by Ed McBain
“I’d have run, too,” Carella said, nodding.
“Me, too,” Meyer said.
“No question,” Willis said.
He was beginning to enjoy this. He was hoping the drunk would ask him again about what had happened back there at the garage. Like any good actor, he was beginning to thrive on audience feedback. At five feet eight inches tall, Willis had minimally cleared the height requirement for policemen in this city—at least when he had joined the force. Things had changed since; there were now uniformed cops, and even some detectives, who resembled fire hydrants more than they did law enforcers. But until recently, Willis had most certainly been the smallest detective anyone in this city had ever seen, with narrow bones and an alert cocker-spaniel look on his thin face, a sort of younger Fred Astaire look-alike carrying a .38 Detective’s Special instead of a cane, and kicking down doors instead of dancing up staircases. Willis knew judo the way he knew the Penal Code, and he could lay a thief on his back faster than any six men using fists. He wondered now if he should toss one of the masked men over his shoulder, just to liven up the action a bit. He decided instead to tell what had happened back there at the garage.
“I pulled my gun,” he said, and to demonstrate, pulled the .38 from its shoulder holster and fanned the air with it. “These two heroes here immediately yell, ‘Don’t shoot!’ You want to know why? Because their own guns aren’t loaded! Can you imagine that? They go in for a stickup, and they’re carrying empty guns!”
“That ain’t such a good story,” the previously interested drunk said.
“So go ask for your money back,” Willis said. “Sit down, punks,” he said to the masked men.
“We’re handcuffed together. How can we sit?” one of them said.
“On two chairs,” Willis said, “like Siamese twins. And take off those stupid masks.”
“Don’t,” one of them said to the other.
“Why not?” the other one said.
“We don’t have to,” the first one said. “We know our constitutional rights,” he said to Willis.
“I’ll give you rights,” Willis said. “I could’ve got shot, you realize that?”
“How?” Meyer said. “You just told us the guns—”
“I mean if they’d been loaded,” he said, and just then Genero came up the hall from the men’s room. He said, “Who turned off my radio?” looked around for the pregnant hooker, the only one of his prisoners who wasn’t in the detention cage, spotted her sitting on the edge of Hawes’s desk, walked swiftly toward her, and was saying, “Okay, sister, let’s…” when suddenly she began screaming at him. The scream scared Genero half out of his wits. He ducked and covered his head as if he’d suddenly been caught in a mortar attack. The scream scared all the drunks in the cage, too. In defense, they all began screaming as well, as if they’d just seen mice coming out of the walls and bats flying across the room to eat them.
The woman’s strenuous effort, her penetrating, persistent, high-pitched angry scream—aside from probably breaking every window within an eight-mile radius—also broke something else. As the detectives and the drunks and the two masked men watched in male astonishment, they saw a huge splash of water cascade from between the pregnant hooker’s legs. The drunks thought she had wet her pants. Willis and Hawes, both bachelors, thought so, too. Carella and Meyer, who were experienced married men, knew that the woman had broken water, and that she might go into labor at any moment. Genero, his hands over his head, thought he had done something to provoke the lady to pee on the floor, and he was sure he would get sent to his room without dinner.
“Madre de Dios!” the woman said, shocked, and clutched her belly.
“Get an ambulance!” Meyer yelled to Hawes.
Hawes picked up the phone receiver and jiggled the hook.
“My baby’s comin’,” the woman said, very softly, almost reverently, and then very quietly lay down on the floor near Meyer’s desk.
“Dave,” Hawes said into the phone, “we need a meat wagon, fast! We got a pregnant lady up here about to give birth!”
“You know how to do this?” Meyer asked Carella.
“No. Do you?”
“Help me,” the woman said with quiet dignity.
“For Christ’s sake, help her!” Hawes said, hanging up the phone.
“Me?” Willis said.
“Somebody!” Hawes said.
The woman moaned. Pain shot from her contracting belly into her face.
“Get some hot water or something,” Carella said.
“Where?” Willis said.
“The Clerical Office,” Carella said. “Steal some of Miscolo’s hot water.”
