Grief Street

for me.
    “So maybe I could write a follow-up on how some rabid cops broke into my apartment house and hung dead rats on my door to scare my pregnant wife.” I paused for a look at Fosdick. The arrogance had disappeared from his face, and he was otherwise having a hard time trying to appear relevant. I asked him, “You know about wreathing, sir?”
    The mayor said nothing. Neglio said, “Here’s what I know. Hock: I warned you before about talking to reporters.”
    “You think I’m after buffers here?”
    “Could be.”
    “And it could be some of your rabid cops went from hanging wreaths to bumping friends of mine.”
    “You’re talking real wild now.”
    “Am I?”
    Fosdick and the witnesses looked like they all wanted to be somewhere else. They would have welcomed a fire drill.
    “Let’s say it wasn’t you who went yapping to Slattery,” Neglio said, reasoning. Finally he started sounding like a cop instead of some City Hall hack. “Who did, then? Who told him about that little item we held back?”
    “The rabbi getting scalped, you mean?” Good question, I thought. Mumbling Mr. Glick? The old synagogue members? No, not them; they only saw a shadow. The forensics cops? Officer Caras? All I could think to say was, “Reporters have snitches. Just like cops. Only they call them sources.”
    “Also reporters hold back, just like cops.”
    “Hold back?”
    “You’re forgetting the playwright. The guy Slattery says in his story called him up. Maybe he said lots more than Slattery let on. Maybe we’ve got a real hungry playwright off his nut. A failed writer living in some crib. He gets it in his head he should murder somebody—for art, for a murder mystery. Christ, that’d be some Broadway ballyhoo for the record books.”
    “Now you’re the one talking wild, Inspector.”
    “No—I’m talking about desperate. There’s a difference.”
    “That being?”
    “Motive. Desperation has a motive behind it, wild doesn’t. A desperate killer is somebody you can catch, Hock. You’ve done it before.”
    “Wait a minute. What’s this all about? First you chew me out for all the excitement. Now you want to put me in charge of it?”
    “Mr. Mayor, would you like to take that one?”
    A fine pass-off for a man of the bureau. I had to admire it. The inspector kept his backside covered by deferring to mayoral rank.
    Fosdick fingered his necktie like he was a kid on his first communion day. Probably he would have preferred no witnesses in the room after all. He said, “Detective Hockaday, in the name of the people of New York, I’m asking you to apprehend the person or persons—”
    “In the name of myself, I accept.”
    “Whatever you need, Detective Hockaday,” the mayor said. “I mean it—anything at all.”
    “Thanks. For right now, just let me have Officer Baize and the shiny black car. Also I might need your help on a phone call.”
    “You got it.”
    “Me, too—anything you want,” Neglio added. “Including exceptional clearance.”
    Exceptional clearance. License to kill.
    “You think it’s that desperate, Tommy?”
    “A guy goes scalping a rabbi, climbs a roof and blasts seven men to kingdom come, he disappears like a shadow each time—I call that desperate. Don’t you?”
    “I have a feeling we’re going to be calling it wild.”

    Before leaving City Hall, I rang up the warden at Rikers Island. I told the lady who answered the phone that it was Detective Neil Hockaday calling, which got me connected with the deputy warden. I asked this deputy when Corrections Officer Harry Darcy was next docketed for work.
    “You’re in luck,” he said. “He’s pulling early afternoon at the bing.”
    The bing—as in bing-bing to the neck with a screw’s baton, and a troublesome inmate’s manners improve—is part of the House of Detention for Men, a cell block for the especially violent and mentally disturbed. Lucky me.
    “I want to see him,” I said. “But he shouldn’t know I'm coming.”
    “What for?”
    “Let’s not argue. I’ll put the mayor on the line. He’ll explain.”
    Fosdick proceeded to tell a rattled deputy warden how to do his job. After which I collected Baize from a nap in the outer office and told him how to do his, by driving me over to a building catty-corner from Ruby’s Downtown Playhouse on South Street—the editorial offices of the New York Post —so I could press my luck some more.

Seventeen

    "Who’s your source?”
    “Don’t