“What’s the matter with him?” the man at the top of the stairs said.
Garry Mansfield looked Gregor over. “He’s got the urban blue. Hey, Lou. We got here as fast as we could. Jackman can talk the ass off a cooked chicken.”
The Black/Hispanic/Asian man must be Lou Emiliani. Maybe it was time for them all to stop trying to pin each other down by ethnicity. It was getting too confusing. Gregor held out his hand.
“Gregor Demarkian,” he said.
“Lou Emiliani,” Lou Emiliani said. He stood back and propped the door a little farther open, so that they could pass by him and into the precinct house itself. It was, Gregor saw, filthy in the way these places got. He was sure it was cleaned often enough. It was probably washed down in Lysol twice a day by a cleaning staff that had nothing else to do but try to make the place as antiseptic as possible. The problem was that some kinds of dirt did not come out, not ever, not even if you destroyed the building and reduced it all to dust.
In the big front room, an old woman in a coat that didn’t quite come down to her knees was standing at the big front desk, tapping her hands against the surface as she tried to explain something to the desk sergeant. On the other side of that counter, three men were handcuffed together and sitting against the wall in wooden chairs. Gregor had no idea what had caused the police to handcuff them in the first place, but at the moment they were closer to sleep than to violence. Bigcity police departments like this were usually unbearably noisy, full of confusion, full of complaints. This one was almost eerily quiet. The only sound Gregor could hear was the old woman talking, her voice rising and falling almost as if in song.
“Cambodian,” Lou Emiliani said helpfully, seeing that Gregor was puzzled. “We’ve got a lot of them in this precinct. They’re decent enough, but they just don’t learn the language.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake,” Garry Mansfield said. “I mean, what do you want? They’re old ladies. They watched their families get shot up by machine guns in the old country and they come here, they’re starting over, they’re supposed to be grandmothers, instead they’re cleaning toilets in some building downtown. I mean, Jesus.”
“I don’t think you call Cambodia the old country,” Lou Emiliani said.
“I don’t think you bug some old lady when she’s lost her old family and she’s in a new country and she’s only trying to catch a break.”
“I don’t bug the old ladies,” Lou Emiliani said.
They had gone through the big front room and into a narrow corridor. They were stopped in front of a steel door with a fire window in it. Gregor pushed the door open and looked inside, at a bare-bones imitation of a conference room. This was where arrested prisoners would be brought to have a private word or two with their Legal Aid attorneys.
“Gentlemen?” Gregor said.
The two men both looked at him. Neither one of them could be much more than thirty. They had forgotten he was even there.
“Oh,” Garry Mansfield said.
Lou Emiliani pushed into the room and looked around. “Just a minute,” he said. “Marsha was supposed to bring in the file.”
He disappeared down the corridor, and Garry and Gregor went inside to sit down. Gregor tried to remember if he had ever been in the precinct house in an unadulteratedly rich neighborhood, and supposed he must have. He had once worked kidnapping detail for the FBI, and in general it was rich people whose family members were kidnapped. He couldn’t remember those precinct houses being much different from this one. Even the suburban police stations, if the suburb was large enough, weren’t much different. The differences began to show in rural districts, where crime was almost nonexistent and the police sometimes felt as if they had only been hired for show.
Lou Emiliani came back in, carrying a thick manila folder, and shut the door behind him. “Here it is,” he said. “Marsha got held up by a shoplifting. What is it, these days, with the hookers? Is business bad or something? Why are they all shoplifting?”
“They aren’t all shoplifting,” Garry Mansfield said patiently.
Lou Emiliani ignored him. He flipped open the manila folder and stared down at its first page, although Gregor knew that there couldn’t be much of anything there that would make any difference to what he had to say. Gregor had looked through a lot of manila folders in his time. Unless they had been especially arranged for a press conference or a meeting, they were generally incomprehensible.
Lou Emiliani pushed the folder away. “Look,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here, okay? I don’t know what Garry thinks, but I’m glad Jackman’s bringing you in. Somebody has to deal with the son of a bitch.”