A Century of Great Suspense Stories

Batman’s Helpers Lawrence Block

There are two kinds of stylists: the show-off who wants to be congratulated every time he turns a nice phrase, and the kind who quietly turns a nice phrase but just gets on with the story. Lawrence Block is one of the latter. Even at the outset of his career, when he was turning out books at a furious pace, he managed to bring elegance and taste to even minor assignments. His hard work paid off. He is one of the premier crime novelists of our time, with two bestselling series: the Matt Scudder novels (dark), including Eight Million Ways to Die, The Devil Knows You’re Dead, and the Edgar-winning A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, and the Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries humorous, including The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart, and The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams. Block is also one of our most accomplished short-story writers. No wonder the Mystery Writers of America hailed him as one of the Grand Masters. Recently he has turned to editing books and has three stellar anthologies: Master’s Choice, Volumes 1 and 2. and Opening Shots.

Reliable’s offices are in the Flatiron Building, at Broadway and Twenty-third. The receptionist, an elegant black girl with high cheekbones and processed hair, gave me a nod and a smile, and I went on down the hall to Wally Witt’s office.

He was at his desk, a short stocky man with a bulldog jaw and gray hair cropped close to his head. Without rising he said, “Matt, good to see you, you’re right on time. You know these guys? Matt Scudder, Jimmy diSalvo, Lee Trombauer.” We shook hands all around. “We’re waiting on Eddie Rankin. Then we can go out there and protect the integrity of the American merchandising system.”

“Can’t do that without Eddie,” Jimmy diSalvo said.

“No, we need him,” Wally said. “He’s our pit bull. He’s attack trained, Eddie is.”

He came through the door a few minutes later and I saw what they meant. Without looking alike, Jimmy and Wally and Lee all looked like ex-cops — as, I suppose, do I. Eddie Rankin looked like the kind of guy we used to have to bring in on a bad Saturday night. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders, narrow in the waist. His hair was blond, almost white, and he wore it short at the sides but long in back. It lay on his neck like a mane. He had a broad forehead and a pug nose. His complexion was very fair and his full lips were intensely red, almost artificially so. He looked like a roughneck, and you sensed that his response to any sort of stress was likely to be physical, and abrupt.

Wally Witt introduced him to me. The others already knew him. Eddie Rankin shook my hand, and his left hand fastened on my shoulder and gave a squeeze. “Hey, Matt,” he said. “Pleased to meetcha. Whattaya say, guys, we ready to come to the aid of the Caped Crusader?”

Jimmy diSalvo started whistling the theme from “Batman,” the old television show. Wally said, “Okay, who’s packing? Is everybody packing?”

Lee Trombauer drew back his suit jacket to show a revolver in a shoulder rig. Eddie Rankin took out a large automatic and laid it on Wally’s desk. “Batman’s gun,” he announced.

“Batman don’t carry a gun,” Jimmy told him.

“Then he better stay outta New York,” Eddie said. “Or he’ll get his ass shot off. Those revolvers, I wouldn’t carry one of them on a bet.”

“This shoots as straight as what you got,” Lee said. “And it won’t jam.”

“This baby don’t jam,” Eddie said. He picked up the automatic and held it out for display. “You got a revolver,” he said, “a .38, whatever you got—”

“A .38.”

“—and a guy takes it away from you, all he’s gotta do is point it and shoot it. Even if he never saw a gun before, he knows how to do that much. This monster, though” — and he demonstrated, flicking the safety, working the slide — “all this shit you gotta go through, before he can figure it out I got the gun away from him and I’m making him eat it.”

“Nobody’s taking my gun away from me,” Lee said.

“What everybody says, but look at all the times it happens. Cop gets shot with his own gun, nine times out of ten it’s a revolver.”

“That’s because that’s all they carry,” Lee said.

“Well, there you go.”

Jimmy and I weren’t carrying guns. Wally offered to equip us but we both declined. “Not that anybody’s likely to have to show a piece, let alone use one, God forbid,” Wally said. “But it can get nasty out there, and it helps to have the feeling of authority. Well, let’s go get ’em, huh? The Batmobile’s waiting at the curb.”

