"Loose ends you had to tie up this hour of the night?"

  "Sometimes the day gets longer than I'd like and sometimes a week gets to be more than I can manage," I say.

  "I thought you was the warlord of the Eleventh?" O'Shea says. "What brought you over here to your old stamping ground in the wee hours of the night?"

  Before I can answer Rourke says, "Exactly what time was it that you stopped in here?"

  "I'd say midnight."

  Rourke gives me the nod and I go on.

  "Mabel's already here. She's sitting in my chair behind my desk."

  "At midnight? What was she doing here at midnight?"

  "Same thing as me, I suppose."

  "But you ain't told us what that was," O'Shea says. "Why was you here, that hour, and not home in bed with your wife?"

  "I been running around all day, here and there, all wound up."

  "Here and there?" O'Shea says, ready to start digging.

  "Wanted a quiet minute before going home?" Rourke says, cutting his partner off. "I can understand that. You can understand that, can't you, Frank?" He looks at me. "So you were here with Milton—Mabel—just chewing the fat?"

  "That's right."

  "About what?"

  "She was having trouble in her personal life and was very upset."

  "She say what kind of trouble?"

  "She didn't really confide in me, but I got the idea she was having a relationship with—"

  "Intimate relationship?" Rourke says.

  "That's the impression I got. Intimate enough for her to decide to tell her boyfriend the truth."

  O'Shea glanced at Rourke.

  "You say she told you that she told the man she was having sex with that she'd once been a he?"

  "No, she didn't tell me that. I thought she was going to tell me something like that, but thought better of it and said we should go home."

  "What time?" Rourke asked.

  "One o'clock. Around one o'clock."

  "See anything on the street?"

  "Nothing. Not a soul. This ain't a very busy avenue even during business hours. No bars up or down the street for at least four blocks each way."

  "So, any activity on the street you would have noticed?"

  "I would."

  "But you didn't," O'Shea said.

  "I heard a car start up. I was locking the door."

  "You see the car?"

  "All I saw was the headlights wash across the door. Then Halstead was pushing me from behind, yelling for me to get down."

  "And the shots?"

  "I heard the shots. Three shots. Rapid fire. I went through the window with Mabel on top of me."

  "You got any cuts on your hands or face?" O'Shea asks me.

  "What? I don't know."

  I look down at my hands. There's blood on them. I touch my face.

  "My blood? Her blood?"

  "As long as you don't feel any cuts or bleeding, we might as well finish up here. Okay?" Rourke says. "We'll have a medic check you out in a minute."

  "That's okay with me," I say, staring at my hands. "Could I have a wet towel, though. Get this..."

  I stop right there at the word, not wanting to say it again. Mabel's blood on my hands. My friend's blood on my hands.

  "You want to go on?" Rourke asks.

  "Sure. But I don't know what more I can tell you."

  O'Shea brings me a towel after wetting it from the jug in the water cooler.

  "Well, you already told us a lot," Rourke says. "You told us somebody was staking you out. The car was parked over on the side street and started its strafing run when Mabel and you come out of the storefront."

  "They fired when you stopped to lock the door," O'Shea says.

  "Maybe whoever did it was stalking you," Rourke says.

  "Followed you from someplace. Where were you before you come here?"

  "In my new office across the street from Schaller's Pump over to the Eleventh."

  "You got a hell of a lot of places of business," Rourke says.

  "You left there, what time?" O'Shea asks.

  "Eleven-thirty. About eleven-thirty," I say.

  "Everything all right at Schaller's?" Rourke asks.

  "Buck Bailey got drunk and tried to start a fight with me."

  "Tried to start?" O'Shea says.

  "It didn't last long. He slipped and bumped his nose on the bar."

  "What was you fighting about?"

  "It wasn't a fight exactly, more like kids shoving in the playground," I say, not telling the exact truth and not really sure why I'm not telling the exact truth.

  "So what was you shoving about?"

