole two minutes on promptness and she did her best to look contrite.

"What?" he grumbled. "Thought I'd be out all day, huh?"

Like you usually are? she thought. But said, "Sorry, sorry, sorry. Won't happen again. Cross my heart."

"I know it won't. This's your last chance. Late once more and you're outa here. I've got people lined up to get a job."

"Lined up?" She looked out the front door. "Where, Tony? Out back? In the alley?" She then realized she should be more contrite. "Sorry. Just a joke."

He glowered and handed her a pink While-You-Were-Out slip. "Another thing, this isn't message central. Now, go get coffee and make it up to me."

"You bet," she said cheerfully. He eyed her uncertainly.

The message was from Richard. It said, "Confirming our 'date.'" She liked the quotation marks. She folded the pink slip of paper and slipped it into her shirt pocket.

"Here," Tony grumbled. Handing her money for the coffee.

"Naw, that's okay," she said. "It's on me."

Perplexing the poor man no end.

"You're from Ohio?"

It was eight p.m. They were sitting in Rune's gazebo, listening to the Pachelbel Canon. Rune had eight different recordings of the piece. She'd liked it for years-even before it had caught on, the way Greensleeves and Simple Gifts had.

Richard continued. "I've never met anyone from Ohio."

She was wearing a black T-shirt, black stretch pants, and red-and-white-striped socks. She'd done this as a homage to Richard's costume the other night. He, however, was in baggy gray slacks, Keds, and a beige Texaco Service shirt with the name Ralph embroidered on the pocket.