We rode down in the elevator, five grown men, three of us armed with handguns. Eddie Rankin had on a plaid sport jacket and khaki trousers. The rest of us wore suits and ties. We went out the Fifth Avenue exit and followed Wally to his car, a five-year-old Fleetwood Cadillac parked next to a hydrant. There were no tickets on the windshield; a PBA courtesy card had kept the traffic cops at bay.

Wally drove and Eddie Rankin sat in front with him. The rest of us rode in back. We cruised up to Fifty-fourth Street and turned right, and Wally parked next to a hydrant a few doors from Fifth. We walked together to the corner of Fifth and turned downtown. Near the middle of the block a trio of black men had set up shop as sidewalk vendors. One had a display of women’s handbags and silk scarves, all arranged neatly on top of a folding card table. The other two were offering tee-shirts and cassette tapes.

In an undertone Wally said, “Here we go. These three were here yesterday. Matt, why don’t you and Lee check down the block, make sure those two down at the corner don’t have what we’re looking for. Then double back and we’ll take these dudes off. Meanwhile I’ll let the man sell me a shirt.”

Lee and I walked down to the corner. The two vendors in question were selling books. We established this and headed back. “Real police work,” I said.

“Be grateful we don’t have to fill out a report, list the titles of the books.”

“The alleged books.”

When we rejoined the others Wally was holding an oversize tee-shirt to his chest, modeling it for us. “What do you say?” he demanded. “Is it me? Do you think it’s me?”

“I think it’s the Joker,” Jimmy diSalvo said.

“That’s what I think,” Wally said. He looked at the two Africans, who were smiling uncertainly. “I think it’s a violation, is what I think. I think we got to confiscate all the Batman stuff. It’s unauthorized, it’s an illegal violation of copy protection, it’s unlicensed, and we got to take it in.”

The two vendors had stopped smiling, but they didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of what was going on. Off to the side, the third man, the fellow with the scarves and purses, was looking wary.

“You speak English?” Wally asked them.

“They speak numbers,” Jimmy said. “ ‘Fi’ dollah, ten dollah, please, t’ank you.’ That’s what they speak.”

“Where you from?” Wally demanded. “Senegal, right? Dakar. You from Dakar?”

They nodded, brightening at words they recognized. “Dakar,” one of them echoed. Both of them were wearing western clothes, but they looked faintly foreign — loose-fitting long-sleeved shirts with long pointed collars and a glossy finish, baggy pleated pants. Loafers with leather mesh tops.

“What do you speak?” Wally asked. “You speak French? Parley-voo français?” The one who’d spoken before replied now in a torrent of French; Wally backed away from him and shook his head. “I don’t know why the hell I asked,” he said. “Parley-voo’s all I know of the fucking language.” To the Africans he said, “Police. You parley-voo that? Police. Pólicia. You capeesh?” He opened his wallet and showed them some sort of badge. “No sell Batman,” he said, waving one of the shirts at them. “Batman no good. It’s unauthorized, it’s not made under a licensing agreement, and you can’t sell it.”

“No Batman,” one of them said.

“Jesus, don’t tell me I’m getting through to them. Right, no Batman. No, put your money away, I can’t take a bribe, I’m not with the Department no more. All I want’s the Batman stuff. You can keep the rest.”

All but a handful of their tee-shirts were unauthorized Batman items. The rest showed Walt Disney characters, almost certainly as unauthorized as the Batman merchandise, but Disney wasn’t Reliable’s client today so it was none of our concern. While we loaded up with Batman and the Joker, Eddie Rankin looked through the cassettes, then pawed through the silk scarves the third vendor had on display. He let the man keep the scarves, but he took a purse, snakeskin by the look of it. “No good,” he told the man, who nodded, expressionless.

