Plainclothes Naked (19 page)

“That’s rich,” said Manny, “coming from you. So what’s it gonna be, you gonna offer me something, or do I have Merch come in here with the cuffs? Show you how an arrest is made. I’d do it myself, but I really think it’d make his day.”

Fayton picked up a brass trophy, for perfect attendance at the

Department of Motor Vehicles, and clutched it to his chest. “You’ll never get away with it.”

Manny laughed. “
I’ll
never get away with it? You got some grasp of reality. I’m not the one who just greased a senior citizen.”

Still chuckling, Manny picked up the cordless and started punching out numbers. Then he stopped. He looked at the phone, then up at Fayton, then back to the phone. The mouthpiece appeared to be cracked, and a few strands of long, yellowy gray hair stuck out of the fractured plastic. Manny raised the phone to the light, turning it slightly. The sheen of fresh blood around the trapped hairs was unmis takable.

Fayton saw the blood at the same time as Manny. He placed his DMV trophy gently back on the shelf.

“Refresh my memory,” Manny said, holding the phone by its rub ber antenna while he dug in his jacket for an evidence baggie. “Are you pro capital punishment? ’Cause the way things are shapin’ up, you might get to see it firsthand. I gotta tell ya, though, you could have avoided a whole lot of trouble if you bothered to just clean the damn phone. Or better yet, if you’d have just got ditched the fucking thing. Pitch it off a bridge, bury it in the fucking woods, throw it in a fire with your FOP pension plan.
Anything
....I know you never did a lot of street time, but jeez, Chief, you only gotta watch a couple
Hawaii Five-O
s to know you don’t leave evidence lying around.”

“I don’t watch television,” said Fayton, still playing superior. “And I’m telling you, Officer Chatlak attacked me. He lost control.”

“Sure he did.” Manny stepped over to the corpse. He squatted down for a closer inspection, gently turning Chatlak’s head. “Oh look, it’s our friend Mr. Hematoma. Wound’s not even that bad. You could probably skate, nobody looked too close. Makes sense a duffer like him might have a stroke and take a tumble. A jury might buy that. Unless, of course, somebody
does
look a little closer, maybe does an autopsy, finds a sliver of plastic or something embedded in his scalp. I’m only tellin’ you, ’cause I know you go in for that real-life police stuff.”

Manny straightened up and casually reached for the cuffs he wore hooked to his back belt loop.

His tone was soothing, even ingratiating, as he drew nearer the chief. A lot of cops were screamers or hitters. They went for intimida

tion. But Manny preferred to relax his perps. It was like rubbing a wild boar’s belly to keep it from goring you. He’d read about hunters in Botswana who did that. Relaxing them seemed more artful. You could still club the fuckers if they got any ideas.

“I’m sure you realize,” Manny went on, keeping things conversa tional, “as long as I have this phone, you’re pretty much done. But that’s okay, right? Plenty of time to work on that screenplay in jail, if that’s how it goes down.”

He was now only a few feet away from Fayton. This was when things happened. The Suicide Dive. The lunge for your gun so you’d have to shoot them. Or the play for the weapon they’d stashed, know ing this moment might someday come....

Manny moved with exaggerated ease, speaking calmly. “I bet you can sell your script easy. A cop-killing police chief ? Come on, that blows away all that penny-ante Rampart shit. You got the market cor nered. But why limit yourself ? Write a book, too. Bang out a tell-all, you’ll be the toast of the supermarket. Maybe get on Judith Regan, by remote. You’ll pull in a lot more for the movie rights with a best-seller under your belt. Guaranteed.” He smiled, just to show they were still friends. “Don’t even think about going for the gun, Chief. I know about the Nine taped under the drawer. Be cool.”

Another step. Another.... Sweet and easy. Manny kept up the patter.

“Of course, the bad news is, you won’t get to keep any money, on account of the Son of Sam law. Profits go to the victim’s family. But what the hell... .”

Closer now. Arm’s length. Fayton silent and tense.

“But it’s not about the money anyway, is it? You want the respect.

And you deserve it. You really do. That’s right. That’s—”

“You son of a bitch!”

Fayton jumped, but Manny saw it coming. He sidestepped, caught the chief ’s wrist, and spun him around. He pinned him to the desk with his head on the blotter, his right arm jammed up his back, an inch from breaking.