“Help me,” the woman said again, and Meyer knelt beside her just as the phone on Carella’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver.
“87th Squad, Carella,” he said.
“Just a second,” the voice on the other end said. “Ralph, will you please pick up that other phone, please!”
In the detention cage, the drunks were suddenly very still. They pressed against the mesh. They watched as Meyer leaned over the pregnant woman. They tried to hear his whispered words. The woman screamed again, but this time they did not echo her scream with their own screams. This was not a scream of anger. This was something quite different. They listened to the scream in awe, and were hushed by it.
“Sorry,” the voice on the phone said, “they’re ringing it off the hook today. This is Levine, Midtown East. We had a shooting around midnight, DOA, girl named—”
“Listen,” Carella said, “can you call back a little later? We’ve got a sort of emergency up here.”
“This is a homicide,” Levine said, as if that single word would clear all the decks for action, cause whoever heard it to drop whatever else he was doing and heed the call to arms. Levine was right.
“Shoot,” Carella said.
“Girl’s name was Sally Anderson,” Levine said. “That mean anything to you?”
“Nothing,” Carella said, and looked across the room. Willis had come back from the Clerical Office not only with Miscolo’s boiling water, but with Miscolo himself. Miscolo was now kneeling on the other side of the woman on the floor. Carella realized all at once that Miscolo and Meyer were going to try delivering the baby.
“Reason I’m calling,” Levine said, “it looks like this may be related to something you’re working.”
Carella moved his desk pad into place and picked up a pencil. He could not take his eyes off what was happening across the room.
“I got a call from Ballistics ten minutes ago,” Levine said. “Guy named Dorfsman, smart guy, very alert. On the slugs they dug out of the girl’s chest and head. You working a case involving a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson?”
“Yes?” Carella said.
“A homicide this would be. The case you’re working. You sent some slugs to Dorfsman, right?”
“Yes?” Carella said. He was still writing. He was still looking across the room.
“They match the ones that iced the girl.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Right down the line. Dorfsman doesn’t make mistakes. The same gun was used in both killings.”
“Uh-huh,” Carella said.
Across the room, Miscolo said, “Bear down now.”
“Hard,” Meyer said.
“However you want to,” Miscolo said.
“So what I want to know is who takes this one?” Levine asked.
“You’re sure it’s the same gun?”
“Positive. Dorfsman put the bullets under the microscope a dozen times. No mistake. The same .38-caliber Smith and Wesson.”
“Midtown East is a long way from home,” Carella said.
“I know it is. And I’m not trying to dump anything on you, believe me. I just don’t know what the regs say in a case like this.”
“If they’re related, I would guess—”
“Oh, they’re related, all right. But is it yours or mine, that’s th
e question. I mean, you caught the original squeal.”
“I’ll have to check with the lieutenant,” Carella said. “When he comes in.”
“I already checked with mine. He thinks I ought to turn it over to you. This has nothing to do with how busy we are down here, Carella. One more stiff ain’t gonna kill us. It’s that you probably already done a lot of leg work—”
“I have,” Carella said.
“And I don’t know what you come up with so far, if anything—”
“Not much,” Carella said. “The victim here was a small-time gram dealer.”
“Well, this girl’s a dancer, the victim here.”
“Was she doing drugs?”
“I don’t have anything yet, Carella. That’s why I’m calling you. If I’m gonna start, I’ll start. If it’s your case, I’ll back off.”
“That’s the way,” Meyer said. “Very good.”
“We can see the head,” Miscolo said. “Now you can push a little harder.”
“That’s the way,” Meyer said again.
“I’ll check with the lieutenant and get back to you,” Carella said. “Meanwhile, can you send me the paper on this?”
“Will do. I don’t have to tell you—”
“The first twenty-four hours are the most important,” Carella said by rote.
“So if I’m gonna move, it’s got to be today.”
“I’ve got it,” Carella said. “I’ll call you back.”
“Push!” Miscolo said.
“Push!” Meyer said.
“Oh, my God!” the woman said.
“Here it comes, here it comes!” Meyer said.
“Oh, my God, my God, my God!” the woman said exultantly.
“That’s some little buster!” Miscolo said.
