by Ed McBain
“No, Pete, we’ve been—”
“Round up your street gun dealers, find out who was shopping for a gun that fits the description.”
“Yes, Pete,” Carella said.
“How does Lopez tie in with these other two?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Were either of them doing drugs?”
“The girl was. We don’t know about Edelman yet.”
“Was Lopez supplying her?”
“We don’t know yet. We do know she was bringing coke in for some of the other people in the show.”
“This last one was a diamond merchant, huh?”
“Precious gems,” Kling said.
“Did he know either Lopez or the girl?”
“We don’t know yet,” Kling said. “But he was held up sometime last summer, and that may be something to go on. We’ll be running it through the computer this morning.”
“Don’t go squeezing them,” Byrnes said to Meyer, who was reaching for a chocolate in the box. “Take all you want, but eat the ones you touch, and don’t go squishing up the whole box.”
Meyer, who had in fact been about to squeeze one of the chocolates, gave Byrnes an offended look.
“What’s with her boyfriend?” Byrnes said. “The girl’s boyfriend.”
“He was on the phone most of last Friday night,” Carella said. “The night the girl was killed.”
“On the phone? Who with?”
“Another student. The boyfriend’s a med student at Ramsey.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Timothy Moore.”
“And his friend’s name?”
“Karl Loeb.”
“You checked with him?”
“Loeb? Yes. They were gabbing till almost two in the morning.”
“Who called who?” Byrnes asked.
“Back and forth.”
“What else?”
“The producer of the show, man named Allan Carter, is playing house with one of the dancers.”
“So what?” Byrnes asked.
“He’s married,” Meyer said.
“So what?” Byrnes asked again.
“We think he’s lying to us,” Meyer said.
“About his little tootsie?” Byrnes said, using one of the quaint, archaic terms that sometimes crept into his vocabulary, for which the younger men on the squad almost always forgave him.
“No, he was straight on about that,” Carella said. “But he claims to have known the dead girl only casually, and it doesn’t smell right.”
“Why would he lie about that?” Byrnes asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Carella said.
“You think they were doing a two-on-one?” Byrnes asked, using one of the more voguish terms that sometimes crept into his vocabulary.
“We don’t know yet,” Meyer said.
“What the hell do you know?” Byrnes asked heatedly, and then gained control of himself once again. “Have some candy, for Christ’s sake!” he said. “I’ll get fat as a horse here.”
“Pete,” Carella said, “this is a complicated one.”
“Don’t tell me it’s a complicated one. Don’t I know a complicated one when I see a complicated one?”
“Maybe it is a crazy,” Brown suggested.
“That’s the easy way out,” Byrnes said, “blaming it on a crazy. You want to know something? In my book, anybody who kills anybody is a crazy.”
The detectives had no quarrel with him there.
“Okay,” Byrnes said, “start vacuuming the street. Or, better yet, call some of our snitches, see if they can come up with a line on that goddamn gun. Bert, Artie, run your computer check on that holdup…have you been to that guy’s shop yet? Edelman’s?”
“Not yet,” Brown said.
“Go there, go through everything in the place. You come across even a speck of white dust, shoot it over to the lab for a cocaine test.”
“We’re not sure cocaine is the connection,” Meyer said.
“No? Then what is? The girl was doing coke and supplying half the cast with it—”
“Not that many, Pete.”
“However goddamn many! I don’t care if she was the star of that show, which I gather she wasn’t. On my block, she was delivering dope, and that made her a mule. We know Lopez was in the business of selling cocaine, he had six grams and eleven hundred bucks in his pocket when he was killed. So find out some more about little Miss Goody Two Shoes. Where’d she get the stuff she was spreading around the cast? Was she turning a profit or just doing a favor? And put the blocks to this producer, whatever the hell his name is, Carter. If he was sleeping with both that other dancer and the dead girl, I want to know about it. That’s it. Call Danny Gimp, call Fats Donner, call any snitch who’s in town instead of in Florida, where I should be. I want this case moved off the dime, have you got that? The next time the Chief calls me, I want to tell him something positive.”
“Yes, Pete,” Carella said.
“Don’t ‘Yes, Pete’ me. Just do it.”
“Yes, Pete.”
“And another thing. I’m not buying this as a crazy until you guys can convince me there was absolutely no connection between the three victims.”
Byrnes paused.
“Find that connection,” he said.
They arranged to meet on a bench in Grover Park, not too far from the skating rink and the statue of General Ronald King, who had once stormed a precious hill during the Spanish-American War, thereby shortening the tenure of the foreign tyrants who (according to William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer) were oppressing the honest Cuban cane cutters and fishermen. A bygone Mayor had commissioned the statue of the general, not because of his indisputable gallantry, but only because King (like the Mayor himself) was reputed to have been a card mayvin whose specialty had been poker and whose favorite game within the genre had been something called “Shove,” which was also the Mayor’s favorite. For his patience in standing out there in bronze in all sorts of weather, the general had been further honored by the city’s Hispanic (though not Cuban) population, who scrawled their names in spray paint across his bold chest and who occasionally pissed on his horse’s legs.
