The Big Bad City

by McBain, Ed

  Last night, for example, some kid in a Calm’s Point mall had shot up seven or eight innocent bystanders while trying to target a fifteen-year-old girl who’d had the temerity to quit a violent street gang. The shooter missed her entirely. He also got away. Last night, too, because this was a big city and it was the summertime, and tempers flared during the summer, a man threw another man’s pigeon coop off the roof in an area of the city called Cascabel, which was the Hispanic section of Diamond-back. For good measure, he also threw the owner of the pigeon coop off the roof. Nobody knew what had caused the argument between them.

  In another part of the city last night, a kid trying to light a crack pipe had accidentally set fire to his T-shirt, and had ripped off the shirt and tossed it into a corner that unfortunately happened to have a pile of newspapers stacked in it. The papers had caught fire and caused a consuming blaze in the Riverhead apartment where the kid’s three-month-old sister was asleep in her crib. The little girl suffered third-degree burns all over her body. The kids’ parents had been out dancing.

  Also last night, a body came floating in downstream of the Hamilton Bridge on the River Harb, and it was identified as that of a small-time drug dealer and parttime pimp known as Julian “Juju” Judell, who had been arrested for illegal possession only a week earlier, and was out on bail awaiting trial when someone shot him and tossed him in the river. Half his face had been blown away with a high-caliber weapon. The other half had been gnawed away by river rats before the body was discovered under the pilings off Hector Street.

  None of this happened in the Eighty-seventh Precinct.

  It was a big city.

  But on Saturday morning at eight o’clock sharp, because both cops and lab technicians get to work early, Harold Fowles called the Eight-Seven and asked to speak to Detective Meyer Meyer, who had got in some twenty minutes earlier and was drinking a cup of coffee at his desk. Fowles reported that they’d come up roses on the felony-murder suspect, and he gave Meyer a name for the man whose fingerprints he’d lifted from the fire escape. He also gave him an address that was three years old and probably no longer valid.

  The good day was starting to go bad.

  What Sonny was starting to realize was that except when he was home with the wife and kiddies, Carella was joined at the hip to his partner, the big black cop whose name Sonny didn’t even know. So unless he wanted to shoot up the whole fuckin police department and Carella’s family besides, he had to catch him either going in the house or coming out of it. Alone. Had to catch the man by his lonesome or a lot of innocent people would suffer. Sonny had no desire to hurt any innocent person.

  It never once occurred to him that Carella’s father had been an innocent person who’d been gunned down minding his own business during a holdup. It never occurred to him that Juju Judell had been an innocent person merely imparting wisdom about the ways cops carried grudges over the years. It never occurred to him that Carella—the target of all this surveillance and scrutiny—was himself an innocent person who had, in fact, not blown Sonny away when he’d had the opportunity to do so. None of this occurred to him.

  His focus now was in getting the job done.

  Because, you see, it was beginning to trouble him, the glimpses he had of this man kissing his wife goodbye when he left the house in the morning, the glimpses he had of this man laughing and joking with his partner, the glimpses he had of this man leaving the station house at night, his brow furrowed, his face troubled, like he was deep in thought. This man was beginning to seem like someone he knew, someone he might have hung with, the way he felt certain his black partner hung with him when they weren’t out chasing people like Sonny. If circumstances had been a little different he wouldn’t have shot this man’s father—he couldn’t even remember now the series of events leading to the shooting—and wouldn’t now have to take out Carella himself because he represented a lifelong threat.

  That was the whole damn thing of it.

  The man had to go because Juju was right, Sonny’d never be able to breathe easy while he was still alive. At the same time, if circumstances were just a little different—

  Fuck that noise, circumstances were not a little different! Circumstances were what they were. Circumstances were what they’d been for Sonny from the day a doctor smacked his black ass and brought him into this fucking white world. The thing had to be done. And it had to be done fast. Before Sonny went all pussy. Before it started going bad.

  He didn’t know that it had already started going bad up there in Hightown, where the owner of a social club named Siesta had told a detective from the Eighty-eighth Precinct that the last person they’d seen Juju with was a man named Sonny Cole.

