The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 18

I found Patrolman Ziccatta walking along East 101st Street, practicing with his nightstick. He wasn’t doing too well tonight, so I heard him before I saw him: Clatter, and, “Damn!”

We’d been driving around the neighborhood for fifteen minutes, moving very slowly with all the windows open. It was heading toward midnight and all Canarsie was, as usual, comatose. My competition, the other two neighborhood bars, were both open, of course, their windows full of red neon, but if they were not comatose they were at least somnolent. My own bar, the ROCK GRILL, was comatose; it was strange to drive by and see it closed and empty. How I wished I could get out of the car and go in there and open the place up, light it up, turn on the TV, put my apron on, maybe have a little small-talk with a customer or two, assuming a customer or two might come by.

The late show tonight, I remembered all at once, was Kiss of Death, where Victor Mature wants to go straight and Richard Widmark won’t let him and pushes the old lady down the stairs in the wheelchair. And the late late show was going to be It’s a Gift, the old W.C. Fields comedy, where Fields buys the orange grove in California.

That was an awful lot of good television to be missing, all on account of somebody making a stupid mistake some place.

So anyway, we drove around the neighborhood about fifteen minutes before the clatter and damn told me I’d found Patrolman Ziccatta. I stuck my head out the window and, keeping my voice down as much as possible, said, “Hoy!”

“Eh?” I could see him on the sidewalk, in the darkness midway between two streetlights, bending over to pick up his nightstick. Staying bent over, he swayed this way and that, like somebody involved in a religious ritual of some kind, looking around to see who’d called him.

“Over here,” I said. “It’s me, Charlie Poole.”

I’d meanwhile brought the Packard up to the left-hand curb, near him. Patrolman Ziccatta looked over at me, finally found me and recognized me, said, “Oh! It’s you, Charlie,” picked up his nightstick, straightened, and came over to the car. “You buy this?” he asked.

“What? Oh, the car. No, I just borrowed it.”

“I noticed the place closed before,” he said. “I was wondering were you maybe sick or something.”

“I had things I had to do,” I said. “I can’t talk about it right now, if you don’t mind. No offense.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Why should I stick my nose in your private business?” And he bent forward again to smile past me at Chloe and raise his uniform hat. “Good evening,” he said.

She smiled back, and nodded her head, and said, “Good evening.”

“Patrolman Ziccatta,” I said, going through the amenities although my heart wasn’t in it, “this is Chloe — uh—”

“Shapiro,” she said.

“Shapiro,” I said. “Chloe Shapiro. Chloe, this is Patrolman Ziccatta.”

They both said, “How do you do?”

I was beginning to feel impatient. Any minute we’d be serving tea and chocolate-chip cookies. I said, “Patrolman Ziccatta, there’s a question I wanted to ask you.”

“Sure, Charlie. Name it.”

“In confidence,” I said. “And I can’t tell you why I have to ask this question.”

He put his left hand on his badge, though I guess he meant the gesture to be hand on heart, and said, “I don’t snoop, Charlie, I don’t pry. Why should I be a nosy parker?”

I said, “Fine. What I want to know is, there’s a man somewhere on the police force named Patrick Mahoney, and what I—”

“I’d be surprised if there wasn’t,” said Patrolman Ziccatta, and laughed. He bent forward again, and looked twinkle-eyed at Chloe, and said, “Wouldn’t you, miss? Be surprised if there wasn’t?”

The smile she gave him this time was perfunctory, I’m happy to report. I said, “This is serious, Patrolman Ziccatta, it really is.”

He sobered immediately, and straightened till he was practically standing at attention. “Sorry, Charlie,” he said. “It just struck me funny, that’s all. You can see that.”

“Sure,” I said. “The question is, I want to find this guy Mahoney. I think he’s probably stationed at Centre Street, but I’m not sure.”

“What is he, a wheel?”

“I think so. But maybe not.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“Could you find out some way if there is a Patrick Mahoney stationed at Centre Street, or a Patrick Mahoney who’s a wheel stationed somewhere else? And find out on the quiet, so Mahoney doesn’t get wise?”

He frowned at me. “Charlie, are you up to something you shouldn’t? I don’t want to talk like a cop now, you know that, I want to talk like a friend. If you’re involved in something you shouldn’t, your best bet is get out of it, right now, before it’s too late.”

“I’m not involved in anything I shouldn’t,” I told him, which wasn’t exactly true but on the other hand was true for what he’d meant. I said, “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t ask me about this.”