  "Bailey accused Canarias and me of not giving him the welcome he thinks he deserves in the Twenty-seventh."

  "And it ended there? No threats of more to come?" Rourke asks.

  "If there was any, I didn't hear them. I left before it went any farther."

  "So, before that?" O'Shea says.

  "Before Schaller's Pump?"

  "Yeah, before that."

  "I was at my Eleventh Ward office."

  "Alone?" O'Shea asks.

  "No. Somebody was helping me."

  "Who would that be?"

  "Shaftoe."

  "Who?"

  "Robert Shaftoe."

  "Old friend?"

  "No, a new associate. You heard the name?"

  "Sounds familiar," O'Shea says. "But I can't place it."

  "There's an old nursery rhyme about a kid named Bobby Shaftoe," Rourke says.

  "What are you talking about?" O'Shea says, showing a little irritation which he does when somebody drops a remark he don't understand.

  Rourke half recites, half sings the old nursery rhyme.

  "Bobby Shaftoe went to sea.

  Silver buckles on his knee.

  He'll come home and marry me.

  Pretty Bobby Shaftoe.

  Bobby Shaftoe's fine and fair.

  Combing down his auburn hair.

  He's my friend for evermore.

  Pretty Bobby Shaftoe."

  "What the hell is that all about?" O'Shea says as though shocked and dismayed that a partner of his should be reciting Mother Goose verses.

  Rourke smiles. "The kiddies like them," he says.

  "My God, you'll be dressing up like Santa Claus next," O'Shea says. He turns to me. "You want to tell us anything else about before you got here?"

  I shake my head.

  "So, go on. After you heard the shots."

  "Mabel pushed me through the door window. The alarm went off. I was on my face. There was broken glass all around. Mabel was on top of me. The next thing I know Penny Tucker's pulling me away from Mabel."

  They both take a step back as though agreeing there's nothing more to be squeezed out of me.

  "You want to call Mary? Anybody?" Rourke asks.

  "I don't know if I should wake her up."

  "It's two-thirty, Jimmy. I got a feeling she may be awake and worrying," Rourke says.

  "You're right," I say.

  "Your hands is as clean as you're going to get them with that towel," Rourke says, taking it away from me.

  I pick up the phone and punch in my home number. The receiver on the other end's picked up right away, like Mary's been sitting right on it.

  "Jimmy?" she says, her voice full of fear.

  "I'm okay, Mary."

  "If you were going to be this late, why didn't you call me?" she asks, immediately switching to a hurt and angry tone.

  "Well, I should've called you, sweetheart. I should've called you the minute I thought I was going to be late, but I didn't want to wake you."

  "You not being here keeps me awake," she says, still running with her angry relief. Then she switches again. "You're sure you're all right?"

  "Yes, I am."

  "But somebody isn't all right?"

  "Mabel Halstead's dead, Mary."

  "Oh, my God. How?"

  "Gunshot."

  "Where?"

  "Outside the storefront."

  "In the Twenty-seventh?"

  "Yes," I say. "I'll be home inside an hour, Mary. Maybe sooner."

  I hang up. Mary's acting like a nurse in an ER doing triage, asking all these curt questions with one or two words, which I don't want to go through again.

  The medic from the examiner's office comes in and looks me over.

  "How'd you do it?" he says. "How'd you go through a glass door and not get cut up?"

  I look up and see O'Shea and Rourke looking at me in this wary way cops look when they're wondering if somebody ain't altogether just an innocent bystander.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Mary's not the kind of woman that cries at the drop of a dime. She's been a nurse for a long time and seen so many pitiful things and so much pain and suffering that she's got ways to defend against them. Besides, when I get home, Kathleen's up and looking at me with big eyes, sensing, like kids and animals do, that something ain't quite right.

  Mary hugs me a little tighter than usual. The kind of hug that means to protect me from anything bad that might ever come my way.

