by McBain, Ed
“So what occasions this call?” Matthew asked at last.
“Well, if you’re really out of the crime business …”
“I am.”
“Then you can’t tell me what the Calusa police learned from four musicians and a girl singer who were down there around this time four years ago.”
“Why were the Calusa cops interested in them?” Matthew asked.
“Because a man named Charlie Custer drowned and got eaten by alligators.”
“Piece of cake,” Matthew said.
The man Murchison put through to the squadroom told Meyer that he knew the Leslie Blyden they were looking for.
“I saw the Chief of Detectives on television Saturday night,” he said, “talking about a Leslie Blyden. I said to myself, What? Then yesterday’s papers said he had a pinkie missing, the Blyden you’re looking for. I said to myself, That has to be the Les I knew in the Gulf. What I want to know now …”
“Yes, sir?”
“Is there a reward?”
“No, sir, there is not.”
“Then thanks a lot,” the man said and hung up.
Meyer guessed he didn’t know that police departments had Caller ID capability and that his name was already displayed on Meyer’s desktop LED panel. FRANK GIRARDI was what it read, with a telephone number directly above it.
Meyer didn’t think they’d be calling ahead.
“So what we’ve got,” Brown said, “is a piano player and a drummer who each say they were packing instruments in a van with a person who’s now dead of AIDS. And we’ve got the piano player saying he saw the drummer, together with a lady who later got strangled in the park, go in the office of a man who later got eaten by alligators. And we’ve got the drummer saying the same thing about the piano player.”
“That’s what we’ve got,” Carella said.
“So one of them’s got to be lying.”
“Not necessarily. Four years was a long time ago. They may not be remembering clearly.”
“They remembered every other detail about that night, though, didn’t they?” Brown said. “Drummers lie a lot, Steve. So do piano players. In fact, been my experience most musicians do. Specially when there’s nobody alive can contradict them.”
“You’ll get letters.”
“I hope not,” Brown said, and turned to look over his shoulder. “Am I dreaming,” he asked, “or has that Honda been with us the past half hour?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Behind us. Little green Accord.”
Carella looked in the rearview mirror.
“I hadn’t noticed,” he said.
“Black man at the wheel.”
“Makes him a wanted desperado, right?” Carella said.
“It’s the next left,” Brown said.
“I know.”
He made the turn at the next corner. Brown’s apartment building was three doors in. He pulled up in front of it. The little green Accord drove right on by. Brown gave it a hard look, and then got out of the car.
“See you tomorrow,” Carella said.
“Want to come up for a drink?”
“Got to go pick up the dope money from Riverhead.”
“Tell them to mail mine.”
“The protection we give, they should messenger it.”
“No respect anymore,” Brown said, and grinned, and closed the door on his side. Carella returned the grin and drove off.
Frank Girardi had lost both legs in George Bush’s television war, which featured surgical strikes and hardly any deaths on either side, to hear the generals and the politicians tell it. Girardi had been wounded in the First Cavalry Division feint up the Wadi al Batin, and now he worked at a computer in his small Calm’s Point apartment, addressing envelopes for any firm that was willing to pay him for this onerous task.
“Reason you get so many letters with handwritten addresses on them is because a lot of people don’t know how to do the envelopes on their computers. I make address files for these various companies, and then I run off the envelopes on my printer and send them back by messenger. I get ten cents an envelope. It’s not bad work.”
Girardi looked to be in his late twenties. Each of the detectives had a good ten years on him. They were each suddenly aware of their legs, the fact that they had legs and Girardi didn’t. They were here to pry Leslie Blyden’s address from him, but it was a little difficult to put the muscle on a man who was sitting in a wheelchair.
“Reason I asked if there was a reward,” Girardi said, “is I figure I got one coming, don’t you? I get all shot up in what was basically an oil war, I think my country owes me something, don’t you?”
Meyer did not think it appropriate to inform Girardi that the city’s police department was not his country. They had come here prepared to offer what they would have given any police informer, a sum ranging from a hundred to a thousand, depending on the value of the information. They took this money from a squadroom slush fund, the origins of which were obscure, but in police work petty detail often fell between the cracks and the point was to get the job done. Just before he and Kling left the squadroom, Meyer signed out a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. If this money had originally belonged to a dope dealer and it was now being used to buy information that would lead to a killer, that was justification enough not to ask questions.
The trouble here, though, was that Girardi wasn’t a sleazy two-bit informer who’d sell his ax-murderer brother for a cup of coffee and a donut. Girardi was a war hero. A man with both the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor. You couldn’t offer a war hero a dope dealer’s dirty money in exchange for information. You couldn’t pressure him, either. You couldn’t say, Okay, Frank, you want us to take another look at the open file on that grocery store holdup? You couldn’t bargain. You couldn’t say, So long, Frank, this shit isn’t worth more than a hundred. The man was a war hero.