  The fingerprints belonged to a man named Leslie Blyden.

  He was twenty-seven years old, and had served with a mechanized cavalry division during the Gulf War. He’d got his right hand caught between a drive wheel and a crawler track, crushing the pinkie and necessitating amputation. He’d earned a Purple Heart, a medical discharge, and a plane ride back home. His last known address was on Beasley Boulevard in Majesta, but the super there said no one by that name was living there now. The super himself was new, so he couldn’t tell them when Mr. Blyden had moved away.

  Blyden was not a common name. Only six of them in the Isola directory, none of them Leslies. Four in Riverhead, ditto. Another half dozen in Calm’s Point, only two in Majesta. None of them were Leslies. But one of the three Blydens listed in the Bethtown directory was a person named Leslie. Male or female, they couldn’t tell, but they guessed a woman would have used the letter L instead of her full name. They dared not call ahead to find out. If Leslie Blyden was their man, he had killed two people. Besides, it was a good day for a ferry ride.

  It would start turning bad for them in about forty minutes.

  Thomas Hollister, the man who’d played bass guitar for The Five Chord nee The Racketeers, had stopped calling himself Totobi Hollister the moment he recognized that if you deliberately chose a name that branded you as an African-American, you were limiting your job possibilities. Tote Hollister was fine for a bass guitarist in a rock band, but it was not so fine for a lawyer. The minute the band broke up, Hollister had gone back to school, getting his law degree last year from Ramsey University, right here in the city. He’d been working for the firm of Gideon, Weinberg and Katzman since last July, more than a year now.

  “When did the band break up?” Brown asked.

  “Minute we finished the tour that summer. Katie decided she’d had enough, told us so long, boys. Without Katie, we were just another garage band.”

  The men were sitting in a small pocket park across the street from Hollister’s office. He had come in on a Saturday to finish some work in preparation for the start of a Monday morning trial. A slight, slender man, he was wearing designer sunglasses and a tan tropical suit that complemented his coconut-shell color. He was lighter than Brown. Hell, Brown’s wife said every brother in the city was lighter than he was. Brown took this as a compliment. He enjoyed looking mean and tough. He enjoyed the hell out of being a big black cop.

  “Why’d she decide to quit, do you know?” Carella asked.

  “Well … I’m not sure I know why,” Hollister said.

  “Did you ever talk about it?”

  “Never.”

  “We understand you were close to her,” Carella said.

  “I think we were. You know how it is,” he said to Brown. “There are limitations.”

  Brown nodded.

  “Be nice if there weren’t, but there are,” Hollister said. “As it was, we were very good friends. Which in itself was a miracle. Poor black kid from the ghetto, upper-middle-class white girl from Philadelphia? Her father a college professor, her mother a psychiatrist? Hell, my mother packs groceries in a supermarket. My father drives a bus. It probably wouldn’t have gone farther, anyway. At least we ended up good friends.”

  “Would you have liked it to go farther?” Carella asked.
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  “Yes. Sure, In fact, I think I might have been in love with Katie. In fact, I think she might have loved me, too. It’s funny, you know. There are no color lines in the music business. You make good music, it doesn’t matter who or what you are. If there’s any prejudice at all, it’s the other way around. Black musicians, white musicians, there’s always a sort of rivalry as to who’s better. Like you invented harmony, man, but we invented rhythm. Look, I’m not saying anything would have developed between Katie and me if we hadn’t been traveling through Dixie. It just made it more difficult. It pointed up our differences instead of our samenesses, do you see what I mean? We were both damn good musicians. That should have been the point.”

  Behind them, a wall of water flowed down a high wall, creating an artificial waterfall that seemed to cool the day and possibly might have. The air stirred. Mist touched their faces. They did not want Hollister to go into the same sort of reverie Roselli had indulged in yesterday. At the same time, they wanted to know what had happened down South that had caused Katie Cochran to leave the band when the tour was over.

