Free Blue Eyes by Jerome Charyn Page B

pants with special pockets, but by the afternoon Jorge had to store quarters in his shoes. Weary in his overalls, weighted down to his heels, Jorge had no appetite to chat with Coen. He grunted his hellos, and tried to pass. Coen held on.
    â€œJorge, where’s Isaac? Please.”
    Still grunting, he twisted his chin toward the electrical signboard of the Primavera Bar and Grill on Southern Boulevard and 174th. Not knowing how to thank him, Coen jerked Jorge’s sleeve, then he jumped between traffic and entered the Puerto Rican bar. He recognized a bald man at the last stool with gray curls around the ears. The man climbed off before Coen could say “Isaac” and locked himself in the toilet. Coen could have flicked the latch with his Detectives Endowment card. He called into the opening.
    â€œIsaac? I’m wearing your burglar picks. I could pull you out if I want.”
    Either Coen heard the toilet flush, or the man was weeping inside.
    â€œIsaac, are you front man at the bar? I’m stalking for Pimloe. Can I trust him, Isaac? Is he wagging my tail? Chief, could you use some bread?” Coen put twenty dollars under the door from the boodle Child had given him. He couldn’t tell whether Isaac was scraping up the money. The bartender glared at Coen. “No more checkers, Isaac? Nothing.” He wanted to clarify his involvement with Child, his perceptions of Odile. Coen had little to do with other detectives. He could only talk shop with Isaac. After Isaac’s disgrace Coen sleepwalked through detective rooms in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens, shuffling from one homicide squad on his way to the next. He was Isaac’s creature, formed by Isaac, fiddled with, and cast off. He made no more overtures to the door. He tied the boodle with a rubberband and went over to the IRT.
    The rookies Lyman and Kelp were cruising the Bronx in an unmarked Ford, complaining about the policewomen who had been in their graduating class. They belonged to a new breed of cop—enlightened, generous, articulate, with handlebar moustaches and neat, longish hair and an ironic stance toward their own police association. Lyman was living with an airline stewardess, Kelp had a stock of impressive girlfriends, and the two rookies were taking courses in social pathology and Puerto Rican culture at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
    â€œCunts in a radio car,” Lyman said. “Man, that’s unbelievable.”
    â€œAlfred, you expect them to type all day in the captain’s office? Imagine all the hard-ons they’d generate.”
    â€œListen, when the shit begins to fly, when it gets hairy over on Seventh Avenue, the junkies poking antennas in your eyes, the transvestites coming at you with their sword canes, these stupid cunts lock themselves in the car, and they won’t even radio for help. And control thinks you’re banging them in the back seat. Unbelievable.”
    The rookies had just been reassigned; they were snatched away from their precincts and picked up by Inspector Pimloe of the First Deputy’s office. It was no glory post. Instead of undercover work, with wires between their nipples and a holster in their crotch, they chauffeured inspectors from borough to borough in a First Deputy car. They would have cursed Pimloe on this day, called him a high-powered glom, but the DI (Pimloe) had put them on special assignment: they were going to meet the First Deputy’s old whip, the legendary Isaac who had disgraced himself and left a smear on the office. But the investigators attached to the First Dep were still devoted to the Chief; through them Lyman and Kelp had heard stories of the old whip. These investigators demurred over Pimloe; they remained “Isaac’s angels.”
    â€œAlfred, how much do you think Isaac took? Half a million?”
    â€œMore, much more. Why would he fuck his career for anything less?”
    â€œShit, we get