The Big Bad City

by McBain, Ed

  “I hope I’ve been helpful,” he said.

  He hadn’t.

  He was afraid he might never do another burglary.

  Burglary was his entire life. He truly enjoyed what he did, but now he was fearful that he might never derive pleasure from it again. He’d really been frightened that day, he admitted it to himself now. And because he’d been so frightened, he hadn’t done another job since. Nor had he baked any cookies. The one enjoyment was linked to the other, and all because of a clumsy accident he’d been deprived of both pleasures. All he could think was that the police would knock on his door at any moment.

  They had to know he was the one who’d been in that apartment. He didn’t know how they’d found out, but he knew they knew. Otherwise, why had all the television stories stopped? How come there was nothing more about The Cookie Boy? No cute little stories about the burglar who left behind chocolate chip cookies. He was sure the police were behind that. They’d been told to throw a blanket over any news release about him. Probably some trick to keep him complacent while they closed in. Any minute now, they’d knock on his door. Probably were questioning everyone in the neighborhood right this minute. Know anybody who bakes cookies? Tightening the net. See anybody who looks like this man? Did they have a composite drawing of him? Had someone seen him going in or coming out of the building that day?

  He tried to think of any mistakes he’d made in the apartment. Had he wiped everything clean? He couldn’t remember. He usually did that because he knew his fingerprints were on file from his days in the army, but now he couldn’t remember. That’s because he’d been so frightened. Such a stupid encounter. He sometimes thought he should go to the police, tell them he hadn’t killed anybody in that apartment, it was the woman who’d done all the goddamn shooting, it was the woman who had the weapon! Had he somehow left fingerprints on it? No, his hands were over hers, she was the one with her finger on the trigger, she was the one who’d first shot the boy and then shot herself. Maybe he should go to the police. Sure, how are you, they’d say, nice you stopped by. That’s two counts of felony murder, so long, fella, see you in a hundred years.

  If only …

  Well, look, there was no sense second-guessing this. What happened happened. He should have been more careful, he should have listened more intently, he shouldn’t have taken a step into that goddamn apartment until he was dead certain nobody was in it.

  Had he left something behind?

  He didn’t think so.

  But had they been able to trace him somehow? Were they this very instant climbing the steps to the fourth floor here, ready to knock on the door, you are under arrest, you have the right to remain silent, you have the right to …

  The ring.

  The one he’d given that hooker.

  Could they link him to that?

  Well, even if they did …

  Marilyn Monroe, was that what she’d told him her name was? Jesus, why hadn’t he gotten her real name? Jesus, how could he have been so stupid?

  But even if they did …

  Wait a minute here.

  Suppose somehow they got to the hooker, and suppose, somehow, she told them how she’d got the ring, and suppose, somehow, they knew this was a ring he’d stolen from an apartment three weeks before that dumb fucking woman shot herself and that stupid little boy, suppose all that. Okay, how could they possibly link the murders to the ring?

  They couldn’t.

  But suppose they could?

  Suppose somehow …

  He’d given the woman a phony name, same as she’d given him, he couldn’t even remember what name he’d given her. So there was no danger there.

  But suppose she’d identified him?

  Look, it was impossible that they’d been able to track down a cheap whore he’d met in a shitty little bar. But suppose they had, and suppose they’d shown her the ring, and suppose she told them yes this man gave me the ring, this man whatever his name was, whatever name I gave her, traded the ring for my services. And this man was missing the pinkie on his right hand, suppose she’d mentioned that? Suppose she’d been as revulsed by that missing pinkie as most women seemed to be? Suppose she’d remembered that one thing about him, never mind anything else, never mind people telling him he looked a little like a young John Travolta, just remember the fucking missing pinkie!

  Well, so what?

  He didn’t have a criminal record, so no one was going to be able to tap into a computer and call up all the burglars in the world who had a pinkie missing on the right hand. So fuck you, lady, you remembered the missing pinkie, so who cares?

  The only thing they could possibly trace were his fingerprints if he’d left any in that apartment. Go back to his army records, hello, fella, come right along.

