Last Chance for Glory (33 page)

Blake responded by taking a roll of bills out of his pocket and dropping it on the bureau. “Courtesy of Max Steinberg’s conscience. You need anything, shirts, socks, another suit, just hoof it up to Bell Boulevard.” He walked over to the bed and sat down. “Do me a favor. Pour us both a drink. I left the bottles in the bathroom.”

Kosinski (to his credit as far as Blake was concerned) obeyed without further comment, fetching two plastic tumblers and a bottle of Absolut, filling both glasses to the brim. Blake sipped at the clear liquid, thought about it for a second, then drained half the glass. He waited for the heat in his belly to blossom up into his brain before he began talking.

“I never worked with a partner before,” he said. “My work never called for it. Not that I wasn’t part of a team. Hell, sometimes there’d be seven or eight of us between the field investigators, the hardware technicians, and the computer people. But that’s not the same as a partner.” He stopped, looked up at Kosinski. “Anyway, I liked seeing myself that way.
The Kid Rides Alone
—that’d be the name of the movie. And that’s probably why I gave you such a hard time in the beginning. I just didn’t wanna share the glory.”

“And don’t forget your father.” Kosinski’s face showed no emotion beyond ordinary cop curiosity.

“Yeah, there was that, too. I didn’t think a …”

“A drunk?”

“Why don’t you make it hard for me, prick?”

Kosinski started to laugh, a typical drunk’s phlegmy rattle. After a moment, Blake joined in, thinking, there’s nothing I like better than acting out a cliché. Maybe that’s why the main thing I feel, right at this minute, is embarrassed.

“Whatever I thought, I was wrong,” he said. “That’s the important point. I’m not kissing your ass, here. I couldn’t have gotten this far without you and that’s all there is to that.”

“So what you’re saying is that you need me. Like you need your computer and your tape recorders.” Kosinski filled his glass, offered the bottle to his partner who waved it away. “Maybe you could keep me in a closet.”

Blake shook his head. “I’m gonna say what I have to say, Bell, so you can drop the attitude. What it is, I think, is that I’m getting too old to go it alone. It gets harder and harder when you can’t even remember why.”

Kosinski raised his glass. “There’s one point I won’t argue.”

“The bottom line is that I don’t wanna lose you. Not by having you deliberately walk into a bullet. And let me emphasize
deliberately.
Because you can’t blame it on the alcohol, or on Chief Harrah.”

“I know that, Marty. But you might wanna consider that I’m not walkin’ around unarmed. Brannigan thinks I’m gonna paint a bull’s-eye on my forehead. He thinks I’m just gonna stand there with my eyes closed. The way I see it, that’s all to my advantage.” He scratched the side of his head, then let his hand fall into his lap.

“Brannigan won’t be the one, Bell. Harrah hasn’t survived all these years because he’s stupid. Look, I’m not asking for the rest of your life. Just give me a couple of days. Once we get through this, we can deal with whatever’s bothering you.”

“Whatever’s
bothering
me? Somehow, I don’t think I like the sound of that. What’d you do, have me checked out?”

“Not me, Bell. My mother did it without asking. You met her, so you know I’m not bullshitting.”

Kosinski nodded thoughtfully. “The first time I saw your mother, she had her fingers wrapped around the butt of a .38. That’s usually the sign of a person who gets her own way. So, what’d she find out?” Changing topics abruptly was a standard interrogative technique. As was the slightly sharper tone. Kosinski suddenly realized that he was pissed off. Which, in light of the fact that all Blake wanted him to do was stay alive, seemed entirely inappropriate.

“For Christ’s sake, Bell, she didn’t show me your file.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Blake took a deep breath, decided the conversation wasn’t going where he wanted it to go and there was nothing he could do about it. “According to my Uncle Patrick, you were a good cop for most of your career, then you ran into some personal problems and lost it.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“He didn’t tell you about Reggie the Veggie?” Kosinski drained the plastic tumbler, filled it up, socked down another two inches of vodka. Figuring if he couldn’t entirely blame his anger, he could always blame the booze. Knowing that when he was finished, he was going to have to blame something, that he couldn’t admit that he
wanted
to recite his story to Marty Blake.

“The floor’s yours, Bell. I got no more punch lines.”

