Free The Hearse You Came in On by Tim Cockey Page B

for the late twentieth century. It especially couldn’t give a damn for its industrial solvents and cleaning products, the ones which might have managed to eat through the decades of ground-in grit and soot sealed into its linoleum floors and tiny tabletops in a permanent dead-dishwater patina. Apparently Sammy also keeps his wait staff sealed in a time vault. Beehives in hair nets, eyeglasses on chains and faces like those repellent little troll dolls that were once so inexplicably popular. Sammy himself mans the counter, a disagreeable old guy dragged along by a toothpick. The younger version of his face, seemingly sucking the same toothpick, can be seen in the several hundred black-and-white photographs tacked up allaround the place, posing with the various celebrities and politicos and mobsters who have dallied with acid indigestion at Sammy’s over the years.
    Hutch pointed out Police Commissioner Alan Stuart’s photograph. It was hung on one of the side walls.
    “When he wins the election, Sammy will move it nearer to the cash register. That’s your prime real estate.”
    “Right up there next to Cher,” I said. “That would be peachy.”
    We were seated at one of the tiny tables. I had gone to put a matchbook under one of the short legs to keep the table from wobbling and had found another matchbook there already. The Pep Boys. Manny, Moe and Jack. All your automotive accessory needs. My dad had voiced a few of their commercials way back when. Our waitress came over to take our orders. Late breakfast for each. She fetched a coffeepot that had been sitting on the burner since the Hoover administration and filled us up. I took a sip and asked Hutch how he was so sure his man was going to take the election.
    “He’s it,” Hutch said. “There is no other choice. Look who the Democrats are putting up. Spencer Davis?”
    “Didn’t he once have a blues band?”
    “
That
Spencer Davis would be a better choice. At least he could keep them grooving. Nah, this guy is a noodle. He’s the district attorney. He’s got a little Kennedy complex.”
    “You mean members of his family keep dying tragically in between sex scandals?”
    Hutch laughed. “Not quite. But he comes from money like that. He spends all his energies propping upthe poor. Thinks he’s the next Bobby. Sounds swell, I know. But we’re not electing a social worker, we’re electing a governor. Davis thinks on a single track. Flip the power from the haves to the have-lesses as often as you can and you’ve reset the balance. That’s his whole agenda. That’s not justice, it’s payback politics. It’s two wrongs make a right. But they don’t. We learned that in kindergarten. Everything you need to know, right? Spencer Davis is a good-looking rich boy, everybody’s chum. He thinks that the noblest form of political behavior is slumming. I’m sorry, but in politics especially I just don’t buy the do-gooder act. He’s pretending he’s something he’s not. Dress it up any way you like, but I still call that dishonest.”
    It was quite a nice speech, except that it didn’t say anything about why Alan Stuart’s shit didn’t stink.
    “And your man?” I asked. “He invented sliced bread?”
    “My man invented the means of protecting it, which is ultimately just as important. Look, Alan Stuart is a tough, edgy son of a bitch, you’re not going to hear me pretend otherwise. He can turn on the charm when he wants to, just like Spencer Davis, but he rarely feels the need to. Alan likes to mix it up with people. He’s a head-knocker. Unlike Davis, you can never be sure which heads he’s going to be knocking together from one day to the next. That’s what makes him so effective. He’s multidimensional. He just wants to solve problems, period. He doesn’t want to be your friend, he just wants to solve the problem. You’ve seen what he has done as police commissioner. He gets his man. It’s pretty basic. And he instills that ethic in his