  He wished he could remember whether or not he’d wiped that apartment clean before he’d left it.

  He must have.

  He always did.

  The call from the Mobile Crime Lab came at six-thirty that night, just as Meyer was taking his nine-millimeter service pistol from his locked desk drawer in preparation for heading home. The technician calling was a man named Harold Fowles who, together with his partner had dusted and vacuumed and otherwise scrutinized the Cooper apartment for hairs, latent prints, semen stains, and the like.

  “I’m the one found the cookie crumbles, remember?” he asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Meyer said. “How are you, Harold?”

  “Fine, thanks. Well, a little hot, but otherwise fine.”

  “So what’ve you got for me?”

  “Well, we went over the latents, and all of them match prints of either the woman or her husband or the kid was banging her, and other members of the family, too, we had a lot of cooperation here, and the maid, and the super who was in there a few weeks ago to unclog the toilet. All people who had legitimate access to the apartment. No wild prints is what I’m saying. Nothing that didn’t belong there, so to speak. Okay.”

  Meyer waited.

  “We know the guy went in through the dining room window just off the fire escape,” Fowles said. “There were wipe marks outside and inside the window, and imprints of his feet in the carpet where he dropped to the floor and then walked across the room. He left the window open behind him. We also know he went out of the apartment by way of the front door. It was unlocked and there were wipe marks on both the inside and the outside knobs. Okay. Something occurred to me.”

  Meyer waited.

  “If he went to all the trouble of wiping everything clean, then he wasn’t wearing gloves. Maybe he was afraid someone would spot him with gloves on in this heat, who knows, I’m not a criminal. But if he wasn’t wearing gloves, and if he didn’t go out the same way he went in, which I’m positive is the case, then there was one thing he couldn’t have wiped.”

  “What was that?” Meyer asked.

  “The ladder.”

  “What ladder?”

  “The fire-escape ladder. The one he had to jump up for. I went back there this afternoon. I recovered some nice latents from the bottom rung where he pulled the ladder down and also some good ones from the rungs above it, which he left when he was climbing to the first-floor landing. I’m running them through the system now. If the guy’s got any kind of record, criminal or military, maybe we’ve got something. It may take a while, but …”

  “I’ll give you my home number,” Meyer said.

  Sonny finally caught up with him at ten that night in a private club called Siesta, all the way uptown in a section of the city called Hightown. Here in the shadow of the bridge connecting Isola to the state next door, you had more damn drug dealers than you could find in the entire nation, all of them Dominican, all of them linked to the Colombian cartel. This was dangerous turf, man. Worth your life to look cockeyed at a man standing on a street corner here, lest he believe you were invading his turf. Sonny couldn’t understand what Juju was doing all the way up here where Spanish was the language and a person’s sensitivity c
ould easily turn into a challenge. He was glad he had the Eagle tucked in his belt. He drove around the block three times, looking for a space, and finally parked in front of the club in a zone clearly marked no parking. Fuck it, he thought, and went inside.

  The owner of the club was a man named Rigoberto Mendez. Sonny introduced himself and told him he was looking for his good friend Juju Judell. A CD player was oozing dreamy close-dancin music when Sonny stepped into the place. The sweet scent of marijuana floated on air thick with smoke, and skinny girls in clingy, tight summer dresses swayed in the arms of dudes black and tan. Juju sat at a table in the corner chatting up a tall black girl with bleached blonde frizzy hair and earrings long as fingers hanging from her ears, low-cut dress about to pop with righteous fruit within. He had an eye for the women, Juju did.

  “Well now looka here,” he said as Sonny approached, and rose from the table, extending his hand, shaking it warmly, “Sonny Cole, meet Tirana … I didn’t catch the last name, honey.”

  “Hobbs,” she said, a little disdainfully, it seemed to Sonny, as if she was looking down her nose at him, for what reason he couldn’t fathom.

