The McBain Brief

by Ed McBain

  The girl said this was okay with her, she was as interested in doing as artistic a job as the rest of us, but it would help if she understood a lot of the words in the script, like sometimes Solly’s descriptions were very artistic but a little difficult to understand. We asked her to point out a specific instance in the script, and she said, “Well, like this one.”

  174 THE LOFT—INT—NIGHT

  The Girl is clad in leather straps.

  She does fellatio on The Cameraman.

  “I just don’t know what he means by ‘clad in leather straps,’” the girl said.

  “We’ll show you the costume when we get to it,” I said.

  “And also,” she said, “it would help if I could see some of the scenes we already shot, so that I could know what I was doing right or doing wrong.”

  “That’s very bad for an actress,” I said. “It only makes her self-conscious. Just take our word that you look beautiful and entirely convincing. I think I can say, in fact, that even in those scenes where Solly or I were handling the camera while Ben was working with you, even those scenes came out beautiful.”

  “Even the close-ups?”

  “The close-ups are particularly beautiful.”

  “Well, okay,” she said. “But this scene we’re supposed to shoot tonight, the one where I’m supposed to be between you and Solly?”

  “Between The Director and The Writer, you mean.”

  “Yeah, you and Solly,” she said. “I want you to know that I can’t even draw a straight line with my left hand. So I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this both together. I might get mixed up.”

  “Just do your best,” I said. “Believe me, you’re everything we hoped for. You’re making our dream come true.”

  “Well, thanks,” she said, and lowered her eyes. “And I want you fellows to know something, too. And that is that I think you really are trying hard here not to make a cheap or dirty picture. I think it’s marvellous the way you pay so much attention to detail and want to get things absolutely right. I really do hope we make lots of money on it, but that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that I got a chance to work with professional people who really care. That, to me, is very very important, and I just wanted to thank you.”

  And that was when Harry the dope stepped in and ruined the entire thing.

  He called me at Benjamin Brothers Apparel, and left a message that I was to return his call right away. When I got back off the road, it must have been three or four o’clock in the afternoon. I called him up, and he said he wanted to meet me for a drink before we began shooting that night. I thought for a minute that maybe Ben had forgotten to send him his twenty-five dollar check, and I asked Harry if that was the problem, but he said, “No, no, I got the check, it’s something else.” So I agreed to meet him at a bar near the loft, though to tell the truth I wasn’t too anxious to talk to him. We were supposed to shoot a very delicate scene that night in which The Director and The Girl experiment with a great many interesting and artistic approaches to exploring personalities through sexual experience, and I wanted to prepare myself for it by taking a little nap before I reported for work.

  Harry was already sitting at a table when I came in. I walked over, pulled out a chair and sat down. He stared at me for a long time, the dope.

  “I can guess what the problem is,” I said. “You’re wondering when you’ll be back in the movie again. Well, I’m happy to tell you it’s going along splendidly, and it’ll seem like no time at all till we shoot that big wedding scene.”

  I smiled at him. He was still staring at me.

  “That’s not what I want to talk about,” he said.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “There is no film in the camera,” he said.

  “What?”

  “There has never been any film in the camera.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Who told you that?”

  “I found out for myself.”

  “How did you find out?” I said. “And besides, it’s a lie.”

  “It’s not a lie,” Harry said. “Do you remember going out for hamburgers last night at two in the morning? Do you remember that?”

  “I remember it.”

  “I sneaked into the loft.”

  “You didn’t sneak into the loft. We locked the door behind us.”

  “I went up the fire escape and in through the window. There was no film in that camera.”

  “That’s because we were finished for the night. Ben had already unloaded.”

  “You were not finished for the night. You came back to the loft at precisely three-ten a.m.”

  “At which time Ben probably reloaded the camera.”

  “There was no film any place in the loft. I looked all over the loft. There was no film. None. Now I understand why Ben always went into the bathroom to reload. You are not shooting a movie there,” Harry said.

  “Of course we’re shooting a movie.”

  “You are paying a girl fifty dollars a week so that the three of you can indulge whatever bizarre sexual fantasies you have, sometimes seven and eight hours a night, every day of the week including Saturdays and Sundays.”

  “We are doing nothing of the sort.”

  “That’s just what you’re doing,” Harry said. “You are treating that girl like a common streetwalker, except that you’d have to pay a streetwalker more than you’re paying her. It’s obscene,” Harry said.

  “Harry,” I said, “don’t be a dope.”

  “I am not a dope,” he said, “I happen to be a very highly regarded insurance adjuster. And anyway, I wanted to see you today only to tell you it’s finished.”

  “What’s finished?”

  “The picture’s finished, the whole set-up is finished. I’ve already discussed it with her, and she’s quitting. In fact, she’s already quit.”

  “You’ve discussed it with the girl?”

  “I’ve been seeing her regularly. I’ve been seeing her every day. She told me what was going on, and that was when I got suspicious and decided to check up.”

