The McBain Brief

by Ed McBain

  “How does it feel?” Fields asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Being an accomplice.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Randolph said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You beginning to think the way Boglio does? About punks, I mean?”

  “My thoughts are my business, Dave,” Randolph said. “Keep out of them.”

  “Boglio’s thoughts are his business, too.”

  “He’s questioning a punk who knifed somebody. What the hell do you want him to do?”

  “He’s questioning a human being who maybe did and maybe didn’t knife somebody.”

  “What’s the matter, Dave? You in love with this precinct?”

  “I think it stinks,” Fields said. “I think it’s a big, stinking prison.”

  “All right. So do I.”

  “But for Christ’s sake, Frank, learn who the prisoners are! Don’t become—”

  “I can take care of myself,” Randolph said.

  Fields sighed. “What are your plans for the little girl outside?”

  “She’s trash,” Randolph said.

  “So?”

  “So what do you want? Go back to the D.D. report you were typing, Dave. I’ll handle my own prisoners.”

  “Sure,” Fields said, and turned and walked to his desk.

  Randolph watched his retreating back. Casually, he lighted a cigarette and then walked out into the corridor. The girl looked up as he approached. Her eyes looked very blue in the dimness of the corridor. Very blue and very frightened.

  “What’s your name?” Randolph asked.

  “Betty,” the girl said.

  “You’re in trouble, Betty,” Randolph said flatly.

  “I . . . I know.”

  “How old are you, Betty?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “You look younger.”

  The girl hesitated. “That’s . . . that’s because I’m so skinny,” she said.

  “You’re not that skinny,” Randolph said harshly. “Don’t play the poor little slum kid with me.”

  “I wasn’t playing anything,” Betty said. “I am skinny. I know I am. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Her voice was very soft, the voice of a young girl, a frightened young girl. He looked at her, and he told himself, She’s a tramp, and his mind clicked shut like a trap.

  “Lots of girls are skinny,” Betty said. “I know lots of girls who—”

  “Let’s lay off the skinny routine,” Randolph said drily. “We already made that point.” He paused. “You’re twenty-four, huh?”

  “Yes.” She nodded and a quiet smile formed on her painted mouth. “How old are you?”

  “I’m thirty-two,” Randolph said before he could catch himself, and then he dropped his cigarette angrily to the floor and stepped on it. “You mind if I ask the questions?”

  “I was only curious. You seem . . . never mind.”

  “What do I seem?”

  “Nothing.”

  “All right, let’s get down to business. How long have you been a hooker?”

  The girl looked at him blankly. “What?”

  “Don’t you hear good?”

  “Yes, but what does hooker mean?”

  Randolph sighed heavily. “Honey,” he said, “the sooner we drop the wide-eyed innocence, the better off we’ll both be.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “A hooker is a prostitute!” Randolph said, his voice rising. “Now come off it!”

  “Oh,” the girl said.

  “Oh,” Randolph repeated sarcastically. “Now how long?”

  “This . . . this was my first time.”

  “Sure.”

  “Really,” she said eagerly. “I’d . . . I’d never gone out looking for . . . for men before. This was my first time.”

  “And you picked me, huh?” Randolph asked, unbelievingly. “Well, honey, you picked the wrong man for your first one.”

  “I didn’t know you were a cop.”

  “Now you know.”

  “Yes. Now I know.”

  “And you also know you’re in pretty big trouble.”

  “Yes,” the girl said.

  “Good,” Randolph answered, grinning.

  Actually, the girl wasn’t in as much trouble as she imagined herself to be—and Randolph knew it. She had indeed stopped him on the street and asked, “Want some fun, mister?” and Randolph had immediately put the collar on her. But in the city for which Randolph worked, it would have been next to impossible to make a prostitution charge stick. Randolph conceivably had a Dis Cond case, but disorderly conduct was a dime-a-dozen misdemeanor and was hardly worth bothering with in a precinct where felonies ran wild. So Randolph knew all this, and he had known it when he collared the girl, and he sat now with a grin on his face and watched her, pleased by her troubled expression, pleased with the way her hands fluttered aimlessly in her lap.

  “You can get out of it,” he said softly.

  “How?” the girl asked eagerly.

  His voice dropped to a whisper. “If you know the right cop,” he said.

  The girl stared at him blankly for a moment. “I haven’t any money,” she said at last. “I . . . I wouldn’t have done this if I had money.”

  “There are other ways,” Randolph said.

  “Oh.” She stared at him and then nodded slightly. “I see.”

  “Well?”

  “Yes,” she said, still nodding. “All right. Whatever you say.”

  “Let’s go,” Randolph said.

  He walked briskly to the railing and leaned on it. To no one in particular, he said, “I’ll be back in an hour or so.” Before he turned, he noticed the curiously sour expression on Dave Fields’ face. Briskly, he walked to the girl. “Come on,” he said.

  They went down the steps to the ground floor. At the desk, a patrolman was booking a seventeen-year-old kid who was bleeding from a large cut behind his ear. The blood had trailed down his neck and stained his tee-shirt a bright red. The girl gasped when she saw the boy, and then turned quickly away, heading for the steps.

