Par Four, page 3
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
“How’s this little two-bit marijuana case gonna help him run for governor?” I asked him. “Why not a crack dealer, if he wants profile?”
“You got one in jail?”
“Well, no,” I admitted, “but it’s only a matter of time.”
“Sure. Maybe quite a lot of time. Crack dealers are tough and smart. Ed and Doris think this case will play well with parents and school boards, and it’s ready right now when they need it. Ed’s gonna talk to the jury about evil outsiders preying on our kids.”
“Outsiders? Pinky Predmore lives in Blooming Prairie, for Chrissake.”
“Still. He’s not from Rutherford. Ed thinks he can make it work.”
Now, in August, Doris apparently remained convinced that this case had the sweet smell of success clinging to it and had urged her spouse to spare no effort. Doris’s urging being no laughing matter, shit was rolling downhill onto Milo, who had the case just about ready to go. Four high school students had been subpoenaed to testify to a jury how an evil dealer named Pinky Predmore had seduced them into buying cannabis in the school parking lot. And today I had pulled myself away from Rowdy’s Bar, where I really belonged, to take part in this interview. “I certainly hope,” Milo said, ostentatiously choosing a pen from the row of implements clipped to his pocket protector, “that I didn’t take you away from anything really important.” Lately, Milo had been groping for an attitude. Today he seemed to be working on irony.
“Just routine,” I said. “One more robbery in Section Three.”
“Aw, hell, what now?”
“Rowdy’s Bar. Looks like it started out as a straightforward burglary, but the thieves surprised the owner counting the money and taped her up.”
“The owner? You mean Babe Krueger? Aw, no kidding? She okay?”
“Seems to be. You know her?”
“Back in her party days she dated my older brother. They used to give me a ride to Little League practice. I never wanted to get out of the car.” He blushed, remembering. “She was always real nice to me,” he added, wistfully. Seeing me smiling at him, he slipped into defensive mode, shooting his cuffs, smoothing his hair and looking at his watch. “Well, let’s get at it, shall we?” he said, pulling forms out of his briefcase.
We went over the facts of the case again. Pinky Predmore, a layabout and loser from a small town west of Rutherford, had been apprehended in the parking lot at Madison High School in mid-May, selling, or attempting to sell, marijuana to students. No leaf had actually been found on the person of any student. Pinky had, in various pockets on his person, about a dozen nickel bags, which in Rutherford go for ten to twenty dollars, import fees being what they are. Buzz Cooper was the arresting officer.
“And Buzz got the complaint how, remind me?” Milo said, leafing through his notes.
“Lessee. Sally Hall was the call taker that day, passed it to Schultzy on dispatch, Schultzy called for the nearest car and Buzz answered.”
“Yeah, here it is, a 911 call and Sally couldn’t understand the name of the caller. But a good address and description of the car, so Schultzy asked Buzz to check it out and he scored. Longworth was backup. You ever find the identity of the caller?”
“Nope.”
“How come you interviewed the suspect, Jake? I thought Bo Dooley was your head narc now?”
“He is. Dooley and Anderson did all the interviews pertinent to your case. I talked to him because I was looking for a trade. Chief said I could offer him a little leverage on his drug charge for some skinny on three stolen cars. We thought the suspects might be customers of his.”
“Did he give you anything?”
“Nah. Pinky doesn’t know anything. That’s his problem. He’s way down at the bottom of the food chain, Milo; he probably got those few bags of dope from some dealer in a one-time purchase and was just trying to double his money. His usual shtick is swiping CD players out of unlocked cars. Boosting wallets, stuff like that. He even works sometimes.”
“No kidding, a solid citizen. Well, his next job’s gonna be making license plates, I guess.” Milo and I agreed on the final wording of my statement, and I was typing it up when the phone rang.
“Had lunch?” the chief asked.
“No. Is it noon?”
“Twelve-thirty. My wife sent too much food, how about helping me eat it up? I need to talk to you.”
“Well, fine. Thanks. Be there in a couple of minutes.”
Milo looked up from packing his briefcase, saw my face, and said, “Somebody gotcha, huh?”
