It was the radio room, a subterranean cubicle filled with desks and computer terminals hooked up to telephone consoles. Through a wall of glass was another room of dispatchers for whom the entire city was a video game; 911 operators glanced curiously at us. Some of them were busy with calls, others were idly chatting or smoking, their headphones down around their necks.
Marino took me around to a corner where there were shelves jammed with boxes of large reel-to-reel tapes. Each box was labeled by a date. He walked his fingers down the rows and slipped out one after another, five in all, each one spanning the period of one week.
Loading them in my arms, he drawled, “Merry Christmas.”
“What?”
I looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.
“Hey.”
He got out his cigarettes. “Me, I got pizza joints to hit. There’s a tape machine over there.”
He jerked his thumb toward the dispatcher’s room beyond the glass. “Either listen up in there, or take ’em back to your office. Now if it was me, I’d take them the hell outa this animal house, but I didn’t tell you that, all right? They ain’t supposed to leave the premises. Just hand ’em back over when you’re through, to me personally.”
I was getting a headache.
Next he took me into a small room where a laser printer was sweeping out miles of green-striped paper. The stack of paper on the floor was already two feet high.
“I buzzed the boys down here before we left your office,” he laconically explained. “Had ’em print out everything from the computer for the last two months.”
Oh, God.
“So the addresses and everything are there.”
His flat brown eyes glanced at me. “You’ll have to look at the hard copies to see what came up on the screen when the calls was made. Without the addresses, you won’t know which call’s what.”
“Can’t we just pull up exactly what we want to know on the computer?” I broke out in exasperation.
“You know anything about mainframes?”
Of course I didn’t.
He looked around. “Nobody in this joint knows squat about the mainframe. We got one computer person upstairs. Just so happens he’s at the beach right now. Only way to get in an expert is if there’s a crash. Then they call DP and the department gets knocked up for seventy bucks an hour. Even if the department’s willing to cooperate with you, those DP dipsticks are as slow coming around as payday. The guy’s going to get around to it late tomorrow, Monday, sometime next week, and that’s if Lady Luck’s on your side, Doc. Fact is, you was lucky I could find somebody smart enough to hit a Print button.”
We stood in the room for thirty minutes. Finally, the printer stopped and Marino ripped off the paper. The stack was close to three feet high. He put it inside an empty printer-paper box he found somewhere and hoisted it up with a grunt.
As I followed him back out of the radio room, he tossed over his shoulder to a young, nice-looking black communications officer, “If you see Cork, I gotta message for him.”
“Shoot,” the officer said with a yawn.
“Tell him he ain’t driving no eighteen-wheeler rig no more and this ain’t Smokey and the Bandit.”
The officer laughed. He sounded exactly like Eddie Murphy.
For the next day and a half I didn’t even get dressed but was sequestered inside my home wearing a nylon warm-up suit and headphones.
Bertha was an angel and took Lucy on an all-day outing.
I was avoiding my downtown office, where I was sure to be interrupted every five minutes. I was racing against time, praying I came up with something before Friday dissolved into the first few hours of Saturday morning. I was convinced he would be out there again.
I’d already checked in with Rose twice. She said Amburgey’s office had tried to get me four times since I drove off with Marino. The commissioner was demanding I come see him immediately, demanding I provide him with an explanation of yesterday morning’s front-page story, of “this latest and most outrageous leak,” in his words. He wanted the DNA report. He wanted the report on this “latest evidence” turned in. He was so furious he actually got on the phone himself threatening Rose, who had plenty of thorns.