  “If he’s the one they’re booking,” Randolph said, “I hate to think what the other guy must look like.”

  The girl didn’t answer. She began walking quickly, and Randolph fell in beside her. “Where to?” he asked.

  “My place,” she said. An undisguised coldness had crept into her voice.

  “Don’t take this so big,” he said. “It’s part of a working day.”

  “I didn’t know that,” the girl said.

  “Well, now you do.”

  They walked in silence. Around them, the concrete fingers of the city poked at the October sky. The fingers were black with the soot of decades, grimy fingers covered with waste and not with the honest dirt of labor. The streets crawled with humanity. Old men and young men, kids playing stickball, kids chalking up the sidewalks, women with shopping bags, the honest citizens of the precinct—and the others. In the ten minutes it took them to walk from the precinct to the girl’s apartment, Randolph saw fourteen junkies in the streets. Some of those junkies would be mugging before the day ended. Some would be shoplifting and committing burglaries. All would be blind by nightfall.

  He saw the bright green and yellow silk jackets of a teenage gang known as “The Marauders,” and he knew that the appearance of a blue and gold jacket in their territory would bring on a street bop and broken ribs and bloody heads.

  He saw the hookers and the pimps and the sneak thieves and the muggers and the ex-cons and the kids holding J. D. cards and the drunks and the fences and the peddlers of hot goods—he saw them all, and they surrounded him with a feeling of filth, a feeling he wanted desperately to search out and crush because somewhere in the filth he had lost himself.

  Somewhere, long ago, a young patrolman had cracked a liquor store holdup, and the patrolman had been promoted to Detective/Third Grade, and the patrolman’s name
was Frank Randolph. And somewhere back there, the patrolman Frank Randolph had ceased to exist, and the detective Frank Randolph had inhabited the shell of his body. The eyes had turned hard, and the fists had turned quick, and the step had turned cautious because there was danger in these streets, and the danger awakened every animal instinct within a man, reduced him to a beast stalking blood in the narrow, dark passages of the jungle. There was hatred within the muscular body of Frank Randolph, a hatred bred of dealing with tigers, a hatred which excluded the timid antelopes who also lived in the forest. And so he walked with a young, thin girl, walked toward her apartment where he would use his shield as a wedge to enter her bed and her body. He had begun using his shield a long time ago. He was as much an addict to his shield as the junkies in the streets were addicts to the white god.

  The tenement stood in a row of somber-faced buildings, buildings that solemnly mourned the loss of their latter-day splendor. The fire escapes fronting each building were hung with the trappings of life: blankets, potted plants, pillows, empty beer cans, ash trays, guitars. Autumn had come late this year, lingering over the slow death of a hot summer, and the cliff dwellers had taken to their slum terraces, the iron-barred rectangles that gave them a piece of sky and a breath of air.

  “This is it,” she said.

  He followed her up the stoop. A woman was sitting on the steps, knitting. She glanced up at him as he passed, sensing immediately, with the instinct of self-preservation, that he was a cop. He could almost feel her shrinking away from him, and his own instinct asked the question, “What’s she done to be afraid of?”

  Garbage cans were stacked in the hallway. The refuse had been collected earlier that day, but the cans were never washed and they filled the air with the stink of waste. There was a naked light bulb hanging in the entrance foyer, but it would not be turned on until dusk.

  The girl climbed the steps ahead of him. He walked behind her; her legs were remarkably good for a girl so thin. They climbed steadily. There were voices behind the doors. He heard the voices in the medley of sound, and he reflected on the doors he had broken, a quick flatfooted kick against the lock to spring it, since he’d been a detective. Rarely had he knocked on a door. Rarely had he given the occupant a chance to unlatch it. The kick was quicker, and it precluded the possibility of a door being opened to reveal a hostile gun inside.

  “It’s on the third floor,” the girl said.

  “All right,” he answered, and he kept following her, watching her legs.

  “Be careful, there’s a broken bottle.”

  He skirted the shards of brown glass, smelling the whiskey fumes as he passed the alcohol-soaked wood. The girl stopped at a door at the end of the hall. She unlocked it and waited for him to enter. When they were both inside, she put the police lock in place, leaning the heavy, unbending steel bar against the door, hooking it securely into the steel plate embedded in the floor, so that it formed a formidable triangle against which entrance was impossible.

  The kitchen was small but clean. A round table sat in the center of the room, and a bowl was on the table. A single apple rested in the bowl. The girl went to the window and lifted the shade. Light, but not sunlight, entered the room. It was a pale light that bounced from the brick walls of the tenement not four feet away, leaping the airshaft between the buildings. The girl turned.

  “I . . . I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “No?” he said, and there was a trace of sarcasm in his voice.

  “No. Could . . . could we talk a little?”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. Anything.” The room grew silent. Patiently, Randolph waited.

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry the place isn’t nicer,” the girl said.

  “It’ll do.”

  “I meant—” She shrugged.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. A girl likes to think—” She stopped, shrugging again. “Would you like a beer or something? I think we have some cold in the frigidaire.”

