Killer's Payoff

by McBain, Ed

It was then that the door burst inward.

  Steve Carella lowered his leg from the flat-footed kick that had sprung the lock. His service revolver was in his right hand. He looked around the room quickly. Then he shrugged.

  “All over?” he asked.

  “Including the shooting,” Hawes said.

  “These our birds?”

  “Um-huh,” Hawes said.

  “The Kramer kill?”

  “Um-huh.”

  “Um,” Carella said.

  “You sure must have broken a lot of traffic regulations getting here,” Hawes said. “Boy, what speed!”

  “I thought you were nuts when I first spoke to you on the phone,” Carella said. “It took me about five minutes to realize you were in trouble. I thought my call had broken in on you and a girl.”

  “You’ve got an evil mind.”

  “Turns out you didn’t need me, anyway,” Carella said. Again he shrugged.

  “If you’d got to the squad at eight, when you were supposed to,” Hawes said, “you could have been here in time for the party.”

  “I had a stop to make first,” Carella said. “I went there from my house, and then I went to the squad.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Lucy Mencken’s place.”

  “What for?” Hawes asked suspiciously.

  “I gave her half a dozen pictures and negatives. I didn’t like the idea of somebody living in fear for the rest of her life.”

  “Was she appreciative?” Hawes asked.

  “We cooked hot rum toddies over the fire the stuff made. It was very cozy.”

  Hawes raised one eyebrow.

  “Now who has the evil mind?” Carella asked.

  Hawes made a rule of never replying to accusations that were true. He walked to the phone, lifted the receiver, and waited for an operator. When the operator came on, he said, “Frederick 7-8024, please.”

  Carella was busily handcuffing Miller to Murphy.

  All at once, Hawes felt very sleepy. He yawned.

  “Don’t go to sleep on us, Cotton,” Carella said. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

  Hawes yawned again and then watched Carella as he walked to the window and lifted the shade. Sunlight spilled into the hotel room.

  “Eighty-seventh Precinct, Sergeant Murchison,” a voice said.

  “Dave, this is Cotton. I’m at the Parker Hotel in Isola. I’ll need a meat wagon and some…”

  Murchison listened patiently, taking notes. Across the street from the station house, he could hear the kids playing in Grover Park. He wished he were a park attendant on a day like this. When Hawes finished talking, Murchison cut the connection. He was about to order the ambulance and the uniformed cops Hawes had requested when the lights on the switchboard began blinking again.

  Murchison sighed and plugged in his socket.

  “Eighty-seventh Precinct,” he said, “Sergeant Murchison.”

  Another day had started.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PROUDLY PRESENTS

  FAT OLLIE’S BOOK

  ED McBAIN

  Coming soon in hardcover from Simon & Schuster

  Turn the page for a preview of Fat Ollie’s Book….

  1

  RESPONSE TIME —from the moment someone at the Martin Luther King Memorial Hall dialed 911 to the moment Car 81, in the Eight-Eight’s Boy sector rolled up—was exactly four minutes and twenty-six seconds. Whoever had fired the shots was long gone by then, but a witness outside the Hall had seen someone running from the alleyway on its eastern end and he was eager to tell the police and especially the arriving TV crew all about it.

  The witness was very drunk.

  In this neighborhood, when you heard shots, you ran. In this neighborhood, if you saw someone running, you knew he wasn’t running to catch a bus. This guy wasn’t running. Instead, he was struggling to keep his balance, wobbling from one foot to the other. Nine, ten in the morning, whatever the hell it was already, and he could hardly stand up and he stunk like a distillery. He finally sat on one of the garbage cans in the alley. Behind him, rain water from a gutter dripped into a leader and flowed into an open sewer grate.

  Slurring his words, the drunk immediately told the responding officers from Car 81 that he was a Vietnam vet, mistakenly believing this would guarantee him a measure of respect. The blues saw only a scabby old black drunk wearing tattered fatigue trousers, an olive-drab tank top, and scuffed black penny loafers without socks. He was having trouble not falling off the garbage can, too. Grabbing for the wall, he told them he’d been about to go into the alley here, yessir, when he saw this guy come bustin out of it…

  “Turned left on St. Sab’s,” he said, “went runnin off uptown.”

  “Why were you going in the alley?” one of the blues asked.

  “To look inna garbage cans there.”

  “For what?”

  “Bottles,” he said. “Takes ’em back for deposit, yessir.”

  “And you say you saw somebody running out of the alley here?” the other blue asked. He was wondering why they were wasting time with this old drunk. They’d responded in swift order, but if they wasted any more time with him, their sergeant would think they’d been laggard. Then again, the TV cameras were rolling.

