It was a promise to build on, and it kept bringing me back to the file. With my days free and Kay at work, I had nothing to do, so I read it over and over. The “R,” “S,” and “T” folders were missing, which was an annoyance, but other than that it was perfection. My real woman had Betty Short pushed back across a Maginot Line into professional curiosity, and I kept reading, thinking and hypothesizing from the standpoint of becoming a good detective–the road I was on until I tripped that alarm. Sometimes I felt connections begging to be made, sometimes I cursed myself for not having ten percent more gray matter, sometimes the report carbons just made me think of Lee.
I continued with the woman he saved from a nightmare. Kay and I played house three and four times a week, the hours late now that I was working swingwatch. We made our tender kind of love and talked around the bad events of the past months, and as gentle and good as I was, I kept churning inside for an outside conclusion–Lee back, the Dahlia killer on a platter, one more Red Arrow shack with Madeleine or Ellis Loew and Fritzie Vogel nailed to a cross. What always came with it was a big, ugly replay of me hitting Cecil Durkin, followed by the question: how far would you have gone that night?
The beat was where it ate at me the most. I worked East 5th Street from Main to Stanford, skid row. Blood banks, liquor stores selling half pints and short dogs exclusively, fifty-cent-a-night flophouses and derelict missions. The unspoken rule down there was that foot beat hacks worked strong-arm. You broke up bottle gangs by whacking winos with your billy club; you hauled jigs out of the day labor joints when they insisted on getting hired. You rounded up drunks and ragpickers indiscriminately to meet the city quota, beating them down if they tried to run from the drunk wagon. It was attrition duty, and the only officers good at it were the transplanted Okie shitkickers hired in the manpower shortage during the war. I patrolled half-heartedly: little jabs with my stick, handing winos dimes and quarters to get them off the street and into the wine bars where I wouldn’t have to roust them, low quotas on my drunk sweeps. I got a rep as the Central swingwatch “sob sister”; twice Johnny Vogel saw me passing out chump change and hooted uproariously. Lieutenant Jastrow gave me a Class D fitness report my first month back in uniform–a clerical aide told me he cited my “Reluctance to employ sufficient force with recalcitrant misdemeanants.” Kay got a kick out of the line, but I saw a stack of bum paper building up so high that all Russ Millard’s juice wouldn’t be able to return me to the Bureau.
So I was back where I was before the fight and the bond issue, only further east and on foot. Rumors raged on my way up to Warrants; now speculation centered on my fall. One story had me shitcanned for beating up Lee, others had me infringing on East Valley Division’s process-serving territory, punking out on a bout with the 77th Street rookie who won the ’46 Golden Gloves, incurring Ellis Loew’s wrath by leaking Dahlia info to a radio station opposed to his upcoming DA candidacy. Every rumor portrayed me as a backstabber, a Bolshevik, a coward and a fool; when my second month’s fitness report ended with the line, “This officer’s passive patrol behavior has earned him the enmity of every enforcement-minded policeman on his watch,” I started thinking of handing out five-spots to the winos and beatings to every bluesuit who looked at me even slightly hinky.
Then _she_ came back.
I never thought about her on the beat; when I studied the file, it was just detective drudge work, facts and theorizing on a common DOA. When my lovemaking with Kay got too involved in affection, she came to help, served her purpose and was banished as soon as we finished. It was when I was asleep and helpless that she lived.