now."
"Pick up your cards," Carr said.
"There's something else," Howard said. "Since the day I was arrested, you're the only one who's stuck by me, and you've never asked me one question about it. I really appreciate that...But I want you to know. A year ago I walked into my apartment with a few drinks under my belt and my old lady is fucking the next-door neighbor. I killed her because I had my gun on. I was a federal cop and my gun was right there in a holster on my belt. Now I'm in the joint for it...but I'm the same now as I ever was, and like you and everybody else in the whole goddamn world, I'm never going to change...My wife is dead and I'm alive and one year older. It's as simple as that. A set of circumstances."
A bell sounded. A guard opened a gate in the chain-link fence, and visitors began to depart.
Howard stood up and put the deck of cards in his shirt pocket. They shook hands. "Drop me a line when you get your transfer orders," Howard said.
The Treasury field office was located in the stodgy-looking Federal Courthouse on Spring Street, just a few blocks up from L.A.'s skid row. Jack Kelly waited in the technical shop. He gazed out the window.
The view from the field office was clear, up to a point. Things over a half-mile or so away were blurry. Boyle Heights was in haze the color of oatmeal.
Below, on Spring Street, the "Blue Goose," a large police van, headed toward the tenderloin. Years ago, when Kelly had been on the force, the old-timers used to make the recruits drive the Goose, to avoid the body lice.
He looked at his watch and sipped coffee. For some reason he thought of the Timmy Fontaine incident.
He remembered being on the duty desk the night a young ponytailed hitchhiker marched into the field office and told him about how she was picked up by a "Timmy," who drove her to his Malibu bachelor pad, which had giant stereo speakers.
After she posed for photos in the bedroom, Timmy masturbated while standing overher (Kelly remembered her describing this as being "far out") and then showed her a suitcase full of phony ten-dollar bills. Probably to show off.
Later, the brass said that before Kelly went to a federal judge and obtained a search warrant, he should have determined who Timmy was. The second-guessers figured that if Kelly had known that young Timmy was the son of the Honorable Augustus Fontaine (D., Calif) he might have handled it differently.
That's where they were wrong. Jack Kelly wouldn't have cared if it had been Prince Charles with the suitcase full of green. He would have done exactly the same thing. Filed the search warrant, knocked on Timmy's door, announced his purpose, kicked Timmy's door down, found the suitcase, and arrested Timmy for possession of funny money, just as though he were any other street punk.
Just that alone would have started a major flap, but it burst into epic proportions when Timmy made the mistake of punching Kelly on the side of his head, during the arrest, breaking a manicured thumb. Kelly counterpunched the unfortunate Timmy on the point of the chin, breaking the attached jaw in two places and causing Timmy's mouth to be wired shut during the trial.
The pressure from above hadn't worked on the judge, and Timmy was sentenced to a year in Lompoc, which Kelly attributed to the fact that the judge had been appointed by a Republican administration.
The honorable congressman got back at them by having one of his old law partners sue Kelly and Uncle Sam in a trumped-up civil-rights and personal-injury case. They even alleged that Kelly broke Timmy's thumb in order to make him talk.
The suit failed, but Kelly ended up in cold storage indexing counterfeit notes and answering calls from bank tellers about what to do if " In God We Trust " was missing from the reverse of a twenty-dollar bill.
After a year he was offered a chance to return to field duties, but he told the agent-in-charge thanks anyway, but that he got the same pay for pushing a pencil as