Small Town

If she’d gone back to the Bronx she hadn’t stayed, and if she’d married her fireman it hadn’t worked out, but she’d evidently found the right way to be in the life, moving into management and letting younger bodies do the heavy lifting. Kept regular hours, made a decent living, lived in a good neighborhood. Nothing wrong with that, the illegality of it aside, until somebody beat her brains out with a hammer, and why in God’s name would anybody want to do that?

They’d be checking everything out, and of course they’d checked Creighton and of course he’d been cleared, and the coincidence of the Pankow kid threw a big monkey wrench into the middle of things, but they’d check Molly’s book, and that would probably upset a lot of citizens and screw up a few of their marriages. And they’d track down the other girls who worked for her, or had worked for her in the recent past, and they’d look for somebody with a grudge. If Molly was mobbed up — and she had to be to some extent or other, she was too hip to try riding bareback — they’d look for the OC connection, and lots of luck to them on that one.

Would they close it? The easy ones broke for you in the first forty-eight hours, and that hadn’t happened, but that only meant it wasn’t going to be easy, not that it wasn’t going to be closed. He sat there, in the Joseph Abboud suit he’d worn to Texas, and after a stretch of staring off into space he pulled himself up short, suddenly aware what he’d been doing.

He’d been figuring out what he’d be doing if it were his case. And, he realized, that’s what he really wanted. Not to run around the country telling people what they already knew. Not to hold office, whether it was mayor or commissioner of police.

What he wanted was to be out there on the street, running an investigation, working a case.

There was a phone call he’d tried to return earlier, to a cop he’d known years ago by the name of Jimmy Galvin. They’d lost touch, and the message on his voice mail hadn’t indicated the reason for the call. Probably to tell him somebody had died, he figured. More and more, that’s what a call from the past meant. Somebody else was gone, and somebody wanted to make sure you got the news.

He called back and got a machine with a canned message, not even Galvin’s voice, and he left his name and number and forgot about it, and he was trying to decide where to go for dinner when the phone rang, and it was Galvin. They exchanged pleasantries, and he scanned his memory for the name of Galvin’s wife and came up empty. If he’d ever known it, he didn’t know it now.

“How’s Mrs. G.?” he asked.

“Well, there you go,” Galvin said. “I retired a little over three years ago, figuring I’d get to spend a little more time around the house, and it turned out she liked me better when I wasn’t around so much. So she went and got herself a divorce, and I’m living in Alphabet City in a coat closet that I can’t afford.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “I’d heard you retired, but I hadn’t heard about the divorce.”

“It’s not so bad, Fran. I have to do my own wash and fix my own meals, but you get used to that. The hard part is now I have to break my own balls.”

“Trust me,” he said. “You get used to that, too.”

They talked a little about being divorced and learning to be single again. Galvin said he figured it would be easier if he had a real job. He was working on a private license, and the dough was okay, what with the pension he got from the city. But the work was irregular, with long stretches of nothing to do, and the inactivity got to him.

“I don’t know, Fran. I was thinking, but you probably got things you have to do. I mean, you had the top job, you’re an important guy...”

“Jim, I was important for fifteen minutes. Now all I am is out of work.”

“Yeah? What I was thinking, you feel like getting together for a drink?”

Just what he needed, a boozy evening with a cop who put in his papers just in time to see his life disintegrate. But he found himself saying that might work, that he’d enjoy it.

“There’s this place,” he said. “I been dropping in there, you might like it...”

He thought, Jesus, not a cop bar. He tried to think of an alternative to suggest, but Galvin surprised him.

“It’s called Stelli’s,” he said. “Up on Second Avenue in the Eighties. The food’s Italian, if you want to have dinner, or we could meet afterward. Entirely your call.”

What the hell, he’d been trying to figure out what to do about dinner. “Dinner sounds good,” he said. “Say eight o’clock?”

“Perfect. I’m trying to remember the cross street, Fran. It’s in the Eighties, and above Eighty-sixth, I know that much—”

“I know the place,” he said. “We’d better have a reservation.”

“I guess we’ll need one, if we’re gonna have dinner.”

“I’ll make the call, Jim. Stelli’s at eight. I’ll look forward to it.”