He spread his hands, and shrugged his shoulders, and said, “All right, Charlie, I don’t snoop, I don’t interfere. Your business is your business.”

“Thanks.”

“And I’ll do what I can,” he said. “You’ll stay here?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll walk by the station house,” he said, “see what I can find out.”

“Quietly,” I said.

“Naturally.”

“I could drive you over to the station house,” I said. “That might be quicker.”

“I got to walk,” he reminded me. “But I’ll meet you there. It’s over on Glenwood Road, you know?”

“I know. I’ll park down the block from it.”

“Fine.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“I haven’t found out anything yet,” he told me.

We waved at each other and he walked on his way, practicing some more. I put the Packard back in gear and headed for the 69th Precinct station house on Glenwood Road.

Chloe said, “He’s sort of sweet, isn’t he? For a cop.”

“He’s a nice guy,” I said.

She said, “I bet you’ve got a better class of friends than somebody like Artie.”

“What do you mean? Artie’s my friend.”

“Sure. But you’re one of the best people he knows, and he’s one of the worst people you know.”

“Artie? What’s wrong with Artie?”

“Never mind,” she said. She patted my hand the way a teacher might pat the hand of a kid who’d just stayed back in kindergarten. “You just be yourself.”

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s to be patronized. But I couldn’t think of a really good comeback line, so I just hunched over the steering wheel and fumed.

Neither of us said anything more until I’d parked the car down the block from the station house, a converted frame one-family house that didn’t look any more like a police station than like a moon rocket. Then Chloe said, “I wonder where Artie is now.”

“Home, I suppose,” I said. “But what about Miss Althea, that’s what I wonder.”

“We’re better off without her,” Chloe said. “She was all trouble, and no use to anybody.”

“Listen,” I said. “About that crack you made about Artie before.”

“Charlie, you know Artie as well as I do. Why talk about it?”

“Well, you’re his girl friend, for Pete’s sake. Why do you say things like that about him?”

She smiled crookedly. “That isn’t the question,” she said. “The question is, I say those things and they’re true, so why am I Artie’s girl friend? And I’m not really even his girl friend, Charlie. At the best I’m one of his girl friends, and at the best he’s one of my boy friends. I’m his morning-after-girl, I told you that.”

I said, “Why?”

She cocked her head to one side and seemed to consider the question. After a minute she said, “I’m twenty-three years old, Charlie. Puberty struck me when I was twelve. That’s eleven years. When I was seventeen I got married, to a boy eighteen, believe me he was a mistake. Two years later I got a divorce for reasons of desertion. Not here, over in Jersey where we lived in Elizabeth. Maury worked in the Esso refinery until he ran out. Is this beginning to sound like a true-confessions story just a little bit?”

I said, “If you don’t want to tell me about it, I don’t... I mean, it’s your personal business, I’ve got no right...”

“No, let me. I’m started now, so let me go. You’ve been taking a very simplistic attitude about me, Charlie, it’s time you got a more complicated picture. Like for instance I’ve got a five-year-old daughter, Linda, my parents have her up in the Bronx.”

I said, “Oh.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re darn right oh. One thing I’m happy about, I didn’t let Maury talk me into quitting high school the middle of my senior year. I finished, I got my diploma. The last four years I’ve been working here and there, going to night school at NYU, sometimes I keep Linda and sometimes my parents keep her, and so it goes. You got a picture in your head now?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Now, here’s another point. After Maury, after getting married too early, one thing I haven’t been in any hurry for is adult responsibility, you follow? That’s why I unload Linda on my parents every chance I get, that’s why I hang around with people like Artie and his crowd where there’s no responsibility at all, you know what I mean?”

“I never got married when I was seventeen,” I said, “but I guess my job at the bar is the same thing. Avoiding responsibility.”

“All right, so you understand that part. Now, one last point, and I hope I don’t make you blush. Remember, puberty at twelve. Married at seventeen. A mother at eighteen. I’m long since no virgin, Charlie, and I’ve got drives and needs just like anybody else. So I’ve got these drives and needs, and I don’t want responsibility, so I wind up Artie Dexter’s morning-after girl. You got the picture?”

“You didn’t have to, uh,” I said.

“Shut up, Charlie,” she said. “I just want you to know what Artie is to me and what I am to Artie. And that I know what Artie is and it’s just the weakness in Artie that made me connect with him.”

I said, “Well, uh, what about this social-conscience thing, this TV special and not selling the pills any more and all?”

