Pariah

THIRTEEN

When Doyle gets into the squadroom at seven-thirty that morning, he sees that Franklin is already in his office, deep in conversation with the sergeant heading up the midnight tour. As Doyle sits at his desk it’s as though it causes a buzzer to sound somewhere, because he sees the two men raise their heads and look across at him through Franklin’s window. A dead giveaway to Doyle that he’s the subject of their discussion.

Two minutes later, when the sergeant walks out to tidy up the tail end of his tour, Franklin beckons Doyle to enter. Wishing he’d stopped off to buy some Tylenol this morning, Doyle blinks against the pain he experiences with each step toward the lieutenant’s office.

‘You want to talk to me about what happened last night?’ Franklin asks.

Doyle is unsure as to what his boss already knows. So he tells him everything. Finishes by placing the latest letter from the killer on Franklin’s desk.

Franklin coasts a hand over his thinning hair. ‘Shit, Cal! What a fucking mess.’

It’s something Doyle can’t deny, so he doesn’t even try.

Franklin says, ‘You sure Rachel and Amy are safe? We need to send some uniforms over?’

Doyle considers this. He knows that Rachel would hate the idea. ‘No. I think they’re okay. I’ve done what that bastard wanted.’ He pauses. ‘You hear anything on the victim?’

‘A hooker from the West Side. From what you’ve just told me, it was probably only the fact that she didn’t look a whole lot different from your wife that got her killed. Shitty reason to die.’ He blows air in exasperation. ‘This’ll hit the desks of the brass this morning, Cal. You know I can’t sit on it. Somebody’s gonna make a connection, somebody else is gonna make a recommendation, and I’m gonna get a phone call.’

‘How long do I have?’

‘Who knows? Hours? Minutes? To be honest with you, Cal, I’m not even sure I’m doing the right thing waiting for that call.’

Doyle leans forward, rests his arms on the edge of the lieutenant’s desk. ‘Mo, please don’t pull me off this just yet. Not until you have no choice. I can’t be pacing a hotel room while all this is going on.’

Franklin picks up a pencil, taps it on the arm of his chair while he considers his next move.

‘You don’t look well to me, Cal.’

Doyle blinks. Does he look so obviously wrecked?

Franklin says, ‘I think maybe you should have called in sick today, at least for this morning. Maybe you’ll feel better around, say, after lunch, when I’m in meetings at 1PP.’

It dawns on Doyle then. He’s just been given a pass.

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I do feel kinda nauseous.’ Which isn’t that far from the truth.

He gets out of his chair and moves toward the door. ‘Thanks, Mo.’

Franklin waves him away. ‘Get out of here before I catch whatever it is you got. An affliction like that could be the death of an old guy like me.’

The five-story tenement building on Suffolk Street in the Lower East Side stinks of piss and stale cooking. On the second floor, Doyle pounds his fist on the door of apartment 2A for the fifth time.

A few yards away, a neighboring door opens and yellow light spills out into the dark hallway. A huge black woman in an indecently short nightdress steps out as if entering the spotlight on a stage. Doyle waits for her to start singing.

‘Hey! You ever think of using the damn doorbell?’

‘It ain’t working,’ Doyle says, and pounds again.

‘Hey, hey! Your momma ever show you how to knock on a door? Politely, I mean. Like this.’ With surprising grace, she extends a pudgy knuckle and raps lightly on her own door. ‘You see?’ she says quietly. ‘These apartments ain’t so big. Don’t need no sledgehammer to make yourself heard.’ She straightens up, raises her voice again. ‘Now show some consideration, you damn ignoramus.’ She hefts her bulk back into her apartment and slams the door with a force that is sure to wake up the whole building.

Doyle sighs and raises his fist again, holding it poised in the air when he hears the locks being taken off.

The door opens, and Doyle is greeted by a face that is less animated than many he’s viewed in the morgue.

‘Jesus, Spinner. It’s like waking the dead. You always sleep through people taking your door off its hinges?’

