Detective

didn’t matter, they had him.
    Pluto came next, looking just like a little kid who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Big, bold Pluto, killer and dope dealer, who looked like he wanted to cry and run home to his mother.
    Floridian #2 came next. He was so frail two cops had to help him. He looked as if he were being assisted into a retirement home, which, in a way, he was.
    Tony came last, and he came on a stretcher. Two medics were desperately working on his chest, but even from my high perch I could see it was too late. Alas, poor Bambi, I knew him well.
    I completed my splice and slid down the pole. No one bothered me. No one seemed to notice. I went back to my cars. I opened the trunk of the rental car, took out the tape recorders and all the equipment, and threw it in the back of my car I got in my car and drove off. I’d come back for the rental car later, if I got a chance. It didn’t matter if anyone found it, seeing as how I’d rented it with the phony driver’s license made by the guy who made the bank I.D. Let the cops go nuts combing the Bronx looking for Julius T. Coosbaine.

41.
    I D ROVE B ACK TO M ANHATTAN . All in all, I felt pretty good. After all, I’d done it, hadn’t I? In my own, bumbling, ineffectual way, I’d done everything I’d set out to do. True, I hadn’t done it heroically dramatically, like some fucking TV detective. I hadn’t shot anybody. I hadn’t even confronted the enemy. As my wife so justly accuses me, I’d avoided all personal confrontation. Aside from briefly meeting Tony in the casino, and Tall, Dark, and Ugly in my repairman guise, I hadn’t even met any of ’em. My one assertive act, aside from frightening poor Red out of his wits, had been Coshing Pedro on the head, and that had affected me almost as much as it had him.
    But I’d had to play it that way. I am not Mike Hammer, nor was meant to be.
    My actual personal involvement in the case was so limited that no one knew I was connected with it at all. And that’s the way I wanted it. That’s the way I intended to keep it. Oh yeah, I had the tapes, and I should have turned them over to the police for evidence, but they didn’t need them. They had Murphy’s confession, and it covered everything; I’d seen to that. It even covered things he couldn’t know, but that didn’t matter. The cops had the murder weapon. They had the guys dead to rights. With all of them in separate cells, all talking their heads, off, trying to pin it on the others to save their own skins, the D.A. would have all he needed and more.
    No one could connect me with the case at all. The only one who might have was Tony, and he was dead. Murphy knew me by sight, but he didn’t know my name. And even if he found out, he wouldn’t talk. I’d read him the riot act before I’d turned him loose on the cops. And he didn’t know I was an ineffectual schmuck. He thought I was a tough son of a bitch, capable of carrying out my threats. Murphy was just as chicken shit as I. He’d keep quiet till doomsday.
    The only thing that could have involved me was the bullet I brought to the cops, but that was no real worry. I’d made sure of that, by telling ’em I’d found it in the parking lot. The police theory of the case, and what I’m sure actually happened, was that Albrect was killed somewhere else and dumped in the lot. The bullet contradicted that theory. Therefore, the D.A. would never mention it. The defense attorney certainly would, if he knew of its existence, but I was sure that would never happen. The cops wouldn’t let it. The bullet would just quietly disappear.
    So I was home free. Uninvolved. Invisible. The man who wasn’t there. And that’s the way I wanted it. That’s the way it had to be. I have a five-year-old kid. I couldn’t live with the knowledge that somewhere,, somehow, someone might strike back at me through him. Or through my wife. Or through me, for that matter. I’m a coward still.
    Yeah, I’m still a coward, but all things are relative. I mean, after all this, I don’t think I’d find the projects quite so scary anymore. Not that I was planning on visiting the projects any time in the near future.
    I pulled up in front of my office, put the blinkers on, and took the recording equipment inside, screw the “NO PARKING TOW ZONE” sign (see, I’m braver already).
    I lugged Red’s suitcase back down to the car. It hadn’t seemed that heavy when I’d yanked it out of Red’s trunk that