by Ed McBain
“A kidnapping!” Parker said. “Of a goddamn rock star! It’s been all over television. Don’t you watch television? They been playing the tape every ten minutes. It’s getting more plays than the attack on the World Trade Center.”
“I saw it, I saw it,” Ollie said. “Ah,” he said and spread his hands wide in greeting. The waiter had just arrived with their appetizers.
“What happened,” Parker said, helping himself to the puffed shrimp, “was this roving reporter from Channel Four was there to tape this girl doing a song from her album…you want some of these?”
“Thanks,” Ollie said. He was shoveling chicken fingers and dumplings onto his plate.
“And what should happen but these two black dudes…”
“Big surprise,” Ollie said.
“…come marching in and grab the girl. It’s the biggest thing hit this city since that fuckin councilman got shot. And like a jerk I handed it to Carella on a silver platter.”
“Well, you couldn’ta known,” Ollie said. “The Harbor Patrol, it coulda been a jumper.”
“Exactly what I thought.”
“Sure, the Harbor Patrol. What else could it be?”
“Or some kinda boating accident.”
“Right, a boating accident.”
Now that food was on the table, he was even less interested in Parker’s rape or kidnapping or whatever it was. When food was on the table, Ollie was hardly ever interested in anything else. Which was why it still surprised him that he’d been so interested in Patricia Gomez this past Saturday night when, after all, food had been on the table then, too. By coincidence, he supposed, Parker chose that moment to ask, “What’d you do this weekend?”
“How do you like this food, huh?” Ollie said, gnawing on a spare rib. “Is it something, or what?”
“Terrific,” Parker said. “So what’d you do this weekend?”
“I went out Saturday night.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Billy Barnacles.”
“No kidding?” Parker said. “They got a band there, don’t they?”
“Yeah, the River Rats.”
“So what’d you do, you went there with a girl?”
“No, I went out dancin all by myself,” Ollie said.
“Hey, that’s right!” Parker said, pointing a spare rib at him. “That little spic uniform up your precinct!”
He was referring to Patricia Gomez, Ollie figured.
“That was Saturday night, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure, I remember you telling me,” Parker said, and looked sternly across the table at him. “You went out with her after all, huh? Even though I warned you.”
“Yeah, I went out with her.”
“I lived with a Spanish girl for six months,” Parker said. “In the end, she cut off my dick for a nickel and sold it to a cuchi frito joint.”
“I guess you mean that figuratively,” Ollie said, using a literary term he didn’t expect Parker to understand.
“I mean it however you wish to take it,” Parker said, sounding offended. “You want to go out with Spanish girls, then you better go hide your cojones in the olive jar.”
“Anyway, Patricia ain’t Spanish, she’s Puerto Rican.”
“What do you think I’m talking about? What are Puerto Ricans if not Spanish? Where do you think the term ‘Hispanic’ comes from, if not Spanish? This girl I lived with, her name was Catalina Herrera, they called her Cathy, all her spic friends. They all sound so fuckin American nowadays, you sometimes forget they came from some shack on the side of a hill in Mayagüez. I met her when we were chasing the Graffiti Killer, you remember that case? Man, he was up to all kinds of mischief, killed four fuckin people before we got him. Her son was the first victim, a bona fide wall-writer. Cathy was divorced from some guy went back to live in Santo Domingo. Anyway, to make a long story short, one thing led to another, and this and that, and eventually we started living together.”
“So what happened?” Ollie asked. “Do you wear a prosthesis now?”
Parker didn’t know what a prosthesis was. He didn’t laugh. Ollie was laughing at his own joke, though.