“Chief wants to chat.”
Milo punched my shoulder. “It isn’t always more work,” he said, helpfully. “Sometimes it’s just a cut in benefits.”
2
✜
Milo’s sarcasm was probably right on target in his own workplace, I reflected as I walked down the hall, but it was way out of the kill zone in mine. My boss has no need for dirty tricks. Frank McCafferty is an honest, confident man, who settles his differences with a candid exchange of ideas. Sometimes he’s so candid I’m halfway out of the building before the echoes die down, but at least I don’t have to worry about getting knifed in the back.
And a summons to talk to the chief isn’t all that unusual; lately, we’ve had plenty to talk about. Last year, when Frank saw we were going to get moved into the new government center building, he lobbied city hall to marry a federal grant to some state matching funds and upgraded the whole department. First he got our patrol cars equipped with computers slaved to downtown. Then he spread his newly wired, more efficient patrolmen out, one to a car, and used some of the payroll he saved to put on three more detectives.
The two cops that tested highest on the Civil Service exams, Darrell Betts and Rosie Doyle, were finishing their training and joining the investigative section this month. Darrell was a shy, quiet farm kid from north of Eyota, whose high scores surprised us all. Rosie was almost his logical opposite, a high school star in basket ball and a bouncy extrovert, whose grandfather and two uncles were Rutherford cops. We intended to start them both on burglaries, where the logjam of unsolved cases was highest. Always the entry-level crime of choice, burglary in Rutherford had increased fifteen percent in the last six months. In neighborhoods where nobody locked a door five years ago, householders had begun shopping for alarm systems.
Next, the chief took Bo Dooley off patrol, sent him to school, and designated him the department specialist in narcotics and vice. Bo had been a patrolman in St. Louis for five years before transferring up to Rutherford, and McCafferty felt he had experience with big-time drug traffic that we could put to good use. “Gimme a break,” some of the foot soldiers were heard to mutter, “a narc in Rutherford?” They took to calling him “The Drug Czar.”
“We already got the game, like it or not,” Frank said grimly. “Why be shy about using the name?” He exerted himself to establish liaison between Bo and his opposite numbers in the Twin Cities, and he told me, “Don’t worry about the bitching from the troops. A lot of ‘em swore they couldn’t live with a computer in the car, either. Now they’re turning into hackers.” I let that obvious exaggeration pass because there was other urgent business to discuss. Frank was putting me in charge of his newly enlarged investigative division.
I applied for this new job, tested for it, and was glad to get picked. I got a raise in pay and a lieutenant’s rating. More money never hurts, and besides, I’d been a detective almost six years; it was time to take on more responsibility. But I knew it was going to be a roller coaster. My newly-rated investigators were going to need plenty of help, and thanks to all these reorganizations, even the old hands were floundering. I was hoping soon to be the hero who led them out of this swamp. On my first morning, I was mostly trying not to let them see me sweat. So now, if Frank wanted to talk some more about organizational matters while we ate some of his wife’s marvelous food, I could use the help and advice. If, on the other hand, Lulu had put a burr under his saddle about my efforts to avoid a CID, I was in for a big case of heartburn. McCafferty is impervious to argument once he climbs on board one of his hot new hobbyhorses. He’s determined to show the guys in St. Paul we’re quick to respond to new ideas, that we’re not just a bunch of hicks down here in little Rutherford.
I marshaled my excuses: the burglary this morning at Rowdy’s, just when I was trying to get moved into my new office and organize my staff. A stack of faxes waiting for answers, somewhere in those boxes still on my office floor. Not to mention an angry lady named Millicent Porter, who was evidently going to call me every week for the rest of my life, till I found the family heirlooms that were taken from her home last spring. I kept getting busier as I went down the hall. By the time I reached the chief’s doorway I didn’t have time to spit.
It was all for nothing. Frank was humming contentedly as he laid out his lunch. He didn’t seem to have anything on his mind but calories.
“Look at this!” he said, pulling baggies out of a brown paper bag. “Sheila makes me a salad so I won’t gain weight. Then she sends along enough garnishes to fatten a hog. You think maybe my wife is secretly working for the opposition?” He chuckled. His desk looked like something out of House Beautiful. He even had carrot sticks, and flowered napkins.
