Where There's Smoke полностью

I know too many cops, especially detectives, who are very quick to assume a man is guilty of something or other simply because he looks “bad.” Nine times out of ten, this means he looks “black,” a condition over which he has very little actual control. I know a two-hundred-pound white detective, for example, who beat up a hundred-and-ten-pound black postal clerk coming home from work at two in the morning—because he looked “bad.” He later charged the man with loitering and resisting ar­rest. I know another white detective—a pair of them, in fact, working as partners—who were investigating a nar­cotics case and busted into an apartment where a teenage black kid was puffing on a joint. That’s all the kid had on him, that single joint, and it was almost down to a roach when they broke in. Otherwise he was clean. But their stoolie had told them there was a dope factory up in Apartment 6A, and this was Apartment 6A, and there was only a skinny black kid sitting on the bed in his under­shirt, half stoned out of his mind on grass, and not know­ing what they were talking about. They figured he looked “bad.” They dropped three nickel bags of heroin on the floor, and they called in the cop on the beat to witness the arrest, and when the three cops testified against the kid in court, they made him sound like the dope king of the Western world. He’s now doing time at Brandenheim, up­state. He probably will still look “bad” when he gets out. Some black detectives aren’t much better where it con­cerns their brothers. Or sisters, as the case may be. I know a black Vice Squad detective who arrested a black woman for violation of Section 887 of the Code of Crim­inal Procedure—the section defining prostitution. In court, he claimed she came up to him on the street, asked if he wanted to have a good time, set a price, took him up to a hot-bed apartment, and “exposed her privates” to him, which in this city is the moment of truth before which no vice arrest can be made. The charge stuck. The woman was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment at the state reformatory for women in Ashley Hills. No pimp came forward to put up bail for her while she was awaiting trial, no shyster lawyer got her off with a pat on the behind and a fifty-dollar fine. That’s because she wasn’t a prostitute, you see. She was a manicurist at a beauty parlor. The detective who arrested her had been stopping by the place for months, trying to make time with her. He’d finally got the courage to ask her for a date, and when she refused—she was a married woman—he busted her the next day.

I’m not trying to suggest that every cop in this city is bigoted or ignorant or merely short-sighted—the hell with that. I’m merely trying to explain why I was watched warily and silently and suspiciously and angrily as I walked past tenement stoops and markets, bars and billiard parlors, storefront churches, barbershops, banks, and empty lots—yes, even pre-school kids playing on heaps of rubble turned to look at me with undisguised hostility. Fuzz is fuzz.

The tenement in which Charles Carruthers lived was made of red brick, but it looked gray, just like all the oth­ers on the block. A fat woman wearing a blue dress and a dark-blue cardigan sweater was standing on the wide top step of the front stoop, holding a sleeping baby in her arms. I nodded to her and went into the entrance foyer. The mailboxes were just inside the door. A naked light bulb hung overhead. The locks on four of the boxes were broken. I could find no nameplate for Charles Carruthers. I went outside again.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman.

“Baby’s sleepin’,” she said.

“Do you know what apartment Charles Carruthers is in?”

“Nope,” she said.

“I’m an insurance adjuster,” I said. “I’ve been autho­rized by Allstate to turn over a check to Mr. Carruthers, but...”

“Shit, you’re an insurance adjuster,” the woman said. “You’re a cop is what you are.”

“I used to be a cop, you’re right,” I said. “How’d you know that?”

“Huh?” she said.

I reached into my pocket and took out the little black-leather case, and opened it, and showed her the gold shield, and said, “See where it says ‘Retired’? Right there under the ‘Detective-Lieutenant’?”

She looked at the shield and nodded. “Mm,” she said.

“How’d you know I used to be a cop?” I asked.

“Jus’ lucky, I guess,” she said dryly, and studied me with a fresh eye, her head cocked to one side, the baby’s head resting on the opposite shoulder. “You’re an insur­ance man, huh?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“With Allstate, huh?”

‘“You’re in good hands with Allstate,’” I said, and smiled.

“And you got a check for Charlie, huh?”

“If I can find him,” I said.

“Whyn’t you just mail it to him?” she said.

“I need his signature. On the release form.”

“How much is the check for?” she asked.

“Not much. Seventy-four dollars and twelve cents. But I’d like to close the file on this, and unless I can find him ... Does he live in this building?”