  “Came out the alley like a bat out of shit,” the drunk said, much to the dismay of the roving reporter from Channel Four, a pretty blonde wearing a short brown mini and a tan cotton turtleneck sweater. The camera was in tight on the man’s face at that moment, and the word “shit” meant they couldn’t use the shot unless they bleeped it out. Her program manager didn’t like to bleep out too many words because that smacked of censorship instead of fair and balanced reporting. On the other hand, the drunk was great comic relief. The Great Unwashed loved drunks. Put a drunk scene in a movie or a play, the audience still laughed themselves to death. If they only knew how many battered wives Honey had interviewed.

  “What’d he look like?” the first blue asked, mindful of the TV cameras and trying to sound like an experienced investigator instead of a rookie who’d just begun patrol duty eight months ago.

  “Young dude,” the witness said.

  “White, black, Hispanic?” the first blue asked, rapping the words out in a manner that he was sure would go over big with TV audiences, unmindful of the fact that the camera was on the witness and not himself.

  “White kid,” the witness said, “yessir. Wearin jeans and a whut chu call it, a ski parka, an’ white sneakers an’ a black cap with a big peak. Man, he was movin fast. Almost knocked me down.”

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “I dinn see no gun.”

  “Gun in his hand, anything like that?”

  “No gun, nosir.”

  “Okay, thanks,” the first blue said.

  “This is Honey Blair,” the Channel Four reporter said, “coming to you from outside King Memorial in Diamond-back.” She slit her throat with the forefinger of her left hand, said, “That’s it, boys,” and turned to her crew chief. “Get him to sign a release, will you?” she said. “I’m heading inside.” She was walking toward the glass entrance doors when the Vietnam vet, if indeed that’s what he was, asked, “Is they a reward?”

  Why didn’t you say that on the air? Honey thought.

  THIS WAS, and is, and always will be the big bad city.

  That will never change, Ollie thought. Never.

  And never was it badder than during the springtime. Flowers were blooming everywhere, even in the 88th Precinct, which by the way was no rose garden.

  Detective/First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks had good reason to be smiling on this bright April morning. He had just finished his book. Not finished reading it, mind you, but finished writing it. He was still rereading the last chapter, which was back at the apartment. He didn’t think it would need any more work, but the last chapter was often the most important one, he had learned, and he wanted to make sure it was just right. He was now transporting the positively perfect portion of
the book to a copying shop not far from the Eight-Eight.

  He wondered if the sun was shining and the flowers were blooming next door in the 87th Precinct. He wondered if it was springtime in the Rockies, or in London, or in Paris or Rome, or in Istanbul, wherever that was. He wondered if flowers bloomed all over the world when a person finished his first work of fiction. Now that he was a bona fide writer in his own mind, Ollie could ponder such deep imponderables.

  His book, which was titled Report to the Commissioner, was securely nestled in a dispatch case that rested on the back seat of the car Ollie drove hither and yon around this fair city, one of the perks of being a minion of the law, ah yes. The windows of the Chevy sedan were open wide to the breezes that flowed from river to river. It was 10:30 on a lovely sunlit Monday morning. Ollie had signed in at 7:50 (five minutes late, but who was counting?), had taken care of some odds-and-ends bullshit on his desk, and was now on his way to the copying shop on Culver Avenue, not four blocks from the station house. So far, the day—

  “10-40, 10-40…”

  The dash radio.

  Rapid mobilization.

  “King Memorial, St. Sebastian and South Thirtieth, man with a gun. 10-40, 10-40, King Memorial…”

  Ollie hit the hammer.

  HE PARKED ILLEGALLY at the curb outside the Martin Luther King Memorial Hall, flipped down the visor on the driver’s side to show the card announcing Police Department authorization, locked the car, flashed the blue-and-gold tin at a uniformed grunt who was already approaching with a scowl and an attitude, said, “Weeks, Eighty-eighth Squad,” and barged right past him and the roaming television teams that were already thrusting microphones at anyone within range. He kept using his detective’s shield like a real warrior’s shield, holding it up to any barbarian who rose in his path, striding through the glass doors at the front of the building, and then into the marble entrance lobby, and then into the auditorium itself, where a handful of brass were already on the scene, had to be something important went down here.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t The Large Man,” a voice said.

  Once upon a time, Ollie’s sister Isabelle had referred to him as “large,” which he knew was a euphonium for “obese.” He had not taken it kindly. In fact, he had not bought her a birthday present that year. Ollie knew that there were colleagues in this city who called him “Fat Ollie,” but he took it as a measure of respect that they never called him this to his face. “Large Man” came close, though. He was ready to take serious offense when he recognized Detectives Monoghan and Monroe of the Homicide Division, already on the scene, and looking like somewhat stout penguins themselves. So someone had been aced. Big deal. Here in the Eight-Eight, it sometimes felt like someone got murdered every ten seconds. Monoghan was the one who’d called him “The Large Man.” Monroe was standing beside him, grinning as if in agreement. A pair of bookends in black—the color of death, the unofficial color of Homicide—the two jackasses were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of law enforcement. Ollie wanted to punch them both in the mouth.

