“So why do you come here?” Nancy was already bored with the topic, but she had to stick to her guns, show Lenhardt she had the stamina to stay with an argument.
“I come here because the beer is cheap, they’ll open the kitchen for a public servant working late, and it’s on the way home. Don’t overanalyze things, Nancy. How many times I gotta tell you that?”
Infante laughed in his hand, and Nancy could feel a blush spreading across her face like a stain. Sometimes she hated being so fair, so blond.
Lenhardt took pity on her. “You got your own stuff to work on, Infante.”
She bit into a popper, the closest thing to a vegetable she had eaten in three days. “Hey, how come he’s Infante and I’m always Nancy, or Miss Nancy?”
“Fer Chri-” But Lenhardt wouldn’t even take the lord’s name in front of Nancy, so he ended up saying nothing more than “Fer cry.” Most times he didn’t even get halfway into the word, but the day had taken its toll.
“You’re not going to get all feminist on me, are you?” Lenhardt asked now. “I mean, he”-he stopped himself again-“heck, you want me to call you Porter, I’ll call you Porter. I’ll even try to call you that mouthful of consonants you were born with-Padrewski, Portrotsky. But cra”-another deft catch-“c’mon, it’s just, it’s just a way of talking, Nancy. I mean Potter. I mean Porterchinski.”
“Potrcurzski. That’s okay, sergeant. I got a special name for you, too.”
“Yeah? What?”
“The Double-L.”
“How you get a double l out of Harold Lenhardt?”
“It’s not for Lenhardt.” Nancy grinned. “For Living Legend. Because that’s what everyone tells me I’m working for. My uncles, Andy-they remind me at least once a week that my sergeant is a genuine goddamn livin’ legend.”
She thought this would make him laugh, but Lenhardt just shook his head. “There are no living legends, Nancy. Only dead ones.”
They had cleared the New York Fried Chicken case that evening. Now it was the prosecutor’s to lose. It had taken twelve hours of interviews with four different kids, but when the day was done, they had booked all four, three on homicide, one on a lesser charge, because that was the deal he had struck. In some ways, Nancy thought the deal-maker the finkiest of the four, but wasn’t that the way? They were always the ones who turned.
Lenhardt misread her mournful expression, seemed to think she was feeling sorry for herself. “You’ll be a good murder police.”
Good, but not great, Nancy thought, then wondered why she was so defensive. No one had criticized her over the past four days, or suggested she was inadequate in any way. She had been praised for some of her work. Yet she felt rebuked, stupid, exposed. A kid had seen through her. A jumpy killer, with the impulse control of a mouse on Ritalin, had gotten to her.
Her Nokia cell phone chirped. Andy typed his good night:
LONG DAY. GOING TO BED.
Even his text message sounded angry. Beneath the table, Nancy typed back:
SUIT YOURSELF.
Then she wanted to take it back, but she couldn’t.
They had been together since high school, one way or another, but it was only lately they had fallen into the habit of sniping at each other. Her mother said it would pass, and her mother had a thirty-five-year marriage on which to stake her expertise. But what did her mother know about twelve-hour days that left you feeling at once victorious and ashamed? You couldn’t go straight home after a day like that. If anyone could understand, it should be Andy, who had been a police and was now working for the feds while attending law school at night.
“I feel like we know what happened,” Nancy said, “but not why. It was supposed to be a robbery, with a gun.”
“Why isn’t our problem,” Lenhardt said. “Forget about it.”
She couldn’t. “According to the inside kid they were going to wear masks, put the manager and their accomplice in the freezer to throw detectives off. The gun was supposed to be for show, to get the money.”
The inside kid, the coworker, had been almost grateful to be found. After all, he knew better than anyone the potential vindictiveness of his buddies, all former employees at New York Fried Chicken. The inside kid had pled to a lesser charge of manslaughter, but his main crime in Nancy’s opinion was being dumb enough to think that if you unlock the door at a Route 40 chicken shack and admit three unmasked guys with a gun, they’re going to be content to take the money and depart, doffing their caps as they go. Doffing their caps was another Lenhardtism, of course: “Tally-ho, good day, thank you for these tens and twenties, and may I have some of the Cajun extra-crispy to go? It ain’t Cary Grant on the Riviera, Nancy. If it were, robbery would be working it. People don’t kill people sometimes, we’re out of work.”
“Yeah, I know,” Nancy said. She suspected that Lenhardt wanted to let it go, put the day behind him, but she couldn’t. She had to learn. It had been so easy to catch them, so hard to break them down. They had an insolence that left her breathless. Her Polish grandfather had escaped from Europe with nothing but the clothes on his back, survived the sinking of an ocean liner, and refused the easy names pressed on him when he arrived at the Port of Baltimore in 1916. Josef Potrcurzski had carried his own knife, and later a gun, guarding his block like a sheriff in the Old West. Yet even he would have been terrified by this trio.
“The killing was the point,” Lenhardt said. “More than the money, which would have lasted maybe forty-eight hours, and that’s if they got some financial planner from Merrill Lynch to help them invest it. They didn’t kill someone in a robbery. They had a robbery so they could kill someone.”
“So why bring a gun,” Nancy said, “and use one of the kitchen knives?”
Lenhardt pressed his palms into his eyes and rubbed, hard, the way the redheaded barmaid had twisted Nancy ’s limed-up margarita glass when Nancy asked for extra salt.
“I don’t know, Miss Nancy. I just don’t know. You found the casing in the parking lot. Maybe the kid with the gun fired it and was scared by the noise. Maybe they shot and missed, what with the vic swinging that knife around, assuming they were telling the truth about that. Poor bastard died defending the honor of New York Fried Chicken.”
“Okay, so they wanted to kill someone. But why someone they’d be connected to so easily?”
“They’re not thinking this through, Nancy. They don’t know from standard probability.”
“Seriously.”
“Maybe they killed him because he was their boss once. Because he told them to clean out the fryer, and put those napkins out, and make sure the tables are wiped down. Because he enforced the hair net rule. They killed him-” Lenhardt paused. He knew how to tell a story, how to get his audience hanging on his every word. “Because he cared, because he thought it mattered that the New York Fried Chicken on Route 40 had clean bathrooms and fresh oil and low absenteeism. The fast-food true believer met the West Side Existentialist Club, and the existentialists won.”
Lenhardt rolled his eyes-Did I say that?-and Infante laughed, repeating existentialist in a slightly drunken slur, as if it were funny, maybe even a little dirty.
“You know, five miles east, and it’s not even a county case,” Infante said. “I don’t think it’s where the crime occurs that should establish jurisdiction. I think it’s where the mope lives. Their bum, their tax dollars, their detectives.”
“Shit, you play by those rules, the only thing we’re catching is domestics in Dundalk. Besides, we represent the victims, remember? We work for the citizens of Baltimore County.”
Lenhardt’s mood had been rising and falling since they arrived at Wagner’s. He always plunged after the initial high of getting the work done. “Homicide hypoglycemia,” he called it. Nancy experienced the same thing, if to a lesser degree. It felt good to get the clearance, but the process exacted a price. She found that she listened to the confessions the way she watched a scary movie, basically wishing it all undone, urging the actors to do the things that would make the movie end in five uneventful minutes. Don’t open that door. Don’t confide in that man. Don’t pick up that phone.