“Sometimes I think you’re a eunuch.”
“Hilary Thomas is … different. And it’s not just the way she looks. She’s gorgeous, of course, but that’s not all of it. I like the way she moves, the way she handles herself. I like to listen to her talk. Not just the sound of her voice. More than that. I like the way she expresses herself. I like the way she thinks.”
“I like the way she looks,” Frank said, “but the way she thinks leaves me cold.”
“She wasn’t lying,” Tony said.
“You heard what the sheriff–”
“She might have been mixed up about exactly what happened to her, but she didn’t create the whole story out of thin air. She probably saw someone who looked like Frye, and she–”
Frank interrupted. “Here’s where I’ve got to say what you won’t want to hear.”
“I’m listening.”
“No matter how hot she made you, that’s no excuse for what you did to me last night.”
Tony looked at him, confused. “What’d I do?”
“You’re supposed to support your partner in a situation like that.”
“I don’t understand.”
Frank’s face was red. He didn’t look at Tony. He kept his eyes on the street and said, “Several times last night, when I was questioning her, you took her side against mine.”
“Frank, I didn’t intend–”
“You tried to keep me from pursuing a line of questioning that I knew was important.”
“I felt you were too harsh with her.”
“Then you should have indicated your opinion a whole hell of a lot more subtly than you did. With your eyes. With a gesture, a touch. You handle it that way all the time. But with her, you came charging in like a white knight.”
“She had been through a very trying ordeal and–”
“Bullshit,” Frank said. “She hadn’t been through any ordeal. She made it all up!”
“I still won’t accept that.”
“Because you’re thinking with your balls instead of your head.”
“Frank, that’s not true. And it’s not fair.”
“If you thought I was being so damned rough, why didn’t you take me aside and ask what I was after?”
“I did ask, for Christ’s sake!” Tony said, getting angry in spite of himself. “I asked you about it just after you took the call from HQ, while she was still out on the lawn talking to the reporters. I wanted to know what you had, but you wouldn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t think you’d listen.” Frank said. “By that time, you were mooning over her like a lovesick boy.”
“That’s crap, and you know it. I’m as good a cop as you are. I don’t let personal feelings screw up my work. But you know what? I think you do.”
“Do what?”
“I think you do let personal feelings screw up your work sometimes,” Tony said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You have this habit of hiding information from me when you come up with something really good,” Tony said. “And now that I think about it … you only do it when there’s a woman in the case, when it’s some bit of information you can use to hurt her, something that’ll break her down and make her cry. You hide it from me, and then you spring it on her by surprise, in the nastiest way possible.”
“I always get what I’m after.”
“But there’s usually a nicer and easier way it could be gotten.”
“Your way, I suppose.”
“Just two minutes ago you admitted my way works.”
Frank didn’t say anything. He glowered at the cars ahead of them.
“You know, Frank, whatever your wife did to you through the divorce, no matter how much she hurt you, that’s no reason to hate every woman you meet.”
“I don’t.”
“Maybe not consciously. But subconsciously–”
“Don’t give me any of that Freud shit.”
“Okay. All right,” Tony said. “But I’ll swap accusation for accusation. You say I was unprofessional last night. And I say you were unprofessional. Stalemate.”
Frank turned right on La Brea Avenue. They stopped at another traffic signal.
The light changed, and they inched forward through the thickening traffic.
Neither of them spoke for a couple of minutes.