School had been canceled today because of hazardous road conditions. As Carella waited for Danny Gimp on the bench near the statue of the general, he could hear the voices of young boys playing ice hockey on the outdoor rink. He was frozen to the marrow. He was not normally a philosophical man, but as he sat huddled inside his heaviest coat—and his jacket beneath that, and a sweater beneath that, and a flannel shirt beneath that, and woolen underwear beneath that—he thought that winter was a lot like police work. Winter wore you down. The snow, and the sleet, and the freezing rain, and the ice just kept coming at you till you were ready to throw up your hands in surrender. But you hung in there somehow until the spring thaw came and everything seemed all right again—till next winter.
Where the hell was Danny?
He saw him limping slowly up the path, turning his head this way and that to check the snow-covered terrain, just like an undercover agent out in the cold, which—to tell the truth—Danny sometimes fancied himself to be. He was wearing a red-and-blue plaid mackinaw and a red watch cap pulled down around his ears, and blue woolen gloves and green corduroy trousers tucked into the tops of black galoshes, a somewhat garish costume for someone trying to appear inconspicuous. He walked directly past the bench on which Carella sat freezing (there were times when he carried this spy stuff a bit too far), walked almost to the statue of the general, peered around cautiously, and then came back to the bench, sat beside Carella, took a newspaper from the side pocket of his mackinaw, opened it to hide his face, and said, “Hello, Steve. Cold, huh?”
Carella took off his glove and offered his hand to Danny. Danny lowered the newspaper, took off his glove, and reached out for Carella’s hand. They shook hands briefly and put on their gloves again. There were not too many detectives who shook hands with informers. Most cops and th
eir informers were business associates of a sort, but they did not shake hands. Not many cops held snitches in very high regard. A snitch was usually someone who “owed” something to the cops. The cops were willing to look the other way in return for information. Some of the snitches who provided information were among the city’s worst citizens. But if politics made strange bedfellows, criminal investigation made even stranger ones. Hal Willis’s favorite snitch was a man named Fats Donner, whose penchant for twelve-year-old girls made him universally despised. But he was a good and valuable informer. Of all the snitches Carella worked with, he liked Danny Gimp best. And he would never forget that once upon a time, more years ago than he cared to remember, Danny had come to see him in the hospital when he was recovering from a bullet wound. That was why he always shook hands with Danny Gimp. He would shake hands with Danny Gimp even if the Commissioner were watching.
“How’s the leg?” he asked.
“It hurts when it’s cold,” Danny said.
“Just once,” Carella said, “I would like to meet someplace that isn’t Siberia.”
“I have to be careful,” Danny said.
“You can be careful inside.”
“Inside there are ears,” Danny said.
“Well, let’s make this fast, okay?”
“It’s your nickel,” Danny said, inappropriately in that they were not on the telephone, and anyway a nickel telephone call had gone the way of the buggy whip.
“I’m looking for a .38 Smith and Wesson that was used in three murders,” Carella said.
“When was this?” Danny asked.
“The first one was a week ago today, the ninth. The second one was last Friday night, the twelfth. The last one was on Saturday night, the thirteenth.”
“All of them up here?”
“Two of them.”
“Which two?”
“A coke dealer named Paco Lopez—ever hear of him?”
“I think so.”
“And a diamond merchant named Marvin Edelman.”
“Doing business up here?”
“No, downtown. He lived on Silvermine Road.”
“Fancy,” Danny said.
“Who’s the third party?”
“A girl named Sally Anderson. Dancer in a musical downtown.”
“So where’s the connection?” Danny asked.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“Mmm,” Danny said. “Lopez, huh?”
“Paco,” Carella said.
“Paco Lopez,” Danny said.
“Ring a bell?”
“Did he burn some chick’s tits a while back?”
“That’s the guy.”
“Yeah,” Danny said.
“Do you know him?”
“I seen him around. This was months ago. He must’ve been living with the chick, they were together all the time. So he bought it, huh? That’s no great loss, Steve. He was bad news all around.”
“How so?”
“Mean,” Danny said. “I don’t like people who are mean, do you? Did you talk to the chick yet?”
“The day after Lopez got killed.”
“And?”
“Nothing. She told us what he’d done to her—”
“Something, huh?” Danny said, and shook his head.
“But they’d stopped living together two months ago. She didn’t know anything.”
“Nobody ever knows anything when it comes to cops in this neighborhood. Maybe she’s the one who done it. For marking her that way.”
“I doubt it, Danny, but be my guest. Frankly, I’m more interested in knowing whether a .38 changed hands sometime during this past week.”
“Lots of .38s in this city, Steve.”
“I know that.”
“Changing hands all the time.” He was silent for a moment. “The first one was last Tuesday, huh? What time?”
“Eleven o’clock.”
“P.M.?”
“P.M.”
“Where?”
“On Culver Avenue.”
“Inside or out?”
“On the street.”
“Not too many people out doing mischief in this weather,” Danny said. “The cold keeps them home. Murderers and thieves like their comfort,” he said philosophically. “Nobody seen the killer, huh?”
