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from Central were back at Sixth
District before they noticed somebody was missing. They'd suspended
Calamity for thirty days without pay and then assigned him to the
radio room until his hip mended. When he could walk without a cane
they stuck him in AID, where he spent his time sorting out how some
kid got drunk and drowned trying to drive his car across a city
reservoir.
    It was a shameful misuse of talent, and the partner
they'd given him, Chuck Arbuckle, was simply a mistake in conception.
Eisenhower wondered sometimes how a sperm could swim all that way
knowing that's what he was going to turn into. They were taking the
body from Holy Redeemer to the medical examiner's office at
Thirty-fourth and Civic Center, and Arbuckle was going over it again.
    "It must of been the ape," he said, meaning
Peets. "He probably never tied that thing up like it was
supposed to. The kid comes walking through, thinking of all the money
he's making, the thing moves and splat. We got to spend half the
fuckin' day cleaning up the mess." Chuck Arbuckle did not like
anybody under forty making more money than he did. He hated any
doctor without gray hair.
    Eisenhower looked across the van at him. Arbuckle
said, "I ain't saying it was his own fault, but you work around
sloppy fuckers, you got to take it into consideration. You got to be
aware of where trouble is coming from. Anything you do, the first
rule is know where the problem is going to come from."
    Arbuckle was thirty-live years old. He'd investigated
ninety-four fatal accidents in the last eighteen months, at great
personal inconvenience. He got his name in the Daily
Times once every two weeks. Eisenhower had
been given Arbuckle in February, and in that time he'd noticed that
Arbuckle never came away from a fatal accident without finding a
lesson in it. It was Arbuckle's order of things that people deserved
what they got, and his job was to figure out why, after they got it.
    Arbuckle thought that protected him.
    Of course, if he wasn't the way he was, Eisenhower
thought, he'd of seen the foreman was lying. A fifteen-year-old kid
would have seen that. In Eisenhower's experience, when everybody lied
it was usually best to leave it alone. Shit, it's how religions got
started. You could tell good people from the lies they told, and he'd
liked Peets right away.
    Arbuckle turned left off Market Street and went into
the University of Pennsylvania area, then around to the back of the
M.E.'s building where they accepted deliveries. A kid in hospital
clothes was waiting at the door, smoking a cigarette. Arbuckle backed
the van up and got out. The body was zipped into a plastic bag, and
the kid unzipped it while Arbuckle read to him from the hospital's
certificate of death. "Male Caucasian, twenty-four years old,
massive cerebral hemorrhaging . . ."
    When he'd finished that, Arbuckle told him what
happened. "The kid was walking by this crane and it came loose
or something, and hit him in the back of the head."
    The kid said, "Yeah, well all I do is accept the
body."
    Arbuckle shrugged. "It don't matter to me, pal.
Sometimes they like to know." Another kid in hospital clothes
came out of the building, and he and the first kid put Leon Hubbard's
body on a stretcher and wheeled him inside. The doors opened on
weight, like at the Acme.
    Arbuckle drove the van back to Center City over the
Walnut Street Bridge and stopped at a phone booth outside Cavanaugh's
Bar. "You got that woman's phone number?" he said.
    Eisenhower looked through the papers until he found
the number Peets had given them for the kid's parents. "I
thought somebody there was going to take care of it," he said.
    Arbuckle shook his head. "Naw, I said we'd do
it." He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to two. "This
won't take a second," he said. Eisenhower sat in the van and
listened. "Mrs. Hubbard? . . . Oh, I see, but you are the mother
of Leon Hubbard, who worked on the construction crew at Holy
Redeemer? . . . No, he's not exactly