The Black Marble (13 page)

“Are you a sergeant?” The young cop sprayed him wetter than Natalie had.

Valnikov couldn't seem to find his handkerchief but he remembered it was soiled from the flow of vodka-induced mucus that morning. He didn't want Natalie to see a dirty handkerchief so he wiped his face discreedy on his sleeve.

“Are you a sergeant!” the young bluecoat screamed again.

“Yes,” Valnikov said, wishing everyone would stop yelling. Then he decided he'd better pin his badge to his coat pocket before a young policeman shot him dead.

“Whadda you want me to do, Sergeant!” the young cop yelled.

“Well,” Valnikov began, as tactfully as possible, “I was wondering if you could stop spitting in my face? And, Natalie, I think you should wipe the moisture off your glasses. This is a dangerous situation and you've got to be able to see.”

“SWAT's on the way, Sergeant!” the young cop screamed. “I've called for detectives and the watch commander! I've called for an ambulance in case we have any wounded! I've …”

Valnikov turned away letting the spray strike his left cheek and then he did something Natalie thought extraordinary. He put his hand over the young policeman's mouth. A broad, strong hand. He clamped the lad's mouth shut and held on.

“Please, son,” Valnikov said quietly. “I can't hear you because you're hollering so loud. When I let you talk again I want you to try to whisper. Now, whisper to me where the barricaded suspect is.”

Natalie watched the young policeman's bulging eyes start to stabilize. His face was reddening, however, because he was having trouble breathing through his nose. He grabbed Valnikov's wrist and nodded. Valnikov released him.

“Thanks, Sergeant, I needed that,” he said.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Natalie said to her Friz.

“Follow me, Sergeant!” the young cop said, and before Valnikov could grab him again, he was gone, duck-walking across the lawn toward the open door of the apartment building where another policeman crouched, fingering the trigger guard of a shotgun.

“I'm sorry we got involved in this, Natalie,” Valnikov said reproachfully as he followed the cop across the lawn toward the ominous opening. Then they heard glass break, which caused everyone, Valnikov included, to fall flat on the pavement by the doorway.

“Son of a bitch aims a rifle out the window every minute or so!” said a craggy cop with a shotgun. “His wife says he's got a semiautomatic rifle and …”

“Where's the rest of the policemen?” Valnikov asked.

“Upstairs, second landing,” said the craggy cop.

The young cop who screamed so much was crouched behind Valnikov, peeking up at that shattered broken window, his service revolver at the ready. Pointed right at Natalie's temple.

Natalie turned and found herself looking down the black hole of a four-inch Smith and Wesson. She could see the lands and grooves from a glint of sunshine.

“Oh, my God,” she said and Valnikov quickly pushed the gun muzzle away. The young cop hadn't noticed a thing.

And then all hell broke loose. PLOOM! PLOOM! PLOOM! A whoosh of air. Windows shattered. A tire exploded.

“Who's shooting?”

“What the hell!”

“The bastard's got a cannon!”

So far, Valnikov noted, nothing unusual had happened. It was a typical barricaded-suspect situation. The kind that rates a small column in the second section of the morning paper, unless a cop gets killed. Then it's front page. So far it was ordinary. Everything screwed up.

A domestic scene. Probably caught his wife cheating. Or she caught him. Maybe the scrambled eggs were too slimy. I love you. I hate you. I love you so much I'm going to kill you. And he tries. He fails. I'm going to kill myself, then. But first of all I'm going to shoot up the goddamn street.

Actually, the berserk gunman yearned for the same things a “sustaining” Junior Leaguer in a Pasadena mansion did: attention, recognition,
celebrity.
He could only get it by playing a scene he'd seen in a thousand movies all his life: He was going out with guns blazing. Watch out, you coppers! Stanley Kravitz ain't going alone!

All of this was going incoherently through Valnikov's mind. Usually, he'd been called in when Stanley Kravitz lay dead, having tired of the game, having put his own rifle in his mouth and fired with his big toe. Valnikov had learned it's hard to fire with the big toe. Sometimes they missed and the side of their skulls cracked off but they lived. On an intravenous diet forever. Never again to complain about slimy scrambled eggs.
Looking
rather like slimy scrambled eggs. Sometimes, like this, Valnikov was there even
before
Stanley Kravitz fired with his big toe. But then a young cop with eyes like balloons would usually put one right in Stanley's ten ring, doing a better job on Stanley than he could have done on himself.