“The first thing you gotta know is that I came from a family of drunks. Both my parents, mother and father, as well as assorted uncles and aunts. Which is like having to spend your life dancing on the edge of an open mine shaft. Whether you like to or not, whether it’s
fair
or not, your life is a disaster waiting to happen.

“Still, I was pretty good. I was very religious, an altar boy and all that, until the juices started to flow. I fucked up as a teenager, like most of the kids in the neighborhood, but I never got into anything heavy. After high school, I joined the army and spent two years stationed in Berlin, which is pretty amazing all by itself, considering that I enlisted because I wanted to go to Vietnam. Maybe that’s why I joined the cops six months after I was discharged. If I didn’t prove myself in Vietnam, I could still do it on the mean streets.

“By that time, I was married. To Ingrid Horst, a German girl I met in Berlin. I’d like to think she wasn’t crazy when I met her, but I have to admit there’s no way I can be sure. Maybe it was the language and the culture that confused me. Or maybe I was too busy to notice, too busy trying to make cop of the century. I swear to God, Marty, at one point in the year, I had more collars than my whole squad put together. I worked like a dog, donating my overtime to the city, prowling the streets on my days off. By the time I started my fifth year on the job, I had the gold shield, which is what I wanted from the beginning.

“Three cheers for the conquering hero, right? Especially when Ingrid announced that she was pregnant after six years of trying. I remember she told me right before Sunday mass at St. Joseph’s, told me to say an extra prayer for the baby. Which I did, Marty. I said a lot of prayers over the next nine months, but somebody upstairs forgot to listen, because my son was born with the top half of his brain missing. The
top
half. He could breathe, drink, chew, swallow, digest, piss, and shit. He couldn’t see, hear, smell, taste, or think. Nice, right?”

Kosinski told his story as if he was reciting a memorized poem to an audience of bored tenth graders. He continued to drink as he went along, working the bottle and glass as if they were props. His voice remained dead calm, though he began to slur his words.

“The docs,” he continued, “told us to put him away, that there was a building at Pilgrim State Hospital where they cared for … lemme see how he put it. Oh, yeah, he said for people in a ‘persistent vegetative state.’ I think that’s when the name first came to me. Ingrid had already decided to call the baby Reginald. I hated the name, of course, but under the circumstances I didn’t put up much of a fight. If you saw the kid, you’d know exactly what I’m talkin’ about. It was like his head just stopped about halfway up. He was as flat on top as an anvil.

“I was devastated, Marty. No joke. The baby was supposed to start the perfect family, the one that went hand in hand with being the perfect cop. When he came out Reggie the Veggie, it was like gettin’ blindsided by an ocean liner. I mean if you spend your whole life tryin’ to take control—which is the only way children of alcoholics can survive—hopeless situations aren’t a whole lot of fun. But it wasn’t like I loved this baby. Or like there was anything there
to
love. The kid was a monster.

“So, whatta ya do when you’re faced with a situation like that? Whatta ya
have
to do?”

Kosinski stopped abruptly. He looked into Blake’s eyes, kept his gaze fixed until Blake realized that the question wasn’t purely rhetorical. He was expected to answer.

“I guess you have to bite the bullet,” he said after a moment. “You have to give the … the child up and get on with your life.”

“Yeah?” Kosinski laughed, a single sharp bark that echoed briefly in the small room. “Well, Ingrid had other ideas. She decided to develop her Reginald’s full potential. Decided that the doctors were wrong, that prayer could overcome science, that love conquers all. I tried to talk to her, the docs tried, the nurses tried, the goddamned hospital social worker tried. I can still see her in the bed holding this baby, her eyes staring somewhere off in the distance. You remember those saint books the nuns used to give out in grammar school? Ingrid looked just like one of the martyrs in those books. Like she’d found her cross and she wasn’t giving it up. Like the cross was the whole point.

“Naturally, I thought about walkin’ out on her. Not because of Reggie. I was gonna walk out because I knew she was crazy. But I didn’t do it, Marty. First, because I was religious all my life and when I said ‘For better or for worse,’ I meant it. But it was also because the docs said Reggie couldn’t live more than a year, that he’d probably be dead within a few months. Maybe then, I figured, we could get it back together.

