Part 25 (2/2)

'It's fine,' I said.

'Now you know what we know,' he said. I told him I appreciated it. He said, 'Listen, you saved us some time and aggravation with the tip about the pimp. We owed you one. If you can turn a buck for yourself, why not?'

'Where do you go from here?'

He shrugged. 'We proceed in normal fas.h.i.+on with our investigation. We run down leads and a.s.semble evidence until such time as we have something to present to the district attorney's office.'

'That sounds like a recording.'

'Does it?'

'What happens next, Joe?'

'Aw, Jesus,' he said. 'The coffee's terrible, isn't it?'

'It's okay.'

'I used to think it was the cups. Then one day I brought my own cup, you know, so I was drinking it out of china instead of Styrofoam. Not fancy china, just, you know, an ordinary china cup like they give you in a coffee shop. You know what I mean.'

'Sure.'

'It tasted just as bad out of a real cup. And the second day after I brought the cup I was writing out an arrest report on some sc.u.mbag and I knocked the f.u.c.king cup off the desk and broke it. You got someplace you gotta be?'

'No.'

'Then let's go downstairs,' he said. 'Let's go around the corner.'

FOURTEEN.

He took me around the corner and a block and a half south on Tenth Avenue to a tavern that belonged at the end of somebody's qualification. I didn't catch the name and I'm not sure if it had one. They could have called it Last Stop Before Detox. Two old men in thrift-shop suits sat together at the bar, drinking in silence. A Hispanic in his forties stood at the far end of the bar, sipping an eight-ounce gla.s.s of red wine and reading the paper. The bartender, a rawboned man in a tee s.h.i.+rt and jeans, was watching something on a small black and white television set. He had the volume turned way down.

Durkin and I took a table and I went to the bar to get our drinks, a double vodka for him, ginger ale for myself. I carried them back to our table. His eyes registered my ginger ale without comment.

It could have been a medium-strength scotch and soda. The color was about right.

He drank some of his vodka and said, 'Aw, Jesus, that helps. It really helps.'

I didn't say anything.

'What you were asking before. Where do we go from here. Can't you answer that yourself?'

'Probably.'

'I told my own sister to buy a new teevee and a new typewriter and hang some more locks on the door. But don't bother calling the cops. Where do we go with Dakkinen? We don't go anywhere.'

'That's what I figured.'

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