City Called July by Howard Engel

Author:Howard Engel [Engel, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780140092387
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1986-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Chris Savas was an old friend. From the moment he came into Nathan Geller’s studio I started to feel better. It wasn’t because the sergeant was considerate of my feelings, far from it. He always gave me a hard time. When he’d finished with me, after a couple of hours of close questioning, barbed sarcasm, and taunting comments on my line of work and personal foibles, I felt I’d been taken to the cleaners and hung up and dried by one of the best. No, it was even better than that. I felt like I’d been put in a crucible and exposed to white heat. There was nothing left but a fine grey ash. As a chemist, Savas was top of the line.

We were sitting in his office at Niagara Regional. Paper cups of coffee with floating corpses of cigarette butts littered his metal desk. The floor had the same rust marks I remembered from last time. The venetian blinds were still dusty and the windows still looked out on the parking lot next to the city’s market square. I could see the old court-house with squadrons of wheeling pigeons circling the geranium which was annually planted in the memorial fountain to commemorate something or other.

Pete Staziak had wedged his large form into the doorway a few minutes before to see what stage we were at. He and Savas exchanged looks and Savas broke down and gave me one of his cigarettes for a change. Staziak had briefed Savas about my activities, judging by the bite of his questions. He’s taken me over the scene of so many crimes in the last five years that I’m going to get them all into one big mulligan stew of who did what to whom. I looked at the bastard sitting across from me, even as his old partner was examining him from the doorway. I wondered if what we saw was the same man.

Staff Sergeant Chris Savas was a hard man and a good cop. He’d been named after a Cypriot painter and on occasion had tried to show a few friends what Greek cooking and drinking were all about. He had a face like a slab of beef, with eyes that could become as cold as steel ball bearings. He had a voice like the sound cardboard makes when you rasp it across a desk. He also had an instinct for when enough was enough.

“You think young Bolduc did it?”

“Christ, Chris, I told you. He was there when I got there. That’s all I said. If I thought you were going to make him the corner-stone of your investigation, I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning him. How do you know he didn’t stumble into it the way I did? Hell, if I got there and thought I might become a suspect I might think twice about sticking around, especially if I heard somebody driving up and turning his motor off. I think he panicked, that’s all.”

“Yeah, you could be right, and you could be wrong.

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