Warren Murphy: Mafia Fix

"Who's them?" Remo asked.

"Well, you know. Them. Urban problems."

"I don't know," said Remo and made squiggles on his pad with his pencil. He crossed a leg.

"You know. The coloured. Blacks. Afro-Americans."

"Them?"

"Yeah. Them," said the chief proudly, his red face beaming, his clear blue eyes twinkling, his freckled hands playing nervously with themselves.

"I hear your city is becoming the heroin capital of the nation." Remo watched the blue eyes. They didn't bat.

"Heroin is a problem," said the chief. "A growing national problem."

"What's your cut?"

"What?"

"What's your cut? Your rake-off?" The tone was casual. The chief was not. He levelled a blue-eyed stare at Remo, his posture exuded integrity, his jaw showed courage. His lips tightened.

"Are you accusing me of being involved in the traffic of drugs?"

The tone was almost identical to that of Remo's former chief when Remo had been a patrolman in Newark and ticketed the patrol car sent around to collect the chiefs Christmas liquor.

"Somebody's got to be protecting the drug traffic," Remo said.

"Are you accusing me?" demanded the chief.

"If the shoe fits, chief."

"Get out of here."

Remo didn't move.

"This interview is at an end," said the chief. "And I'd like to warn you there are laws against libel."

"Only if you print an untruth," Remo said and smiled. Then he got up and left. Another seed planted.

He walked out of the office, past the lieutenant who performed the duties of a clerk-typist, out into the hallway and waited for the elevator in the special mustiness that only a police station could manufacture. He wondered casually if his job would be necessary if police departments were better. But how could they be better? They didn't recruit from Mars. No, the police of any city reflected the morality of that city. No better, no worse. It took two to make a bribe.

The elevator door opened and Remo strolled in. It was a large elevator, the size of a small kitchen, apparently a good quarter-of-a-century old. He pressed main floor.

The bronze-like metal door closed, almost painfully slowly. With a cough, the elevator descended. It stopped at the next floor to let two detectives and a prisoner enter. One of the detectives, a drawn-faced man of Remo's height, wearing the standard fedora, saw Remo and said politely: "Hi."

Then the trio moved to the rear and Remo moved to the front. Remo had nodded, before he suddenly realized why he recognized the detective and the detective recognized him.

"Balls," thought Remo and attempted to keep his face forward toward the elevator door, hoping the detective would just be mildly troubled, trying to remember the face and then would forget it.

Unfortunately, the policeman's trade, especially the detective's, did not allow for the casual filing of faces in the memory. At least not the competent ones. Remo hoped that Bill Skorich had not developed competence.

Remo remembered their first year together on the force in Newark and how Skorich would forget little things and always end up on the short end of conversations with the desk sergeant, the detectives, the lieutenant and the captain. He never fouled up enough to stand before the chief.

Yet, although negative feedback was not the best training device in the world, it most certainly was a training device. Either the person adjusted to the abuse or he adjusted himself so that there was no more abuse. If Skorich had adjusted himself, he was about to be a dead man.

Out of the corner of his eye, Remo saw Skorich take a step to the front. He was examining the side of Remo's face. He took another step dragging the prisoner a step forward with him, and the detective on the other end moved a half step.

Remo couldn't hide his face and then run for it, not in police headquarters. It would be a great way to get your picture circulated, especially after the conversation with the chief.

So Remo turned slowly to Bill Skorich and hoped that the plastic surgery on his cheekbones and nose would do the trick, and he looked Skorich in the eye and then appeared confused. As he did this, he silently prayed: "Bill, be a foul-up. C'mon, baby. Don't do it right. Not now."

Skorich's drawn face twisted in confusion and Remo's heart suddenly became light. "Attaway to go, Billy baby," he thought. "That's it. Beautiful. Nobody remembers a dead man's face. Especially after plastic surgery."

Then Skorich's face lighted up, a smile with it, that quickly turned into shock at seeing a dead man alive. And Remo knew that Skorich knew.

The last word Detective William Skorich of the Newark Police Department said was not a word. It was the beginning of a name.

The sound was "Re. ..."

Using Skorich's body as a shield, out of view of the prisoner and the other bull, Remo shot a finger into Skorich's solar plexus, driving the finger in deep, up into the heart, rupturing muscles and valves. All in just the time it took to say "Re. . . ."

It was the floater stroke where the hand floated free of the momentum of the body and moved itself. It had the advantage of stopping talk immediately.

Skorich's eyes widened and before he slumped, Remo's hands were in his own pockets with the note pad tucked under an arm. Skorich collapsed into Remo and Remo let himself be knocked to the far side of the elevator, saying, "Watch yourself, buddy."

Skorich brought the prisoner down on him as he fell. The fedora plopped over and the other detective, spinning like the far end of a whipping chain, stumbled onto it and then down onto the prisoner on top of the dead man on the floor of the elevator.

The doors opened on the main floor. Remo regained his balance, brushing himself off and stormed out of the elevator, yelling loudly, "I've been assaulted by a police officer. I've been assaulted right here in headquarters. Is that how you treat the press?"

Remo stood at the entrance of the elevator, pointing to the pile of bodies. The living detective was trying to raise himself and the prisoner both.

"There," yelled Remo. "That's him on the bottom. I want to press charges, right now. He pushed me." It took the desk lieutenant three minutes to ascertain the situation, ten seconds to yell for an ambulance and three minutes with the faggy, pinko magazine writer to convince the writer that he had not been assaulted, but that the detective had fallen into him because he was dead, probably with a heart attack.

"Dead?" said Remo, his mouth open, his eyes wide with terror.

"Yeah. Dead. You know. What happens to us pigs when we try to protect you. Another pig dead, buddy."

"I ... I don't know what to say," Remo said.

"Just try looking before you jump to conclusions. That's all. Just try looking. Just a little, fair look."

"I ... I'm sorry," said Remo and there was no act to his sadness. It was very real and when he left the station, he felt very much like a drink, but you do not take a drink when you are on peak, you do not take it even when you come off peak. You treat yourself like an alcoholic because that's the business.

And when you pass a bar and see yourself in the reflection of the window, you're glad you can deny yourself something you want very much. And you hate the face looking back at you and moving along with you.

Because, Remo Williams, you're lower than an animal. You're a machine. An animal kills to eat and live. A man kills because he's frightened or sick or he's told to and he's afraid not to. But you, Remo Williams, you kill because that's what the machine was designed to do.

Remo crossed the street, where the red-headed cop directed traffic with a sure hand born of experience, and walked past a donut store where youngsters jammed around the counter in their after-school gluttony ritual. He would have liked, at that moment, to have Smith in his hands and to break Smith's arms and to say to Smith, "That's what pain feels like, Smitty. That's where it's at, little adding machine." Now he knew why he sometimes hated Smith. Because they were alike. Twin peas in a sick pod. And they did their jobs right.