Ghosts

by Ed McBain

  “We go near that door,” Phelps said, “that spic in there’ll blow our fuckin’ heads off.”

  “Think we can hit the window?” one of the Emergency cops asked.

  “What floor is this?” the other one said.

  “The fourth.”

  “How many in the building?”

  “Five.”

  “Worth trying a rope from the roof, don’t you think?”

  “You guys keep him busy outside the door,” the first Emergency cop said. “One of us’ll come in the window behind him.”

  “When you hear us yell,” the second Emergency cop said, “kick in the door. We’ll get him both ways.”

  The patrolmen who were first at the scene had meanwhile talked to a lady in an apartment down the hall who told them there were two daughters in the family—the sixteen-year-old they’d found dead on the floor and a ten-year-old named Consuela. They reported this to the cops working out their strategy in the hallway, and all of them agreed they had what was known as a “hostage situation” here, which made it a bit risky to come flying in the window like Batman. The two Emergency cops were in favor of trying it, anyway, without asking for help from the Hostage Unit. But Phelps and Forbes vetoed them and asked one of the patrolmen to go downstairs and call in for a hostage team. Nobody yet knew whether ten-year-old Consuela was indeed behind that locked door with whoever was shooting the gun or out taking a stroll in the snow instead.

  A genuine hostage situation normally brought a lot of muck-a-mucks to the scene, even if the scene happened to be in a Puerto Rican section of town. By 11:00 that morning, when the two Hostage Unit cops arrived, there were four sergeants, a lieutenant, and a captain standing in the crowded hallway with all the others. The captain was in charge of the operation now, and he laid his plans like someone about to storm the Kremlin, telling the Emergency cops he did indeed want a man on a rope from the roof coming down to the window while the Hostage cops talked to the guy through the door. He wanted bulletproof vests on everybody, including the man coming down on the rope. He wanted Wizonski and Willis in vests as backups behind the Hostage cops at the door. The Emergency cop who planned to make the descent from the roof told him the vest weighed a ton and a half, and he’d have trouble enough on the rope with this wind, never mind wearing a vest that might send him plummeting to the street four stories below. The captain insisted on the vest. They all were ready to take up their positions when the door opened and a thin guy wearing only undershorts threw an empty Colt .45 automatic out into the living room and came out with his hands up over his head. He was weeping. His ten-year-old daughter, Consuela, was on the bed behind him. He had smothered her with a pillow. The captain seemed disappointed that he would not now have the opportunity to put his brilliant plan into action.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Meyer Meyer and Bob O’Brien caught a somewhat more elevated squeal. Ordinarily Meyer did not enjoy working with O’Brien. This had nothing to do with O’Brien’s personality, skill, or courage. It had to do only with O’Brien’s peculiar penchant for getting into situations where it became necessary for him to shoot somebody. O’Brien did not enjoy shooting people. In fact, he went to enormous lengths to avoid having to draw his pistol. But people eager to get shot seemed naturally to gravitate toward him. As a result, because cops don’t like to get shot any more than civilians do, and because working with O’Brien increased the possibility that there would be an exchange of unwanted gunfire, most of the cops on the 87th tried to arrange it so that they were not too often partnered with him. O’Brien, perhaps wrongly, had been dubbed a hard-luck cop. He himself believed that if anywhere in this city there was a man or a woman with a weapon, that weapon would somehow be used against him, and he would have to defend himself. He once told this to the girl he was engaged to marry; she broke the engagement the following week, small wonder.

  Today, though—being Christmas and Hanukkah both—Meyer felt the possibilities for violence in the company of O’Brien were perhaps tilted eighty-twenty in their favor. The odds soared to ninety-ten when they caught the Smoke Rise squeal. Smoke Rise was the most elegant community within the boundaries of the Eight-Seven, almost a township unto itself, with houses ranging in the $200,000 to $300,000 class, most of them commanding splendid views of the River Harb. Moreover, the squeal was a 10-21—a “Burglary Past”—which meant the thief had done his song and dance and then got off the stage to a less than tumultuous applause. There was no danger of anyone shooting at O’Brien—or of O’Brien shooting back—because the man was nowhere on the premises when they arrived.

