"Explain the survivor script. Diaz has handled five hundred municipal voucher frauds, but he had to look at those blue stamps twice. When did the yard workers start printing that prefix?"
"Nineteen eighty-two," I told him, unbuttoning the flannel cuffs of my shirt and rolling them back to expose the faded blue shipyard tattoo on my left forearm.
"After the boiler blast in the lower machine shop at the 207th Street yard. Four mechanics were scalded when a high-pressure line gave out. The city didn't want the liability on the main ledger, so the transit board cut a special survivor fund. It was issued through the credit union, backed by collateralized municipal utility bonds."
I reached into the pocket of my slacks and pulled out my original brass union book, its leather cover worn soft as cloth, the metal corners rounded from forty winters in grease-soaked pockets.
"Every time an old shop mechanic dies without an immediate heir," I said, laying the small book flat beneath the green desk lamp, "his accrued maintenance credits revert to the depot welfare co-op. The city can’t reabsorb them, and the commercial banks won’t take them. They can only be liquidated if three living trustees sign an affidavit stating the funds are being used to keep a union brother from losing his roof."
Rourke picked up the book, turning the stiff linen pages with a heavy thumb.
His eyes moved across the signatures inked in purple indelible pencil across the bottom leaf: E. Henderson, Machine Shop 4; T. O’Bannon, High-Voltage Traction; F. Miller, Boiler Division.
"Henderson died in November," Rourke noted, his voice flat.
"O'Bannon is in a state veterans' home up in Castle Point with advanced Parkinson's."
"Tom O'Bannon can't hold a pen anymore," I said.
"I took the subway up to Dutchess County on Tuesday. His orderly held his wrist while he put his thumb in an inkpad and pressed it against the registry ledger. Vance thought he was pulling money off a helpless old man who couldn't remember what day of the week it was. He didn't know that every single note in that packet was personally recorded in the Supreme Court registrar's docket in Downtown Brooklyn at ten o'clock yesterday morning."
The desk telephone began to ring, a loud, two-tone bell that rattled the iron radiator pipe behind my head.
Rourke let it ring three full times before he lifted the heavy receiver.
"Rourke," he said.
He listened for forty seconds without shifting his stance.
His gray eyebrows drew down tight over the bridge of his nose, the skin around his jaw tightening until the muscle stood out like a knot of rope.
"Who authorized the transfer?"
Rourke demanded.
Another ten seconds of dead silence filled the small room, broken only by the faint hum of the fluorescent tube flickering overhead.
"No," Rourke said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, icy calm that brooklyn detectives used when a suspect thought he had found an exit.
"The prisoner stays in the holding tank at Jay Street. Do not move him to the seventy-eighth precinct until the county prosecutor’s investigator takes physical possession of the evidence log. I don't care if his delegate has an administrative order. Tell Inspector Cleary that if Vance steps out of that cell before eight o'clock, I will walk the intercept audio down to the federal courthouse on Cadman Plaza myself."
He slammed the black receiver back into its cradle with enough force to crack the Bakelite housing.
"They're already moving the levers," Rourke said, looking down at me.
"Vance’s delegate showed up at Jay Street five minutes after the patrol wagon backed into the sally port. He’s claiming Vance was conducting an off-book field audit under the transit authority's Special Operations directive. He says Vance had verbal orders from the precinct commander to test whether unauthorized personnel were brokering legacy transit script on the late trains."
"A field audit?"
I asked, my fingers tightening against the arms of the oak chair.
"Vance told me I’d leave the platform with broken ribs if I didn't hand over the envelope. He called it a safety tax. You heard it on tactical four."
"Tactical four is an internal frequency," Rourke answered grimly.
He walked to the battered filing cabinet in the corner, unlocked the third drawer with a brass key on his ring, and pulled out a stack of blue carbon transfer slips.
"If Cleary claims Vance was on an undercover procurement assignment, the precinct lawyer will argue the language was operational cover. They'll say Vance was using street intimidation tactics to keep you from blowing his cover to other loiterers on the concourse."
"And the marked serials?"
"They'll claim he was bringing the bills directly to the precinct safe for registry," Rourke said, slapping the blue slips down onto the oak desk between us.