We trooped back to the Fleetwood and Wally popped the trunk. We deposited the confiscated tees between the spare tire and some loose fishing tackle. “Don’t worry if the shit gets dirty,” Wally said. “It’s all gonna be destroyed anyway. Eddie, you start carrying a purse, people are gonna say things.”

“Woman I know,” he said. “She’ll like this.” He wrapped the purse in a Batman tee-shirt and placed it in the trunk.

“Okay,” Wally said. “That went real smooth. What we’ll do now, Lee, you and Matt take the east side of Fifth, and the rest of us’ll stay on this side and we’ll work our way down to Forty-second. I don’t know if we’ll get much, because even if they can’t speak English they can sure get the word around fast, but we’ll make sure there’s no unlicensed Batcrap on the Avenue before we move on. We’ll maintain eye contact back and forth across the street, and if you hit anything give the high sign and we’ll converge and take ’em down. Everybody got it?”

Everybody seemed to. We left the car with its trunkful of contraband and returned to Fifth Avenue. The two tee-shirt vendors from Dakar had packed up and disappeared; they’d have to find something else to sell and someplace else to sell it. The man with the scarves and purses was still doing business. He froze when he caught sight of us.

“No Batman,” Wally told him.

“No Batman,” he echoed.

“I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” Wally said. “The guy’s learning English.”

Lee and I crossed the street and worked our way downtown. There were vendors all over the place, offering clothing and tapes and small appliances and books and fast food. Most of them didn’t have the peddler’s license the law required, and periodically the city would sweep the streets, especially the main commercial avenues, rounding them up and fining them and confiscating their stock. Then after a week or so the cops would stop trying to enforce a basically unenforceable law, and the peddlers would be back in business again.

It was an apparently endless cycle, but the booksellers were exempt from it. The courts had decided that the First Amendment embodied in its protection of freedom of the press the right of anyone to sell printed matter on the street, so if you had books for sale you never got hassled. As a result, a lot of scholarly antiquarian booksellers offered their wares on the city streets. So did any number of illiterates hawking remaindered art books and stolen bestsellers, along with homeless street people who rescued old magazines from people’s garbage cans and spread them out on the pavement, living in hope that someone would want to buy them.

In front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral we found a Pakistani with tee-shirts and sweatshirts. I asked him if he had any Batman merchandise and he went right through the piles himself and pulled out half a dozen items. We didn’t bother signaling the Cavalry across the street. Lee just showed the man a badge — Special Officer, it said — and I explained that we had to confiscate Batman items.

“He is the big seller, Batman,” the man said. “I get Batman, I sell him fast as I can.”

“Well, you better not sell him anymore,” I said, “because it’s against the law.”

“Excuse, please,” he said. “What is law? Why is Batman against law? Is my understanding Batman is for law. He is good guy, is it not so?”

I explained about copyright and trademarks and licensing agreements. It was a little like explaining the internal combustion engine to a field mouse. He kept nodding his head, but I don’t know how much of it he got. He understood the main point — that we were walking off with his stock and he was stuck for whatever it cost him. He didn’t like that part, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

Lee tucked the shirts under his arm and we kept going. At Forty-seventh Street we crossed over in response to a signal from Wally. They’d found another pair of Senegalese with a big spread of Batman items — tees and sweatshirts and gimme caps and sun visors, some a direct knockoff of the copyrighted Bat signal, others a variation on the theme, but none of it authorized and all of it subject to confiscation. The two men — they looked like brothers and were dressed identically in baggy beige trousers and sky-blue nylon shirts — couldn’t understand what was wrong with their merchandise and couldn’t believe we intended to haul it all away with us. But there were five of us, and we were large intimidating white men with an authoritarian manner, and what could they do about it?

“I’ll get the car,” Wally said. “No way we’re gonna shlep this crap seven blocks in this heat.”

With the trunk almost full, we drove to Thirty-fourth and broke for lunch at a place Wally liked. We sat at a large round table. Ornate beer steins hung from the beams overhead. We had a round of drinks, then ordered sandwiches and fries and half-liter steins of dark beer. I had a Coke to start, another Coke with the food, and coffee afterward.