  Many of the streets in Smoke Rise were named regally—Victoria Circle, Elizabeth Lane, Albert Way, Henry Drive—giving the community a royal tone it neither needed nor desired. The builder, however, taking no chances that his area might be confused with some of the seedier sections on this side of town, had named the streets himself when subdividing the tract. When he ran out of Normandys, Plantaganets, Lancasters, Yorks, Tudors, Oranges, and Hanovers, he switched over to Windsors. And when he ran out of royalty, he hit upon names like Westminster and Salisbury and Winchester (which he abandoned because it sounded too much like a rifle) and Stonehenge. The entire place had an absolutely British tone to it. Many of the houses even looked as if they’d have been right at home on some moor in Cornwall.

  The burglary had taken place on Coronation Drive, just around the corner from Buckingham Way. The house was a multigabled, multiturreted stone and leaded-glass wonder that rose on the bank of the river like the queen’s summer palace. The man who lived inside the house had earned his fortune as a junk dealer when it was still possible to amass great deals of cash without having to give 70 percent of it to Uncle. He still spoke with a distinct Calm’s Point accent, his “deses” and “doses” falling like blasphemies in the vaulted living room with its cathedral ceiling. His family—a wife and two sons—were dressed in their holiday finery. They had left the house at a quarter to 11:00, to deliver some Christmas gifts up the street, and had arrived home at 12:30 to find the place ransacked. They had called the police at once.

  “What’d he take, Mr. Feinberg?” Meyer asked.

  “Everything,” Feinberg said. “He musta backed a truck in the driveway. The stereo’s gone, and the TV, and my wife’s furs and jewelry, and all my cameras from the upstairs closet. Not to mention all the presents that were under the tree. Son of a bitch took everything.”

  In one corner of the living room was a mammoth Christmas tree that must have taken a crew of four to erect and decorate. Meyer did not find the tree strange in a Jewish home. He had struggled with the concept of celebrating Christmas together with the Gentiles ever since his own children were born and had finally succumbed when they were respectively nine, eight, and six. His first compromise had been a wooden orange crate decorated with crepe paper to resemble a chimney. From there he had progressed to a small live spruce complete with a burlapped ball of earth, which he told the children was a Hanukkah bush. He had strained his back planting the damn tree in the backyard after Christmas and the very next year had bought a chopped-down pine from the charitable organization selling them in the empty lot on the corner. He did not feel any less Jewish for having a decorated Christmas tree in his home. As with many Gentiles, the holiday for him was one of spirit rather than religion. If anything on earth could bring people together for the briefest tick of time, Meyer was all for it.

  Some of his Jewish friends told him he was a closet goy. He told them he was also a closet Jew. It was Meyer’s belief that Israel was not the homeland, but a foreign country. He was dedicated to the concept that Israel must survive and, in fact, endure—but there was never any question in his mind that he was first an American, next a Jew, and never an Israeli. He knew that Israel had accepted within its besieged boundaries homeless Jews from all over the world—but he never forgot that America was accepting homeless Jews long before Israel was even a dream. So yes, he had given money to plant trees in Israel. And yes, he ha
ted with all the passion in his soul the acts of terrorism against that tiny nation. And yes, he longed to see those biblical places he knew of only from the days of his youth, when he was going to heder six days a week and was, in fact, the most brilliant Hebrew student in the class. He was pleased that Christmas and Hanukkah fell on the same day this year. He suspected in his heart of hearts, anyway, that all religious holidays had been agrarian holidays centuries ago; it was no accident that Easter and Passover came so close together each year and sometimes—as with this celebration—fell on exactly the same day. Lou Moscowitz, who was a detective/2nd on the squad, told Meyer he was no longer a real Jew. Meyer Meyer was a real Jew with every fiber of his being. He was just his own kind of real Jew.

