But everything’s so … extreme now. Either you pick a girl up off a stroll, or you use one of the out-call services. A stroller could be underage. Carrying anything from a disease to a straight razor. And you’d have to get it on in the car, real quick. An escort could be an undercover. Or a psycho who kept souvenirs.
Most of the strip clubs, they had private rooms where you could get whatever you were willing to pay for. But there’s always some Law sniffing around those places. Not for the sex, for the skim. So the undercovers spent their time in the upscale places. The more the joints charged, the more likely there was Law around somewhere.
On top of all that, I knew the owner of that jewelry store we’d hit was still trying to collect on the insurance. He had to sue to get that, which is how I knew about it, from the papers.
All the insurance company had was suspicion. Nobody had ever been bagged for the crime, and real thieves had done the work—even the cops told the papers that it had been a professional job.
I admit, reading that made me feel good. Respected. I can translate cop-talk, so I knew what they were saying: “Either we find ourselves an informant, or this case is going to the North Pole.”
I knew something else: even if the cops quit trying to solve that one, it was a sure bet that the insurance company wouldn’t. And some of their guys were supposed to be real good. I don’t mean any ex-cop with a few pals still on the job. I mean one of those serious, fuck-the-rules spooks. The kind who get fired for going over the line once too often.
It had to be the cops who told this guy that they knew I’d been in on that jewelry-store job, but that they could never prove it in court. That’s why I got a visit, the only one I got all the time I was away.
Now, you can refuse a visit. Even if it’s the cops, you can still say no. Or at least you could have your lawyer there. I didn’t recognize the name the CO told me, but I … ah, I guess I was just bored. Or maybe curious.
My visitor didn’t look like an ex-cop to me. More like an accountant. He was maybe in his fifties, in good shape, but everything about him was a kind of gray. I don’t mean he looked blurry or anything. And it wasn’t his suit, or even his skin color. It was like he was part of a dark cloud.
Sure enough, he started raining. “We know you were one of several individuals involved in that jewelry-store robbery,” he said, flat out.
I almost told him it wasn’t a robbery, it was a burglary, but I didn’t. I still can’t figure out why I’d want to tell him that.
“We don’t care about the people who did the grunt work,” he went on. “What we want is the man who planned it. And we know who that was, too.”
Maybe he’d been a soldier once, because when he said “grunt work,” he was watching my eyes. I don’t know what he was looking for, but I know it wasn’t there.
“What are you telling me all this for?” I asked him.
“Mr. Caine, I’m telling you ‘all this’ because you’re doing a prison sentence. When you come out, you’ll be broke. And the owner of that jewelry store will be rolling in money. That doesn’t seem quite fair to me. We thought it might not seem fair to you, either.”
“I’m not in here for no robbery.”
“Yes, you are,” he said. That’s when I knew for sure that the big cop had talked to him, face-to-face. Woods was too smart to put my real alibi on paper, or talk about it on the phone. So, even if this guy had connections strong enough so they’d open the whole file on that jewelry job for him, my name wouldn’t be in it.
Who has that kind of connections? I thought. Not the feds; everyone knows they don’t get along with NYPD. This guy looked like a private contractor, but he had to be working for some … company. A big company. Sure! The insurance company. Their investigators kept on going long after the cops quit. I heard of them staying on death cases for twenty years, trying to get their money