“You’re not drinking,” Lee Trombauer said.

“Not today.”

“Not on duty,” Jimmy said, and everybody laughed.

“What I want to know,” Eddie Rankin said, “is why everybody wants a fucking Batman shirt in the first place.”

“Not just shirts,” somebody said.

“Shirts, sweaters, caps, lunch boxes — if you could print it on Tampax they’d be shoving ’em up their twats. Why Batman, for Christ’s sake?”

“It’s hot,” Wally said.

“ ‘It’s hot.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means it’s hot. That’s what it means. It’s hot means it’s hot. Everybody wants it because everybody else wants it, and that means it’s hot.”

“I seen the movie,” Eddie said. “You see it?”

Two of us had, two of us hadn’t.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Basically, I’d say it’s a kid’s movie, but it’s okay.”

“So?”

“So how many tee-shirts in extra large do you sell to kids? Everybody’s buying this shit, and all you can tell me is it’s hot because it’s hot. I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to,” Wally said. “It’s the same as the niggers. You want to try explaining to them why they can’t sell Batman unless there’s a little copyright notice printed under the design? While you’re at it, you can explain to me why the assholes counterfeiting the crap don’t counterfeit the copyright notice while they’re at it. The thing is, nobody has to do any explaining because nobody has to understand. The only message they have to get on the street is ‘Batman no good, no sell Batman.’ If they learn that much we’re doing our job right.”

Wally paid for everybody’s lunch. We stopped at the Flatiron Building long enough to empty the trunk and carry everything upstairs, then drove down to the Village and worked the sidewalk market on Sixth Avenue below Eighth Street. We made a few confiscations without incident. Then, near the subway entrance at West Third, we were taking a dozen shirts and about as many visors from a West Indian when another vendor decided to get into the act. He was wearing a dashiki and had his hair in Rastafarian dreadlocks, and he said, “You can’t take the brother’s wares, man. You can’t do that.”

“It’s unlicensed merchandise produced in contravention of international copyright protection,” Wally told him.

“Maybe so,” the man said, “but that don’t empower you to seize it. Where’s your due process? Where’s your authority? You aren’t police.” Poe-lease, he said, bearing down on the first syllable. “You can’t come into a man’s store, seize his wares.”

“Store?” Eddie Rankin moved toward him, his hands hovering at his sides. “You see a store here? All I see’s a lot of fucking shit in the middle of a fucking blanket.”

“This is the man’s store. This is the man’s place of business.”

“And what’s this?” Eddie demanded. He walked over to the right, where the man with the dreadlocks had stick incense displayed for sale on a pair of upended orange crates. “This your store?”

“That’s right. It’s my store.”

“You know what it looks like to me? It looks like you’re selling drug paraphernalia. That’s what it looks like.”

“It’s incense,” the Rasta said. “For bad smells.”

“Bad smells,” Eddie said. One of the sticks of incense was smoldering, and Eddie picked it up and sniffed at it. “Whew,” he said. “That’s a bad smell, I’ll give you that. Smells like the catbox caught on fire.”

The Rasta snatched the incense from him. “It’s a good smell,” he said. “Smells like your mama.”

Eddie smiled at him, his red lips parting to show stained teeth. He looked happy, and very dangerous. “Say I kick your store into the middle of the street,” he said, “and you with it. How’s that sound to you?”

Smoothly, easily, Wally Witt moved between them. “Eddie,” he said softly, and Eddie backed off and let the smile fade on his lips. To the incense seller Wally said, “Look, you and I got no quarrel with each other. I got a job to do and you got your own business to run.”

“The brother here’s got a business to run, too.”

“Well, he’s gonna have to run it without Batman, because that’s how the law reads. But if you want to be Batman, playing the dozens with my man here and pushing into what doesn’t concern you, then I got no choice. You follow me?”

“All I’m saying, I’m saying you want to confiscate the man’s merchandise, you need you a policeman and a court order, something to make it official.”