“Look,” Meyer said, “we don’t want to insult you …”
“I’ve been insulted by experts,” Girardi said.
“As I told you on the phone, there’s no reward on this thing. But we’re prepared to give you money out of our own pockets …”
“Bullshit,” Girardi said.
“Whatever. It embarrasses me, believe me. A man who did so much for his country, I wish I could offer more. But all we can go is a thousand.”
“I’ll take it,” Girardi said.
13
THE PROBLEM WAS ALL THE BACKGROUND.
BLYDEN’S LANDLADY HAD TOLD them that she’d seen him leaving the building at around six-thirty P.M. What he usually did, she told them, was walk up to the McDonald’s on the next block, catch himself a bite there. Did it every night, far as she could tell. A creature of habit was Mr. Leslie Blyden.
The sign out front was claiming billions and billions of hamburgers sold, but Meyer figured that was an underestimate. The place at a quarter to seven that Monday night was packed with diners inside and cars outside. They had no clear picture of what Blyden looked like because the Feebs hadn’t yet sent along his army ID photo. All they had was the description of him from when he’d entered the service nine years ago. They also knew he’d lost the pinkie on his right hand since then.
This same information hadn’t helped them much when they killed the Leslie Blyden who now turned out to be a man named Lester Blier, who was wanted in the state of Arizona for mail fraud, and who’d been living here in the city under a touch-close alias for nearly two years—which perhaps explained his panicky reaction on Saturday. The new data somewhat lessened the public hue and cry over four armed and armored police detectives nailing an innocent man in his own kitchen. But only somewhat. Mail fraud was perceived in the public imagination as some sort of gentlemanly crime, far distant from armed robbery or rape. You didn’t go gunning down a man who had a mail fraud warrant chasing him from Wee Mesa, Arizona. This was a sophisticated city, man, and it did not expect its police officers to behave like barbaric goons.
The presence of background severely limited their choice of engagement. This was not a matter of the English and French deciding like proper gentlemen to settle their ancient dispute on the level though muddy field of Agincourt. The guidelines clearly stated that if you anticipated shooting, then you made your arrest where there wasn’t no background, kiddies. The Gang of Four, as the media had immediately dubbed Meyer, Kling, Parker, and Willis, congregated on the sidewalk outside, working out a game plan.
They decided that two of them would go in to scout the joint, see if they could spot a guy with the pinkie missing on his right hand. Even though Willis and Parker had caught the murder of the lady and her teenybopper lover boy, Meyer and Kling had caught the initial Cookie-Boy burglary. The cases were now irrevocably joined at the hip, but the doctrine of First Man Up prevailed, and Meyer and Kling caught the brass ring.
Parker was delighted. All that background in there made him very nervous. Suppose The Cookie Boy spotted fuzz on the premises and decided to shoot his way out? Guidelines applied only to law-enforcement officers. The rest of the population could fire at will. So Parker took up a position in the parking lot outside the side door, and Willis planted himself outside the front doors, and Meyer and Kling went in looking for a man some six feet tall, with black hair and blue eyes, weighing around two hundred pounds, and missing the pinkie finger on his right hand.
The air conditioning provided a welcome oasis of relief after the soggy atmosphere outside. Meyer and Kling fanned out, one heading for the service counter on the right, the other moving toward the seating area on the left. Each cop looked like any of the other customers in the place. Not many men here were wearing jackets, but Meyer and Kling were wearing them only to hide the hardware, and their clothing was wrinkled and limp from the weather outside. No one in the place gave them a second look.
Meyer got on the line closest to the door, scoping the crowd, alternately glancing at the menu on the wall above the counter and the customers waiting to place orders. Kling was doing the same thing on the other side of the room, peering around like a guy looking for his wife and three little kids. First came height, weight, color of hair and eyes. They were easier to check at a glance. Searching for a missing pinkie demanded a scrutiny of hands. Nobody ever looked at another person’s hands unless he was some kind of pervert. The missing pinkie came only after all the other criteria were met.
Kling was the one who spotted him.
He was sitting silhouetted in a western window, drinking a cup of coffee, the sun dipping lower on the horizon behind him. He looked a lot like John Travolta, but what would John Travolta be doing in a McDonald’s in Calm’s Point? For a moment, Kling felt like going over to the table and asking him if he was John Travolta, but then he noticed the missing pinkie on the hand holding the coffee cup, and any thought of getting an autograph went straight out of his mind. He walked swiftly toward the utensil counter, turned sideways so he could keep an eye on Blyden while at the same time shielding the walkie-talkie that came out of his pocket and up to his mouth.
“Got him,” he said. “Third table on the western wall. Sitting alone, looks like he’s finished his meal and is ready to go.”
There was a silence.
Then Meyer’s voice said, “I see him.”
“What do we do?” Parker asked.
