by Ed McBain
The lights were on.
A man was in one of the stalls.
I heard him coughing, and then I heard the toilet flushing.
I ran for the door at the other end of the room, opposite the sinks.
I opened the door, and stepped out into a long corridor. I was on the stage-left side of the auditorium. A door painted red was immediately to my left. An illuminatedEXIT sign was above it. I opened the door and went out into an alley. Sunlight struck my eyes. I dropped the gun down a drainage sewer near the wall, and began running.
An old bum in army fatigues was just stepping into the alley at the far end.
I almost knocked him off his feet.
He said, Hey!
That was all he said.
Hey.
After I’d just killed a man.
THEY ASKED HERif there was anything she wished to change or add to her confession. She said No. They asked her to sign it, and handed her a pen.
She signed it.
It was all over but the shooting.
18
This is what they call The Denouement, I thought.
I am not a writer, Mr. Commissioner, but that is what writers call the chapter in the novel where everything falls into place and makes sense. It is alternatively called The Epiphany, which has religious overtones, I know, but which means some kind of dramatic change, as for example when a woman looks at herself in the mirror and sees looking back at her someone all bleary-eyed from being knocked unconscious, and all tied up to a chair in a basement she doesn’t even know where.
A black woman came in carrying a tray upon which was, or were, a donut and a cup of coffee, when a person was starving to death. There was also an Uzi on the tray, which the black woman was careful to remove before placing the tray in front of me.
“Here you go, sister,” she said.
I asked her how I was supposed to eat with my hands tied behind my back.
“You won’t have to worry about eatin too much longer,” she said, and burst out laughing, which I considered ominous.
“You goan be dead by midnight,” she added, which I also took to be a bad sign.
The clock was ticking.
Along about eleven-thirty, the door opened and Mr. Mercer Grant himself came marching down the steps. Behind him was the French receptionist from the Rêve du Jour Underwear Factory.
“This is my wife Marie,” he said. “By the way, those are our real names.”
“Then why did you tell me they werenot your real names?” I asked.
“To lure you to the factory,” he said. “It’s called entrapment. It’s done all the time.”
“How about your cousin Ambrose Fields?”
“You rang, madam?” someone asked, and a black guy as big as the one inThe Green Mile , who could draw snot out of your body and make you able to urinate again, came walking down the basement steps, ducking under the hanging light bulb as he approached me. “Dat ismy real name, too,” he said, and grinned.
Nothing could surprise me anymore.
All I knew was that the clock was ticking.
“So where are the diamonds?” I asked.
“What diamonds?” Grant asked, grinning to show the gold-and-diamond tooth in his mouth. His wife Marie stood by his side, all curly haired and brown eyed, and not wearing a bra. She was grinning, too.
“The conflict diamonds,” I said. “Isn’t this all about blood diamonds?”
“Have you forgotten about theother blood diamonds?” Grant asked.
“I’ll bet she’s forgotten about the other blood diamonds,” Ambrose said.
“Oh dear, she’s forgotten all about the other blood diamonds,” Marie said.
“I thoughtyou were supposed to be dead by Tuesday,” I said.
“That was to throw you off the scent,” she said. “It’s done all the time.”
“Besides,” Ambrose said, “don’t worry. You yourself will be dead by midnight.”
“Butwhy ?” I asked.
And a voice I had heard somewhere before said, “Because.”
I looked toward the stairway leading from above.
Someone I knew was coming down the steps.
AT MIDNIGHTthat Tuesday, they came into the basement simultaneously, the six detectives in Kevlar vests, and the three men wearing ski masks. It would have been a regular traffic jam if Emilio and Aine had also showed up at the stroke of midnight, but at that very moment they were just coming around the corner to 3211 Culver. When they heard the shooting start, they almost turned and ran in the opposite direction.
It was Rosita’s goons who started shooting first.
They did not know in which direction to turn. It was as if the Northern Alliance were coming down the stairs from the ground floor, and the Pashtun were breaking in the door from the back yard. Everybody had guns. Somebody was bound to get hurt. The goons figured it wasn’t going to be them. So they started shooting.
They took out the three men in the ski masks first.
They were easy marks, these three. They came down the steps one after the other, in single file. You shot the first guy in the row, he fell over and gave you a clear shot at the second one, and so on till all three of them were lying on the steps bleeding from a dozen holes, one of them between the eyes of the first guy’s ski mask.
The guys in the Kevlar vests were another matter.
To begin with, they came in following the business end of a battering ram that sent wood from the door flying all over the place. And they were all six of them carrying assault rifles.
Rosita’s goons—Rosita herself, for that matter—recognized the weapons as AR-15s, heavy Colt carbines that could tear off a man’s head. As the goons turned toward the door, one of the guys coming in yelled, “Police! Hold it right there!”
The guy was a woman.
The goons had no qualms about shooting a woman, police detective or not. It was only the AR-15 assault rifles that gave them pause.
