The Vanished Man

forged walking a beat for twenty years and tempered by spending another fifteen at the far-riskier job of supervising officers who walked similar beats.
    Now, Monday morning, Amelia Sachs stood more or less at attention in front of him, willing her knees to ignore the arthritis that dug switchblades into them. They were in Marlow’s corner office high up in the Big Building, One Police Plaza, downtown.
    Marlow glanced up from the file he’d been reading and eyed her impeccably pressed blue navies. “Oh, sit down, Officer. Sorry. Sit down. . . . So, Herman Sachs’s daughter.”
    Sitting, she noted a faint hesitation between the last two words of his sentence. Had the word “girl” been quickly replaced?
    “That’s right.”
    “I was at the funeral.”
    “I remember.”
    “It was a good one.”
    As funerals go.
    Eyes on hers, posture upright, Marlow said, “Okay, Officer. Here it is. You’re in some trouble.”
    It hit her like a physical blow. “I’m sorry, sir?”
    “A crime scene on Saturday, by the Harlem River. Car went into the water. You ran it?”
    Where the Conjurer’s Mazda took out crack-head Carlos’s shack and went for a swim.
    “Yes, that’s right.”
    “You placed somebody under arrest at the scene,” Marlow said.
    “Oh, that. Not really arrest. This guy went under the tape and was digging around in a sealed area. I had him escorted out and detained.”
    “Detained, arrested. The point is he was in custody for a while.”
    “Sure. I needed him out of my hair. It was an active scene.”
    Sachs was starting to get her bearings. The obnoxious citizen had complained. Happened every day. Nobody paid attention to crap like that. She began to relax.
    “Well, the guy? He was Victor Ramos.”
    “Yeah, I think he told me that.”
    “ Congressman Victor Ramos.”
    The relaxation vanished.
    The captain opened a New York Daily News. “Let’s see, let’s see. Ah, here.” He lifted the paper and held up a centerfold, which featured a large picture of the man in cuffs at the scene. The headline read: “TIME-OUT” FOR VICTOR.
    “You told the officers on the scene to put him in time-out ?”
    “He was—”
    “Did you?”
    “I believe I did, sir, yes.”
    Marlow offered, “He claimed he was looking for survivors.”
    “Survivors?” she barked, laughing. “It was a ten-by-ten squatter’s shack that got clipped when the perp’s car went into the river. Part of a wall fell over and—”
    “You’re getting a little hot here, Officer.”
    “—and I think a bag of goddamn empties got ripped open. That was the only damage. EMS cleared the shack and I sealed it. The only living things left to rescue in that place were the lice.”
    “Uh-huh,” Marlow said evenly, uneasy with her temper. “He said he was simply making sure anybody living there was safe.”
    She added with uncontrolled irony, “The home owners walked out on their own. Nobody was hurt. Though I understand one of them later got a bruised cheek when he resisted arrest.”
    “Arrest?”
    “He tried to steal a fireman’s flashlight and then urinated on him.”
    “Oh. Brother . . .”
    She muttered, “They were unharmed, they were stoned and they were assholes. And those were the citizens Ramos was worried about?”
    The captain’s grimace, containing shreds of both caution and sympathy, faded. The emotion was replaced by his rubbery bureaucratic façade. “Do you know for a fact that there was any evidence Ramos destroyed that would’ve been relevant to collaring the suspect?”
    “Whether there was or not doesn’t make a bit of difference, sir. It’s the procedure that’s important.” She was struggling to keep calm, keep the edge out of her voice. Marlow was, after all, her boss’s boss’s boss.
    “Trying to work things out here, Officer Sachs,” he said sternly. Then repeated, “Do you know for a fact that evidence was destroyed?”
    She sighed. “No.”
    “So his being in the scene was irrelevant.”
    “I—”
    “Irrelevant?”
    “Yessir.” She cleared her throat. “We were after a cop killer, Captain. Does that count for anything?” she asked bitterly.
    “To me. To a lot of people, yeah. To Ramos, no.”
    She nodded. “Okay, what kind of firestorm’re we talking?”
    “There were TV crews there, Officer. You watch the news that night?”
    Nup, she thought, I was pretty busy trying to collar a murderer. Sachs chose a different answer: “Nosir.”
    “Well, Ramos was