  The burglar had indeed done a lovely number in the Feinberg house. As the detectives went through it, itemizing the stolen goods, they discovered that many more items had been taken than Feinberg had originally surmised. The premise that the burglar had backed a truck into the driveway now seemed entirely plausible. He had even stolen the boys’ bicycles from the garage and had taken the younger boy’s prize collection of Queen albums. The loss of the albums seemed to distress the kid more than the loss of his new movie camera, a Christmas gift he had left under the tree after opening it. The family’s original outrage at the theft was giving way to a numbed sense of loss that had nothing whatever to do with the value of the goods. Someone had been inside this house. An unwelcome intruder had entered and pillaged, and the most valuable thing he’d stolen was the family’s sense of inviolate privacy. Since the detectives lacked any real knowledge of whether the burglar had been armed with either explosives or a deadly weapon, the crime seemed to be third-degree burglary: “Knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in a building with intent to commit a crime therein.” But the criminal law language was hardly adequate to define the crime that had been committed against the Feinbergs. They would none of them forget this day as long as they lived. For years to come they would tell about the man who had come into their house on Christmas Day, the same day as Hanukkah that year—and of what had happened to the two detectives ten minutes after they left the scene of the crime.

  Meyer and O’Brien’s attention might not have been captured by the moving van had this not been Christmas Day. The van was parked on a side street some fifteen blocks from the Feinberg house and indeed well outside the stone walls that circumscribed the Smoke Rise development. The left rear tire of the van, the one away from the snowbanked curb, was flat. A man wearing a brown leather jacket and a blue woolen watch cap was changing the tire. A tire iron and a lug wrench were on the partially scraped pavement beside him. When they saw the van, neither Meyer nor O’Brien said a word to each other about a moving company working on Christmas Day. They had no need to. Meyer, who was driving, pulled the unmarked sedan into the curb behind the van. Both men got out of the car, one from each side of it. The pavement was still slippery with patches of hardened snow the plows had missed. Their breaths feathered from their mouths as they approached the man lifting the spare tire into place.

  “Need any help?” Meyer asked.

  “No, I’m fine,” the man said. He was in his late twenties, Meyer guessed, a white man with a rather pale complexion that seemed almost chalky against the darkness of his eyes and the black mustache under his nose. The lettering on the side of the truck read CULBERTSON MOVING AND TRUCKING COMPANY. The license plate was a commercial plate from the next state.

  “Got you working on Christmas Day, huh?” O’Brien said casually.

  “Yeah, you know how it is,” the man said.

  “Must be an important load,” Meyer said. “Sent you to pick it up on Christmas.”

  “Listen, what’s it to you?” the man said. “I got a flat here, I’m trying to change it, why don’t you just fuck off, huh?”

  “Police officers,” O’Brien said, and was reaching into his pocket for his shield when the pistol appeared in the man’s hand. The move took them both by surprise. Not many crib burglars—as house and apartment burglars were called—carried weapons. The man committing a burglary at night, especially in a residence where there was a human being at the time, ran the risk of the heaviest burglary rap and might well be armed, even if the gun charge would lengthen his stay in prison. If they’d expected any show of violence—and they truly hadn’t—it might have come by way of a sudden grab for the tire iron on the pavement. But the man reached under his jacket, instead, and the gun appeared in his hand, a .38-caliber pistol pulled from the waistband of his trousers and aimed directly at Meyer now.

  The gun went off before Meyer could react and draw his own pistol. The man fired twice, both shots taking Meyer in the leg and knocking him to the pavement. O’Brien’s gun was in his hand at once. He had no time to think that it was happening to him again. He thought only, My partner is down, and then he saw the man turning the gun toward him, and he fired instantly, catching him in the shoulder, and then fired again as the man toppled over, the second bullet taking him in the chest. The gun still in his right hand, O’Brien knelt over the wounded man, grabbed for the handcuffs at his belt in a clumsy left-handed pull, and then rolled him over with no concern for the wounds pouring blood and cuffed his hands behind his back. Out of breath, he turned to Meyer, who lay on the street with one leg buckled under him.