The pause was all the team needed.
They swarmed over the room like fire ants, yelling and swearing, and snapping on handcuffs, and telling anyone in sight that he, or she in Rosita’s case, was under arrest. Parker picked up the suitcase with the hundred and fifty keys of coke in it.
“Better file a report on that,” Eileen reminded him.
He shot her a dirty look.
As if he would evernot file a report.
EMILIO AND AINEhuddled in the shadows near the building.
There were police cars angled into the curb now, their dome lights blinking. There were unmarked cars as well. It looked like the whole police department was here. The guy they’d seen in Shanahan’s last night came out carrying a suitcase. Livvie came out behind a woman in handcuffs. There were other detectives with assault rifles. This had to be a big bust.
As Emilio took a step forward, Aine put her hand on his arm, trying to stop him. He shook it off.
“Detective?” he said.
Eileen Burke turned.
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry about your report,” he said, and winked.
“What?”
“I burned it,” he said. “The bad guys won’t ever see it.”
“What?” she said again.
“But you don’t have to worry. I memorized it,” he said, not realizing that in that moment he became one of a long line of traditional storytellers.
Eileen still didn’t know what he was talking about.
Just then, Rosita made a sudden move as if to run. Eileen grabbed her by the arm, and said, “Don’t get any ideas, sister,” and shoved her toward one of the cars at the curb.
Emilio’s only regret was that he would never know how she’d got out of that damn basement.
19
THE CALL FROMthe Reverend Gabriel Foster came at eleven o’clock that Wednesday morning. He asked to speak to Detective Kling, and when Kling came on the line, he said, “I asked for you because of Miss Cooke.”
Kling said nothing.
“Your relationship with Miss Cooke,” he said.
“Deputy Chief Cooke, you mean,” Kling said.
“Yes, Deputy Chief,” Foster said, and Kling could swear he heard a chuckle. “You asked me to call if I heard anything. My having a finger on the community pulse and all. Is what your partner said.”
“Uh-huh,” Kling said.
“This has nothing to do with the councilman, may he rest in peace, poor soul. I understand you’ve already cleared that one.”
“Yes, we have,” Kling said. “Whatdoes this have to do with?”
“A big drug deal is about to go down,” Foster said, lowering his voice. “Three hundred grand changing hands. A hundred and fifty keys of cocaine. I don’t like narcotics in my community. You want to hear more?”
“We already heard more,” Kling said. “It went down at midnight last night.”
“It did?” Foster said, surprised.
“It did.”
“Oh. Well,” Foster said. There was a long silence on the line. Then he said, “Give my regards to your lady,” and hung up.
Eileen was just leaving the building, coming down the corridor from the squadroom to the metal steps leading below, when Kling came out of the men’s room. Startled, she stopped dead in her tracks.
“Hey, hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said. “I hear it went down good last night.”
“Oh yeah, terrific,” she said.
“How’s everything otherwise? Did you like working with Andy?”
“Joy and a half,” she said.
“Did he tell you any of his jokes?”
“Oh yes…”
“Which one?”
“The nuns peeing in a gasoline can?”
“Lovely joke.”
“Lovely,” Eileen said, and they both fell silent.
“Well,” he said.
“Listen…” she said.
“Yes?”
“I hope this isn’t going to be awkward for you.”
“No, no. Awkward? Hey, why? Awkward?”
“Cause Pete gave me a little welcoming lecture, you know…”
“He did?”
“Yeah. Did he talk to you, too?”
“About what?”
“About this being one big happy family…”
“No. What? A big happy family? Why?”
“He also told me I’m a good cop, but ‘There’s this thing with Bert,’ quote, unquote.”
“Oh.”
“So I was wondering if he’d given you the same, well,warning was what it was.”
“No. I’d have told him to shove it.”
“Really?” Eileen said, genuinely surprised.
“My private life…ourprivate lives…are none of Pete’s business. What does he think this is, a soap opera? We’re professionals here,” Kling said. “This really pisses me off, Eileen. I have a good mind to go in there and tell him…”
“Hey, slow down, Bert. I wasn’t trying to incite a riot.”
“What’d you tell him? When he said there was thisthing with Bert, or whatever it was he said.”
“I told him I didn’t think there’d be a problem.”
“Well, there won’t.”
“I know there won’t. You’re with Sharyn now, and I’m…”
I’m what? she wondered. Still looking for Mr. Right?
“I’mperfectly content to be here at the Eight-Seven,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure it’s cool with you.”
“It’s cool,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“So, I mean, we don’t have to avoid each other, or anything stupid like that, tiptoe around each other…”
“Is that what we were doing?”
“No, I meant it’s not something we even have tothink about anymore, is what I meant. We’re two professionals, like you said, and this isn’t a soap opera.”