Before Valnikov moved up the stairs toward the upper landing where five policemen with shotguns and revolvers had fired twenty-three rounds through Stanley Kravitz' door, before he tried to quiet down five other policemen with balloon eyes, Valnikov turned to Natalie and said sadly, “Why did you want to come here, Natalie? I
wish
you hadn't insisted on it.”

And then Stanley Kravitz (whose real name was William Allen Livingston) opened Act II with an M-14 and pinned everybody inside the building for two hours. And darkness fell.

A command post was set up. The SWAT truck arrived with spotlights. Deputy Chief Digby Bates hovered safely over the building in a helicopter, his teeth clenched in determination, face pressed to the glass, hoping the photographers below had enough light, and telephoto lenses on their Nikons.

It was ten minutes after dark that William Allen Livingston got sick and tired of the noisy police helicopter, and risked leaning out the window to fire up at the chopper. He shot a six-inch shard out of the bubble, causing Deputy Chief Digby Bates to forget about photographers with telephoto lenses and scream: “Let's get the fuck OUT of here!” spraying the pilot with saliva.

And then the situation got totally out of control, and twenty guns responded to the sniper by making a ruin of the side of the building where Livingston had barricaded himself. The police officers trapped inside heard Livingston speak for the first time. He played Act IV the way he'd been taught in Saturday matinees. He said, “I'm coming out, coppers! With guns blazing!”

But before the barricaded suspect could get his guns blazing, a frenzied young cop on the stairwell screamed, “The lights!” And five blue-coats banged away with revolvers at the two wall sconces lighting the narrow hallway now that the sun had set.

Valnikov was momentarily deafened. Natalie was holding her ears. The uniformed cops fired eighteen rounds at the two lights. In the movies one would do. In real life, when adrenaline turns an arm to licorice, eighteen rounds won't do. They were covered with plaster dust. They could hardly breathe from the falling plaster and burning gunpowder. They missed the two lights completely. There was one hole in a lampshade.

They were reloading when Valnikov raised his voice for the first time. He shouted: “Stop it! This is giving me a headache!”

“The lights, Sergeant!” a young cop babbled.

“We're exposed to his fire!” a tall cop added.

“He'll be coming out!” a fat cop promised.

And then Natalie gasped because Valnikov stood, his gun in front of him at the ready, and advanced down the hallway toward the bullet-riddled door of William Allen Livingston, known to Valnikov as Stanley Kravitz, corpse-to-be.

Watching the door carefully, keeping as close to the wall as possible, covered with dust from the bullet-riddled walls and ceiling, Valnikov did something that no one had thought of.

He unscrewed the light bulb.

The hallway was immediately plunged into darkness. One policeman had a flashlight. He trained it on the door when Valnikov returned to his position.

Never one to avoid a cliché, William Allen Livingston yelled again. He said: “I'm coming out coppers and I'm taking some of you with me!”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Valnikov yelled back. “Let's talk about it. Let me come in and talk to you. I'm sure there's something we can …”

When the door flew open, Valnikov threw his heavy body across Natalie Zimmerman. William Allen Livingston lost several ounces of urine and defecation when the fusillade of .38 caliber and .00 buckshot devastated him, but, considering he was struck with twenty-seven lead projectiles, his total weight was increased considerably. The homicide detectives discovered later that the gun he died with was unloaded. He had obviously decided not to take anybody with him. But at least he got one wish. Even though he hadn't shot a cop and didn't rate any more than page thirteen, the siege was so grandiose that it was on the inside front page the next morning.

It made a hell of a flaming explosion, that last volley. One continuous roar in fact, which stayed with Natalie Zimmerman through it all, even while Valnikov, arms around her, led her down the back stairway, through the throngs of policemen, past the reporters, by the command post where Deputy Chief Digby Bates, wearing a flak jacket, was already preparing his statement, his good side facing the television camera crew across the street. Luckily, the detective car was not boxed in by the crowds of laughing, jeering, cheering, Hollywood onlookers who were having a whale of a good time.