  “Tirana Hobbs,” he said, “how you doin, honey?” and extended his hand, which she didn’t take, so he figured he’d be taking her to bed tonight, Juju notwithstanding. He pulled up a chair. Tirana was sitting across from him at the small round table, Juju on his right. All their knees almost touched under the table.

  “Choo drinkin, man?” Juju asked, and signaled to a man wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with an NFL logo on it. “They got ever’thin, juss name it.”

  “What’s that you’re drinkin there, Tirana?” Sonny asked, trying to be friendly, trying to let her know she was gonna end up in bed with him, so let’s cut the thaw, honey, no sense playin games here.

  “Gee,” she said, “what can it possibly be comes in a brown bottle and pours out yellow with foam on it?” To demonstrate, she poured more beer into her mug. Sonny grinned.

  “I’ll have a beer, too,” he said. He wanted to keep a clear head for what was coming later. Started drinking anything harder, he’d liable to fuck up. “So how you been, Juje?” he said.

  “What’s that stand for, anyway?” Tirana asked.

  She had yellow eyes, Sonny noticed, sort of glassy now, as if she’d been smoking before he got here. Maybe that’s why she sounded so harsh. Grass sometimes did that to people. They either got mellow or they got mean. He didn’t mind a mean girl, long as she understood who had the cock.

  “Juju stands for Julian Judell,” he said.

  “That’s a nice name,” Tirana said. “Why’d you shorten it to Juju?”

  “Didn’t do it myself, honey. Kids started sayin it and it stuck.”

  “Tirana’s a nice name, too,” Sonny lied. He thought it was one of those bullshit names lots of black mothers picked outta some African baby-name book. “Where’d you get such a pretty name?”

  “It was supposed to be Tawana.”

  “Oh? Yeah? Tawana?”

  “My mother didn’t know how to spell it. She thought what they were sayin on the TV was Tirana. You remember Tawana Brawley, the one got raped by all those white guys smeared her with shit later?”

  “She was full of shit, anyway,” Juju said.

  “I don’t think so,” Tirana said.

  “I think she was tellin the truth,” Sonny said.

  Tirana smiled.

  “How’d you get the name Sonny?” she asked.

  “I don’t know how. My real name is Samson.”

  “Ooooh,” Tirana said. “Strong.”

  “Still got all my hair, too,” Sonny said, and smiled charmingly.

  “I’ll bet,” Tirana said.

  If Juju was noticing any of this, he wasn’t showing it. In any case, Sonny wasn’t about to let pussy intrude on what was the real order of business here tonight. He suddenly wondered if Tirana bleached herself down there, too, be interesting to find out. But Juju came first. What had to be done with Juju came first. Then they’d tend to other matters. If there was to be any other matters.

  Juju said, “So how come you knew where I was at?”

  “I asked around,” Sonny said.

  “Why was it you wanted to see me?”

  Sonny tried to calculate was he suspicious. He decided no.

  “Couple things we should talk about,” he said, “you have a minute.”

  “Want to take a walk?” Juju asked.

  “You mind, Tirana? Just take a few minutes.”

  “Time and tide wait for no man,” Tirana said.

  “Be the tide’s loss,” Sonny said, and shoved back his chair.

  Tirana looked up at him. Same mean smile on her face like when he first came over to the table. He knew for sure now she’d be waiting for him when he got done with Juju.

  Outside, the night was cool.

  They strolled through streets full of people jabbering in Spanish. He wondered all at once if Juju was of Spanish descent. Julian could be Spanish, he guessed. But Judell? He doubted it. Still, what the hell was he doing all the way up here in Hightown? Lots of laughter, too, on the summer air. People hanging out of windows, looking down into the street. People drinking. Some of them dancing. Like some kind of carnival atmosphere, you’d think it was still early in the evening, number of people in the street.

  “So what is it?” Juju asked.

  “I been having trouble finding a piece,” Sonny said.

  Juju looked surprised.

  “You can get any kind of weapon you wish, this city,” he said. “Where you been looking?”

  “Well, I had to be discreet.”

  “Naturally. But where you been looking?”

  “I been asking around.”

  “Who you been askin?”