  After we tuck Kathleen back in and I give Alfie another pat on the head to let the old dog know that I'm really all right, Mary and me go into our bedroom.

  It's after four in the morning but I don't feel like going to bed because I know I ain't going to sleep a wink.

  "Get into your pajamas and under the covers anyway," Mary says. "If you can't sleep at least you can rest your body."

  I do like she says and she gets into bed beside me.

  Then she starts to cry.

  Sometime around dawn I fall asleep after all.

  I know the drill good enough to know that the interrogation on the site is only the first and there could be a lot more, so I ain't surprised when I get a call from Bill Malloy, the chief of detectives at the precinct which serves the Twenty-seventh, asking me to come down and clear up a couple of things.

  I don't know Malloy all that well, having only met him once or twice, here and there, but the word is that he's a fair minded cop who rarely cut a deal for hisself or anybody else. And the times he did cut a deal or give an edge was because there was two wrongs he figured canceled themselves out but one of the people involved needed his help more than the other. Or there was two rights, and he had to choose which was righter.

  He's a slender guy what looks no more like a cop than I do. In fact less. He gets up from behind his desk and reaches out to shake my hand.

  "I've heard a lot about you, Mr. Flannery."

  "Nothing good, I hope," I say, using the old joking formula with the police, hoping they ain't going to say you're wrong about that.

  "Detectives O'Shea and Rourke filed their report. There's a couple of things here I'd like to double-check with you."

  "There's something I'd like to ask you, too," I say.

  "Go ahead."

  "How come O'Shea and Rourke caught the call?"

  "They're headquarters men," Malloy says. "Every precinct call goes through headquarters. You know that. They picked it up off the screen and tapped Captain Buntley, night watch, for permission to roll on it. Are you complaining about the special treatment you're getting, Flannery?"

  So it ain't "Mr." anymore.

  "I just wondered if they were keeping a special eye on me or my ward for some reason unbeknownst to me."

  "As far as I know it was nothing but pure chance," Malloy says. "Now, my turn?"

  Reading from a report, he starts asking me questions related to what I already told O'Shea and Rourke.

  I know the way it works, so I don't object. Cops ask the same questions over and over again, make you tell your story over and over again, for two reasons. One, they might be able to build a case on some small contradiction or inconsistency. Two, they might jog a memory loose.

  "You know anybody out to get you, Flannery? You get any hate mail recently? Any threats?"

  "I suppose like anybody who ever deals with the public on a regular basis, I got my share of people what don't like me very much. I suppose I've even got a couple of enemies just like I bet you got a couple of enemies."

  He nods and smiles.

  "I might even know a few who'd like to see me dead, but I don't know anybody who'd try to make it happen," I say.

  "It's usually somebody you wouldn't think would make it happen who makes it happen," he says. "So, you haven't told me. Have you had any hate mail?"

  "I got a pile of it."

  "More than usual?"

  "More than when I was taking care of the Twenty-seventh," I say.

  "You save it?"

  "No, I usually dump it. I don't even read it through once I see what it's going to be about."

  "So, it doesn't scare you?"

  "Well, yeah, it scares me, but I don't know what I can do about it."

  "You ever save any of it?"

  I shake my head.

  "You happen to have any on your desk or in your files now?"

  "Some."

  "How come, if you usually trash it, that you've still got some?"

  "I got a new assistant lately. He advised me to take such mail a little more seriously. At least let him vet it."

  "He say why?"

  "Mentioned that it might be useful if anybody tried to carry out a threat."

  "He got a name?"

  "Robert Shaftoe."

  Malloy leans forward and makes a note of the name on the corner of his blotter.

  "You mind if I send over a man to collect that mail and look it over?"

  "You mean I should've been taking it seriously?"

  "I mean you never know. Also, sometimes, a letter we get from one place links up with a letter we get from another place."

  He stands up.

  "Well, anything I can do to help you learn the neighborhoods, you just let me know, will you?"