“Fine,” Wally said. “You’re saying it and I hear you saying it, but what I’m saying is all I need to do it is to do it, official or not. Now if you want to get a cop to stop me, fine, go ahead and do it, but as soon as you do I’m going to press charges for selling drug paraphernalia and operating without a peddler’s license—”

“This here ain’t drug paraphernalia, man. We both know that.”

“We both know you’re just trying to be a hard-on, and we both know what it’ll get you. That what you want?”

The incense seller stood there for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “Don’t matter what I want,” he said.

“Well, you got that right,” Wally told him. “It don’t matter what you want.”

We tossed the shirts and visors into the trunk and got out of there. On the way over to Astor Place Eddie said, “You didn’t have to jump in there. I wasn’t about to lose it.”

“Never said you were.”

“That mama stuff doesn’t bother me. It’s just nigger talk, they all talk that shit.”

“I know.”

“They’d talk about their fathers, but they don’t know who the fuck they are, so they’re stuck with their mothers. Bad smells — I shoulda stuck that shit up his ass, get right where the bad smells are. I hate a guy sticks his nose in like that.”

“Your basic sidewalk lawyer.”

“Basic asshole’s what he is. Maybe I’ll go back, talk with him later.”

“On your own time.”

“On my own time is right.”

Astor Place hosts a more freewheeling street market, with a lot of Bowery types offering a mix of salvaged trash and stolen goods. There was something especially curious about our role as we passed over hot radios and typewriters and jewelry and sought only merchandise that had been legitimately purchased, albeit from illegitimate manufacturers. We didn’t find much Batman ware on display, although a lot of people, buyers and sellers alike, were wearing the Caped Crusader. We weren’t about to strip the shirt off anybody’s person, nor did we look too hard for contraband merchandise; the place was teeming with crackheads and crazies, and it was no time to push our luck.

“Let’s get out of here,” Wally said. “I hate to leave the car in this neighborhood. We already gave the client his money’s worth.”

By four we were in Wally’s office and his desk was heaped high with the fruits of our labors. “Look at all this shit,” he said. “Today’s trash and tomorrow’s treasures. Twenty years and they’ll be auctioning this crap at Christie’s. Not this particular crap, because I’ll messenger it over to the client and he’ll chuck it in the incinerator. Gentlemen, you did a good day’s work.” He took out his wallet and gave each of the four of us a hundred-dollar bill. He said, “Same time tomorrow? Except I think we’ll make lunch Chinese tomorrow. Eddie, don’t forget your purse.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Thing is, you don’t want to carry it if you go back to see your Rastafarian friend. He might get the wrong idea.”

“Fuck him,” Eddie said. “I got no time for him. He wants that incense up his ass, he’s gonna have to stick it there himself.”

Lee and Jimmy and Eddie went out, laughing, joking, slapping backs. I started out after them, then doubled back and asked Wally if he had a minute.

“Sure,” he said. “Jesus, I don’t believe that. Look.”

“It’s a Batman shirt.”

“No shit, Sherlock. And look what’s printed right under the Bat signal.”

“The copyright notice.”

“Right, which makes it a legal shirt. We got any more of these? No, no, no, no. Wait a minute, here’s one. Here’s another. Jesus, this is amazing. There any more? I don’t see any others, do you?”

We went through the pile without finding more of the shirts with the copyright notice.

“Three,” he said. “Well, that’s not so bad. A mere fraction.” He balled up the three shirts, dropped them back on the pile. “You want one of these? It’s legit; you can wear it without fear of confiscation.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You got kids? Take something home for your kids.”

“One’s in college and the other’s in the service. I don’t think they’d be interested.”

“Probably not.” He stepped out from behind his desk. “Well, it went all right out there, don’t you think? We had a good crew, worked well together.”

“I guess.”

“What’s the matter, Matt?”

“Nothing, really. But I don’t think I can make it tomorrow.”

“No? Why’s that?”

“Well, for openers, I’ve got a dentist appointment.”

“Oh yeah? What time?”