“As it turned out, Reggie the Veggie lived for nine years. And for nine years I continued to do my Christian duty. I didn’t drink, except for the occasional beer. I stopped putting in all the overtime so I could help Ingrid around the house. I listened to her read bedtime stories to a creature with all the understanding of an artichoke. That’s where the name came from. Reggie the Veggie. It popped into my head one day and I couldn’t get it out again.”

Kosinski stopped, took a deep breath, stared at the drink in his hand for a moment. “So, that’s the way it went for nine years. On the job, I was a good cop, but not the super cop I wanted to be. At home, I was an appliance, a vacuum cleaner, a dishwasher. I swear, Marty, over time the house seemed to get colder and colder. No matter what it was doing outside, there was a damp chill that washed over me the minute I opened the door. You think I’m exaggerating? I’d invite you to talk to our friends, only we didn’t have any.

“The final act began the day Reggie was buried. As we walked away from the grave, Ingrid turned to me and said, ‘You haff killed him, Bell.’ Just like that, in a thick German accent. And she didn’t stop. Faith would have saved Reggie, but I didn’t have faith. Love would have saved him, but I didn’t have love. Prayer would have saved him, but I’d refused to pray. It all added up to the same thing: Reggie the Veggie would’ve grown up to be Albert Einstein if it hadn’t been for my failings.

“Two weeks later, Ingrid’s lawyer served me with divorce papers and a restraining order keeping me out of my own house. The bank accounts had already been emptied. A year after that, when the divorce became legal, she married a postman from Howard Beach. Last I heard, they had three kids, two girls and a boy.”

Kosinski felt the vodka for the first time. He looked down at the bottle, saw that it was within four inches of being empty. He hadn’t done this in a long time, hadn’t drunk himself into what would soon become a stupor.

“So ya see, Marty,” he said, trying to get the words out as quickly as possible, “what I did was step into that mine shaft I already mentioned. I mean it was always there, right, so it wasn’t much of a problem. All I had to do was close my eyes and jump.”

B
LAKE’S FIRST INKLING THAT
events were not about to unfold on schedule came at nine o’clock the following morning when he looked out his kitchen window to find a white Ford Econoline parked across the street. The vehicle itself wouldn’t have aroused any suspicion—it was as anonymous as any of the other vehicles lining either side of the avenue—but the overweight middle-aged man with the bent nose and the brush cut leaning against the Ford fairly screamed cop. As did the occupied black Dodge sedans parked behind the van.

Blake stood watching for a moment, sipping at his coffee while he digested the information. Curiously (to himself, at least), he felt no emotion whatever; his mind was clicking away, calculating the possibilities. The cop—he assumed it was Aloysius Grogan, based on Kosinski’s description—was making no attempt to conceal himself.

At first glance, it seemed an attempt at pure intimidation, the neighborhood bully just waiting for some little kid to head out to school. But there had to be fear behind it, too. Kosinski hadn’t simply recited his lessons to Brannigan the night before. He’d used the facts the way a mugger uses a lead pipe.

Blake tried to put himself in his enemy’s shoes. He began by assuming that Samuel Harrah—a man he’d never met and knew very little about—would have the cold objectivity to act in his own self-interest. In that case, he couldn’t afford to accept the carefully presented scenario that had Bell Kosinski operating on his own. The stakes were too high. At the same time and for the same reason, Harrah wouldn’t simply order his (Blake’s) and Steinberg’s executions. Steinberg was too important, too high profile. If he disappeared, there’d be hell to pay. Too much hell if Blake and the lawyer were simply going about their business. If, as advertised, they’d decided to back off.

But there was another side to be considered. This one involved a power-crazed cop who’d been having his own way for a long time. Blake recalled a psych course he’d taken at Columbia. The class (as were all classes, according to the instructor, a woman named Cynthia Williams) had been fascinated by descriptions of the criminal psychopath. Professor Williams, after a long, technical discussion, had advised that the simplest way to understand the mind of the psychopath/sociopath was in terms of control. Control over his or her own life as well as the lives of others. When that control was threatened, when the facade was pulled down, the psychopath’s response was almost certain to be aggressive, rather than passive. Aggressive and, as often as not, irrational.