Last Chance for Glory (12 page)

“Actually, I went to pieces while I was still on the job. That’s why they retired me.” Kosinski sipped at his fortified coffee, took a minute to evaluate the woman in front of him. She had her son’s thick, curly hair, but there was nothing goofy about Dora Blake. Even surrounded by dark circles, her blue eyes were sharp and knowing. They complemented her strong nose and stubborn mouth, her trim, angular body.

“I suppose you’ve got a sad story. They’ve all got sad stories, the cops and the criminals.”

Bell Kosinski bristled at the comment. “That’s like comparing the fisherman to the fish. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re saying it makes sense, good or otherwise, to drink vodka at eight o’clock in the morning? This is news to me.”

Marty Blake, as he assembled his wardrobe and began to dress, could hear his mother slash at the ex-cop’s psychic armor. Several clichés floated through his consciousness—better him than me; it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy; as ye sow, so shall ye reap. Fitting payback for Kosinski’s waggling fingers.

Still, despite his pleasure at Kosinski’s battering, Blake couldn’t help but wonder exactly what the guy was doing in his apartment. What he was doing and how he’d found it. Blake had made the ex-cop for a hopeless drunk, had used that conviction to control his own annoyance. Now, just twelve hours later, the drunk was sitting in his kitchen.

Blake tucked a white, short-sleeved shirt into navy-blue cotton trousers, buckled a narrow, gray belt, took a moment to assess his reflection in the mirror. The shirt was too tight, that much was obvious—Bernstein’s French Dry Cleaning had struck again and his biceps were threatening to rip the sleeves apart. He was going into a prison to visit a retarded convict and the look he was trying for was fatherly, not bad cop in a precinct interrogation.

Rather than change the shirt, Blake decided to cover the whole thing with a wool-nylon jacket he’d gotten at a shop that specialized in fitting oddly shaped human bodies. An eggshell-white with just a touch of yellow, it was both too expensive and too sophisticated (in his estimation) for a prison visit, but it would have to do. His suits were too formal and his seersucker jacket, which makes him look like a complete schmuck and which would have been perfect, was in the cleaners.

Blake’s mind shifted gears once the decision had been made. Shifted to Kosinski’s cheap suit and cheaper tie. The drunk had made an effort to appear human, but that cut no ice with Marty Blake. Thoroughly conditioned by his father’s last years, he wasn’t about to be fooled by an off-the-rack cotton suit. A drunk was a drunk, a junkie was a junkie, a crackhead was a crackhead. In Blake’s estimation, there was very little difference between them.

As he turned toward the kitchen, he heard Kosinski’s voice. “I was everywhere in the detectives,” he was saying. “Homicide, safes and lofts, organized crime, narcotics. Everywhere but Internal Affairs. That’s where I drew the line. I mean, ya take the man’s pay, ya do the man’s job, but there’s gotta be limits.”

Dora Blake started to respond, then saw her son. “I think that’s my cue, Bell. Time for me to go home.”

“You don’t live here?” Kosinski’s surprise was sincere.

“Naw, I live in the building. Three flights up.” She pushed her chair back, started to rise.

“Stick around, ma. I want a witness.” Blake was convinced that Kosinski had come to threaten him in some way. The idea was both frightening and exhilarating. Or, at least, that’s the way he felt it—warning bells announcing that he was into something much bigger than he expected, a rising excitement pricking at the hairs on the back of his neck. “All right, Kosinski, let’s have the bad news.”

Bell Kosinski looked up at Blake. Thinking, there was a time when I would have broken my nightstick over this jerk’s head. Now, I’m coming to him as a beggar. No, not a beggar. A merchant. I’m here to trade.

“You remember that five you told me about last night?” he asked.

“Five?”

“He’s talking about a follow-up report in the case file,” Dora Blake interjected. “Right, Bell?”

“Yeah. Specifically, the one signed by me that says I got an anonymous phone call naming William Sowell as the killer of Sondra Tillson.”

Blake, with no idea where this was going, managed a grudging, “Yeah, I remember. What about it?”

“Well, it didn’t happen that way.” Kosinski lifted his cup, took a long pull, flashed his best “in your face” smirk.

A silence followed, a silence in which Marty Blake found himself actually hating Bell Kosinski.

