Detective

facts.
    Before I could figure out what it was, the sound of footsteps suddenly stopped and there was silence.
    I turned the volume up on the machine. Dead air. There was nothing there.
    Suddenly, I realized what had been bothering me. Tony’s phone call to Murphy. It hadn’t happened. It wasn’t on the tape. I’d just listened to the last calls on the tape, and they were incoming calls immediately terminated by TDU. If Tony was about to call Murphy, the call should have been on the tape. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t on the phone tape, and it wasn’t on the room tape. Somehow the tapes had fucked up.
    My first thought was that they’d found the bug. That would be my first thought—always think the worst. Then it hit me. The tape hadn’t fucked up. They hadn’t found the bug. For whatever reason—it didn’t really matter why—Tony hadn’t gone straight to Pluto’s that night. He’d gotten there that morning, and not too far ahead of me. The conversation I’d been listening to hadn’t taken place in the early hours of the morning. It had taken place that very day, just as I’d been out there to change the tapes. The phone call wasn’t on either tape, because I’d ripped the tapes out of the machines just before it happened.
    Now it made sense that Tony could call Murphy. He couldn’t have called him at home early in the morning and made it seem casual. But he sure as hell could have called him at the office that day. And that’s just what he had done. Only I’d missed the goddamn call because I’d changed the tape just before he made it.
    On the heels of that realization came another one. I had to go out there and get the tape and find out what was said. Now that they were on to me, now that they’d gotten a lead to me, now that they were focusing all of their efforts toward finding out who I was, I had to go out there virtually under their noses and get the tapes.
    What if they’d found the bugs? What if they’d traced them and found the car? Ironically, there was no way of knowing without having the tapes.
    My beeper went off again, and I almost welcomed it. Good. It must be important. It’ll give me something to do. Give me something that’s important enough that I have to do it and can put off, at least for a few hours, having to get those tapes.
    I dialed the office.
    “Agent Blue,” I said.
    “It’s about time,” Kathy snarled. “Don’t you ever answer your beeper?”
    “I had to get to a phone.”
    “Oh yeah? I’ll bet you’re in your office.”
    “Why would you think that?”
    “I don’t hear any traffic.”
    “Remind me to tape record some and play it back when I’m inside.”
    “Never mind that, this is important. It won’t wait.”
    “Then you’d better tell me what it is.”
    She did. An old man in Queens had just gotten out of the hospital. It had been a medical malpractice case, so taking pictures in the hospital had been out of the question. The doctor in the hospital had been treating the patient’s leg. Gangrene had set in. The old man had lost his foot. The kicker was, that was his good leg. His other leg had already been cut off at the hip.
    Richard must have been salivating over this one: I mean, it’s not as if the pictures wouldn’t keep—the guy wouldn’t have any legs tomorrow, either. But Richard was adamant. It had to be done today.
    Fine, I thought. Anything, rather than the tapes. I wrote down the address, and pulled out the Hagstrom map.
    It was way the hell out in Rosedale, right on the way to Pluto’s house.

29.
    O N M Y W AY OUT TO Rosedale it began to rain really hard. I don’t know how other detectives handle the rain. I suppose James Bond has an umbrella, but he’s British, he could get away with it. I don’t see Mike Hammer carrying one, somehow. I think it’s always sunny when he’s on a case.
    I have a problem with rain. I’ve never liked umbrellas or raincoats. I guess it goes back to my childhood, when my mother always wanted me to wear a raincoat or take an umbrella, or both, and I never wanted to because they interfered with my play. I preferred always to sprint madly wherever I wanted to go.
    I still do, but with the job, it’s a problem. I started my detective work in February, so there wasn’t any rain to contend with. Then the summer came. I still have no raincoat. Tommie and I got free CitiBank umbrellas by going to Yankee Stadium on umbrella day, so on rainy days I’ll take that, since I have to protect my