“Would I be here freezing my ass off if we had a witness?” Carella said.
“I’m freezing, too, don’t forget,” Danny said, somewhat offended. “Well, let me see what I hear. How urgent is this?”
“Urgent,” Carella said.
” ‘Cause there’s a bet I want to place before I get to work.”
“Anything good?” Carella asked.
“Only if he wins,” Danny said, and shrugged.
Brother Anthony and Emma were smoking dope and drinking wine and going over the list of names and addresses Judite Quadrado had given them two days ago. A kerosene heater was going in one corner of the room, but the radiators were only lukewarm, and the windows were nonetheless rimed with ice. Brother Anthony and Emma were sitting very close to the kerosene heater, even though both of them insisted that cold weather never bothered them. They were both in their underwear.
They had smoked a little pot an hour ago, before making love in the king-sized bed in Brother Anthony’s bedroom. Afterward, they had each and separately pulled on their underwear and walked out into the living room to open a bottle of wine and to light two more joints before sitting down again with the list of potential customers. Brother Anthony was wearing striped boxer shorts. Emma was wearing black bikini panties. Brother Anthony thought she looked radiantly lovely after sex.
“So what it looks like to me,” Emma said, “is that he had a dozen people he was servicing.”
“That’s not so many,” Brother Anthony said. “I was hoping for something bigger, Em, I’ll tell you the truth. Twelve rotten names sounds like very small potatoes for all the trouble we went to.” He looked at the list again. “Especially in such small quantities. Look at the quantities, Em.”
“Do you know the joke?” she asked him, grinning.
“No. What joke?” He loved it when she told jokes. He also loved it when she went down on him. Looking at her huge breasts, he was beginning to feel the faintest stirrings of renewed desire, and he began thinking that maybe he would let her tell her joke and then they would forget all about Lopez’s small-time list and go make love again. That sounded like a very good thing to do on a cold day like today.
“This lady is staying at a Miami Beach hotel, you know?” Emma said, still grinning.
“I wish I was staying at a Miami Beach hotel,” Brother Anthony said.
“You want to hear this joke or not?”
“Tell it,” he said.
“So she eats a couple of meals in the dining room, and then she goes to the front desk and starts complaining to the manager.”
“What about?” Brother Anthony said.
“Will you let me tell it, please?”
“Tell it, tell it.”
“She tells the manager the food in the dining room is absolute poison. The eggs are poison, the beef is poison, the potatoes are poison, the salads are poison, the coffee is poison, everything is poison, poison, poison, she says. And you know what else?”
“What else?” Brother Anthony asked.
“The portions are so small!” Emma said, and burst out laughing.
“I don’t get it,” Brother Anthony said.
“The lady is complaining the food is poison—”
“Yeah?”
“But she’s also complaining the portions are too small.”
“So what?”
“If it’s poison, why does she want bigger portions?”
“Maybe she’s crazy,” Brother Anthony said.
“No, she’s not crazy,” Emma said. “She’s complaining about the food, but she’s also telling the manager the portions—”
“I understand,” Brother Anthony said, “but I still don�
�t get it. Why don’t we go in the other room again?”
“You’re not ready yet,” Emma said, glancing at his lap.
“You can make me ready.”
“I know I can. But I like it better when you’re ready before I make you ready.”
“Sweet mouth,” Brother Anthony said, lowering his voice.
“Mmm,” Emma said.
“So what do you say?”
“I say business before pleasure,” Emma said.
“Anyway, what made you even think of that joke?” he asked.
“You said something about the small quantities.”
“They are small,” Brother Anthony said. “Look at them,” he said, and handed the list to her. “Two or three grams a week, most of them. We ain’t gonna get rich on two, three grams a week.”
“We don’t have to get rich all at once, Bro,” Emma said. “We’ll take things slow and easy at first, start with these people who used to be Lopez’s customers, build from there.”
“How?”
“Maybe the lady can put us onto some other customers.”
“What lady? The one eating poison?”
“The one who was supplying Lopez. His ounce dealer.”
“Why would she want to help us that way?”
“Why not? There has to be a chain of supply, Bro. An ounce dealer needs gram dealers, a gram dealer needs users. The lady puts us onto some users, we buy our goods from her, and everybody’s happy.”
“I think you’re dreaming,” Brother Anthony said.
“Would it hurt to ask?” Emma said.
“She’ll tell us to get lost.”
“Who knows? Anyway, first things first. First we have to let her know we’ve taken over from Lopez and would like to continue doing business with her. That’s the first thing.”
“That’s the first thing, for sure.”
“So what I think you should do,” Emma said, “is get dressed and go pay this Sally Anderson a little visit.”
“Later,” Brother Anthony said, and took her in his arms.
“Mmm,” Emma said, and cuddled closer to him, and licked her lips.
Eileen Burke called the squadroom while Kling was still on the phone with Communications Division. Brown asked her to wait, and then put a note on Kling’s desk, advising him that Detective Burke was on six. Kling nodded. For a moment, he didn’t know who Detective Burke was.