“What’s so fuckin funny?” Parker asked. “What happened was we had this big drug bust set up for a Tuesday night, and I happened to mention this to Cathy while we were in bed the night before, little pillow talk, you know? She listened very carefully, they have this way of listening, Spanish girls, but who suspects anything, am I right? I mean, we’re living together, we’re like man and wife. Okay, Tuesday night rolls around, we put on the vests, we break out the assault rifles, we’re six guys strong who go out to raid this posse run by a guy we know only as El Zorro Canoso, which means ‘The Gray Fox’ in case your girlfriend ain’t teaching you too much Spanish these days…”
“She ain’t my girlfriend,” Ollie said. “We only went out once togeth…”
“El Zorro Canoso. Twenty-four years old, he’s got a full head of gray hair already, probably because he’s worried about being sent upstate for a long time. But guess what? Nobody’s home. We go in with a warrant, but nobody’s there. The place is empty. El Zorro Canoso has flown El Coopo. Next thing I know, Cathy comes around wearing a silk Fuck-Me dress she bought at Juno’s on Jeff Av, and these high-heeled whore shoes that are all straps, I ask her did somebody die and leave her a fortune? She tells me she hit the numbers, which was bullshit because I knew she never played the numbers. What it turns out…”
“She ratted out your bust,” Ollie said.
“How’d you guess? The morning after I told her about it, Tuesday morning this is, the day of the bust this is, she runs to her former husband’s cousin, whose name happens to be Bernardo Herrera, who is guess who?”
“Zorro.”
“Bingo, you shoulda been a detective. Her ex-hubby’s fuckin cousin is El Zorro Canoso, who runs the posse we’re about to bust! He thanks her for being such a good relative, and then he lays five bills on her, which is what I meant when I said she’ll cut off your dick for a nickel and sell it to a cuchi frito joint.”
“Well, Patricia didn’t cut off my dick,” Ollie said. “For a nickel or however much. In fact, she doesn’t even like cuchi frito.”
“You’re missing my point, friend. And what’s this on the platter here? It looks like somebody cut off the chef’s dick.”
“That’s the Szechuan beef.”
“It looks like it.”
The men were silent for several moments, eating.
“So did you get in?” Parker asked.
“Come on, what kind of talk is that?”
“I’m curious,” Parker said, and lowered his voice, and leaned across the table, and said, “Well, didja?”
“Come on, Andy,” Ollie said, and sort of jerked his head over his shoulder and slitted his eyes at the booth behind him.
“Nobody can hear us,” Parker said.
“We better hurry here,” Ollie said. “The judge said one-thirty, didn’t he?”
Parker looked at him.
“What?” Ollie said.
Parker kept looking at him.
“Nothing,” he said at last, and went back to his lunch.
FOR THE FIRST TIME in fifteen years, Carella wanted to smoke a cigarette.
Anything but sitting here on his hands.
The four men who’d been sent to find Rosalita Guadajillo were back.
“Lady’s clean as a whistle,” Forbes reported. “She runs a little jewelry boutique on Mason Avenue, up there in La Perlita, sells mostly cheap crap from third-world countries. She went to call her kids last night around ten-thirty, fished in her handbag, no cell phone. Somebody stole it.”
“Our man,” Corcoran said, nodding.
“Smart,” Endicott said.
“He knew we’d be tracing the call…”
“Even if he made it from a mobile…”
“So he made it from somebody else’s phone…”
“Which is now undoubtedly at the bot
tom of the river,” Endicott concluded.
“Which means all your equipment here is worthless,” Loomis said, waving his hand at the gear they’d set up all over the room.
“Not entirely,” Endicott said. “When he calls again…”
“If he calls again,” Loomis said.
“Oh, he’ll call,” Corcoran said. “The name of the game is money. Until he gets his money, he’ll keep calling.”
“And when he calls, we’ll be taping it,” Endicott said. “Voice prints are admissible evidence. We take this guy to trial…”
“I don’t care about taking him to trial,” Loomis said. “I already told you that. All I want is Tamar back.”
“Oh, we’ll get her back, all right,” Corcoran assured him.
“I don’t want her endangered in any way. I want to give them the money, get her back, and that’s that.”
