City Primeval

18

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.