  “How you doing?” he asked.

  “Hurts,” Meyer said.

  O’Brien went into the car and pulled the radio mike from the dashboard. “This is Eight-Seven-Four,” he said, “on Holmsby and North. Police officer down. I need an ambulance.”

  “Who’s this?” the dispatcher said.

  “Detective O’Brien.”

  As if the dispatcher hadn’t already guessed.

  The nearest hospital to Smoke Rise was Mercy General on North and Platte. There, as a holy crucifix of nuns fluttered about him in the emergency room, an intern slit Meyer’s left trouser leg on both sides, looked at the two holes in his leg—one in the thigh, the other just below the kneecap—and phoned upstairs for immediate use of an operating room. The burglar who’d shot Meyer was afforded the same meticulous care—all God’s creatures, large and small. By 1:00 that Christmas afternoon, both were doing fine in separate rooms on the sixth floor. A patrolman was posted outside the burglar’s room, but that was the only difference.

  The burglar’s name was Michael Addison. In the van he’d stolen from the Culbertson parking lot in the next state, the police found not only the loot from the Feinberg job but also the flotsam and jetsam of several other burglaries he’d committed that day. Addison refused to admit anything. He said he was a sick man, and he wanted a lawyer. He said he was going to sue O’Brien personally and the city corporately for having shot an innocent person trying to change a tire. O’Brien, leaning over his bed, whispered to him that if his partner came out of this a cripple, Addison had better move to China.

  Back at the squadroom, Arthur Brown—who was an English literature freak—mentioned to Miscolo in the Clerical Office that the guy had been named absolutely perfectly for a burglar.

  “What do you mean?” Miscolo said.

  “Addison and Steal,” Brown said, and grinned.

  “I don’t get it,” Miscolo said.

  “Steal,” Brown said. “S-T-E-A-L.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Miscolo said. “You want some coffee?”

  This was before a team of six men stole an entire city street.

  The call came in at ten minutes to 5:00. By then there had been the expected number of actual suicides or suicide attempts—in fact, a bit more than anyone could remember for previous Christmases. By then Lieutenant Byrnes had personally driven out to Meyer’s house to break the news to Sarah. Sarah was relieved to learn her husband had only been shot in the leg; the moment she saw Byrnes on her doorstep she’d assumed the worst of her fears had been realized. Byrnes drove her to the hospital after his brief visit, and she spent the rest of the afternoon with Meyer, who complained that
when a man got shot, his wife should bring him a nize bowl tschicken soup. Along about then, as she was holding Meyer’s hand between both her own and telling him how glad she was that he was still alive, a truck pulled into Gedney Avenue, and six men got out of it to begin tearing up the cobblestone street.

  Gedney was one of the few areas in the city that still boasted cobblestone streets—or at least until that Christmas Day it did. The cobblestones, some said, went back to when the Dutch still governed the city. Others maintained that the Dutch wouldn’t have known a cobblestone from a tulip, and it was the British who’d first paved Gedney. The name of the avenue was British, wasn’t it? So it had to be the British. Whoever had paved it, the six men who jumped out of the truck were now unpaving it. The plows had been through Gedney twice already, and the street was relatively clear of snow. The men set to work with great vigor—odd for civil service employees at any time, but especially peculiar on Christmas Day—using picks and crowbars, prying loose the precious cobblestones, lifting them into the truck, stacking them row on row there, working with the precision of a demolition squad. All up and down the street, people peered from their windows, watching the men at work, marveling at their dedicated industry. It took the men two hours to unpave the entire block from corner to corner. At the end of that time they piled back into the truck and drove off. No one noticed the license plate of the truck.