“Or vice versa,” Endicott said.
Loomis looked at him.
“Sometimes it’s better to get the victim back first,” Endicott explained.
“Or simultaneously,” Corcoran said.
“Or at least get proof of life,” Endicott said.
“Proof that she’s still alive,” Corcoran explained. “An ear, or a finger, or…”
Barney Loomis went suddenly pale.
Carella wondered what the hell he was doing here.
YEARS AGO in the police department, long before he’d joined the force, a commonly accepted axiom was that if you weren’t Irish, you’d never “cop the gold.” In this case, “cop” wasn’t an abbreviation of “copper,” which might have made for some nice metallurgical imagery. Instead, “cop” meant to achieve or to obtain, or more specifically to be promoted from a uniformed officer to a detective carrying a gold shield. In this city, so rare was the occurrence of anyone not Irish copping the gold, that whenever it did happen to an outsider, the surprised recipient (regardless of his religious beliefs) was automatically asked “Who’s your rabbi?”
Eventually, as more and more police officers of non-Irish descent began making detective, “Who’s your rabbi?” became a standard joke. Indeed, over the syears, the dogma gradually changed to read, “If you ain’t Irish, you’ll never make captain,” but even that bromide fell into disuse when two black police commissioners were appointed in succession.
Now, in this room full of WASPs—or such was Carella’s perception even though Corcoran was Irish-Catholic and Feingold was Jewish and Jones was black—he suddenly felt like a little Wop mutt who had no right pissing with the big pedigreed dogs.
Detective Lieutenant Charles Farley Corcoran and Detective/ Second Grade Stephen Louis Carella had been graduated from the Academy on the very same day. Corcoran had been assigned to the Thirtieth, a silk-stocking precinct. Carella had begun walking a beat in the Eight-Seven, a precinct uptown in the asshole of creation.
His first day on the job, uniform all spanking new, shoes polished to a high luster, silver shield shining on his chest, thirty-eight S&W—the mandated weapon back then—hanging in a holster on his right hip, a woman came running out of a building wearing only panties and a bra and screaming at the top of her lungs, he figured somebody was about to rape her. Two minutes later, a guy in his undershorts and a tank top undershirt came running out after her, also yelling bloody murder, which now seemed to be what this was about to turn into. Because right behind him was a second woman, fully dressed this time, and carrying in her hands what later turned out to be an ax she’d taken from the fire-alarm box on the third floor of the building. The second woman was yelling “Bums!” as she came running down the steps of the front stoop, “Bums! Bums!” It took Carella, bright rookie that he was, maybe thirty seconds to realize she was referring to the half-naked man and woman who’d preceded her out of the building, and another thirty seconds to calculate that the lady with the ax had caught them in bed together.
Stepping into her path, holding up his hand like a traffic cop, which frankly he wished he was in that moment, he said, “All right, lady, let’s hold it right there.”
The only thing the lady was holding right there was the ax.
Wild-eyed, she shoved past Carella…
Actually shoved past him, pushing him out of her way as if he were some sort of inanimate obstacle keeping her from exacting justice upon the two barefoot bums in their skivvies, who were now running around the corner, out of sight.
While Carella recovered his balance, he tried to remember the rules and regulations that governed when it was permissible for him to draw his gun and fire it. He was certain that assaulting a police officer qualified. He was also certain that carrying a dangerous weapon was another good reason to bring the piece into play. In fact, back then there weren’t too many restrictions on when a cop could unholster and/or discharge his weapon. But however justified he may have felt, he was pretty positive he wouldn’t get any medals for shooting a fat lady in the back—her back was to him now as she ran for the corner. So he yelled into the suddenly sweaty summertime air, “Police! Stop or I’ll shoot!,” drawing his gun, and hoping against hope that he wouldn’t have to shoot anybody his first day on the job.