I felt saliva spring into delighted action under my tongue. Frank was unwrapping a plate of deviled eggs, and I smelled cucumbers in vinegar.
We filled our plates with pasta curls and greens. Frank found a bottle of vinaigrette dressing, which he sloshed on like water, crowing happily, “This stuff is low fat, see?” He claims his size is due to old-jock metabolism that never adjusted to his desk job, but he’s a powerful hand with a fork, too.
We crunched through a few thousand vitamins. Finally, Frank sat back, sighed contentedly, and began poking idly at a radish with a broccoli spear.
“Well, so,” he said, “how’s it going with the move? Gonna be able to offload some of your cases and get on with supervising?”
“Hope so. Had to take a new burglary call this morning at Rowdy’s Bar, though. Just as well I did,” I said as I saw him open his mouth to protest. “It’s gonna turn into aggravated robbery. Lucky it wasn’t murder.”
“What, somebody got hurt?
“Babe Krueger was taped in a chair for almost twenty-four hours. Alone all night in the basement of Rowdy’s Bar? Good thing she’s tough. Most women would be in the hospital.”
He shook his head. “See, there we go again, section three.”
“Yep. Maintaining its average.” In the near north watch area, east of Broadway and north of Center, the call rate this year had been roughly two to one over any other patrol zone in Rutherford. Lately, patrolmen assigned to section three got the adrenaline pumping before they even left the station.
“They robbed the safe, huh? While the place was closed? Anything else taken?”
“Storerooms weren’t touched. Haven’t had time to talk to the bartender yet, but he had the bar open, and it looked okay. ”
“So how much money?”
“Still working on the total. Close to thirty thousand, give or take.”
Frank stared. “From Rowdy’s? Hard to believe.”
“Biggest weekend of the summer, Babe says. Pool tournament. I’ve got the deposit slips. She’s still working on the change list.”
“Seems like a lot. Whaddya say,”–he stood up, suddenly irritated by the groceries spread over his desk–“had enough? Okay if I deep six all this?” He scooped a lot of garbage into his wastebasket, sat down and tortured his swivel chair for a minute. “I’ve been thinking about pop.”
“What do you want? I’ll get it.” I started toward the machine in the hall.
“No, no, no.” He waved his arms. “Capital P-O-P. Remember? Problem Oriented Policing. We talked about it in May, after I came back from the chief’s convention. Then all Hell broke loose around here, and I kind of tabled it. But I’m thinking about a POP program for Section Three.”
The acronym approach to law enforcement makes me deeply uneasy. Why should we make it sound as if we’re playing some cute game? “I gotta tell you, Frank,” I said, “I feel quite problem-oriented already.”
“What? You think it sounds kind of la-dee-da?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t know,” Frank kicked his desk three or four times. He has very large feet that he’s always trying to maneuver into a comfortable spot. “This time I think maybe we’re onto something. They call it the proactive approach. Instead of reactive, see? I mean, for instance, usually, we wait till we get a call, then after we know somebody’s got a problem, we respond to that, right?”
I let three seconds go by while I re-crossed my legs and then said, “Right.”
Frank picked up the big glass paperweight from his desk and played with it a minute. I watched while he decided not to throw it at my head. Finally he put it back on a stack of spreadsheets, sat back, and gave me one of his big, innocent stares. He has prominent baby blue eyes. It’s distressingly easy to tell when you’re enjoying his full attention.
“All this reorganization we’ve been doing in the investigative section, you remember what got us started on that?” he asked softly.
“Rapidly growing town, rising crime rate. So many new cases–”
“Uh-huh. Accompanied by an even larger dip in the clearance rates, right?”
“Down a little from last year, for sure.” I’d been hoping we weren’t going to go all over that ground again. Hadn’t we decided on a strategy? Weren’t we taking steps?
“I just got the June figures.” He pulled one of the spreadsheets toward him. “Eight percent down from last year, which was five percent below the year before.”
