Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“About how long will this take?” Selby asked.

“Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. But I got a different slant on how long in ’Nam, Selby. Buddhists think babies are as old as God because they’re complete. That’s a heavy idea. You better make that forty-five minutes.”

“I’ll be back,” Selby said.

He walked from Parks’s studio to the offices of the Brandywine Standard . Buying a back issue, he went through the paper until he came to the photograph Shana had cut out of their copy, a four-column picture taken at Longwood Gardens. A group of people stood near a four-door sedan that was identified in the caption as a Maserati Quattroporta. In the background were other antique cars, cordoned off by ropes in front of a greenhouse.

An elderly couple in bulky tweeds was prominent in the photograph. Behind them stood three young men. Two wore crew cuts and military school uniforms. The third young man was taller than his companions and wore a cardigan jacket and a long scarf. A thin chain glittered at his throat. His head was bare, his thick, dark hair blown about by the breezes.

Selby cut out the picture, folded it and put it in his wallet. Discarding the Standard in a trash receptacle, he returned to Parks’s studio and joined him in the darkroom.

“Pay dirt, geronimo, eureka and other sundry shit,” Parks announced cheerfully. “Take a look, pal.”

Selby wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and stared closely at the surface of the shimmering developing solution. Mag wheels gleamed dully through the liquid, and the details of the license plate were coming into a trembling focus. Selby saw a letter emerging, clearly and sharply, the letter “N,” and after that, two numbers, “9” and “6”...

The other numbers remained lost in smudged shadows.

By the time Selby left Parks’s studio, the streets were empty. Shop windows were slick and white with frost, and some had Christmas decorations up, holly wreaths and strings of colored lights.

The uniformed black lady at the counter of the detective division didn’t remember Selby. She asked his name and pointed to a stack of forms.

“Write it on one of them, and your business.”

“The name’s Selby, Harry Selby. I was here before. Would you tell Captain Slocum I need to see him? It’s important.”

She regarded him dubiously. “You got to write your name down anyway, but I’ll tell him. You better take yourself a seat. Captain’s on the phone. They got a homicide downtown.” I he floor of the narrow reception room was covered with brown linoleum, patterned randomly with cigarette burns. A framed photograph of a smiling uniformed policeman hung on the wall. A caption told anyone interested that Patrolman Anthony Vito had died in the line of duty 11/13/1972.

Selby didn’t recognize the detectives on this shift. A constant clatter sounded as they typed reports, answered phones, talked to witnesses and/or victims. A woman was crying; someone had struck her in the face; her jaw was round and shiny as a big, red apple. A shabbily dressed black man with blood dripping from his hand responded to a detective’s questions with exaggerated, head-bobbing smiles. In whining, righteous tones, a drunken white man was reporting the theft of a blanket by a teenager he had given a lift to. A white hooker complained that a trick had cut her leg with his belt buckle and hadn’t paid her for—

The black clerk said, “Captain says he’ll see you soon as he can, Mr. Selby.”

He stretched his legs and rested his head against the wall beneath Patrolman Vito’s smiling picture. Take a number, wait your turn... Pay the two dollars... He thought of the night he had taken Sarah’s mother to the hospital for the last time.

Her pain had become constant by then, but it wasn’t particularly worrisome. It was just an inconvenience, so pay the two dollars.

“The bad thing about being sick,” Tishie said on the way to the hospital, “is that you think you got squatter’s rights on what’s real. You stop believing other people are buying and selling things, cooking and putting food on the table. Sick people think their world is the only one that’s real.”

Her eyes were bright when she came out of the doctor’s office.

“She never liked bad news at night, my Sarah,” she told him on the way home. “We won’t spoil the evening for the children. We’ll have a nice dinner and I’ll tell Sarah when they’re off to school in the morning.”

Shana and Davey had never known their grandmother was sick and in pain. Tishie could handle that kind of thunder and lightning. She was slim and small under her bed covers the next morning, the pink of her best nightgown showing against the blankets, the empty bottle of Demarol on her night table...

Selby’s number came up. “Captain’ll see you now, Mr. Selby.”

Slocum was at his desk, his thinning hair and broad face shining under strong fluorescent lighting. His tie was pulled down and a day’s beard smudged his wide jaw. Glancing up, he said, “We’re pretty busy tonight, Mr. Selby. What’s on your mind?”

Selby dropped the stack of photographs on his desk. “Captain, those are pictures of a parked car. It’s parked in the driveway of a place called Vinegar Hill over on Dade Road. That’s where my daughter was taken and raped. The pictures were taken that same night. What you’re looking at, Captain Slocum, is the car the rapist used to drive her there. It’s a Porsche Turbo 924, a distinctive, customized job. One letter and two digits of the license are visible. That’s what’s on my mind, Captain.”

Slocum looked steadily at him, patches of red darkening his cheekbones. “Maybe you better come around and sit down at my desk, Selby. Maybe you better take over the whole job.”

After flipping quickly through the photographs, he punched a button on the base of his phone. A pulse leaped in his throat, a pounding rhythmically under his carotid artery.

“I thought we had an understanding, Selby, about who was the cop and who was the civilian.” His voice was thick, hard with anger. “Remember our talk? I told you not to go off on your own. I told you it was our responsibility to investigate your daughter’s kidnapping and rape.”

“I remember that,” Selby said. “But I’ve been getting the impression you’re too busy around here to pay much attention to that. There’s a room full of cops and detectives outside spending time on hookers and winos. Somebody’s typing up a report about a teenager who stole a blanket from a car.”

Slocum said, “So you figured we were too busy, is that it, Selby? Figured that gave you a green light to handle things yourself? Well, this probably hasn’t occurred to you, but when you go off chasing shadows with bloodhounds, or horsing around with local photographers, you could be destroying leads we’re already working on. You want to play the outraged citizen who thinks the local police are a bunch of fuck-ups, be my guest, Selby. I’m used to it. I get priests in here with long hair and windbreakers, complaining we’re too hard on faggots, that they’re God’s chilluns just like the rest of us. Every time a drunk falls down a flight of stairs into the basement, we get screams of police brutality from the ACLU Jew boys. Last week, a professor of African studies—”

His office door opened and the noisy clatter from the outer office spilled in. A detective sauntered to Slocum’s desk, glancing curiously at Selby.

“Where the hell’s Wilger?” Slocum asked him.

“He’s not back yet, Captain. Took a ride over to Muhlenburg a couple of hours ago.”

Slocum waved irritably from the detective to Selby. “Lieutenant Eberle, Mr. Selby.”

Eberle nodded. “Selby, sure. That kidnapping out on Fairlee Road.”