The woman didn’t stop, but neither did he have to shoot her because in that moment she ran around the corner, and by the time he himself reached the corner, and turned it out of breath, all three of them were gone, the two adulterers—if that’s what they were—in their scanties, and the fat lady with the ax. A disappearing act! Carella still had his gun in his hand. He felt like a jackass.
“Where’d they go?” he asked a kid on a bicycle.
“Where’d who go?” the kid asked.
Totally vanished.
He went back to the building, where a sizable crowd had gathered, and began asking questions the way he guessed he was supposed to, but all he could learn from anybody was that the woman probably thought there was a fire, which is why she was using an ax to help those people in their underwear get out of the building.
He learned something that first day on the job.
In this precinct, nobody knew anything.
In this precinct, the cop on the beat was the enemy.
When he got home that night and told his mother what had happened his first day on the job, they both had a good laugh over it. The next day, things weren’t quite as funny.
The next day a patrolman hoping to cash his paycheck at a bank not too far from…
The telephone rang.
It was precisely three o’clock.
ENDICOTT signaled for Loomis to pick up.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Loomis?”
“Yes?”
“Have you got the money?”
“Yes,” Loomis said.
“Hundred-dollar bills? Unmarked?”
“Yes.”
“They’d better be. What kind of car do you drive?”
“What?”
“What kind of…?”
“The company provides a car and driver. It’s a Lincoln Town…”
“Can you drive it yourself?”
“Yes?”
“Is there a phone in it?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know the number?”
“Not offhand. I can get it for you.”
“Get it. I’ll call back in five minutes.”
“Wait!” Loomis shouted.
But he was already gone.
“Cell phone again,” one of the agents manning the computers said. “Sprint. They’re checking the number now.”
“One tower got him, and out,” another agent said.
“Someplace in Calm’s Point.”
“He knows what he’s doing.”
“Here’s the number now,” the first agent said, and went to the printer. Reading from the sheet of paper as it reeled out, he said, “Randall Carter, Jr. 421 Pastoral Way…over the river in the next state!” he said, sounding surprised.
“Another stolen phone,” Endicott said.
“Probably has a dozen of t
hem.”
“He’ll use a different one each time he calls, wait and see,” Corcoran said, nodding sagely.
Everyone else nodded, too.
THE PHONE rang some six minutes later.
Endicott nodded.
Loomis picked up.
“Hello?”
“Have you got that number?”
“Yes.”
“Give it to me. Read it slowly.”
Loomis read the number to him.
“Is this it?” the caller asked, and read the number back to him.
“Yes, that’s it exactly.”
“First tower’s on him.”
“Okay, this is what I want you to do. You say you’ve got the money?”
“Yes.”
“Are there any policemen there with you?”
Loomis didn’t know what to answer. He looked first at Endicott and then at Forbes. Both men shook their heads.
“No,” Loomis said.
“You’re lying, but that’s okay. I want you to put the money in a dispatch case, have you got that?”
“Yes,” Loomis said.
“Then pick one of the detectives sitting there with you…”
“There are no detectives here with me,” Loomis said.
“Of course not. Find one, anyway, do you think you can manage that, Mr. Loomis?”
Little bit of bitchy sarcasm there.
Loomis ignored it.
“Yes, I think I can find a detective,” he said.
“Well, good. When you find one, I want you to give him the case with the money in it. For safekeeping. To make sure no bad guys try to grab it before it’s in our hands. Have you got that?”
“Yes?”
Loomis was looking puzzled now. So were all the people on The Squad. Usually, they told you not to inform the police or the vic would die. Either these guys were complete amateurs or they’d done this a hundred times before and had come up with a new wrinkle. Not having access to the ear phones, Carella was puzzled, too, but only because he didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Second tower’s on him. He’s in a moving vehicle.”
“At three-thirty sharp…that should give you enough time to find a dispatch case and a cop, shouldn’t it, Mr. Loomis?”
More sarcasm.