Spinner pries open one encrusted eyelid. ‘I need my beauty sleep. Ugly lunk like you could do with a bit more of it yourself.’

Doyle says, ‘You waiting for me to produce a bottle of wine before you invite me in?’ but then doesn’t linger for an answer before pushing the door open wider and stepping over the threshold.

The living room is a wreck. Unwashed dishes everywhere. Dark stains on the table and the carpet. There’s a smell of blocked drains. In various stacks on the floor are collections of items that Spinner hasn’t fenced yet — DVD players, GPS units, game consoles — all neatly packaged in brown cartons. Stamped onto each of the boxes is the outline of a squat-bodied bird with a long tail, sitting on a branch.

‘Christ, Spinner, how can you live like this?’

He steps over some boxed hi-fi speakers and heads toward the bedroom.

‘Hey!’ Spinner says. ‘Did you hear me say you could go in there? Hey!’

Doyle opens the door, and takes one brief look at the chaos inside before his eyes alight on the bedside table. On top of the table is a length of rubber tubing and an empty hypodermic syringe.

He turns back to Spinner, closing the bedroom door behind him.

‘No wonder I couldn’t get you out of bed. You got wasted last night, didn’t you?’

Swaying on his feet, his eyes half-closed, Spinner shrugs. ‘What’s it to ya? You looking to bust me for it?’

Doyle advances on him, grabs him by the bicep of his good arm, drags him into the bathroom. He kicks aside a mound of damp towels, then reaches for the shower control and turns it on full blast.

Spinner says, ‘Cal! What you doing, man?’

Doyle brings his other hand to the nape of Spinner’s neck and pushes his head into the jet of water.

‘Cal!’ Spinner yells, then splutters and coughs. ‘That’s fucking freezing, dude. Cut it out! Cut it out!’

Spinner struggles, but Doyle holds him there for a full minute, ignoring the protests. Finally, he releases him and steps away, trembling with his own fury. Spinner whirls himself out of the spray, and flattens himself against the cracked wall tiles as he sucks air back into his lungs.

‘What you doing, man? What the fuck you have to do that for?’

Doyle picks up a towel and does what he can to dry his hands on the sodden fabric. He throws it at Spinner.

‘Dry yourself off.’

He leaves Spinner there and moves back into the living room. He rests his hands on the back of a wooden chair as he tries to calm himself. A minute later, he hears Spinner enter the room behind him.

‘You didn’t have to do that.’

Doyle pushes himself off the chair and turns around. ‘Look at yourself. Look at this fucking shit-heap of an apartment. Look at what you do.’ He kicks an empty cardboard box, sending it sailing across the room. ‘Selling stolen toys so you can pump more crap into your veins. What kind of life is that, Spin?’

Spinner rubs the towel under his chin. ‘It’s my life. Not yours. Mine. You don’t have to live it.’

‘And you do? Jesus, Spinner, what happened? What went wrong? You could have had a lot better than this.’

Spinner snorts a humorless laugh. ‘Yeah, I coulda been a contender.’

Doyle closes the distance between them, and for a brief instant he feels like he’s about to slap Spinner across the face. His hand comes up, but instead of striking him he takes a fistful of his grimy T-shirt.

‘It’s no joke, Spinner. It’s sad. It’s pathetic. There was a time I looked up to you. I actually wanted to be like you. And now you’re just … you’re just a…’

‘A cripple.’

Doyle stares at him. ‘What?’

‘Go ahead, say it. I’m a cripple, an invalid — whatever term you want to use.’

‘No, that’s not what-’

‘It’s okay. Say it. Everybody else does. I hear ’em. They make jokes about me. You think I don’t know what I used to be? You’re right, I was good. I really think I could have been one of the best fighters in the country, maybe even the world. But do I have to take all the blame for what I am now? No, I don’t think so. Doesn’t matter how many times I run through my history, looking at all the stupid things I did, I can’t find nothing explains why I had to be punished like this. So go ahead. Criticize me all you want. You don’t want to deal with me no more, find yourself another sewer rat for your information. There’s plenty other cops want what I got to sell.’