  “Harry,” I said, “don’t be a dope. If that’s what you suspect . . . if what you suspect is that the three of us figured out a scheme to get a little sexual pleasure at a minimal weekly cost . . . if that’s what you suspect, which is a lie, we’ll be happy to cut you in on the deal, we’ll put you back in the picture starting tonight. I’ll ask Solly to rewrite the script so that there’s a great deal of action between The Girl and The Leading Man, we’ll do that right away, if that’s what you suspect, though of course it’s a lie.”

  “I love her,” Harry said.

  “You what?”

  “I love her. I’ve asked her to marry me.”

  “Harry,” I said, “that’s in the movie!”

  “It’s in real life, too,” he said. “She’s going to marry me, we’re leaving this city as soon as you and I are finished with our talk here. You just try to go anywhere near her, or telephone her, or anything, and I’ll call the police. I’m sure what you did here was illegal. You signed a contract with her, and also with me, and we’re supposed to get a percentage of the profits on this movie you were making without any goddamn film in the camera!”

  “Harry,” I said, “you can’t fault us for a small oversight like forgetting to put film in the camera.”

  He hit me in the nose then, and broke it.

  I will never forgive Harry. Never. I don’t mean about the nose because to tell the truth my nose was never such a prize to begin with, and besides, they taped it up nice, and the bones knitted, though a little crooked. I am talking about the way he ruined our dream. Solly tells me the best laid plans, and all that, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. And Ben has been going around town telling anybody who’ll listen that the idea was his to begin with, which it wasn’t, and anyway that’s not the point. The point is he’s killing any chance we might possibly have of finding ourselves another girl, and making her a star,
too, when if only he’d shut up . . .

  Ah, what the hell.

  That’s show biz.

  The Prisoner

  They were telling the same tired jokes in the squadroom when Randolph came in with his prisoner.

  Outside the grilled windows, October lay like a copper coin, and the sun struck only glancing blows at the pavement. The season had changed, but the jokes had not, and the climate inside the squadroom was one of stale cigarette smoke and male perspiration. For a tired moment, Randolph had the feeling that the room was suspended in time, unchanging, unmoving and that he would see the same faces and hear the same jokes until he was an old, old man.

  He had led the girl up the precinct steps, past the hanging green globes, past the desk in the entrance corridor, nodding perfunctorily at the desk sergeant. He had walked beneath the white sign with its black-lettered DETECTIVE DIVISION and its pointing hand, and then had climbed the steps to the second floor of the building, never once looking back at the girl, knowing that in her terror and uncertainty she was following him. When he reached the slatted rail divider, which separated the corridor from the detective squadroom, he heard Burroughs telling his old joke, and perhaps it was the joke which caused him to turn harshly to the girl.

  “Sit down,” he said. “On that bench!”

  The girl winced at the sound of his voice. She was a thin girl wearing a straight skirt and a faded green cardigan. Her hair was a bleached blonde, the roots growing in brown. She had wide blue eyes, and they served as the focal point of an otherwise uninteresting face. She had slashed lipstick across her mouth in a wide, garish red smear. She flinched when Randolph spoke, and then she backed away from him and went to sit on the wooden bench in the corridor, opposite the men’s room.

  Randolph glanced at her briefly, the way he would look at a bulletin board notice about the Policeman’s Ball. Then he pushed through the rail divider and walked directly to Burroughs’ desk.

  “Any calls?” he asked.

  “Oh, hi, Frank,” Burroughs said. “No calls. You’re interrupting a joke.”

  “I’m sure it’s hilarious.”

  “Well, I think it’s pretty funny,” Burroughs said defensively.

  “I thought it was pretty funny, too,” Randolph said, “for the first hundred times.”

  He stood over Burroughs’ desk, a tall man with close-cropped brown hair and lustreless brown eyes. His nose had been broken once in a street fight, and together with the hard, unyielding line of his mouth, it gave his face an over-all look of meanness. He knew he was intimidating Burroughs, but he didn’t much give a damn. He almost wished that Burroughs would really take offense and come out of the chair fighting. There was nothing he’d have liked better than to knock Burroughs on his ass.

  “You don’t like the jokes, you don’t have to listen,” Burroughs said, but his voice lacked conviction.

  “Thank you. I won’t.”

  From a typewriter at the next desk Dave Fields looked up. Fields was a big cop with shrewd blue eyes and a friendly smile. The smile belied the fact that he could be the toughest cop in the precinct when he wanted to.

  “What’s eating you, Frank?” he asked, smiling.

  “Nothing. What’s eating you?”

  Fields continued smiling. “You looking for a fight?” he asked.

  Randolph studied him. He had seen Fields in action, and he was not particularly anxious to provoke him. He wanted to smile back and say something like, “Ah, the hell with it. I’m just down in the dumps”—anything to let Fields know he had no real quarrel with him. But something else inside him took over, something that had not been a part of him long ago.

  He held Fields’ eyes with his own. “Any time you’re ready for one,” he said, and there was no smile on his mouth.

  “He’s got the crud,” Fields said. “Every month or so, the bulls in this precinct get the crud. It’s from dealing with criminal types.”

