Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 by Cops (and) Robbers (missing pg 22-23) (v1.1)

           “Right,”
Joe said. “And a
buyer. Some rich person with a lot of cash.”
                 They
were about to enter the tunnel. “Rich people,” Tom said. He was thinking very
hard. They both were.

           Joe
     
     
     
                 There
were camera crews from two of the television news programs that showed up to cover
it. The way we handled that, Paul and I were the first
car that reacnea tne scene after the call came in, so Paul got interviewed by
the one crew and I got interviewed by the other.
                 I
wasn’t nervous at all. I’d never been interviewed personally on television
before, but of course I’d watched the news sometimes when other guys did it, at
the scene of an explosion or a big water-main break or something like that.
Three times I’d seen guys I actually knew in real life being interviewed. Also,
sometimes while taking a shower I’d run a fantasy kind of interview in my head,
the questions and the answers and all, and how I’d hold my face. So you might
say I was pretty well rehearsed.
                 The
way they set things up for the interview, they put the camera so it was facing
the building, so the building would show behind me and the interviewer while we
were doing our thing. It was one of those huge office buildings being
constructed there, and the hardhats kept steady working away at it all through
the interview. One of their number had got himself
killed, but that had only held their interest for maybe five minutes. Where
money is concerned, you keep your mind on the job, you get it done.
                 These
buildings are going up all over town, big glass and stone boxes full of office
space. Practically none of them have apartments in them, because who wants to
live in Manhattan ? Manhattan is a place you work in, that’s all.
                 The
buildings have been going up ever since the end of the Second World War. Good
times, bad times, boom, recession, it doesn’t matter, they just keep going up.
For the last ten years or so, most of them have been on the east side of
midtown, Third Avenue and Lexington Avenue , around there. The first thing you know,
they’ll give Third Avenue a classier name, the way they did with Fourth Avenue
when the big office buildings went up on it and it was turned into Park Avenue
South.
                 Anyway,
that’s the section where most of the new buildings are concentrated, but
there’s others going up all over the place. The World Trade Center way downtown* Sixth Avenue across from Rockefeller Center . And a couple up in my precinct, including
this one where they’d just had the death and where I was going to get myself
interviewed.
                 A
guy I was talking to in a bar a couple of years ago said it was his opinion
that the main characteristic of New York is that it’s going through all the phases
of the phoenix at once. You remember reading about the phoenix in high school?
That’s what he said New York was; but all at once. New York is living, and it’s on fire, and it’s
dying, and it’s ashes, and it’s being reborn, all at
the same time and all the time. And boy, those buildings look it, coming up out
of brick rubble where yesterday’s buildings were knocked down, coming up new and
clean and pretty, and every once in a while killing somebody along the way.
                 The
interviewer was a light-colored spade, with a moustache. You could see he
thought he was the hottest thing in Bigtown. He and the director and the sound
man and a couple other people fussed around a while, getting everything set,
and then they started the interview. Somebody had written a little lead-in
paragraph for the interviewer to say, and he had it on a clipboard he held in
his other hand. The hand without the microphone, I mean. He had it on the
clipboard, but he’d memorized it, because once he started talking