'Bootsie almost had a DWI yesterday afternoon.'
I felt something sink in my chest.
'Fortunately the right deputy stopped her and let the other lady drive,' the sheriff said.
The room seemed filled with white sound. I took my sunglasses out of their leather case, then slipped them back in again. I opened my mouth behind my fist to clear my ears and looked out the window. Then I said, 'What other lady?'
'I don't know. Whoever she was with.'
'I'll finish my report now and put it in your box.'
'Don't. The newspaper'll get ahold of it for sure. It's just what this character wants. Walk outside with me.'
It was warm in the parking lot, and the wind was flattening the leaves in the oak grove across the street. The sheriff unlocked the trunk of his car, took out a stiff, blanket-wrapped object, and walked to my truck with it. He laid the object across the seat of my truck and flipped the blanket open.
'Some people might tell you to wire up a shotgun to your back door,' he said. 'The problem is, you'd probably kill an innocent person first or only wound the sonofabitch breaking into your house, then he'd sue you and take your property. You know what this is, don't you?'
'An AR-15, the semiauto model of the M-16.'
'It's got a thirty-round magazine in it. Jerry Dipple's in a prison cemetery and children around here are a lot safer because of it. Nobody cares how the box score gets written, just as long as the right numbers are in it.' He tapped down the lock button on the door with the flat of his fist, closed the door, and looked at his watch. 'Time for coffee and a doughnut, podna,' he said, and laid his arm across my shoulders.
Back in my office I tore my unfinished report in half and dropped it in the wastebasket. There were two ways to think about the sheriffs behavior, neither of which was consoling:
1. Semper fi, Mac, you're on your own.
Which was too severe an indictment of the sheriff. But—
2. No application of force or firepower has so far been successful. Since we've concluded that we don't understand what we're dealing with, use more force and firepower.
Yes, that was more like it. It was old and familiar logic. If you feel like a reviled and excoriated white sojourner in, a slum area, break the bones of a drunk black motorist with steel batons. If you cannot deal with the indigenous population of a Third World country, turn their rain forests into smoking gray wasteland with napalm and Agent Orange.
But my cynicism was cheap, born out of the same impotence in trying to deal with evil that had caused the sheriff to make me a present of his Colt Industries urban-Americana meatcutter.
My desk was covered with fax sheets from the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., and photocopied files from NOPD that had been sent to me by Ben Motley. The people in those combined pages could have been players in almost any city in the United States. They were uniquely American, ingrained in our economy, constantly threading their way in and out of lives, always floating about on the periphery of our vision. But nothing that we've attempted so far has been successful in dealing with them. In fact, I'm not even sure how to define them.
1. Max and Bobo Calucci: In popular literature their kind are portrayed as twentieth-century Chaucerian buffoons, venial and humorous con men whose greatest moral offense is their mismatched wardrobe, or charismatic representatives of wealthy New York crime families whose palatial compounds are always alive with wedding receptions and garden parties. The familial code of the last group is sawed out of medieval romance, their dalliance with evil of Faustian and tragic proportions.
Maybe they are indeed these things. But the ones I have known, with one or two exceptions, all possessed a single common characteristic that is unforgettable. Their eyes are dead. No, that's not quite correct. There's a light there, like a wet lucifer match flaring behind black glass, but no matter how hard you try to interpret the thought working behind it, you cannot be sure if the person is thinking about taking your life or having his car washed.
I once spent three hours interviewing a celebrity mafioso who lives today in the federal witness protection program. Two-thirds of his stomach had been surgically removed because of ulcers, and his flesh was like wrinkled putty on his bones, his breath rancid from the saliva-soaked cigar that rarely left his mouth. But his recall of his five decades inside the Outfit was encyclopedic. As he endlessly recounted conversations with other members of the mob, the subject was always the same—money: how much had been made from a score, how much had been pieced off to whom, how much laundered, how much delivered in a suitcase for a labor official's life.
Thirty years ago, in the living room of a friend, he had wrapped piano wire around the throat of an informer and pulled until he virtually razored the man's head off his shoulders.
Then I said something that my situation or job did not require.
'The man you killed, he had once been your friend, hadn't he?'
'Yeah, that's right.'
'Did that bother you?'
'It's just one of them things. What're you gonna do?' He shrugged his shoulders and arched his eyebrows as though an impossible situation had been arbitrarily imposed upon him.
Then I posed one more question to him, one that elicited a nonresponse that has always stayed with me.
'You've told the feds everything about your life, Vince. Did you ever feel like indicating to God you regret some of this bullshit, that you'd like it out of your life?'
His eyes cut sideways at me for only a moment. Through the cigar smoke they looked made from splinters of green and black glass, watery, red-rimmed as a lizard's, lighted with an old secret, or perhaps fear, that would never shake loose from his throat.