Page 121 of One of Us Is Guilty

Eddie

Harry was right.

Those two words didn’t leave my mind for a second.

I sat on a stool in the Taco Bell restaurant in Times Square. I chewed the paper straw that sat in my soda cup.

I wasn’t thirsty, and I don’t eat here. I just wanted something to chew on.

It was about the last place on earth you’d find anybody who actually lives in New York. This place was tourist central. Thousands of people passed through these doors. None of them would be remotely connected with the Molly Green trial or the investigation. In the unlikely event a local did come in, they would order take-out. Having a secret meeting in one of the busiest restaurants in the world didn’t sound like a smart plan, but it worked. Hiding in plain sight didn’t get much better.

Larkin was five minutes late when he walked through the doors. He clocked me, stopped dead in his tracks and swore. He went up to the counter and ordered, then came to the table and set down a soda and a side of nachos in front of him.

‘Come here, Eddie,’ he said, and held his hands out to embrace me in a hug.

He wasn’t being friendly. I embraced him, let his hands pat myback, my sides, then my pants pocket, and finally the inside pockets of my overcoat. I patted his back, and his sides, to make it look like we were glad to see each other when in fact he was patting me down, looking for a wire.

‘You got a phone in your jacket pocket,’ he said, as he let me go.

I took my phone out of my pocket, placed it beside my soda cup.

‘Turn it off, please,’ he said as he sat down opposite me.

I switched off my phone. He was paranoid about being taped. I’d guessed as much.

‘You have the photo I sent you?’ I asked.

‘I should’ve known it was you,’ he said.

‘Who were you expecting?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said as he took out the photo I’d included in the box of donuts I’d sent him earlier that day with instructions on the back to meet here, at this time.

‘If you know that many people who might want to blackmail you, I would seriously consider making some lifestyle adjustments.’

He put the photo on the counter, the one of him receiving a package from Dekker. The picture that Bloch took many weeks ago when she was trailing the cops and trying to figure out their angle on the investigation.

‘Fuck you, Eddie,’ he said.

‘I’m here to help you, Larkin. You’ve had Internal Affairs crawling over your skin before. I thought you might want to take all available steps to stop that from happening again.’

He put several nacho chips into his mouth at once and began to crunch them. The dust from the chips coated his lips and fell onto his blue tie.

‘I have two options for you,’ I said, taking a cigarette lighter from my pocket and placing it on the table. ‘I can burn this photo. Pretend like it never happened. I didn’t see it. Bloch didn’t see it. It never existed. Or, I can burn you. That’s your choice.’

‘Not much of a decision, is it?’ said Larkin, and as he spoke smallfragments of nachos erupted from his mouth like the waste pipe on a woodchipper.

‘Not really. But this is all your fault. You used to be a good cop, before you fucked up an investigation by cutting corners. If you hadn’t been so good, they would have canned your ass and saved the money on your pension. This could be another chance for you. But you’ve gotta do exactly as I say.’

He washed the chips down with a slurp from his soda, and asked, ‘How much?’

‘I don’t want money. I want something else.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to do the right thing. For a start, your employment with Julian Vanderpool is unofficially at an end. Now you work for me.’

‘What if I arrested you now for trying to blackmail an investigating officer during a murder trial in which your client is the sole defendant? You’d be disbarred, you’d serve ten, maybe fifteen years for perverting the course of justice. How about that?’