“Have a seat.”
Smith removes his hat and approaches the desk of the older, still well-built man. There’s a plain wooden chair with its back to him, which he withdraws from the desk to sit down.
“Would you like a drink?”
Smith declines the drink on account of still being on duty, then reaches into the breast coat pocket of his light-gray suit to retrieve a cardboard-covered notebook and a large yellow No. 2 pencil.
“Dickerson has been checked in on Frunze. He could use the peace and quiet.”
Smith begins to thumb through the thick manila leaves of the notebook, apparently making short-hand notes in the margins, crossing out text on some pages, penciling it in on others. The older man follows him with small, tired eyes.
“The apartment in Podil is clean, and the protests in front of the Hassidic Strip Bar are largely no more.”
Smith slaps shut the notebook and is about to put it back into his jacket pocket, but halts, briefly hesitates, and then reaches into his left-hand trouser pocket to retrieve a small white slip of paper, possibly a receipt of some kind, which he then inserts among the pages of the notebook that is promptly returned to its previous place in his suit jacket.
“Step’s in witness protection.”
To which Smith responds with undisguised surprise bordering on a facial expression of blatant contempt that: Step’s record of alcoholism was well documented; his falsification of surveillance intelligence was now a matter of fact; and worst of all – at least as far as Smith was concerned – the evidence appears to indicate, in increasing, indeed alarming abundance, that Step was doing everything in his authority as an investigator, in his filing of reports, during everyday gossip around the office watercooler, to undermine, sabotage and possibly derail Smith’s investigation into the ongoing case of the Hassidic Strip Bar.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about the girl?”
Smith begins searching for something in his suit, then appeals to the man for a cigarette and a lighter, if he wouldn’t mind. While the man rummages through an assortment of nondescript materials that fill the upper right-hand drawer of his desk, Smith abruptly rises from his seat and announces his need to visit the Men’s Room and empty his bladder; that he would only be just a minute.
Upon reentering the office, Smith waves off the man’s offer of a single, albeit somewhat crumpled cigarette and a small cardboard packet of matches, declaring that he needs to quit.
Before the man can resume their earlier conversation, Smith promptly produces a small, oddly moist, transparent zip-lock bag containing a loose collection of colored photos. Visible through the bag is at least one photo of a partially nude young woman being mounted on a bed by an older man of possibly East Indian ethnicity.
But the older still well-built man cuts Smith off at the pass, as it were, rises heavily from his chair, and after asking the young detective as to whether he’d remembered to lift the toilet seat, excuses himself to make use of the same nearby toilet.
During the man’s absence, Smith turns over the see-through baggy of photos in his hands but doesn’t open it up. The faces, furnishings, clothes and mix of nude body parts is a kaleidoscope of playing cards yet to be shuffled, dealt and laid out on the table between the two men.
When the man reenters the office, instead of that long familiar facial expression of bodily relief so often associated with a satisfying bowel movement by a man of his age, Smith notices a matter-of-fact smirk, straight shoulders and swinging arms, at the end of which swings a large white envelope that the man briskly tosses onto his desk, spilling an even larger collection of colored photos of people in various stages of undress.
“What’s this,” asks Smith.
To which the older man explains, first, that he himself was no stranger to photo surveillance and felt both comfortable and sometimes obliged to follow up on cases under his supervision; and that second, although Step was indisputably a drunk and maybe even a sneaky one, and that Dickerson was hardly more reliable, Smith too was not beyond reproach and had better stay clear of sleazy strip bars, or at least have the good sense to avoid being photographed in them, particularly as he was or once used to be married.
“What about CG,” protests Smith.
To which the older man, in lieu of answering, begins to sift through his photo collection to reveal the girl in question in questionable poses, with positions and backdrops that include a closeup with international educator Rico Soiree, and most damning, a mirror shot of her trying on one of the now infamous ‘perforated performance sheets’ in what could easily be the dressing room of the Hasidic place.
“Is she undercover?”
Yes, and more than one, answers the older man, who then questions whether Smith had had anything to do with her recent employment at the Heavy Heeb’s drycleaners. If not, it sure was a fortunate happenstance that she’d managed to pass on to Smith that piece of evidence in the way of the dry-cleaning ticket.
But more importantly, did not Smith, during his countless hours of (paid) surveillance of the strip bar, have an opportunity to notice this very same loveable young girl beneath one of those ‘holey’ sheets? And if he had, shouldn’t he have reported this possibly valuable lead, preferably earlier than its dissemination by trolls in the chat section of Kyiv Comics?
“She kicked The Ferret’s ass.”
And the older man presents a photo of that, too: The Ferret face-first in the cement with his umbrella wings bent and broken behind his back; then another of Step on a stretcher with a sheet being pulled over his head as he takes one last drag on a smoke.
“Did you send the Heavy Heeb to the apartment that night?”
The older man then finds and pulls a flier for the drycleaners off his desk.
“Who was the third guy in the hallway… who turned out the lights?”
“Who said there was a third guy? And are you sure that the light bill had been paid on time,” laughs the older man.
“And the gunshot?”
“Or shot nerves – after too many hours of cleaning sheets,” shoots back the man, his face a broad red smile.
“I didn’t kill my wife,” shouts the detective.”
“And neither did I,” cries the man, now chortling, guffawing, almost in pain.
FILED BY DIRK DICKERSON WITH SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTION FROM LOCAL SOURCES. Undated