Page 98 of Hanging and Burning

“Yes.”

Gladstone’s office was on the fourth floor of the precinct. It was a surprisingly small and somewhat shabby room where the highly decorated head of all dispatchers plied his trade. One might think that the occupant of such an innocuous space would be a minor bureaucrat, in charge of something like buttons for the uniforms of street-level cops. But those in the know understood that Sergeant Palmer took care of the most delicate police business, whether it was official or off the books.

The door was open and so I walked in.

“Joe,” my old friend and sometime nemesis hailed.

He jumped up from behind the battered oak desk and embraced me.

“Sit, sit.” He closed the door and then pushed the visitor’s chair as an indication of where I should put myself. Then he went to his chair nestled behind the desk, set beneath a wall-unit air conditioner.

“What can I do for you, Joe?”

“How you doin’, Glad?”

He heard something in my evasive reply, squinted his green left eye, and rephrased, “Nuthin’ special. What’s up?”

“Type in the name Helma Ortiz,” I said, gesturing at his computer monitor.

“Helma with an H-E?” he asked.

I nodded.

He entered the name, found something, and set in reading. After maybe seven minutes he turned his gaze back on me.

“Okay,” he said.

“Now try Benny Lamont.”

Same procedure, though this time the article was a little longer.

“A whore and her pimp,” he said. “Maybe they retired to Bimini.”

“I doubt it.”

“And why is that?” asked the preternaturally white Irishman. He was smiling because Glad loved trouble almost as much as he loved being Irish.

“There’s a house on Haring Street in Brooklyn—”

“Where’s that?” he asked.

“Sheepshead Bay,” I said and then gave him an address.

“What’s there?”

“A private mausoleum, built for two.”

“Benny and Helma?”

“Yes, sir.”

“From way back in the early eighties?”

“Probably from a week before they were declared missing.”

“You doin’ cold cases now, Joe?”

“Every once in a while, when I’m walkin’ around with my head in the clouds, I stumble and then fall into some grave.” I realized that this metaphor had its origins in the Ministry of the Divine Orgasm. This revelation brought a smile to my lips.