“Bad move,” Manny hissed, close enough to lick the Chief ’s hair less ear. “Now let’s stop dicking around. I’d love to see you go down. But there’s something I want even more.”

Fayton’s body began to shake under Manny’s. “What is it? You’re breaking my arm.”

“That’s the idea. Justice isn’t always pretty. You can put that in your memoir.”

Manny let his gaze fall on Chatlak. With rigor mortis, the fingers of his right hand had curled. The same hand, no doubt, that had banged on his parents’ front door to rat him out in another lifetime. Small world.

The chief began to sputter, as the first drops of urine leaked from his pant leg into his sock. “J-j-just tell me what you want!”

Manny danced out of splash range.

“For God’s sake, Rubert, what do you want me to do?”

Manny jerked Fayton’s arm a bit farther up his back, keeping his voice at a dead whisper. “You’ll do what I tell you to do, killer.”

With this he let him go, and the chief spun back around, reeling, in time to see Manny slide the baggied telephone inside his jacket.

“Call me sentimental,” he said, “I’m gonna keep this as a souvenir.”

Well, aren’t I a busy little man?
‌

Submerged in the driver’s seat of his Impala, twenty-four hours after scaring the urine out of Chief Fayton, Manny washed down a half dozen Codeine Number Fours with his 7-Eleven coffee. This morning he’d gone for Mocha Mint, which tasted like Listerine and paint thinner. Taking another slurp, he fought off the gag-reflex and glanced at the back of his gas bill, where he’d listed all the prestige activities he had to slog through that day.
Dendez, 1818 Pike
was scrib bled above another notation,
Pics—Dr. Roos,
and below that, underlined three times, the single letter
T,
with a question mark.

Paperwork was the bane and backbone of police life, and Manny took great pains to ensure that his com

ings and goings were left out of the never ending slime trail of reports, case files, and Day Log entries maintained at the station. He’d already stopped by earlier to pick up the Pawnee Lodge report that Mindy, the Pentecostal dispatcher, had transcribed off his answering machine.

Mindy shot him her usual scowl, no doubt partly inspired by the rank nature of his Pawnee Lodge notes. (The labial details alone would have her phoning
The 700 Club
.) Mindy claimed she could type with out listening, but she’d confided to Krantz, who had a crush on her, that she had to take a shower and pray after handling Manny’s case reports. Mostly, Manny believed, she scowled because he’d made the mistake of buying her a Christmas present his first year on the force. Since then the freckled Christian single had been waiting, in a hot ball of resentment, for him to ask her out. Despite her faith in the Lord, Mindy was a spectacularly high-strung and angry young woman. With good reason. Among other things, it was rumored, she’d once had an affair with Chief Fayton—until he dumped her, seduced by the contact prestige of bedding down and wedding a former celebrity assistant. (Before she became Mrs. Fayton, the chief would proudly recount, his wife had gotten dry cleaning for Dr. Laura and Britney Spears’s mom, respectively.)

Over the years, Manny had tried to explain to Mindy that he didn’t date. It was nothing about
her,
he just wasn’t a dater. But the fact that he’d bothered to show her some affection in the first place—that ill-conceived Xmas gift, a pair of macrame plant holders—made it all the worse that he’d showed her virtually none since. Still, Mindy grudg ingly consented to the extra work Manny threw her. It was, he rea soned, the least he could do to help fuel her fury. Her Manny-hate, along with her faith in a Personal Savior, seemed to comprise the abid ing passions in her life. Which was a fairly scary thought. But anything was better than doing his own typing, let alone listening to more than a minute of his own tape-recorded lisp.

Manny was
in the station now to drop in on Fayton and make sure the chief was still in line. He had the killer cordless stashed in a safe-deposit, but it had been twenty-four hours. He knew Fayton well enough to know he had to be sat on. The chief had the metabolism of

a PR-driven shark: self-promote or die. Which made the frenzy in the
Trumpet
a tad problematic. On a mission to glorify one of its own, the paper could not generate enough retro-heroics for its fallen star. In death Dee-Dee Walker was reborn an ace journalist, cut down before she could snag the Pulitzer that was her due. Nobody seemed to remember that the bulk of her copy involved pet neutering and snow removal.

