“I don’t think it’s supposed to make sense,” Gregor said. There was a little plastic statue of the Virgin Mary glued to the dashboard and a St. Christopher medal hanging from the back of the rearview mirror.
Tony Bandero went around the front of the car and got in the other side. He started the engine and the car immediately began to make a series of very odd noises. First it squeaked in a way that sounded like a bird mating. Then it clanked. Then it let out a long hiss, as if all its tires were losing air at once.
“The thing is,” Tony Bandero said, “I don’t hold with these liberals who don’t want to lock anybody up, but I can see some of the points they make. I mean, for God’s sake, what can you expect?”
“I don’t know.”
“Half the time, I want to lock the mothers up along with the kids, only then it turns out the mothers had mothers and it was just as bad and you’ve got to go back to our generation practically before you find anybody who was making any sense, and then of course what you find is dope. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. Lock everybody up. Drop bombs on Colombia. Torch the Thailand poppy fields. Which is why I think I’m so hyped on this case I got you out here for.”
“I didn’t think this case had anything to do with dope.”
“It doesn’t.” Tony Bandero was definite. “It doesn’t have anything to do with dope. It doesn’t have anything to do with prostitution. It doesn’t have anything to do with battered child syndrome. It is not a mess.”
“I thought you couldn’t solve it,” Gregor said.
“I can’t. I haven’t got the faintest idea in hell what’s going on here. But, Mr. Gregor Demarkian, let me tell you this. In this case there are good guys and there are bad guys and the good guys are going to chase the bad guys and if the good guys catch the bad guys, I’m not going to spend a month lying awake nights wondering if I shouldn’t quit the force and become a priest so I can do something about all this shit. I’m going to go out to a damned good steakhouse and celebrate.”
The Ford Fairlane edged out onto the road. The cabs in the cab rank hooted their horns at it. Gregor restrained himself from pointing out the obvious. If it were true that Tony Bandero didn’t know anything at all about how to solve this case, then this case could turn out any which way. It could be about dope. It could be about prostitution. It could be about battered child syndrome. When he got to the end of it, Tony Bandero might not like what he saw any better than he liked what he saw in the rest of his work.
Tony Bandero was easing himself into the traffic. The traffic was picking up in volume and noise. Tony was bouncing happily behind the steering wheel, singing something to himself that Gregor couldn’t put a name to, but that he definitely connected to Frank Sinatra.
“Listen,” Tony said. “This time, we’ve got it made.”
3
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, GREGOR Demarkian got a look at why Tony Bandero thought they had it made. The Ford Fairlane was parked in the gravel driveway of a tall Victorian house on something called Prospect Street. All around them, the bare branches of tall trees bent in the wind and fat little evergreen bushes shuddered. The house was not only tall but elegant—Civil War vintage, Gregor thought, with a curving black mansard roof and elaborate wrought-iron grillwork balconies at all the windows. The glass at the windows, however, was new and thick and expensive looking—E glass, Gregor thought—and the rest of the house was expensive looking, too. Someone had done a first-class renovation here, careful and detailed. The place looked new, without looking newly built, and old, without looking decrepit. The lawn looked clipped and cared for even in the middle of winter.
They were parked well to the back, near the matching detached garage that might once have been a carriage house or could just as easily have been newly built at the time the renovation was done. The yard back here looked wide and blank, and to either side of the back door were thick collections of evergreen bushes, cut into gumdrop shapes. The arrangements looked like they had been copied from a landscaping magazine.
Tony Bandero climbed out of the car and looked around. The yard was deserted. The house looked deserted, too, but Gregor thought it probably wasn’t. Tony had said something about a course of exercise workshops due to start inside today. It was only eight fifteen in the morning. Maybe the bouncing and stretching hadn’t started yet. Gregor got out of the car himself and walked over to where Tony was standing, facing the back door.
“It was found over there,” Tony said, pointing to the clump of evergreens to the left of the door. “Actually, it was seen before it was found. From one of the bedrooms on the third floor. A young woman named Frannie Jay—it was originally something Polish and she changed it—anyway, she looks out her window around midnight and sees what she’s sure is a naked leg and foot sticking into the yard, so she goes to investigate.”