Marlow glanced up from the file he'd been reading and eyed her impeccably pressed blue navies. "Oh, sit down, Officer. Sorry. Sit down. . . . So, Herman Sachs's daughter."
Sitting, she noted a faint hesitation between the last two words of his sentence. Had the word "girl" been quickly replaced?
"That's right."
"I was at the funeral."
"I remember."
"It was a good one."
As funerals go.
Eyes on hers, posture upright, Marlow said, "Okay, Officer. Here it is. You're in some trouble."
It hit her like a physical blow. "I'm sorry, sir?"
"A crime scene on Saturday, by the Harlem River. Car went into the water. You ran it?"
Where the Conjurer's Mazda took out crack-head Carlos's shack and went for a swim.
"Yes, that's right."
"You placed somebody under arrest at the scene," Marlow said.
"Oh, that. Not really arrest. This guy went under the tape and was digging around in a sealed area. I had him escorted out and detained."
"Detained, arrested. The point is he was in custody for a while."
"Sure. I needed him out of my hair. It was an active scene."
Sachs was starting to get her bearings. The obnoxious citizen had complained. Happened every day. Nobody paid attention to crap like that. She began to relax.
"Well, the guy? He was Victor Ramos."
"Yeah, I think he told me that."
"Congressman Victor Ramos."
The relaxation vanished.
The captain opened a New York Daily News. "Let's see, let's see. Ah, here." He lifted the paper and held up a centerfold, which featured a large picture of the man in cuffs at the scene. The headline read: "TIME-OUT" FOR VICTOR.
"You told the officers on the scene to put him in time-out?"
"He was--"
"Did you?"
"I believe I did, sir, yes."
Marlow offered, "He claimed he was looking for survivors."
"Survivors?" she barked, laughing. "It was a ten-by-ten squatter's shack that got clipped when the perp's car went into the river. Part of a wall fell over and--"
"You're getting a little hot here, Officer."
"--and I think a bag of goddamn empties got ripped open. That was the only damage. EMS cleared the shack and I sealed it. The only living things left to rescue in that place were the lice."