Gun Machine

“Lovely guy,” said the captain. “Went to pieces when his little girl was lost. At the funeral he said to me that it was like Manhattan had betrayed him. Never saw him again.”

“Yes,” said the assistant chief. “Well.”

Tallow gave him an amiable smile without letting him off the cold hook of his gaze. “Quixotic, sir, yes. But as you can see, we’re putting together a picture of our man. The way he works.”

“Yes,” said the assistant chief. “Well.”

“The sort of people he deals with.”

“Yes,” said the assistant chief.

“Did you know Assistant Chief Tenn, sir?”

“No, Detective. Well. Not well. Marcus Casson took over from Tenn, and I took over from Casson.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said the captain quietly, as if speaking from a distant cave. “Casson moved on to Transit as a bureau chief. After Beverly Garza died.”

The threads of the net, thought Tallow, are so fine as to be invisible, until the light catches them.

“How did she die, Captain?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” the assistant chief said. Tallow was still standing in front of the door.

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” he repeated, “I have to get back to my office.”

“Oh,” said Tallow. “Yes, sir. You have to get back to work.” He took a step to the side and opened the door for Turkel. “Thank you for coming over and explaining things to us. Very kind of you. I think we all know where we stand now.”

Assistant Chief Turkel gave Tallow a hard look. Tallow saw a man without empathy. He’d heard of it, could fake it when he needed to, but felt nothing for anything himself. He looked at Tallow as if Tallow were a dead animal on the side of the road.

“You’re working this case on your own, yes?”

“Yes,” said Tallow.

“Shouldn’t you be mandatorily off the street?”

“I was told we didn’t really have the resources for that, sir. The whole system’s out of whack, after all. So I was put where I’ll do the most good.”

“Perhaps,” the assistant chief said, and left. Tallow closed the door.

“John Tallow,” said the captain, “I did not know that you were a smart man.”

“Jury’s out on that,” said the lieutenant.

The captain laughed a whispery laugh, standing with difficulty. “You know,” he said, “if you’d been a smart man all this time, I would have heard about you. But I’ll tell you a thing. When I was a detective, I was partnered with a smart lady. Very smart. So smart that she got promoted, up the chain and away from me. My next partner, God love him, he was so stupid that the squad room had to make up new words to describe him. It was like I didn’t have a partner at all. And it was at that point, John Tallow, that I finally began to learn how to be police. You were probably a smart boy when you were assigned here. But I have a feeling that only just now did you start becoming a smart man.”

The captain moved to the door, with some visible pain. Tallow opened it for him. The captain looked at him levelly.

“I can’t cover your ass, John. I will leave this room and go back to approving the requisition of paper clips or some damned thing. Being the captain of the 1st doesn’t even make me the most important office-supplies manager in the area. That’ll be some Master of the Universe down on Wall Street. I’ve got no juice with anyone and a bunch of senior staff just waiting for me to cardiac out on the crapper one morning. I can see where you’re taking this. All I’m going to say to you is, you better damn well have it.”

Tallow said, “Captain, how did Beverly Garza die?”

The captain smiled, very thinly. “She was run down. Hell of a thing for the chief of Transit, right? But I’ll tell you something. The pathologist swore up and down that he’d found gunshot residue on what was left of her head. Like someone shot her and then drove over her. CSU even turned up a mashed bullet on the scene. Nothing ever came of it, mind.”

“Did you know her well?”

“Because I remember it so well, you mean? No. It stuck in my head because of that bullet. A .357, fired from a restored single-action revolver. The old night-shift boss at CSU, it was his personal project for six months. I remember it because he came up with the weirdest match. He thought it came from a Pinkerton pistol. The kind the railroad police used in the 1800s. But the old boss at CSU, he really wanted to come up with something. Now him, he was close to Beverly. Not me. I’m not close to anyone. Never was.”

The captain left, no energy left for an acknowledgment to the lieutenant.

“Close the door, John,” she said. He did.

“Sit down, John,” she said.

“I’d rather stand.”

“Sit down.”

“You have really shitty chairs, Lieutenant.”

She burst out laughing. “What did you just say to me?”

“Seriously. They hurt my ass. That’s why you got them. So no one stays in your office too long.”

“You incredible asshole,” she said, still laughing. “How did you even…?”

“The first time I had to sit on one for more than five minutes. It took the rest of the day for my backside to turn the right way out again.”