  “The South isn’t what it used to be, you know,” Hollister said. “You go into any expensive restaurant in Georgia, you’ll see more blacks in it than you will in a similar restaurant up here. Integration is a fact down south. Up here, it’s a myth. Up here, there isn’t even a pretense of races mingling. In the South, you don’t have to sit in the back of the bus anymore and you don’t have to drink at separate water fountains, but at the same time you don’t see any pepper-and-salt couples, at least I didn’t. I do a lot of business in San Francisco, I see more mixed couples there than I do either here or in the South, mostly Asian-white, but mixed anyway. The prejudices linger, man, they linger.”

  Brown nodded again.

  “There’s integration in the South,” Hollister said, “but there isn’t oneness, do you follow me? They don’t say nigger anymore, but they still think nigger. Same as up here. The N word is forbidden, but that doesn’t stop the white man from thinking it. The only reason he doesn’t say it out loud is he knows it can get him killed. Excuse me, Detective, that’s prejudice in itself, isn’t it?”

  “But maybe you’re right,” Carella said.

  Brown looked at him.

  “I remember one thing that really disturbed me one night,” Hollister said. “In fact, it still bothers me …”

  This was in Alabama, we were maybe a third of the way into the tour. There was this crowd of young college professors at the place we were playing, drinking a lot, laughing it up, really digging the music. A very hip, white clique. Some single guys, some guys with their wives, all of them educated, all of them color-blind, right? So one of the professors asked us to come back to his house when we quit for the night, he and his wife wanted to extend the evening, this was one o’clock on a Saturday night, what the hell, they could all sleep late tomorrow morning. This was the New South, nobody had to stand up for my rights. It was understood that if the band went to this party, then Tote went with the band. There was no quarrel there, not even a murmur of dissent. We packed our axes and off we went.

  Well …

  One of the single guys, a professor who taught anthropology or archeology or whatever thought it might make me feel more comfortable if he invited a black girl to join us. This was already condescension, can you dig? I was already perfectly comfortable. I was a college graduate, and a skilled musician besides, here with my friends and fellow musicians who had just made superb music in a roadside joint that frankly didn’t deserve us. But the professor decided to make me feel more comfortable by asking one of the waitresses at the club to come on along to the party.

  The girl wasn’t a college girl putting herself through school, she wasn’t an aspiring model or actress or anything but a very dumb eighteen-year-old black girl who spoke largely black English and drank too much bourbon and made a complete fool of herself while the professor stood by waiting to get in her pants. That was the whole point of the exercise. He no more wanted this mud-eating nigger at that party—yes, nigger—than he wanted me there. All he wanted to do was humiliate her and fuck her. And by doing so, he was humiliating me as well. He was raping us both.

  “I’ll never forget that night,” Hollister said. “I told Katie how I felt afterward. The others had all gone to sleep, we were sitting on the porch outside this motel we were staying at, one of these old run-down Southern motels surrounded by trees hung with moss.”

  For a moment, he was silent, lost in the memory.

  “She kissed me that night,” he said. “Just before we went to our separate rooms. Kissed me and said goodnight. That was the one and only time we ever kissed. I’ll remember that night as long as I live. Kissing Katie Cochran on the porch of that old Southern motel. Two months later, she quit the band.”

  “What’d you mean back there?” Brown asked.

  “When?” Carella asked.

  “When you told him maybe he was right. About the white man thinking nigger. You don’t think nigger, do you?”

  “No.”

  “So why’d you say maybe he was right?”

  “Because lots of white people do.”

  “Let me tell you my own band story,” Brown said. “I used to play clarinet in the high school marching band, this was a long time ago. Some guys …”

  “I didn’t know you played clarinet.”

  “Yeah. B-flat tenor, too, later on. But at the time, all I played was clarinet. And these guys I knew in high school, they were all of them white, were starting a band and they asked would I like to join them. This was kind of weird instrumentation for a rock group, it wasn’t your usual rhythm and guitars. We also had a trumpet in there. Actually, we got a good sound. Five of us in the group. Lead guitar, bass, drums, clarinet, and trumpet. We only played weekends, we were still in high school, you know.