“So many cases all at once…”
He picked up the paperweight again and put it down again, but harder. “What do you think I’m saying to you?” His voice was going up despite his best efforts. Down the hall, I could hear doors closing. “We’re just answering one call after another as fast as we can, and it’s making the whole department look like a bunch of turkeys! Morale is in the toilet and everybody’s jumpy and mean because we’re up to our armpits in a goddamn swamp! And the more swamped we get, the lousier our score is going to look!”
He slammed the paperweight down again, and Lulu came and closed the door to the outer office. “Your ass is on the line as much as mine is. You think the City Council is going to send you little bouquets of flowers saying, ‘Golly, Jake, we’re sorry you’re having it so tough just when you got your nice promotion’? Think again.
“I just got this note in the mail.” He waved a piece of paper over his head and then brought it to eye level and gave it a glare that should have set it on fire.
“The Mayor wants to know if we”–he held the paper in front of his nose and read, in a voice like battery acid, “‘perhaps need interim assistance.’ Which in plain English means”–Frank was beginning to look apoplectic–“ ‘when are you going to get your asses in gear over there?’ You know what the next goddamn helpful sonofabitching memo’s going to say? Huh?”
He was getting so worked up I didn’t dare answer. He wadded the memo into a hard ball and hurled it into his wastebasket with a metallic twang. Plastic baggies and a couple of shreds of lettuce flew out. “It’s going to say, ‘Help is on the way asshole and send us your resignation and don’t forget to include one for your smartass new head of detectives.’ ”
He sat back and kicked his desk a few more times. He picked up the heavy paperweight again and sat looking at it curiously while I held my breath.
I watched my watch scroll through ten seconds before I said softly, “I’m sorry, Frank. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“Like shit you didn’t.” He had me there. I had indeed meant to poke fun at what I saw as a silly initialized everybody-into-the-pool approach to crime control. Now I meant to talk him out of beaning me with a glass knickknack. If I could.
“What do you want me to do?”
He stared out his window a minute. “I want you to quit being a piss-ant,” he said, “and give this idea a chance.”
“Okay,” I said. I still thought it was crap but I was sorry to have offended him. “What’s first?”
He stared at me a minute. I must have looked sufficiently sincere because finally he nodded, satisfied, swiveled his chair noisily, and said, “Look at this.”
He had two blowups of section three pinned to a corkboard behind his desk.
“I had Lulu flag the addresses for calls in section three for the first half of this year, and for the same period last year.” He poked the left-hand chart with his pen. “Here’s last year. Blue is for no-arrest calls and misdemeanors, theft, vandalism, DUI. Red is for the serious stuff, assault, armed robbery, rape, domestic violence. Look where the pins cluster.”
Three-quarters of the calls were between Tenth and Eighteenth Street, along Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
“Huh,” I said. “We all keep blaming section three, but really most of the calls are in the center, aren’t they? Basically in what they call the North End.”
“Exactly,” Frank said. “The rest of section three, the brick apartment houses from Center north to Eighth Street, and the commercial sections along Broadway and out by the highway, I had Lulu run the averages, and they’re actually a little lower than the rest of town.
“But here’s what concerns me the most.” He swiveled right. “Look at this year’s map.”
The clustering was equally obvious, but denser; there were many more pins. And now the most active area extended north almost to Twentieth Street and was creeping east; Seventh Avenue had many pins.
“It’s growing,” I said.
“Like a cancer,” Frank said. “And do you see how the color’s changing? Last year it was nearly all blue pins. Now it’s much redder. The level of violence is going up fast.”
He sat down at his desk and turned his pop-eyed blue stare on me. When McCafferty thinks hard, his eyes open wider and he starts to look like a deer caught in the headlights.
“Some of the problems in that neighborhood are obvious. It’s the oldest part of town, a lot of the buildings are seriously run-down. Some of the bigger houses that used to be occupied by families have been divided into apartments, getting shabbier and shabbier. And there’s a growing tendency toward absentee landlords. They don’t check references. They rent to anybody that puts down the deposit, and they’re very reluctant to evict anybody when the neighbors complain about noise and disruption. The houses go downhill fast.
