arms outward expansively. He was a short, boxlike man with a back slightly hunched, and wiry gray hair cropped close to the scalp. “Your typical street kid would never be content tossing a cinder block over the rooftop into the crowd below. A head is bashed. Brains splattered over the pavement. But so what? You never get to see it. Where’s the kicks in that?” Baum scratched his chin reflectively. “The kid from the barrio wants the body contact. He loves that part of it. Walking up to the designated victim. Skewering the fellow’s tripes with a switchblade. Seeing the blood spurt. Feeling the victim squirm under his hand as he twists the blade. Looking into the poor bugger’s eyes, seeing the panic there as life oozes out. That’s the real kicker for the newly pubescent, Mooney. The confrontation. The macho factor. Something to write home about. Standing up there face-to-face with the victim. Experiencing it all with him. Your fellow doesn’t want that. He wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. He’s got the same psychotic rage inside him as the barrio kid but he doesn’t have the stomach to bring himself off quite the same way. No, your man’s a secretive little rascal, Mooney. Furtive. Creeping. Outwardly inoffensive, law-abiding, but inwardly a ghoul.”
The detective was skeptical. He had his own impressions. They didn’t happen to coincide with Dr. Baum’s. From the start, Mooney had always seen his “bombardier” as some crazed, disaffected youth—undoubtedly black or Puerto Rican. Up to his ears in coke; spouting vague, half-baked theory about the social injustices of the past. Nickel-a-dozen slogans and show-business high jinks for the six o’clock news. That’s what Mooney had believed right from the start since it fit so comfortably with his own carefully cultivated theories of social history.
Now here was this police shrink attempting to explode all of that. What the hell did Baum know anyway—with his quaint laboratory criminology that bore no relation to the hard truths of the street? What kind of a shrink worth his salt would be working for the goddamned city anyway? A fucking civil servant sawbones.
“What about motives?” Mooney jeered. “Have you thought about motives?”
“What about them?”
“I mean the fact that there aren’t any. Any old victim’ll do in a pinch. To me that spells kid. K-I-D .”
Baum appeared surprised at the detective’s vehemence. He shook his head and sighed. “This is 1980, Mooney. Motives are passé. Even for the over-forty crowd, motives are Victorian. Really chic contemporary crime doesn’t require anything as fusty and downright inhibiting as an excuse to murder. The really exciting thing is to play it as it lays. Let it just happen. Cool. Laid back. Someone stands in front of you on a subway platform. The train hurtles into the station. All you do is push. A man pulls up to a red light. You stroll over to the car as if to ask him a question. He rolls down his window. You put a .320-magnum to his head and POOF . Or you stand up on a rooftop under the stars with a forty-pound cinder block. Then just let it drop down, slip from your fingers into the crowd below. Roulette. Round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. No regrets.” Baum’s chubby little hands rummaged the litter of his desk for a tobacco pouch. “It’s all part of the New Man construct,” he continued enthusiastically. “Go to the movies. See a ball game. Bash someone’s skull with a cinder block. It’s all recreation. There are no motives because there are no real actions. It’s just storybook. Purely imitative. Acting. Everyone is acting some cheap serial melodrama of bloodshed and retribution.”
Baum glanced sharply at Mooney, then smirked. “You look a little puzzled, Francis. Why? What’s troubling you? This is not exactly the way you see things, ay? You want it all neat and convenient with motives, the way it was a hundred years ago when you grew up.
The detective was skeptical. He had his own impressions. They didn’t happen to coincide with Dr. Baum’s. From the start, Mooney had always seen his “bombardier” as some crazed, disaffected youth—undoubtedly black or Puerto Rican. Up to his ears in coke; spouting vague, half-baked theory about the social injustices of the past. Nickel-a-dozen slogans and show-business high jinks for the six o’clock news. That’s what Mooney had believed right from the start since it fit so comfortably with his own carefully cultivated theories of social history.
Now here was this police shrink attempting to explode all of that. What the hell did Baum know anyway—with his quaint laboratory criminology that bore no relation to the hard truths of the street? What kind of a shrink worth his salt would be working for the goddamned city anyway? A fucking civil servant sawbones.
“What about motives?” Mooney jeered. “Have you thought about motives?”
“What about them?”
“I mean the fact that there aren’t any. Any old victim’ll do in a pinch. To me that spells kid. K-I-D .”
Baum appeared surprised at the detective’s vehemence. He shook his head and sighed. “This is 1980, Mooney. Motives are passé. Even for the over-forty crowd, motives are Victorian. Really chic contemporary crime doesn’t require anything as fusty and downright inhibiting as an excuse to murder. The really exciting thing is to play it as it lays. Let it just happen. Cool. Laid back. Someone stands in front of you on a subway platform. The train hurtles into the station. All you do is push. A man pulls up to a red light. You stroll over to the car as if to ask him a question. He rolls down his window. You put a .320-magnum to his head and POOF . Or you stand up on a rooftop under the stars with a forty-pound cinder block. Then just let it drop down, slip from your fingers into the crowd below. Roulette. Round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. No regrets.” Baum’s chubby little hands rummaged the litter of his desk for a tobacco pouch. “It’s all part of the New Man construct,” he continued enthusiastically. “Go to the movies. See a ball game. Bash someone’s skull with a cinder block. It’s all recreation. There are no motives because there are no real actions. It’s just storybook. Purely imitative. Acting. Everyone is acting some cheap serial melodrama of bloodshed and retribution.”
Baum glanced sharply at Mooney, then smirked. “You look a little puzzled, Francis. Why? What’s troubling you? This is not exactly the way you see things, ay? You want it all neat and convenient with motives, the way it was a hundred years ago when you grew up.
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