  “Who got it?” he asked.

  “Lester Henderson.”

  “You kidding me?”

  “Would we kid a master detective?” Monoghan said.

  “A super sleuth?” Monroe said, still grinning.

  “Stick it up your ass,” Ollie explained. “Anybody else from the Eight-Eight here?”

  “You’re the first.”

  “Then that puts me in charge,” Ollie said.

  In this city, the appearance of Homicide detectives at the scene of any murder was mandatory if not necessary. Presumably, they were here in an “advisory and supervisory capacity,” which meant they only got in the way of the precinct detectives who caught the squeal. Since Ollie was the so-called First Man Up, the case was his. All he had to do was file his reports in triplicate with Homicide, and then go his merry way. He did not think he needed to remind the M&Ms that this was a fact of police life in this fair metropolis, ah yes. They knew full well that except on television, the glory days of Homicide were long gone.

  The dead man lay on his back in a disorganized heap alongside a podium draped with red, white, and blue bunting. A sign above the podium read LESTER MEANS LAW. Ollie didn’t know what that meant. The dead man was wearing blue jeans, brown loafers without socks, and a pink crewneck cotton sweater. The front of the sweater was blotted with blood.

  “So what happened?” Ollie asked.

  “He got shot from the wings,” Monroe said. “They were setting up for the big rally tonight…”

  “Who was setting up?”

  “His people.”

  “All these people here?”

  “All these people.”

  “Too many people,” Ollie said.

  “Is right.”

  “What rally?”

  “Big fund raiser. Putting up lights, American flags, cameras, bunting, the whole shmear.”

  “So?”

  “So somebody fired half a dozen shots from the wings there.”

  “Is that an accurate count, or are you guessing?”

  “That’s what his aide told us. Five, six shots, something like that.”

  “His aide? Who’s that?”

  “Guy with all those reporters over there.”

  “Who let them in?”

  “They were already here when we responded,” Monroe said.

  “Terrific security,” Ollie said. “What’s the aide’s name?”

  “Alan Pierce.”

  The corpse lay in angular disarray, surrounded now by the Mobile Lab techs and the Medical Examiner, who was kneeling beside the dead man and delicately lifting his pink cotton sweater. Not fifteen feet from this concerned knot of professionals, a man wearing blue jeans similar to the dead man’s, and a blue denim shirt, and black loafers with blue socks stood at the center of a moving mass of reporters wielding pencils and pads, microphones, and flash cameras. A tall, slender man, who looked as if he jogged and swam and lifted weights and watched his calories—all the things Ollie considered a waste of time—Pierce appeared pale and stunned but nonetheless in control of the situation. Like a bunch of third graders waving their hands for a bathroom pass, the reporters swarmed around him.

  “Yes, Honey?” Pierce said, and a cute little blonde with a short skirt showing plenty of leg and thigh thrust a microphone in Pierce’s face. Ollie recognized her as Honey Blair, the roving reporter for the Eleven O’Clock News.

  “Can you tell us if it’s true that Mr. Henderson had definitely decided to run for the Mayor’s office?” she asked.

  “I did not have a chance to discuss that with him before…before this happened,” Pierce said. “I can say that he met with Governor Carson’s people this weekend, and that was the main reason we flew upstate.”

  “We’ve heard rumors that you yourself have your eye on City Hall,” Honey said. “Is that so?”

  “This is the first I’m hearing of it,” Pierce said.

  Me, too, Ollie thought. But that’s very interesting, Mr. Pierce.

  Honey would not let it go.

  “Well, had you planned on running for Deputy Mayor? Assuming Mr. Henderson ran for Mayor?”

  “He and I never discussed that. Yes, David?”

  A man Ollie had seen a few times here and there around City Hall shoved a microphone at Pierce.

  “Sir,” he said, “can you tell us where you were when Mr. Henderson…?”

  “That’s it, thank you very much,” Ollie said, and strolled into the crowd. Flashing his shield like a proud father exhibiting a photograph of his firstborn, he said, “This is all under control here, let’s go home, okay?” and then signaled to one of the blues to get this mob out of here. Grumbling, the reporters allowed themselves to be herded offstage. Ollie stepped into Honey’s path just as she was turning to go, and said, “Hey, what’s your hurry? No hello?”

  She looked at him, puzzled.

  “Oliver Weeks,” he said. “The Eighty-eighth Precinct. Remember t
he zoo? The lady getting eaten by lions? Christ-mastime?”

  “Oh yes,” Honey said without the slightest interest, and turned again to go.

  “Stick around,” Ollie said. “We’ll have coffee later.”

  “Thanks, I have a deadline,” she said, and followed her tits offstage.

  Ollie showed Pierce his shield. “Detective Weeks,” he said, “Eighty-eighth Squad. Sorry to interrupt the conference, sir, but I’d rather you told us what you saw and heard.”