Detective

great. Two separate pieces of information, each telling me I was making all the right moves.
    The first came up when Tony asked Pluto if he had a hit of coke. Pluto came down on him, saying Tony ought to know he always kept his house clean, that when he made a deal he always brought the stuff in from where he had it stashed minutes before it was going out, and that the police could search his house any time and they’d find nothing. So my idea of framing Pluto with Albrect’s kilo wasn’t that farfetched, after all.
    The second was that Tony had been unable to line up another courier, but by boosting the ante, he had managed to talk Forrester into going again.
    So I’d been right to leave the tracking device in place. Red was making one more run.

24.
    I T RACKED R ED AS H E came through New York headed for Miami. I picked him up just west of Patchogue, Long Island, and tracked him till he went out of range, somewhere north of Camden, New Jersey.
    I wasn’t sure why I was tracking Red. It was just something to do. That and the fact that eventually I wanted to get my transmitter back. But as far as helping me along with my problem, it really didn’t. I mean, I knew Red was on his way to buy drugs, and I’d know when he was coming back. If I wanted, I could pass the information on to the cops and get Pluto and the boys busted for drug trafficking. But I didn’t want to get them for drugs. I wanted to get them for murder.
    Red had gone down over the weekend, so I had some free time on my hands while I waited for him to get back. That should have been great, considering the double duty I had been pulling lately (the Albrect thing and Richard’s cases had kept me going around the clock) but it wasn’t. Just the opposite. At least while I was racing around like a madman, I was occupied, I was doing something. Now I had nothing to do but think, and that’s never good. Because the first thought that came to mind was, what the hell did I think I was doing? In the first place, I was neglecting my family. What I’d told Richard about being behind on the bills was absolutely true, and what was I doing about it? Nothing. If anything, I was avoiding work. And for what? Because somehow or other I’d gotten myself obsessed with some neurotic need to prove myself useful? Great. Good goal. The best way to accomplish it, I’m sure, is to let your wife and kid starve. And justify it all because you’re caught up in some farfetched, glamorous, storybook crusade to avenge the death of dear old Martin Albrect. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so futile. I mean, when you came right down to it, what was I really doing in the Albrect affair, besides withholding evidence, compounding a felony, and conspiring to conceal a crime? Instead of going to the police, I was attempting to solve the whole thing singlehanded. Great. Who the fuck did I think I was, Sam Spade? What did I expect to accomplish?
    At least, if I went to the police, maybe they could do something about it. I couldn’t give them any proof, but I could tell them who did it, and surely they could take it from there. And if they couldn’t, wouldn’t that mean that it couldn’t be done, that it had been impossible to begin with, that I’d taken it as far as it could go and done everything I could?
    The reason these thoughts taunted me so much was, basically, I had done everything I could. I’d managed to plant a transmitter on a car, tap some phones, and confiscate a kilo of contraband, but that was it. I’d shot my wad. I was tapped out, drained, fresh out of ideas. If something helpful came in on Pluto’s phone tap, it might at least point me in the right direction, but barring that, my basic problem was I simply didn’t know what the hell to do.
    It was beautiful on Saturday, so I took Tommie to the Bronx Zoo. We’re family members. I figure if you have to be a member of something, the Bronx Zoo is a good thing to be a member of. As members, we have a book of tickets to get into the parking lot free. We also have a membership card that gets us in the main gate, and tickets for the rides. The ride tickets are great at the Children’s Zoo, which is always mobbed on weekends. We skip the long ticket line and go straight through the gate with our passes.
    We did the Children’s Zoo first. We sat in birds’ nests. Then we crawled into tunnels and stuck our heads out of the plastic tops and pretended we were prairie dogs. Then Tommie climbed a giant