“Nine-fifteen.”

“So how long can that take? Half an hour, an hour tops? Meet us here ten-thirty, that’s good enough. The client doesn’t have to know what time we hit the street.”

“It’s not just the dentist appointment, Wally.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think I want to do this stuff anymore.”

“What stuff? Copyright and trademark protection?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the matter? It’s beneath you? Doesn’t make full use of your talents as a detective?”

“It’s not that.”

“Because it’s not a bad deal for the money, seems to me. Hundred bucks for a short day, ten to four, hour and a half off for lunch with the lunch all paid for. You’re a cheap lunch date — you don’t drink — but even so. Call it a ten-dollar lunch, that’s a hundred and ten dollars for what, four and a half hours’ work?” He punched numbers on a desktop calculator. “That’s twenty-four forty-four an hour. That’s not bad wages. You want to take home better than that, you need either burglar’s tools or a law degree, seems to me.”

“The money’s fine, Wally.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

I shook my head. “I just haven’t got the heart for it,” I said. “Hassling people who don’t even speak the language, taking their goods from them because we’re stronger than they are and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

“They can quit selling contraband, that’s what they can do.”

“How? They don’t even know what’s contraband.”

“Well, that’s where we come in. We’re giving them an education. How they gonna learn if nobody teaches ’em?”

I’d loosened my tie earlier. Now I took it off, folded it, put it in my pocket.

He said, “Company owns a copyright, they got a right to control who uses it. Somebody else enters into a licensing agreement, pays money for the right to produce a particular item, they got a right to the exclusivity they paid for.”

“I don’t have a problem with that.”

“So?”

“They don’t even speak the language,” I said.

He stood up straight. “Then who told ’em to come here?” he wanted to know. “Who fucking invited them? You can’t walk a block in midtown without tripping over another super salesman from Senegal. They swarm off that Air Afrique flight from Dakar, and first thing you know they got an open-air store on world-famous Fifth Avenue. They don’t pay rent, they don’t pay taxes, they just spread a blanket on the concrete and rake in the dollars.”

“They didn’t look as though they were getting rich.”

“They must do all right. Pay two bucks for a scarf and sell it for ten, they must come out okay. They stay at hotels like the Bryant, pack together like sardines, six or eight to the room. Sleep in shifts, cook their food on hotplates. Two, three months of that and it’s back to fucking Dakar. They drop off the money, take a few minutes to get another baby started, then they’re winging back to JFK to start all over again. You think we need that? Haven’t we got enough spades of our own can’t make a living, we got to fly in more of them?”

I sifted through the pile on his desk, picked up a sun visor with the Joker depicted on it. I wondered why anybody would want something like that. I said, “What do you figure it adds up to, the stuff we confiscated? A couple of hundred?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Figure ten for a tee-shirt, and we got what, thirty or forty of them? Add in the sweatshirts, the rest of the shit, I bet it comes close to a grand. Why?”

“I was just thinking. You paid us a hundred a man, plus whatever lunch came to.”

“Eighty with the tip. What’s the point?”

“You must have billed us to the client at what, fifty dollars an hour?”

“I haven’t billed anything to anybody yet — I just walked in the door — but yes, that’s the rate.”

“How will you figure it, four men at eight hours a man?”

“Seven hours. We don’t bill for lunch time.”

Seven hours seemed ample, considering that we’d worked four and a half. I said, “Seven times fifty times four of us is what? Fourteen hundred dollars? Plus your own time, of course, and you must bill yourself at more than regular operative’s rates. A hundred an hour?”

“Seventy-five.”

“For seven hours is what, five hundred?”

“Five and a quarter,” he said evenly.

“Plus fourteen hundred is nineteen and a quarter. Call it two thousand dollars to the client. Is that about right?”

“What are you saying, Matt? The client pays too much or you’re not getting a big enough piece of the pie?”

“Neither. But if he wants to load up on this garbage” — I waved a hand at the heap on the desk — “wouldn’t he be better off buying retail? Get a lot more bang for the buck, wouldn’t he?”

