“You told him to find another lawyer,” Raymond said.
“Yes, but he won’t. He not only needs me, he likes me…”
Raymond listened to the lawyer and the woman talking at the same time.
“… But he is going to have to realize, once he gets this extortion-blackmail bullshit out of his head, that I charge a fee, and if he’s not willing to pay it he will, indeed, have to go somewhere else.” She seemed to smile, though it was a bland expression. “We can play our games, but it still has to be within the context of the jobs we’re paid to do. You can’t expect me to give you information about my client, just as I don’t expect you to shoot him down without provocation… Agreed?”
“I guess we are back where we started,” Raymond said.
“Why? Where did you expect to be?”
He paused and said, “I don’t know,” as he got out of bed and then stood naked looking down at her. “But aside from all that, how was the fuck?”
“Let me put it this way,” Carolyn said, her eyes moving up his body to his face, “it was about what I expected it to be.”
MARY ALICE HAD SAID TO HIM, “You don’t care about anybody else; you only think of yourself.”
Bob Herzog had said to him, “You know what I admire about you? Your detachment. You don’t let things bother you. You observe, you make judgments and you accept what you find.”
Norb Bryl had said to him, “You spend two hundred and ten dollars on a blue suit?”
Wendell Robinson had said to him, “I don’t mean to sound like I’m ass-kissing, but most of the time I don’t think of you as being white.”
Jerry Hunter had said to him, more than once, “What’s the matter you’re not talking?”
The girl from the News had said to him, “I think you’re afraid of women. I think that’s the root of the problem.”
The woman, Carolyn Wilder, had said to him, “It was about what I expected it to be.”
He had put on his blue suit and left her house because he couldn’t think of anything to say. All the way home he had tried to think of something that would have nailed her to the antique headboard, her mouth open; but he couldn’t think of anything. He went to bed and woke up during the night thinking of lines, but none of them had it. Until finally he said to himself, What’re you doing? What difference does it make what she thinks?
He was working it out slowly, gradually eliminating personal feelings.
But it was not until morning, when he walked into his living room and again saw the broken glass, that he finally realized what he should have said to her and it amazed him that it had nothing to do with him, personally.
He should have told her flatly-not trying to be clever, not trying to upstage her with the last word-that if she continued to play games with Clement the time would come when Clement would kill her.
It was that clear now in his mind. He did not believe for a moment she had had any kind of a kickback scheme going with Guy. She had not denied it directly, because she would feel no need to, would not dignify it. Carolyn Wilder, of all the Recorder’s Court defense lawyers he knew, would be the last one to ever get involved in backcourt deals. Especially with Guy.
He pried flattened chunks of lead from his living room wall and knew by looking at them they weren’t from a P .38. When his landlady came in, approaching the window as though something might again come flying through the broken shards of glass, he told her it was probably kids with a B-B gun, over in the park. The landlady seemed to have doubts, questions, but asked only if he’d reported it to the police. Raymond reminded her he was the police. She told him he would have to pay to have the window replaced.
That morning, Raymond sat at his desk in a gray tweed sportcoat he had not worn since spring-since dieting and exercising-and the coat felt loose, a size too large. He reviewed the Judicial Tenure Commission’s Report on the investigation of Judge Guy, seeing familiar names, Carolyn Wilder’s appearing several times.
He did not tell his squad about the shooting-whether it was an attempt on his life or a challenge-not because he considered it a personal matter, but because he didn’t want to spend the morning discussing it. He was quiet this morning, into himself, and they left him alone. They made phone calls. They worked on other cases. They looked at hard-core sex photos they had picked up during the evidence-search of a victim’s house: exclaiming, whistling, Wendell pretending to be sick; Hunter studying one of the photos and Norb Bryl saying to him, “You go for that kinky stuff, huh?” Hunter saying, “Jesus, Christ, what kind of pervert you think I am?” And Bryl saying, “Oh, one about six foot, sandy mustache, green-striped shirt…” At noon, Raymond told them he was going to skip lunch.
After they had left he took off his sportcoat, unlocked the plywood cabinet next to the GE battery charger and hung his .38 snub-nose with the rubber bands around the grip on a hook inside the cabinet. He brought out, then, a shoulder holster that held a 9-mm blue-steel Colt automatic with a hickory grip, slipped the rig on, adjusted it snugly beneath his left arm and put on his sportcoat again, now a perfect fit.
SANDY WOKE UP lying on her side, feeling Clement cuddled close to her and something hard pressing against her bare behind.
She said, “Is that for me, or you have to go to the bathroom?”
Clement didn’t answer. She hadn’t heard him come in last night. When she shifted to her back, turning her head to look at the Oklahoma Wildman, he made a face with his eyes still closed and said, “Get off me.”
“Pardon me, did I touch you or something?… You have a big time last night?” No answer. “Well, I was somewhere, too, if you think I was sitting home.”
Clement’s little-boy face looked red and swollen; his breath smelled of sour-mash whiskey.
“The wildman all tuckered out? You big shit, where’d you go?”
Clement opened his eyes, blinked a few times to focus, seeing noon sunlight in the window and Sandy’s frizzy hair sticking out golden from the pillow. He said, “I went to that place out Wood’ard… took me back home it was so good.” Clement’s mouth was partly open against the pillow and he talked as though he had a toothache or had just eaten Mexican peppers.
Sandy said, “What?… What place?”
He worked his mouth to loosen the stickiness. “Line up your Albanian, I’m ready for him now,” Clement said. “You all be sitting there when I walk in. You introduce us… we’ll look into this business.”
“What place?”
“Uncle Deano’s.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sandy said, “he’s Albanian, he doesn’t like Country. He likes disco.”
Clement stared at his little partner, waiting for what she said to make sense.
Finally he said, “Honey?… I want to talk to this man, I don’t want to dance with him.”
“Well, what if he doesn’t want to go there?”
“Hey, aren’t you with the good hands people?” Clement inched his own hand over as he said it and caught Sandy between her slender legs. “Aren’t you?”
“Cut it out.”
“Why, what’s this?” Clement closed his eyes as he felt around. “Whiskers? You growing whiskers on me?”
“That hurts.”
“Yeah, but hurts good, don’t it? Huh? How ’bout right there? Feel pretty good?”
Sandy rolled toward him, pushing out her hips, then stopped. “I ain’t gonna do it less you brush your teeth.”
“Come on,” Clement said, “we don’t have to kiss. Let’s just do it.”
Clement laid around the rest of the day while he thought and stared out at Motor City. Sandy sat at the desk to write a letter to her mother in French Lick, Indiana, that began “Dear Mom, The weather has been very warm for October, but I don’t mind it a bit as I hate cold weather. Brrrr.” And stopped there. She rattled the ballpoint pen between her front teeth until Clement told her to, goddamn-it, cut it out.