Scudder - Eight Million Ways To Die Part 26

'We know who killed her.'

'Chance?' He nodded. 'I thought his alibi looked pretty good.'

'Oh, it's gilt-edged. It's bottled in bond. So what? He still could have done it. The people he says he was with are people who would lie for him.'

'You think they were lying?'

'No, but I wouldn't swear they weren't. Anyway, he could have hired it. We already talked about that.'

'Right.'

'If he did it he's clear. We're not going to be able to put a dent in that alibi. If he hired it we're not gonna find out who he hired. Unless we get lucky. That happens sometimes, you know. Things fall in your lap. One guy says something in a gin joint and somebody with a grudge pa.s.ses it on, and all of a sudden we know something we didn't know before. But even if that happens, we'll be a long way from putting a case together. Meanwhile, we don't figure to kill ourselves over it.'

What he was saying was no surprise but there was something deadening about the words. I picked up my ginger ale and looked at it.

He said, 'Half the job is knowing the odds. Working the cases where you got a chance, letting the others flap in the breeze. You know the murder rate in this town?'

'I know it keeps going higher.'

'Tell me about it. It's up every year. All crimes are up every year, except we're starting to get a statistical drop in some of the less serious ones because people aren't bothering to report them. Like my sister's burglary. You got mugged coming home and all that happened was he took your money? Well, s.h.i.+t, why make a federal case out of it, right? Be grateful you're alive. Go home and say a prayer of thanks.'

'With Kim Dakkinen - '

'Screw Kim Dakkinen,' he said. 'Some dumb little b.i.t.c.h comes fifteen hundred miles to peddle her a.s.s and give the money to a n.i.g.g.e.r pimp, who cares if somebody chopped her up? I mean why didn't she stay in f.u.c.king Minnesota?'

'Wisconsin.'

'I meant Wisconsin. Most of 'em come from Minnesota.'

'I know.'

'The murder rate used to be around a thousand a year. Three a day in the five boroughs. That always seemed high.'

'High enough.'

'It's just about double that now.' He leaned forward. 'But that's nothing, Matt. Most homicides are husband-wife things, or two friends drinking together and one of 'em shoots the other and doesn't even remember it the next day. That rate never changes. It's the same as it always was. What's changed are stranger murders, where the killer and the victim don't know each other. That's the rate that shows you how dangerous it is to live somewhere. If you just take the stranger murders, if you throw out the other cases and put the stranger murders on a graph, the line goes up like a rocket.'

'There was a guy in Queens yesterday with a bow and arrow,' I said, 'and the guy next door shot him with a.38.'

'I read about that. Something about a dog s.h.i.+tting on the wrong lawn?'

'Something like that.'

'Well, that wouldn't be on the chart. That's two guys who knew each other.'

'Right.'

'But it's all part of the same thing. People keep killing each other. They don't even stop and think, they just go ahead and do it. You been off the force what, a couple years now? I'll tell you this much. It's a lot worse than you remember.'

'I believe you.'

'I mean it. It's a jungle out there and all the animals are armed. Everybody's got a gun. You realize the number of people out there walking around with a piece? Your honest citizen, he's gotta have a gun now for his own protection, so he gets one and somewhere down the line he shoots himself or his wife or the guy next door.'

'The guy with the bow and arrow.'

'Whatever. But who's gonna tell him not to have a gun?' He slapped his abdomen, where his service revolver was tucked under his belt. 'I gotta carry this,' he said. 'It's regulations. But I'll tell you, I wouldn't walk around out there without it. I'd feel naked.'

'I used to think that. You get used to it.'

'You don't carry anything?'

'Nothing.'

'And it doesn't bother you?'

I went to the bar and got fresh drinks, more vodka for him, more ginger ale for me. When I brought them back to the table Durkin drank the whole thing in one long swallow and sighed like a tire going flat. He cupped his hands and lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew out the smoke as if in a hurry to be rid of it.

'This f.u.c.king city,' he said.

It was hopeless, he said, and he went on to tell me just how hopeless it was. He rang changes on the whole criminal justice system, from the cops to the courts to the jails, explaining how none of it worked and all of it was getting worse every day. You couldn't arrest a guy and then you couldn't convict him and finally you couldn't keep the son of a b.i.t.c.h in jail.

'The prisons are overcrowded,' he said, 'so the judges don't want to hand out long sentences and the parole boards release people early. And the D.A.s let the guys cop to a reduced charge, they plea bargain good cases down to nothing, because the court calendars are so jammed up and the courts are so careful to protect the rights of the accused that you just about need a photo of the guy committing the crime in order to get a conviction, and then you might get a reversal because you were violating his civil rights by taking his photograph without prior permission. And in the meantime there's no cops. The department's got ten thousand men below what it had twelve years ago. Ten thousand fewer cops on the street!'

'I know.'

'Twice as many crooks and a third less cops and you wonder why it's not safe to walk down the street. You know what it is? The city's broke. There's no money for cops, no money to keep the subways running, no money for anything. The whole country's leaking money, it's all winding up in Saudi f.u.c.king Arabia. All those a.s.sholes are trading in their camels for Cadillacs while this country goes down the f.u.c.king tubes.' He stood up. 'My turn to buy.'

'No, I'll get them. I'm on expenses.'

'Right, you got a client.' He sat down. I came back with another round and he said, 'What are you drinking there?'

'Just ginger ale.'

'Yeah, I thought that's what it looked like. Whyntcha have a real drink?'

'I'm sort of cutting back on it these days.'

'Oh yeah?' The gray eyes focused on me as he registered this information. He picked up his gla.s.s and drank about half of it, set it down on the worn wooden table with a thunk. 'You got the right idea,' he said, and I thought he meant the ginger ale, but he had s.h.i.+fted gears by then. 'Quitting the job. Getting out. You know what I want? All I want is six more years.'

'Then you got your twenty?'

'Then I got my twenty,' he said, 'and then I got my pension, and then I'm f.u.c.king well gone. Out of this job and out of this s.h.i.+thole of a city. Florida, Texas, New Mexico, someplace warm and dry and clean. Forget Florida, I heard things about Florida, all the f.u.c.king Cubans, they got crime like you get here. Plus they got all the dope coming in there. Those crazy Colombians. You know about the Colombians?'

I thought of Royal Waldron. 'A fellow I know says they're all right,' I said. 'He said you just don't want to cheat 'em.'

'You bet your a.s.s you don't want to cheat 'em. You read about those two girls over in Long Island City? Must have been six, eight months ago. Sisters, one's twelve and one's fourteen, and they found 'em in the back room of this out-of-business gas station, hands tied behind their backs, each of 'em shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon, I think a.22, but who gives a s.h.i.+t?' He drank the rest of his drink. 'Well, it didn't figure. No s.e.x angle, nothing. It's an execution, but who executes a couple of teenage sisters?

'Well, it clears itself up, because a week later somebody breaks into the house where they lived and shoots their mother. We found her in the kitchen with dinner still cooking on the stove. See, the family's Colombian, and the father's in the cocaine business, which is the chief industry down there outside of smuggling emeralds - '