  He recognized Fields’ maneuver and was grateful for it. Fields was smoothing it over. Fields didn’t want trouble, and so he was joking his way out of it now, handling it as it should have been handled. But whereas he realized Fields was being the bigger of the two men, he was still immensely satisfied that he had not backed down. Yet his satisfaction rankled.

  “I’ll give you some advice,” Fields said. “You want some advice, Frank? Free?”

  “Go ahead,” Randolph said.

  “Don’t let it get you. The trouble with being a cop in a precinct like this one is that you begin to imagine everybody in the world is crooked. That just ain’t so.”

  “No, huh?”

  “Believe me, Frank, it ain’t.”

  “Thanks,” Randolph said. “I’ve been a cop in this precinct for eight years now. I don’t need advice on how to be a cop in this precinct.”

  “I’m not giving you that kind of advice. I’m telling you how to be a man when you leave this precinct.”

  For a moment, Randolph was silent. Then he said, “I haven’t had any complaints.”

  “Frank,” Fields said softly, “your best friends won’t tell you.”

  “Then they’re not my best . . .”

  “All right, get in there!” a voice in the corridor shouted.

  Randolph turned. He saw Boglio first, and then he saw the man with Boglio. The man was small and thin with a narrow moustache. He had brown eyes and lank brown hair, and he wet his moustache nervously with his tongue.

  “Over there!” Boglio shouted. “Against the wall!”

  “What’ve you got, Rudy?” Randolph asked.

  “I got a punk,” Boglio said. He turned to the man and bellowed, “You hear me? Get the hell over against that wall!”

  “What’d he do?” Fields asked.

  Boglio didn’t answer. He shoved out at the man, slamming him against the wall alongside the filing cabinets. “What’s your name?” he shouted.

  “Arthur,” the man said.

  “Arthur what?”

  “Arthur Semmers.”

  “You drunk, Semmers?”

  “No.”

  “Are you high?”

  “What?”

  “Are you on junk?”

  “What’s—I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Narcotics. Answer me, Semmers.”

  “Narcotics? Me? No, I ain’t never touched it, I swear.”

  “I’m gonna ask you some questions, Semmers,” Boglio said. “You want to get this, Frank?”

  “I’ve got a prisoner outside,” Randolph said.

  “The little girl on the bench?” Boglio asked. His eyes locked with Randolph’s for a moment. “That can wait. This is business.”

  “Okay,” Randolph said. He took a pad from his back pocket and sat in a straight-backed chair near where Semmers stood crouched against the wall.

  “Name’s Arthur Semmers,” Boglio said. “You got that, Frank?”

  “Spell it,” Randolph said.

  “S-E-M-M-E-R-S,” Semmers said.

  “How old are you, Semmers?” Boglio asked.

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Born in this country?”

  “Sure. Hey, what do you take me for, a greenhorn? Sure, I was born right here.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Eighteen-twelve South Fourth.”

  “You getting this, Frank?”

  “I’m getting it,” Randolph said.

  “All right, Semmers, tell me about it.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know why you cut up that kid.”

  “I didn’t cut up nobody.”

  “Semmers, let’s get something straight. You’re in a squad room now, you dig me? You ain’t out in the street where we play the game by your rules. This is my ball park, Semmers. You don’t play the game my way, and you’re gonna wind up with the bat rammed down your throat.”

  “I still didn’t cut up nobody.”

  “Okay, Semmers,” Boglio said. “Let’s start it this way
. Were you on Ashley Avenue, or weren’t you?”

  “Sure, I was. There’s a law against being on Ashley Avenue?”

  “Were you in an alleyway near number four sixty-seven Ashley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Semmers, there was a sixteen-year-old kid in that alleyway, too. He was stabbed four times, and we already took him to the hospital, and that kid’s liable to die. You know what homicide is, Semmers?”

  “That’s when somebody gets killed.”

  “You know what Homicide cops are like?”

  “No. What?”

  “You’d be laying on the floor almost dead by now if you was up at Homicide. Just thank God you’re here, Semmers, and don’t try my patience.”

  “I never seen no kid in the alley. I never cut up nobody.”

  Without warning, Boglio drew back his fist and smashed it into Semmers’ face. Semmers lurched back against the wall, bounced off it like a handball, and then clasped his shattered lip with his hand.

  “Why’d you—”

  “Shut up!” Boglio yelled.

  From where he sat, Randolph could see the blood spurting from Semmers’ mouth. Dispassionately, he watched.

  “Tell me about the kid,” Boglio said.

  “There ain’t nothing to—”

  Again, Boglio hit him, harder this time.

  “Tell me about the kid,” he repeated.

  “I—”

  The fist lashed out again. Randolph watched.

  “You going to need me any more?” he asked Boglio.

  “No,” Boglio said, drawing back his fist.

  From across the room, Fields said, “For Christ’s sake, lay off, Rudy. You want to kill the poor bastard?”

  “I don’t like punks,” Boglio said. He turned again to the bloody figure against the wall.

  Randolph rose, ripped the pages of notes from the black book, and put them on Boglio’s desk. He was going through the gate in the railing when Fields stopped him.