Meyer lifted the blood-smeared infant and slapped its buttocks. A triumphant cry pierced the stillness of the squadroom.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” one of the drunks whispered.
Carella did not call Levine back until ten minutes past 11:00, because that was how long it took to straighten out the protocol regarding the two corpses. By that time, the squadroom had quieted down considerably. The no-longer-pregnant hooker and her operatic new daughter had been taken by ambulance to the hospital, and the four drunks had been booked for Public Intoxication and led out of the station house to the waiting van by a triumphant Detective Genero, who perhaps did not realize that Public Intoxication was a mere violation as opposed to a misdemeanor or a felony, and was punishable only by a sentence not to exceed fifteen days. There was not a man or woman in that squadroom on that bright February morning who did not realize that Genero was wasting the city’s time and therefore money by dragging those drunks downtown, where they would undoubtedly be turned loose at once by a judge who knew that every available inch of cell space was needed for more serious offenders than a quartet of happy imbibers. Blithely, Genero went his way. The men—and the one woman who arrived at the squadroom at 11:00 A.M. that Saturday, just as Genero was leading his procession of prisoners out—shook their heads in unison and moved on to the more serious matters at hand.
The woman was a detective/2nd on loan from Headquarters Division’s Special Forces Unit. Her name was Eileen Burke, and she worked out of the Eight-Seven only occasionally, usually on cases requiring a female decoy. Which meant that whenever Eileen worked up here, she walked the streets alone as bait for a mad rapist, or any other kind of degenerate person out there. Eileen had red hair and green eyes; Eileen had long legs, sleek and clean, full-calved and tapering to slender ankles; Eileen had very good breasts and flaring hips and Eileen was five feet nine inches tall, all of which added up to someone who could not be missed on a city street if someone else had rape on his mind. But Eileen had once worked a mugging case up here, too, with Hal Willis as her backup, and she’d coincidentally worked another case with Willis as her partner in a sleeping bag in the park, both of them pretending to be passionate lovers in a complicated stakeout that included Detectives Meyer and Kling dressed as nuns and sitting on a nearby bench.
Eileen could not later remember the purpose of the elaborate stakeout. She remembered only that Willis kept putting his hand on her behind while she tried to watch a third bench on which there was a lunch pail that was supposed to contain $50,000 but instead contained fifty thousand scraps of newspaper. Willis— in his role as ardent lover—kissed her a lot while they huddled together in the sleeping bag on that bitterly cold day. The necking came to an abrupt halt when a young man picked up the lunchpail bait and began walking away toward the bench upon which the fake blind man Genero was sitting, whereupon Genero leaped to his feet, ripped off his dark glasses, unbuttoned the third button of his coat the way he had seen detectives do on television, reached in for his revolver, and shot himself in the leg. In the sleeping bag, Willis managed to slide the walkie-talkie up between Eileen’s breasts and began yelling to Hawes, who was parked in an unmarked car on Grover Avenue, that their man was heading his way—it was always fun working out of the Eight-Seven, Eileen thought now. She also thought it was a shame she only got to see Willis every once in a while. Idly, she wondered if Willis was married. Idly, she wondered why she had begun thinking of marriage so often these past few days. Was it because no one had sent her a valentine this year?
The squadroom was relatively quiet with Genero and all of his prisoners (the delivered hooker had escaped his grasp—for the time being, anyway) gone their separate ways. Cotton Hawes, at his desk, was taking a complaint from a fat black man who insisted that his wife threw hot grits all over him every time he got home late because she thought he was out larking around with another woman. Those were his words: larking around. Hawes found them somewhat poetic. Hal Willis had already gone down to book the two juves and was leading them into the alley running through the station house and adjacent to the detention cells on the street level, where Genero’s drunks were already in the van that would take them downtown. The juves still refused to take off the ski masks. One of the drunks in the van asked them if they were going to a party. As Willis delivered them to the uniformed cop, who slammed the locked door of the van behind them, Eileen Burke perched herself on the edge of Willis’s desk upstairs, and crossed her splendid legs, and then looked at her watch, and then lit a cigarette.