“It certainly isn’t. Besides, why should people have toforget what happened between them?” he said, and she could have hugged him then and there. “Why can’t they just remember the past, and move on?” His voice lowered, but he wasn’t trying to be sexy or anything, he wasn’t coming on or anything. “There’s a lot to remember, Eileen. No one can shoot us for remembering.”
“No one,” she said, and smiled.
“You going back inside?” he asked.
“No, I was just leaving,” she said.
“In that case,” he said, and bowed her in the direction of the staircase.
She suddenly remembered why she had loved him so much.
• • •
THE GAUCHO CALLEDAine at three o’clock that afternoon, hoping he could see her again tonight. He had enjoyed being with her, and now they really had something to celebrate; the bust had gone down as predicted, and he was in possession of five hundred bucks the generous cops of the Eight-Seven had given him as a reward for his services.
He let the number she’d given him ring a dozen times.
Aine didn’t hear it.
She had shot up half an hour ago, and was lying stoned on the mattress in Emilio’s apartment, her eyes closed, a dreamy expression on her face. Emilio didn’t hear the ringing phone, either. He was on the toilet bowl, a needle still in his arm, the same peaceful look on his face.
The Gaucho hung up and went out front to greet a woman who was looking for herbs that would cure her insomnia.
CARELLA CALLED HONEY BLAIRat three-thirty that afternoon.
She came on the phone all treacle and smiles.
“Well,hello, ” she oozed, “how’s it goin? What can I do for you?”
“My wife’s looking for a job,” he said.
“I’m sorry,what? ”
“My wife’s looking for a job,” he said again, and then he explained that she was this beautiful speech- and hearing-impaired woman who could sign at the speed of light, and whose face spoke volumes besides, and he thought if the station was looking for someone who could appear in that little box in the left hand corner of the screen to sign for the deaf while a news report was going on, she’d be perfect for the job.
“She’s really the most beautiful woman on earth,” he said. “You won’t be sorry, I promise you.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“Honey?” he said.
“I’m here,” she said.
There was another silence.
Then she said, “You are really unique, you know that? You are positively unique.”
He imagined her shaking her head.
“Have her send me a resume,” she said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
And hung up.
AT THE EIGHT-EIGHTlater that afternoon, Ollie ran into Patricia Gomez just as the shift was changing.
“I want to thank you for that wonderful work you did on the Henderson case,” he said.
“Well, hey, thankyou, ” she said.
“I already mentioned it to the Boss, he knows what a role you played.”
“Well, gee,” she said, “thanks.”
There was an awkward moment of silence.
“Did you ever find that guy who stole your book?” she asked.
“No, all I still got is the last chapter.”
“I’ll bet it’s good.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “But I’ll get him, don’t worry. There’s always another day, am I right?”
“Always another day,” she said.
He looked at her.
Quite seriously, he asked, “Are you gonna cut off my dick for a nickel?”
“What?” she said.
“And sell it to the nearest cuchi frito joint?”
“Why would I do that?” she asked, and smiled. “I don’t evenlike cuchi frito.”
He kept looking at her.
“You still wanna go dancin Saturday night?”
“I bought a new dress.”
“So okay then.”
“So okay.”
“Que puede hacer?”he asked, and shrugged.
; “Nada,”she said.
I watched him as he came down the steps into the basement.
“So, Olivia,” he said. “We meet again.”
“Apparently so, Commissioner,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
“Does she know?” he asked the black man.
“Nothing,” Ambrose said.
“Then kill her,” the Commissioner said.
There was on his face a look of ineffable sadness. I could tell he felt badly, or perhap seven bad.
“It isn’t midnight yet,” I said.
“But who’s counting?”
“I am. Can you please tell me what’s going on here?”
“Well, since you’ll never be able to tell anyone else,” the Commissioner said, “I see no reason why you shouldn’t share my little secret.”
This was a line I had heard many times before in detective work, and I was surprised to hear it coming from someone as erudite, you should pardon the expression, as the Commissioner, who surely knew that if you told someone he or she would never be able to tell anyone else, then in the next thirty seconds or so he or she was going to kick you in the balls and tell everyone in the entire world.
Strengthened by this knowledge, I began working on the ties that bound me, so to speak, laboring secretly behind my back with a little razor I normally use for shaving my legs and armpits while the Commissioner began telling me what his little secret was.
It turned out that spilling red wine on his white linen suit was only the first of a series of real or imagined affronts he had suffered at my hands over the many years I’d been on the job. Never mind that this was his favorite suit, which he had bought after hearing Tom Wolfe speak at a Barnes & Noble one time long ago. Never mind that I had once crashed my motorcycle into the rear fender of his personal car, which happened to be a Mercedes-Benz—and this is not product placement, believe me; I am a police officer and above such mercantile pursuits. Never mind, too, that I had once—inadvertently—called him an asshole in the presence of several reporters, but that was when he was still only Chief of Detectives and I hadn’t known at the time that he would become the Commish. What really bothered him—