Page 149 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

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It couldn’t have been more than a minute past eight a.m. I had not
planned to resume rushing like an idiot to arrive just before working
hours until the following Monday. That was when she was slated to
return to duty from a five-week training course in the Virgin Islands
for police officials involved in counter-terrorism. But this was the
Wednesday before that date, and there she was: Labelle Gramercy at
her desk in our office at headquarters, nose in a folder I had
compiled concerning the Simulian case. I’ll bet she didn’t even know
she had been in the tropics: not the slightest suggestion of a tan on
that hard-lined face, much less any more tangible souvenir or gift for
her coworkers.
“You’re late, Duncan. But your tardiness did allow me to review
this file I found under that small pile of mail-order catalogues in the
center of your blotter. I regret not being here during these recent
developments in a matter I had considered closed.”
If she regretted anything besides having her twelve-hours-a-day,
six-days-a-week work schedule interrupted by a mandatory
boondoggle to a former sun-and-surf resort it would be relying on
me as a source of information. After seven years as her often left-
behind partner my attitude was well-founded: not that I could read
her like a book, but that I knew nothing was between the covers you
couldn’t learn from the dust jacket. What little respect I had gained in
the department owed to my longevity at this beaten-up old desk, a
mixed blessing. At first I thought I could prove my mettle by hanging
in with her; too late I discovered that my success condemned me to
stay right where I was, a sergeant in the shadow of a super-cop. She
would never move up the ladder, living refutation of the principle
that doing well gets you advanced until you finally land a job you do
poorly. She knew her limitations or had no ambition. Same effect on
me: my only hope was a promotion, and I wouldn’t get that before I

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