"Wildcards - 07 - Dead Mans Hand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

"You're beautiful when you're angry," Jay said.
Ellis ignored him. "I don't like bodies cluttering up my precinct either."
"You must be unhappy a lot of the time," Jay said as he headed for the door. He
paused in the doorway to study her little glass-walled cubicle. "This really
where they killed Captain Black?" he asked innocently.
"Yes," she snapped, irritated. Jay figured he'd hit a sore point. Knowing the
NYPD, they probably hadn't even gotten her a new chair. "What the hell are you
doing?" she said.
"Getting a good picture of the place in my head," Jay said. He smiled crookedly
and made his right hand into a gun, three fingers folded down, thumb cocked like
a hammer, index finger pointed at Angela Ellis. "I'm a good boy, Captain. If I
bump into your killer, I'll want to send him right here to you."
She looked puzzled for a moment, then flushed when she remembered what he could
do. "Aces," she muttered. "Get the hell out of here."
He did. Kant and Maseryk were back in the squad room. "Captain on the rag?" Jay
asked as he passed. They exchanged looks and watched him leave. Jay went out the
front door, walked around the block, went back in, and took the steps down to
the basement.
The precinct records were kept in a dimly lit, lowceilinged room next to the
boiler, part of which had been the coal cellar once upon the time. Now it held a
couple of computer consoles, a xerox machine, a wall of overflowing steel filing
cabinets, and one very pale, very short, very nearsighted policeman.
"Hello, Joe," Jay said.
Joe Mo turned around and sniffed at the stale air. He was just under five feet
tall, stooped and potbellied, with a complexion the color of a mushroom. Tiny
pink eyes peered out from behind the largest, thickest pair of tinted spectacles
that Jay had ever seen. White, hairless hands rubbed together nervously. Mo had
been the first joker on the NYPD, and for more than a decade he'd been the only
joker on the NYPD. His appointment, forced through under the banner of
affirmative action during Mayor Hartmann's administration in the early
seventies, had drawn so much fire that the department had promptly hidden him
down in Records to keep him out of public view. Joe hadn't minded. He liked
Records almost as much as he liked basements. They called him Sergeant Mole.
"Popinjay," Mo said. He adjusted his glasses. The milk white of his skin was
shocking against the dark blue of his uniform, and he always wore his cap, night
and day, even indoors. "Is it true?"
"Yeah, it's true," Jay told him. Mo had been a pariah when he'd joined the
force, even in Fort Freak. No one had wanted to partner him, and he'd been made
unwelcome in the usual cop bars. He'd been doing his off duty drinking in the
Crystal Palace since its doors first opened, paying for every drink in a rather
ostentatious show of rectitude, and collecting ten times his tab under the table
for acting as Chrysalis's eyes and ears in the cophouse.
"I heard you were the one found the body," Joe Mo said. "Nasty business, wasn't
it? Makes you wonder what Jokertown is coming to. You'd think she'd be safe, if
anyone was." He blinked behind the dark, thick lenses. "What can I do for you,
dear boy?"
"I need to see the file on the ace-of-spades killer."
"Yeoman," Joe Mo said.
"Yeoman," Jay Ackroyd repeated thoughtfully. It came back to him then. Yeoman, I
don't care for this, Chrysalis had said with ice in her voice, that night a year