“Let me take this back to my lieutenant,” Kling said. “He’ll want to make some calls. If we can tell Restaurant Affiliates we’ve actually got someone who’s willing to come forward with information…”
“I am.”
“I understand that.”
“But only if they drop the conviction part of it. I want my money the minute he’s charged with the crime. I mean, suppose I’d seen O.J. stabbing his wife and I gave the police information that led to his arrest? And then he walked. Do you see what I mean?”
“But you said you didn’t witness the actual shooting…”
“That’s right, I didn’t witness the shooting itself. But I know one of the men who did it.”
“Why’d you decide to come forward at this time, Miss Young?”
“My conscience was bothering me.”
She paused a moment, and then said, “Also, I broke up with him last week.”
The deputy chief in charge of PIN was informed by Lieutenant Byrnes of the Eighty-seventh Squad somewhere away the hell uptown that one of his detectives had interviewed a young woman who claimed to know one of the shooters in the pizzeria rumble, but would not divulge any information about him until she was assured she’d get the reward money the moment criminal charges were brought-all of this in a somewhat breathless rush from Byrnes who was, to tell the truth, a bit excited by what Kling had brought home.
“The fuck she think she is?” the deputy chief asked.
“You might want to discuss this with the Guide’s people,” Byrnes suggested.
“They’ll say no,” the deputy chief said.
He was wrong.
The executives up at Restaurant Affiliates, recognizing another brilliant public relations coup when they saw one, immediately pounced upon it. On television that night- with commercial spots going for hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute-all five major networks and most of the cable channels gave at least two minutes of free broadcast time to the news that RA, Inc., ever mindful of the uncertainties of the criminal justice system, were revising their reward offer. If anyone provided information leading to the arrest and indictment of the shooters, the $50,000 was theirs for the asking.
RA Inc.’s advertising people might have been forgiven for linking the singular “anyone” with the plural “theirs” because they were selling a product and they didn’t want to offend any feminist who might object to the proper but politically incorrect “his.” Too clumsy to say “his or hers for the asking.” Much easier to say “theirs” and play it ungrammatically safe, as if anyone cared. But the journalists reporting the revised offer should have known better. Instead, they read it verbatim from the ad agency’s press release, compounding the felony. Further aiding and abetting, most of them closed their reports with the slogan RA, Inc. had paid millions to popularize over the years: “So come on over to Guide’s for a nicer pizza!”
There was enough bitterness and bile in Betty Young to corrode the hull of a battleship. Divorced at the age of thirty-two, after eleven years of seemingly blissful marriage to a stockbroker who ran off to the Pacific with a Hawaiian woman visiting the city- “An easy lei,” Betty mentioned. -she’d finally met the man she thought she could unreservedly love again. This happened just this past March, when Maxwell Corey Blaine, a good ole thirty-seven-year-old white boy from Grits, Georgia, walked into the accounting firm for which she worked and asked for some help filling out his income tax return. Ole Maxie, it seemed, worked for a pool hall up in Hightown, a largely Dominican section of the city, but this did not seem at all ominous to Betty at the time, she being the most tolerant of human beings except when it came to cheating sons of bitches, “May they both drop dead,” she also mentioned.
Maxie’s title at the pool parlor was “table organizer,” an occupation he found difficult to describe to Betty with any precision, but apparently a job requiring skills enough to warrant a salary of three thousand dollars a week. His employer, a man named Enrique Ramirez, was dutiful in supplying a W-2 as tax time rolled around, but that wasn’t the problem.
Apparently, the state of Georgia wanted Maxie to file a return for the previous year, during which time not only had he been unemployed, he had also been in jail. Maxie wondered if the meager wages he’d earned in the prison laundry washing other inmates’ uniforms was taxable income. Betty passed him on to one of the firm’s junior accountants, who straightened out the entire mess-but that was another story.
To tell the truth, Betty found Maxie’s imprisonment somewhat exciting. He had been sent to the state prison in Reedsville on what they called in Georgia “aggravated assault,” a felony that carried with it a sentence of one to twenty. He’d been paroled in January and had left the state to come straight north, in itself a violation, but the hell with Georgia, he’d found his own sweet little peach right here.