  “No, thanks,” Randolph said. He grinned. “We’re not allowed to drink on duty.”

  The girl missed his humor. She nodded and then sat opposite him at the table. Silence crowded the room again.

  “Have you been a cop long?” the girl asked.

  “Eight years.”

  “It must be terrible. I mean, being a cop in this neighborhood.”

  For a moment, Randolph was surprised. He looked at the girl curiously and said, “What do you mean?”

  “All the . . . all the dirt here,” she said.

  “It . . .” He paused, studying her. “You get used to it.”

  “I’ll never get used to it,” she said.

  She seemed about to cry. For a panicky instant, he wanted to bolt from the room. He sat undecided at the table, and then he heard himself saying, “This isn’t so bad. This is a nice apartment.”

  “You don’t really mean that,” she said.

  “No,” he answered honestly. “I don’t.”

  The girl seemed to want to tell him about the apartment. Words were perched on the edge of her tongue, torrents of words, it seemed, but when she spoke she only said, “I haven’t got my own room.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “We can use . . .” And then he stopped his tongue because he sensed the girl had meant something entirely different, and the sudden insight surprised him and frightened him a little.

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “In a hotel,” he said.

  “That must be nice.”

  He wanted to say, “No, it’s very lonely.” Instead, he said, “Yeah, it’s all right.”

  “I’ve never been to a hotel. Do people wait on you?”

  “This is an apartment hotel. It’s a little different.”

  “Oh.”

  She sat at the table, and he watched her, and suddenly she was trembling.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because of . . . of what I almost did. What I almost became.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m glad you arrested me,” she said. “I’m glad I got caught the first time. I don’t want to be—”

  She began crying. Randolph watched her, and he felt inordinately big, sitting across from her, awkwardly immense.

  “Look,” he said, “what do you want to bawl for?”

  “I . . . I can’t help it.”

  “Well, cut it out!” he said harshly.

  “I’m sorry.” She turned and took a dish towel from the sink, daubed at her eyes with it. “I’m sorry. Let’s . . . let’s do it.”

  “Is this really your first time?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Yes.”

  “What made you . . . well . . . I don’t understand.”

  “I got tired,” she said. “I got so damned tired. I don’t want to fight any more.”

  “Fight what?”

  “Fight getting dirty. I’m tired of fighting.” She sighed wearily and held out her hand. “Come,” she said.

  She stood stock-still, her hand extended, her shoulders back.

  “Come,” she repeated.

  There was a strength in the rigidity of her body and the erectness of her head. In the narrow stillness of her thin body, there was a strength and he recognized the strength because he had once possessed it. He rose, puzzled, and he reached out for her hand, and he knew that if he took her hand, if he allowed this girl to lead him into the other room, he would destroy her as surely as he had once destroyed himself. He knew this, and somehow it was very important to him that she be saved, that somewhere in the prison of the precinct, somewhere in this giant, dim, dank prison there should be someone who was not a prisoner. And he knew with sudden painful clarity why there were potted plants on the barred fire escapes of the tenements.

  He pulled back his hand.

  “Keep it,” he said
harshly, swiftly.

  “What?”

  “Keep it,” he said, and he knew she misunderstood what he was asking her to keep, but he did not explain. He turned and walked from the room, and down the steps past the stacked garbage cans in the hallway and then out into the street.

  He walked briskly in the afternoon sunshine. He saw the pushers and the pimps and the prostitutes and the junkies and the fences and the drunks and the muggers.

  And when he got back to the precinct, he nodded perfunctorily at the desk sergeant and then climbed the stairs to the Detective Division.

  Dave Fields met him just inside the slatted rail divider. Their eyes met, locked.

  “How’d you make out?” Fields asked.

  Unwaveringly, unhesitatingly, Randolph replied, “Fine. The best I’ve ever had,” and Fields turned away when he added, “Any coffee brewing in the Clerical Office?”

  Every Morning

  He sang softly to himself as he worked on the long white beach. He could see the pleasure craft scooting over the deep blue waters, could see the cottony clouds moving leisurely across the wide expanse of sky. There was a mild breeze in the air, and it touched the woolly skullcap that was his hair, caressed his brown skin. He worked with a long rake, pulling at the tangled sea vegetation that the norther had tossed onto the sand. The sun was strong, and the sound of the sea was good, and he was almost happy as he worked.

  He watched the muscles ripple on his long brown arms as he pulled at the rake. She would not like it if the beach were dirty. She liked the beach to be sparkling white and clean . . . the way her skin was.

  “Jonas!”

  He heard the call, and turned toward the big house. He felt the same panic he’d felt a hundred times before. He could feel the trembling start in his hands, and he turned back to the rake, wanting to stall as long as he could, hoping she would not call again, but knowing she would.

  “Jonas! Jo-naaaas!”

  The call came from the second floor of the house, and he knew it came from her bedroom, and he knew she was just rising, and he knew exactly what would happen if he went up there. He hated what was about to happen, but at the same time it excited him. He clutched the rake more tightly, telling himself he would not answer her call, lying to himself because he knew he would go if she called one more time.