Deadeye Dick Page 0,29

been doing.

Word may have come down from Chief Morissey that enough was enough. Father and I had no lawyer to secure our rights for us. Father refused to call a lawyer. But the district attorney or somebody must have said that I should be sent home without any further monkey business.

Anyway—after being shown my father, I was told to sit on a hard bench in a corridor and wait. I was left all alone, still covered with ink. I could have walked out of there. Policemen would come by, and hardly give me a glance.

And then a young one in uniform stopped in front of me, acting like somebody who had been told to carry the garbage out, and he said, “On your feet, killer. I’ve got orders to take you home.”

There was a clock on the wall. It was one o’clock in the morning. The law was through with me, except as a witness. Under the law, I was only a witness to my father’s crime of criminal negligence. There would be a coroner’s inquest. I would have to testify.

• • •

So this ordinary patrolman drove me home. He kept his eye on the road, but his thoughts were all of me. He said that I would have to think about Mrs. Metzger, lying cold in the ground, for the rest of my life, and that, if he were me, he would probably commit suicide. He said that he expected some relative of Mrs. Metzger would get me sooner or later, when I least expected it—maybe the very next day, or maybe when I was a man, full of hopes and good prospects, and with a family of my own. Whoever did it, he said, would probably want me to suffer some.

I would have been too addled, too close to death, to get his name, if he hadn’t insisted that I learn it. It was Anthony Squires, and he said it was important that I commit it to memory, since I would undoubtedly want to make a complaint about him, since policemen were expected to speak politely at all times, and that, before he got me home, he was going to call me a little Nazi cocksucker and a dab of catshit and he hadn’t decided what all yet.

He explained, too, why he wasn’t in the armed forces, even though he was only twenty-four years old. Both his eardrums were broken, he said, because his father and mother used to beat him up all the time. “They held my hand over the fire of a gas range once,” he said. “You ever had that done to you?”

“No,” I said.

“High time,” he said. “Or too late, maybe. That’s locking the barn after the horse is stolen.”

And I of course reconstruct this conversation from a leaky old memory. It went something like that. I can give my word of honor that one thing was said, however: “You know what I’m going to call you from now on,” he said, “and what I’m going to tell everybody else to call you?”

“No,” I said.

And he said, “Deadeye Dick.”

• • •

He did not accompany me to the door of our home, which was dark inside. There was no moon. His headlights picked out a strange broken form in the driveway. It hadn’t been there on the previous morning. It was of course the Wreckage of the cupola and the famous weather vane. It had been pulled off the top of the police chief’s car and left there in the driveway.

The front door was locked, which wasn’t unusual. It was always locked at night, since the neighborhood had deteriorated so, and since we had so many supposed art treasures inside. I had a key in my pocket, but it wasn’t the right key.

It was the key to the gun-room door.

• • •

Patrolman Anthony Squires, incidentally, would many years later become chief of detectives, and then suffer a nervous breakdown. He is dead now. He was working as a part-time bartender at the new Holiday Inn when he had his peephole closed by ye olde neutron bomb.

• • •

Mrs. Gino Maritimo’s spuma di cioccolata: Break up six ounces of semisweet chocolate in a saucepan. Melt it in a 250-degree oven.

Add two teaspoons of sugar to four egg yolks, and beat the mixture until it is pale yellow. Then mix in the melted chocolate, a quarter cup of strong coffee, and two tablespoons of rum.

Whip two-thirds of a cup of cold, heavy whipping cream until it is