  We shake hands and I go to the door.

  "Oh, by the way, I understand you had a fight with Buck Bailey and Pat Connell over to Schaller's Pump last night."

  "Bailey had a few too many."

  "Also a bad temper. That's what got him in trouble before."

  "I don't think he'd carry it that far again."

  "How far is that?"

  "Far enough to try and kill me."

  "Wouldn't you say he could have more reason to kill you than he did to beat those two men to death? Watch your back."

  I leave, thinking about the people I know who'd want me dead and could find the balls to make it happen.

  How far back do I have to go? I mean I had my quarrels and little run-ins going back to when I was a kid in the playgrounds, things you practically totally forget about a month after they happen. But nowadays people with automatic weapons walk into business offices and doctors' offices and post offices and restaurants and start shooting for some injury, real or imagined, that was done to them, a year, five years, ago.

  So, it's perfectly possible that some kid I kicked in the knee when I was ten is a forty-year-old man who's been brooding about it all these years and one night decides he's going to do me in.

  There's probably one or two I work with down in the sewers who take exception to my personality or the color of my hair, but that's about as doubtful as the first proposition.

  Chances are, if somebody was coming after me, it would be something to do with politics. I got to figure that for every person I ever helped there could be another person dislikes me because of what I done.

  So looking at the people I met or re-met recently, I'm thinking of Buck Bailey most of all.

  Also, because of the confrontation I have with Lundatos up at Club Fed, there's an outside chance he put a hit out on me. I don't want to be accused of political incorrectness but it's a well-known fact that Greeks is very passionate and jealous people.

  Janet Canarias ain't in her office or her storefront. I call the morgue and find out she's down there making the official identification.

  By the time I get there, she's through with it and looking grim and uncertain.

  "You all right?" I ask.

  "Ah, Jimmy," she says, as though she expected more from me than something as ordinary as that.

  I put my arms around her and she holds on for a minute, then breaks away.

  "Cup of coffee?" she says.

  "There's a place around the corner," I say.

  When we get to the diner she orders coffee and I order milk.

  "You got a stomachache?"

  "You think I could be getting an ulcer?"

  "Go see a doctor, Jimmy. No need to suffer if you don't have to suffer."

  "Well, it ain't that bad. Only now and then I get a little nervous stomach."

  "I don't wonder we don't all have nervous stomachs," she says.

  When the coffee comes, she takes a swallow. "That was very hard for me, Jimmy. Very hard."

  "You weren't having..."

  I don't finish what I start to say.

  "A relationship with Mabel?"

  "None of my business."

  "It'd seem sort of right for me to get intimate with Mabel, wouldn't it? After all I work both sides of the street, like they say. With Mabel I could resolve the conflict in my own heart. I'd have a woman with some of a man's sensibilities and a man with a woman's body. Jackpot."

  "Hey," I say, telling her to come down off the pain and sorrow.

  "No, Jimmy, there was no chemistry between Mabel and me. Just good, good friends."

  "More precious than gold."

  "You know the poem?"

  "I didn't know it was from a poem," I say. "It's just some thing my mother—God rest her soul—used to say."

  "How did you feel about Mabel, Jimmy?"

  "Same as you, except I knew her pretty good when she was Milton Halstead, one of the best cops I ever met. As pretty and feminine as she was, I couldn't ever stop seeing her as a man. Even the way she stepped in and helped me out with a couple of bone-breakers kept that opinion of her alive. And at the end—I'm not saying another person, man or woman, wouldn't've put themselves in harm's way to push me—it was a cop's instincts that got her moving and saved my life."

  "You have any idea who was out to get you?"

  "I can't even make up a decent field of probables. There's some very long shots but I figure your committeeman in your ward for the front runner."

  "Bailey? I don't think he's got the cojones to take a shot at you."

  "He had the guts to beat up on your friends so bad he killed them," I said.

 

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