Faced with Fayton’s salacious love of the limelight, Manny felt compelled to brace him again. It was an odd phenomenon, but perps had a way of forgetting humiliation. Forgetting they were on borrowed time. Merch used to call it the Bad Dream Syndrome. It never failed:A day after some little dealer had been paid a visit, after he’d
agreed
to rat out the big dealer by way of saving his own ass, he would decide, in some irrational blast of optimism, that he could just—go figure—
go on with his life
. As if what happened had never happened. . . . But the Syn drome could get worse. More than once, when Manny paid a suspect who’d agreed to cooperate on Monday a visit the following Tuesday, the guy wouldn’t even recognize him—so thoroughly had he blocked out his Bad Cop Dream. With Fayton, no doubt, garden-variety denial would be turbocharged with vanity and greed.

Yesterday Manny’d left the chief in a quaking puddle. Today, if he knew anything about bent psychology, the chief would be unable to resist the chance to make himself look huge by spilling tidbits to the
Trumpet
about Ms. Walker’s final subject, the lonely widow, Tina Podolsky. It was the kind of thing he lived for. Visions of law enforce ment glory would no doubt obliterate the nasty reality of his chat with Detective Rubert.

Manny barged
into the office of the chief without knocking. Fayton peered up from his desk, a jar of silver polish in one hand, a fresh Handi Wipe in the other. His badge rested on a bed of Handi Wipes.

“Let me guess,” said Manny, “you’re buffing your badge.” “You could have called ahead,” the chief replied testily.

“That’s me, no manners.” Manny kicked the door closed behind him. “So you went and got a new phone? That’s good. Glad you’re keeping busy. ’Cause I’ve got your old one on ice. Not that DNA

needs a whole lof of upkeep.” He put one foot up on the chief ’s Lemon Pledged desk and leaned in. “Now listen, I know from Marvin Podolsky’s widow that Dee-Dee Walker came by to talk to her before the accident.”

“Is there a reason you’re telling me this?”

“Yeah, for the same reason you’re shining your little star. Her editor probably knew where she’d been before she died, and he’s gonna be all over it. Maybe they’re coming to take your picture, huh? Ask you a couple of questions. Let you act like you know what the fuck’s going on. We know how much you love that. Problem is,
Chief,
I think Mrs. Podolsky’s been through enough, so I’d appreciate if you kept any inspiring comments to yourself.”

Fayton dipped a fresh Handi Wipe in the polish, then picked up his badge and resumed polishing. “Mrs. Podolsky,” he declared, looking put out, “works at Seventh Heaven. The same place where Tony Zank swung his own mother out the window. The same place where Carmella Dendez was employed as supervisor before Zank and McCardle took her to the Pawnee Lodge and killed her. I know you finished ninety-third out of a hundred and two at the Academy, but surely even you can you see a connection.”

Manny hated himself for wincing. “You checked my file?”

“Of course. I’m an old personnel man, remember? Since I’m going to be answering to you, I got curious. You’re even dumber than I thought.”

“That makes two of us.” On impulse, Manny snatched the chief ’s badge and wiped it off the bottom of his shoe, hoping he’d stepped in something. “Not a day goes by I don’t blush about my Academy rank. It haunts my sleep. So who the fuck told you about Zank and McCar dle?”

“You did,
Ruby.
Mindy showed me your case report.Very colorful.”

“Shit!”

Fayton smiled his thin-lipped smile. “You know, you really should go out with Mindy sometime. She’s a special girl. Perhaps you could escort her to Officer Chatlak’s funeral.”

Manny slapped the badge back on the desk. He wondered, for a jagged second, if the drugs were making his brain soft. Why the fuck was he still writing reports when he had Fayton in his pocket?
Pathetic!

It was one more example of something he’d long suspected about him self, that deep down he wasn’t a real lawbreaker. Bad didn’t come nat ural. He had to work at it. The awful truth: Sometimes he felt like Mister Rogers playing
The Bad Lieutenant.
Unlike Tina, he thought, and smiled in spite of how pissed off he felt. You knew out of the gate that Tina could write the book on being bad.

“New rule,” Manny announced. “From now on, no reports.” Fayton did not look cowed enough, so Manny cranked up the vol

ume. He jammed his face an inch in front of his boss’s. Any closer and their nose hairs would mesh.

“And one other thing,
Sir.
You ever get the bright idea you can get out of this by wearing some kind of wire, or planting a bug, you might think twice, ’cause whatever the fuck I go down for, you go down for killing a cop. You got that? You do what I fucking tell you to do.”