“Here’s the truth,” Kosinski finally continued. “The tip came through a captain named Aloysius Grogan. We, meaning Detective Tommy Brannigan and myself, received it from the mouth of Grogan’s informant in a parking lot in Jamaica. I don’t know who signed that five, but it wasn’t me.”

Marty Blake finally sat down. He folded his hands, dropped them to the top of the table. “You willing to swear to this?”

“I might be.”

“Might?”

“Well, I want something for it.”

“What is it, money?”

Kosinski shook his head, turned to Blake’s mother. “Ya know, Dora, I don’t wanna criticize, but you didn’t raise your kid very polite.”

Dora Blake flashed a wry smile, her eyes denying her lips. “What you’re talking about is selling information that could get an innocent man out of prison. That’s not nice, Bell. It doesn’t call for polite.”

“Did I say anything about money?” Kosinski looked into the depths of his empty cup, fought the urge to fill it from the bottle in his pocket. “Money has nothing to do with it. I came here to work on the case. You know, as a kind of assistant. And don’t think I couldn’t do any good, because as far as I can see, your son doesn’t know squat about conducting a street investigation. Plus, I also have friends in the job. Friends like the one who pulled Martin Blake’s file. Who told me, for instance, where Martin Blake lives. Who told me that Martin Blake’s coming off a year’s suspension for bugging somebody’s apartment. Who told me that he spent his whole career chasin’ down corporate criminals.”

Kosinski stopped abruptly, like a lawn mower that’s just run out of gas. He looked down at his hands, wished he was anywhere but sitting at this table. Wished he was back at Cryders, watching CNN while Ed kept his glass full.

“Wait here a minute.”

Kosinski raised his eyes. Blake was turning away, heading back into his bedroom. Dora’s eyes, on the other hand, were looking right through him.

“You calling the lawyer, Blake?” he said. “You reporting to your master?”

Blake hesitated briefly, then continued on. The sound of Kosinski’s voice followed him into the bedroom.

“Tell him I can prove what I’m saying. Tell him I can give it to him on a silver platter.”

Blake had always prided himself on his objectivity. His work, as he saw it, inevitably put him in contact with people he didn’t like. Some, maybe the majority, were paying clients. Others were people he needed for one thing or another. He could vividly recall an investigation where he spent night after night drinking with a man who spoke about women as if they were dogs. Who verbally undressed every female in every bar they walked into, describing things he wanted to do with them while their mothers watched.

“And ya know somethin’, Blake, if the old cunt begs for it, maybe I’ll give her a quick bang, too. While her kid licks my asshole. Whatta ya think of that?”

The man had been Blake’s entree into an extensive kickback scheme involving several hundred thousand dollars and half a dozen New York construction firms. At trial, he’d been the star witness for the prosecution. None of that would have happened if Blake hadn’t listened to the sleaze, chuckled in the right places, paid for the drinks.

Blake fished Max Steinberg’s card out of his wallet, punched the lawyer’s number into the phone. The woman who answered took his name, then informed him that Steinberg was in conference.

“Mister Steinberg will call you back as soon as possible.”

“I need to speak to him now. I’ll wait.”

“He may be quite some time, Mr. Blake.”

“Just get him,” Blake roared. “Interrupt him, tell him I have to make a decision about something and I can’t wait.”

“One moment.”

The moment quickly stretched into two, then three, then four. Blake found himself wishing he’d never made the call, that for once he’d surrendered to impulse and thrown Bela Kosinski’s drunken ass down the nearest stairwell.

“Short and sweet, Blake. And it better be good.”

Blake took a breath, imagined the famous wig slipping down to cover Steinberg’s forehead. “All right, according to the official record, William Sowell’s name came to the attention of the police through an anonymous telephone tip. The detective who took that tip and who signed the report was named Bela Kosinski. You with me so far, Max?”

“Yeah, keep goin’.”

“Right this minute, as we’re talking, Bela Kosinski, who is now an ex-cop, is sitting in my kitchen. He says the tip came from a captain named Grogan. He also says he never signed that report.”

Dead silence, then, “You’re bullshitting me, right? This is a joke?”

“No joke, Max. And don’t ask me to explain why Bela Kosinski is willing to swear to what he says. He claims he can prove it. Claims he didn’t know anything about the report until I told him last night. My problem is that I don’t know how important it is. Whether or not I should pay the price.”

“Price? Is he actually demanding payment?”

