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“Do you want a physical description?”
“No.”
“The odds that you’ll have to lay her?”
“No.”
“Do you want her sexual background?”
Da
Considine blushed pink—the way Felix Gordean told him he blushed; Da
Da
Considine made the sign of the cross on his vestfront. “Ashes to ashes, and not bad for a minister’s son. Let’s just say I’m susceptible to dangerous women, and my wife is divorcing me, so I can’t chase around and give her ammo to use in court. I want custody of my son, and I will not give her one shred of evidence to spoil my case. And I don’t usually offer my confessions to junior officers.”
Da
Considine smiled and tapped the top desk drawer. “Why am I betting there’s a bottle, in here?”
Da
The hand kept tapping. “No, because your nerves are right up there with mine, and because you always stink of Lavoris. Brass to rookie, here’s a lesson: cops who smell of mouthwash are juicers. And juicer cops who can keep it on a tight leash are usually pretty good cops.”
“Pretty good cops” flashed a green light. Da
Da
Da
Considine’s, “And why you do what you do yourself,” was very soft. Da
Considine laughed. “Kid, would you buy patriotism if I told you the grand jury guarantees me a captaincy, Chief DA’s Investigator and the prestige to keep my son?”
“Yeah, but there’s still De Haven and—”
“Yeah, and me. Let’s just put it this way. I have to know why, too, only I like going at it once removed. Satisfied?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think you would be.”
“Do you know why?”
Considine sipped bourbon. “It wasn’t hard to figure out.”
“I used to steal cars, Lieut—Mal. I was the ace car thief of San Berdoo County right before the war. Turnabout?”
Lieutenant Mal Considine stuck out a long leg and hooked the wastebasket over to his chair. He rummaged in it, found his wedding band and slipped it on. “I’ve got a confab with my lawyer for the custody case tomorrow, and I’m sure he’ll want me to keep wearing this fucking thing.”
Da
Considine stood up and stretched. “My brother used to blackmail me, threaten to rat me to the old man every time I said something snotty about religion. Since ten strokes with a switch was the old man’s punishment for blasphemy, old Desmond pretty much got his way, which was usually me breaking into houses to steal stuff he wanted. So let’s put it this way: I saw a lot of things that were pretty swell, and some things that were pretty spooky, and I liked it. So it was either become a burglar or a spy, and policeman seemed like a good compromise. And sending in the spies appealed to me more than doing it myself, sort of like Desmond in the catbird seat.”
Da
“I don’t doubt it, Ted.”
“In vino veritas, right?”
“Sure, and one more thing. I’ll be Chief of Police or something else that large before too long, and I’m taking you with me.”
Chapter Nineteen
Mal woke up thinking of Da
Rolling out of bed, he looked at the four walls of Room 11, the Shangri-Lodge Motel. One framed magazine cover per wall— Norman Rockwell testimonials to happy family life. A stack of his soiled suits by the door—and no Stefan to run them to the dry cleaners. The memo corkboard he’d erected, one query tag standing out: locate Doc Lesnick. The fink/shrink could not be reached either at home or at his office and the 1942—1944 gaps in Reynolds Loftis’ file had to be explained; he needed a general psych overview of the brain trusters now that their decoy was about to be in place, and all the files ended in the late summer of last year—why?
And the curtains were cheesecloth gauze; the rug was as threadbare as a tortilla; the bathroom door was scrawled over with names and phone numbers—”Sinful Cindy, DU-4927, 38-2438, loves to fuck and suck”—worth a jingle—if he ever ran Vice raids again. And Dudley Smith was due in twenty minutes—good guy/bad guy as today’s ticket: two Pinko screenwriters who avoided HUAC subpoenas because they always wrote under pseudonyms and blew the country when the shit hit the fan in ‘47. They had been located by Ed Satterlee operatives—private eyes on the Red Crosscurrents payroll—and both men knew the UAES bigshots intimately back in the late ‘30s, early ‘40s.
And getting so chummy with an underling was strange. A couple of shared drinks and they were spilling their guts to each other—bad chain of command policy—ambitious policemen should keep it zipped while they climbed the ladder.
Mal showered, shaved and dressed, ru
They drove west on Wilshire, Mal silent, Dudley talking politics. “…I’ve been juxtaposing the Communist way of life against ours, and I keep coming back to family as the backbone of American life. Do you believe that, Malcolm?”
Mal knew that Loew had filled him in on Celeste—and that as far as partners went, he could have worse—like Buzz Meeks. “It has its place.”
“I’d be a bit more emphatic on that, given the trouble you’re taking to get your son back. Is it going well with your lawyer?”
Mal thought of his afternoon appointment with Jake Kellerman. “He’s going to try to get me continuances until the grand jury is in session and making hay. I have the preliminary in a couple of days, and we’ll start putting the stall in then.”