“Let him jump,” Kling said.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Meyer moving off the line and heading toward the dining room. In that same instant, Blyden put down his coffee cup, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, picked up his tray, and started for where Kling was standing. Kling moved away at once. Blyden went to the trash container at the end of the counter, scraped his tray clean, stacked it, and again moved toward where Kling was now standing near the side exit door.
“Moving out,” Meyer said. “Side exit.”
“I’m here,” Parker said.
Willis, hearing this out front, began moving toward the parking lot.
Blyden walked past Kling without looking at him. He shoved open the exit door, walked past Parker without looking at him. Meyer and Kling came out immediately behind him. Parker fell in on Blyden’s left. Willis, spotting their approach, took up position ahead of him. The classic three points of a moving-target triangle. If he’d come here in a car, they’d have to close in before he entered it. Either that, or lose him. Plenty of background out here, too, but not as closely packed as it was inside. No one dared use a walkie-talkie again, not just yet. One false move and he’d bolt.
Somebody made that false move.
They would later debate who it might have been.
Maybe the entire setup was the false move, the short guy in a jacket moving some ten feet ahead of Blyden, the guy needing a shave and also wearing a jacket moving parallel to Blyden some twelve feet on his left, the two guys in jackets behind Blyden, maybe all at once there were too many guys in jackets on a hot summer night, and maybe all at once Blyden smelled cop.
Whatever it was, he suddenly darted to his right, the open side of the surveillance triangle, and began racing up the avenue. Willis was closest to him when he made the break. He started after him at once, and shouted the initial warning mandated by the guidelines, “Police! Stop!” but Blyden kept running because he knew he was looking at a positive burglary and two possible felony murders. “Police! Stop!” The second warning. But a different voice this time. Parker’s voice. Coming up fast on Willis’s left, his legs longer than Willis’s, pounding past him and closing on Blyden, who would have thought it? Andy Parker?
None of the detectives dared open fire. There was simply too damn much background on this hot August night with everybody out for a walk, the sky purple now as Blyden fled westward into it. Moreover, they were literally gun shy, having been lambasted in the press and on television, having been severely chastised by a publicly defensive but privately furious Chief of Detectives. So they followed Blyden down the avenue into the setting sun, four of them in a Keystone Kops opera, echoing one after the other, “Police! Stop!,” the choruses overlapping, the crowds parting, but not one of them firing the weapon that would have decisively stopped Blyden in his tracks.
It was Parker …
Andy Parker?
… who finally took a headlong dive at Blyden, throwing himself in the air like a football hero, which he’d never been, grabbing for Blyden’s churning legs and pounding feet, making a tackle he’d never before made in his lifetime, and bringing Blyden and himself crashing to the sidewalk in a sprawling tangle of arms and legs. The other detectives came thundering up, nobody yelling “Stop” anymore because Parker …
Andy Parker?
… had finally stopped Blyden.
So all there was to say now was “Police.”
Which Meyer said.
And breathlessly added, “You’re under arrest.”
And began reciting the Miranda rigmarole.
“You have the right to remain silent, you have the right …”
And so on.
This was America.
Nellie Brand wondered why it was that every time she was on homicide call there was a murder in the Eighty-seventh Precinct. Her home phone rang at seven-thirty P.M. She and her husband were just about to leave the apartment. S
he was wearing a pretty white summer frock with a yoke neck and pale blue French-heeled pumps. Simple silver and turquoise pendant on a peach-colored silk cord. Sand-colored hair swept back and caught in a ponytail. Jeff Callard was the cop calling from the D.A.’s Office downtown.
“Hello, Jeff,” she said.
“Nellie,” he said, “they caught The Cookie Boy.”
Nellie didn’t know who The Cookie Boy was. She figured he was a sex offender who lured kiddies into his car. Callard told her who he was. She said she was all dressed up to go out to dinner with her husband. Callard said he was sorry, but this was August, and half the world was on vacation. She told him her husband would divorce her.
“That’s okay,” Callard said, “I’ll marry you.” She went into the bedroom to change her clothes.
When she got uptown at eight-fifteen, she was wearing simple tailored slacks, a tailored shirt, and a fawn-colored linen jacket. Her hair was still in a ponytail. She was expecting Carella, but the desk sergeant told her he’d already gone home. He told her The Gang of Four had made the arrest here. She didn’t know who The Gang of Four was, either. Working for the District Attorney’s Office did not leave much time for watching television. She liked Carella, and was a little disappointed that he hadn’t been the arresting officer.
The Gang of Four was waiting upstairs. Meyer and Kling, she knew. Kling introduced her to the other two detectives, Willis and Parker, and then told her Blyden’s lawyer hadn’t yet arrived, so they had a little time to talk here. Blyden was The Cookie Boy. Full name was Leslie Talbot Blyden. Gulf War veteran, lost his pinkie in an accident overseas. Admitted to the burglary, but said he had nothing to do with killing two people.
“We’re looking at a Burg Two and two counts of felony murder,” Meyer said.
“He looks like John Travolta,” Parker said.