There was a Good Humor man double parked beside their detective car selling frozen bananas. He'd busted two stoplights when he heard about the seige on the radio. Last time there was a big deal like this he'd been lucky enough to
be
there when a young rock singer leaped eight stories from the penthouse suite of a record company that wouldn't publish his music. The Good Humor man had strolled through the crowd and made thirty-two bucks selling ice cream and soda pop to all the folks with throats parched from yelling: “Jump, you chickenshit!”

Valnikov waited until the Good Humor man made a triple sale to a guy with two kids. One child sat on daddy's shoulders to see the body better when it was removed.

Natalie got in the car, lit a cigarette and smoked shakily. She couldn't keep her legs still. Nor her chin.

Finally Valnikov said, “Move that ice cream truck. I've got to get out.”

“Fuck you, Jack,” said the Good Humor man, not knowing Valnikov was a cop. “I'm selling ice cream.”

Then Valnikov drew the revolver from his waist holster, pointed it at the astonished ice cream vendor who was holding an ice cream bar in one hand and a fistful of currency in the other.

“If you don't move that truck, I'll put a hole right through your Fudgsicle,” Valnikov said.

While the ice cream truck clanked across a driveway with its driver yelling to the bluecoats that he'd found
another
madman with a gun, Valnikov was driving Natalie Zimmerman back toward Hollywood Station.

Finally she said, “Valnikov, where're we going?”

“We're going end-of-watch,” he said. “We've had a very long day.”

“We've got to go back! We were witnesses! We've got to give our statements!”

Valnikov shook his head and said persuasively: “There were so many policemen, nobody'll even remember us. Besides, what can we say? We didn't fire any shots. Our story isn't important or relevant. A man committed suicide. A dozen policemen witnessed it and helped him do it.”

“But …
”

“Somebody might find out we were at the scene and ask us some questions later. We didn't take part in the man's suicide. Why should we sit up all night while the shooting team interviews and reinterviews, and draws diagrams and takes pictures and … well, I think I'm too tired for all that nonsense so I'd just as soon go home, Natalie.”

It was a very dark night in Hollywood. For a Friday, the car traffic was not particularly heavy. Of course Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard were a mess thanks to the tourists, but Valnikov took the side streets. He drove, as always, ten miles an hour.

Natalie said, “Valnikov.”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry I browbeat you into driving to that call.”

“Browbeat me?”

“Well … we didn't … I didn't … well … you were …”

“Natalie, would you like to go to a movie? Not tonight, of course. Maybe next week? Or in two weeks? Maybe you could pick a first-run movie you'd like to see? I haven't been to a movie in … I don't know how long.”

“Several years,” she said, steadying her trembling knees as she smoked. “Since
Nicholas and Alexandra.
”

Then they were on Wilcox, nearing the station. She knew the day-watch crew would be gone home except for the homicide team, there because of William Allen Livingston, deceased. Certainly Hipless Hooker would be gone to get ready for his goddamn voyage with Sin-bad Cromwell tomorrow. Even if Captain Hooker were there she couldn't brace him with it tonight. Not now.

Of course, she couldn't go on working with a doper. But she couldn't help thinking of him leading her out through all that horror and chaos when her legs were shaking like … and she could not forget his heavy body shielding her from the Big Explosion. He had just thrown himself on her. And never mentioned it. She'd bet the dopey bastard didn't even know he did it. But she knew.

She couldn't tell Hooker tonight. She would have to think about it over the weekend. Tell him thoughtfully, carefully, that Valnikov was unfit for street duty. That perhaps they should make him submit to a search. A terrible, humiliating, degrading search, and find the drug, whatever it was making him behave so … so …

“Well, I think I'll go home and make myself a Christmas dinner,” Valnikov said cheerfully, when they parked at Hollywood Station. “Would you please sign me out, Natalie?”

So
… crazy!

“But Valnikov, it's January seventh!” Crazy! That's it! Crazy!