“Hello, Eileen,” Hawes said to her as he led the fat black gritsvictim past her and out of the squadroom, presumably to confront the grits-tossing wife in the sanctity of their own peaceful home. Eileen watched Hawes as he disappeared down the corridor. He had red hair, much like her own. She wondered idly if the progeny of two redheaded people would also be redheads. She wondered idly if Hawes was married. She began jiggling one foot.
Some three feet away from where she smoked her cigarette and impatiently jiggled her foot, Meyer was on the telephone with his wife, telling her he’d delivered a baby right here in the squadroom with a little—but only a little—help from Alf Miscolo, who was at the moment down the hall in the Clerical Office, brewing another pot of coffee now that his hot water was no longer urgently needed in maternity cases. On another telephone, at his own desk, Carella finally made contact with Levine at Midtown East, and began apologizing to him for having taken so long to get back.
It had taken him all this while to get back because a police department is like a small army, and a homicide is like a big battle in a continuing war. In big armies, even small battles get serious consideration. In a small army like a police department, a big battle like homicide commands a great deal of attention and participation from a great many people all up and down the line. In the city for which these men worked, the precinct detective assigned to any homicide was the one who’d caught the original squeal, generally assisted by any member of the detective team who’d been catching with him at the time. The moment a squadroom detective said, “I’ve got it,” or, “I’m rolling,” or some such other colorful jargon to that effect, the case was officially his, and he was expected to stick with it until
he solved it, or cleared it (which was not the same thing as solving it), or simply threw up his hands in despair on it. But since homicide was such a big deal—a major offensive, so to speak—there were other people in the department who were terribly interested in the activity down there at the squadroom level. In this city, once a squadroom detective caught a bona fide or “good” homicide, he had to inform:
The Police Commissioner
The Chief of Detectives
The District Commander of the Detective Division
Homicide East or Homicide West, depending upon where the body was found
The Squad and Precinct Commanding Officers of the precinct in which the body was found
The Medical Examiner
The District Attorney
The Telegraph, Telephone, and Teletype Bureau at Headquarters
The Police Laboratory
The Police Photo Unit
Not all of these people had to be consulted on protocol that Saturday morning. But the situation was knotty enough to cause Lieutenant Byrnes, in command of the 87th Squad, to wrinkle his brow and phone Captain Frick, in command of the entire 87th Precinct, who in turn hemmed and hawed a bit and then cleverly said, “Well, Pete, this would seem to be a matter of ‘member of the force,’ wouldn’t it?” which Byrnes took to mean “member of the force handling the case,” which is exactly what he’d called Frick about in the first place. Frick advised Byrnes to go to superior rank within the division on this, which necessitated a call to the Chief of Detectives, something Byrnes would have preferred avoiding lest his superior officer think he was not up on current regs. The Chief of Detectives did a little telephonic head scratching and told Byrnes he had not had one like this in a great many years and since the police department changed its rules and regulations as often as it changed its metaphoric underwear, he would have to check on what current procedure might be, after which he would get back to Byrnes. Byrnes, eager to remind his superior officer that the men of the Eight-Seven were conscientious law enforcers, casually mentioned that there were two homicides involved here, and two detectives in separate parts of the city waiting to get moving on the second and freshest of the killings (which wasn’t quite true; neither Levine nor Carella was particularly hot to trot) so he would appreciate it if the Chief could get back to him as soon as possible on this. The Chief did not get back until close to 11:00 A.M., after he’d had a conversation with the Chief of Operations, whose office was two stories above the Chief’s own in the Headquarters Building. The Chief told Byrnes that in the opinion of the Chief of Operations, the former homicide took priority over the latter; the member of the force handling the case should be the squadroom detective who’d caught the initial squeal, whenever that had been. Byrnes didn’t know when it had been, either; he simply said, “Yes, whenever. Thank you, Chief,” and hung up, and summoned Carella to his office and said, “It’s ours,” meaning not that it was actually theirs (although in a greater sense it was) but that it was his—Carella’s. When Carella reported all this to Levine, Levine said, “Good luck,” managing to convey an enormous sense of relief in those two simple words.