"But I talk to her," Merrion said. "I have a heart-to-heart talk with her, and I tell her to stay away from this guy, have nothing more to do with him, and she assures me she will not. She'll stay away from him."
"Amby, you're a dear man," Diane said, 'but how is she going to do that? How on earth… if the reason you don't want her seeing this man is that someone who knows him thinks that he might kill her, how do you think your Sad Sack of a woman's going to make him leave her alone?
Isn't it more likely she'll set him off completely if she tries to do that? Provoke him into doing the very thing that you're afraid he'll do?"
"I don't think so," he said. "Or at least this morning, down at the station, I didn't think so. From what Sammy told me and you understand this's confidential stuff that he's only telling it to me because he has to, do his job and I need him to, to do mine, so I shouldn't really be telling it to you this's all very hush-hush and so forth."
"Right," she said. "At least 'til they find the body. But once that happens, I think you'll find it becoming general knowledge fairly quickly."
"Yeah," he said. "Well, I'm sorry I brought it up. But this squatter-lady last night, Linda Shepard, with her three kids named after movie stars and her dog-ass boyfriend, of course, to go with her and the kids: I had no idea at all what the hell to do with the five of them.
"So I say to Ev Whalen, I said: "Ev, 've you by any chance got any ideas here, what I can do with these folks? Assuming as I am of course that you don't want to keep 'em here, locked up in the jail overnight and tomorrow until Social Services opens up again Monday? I never run into anything like this before, where I couldn't release somebody when there wasn't any reason why they should be locked up, because they didn't have a place to go when they got out. Something you can do to just get these people under cover for a while, a day or two. You know?" And he just looks at me. Then he says: "No, not really, no.
They don't pay me here to have ideas." '"Well, you're a big help," I say to him. He gets kind of pissed off at me. "Hey," he says, "don't look at me. You've got these people here charged with a crime and you don't know what to do with them. I'm not in charge of homeless."
"Well, he's right, isn't he?" Diane said. "It isn't a crime to be homeless. The police aren't supposed to do anything except call the proper authorities when it looks like otherwise they might freeze to death, starve, or die without immediate medical care. Back when we were building the new station, I don't recall making any provision for that kind of problem, facilities for short-term family shelter."
"We didn't," Merrion said. "There aren't any."
"Well, doesn't that tell you something?" she said. "The sergeant was right."
"Well, that's what I'm trying to tell you, for Christ sake," Merrion said. "If you'd just… you know what it is about you people all the time, that gets on people's nerves? It's that it's always so important to you, matter what the situation is, to never get excited. Act like anything ever really mattered to you. You've always got to be completely in control. Always superior, cool, calm and collected, never upset about anything. That and the fact that you just will not listen. When somebody tries to tell you something that you may not understand, maybe don't know all the facts about even though you always think you do; always sure of that well, you got no time to hear it.
"You're always sort of lookin' down your nose all the time, at people like me who look to you as though we're getting' so riled up and everything, like I guess I am right now; doing things you look at, and then sit back and say: "Well, that's a stupid idea." The reason you can do that and the reason we can't, and that we do what we do, is because we're in the situation. We don't have your luxury, being able to stand back and shake our heads and say: "No, I don't like the looks of that one. I wont take that case. That problem don't appeal to me.
Not my specialty at all. Take it away. Find someone else. Don't leave it for me to get rid of."
"We're the people running the places where those people and problems you don't want get taken away to. We are the last fuckin' stop. After us there ain't nobody else. Every day we're in situations where it's pretty clear someone'd better do something, someone's got to do something, and fast, or something bad is gonna happen and we'll all be in the shit. The wheels'll come off a the world.
"To deal with this kind of problem day after day, we have to have passion. You can't do the hopeless work that we have to do every day without taking risks, and you can't take those risks without passion.
