Clockers: A Novel by Price Richard

Author:Price, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1992-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

18

WALKING into the office on Monday afternoon, Rocco saw an article on the arrest in the Darryl Adams job pinned to the bulletin board. Rocco’s name was mentioned twice. Usually that gave him a little kick, but this time the article served to remind him of how unnerving and frustrating the interrogation had been.

The night before, when he had handed Victor Dunham over to County, Rocco had reached out to one of the ranking correction officers, a sergeant named Frank Lopez, and asked him to keep an eye on the kid. Over the years, Rocco would occasionally call Lopez or some other buddy on the inside and request that an incoming mutt be put in a cell with a certain informer, or that a particularly nasty scumbag be assigned a nightmare roommate, but last night was the first time Rocco had ever asked a CO to do some babysitting for him and watch a confessed murderer’s back. Given Victor’s background, it had seemed like the decent thing to do.

On the way to dinner with Mazilli, Rocco parked for a minute outside the Municipal Court and went downstairs to the Bureau of Criminal Identification to get a copy of Dunham’s pedigree for the homicide folder. BCI was in the basement of the court building, below the ground-level police garage. It was a gloomy antique of an office, with mint-green walls, oily wainscoting and an ancient scale that had once taken the height and weight of young punks like Carmine Galante, Frank Costello and Longy Zwillman in the days when “consorting with known Italians” was a criminal offense on the Dempsy books.

Rocco walked up to the waist-high counter that divided the holding cells and fingerprinting station from a cluster of battered desks and filing cabinets. He gave a short salute to Bobby Bones. The ID King was holding down the fort solo, sitting behind a typewriter and eating a sandwich.

Bones met Rocco belly-to-belly across the divider and braced himself like a goalie. “Hit me.”

“Victor Dunham.”

The crow’s feet at the corners of Bones’s eyes turned to starbursts. “Who?” His mouth hung open, a crescent of yellow cheese plastered along his jaw.

“Victor Dunham.”

Bones reared back and smoothed his hair. “He got a moniker?”

Rocco shrugged.

“Dunham, Dunham . . . Victor Dunham . . . You sure he’s Dempsy?”

“Yup.”

Bones looked lost. “You sure that’s his name?” Rocco scratched his jaw. “Do me two favors, OK?”

“Sure.”

“Number one, look it up in the files, OK?”

“Yeah, well of course,” Bones said unhappily.

“Number two, take that fucking piece of cheese off your face.”

Bones moved toward a six-foot-high cabinet, fingers twitching at his hips like a gunslinger. “Dunham . . .”

“Look under D.” Rocco leaned forward on the counter. “Please.”

“How about a Ronald Dunham?” Bones offered, sounding like a desperate salesman. “I got a Ronald Dunham.”

“Please.”

Hissing in defeat, Bones finally went into a drawer and pulled out a file card. “Son of a bitch.” He glared at it, committing it to memory. “Victor Dunham . . . who the fuck is

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