  “Anyway, we go to this wedding job up in Riverhead one Saturday night, and the bride’s father takes one look at me and he pulls the leader aside—a kid named Freddy Stein, I’ll never forget his name—and he tells him either the black guy goes or we can forget about the job. I think back then it was colored guy. Either the colored guy goes or there’s no job for you here. So the band took a vote. And Freddy went to the father of the bride, and told him either the colored guy stays or your daughter has no music for her wedding. He reconsidered. We played the job and everybody went home happy.”

  “Nice story,” Carella said.

  “True story,” Brown said. “It was an Italian wedding.”

  “Figures.”

  “You think that guy still thinks nigger?”

  “I’m sure,” Carella said.

  “That’s the pity of it,” Brown said. “We made damn good music that night.”

  Four of them went in with Kevlar vests because maybe this was a murderer inside the apartment. There was Meyer on point and Kling directly behind him, with Parker and Willis flanking the door and ready to charge in as backups. It was about to go bad in the next three minutes, but none of them knew that yet. They were prepared for anything, jacketed and unholstered, and ready to go the minute Meyer kicked in the door. They were equipped with a No-Knock warrant. This was maybe a murderer inside there.

  In a minute, it would start going bad.

  Meyer listened at the wood.

  Not a sound in there.

  He shrugged, turned to the others, shook his head, signaled nothing in there.

  In thirty seconds, it would go bad.

  He listened again.

  Turned to the others again.

  Nodded and backed off the door, knee coming up, arms spread like a punter going for the extra point, sole and heel of his shoe smashing into the lock, splintering the wood and breaking the screws loose. “Police!” he yelled and behind him Kling yelled “Police!” and all four of them rushed into the room.

  In ten seconds …

  A man wearing gold-rimmed eyeglasses was standing in his undershorts at the kitchen counter, a bread knif
e in his right hand, his left hand cupped over a loaf of Italian bread on the counter.

  “Leslie Blyden?” Meyer shouted.

  “Don’t move!” Kling shouted.

  Five seconds …

  Behind them, Willis and Parker had fanned into the room.

  In three seconds …

  “Leslie Blyden?” Meyer shouted again.

  And it went bad.

  The man turned on them with the bread knife in his hand. He must have seen that they were all wearing vests because he went directly for Meyer, raising the knife high over his head like Anthony Perkins in Psycho, coming at him with the same purposeful stiff-legged stride.

  There was an instant …

  There is always an instant.

  … when Meyer hesitated, but only for an instant because the blade of the knife was rushing toward his chest with seemingly blinding speed, the man’s downward thrust fierce and decisive, he was going to plunge the knife into Meyer’s chest. His eyes said that, the grim set of his mouth said that, but most of all the plunging knife said that.

  Meyer shot him.

  So did the other three cops in the room.

  The man’s chest exploded like the villain’s chest in a Sylvester Stallone movie, holes appearing everywhere, fountains of blood erupting. He was dead even before the knife fell from his hand and he collapsed to the floor.

  “Jesus,” Parker whispered.

  Trouble was, the guy laying dead on the floor there had all five fingers on both of his hands.

  Fat Ollie Weeks called the squadroom at twelve-fifteen that Saturday afternoon and asked to talk to his good old buddy Steve Carella. Sergeant Murchison, sitting the muster desk, told him Carella and Brown were in the field just now, was there anything he could do to help?

  “I hear you guys are getting very trigger-happy, hm?” Ollie said.

  He was sitting at his own desk in the Eight-Eight squadroom farther uptown, looking out the window and eating a ham sandwich on a buttered roll with mustard. Half the sandwich was on his tie. It was rumored that Ollie was the only man in the world who could eat and fart at the same time. Actually, he managed this alternately, taking a bite of the sandwich, swallowing, drinking chocolate milk shake from a cardboard container, passing wind, biting again, chewing, farting, drinking, occasionally belching, a virtual perpetual digestion machine. “First you shoot a guy with a sling-blade knife in your own squadroom, and next you shoot another guy with a bread knife in his own kitchen. You trying to rid the world of knifers, is that it?”