Doyle releases his grasp, tries to smooth out the extra creases he’s just added to Spinner’s shirt. ‘Spinner, I didn’t mean-’

‘No. You know what? Fuck you. Get the fuck out of my crib. I don’t need this grief.’ He pushes Doyle hard in the chest. ‘Go on. Get your ass out of here.’

Doyle looks for a long time into Spinner’s face, and sees only fading echoes of the man he used to be. But he’s right. It’s not all his fault. He was dealt a bad hand, excuse the pun. And now he’s hurting.

Doyle turns away and drags his feet toward the door. Stops after only three paces.

‘What are you waiting for? Get the fuck out before I throw you out.’

‘I can’t,’ Doyle says.

‘What?’

Doyle faces Spinner again. ‘I said I can’t. I need you, man.’

‘Ha! You need me. Yeah, right. You got a great way of showing it too. Makes me feel all warm inside the way you keep giving me so much affection.’

‘No, seriously. I need your help. Things are bad for me right now.’

He detects a change in Spinner’s stance. A slight softening.

‘Bad how?’

‘The cop killer? He’s not smoking cops just for the sake of it. He’s doing it to get at me. He’s been sending me messages. Last night he killed a hooker and had me believing it was Rachel. For some reason he wants to isolate me, make me afraid to go near other people. He’s trying to turn me into some kind of kiss of death.’

Spinner throws his towel down onto the floor — a gesture that tells Doyle he’s just achieved the opposite effect of dredging up sympathy.

‘Well, ain’t that just dandy? You listen to any of what just came out of your mouth? About killing people close to you? And now you’re where? Here, in my apartment, talking to your old buddy Spinner about how much you need him.’ He stabs a finger angrily into his temple. ‘Real clever, Cal. Real fucking intelligent.’

Doyle puts his hands out in front of him. ‘Nobody knows I’m here, Spin. Not a soul. And before you ask, no, I wasn’t followed. I made sure of that.’

But Spinner hasn’t finished. ‘Or is it maybe just that I’m expendable? Is that it, Cal? You can risk coming to me because it don’t matter all that much if I get whacked. One less cripple in the world-’

‘Jesus fucking Christ, man. Will you listen to me for one fucking minute? I’m coming to you for help, as a friend. The PD’s getting nowhere on this. I need other sources. You want to know why I got so crazy a few minutes back? Because I wanted you clean. I wanted your head in shape so you could put everything you have into this. I’m that desperate. You may be all I got.’

Silence. The crunch point. Either Spinner buys this now, thinks Doyle, or I’m out on my ear.

Slowly, Spinner stoops and picks up the towel, then drapes it over the back of a chair. As if that makes any difference in a room that looks like it’s had a hurricane blasting through it.

‘I already asked around. After we talked last time. Nobody knows nothing. Or if they do, they’re not telling me.’

‘I need you to ask some more. Dig a little deeper.’

‘How long you been running CIs, Cal? You know it don’t work like that.’

Doyle nods his acceptance. On TV, in the movies, the cop meets his informant in a shady corner, inquires about the armed robbery at the First National Bank, and surreptitiously hands over a few bills. The next day, the snitch brings him a full list of the gang members, probably with their whereabouts, phone numbers and shoe sizes too.

Well, that’s not how it goes in real life. Anyone who goes around asking career criminals direct questions about specific nefarious activities is liable to end up studying aquatic life at the bottom of the East River. Informants stay alive by being reactive rather than proactive. They listen, they remember, and they sell. Sometimes what they hear can be key to breaking a big case, but it’s all down to being in the right place at the right time, and to gaining the trust of the right people.

Spinner says, ‘But I’ll do what I can, okay? Because you’re a buddy, right? Because we go back a long way. Because there was a time when you and me, we weren’t so different.’

Silence descends again. The two men face each other in the room, both lost in their thoughts, their memories. Both recalling a time when they had the same dreams for a better future. Both wondering how it was possible for their paths to diverge so greatly, and yet for them still to be thrown together in this crummy apartment.