He just stared at me for a long moment. Then abruptly, his hard face cracked and he started to laugh. I was laughing, too, and it took all the tension out of the air. “Jesus, you’re right,” he said. “Guy’s paying way too much.”

“I mean, if you wanted to handle it for him, you wouldn’t need to hire me and the other guys.”

“I could just go around and pay cash.”

“Right.”

“I could even pass up the street guys altogether, go straight to the wholesaler.”

“Save a dollar that way.”

“I love it,” he said. “You know what it sounds like? Sounds like something the federal government would do, get cocaine off the streets by buying it straight from the Colombians. Wait a minute, didn’t they actually do something like that once?”

“I think so, but I don’t think it was cocaine.”

“No, it was opium. It was some years ago — they bought the entire Turkish opium crop because it was supposed to be the cheapest way to keep it out of the country. Bought it and burned it, and that, boys and girls, that was the end of heroin addiction in America.”

“Worked like a charm, didn’t it?”

“Nothing works,” he said. “First principle of modern law enforcement. Nothing ever works. Funny thing is, in this case the client’s not getting a bad deal. You own a copyright or a trademark, you got to defend it. Otherwise you risk losing it. You got to be able to say on such and such a date you paid so many dollars to defend your interests and investigators acting as your agents confiscated so many items from so many merchants. And it’s worth what you budget for it. Believe me, these big companies, they wouldn’t spend the money year in and year out if they didn’t figure it was worth it.”

“I believe it,” I said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t lose a whole lot of sleep over the client getting screwed a little.”

“You just don’t like the work.”

“I’m afraid not.”

He shrugged. “I don’t blame you. It’s chickenshit. But Jesus, Matt, most P.I. work is chickenshit. Was it that different in the Department? Or on any police force? Most of what we did was chickenshit.”

“And paperwork.”

“And paperwork — you’re absolutely right. Do some chickenshit and then write it up. And make copies.”

“I can put up with a certain amount of chickenshit,” I said. “But I honestly don’t have the heart for what we did today. I felt like a bully.”

“Listen, I’d rather be kicking in doors, taking down bad guys. That what you want?”

“Not really.”

“Be Batman, tooling around Gotham City, righting wrongs. Do the whole thing not even carrying a gun. You know what they didn’t have in the movie?”

“I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Robin, they didn’t have Robin. Robin the Boy Wonder. He’s not in the comic book anymore, either. Somebody told me they took a poll, had their readers call a 900 number and vote, should they keep Robin or should they kill him. Like in ancient Rome, those fighters, what do you call them?”

“Gladiators.”

“Right. Thumbs up or thumbs down, and Robin got thumbs down, so they killed him. Can you believe that?”

“I can believe anything.”

“Yeah, you and me both. I always thought they were fags.” I looked at him. “Batman and Robin, I mean. His ward, for Christ’s sake. Playing dress-up, flying around, costumes, I figured it’s gotta be some kind of fag S-and-M thing. Isn’t that what you figured?”

“I never thought about it.”

“Well, I never stayed up nights over it myself, but what else would it be? Anyway, he’s dead now, Robin is. Died of AIDS, I suppose, but the family’s denying it, like what’s-his-name. You know who I mean.”

I didn’t, but I nodded.

“You gotta make a living, you know. Gotta turn a buck, whether it’s hassling Africans or squatting out there on a blanket your own self, selling tapes and scarves. Fi’ dollah, ten dollah.” He looked at me. “No good, huh?”

“I don’t think so, Wally.”

“Don’t want to be one of Batman’s helpers. Well, you can’t do what you can’t do. What the fuck do I know about it, anyway? You don’t drink. I don’t have a problem with it myself. But if I couldn’t put my feet up at the end of the day, have a few pops, who knows? Maybe I couldn’t do it either. Matt, you’re a good man. If you change your mind—”

“I know. Thanks, Wally.”

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t mention it. We gotta look out for each other, you know what I mean? Here in Gotham City.”