Free No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart by Larry Beinhart Page B

from New York to
talk to you."
    "I bet your arms are tired." The slabs of
his face crooked briefly into a smile so we would all know it was a
joke.
    " It's by water, by running water, " the
woman who looked like a New Jersey housewife said.
    "Look, Captain," I said, "I have been
waiting here for three hours."
    "She has to concentrate," the other guy,
the one in the polyester plainclothes cop suit, said.
    "Don't bother me, son," Deltchev said.
    "We're prepared to give you all the time you
need," the other guy said to Deltchev, "but not for these
interruptions."
    "You hear that, you hear what the man said?"
Deltchev said to me, pointing a finger somewhat smaller than a
kielbasa at me. "Now desist these interruptions."
    "Don't wave your finger in my face .... " I
snapped.
    The man in plainclothes stepped between us and shoved
me. I didn't want to hit a cop in a police station. There are some
forms of stupidity that even I find excessive. But I did say, "If
you fucking touch me again, I'll break your fucking arm."
    Unlike Deltchev, he was pretty close to my size and I
might have been able to do it.
    At that point still another party entered the fray. A
slim, neatly dressed black man, who I also took to be a cop, stepped
between me and the pusher.
    "What's the problem?" he said calmly.
    "The fucking problem . . ." I started to
explain.
    "Tillman," Deltchev bellowed, "you
take care of him. Dan, come with me. We have things to do," and
he swept into his office, the other two following in his wake,
Tillman staying with me.
    "Detective Tillman," he said with the same
aplomb, "what can I do for you?"
    "I came down from New York to see Captain
Deltchev; I had an appointment. I've been waiting three hours."
    "Are you from the media?" he asked.
    "Media?"
    "I guess not," he said. "Who are you?"
    I told him, I even gave him a card. I explained why I
was there.
    "Too bad you're not from the media," he
said.
    "What's going on?" I asked.
    "Come on into my office, I'm the one who's
really handling the Wood thing now. I'm sorry," he said, as I
followed him, "you came at a bad time. We have some little girls
missing, three of them, and we found the body of a fourth. The
captain's a little preoccupied."
    He gestured me to a seat while he opened a file
cabinet and took out the paperwork. I complimented him on what a good
report he had written up and what thorough police work
they
had done.
    "Is there anything," I asked, "any
dangling thread, any detail that didn't fit, or maybe just a sense of
things that didn't find its way into that report?"
    "Right now it looks a whole lot like the report
reads. I'll fill you in on a little background though. Lately, we've
been getting a big rise in auto theft. It seems like it's been moving
out from the city, all around, over in Maryland too. They like to
work shopping centers, particularly where there are restaurants. Not
McDonald's or Burger King, real restaurants. You figure a guy goes
into a restaurant, you got an hour or two before he's out. That's
time enough for the car to be good and gone and at the chop shop. It
seems like it's organized, because there's a pattern and because
they're picky about it, BMWs, Volvos, Mercedes, Saabs, the smaller
Caddies, Lincolns. The high-price spread. I'm figuring a lot of it
goes straight to parts. Do you have any idea what a replacement
engine for a BMW goes for?
    "We had one victim, three months ago, was having
dinner with his wife. He says, 'Oh, honey, I left my wallet in the
car.' But what he really was doing was sneaking to the pay phone to
call his extracurricular lady friend. But from the pay phone he sees
these two perpetrators messing with his brand-new Seville. Being at
the phone anyway, he calls police emergency. By then, the perps have
already got his door open, which doesn't take but a couple of
seconds, so he goes tear-ass out of the restaurant screaming; they
jump away from his car and they tear-ass out in the car they came in.
Less than a minute later