“Not in money. He wants to become my assistant; he wants to work on the case.”

“No shit?”

“And he’s a drunk, Max. A straight-out lush with a nasty mouth.”

“Welcome to the club.”

“It’s not funny. Look, Kosinski claims he was on vacation when Sowell was picked up, and by the time he came back, the deal was done. He can’t tell us what actually happened to Sowell …”

“Forget it, Blake. I want him in my office tomorrow. What kind of a drunk is he? He fall down? Puke on himself? Tell me.”

“How would I know? I just met him last night.”

“Was he coherent last night?”

“Yeah, obnoxious in the extreme, but definitely coherent.”

“Good. Don’t let this guy out of your sight, Blake, because if you do, I got a feeling he’s gonna disappear. Meanwhile, just so he doesn’t get itchy, drown him in alcohol. Let him shoot his mouth off, listen to his troubles, keep your own mouth shut. You don’t know he was on vacation. And even if he was, you don’t know he didn’t talk up the case after he got back. In fact, you don’t know anything, except that your job is to get Bela Kosinski into my office tomorrow morning. Have a nice day.”

“Look, Max …”

“And one more thing, Mister Blake—you should have known what to do without asking me.”

M
ARTY BLAKE, AS HE
pushed his ’91 Taurus north toward the Columbia Correctional Facility, chose to ignore his client’s advice. It wasn’t just that he was smarting over Steinberg’s sarcastic remarks or peremptory tone. Blake was remembering his father and a boyhood filled with near-worship. For as long as he could recall, he’d always wanted to embody that mix of strength and kindness he’d seen in his dad. At fifteen, Marty would have been perfectly willing to blast the faces off Mount Rushmore and chisel Matthew Blake’s features into the bluff. Right alongside those of Dirty Harry, James Bond, and Rocky.

At twenty, Blake saw it all come crashing down. Upon retirement, his father, who’d never had more than a single beer with dinner, became a straight-out lush. There was just no other way to put it; no other way Marty Blake
wanted
to put it. And it hadn’t been the gradual slide of a man facing years of unstructured time—if that was the problem, Matthew Blake, all of forty-two years old, could simply have gotten a job. No, the fall had come with the abrupt finality of a Yugo slamming into the grill of an oncoming Peterbilt. One day he was Sergeant Blake, cool and confident; a month later he was citizen Blake, on his knees, hugging the toilet.

Blake had been a freshman at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice when his father turned in his papers. A year later, he was majoring in computer science at CCNY. By the time he reached his senior year, he’d found a girlfriend with an apartment and stopped coming home.

The weakness was the worst of it, he thought. That and my mother going about her business as if nothing had changed. It was like she was
trying
to kill him. Or better yet, to assist in his suicide, like the Michigan death doctor. Only pop didn’t have multiple sclerosis or cancer or any disease of any kind. Not one you could actually measure.

It wasn’t until Blake saw his mother wailing at the graveside that he began to understand that something far more complicated had been going on. By that time, his girlfriend was long gone and the apartment lease was in his own name. His mother, without a word of explanation, started coming down in the morning for a cup of coffee. They maintained their relationship by not mentioning Matthew Blake.

“Cheers.”

Blake looked over. Kosinski was grinning at him, holding a pint of Smirnoff in his right hand.

“You enjoying this beautiful day, Marty?” He waved the bottle at the surrounding countryside. “‘What is so rare as a day in June?’ I’ll tell ya what, Blake. A clear day in August in New York City is what. It’s fuckin’ beautiful out there.”

“Maybe that’s because we’re not
in
New York City.”

Properly chastened, Kosinski turned back to the open field. A small herd of cows cropped the grass on the crest of a hill. Silhouetted against a deep blue sky, they seemed as exotic to him as Columbus and his crew must have seemed to the Indians. He wondered, briefly, whether they were cows for milking or cows for eating. Or both.

“I just wanna go on record as saying that this has been a very liberating experience for me.” He dropped the bottle into his jacket pocket, glanced over at Blake, decided there was something about the kid that made you want to ruffle his hair.

“Liberating? From what?”

“From the blue wall. From the fucking job. From the lies and the bullshit. Last night, after you left, I started thinking about all the times I looked the other way. Times I seen drug money go into somebody’s pocket. Times I seen cops rob the dead. You know about cops robbing the dead, Blake? You know about that?”