“I understand.”
“I’ll give you fifty an hour, plus all your expenses, if you can get on this right away, Phil.”
“I told you, Joey, I’m up to my ass—”
“This is important to me, Phil, but I would hate to think you’re trying to hold me up. We have a good relationship here. . . .”
“I wasn’t talking about money. I was talking about other jobs I have, Joey.”
“No offense, Phil.”
“No offense taken, Joey. I’ll get on it as soon as I can.”
“I appreciate that, Phil,” Joey said.
He got up behind his desk and put out his hand.
“You get me something on this guy I can take to my partners, something solid, and there’ll be a bonus in this for you, Phil.”
“If there’s something there, I’ll find it,” Phil said.
“Jesus, I just had a thought,” Joey said.
“What?”
“Let me throw this at you. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
“Think of what before?”
“If anybody knew if my Howard Johnson motel is being used as a fucking drug supermarket, it would be the narcotics cops, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe, my ass. They did one drug bust there. They had to have a reason, a suspicion, that something was going on there.”
“So what?”
“Could you ask them? You know any of them?”
“No, and no. I don’t know any of them, and if I did know one of them, and asked him something like that, he’d tell me to go fuck myself.”
“I thought you cops got along pretty well,” Joey said visibly disappointed.
“I’m a retired cop, which is the same thing as saying, so far as they’re concerned, that I’m a civilian. They don’t tell civilians anything. So far as that goes, they don’t tell other cops anything.”
“If they knew—even suspected; we wouldn’t need any proof—about something going on at my motel, that would settle this thing in a hurry. Which is what I’m after, Phil, finding out yes or no in a hurry.”
“I told you, Joey, if the Narcotics Unit knew that drug deals were going on every hour on the hour at your motel, they wouldn’t tell me.”
“You couldn’t explain the situation to them?”
“Jesus, you don’t know how to take ‘no’ for an answer, do you?”
“Not when I’m about to lose a lot of fucking money, I don’t,” Joey said. He paused. “The bonus I was talking about would kick in, of course.”
Phil shook his head. “No.”
“Well, how about this? Get me a couple of names of detectives in the Narcotics Unit. Get me two names of the detectives who did the drug bust at my motel last Thursday. I’m a very reasonable guy. I can talk to them, explain my problem.”