  “Point is, Juju, I was wondering you could help me.”

  “You want to link me to a gun you goan use in a murder?”

  “Who’s talking about any murder?”

  “Oh, scuse me, I thought you were planning to do some police officer.”

  Juju had been drinking. Otherwise he wouldn’t be talking so loose now. People in the street here were all speaking Spanish, but they understood English fine, and Juju’s voice was too loud. Mention the words “police officer” in this neighborhood, ears went up.

  “I don’t know where you got that idea,” Sonny said.

  “Maybe from me,” Juju said, and burst out laughing.

  Sonny laughed with him, faking it along. They were walking north toward the bridge. The crowd was beginning to thin, except for teenyboppers ambling down toward the water for their hand jobs. Behind him, Sonny could hear the laughter trailing, the crowd noises fading. It was a cool, clear, beautiful night.

  “Sure, I’ll help you find a piece,” Juju said.

  “That’s kind of you, Juje.”

  “What I’ll do, I’ll make the initial inquiry, set you up. Then you go do the deal yourself. That way, I’m out of it.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  A pair of thirteen-year-olds were standing close together on the rocks down by the water, the girl’s blouse open, the boy’s fly open, too. They saw two big black guys approaching, they zipped up and buttoned up mighty fast, got the hell out of there in a hurry. The men sat on the rocks the kids had vacated. Juju offered Sonny a joint. Sonny shook his head no. Had to stay clear. Had to be cool. Juju lit up. The cloying smell of grass wafted out over the water.

  “I’ve been thinkin what you advised me that night in jail,” Sonny said.

  He was scoping the area now, making sure there wasn’t anybody else lingering. Two more teenagers were climbing down the bank now. He didn’t have to wave them off. They saw Sonny and Juju sitting there on the rocks, they made an abrupt about-face, moved right on out again. Black power, Sonny thought, and smiled.

  “What’s funny?” Juju said, and sucked on the joint. The tip glowed hot in the dark.

  “What you said. In jail that night.”


  “What’d I say?”

  “You said to do it clean, man.”

  “Thass right. Why is that funny?”

  “Clean piece …”

  “We’ll get one for you, don’t worry.”

  “… no partners. In, out, been nice to know you.”

  “That was good advice, man,” Juju said, and took another hit off the joint.

  “But what I realized just recently,” Sonny said, “is I already got a partner.”

  Juju turned to look at him.

  “You,” Sonny said. “You the partner. You the only one knows what I’m goan do, man.”

  Juju was all at once looking into the barrel of a Desert Eagle.

  “Thought you couldn’t find a piece,” he said dryly.

  “I found one,” Sonny said.

  “Ain’t no need to do this, man,” Juju said. “I’m the one advised you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So come on, put away …”

  “I’m just takin your advice,” Sonny said, and fired two shots into his face.

  In this neighborhood, the sound of gunfire was as common as the sound of salsa. Four teenagers, laughing as they came down the bank, heard the shots and immediately turned back. Sonny dragged Juju to the edge of the river.

  “Been nice to know you,” he said, and rolled him off the rock wall and into the water.

  There was a parking ticket under Sonny’s windshield wiper when he got back to the club. He read the ticket and then tore it up and threw the pieces down the sewer. Rigoberto Mendez was watching him from the doorway, his arms folded across his chest. He told Sonny that Tirana and her bleached blonde hair had gone off with a Dominican who looked very white.

  “Where’s Juju?” he asked.

  “Last I seen him, he was with some hot babe we met on the street.”

  “That’s Juje, all right,” Mendez said.

  “That’s him,” Sonny said.

  11

  THE MORNING STARTED OUT GOOD. SATURDAY, THE TWENTY-NINTH DAY OF AUGUST.

  Not too hot, not too muggy. Looked like it was going to be a great day for the beach. Looked like there wouldn’t be too much traffic on the highways leading to the mountains or the beaches; most people who had the wherewithal had got out of the city yesterday afternoon. All in all, it looked good, A distinct change from the night before. Well, the start of the weekend. You had to expect things.