“I know,” she said. “There’ve been a couple of other signs like that. Like him looking up to you like he does these days. Maybe he’s growing up, maybe pretty soon I’ll have to be somebody else’s morning-after girl.”

I said, “Couldn’t you—”

“Don’t say anything dumb, Charlie,” she said. “Look, there goes your cop friend.”

I looked, and there went my cop friend all right, into the station house.

Chloe said, “To get back to business, can I make a suggestion?”

“Sure.”

“After this, we call it quits for tonight. It’s getting late, Mr. Gross probably has men looking all over for us, we’d probably be smartest to hole up somewhere until morning. Besides, I’m getting tired and you should be, too.”

“I guess I am,” I said. “But—”

“You’re not going to find this Mahoney in the middle of the night,” she said.

“Where do I hole up?”

“Same place as last night. Artie’s. I’ve got a key. We should be safe there till morning.”

“We?”

She made a disgusted face. “Don’t start a foolish argument, Charlie,” she said. “I’m sticking with you. I’ll drive the getaway car, I’ll do whatever you need. I already came in handy once, remember?”

“I remember,” I said. And I thought to myself, there was no point arguing with her. She was right about my waiting till morning before going on, and right about my holing up at Artie’s place in the maantime. If Artie was there, or showed up by morning, we could all talk over who’d do what from there on. If Artie didn’t show, the morning would be time enough to tell Chloe I’d feel better going off on my own.

Not that I would feel better. It just seemed as though that’s what I ought to say.

A few minutes later Patrolman Ziccatta came back out of the station house and began walking back and forth, looking for us. We were across the street and down a way to his left, in plain sight, with a streetlight just down at the corner behind us. I rolled my side window down and waved my arms at him, but he just kept walking back and forth and he couldn’t find us.

All in all, Patrolman Ziccatta was not an ideal cop. He couldn’t twirl his nightstick worth a damn, he didn’t like poking his nose into other people’s business, and he couldn’t find a 1938 Packard parked directly across the street under a streetlight.

I finally had to holler, “Hey!”

He looked up, looked around, and saw us. In fact, he pointed at us, as though showing us to himself. He smiled, pleased to find us at last, and came across the street.

I said, sotto voce, “Did you find out anything?”

“Did I?” he said. “You bet I did.” He leaned a forearm on the Packard, above my side window, and leaned down so his face was framed in the window. He smiled past me at Chloe and said, “Hello, there.”

She smiled back, a little more sweetly than necessary I thought, and said, “Hello again.”

“Hello, hello,” I said, somewhat snappish. “What did you find out?”

“This might not be the right Patrick Mahoney,” he said. “There’s probably more Patrick Mahoneys on the force than you could shake a stick at.”

“I don’t want to shake a stick at anybody,” I said. “Tell me about the Patrick Mahoney you’ve got.”

“Well, he’s a wheel,” he said. “He’s a deputy chief inspector, and that’s right under an assistant chief inspector.”

“Wow,” I said snidely. “What does he deputy chief inspect?”

“He’s in the Mob & Rackets Squad,” he said. “He’d be second in command under Assistant Chief Inspector Fink.”

“What’s the Mob & Rackets Squad?”

“It’s something they started after all that stuff came out on television about the Cosa Nostra. It’s a special squad to be on the lookout for organized crime in New York City.”

“I wonder if they find any,” I said.

“I don’t know if he’s the Mahoney you want,” Patrolman Ziccatta said.

I told him, “I’ll be mightily surprised if he isn’t. Where’s he stationed, at Centre Street?”

“No. At Headquarters out in Queens.”

“Queens,” I said.

“It’s probably in the phone book,” he said. “Somewhere out in Queens.”

“Queens.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Queens.”

“The Mob & Rackets Squad is out in Queens.”

“Well, you know. It’s a bureaucracy, Charlie, you know that.”

“Sure. Thanks a lot, anyway. I really appreciate it.”

“Any time, Charlie. And if there’s anything I can do, whatever the problem is here, I don’t want to pry but you know I’ll do all I can to help.”

“I know that,” I said, and I did. Patrolman Ziccatta really was a first-rate guy. How he ever got on the force I do not know.

“Thanks again,” I said.

He lowered his head so he could smile past me at Chloe again. “Well,” he said to her, “good-bye again.”

“So long,” she said, and smiled upon him once more.

Ostentatiously I started the engine. “I don’t want to keep you from your appointed rounds,” I said.

“That’s mailmen,” he said, but he backed away from the car and the conversation was over.

As we drove away, Chloe said, “He’s sweet.”

I said nothing. I was feeling mixed emotions.