Give the Boys a Great Big Hand

by Ed McBain

  “Your clothes. Your pants, your tie, your raincoat, your umbrella. Black.”

  “I bought them for a funeral,” Cronin said.

  “Whose funeral?”

  “A buddy of mine. We used to run a crap game together.”

  “You ran a crap game, too, Lennie? You’ve been a busy little man, haven’t you?”

  “Oh, this wasn’t nothing illegal. We never played for money.”

  “And your friend died recently, is that right?”

  “Yeah. The other day. So I bought the black clothes. Out of respect. You can check. I can tell you the place where I bought them.”

  “We’d appreciate that, Lennie. But you didn’t own these clothes on Wednesday, did you?”

  “Wednesday. Now let me think a minute. What’s today?”

  “Today is Saturday.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, Saturday. No. I bought the clothes Thursday. You can check it. They probably got a record.”

  “How about you, Lennie?”

  “How about me? How do you mean how about me?”

  “Have you got a record?”

  “Well, a little one.”

  “How little?”

  “I done a little time once. A stickup. Nothing serious.”

  “You may do a little more,” Carella said. “But nothing serious.”

  In the Interrogation Room, Lieutenant Byrnes said, “You’re a pretty forthright woman, Mrs. Livingston, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t like being dragged out of my house in the middle of the morning,” Martha said.

  “Weren’t you embarrassed about going downstairs in your slip?”

  “No. I keep my body good. I got a good body.”

  “What were you and Mr. Cronin trying to hide, Mrs. Livingston?”

  “Nothing. We’re in love. I’ll shout it from the rooftops.”

  “Why did he try to get out of that room?”

  “He wasn’t trying to get out. He told them what he was trying to do. He wanted to see if it was still raining.”

  “So he was climbing out on the fire escape to do that, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you aware that your son Richard could be dead at this moment, Mrs. Livingston?”

  “Who cares? Good riddance to bad rubbish. The people he was hanging around with, he’s better off dead. I raised a bum instead of a son.”

  “What kind of people was he hanging around with?”

  “A gang, a street gang, it’s the same story every place in this lousy city. You try to raise a kid right, and what happens? Please, don’t get me started.”

  “Did your son tell you he was leaving home?”

  “No. I already gave all this to another detective when I reported him missing. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t give a damn, as long as I get my relief checks. Now that’s that.”

  “You told the arresting officers your husband was dead. Is that true?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “When did he die?”

  “Three years ago.”

  “Did he die, or did he leave?”

  “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “He left.”

  The room was suddenly very silent.

  “Three years ago?”

  “Three years ago. When Dickie was just sixteen. He packed up and left. It ain’t so easy to raise a boy alone. It ain’t so easy. And now he’s gone, too. Men stink. They all stink. They all want one thing. Okay, I’ll give it to them. But not here.” She tapped her chest. “Not here inside, where it counts. They all stink. Every single one of them.”

  “Do you think your son might have run off with some of his friends?”

  “I don’t know what he done, the little bastard, and I don’t care. Gratitude. I raised him alone after his father left. And this is what I get. He runs out on me. Quits his job and runs out. He’s just like all the rest of them, they all stink. You can’t trust any man alive. I hope he drops dead, wherever he is. I hope the little bastard drops…”

  And suddenly she was weeping.

  She sat quite still in the chair, a woman of forty-five with ridiculously flaming red hair, a big-breasted woman who sat attired only in a silk slip, a fat woman with the faded eyes of a drunkard, and her shoulders did not move, and her face did not move, and her hands did not move, she sat quite still in the hardbacked wooden chair while the tears ran down her face and her nose got red and her teeth clamped into her lips.

  “Running out on me,” she said, and then she didn’t say anything else. She sat stiffly in the chair, fighting the tears that coursed down her cheeks and her neck and stained the front of her slip.

  “I’ll get you a coat or something, Mrs. Livingston,” Byrnes said.

  “I don’t need a coat. I don’t care who sees me. I don’t care. Everybody can see what I am. One look, and everybody can see what I am. I don’t need a coat. A coat ain’t going to hide nothing.”

  Byrnes left her alone in the room, weeping stiffly in the hardbacked chair.

  They found exactly thirty-four ounces of marijuana in Martha Livingston’s apartment. Apparently, Leonard Cronin was not a very good mathematician. Apparently, too, he was in slightly more serious trouble than he had originally presumed. If, as he’d stated, there had only been a stick or two of marijuana in the room—enough to have made at least two ounces of the stuff—he’d have been charged with possession, which particular crime was punishable by imprisonment of from two to ten years. Now thirty-four ounces ain’t two ounces. And possession of sixteen ounces or more of narcotics other than heroin, morphine, or cocaine created a rebuttable presumption of intent to sell, the “rebuttable” meaning that Cronin could claim he hadn’t intended selling it at all, at all. And the maximum term of imprisonment for possession with intent to sell was ten years, the difference between the two charges being that a simple possession rap would usually draw a lesser prison term whereas an intent to sell rap usually drew the limit.

  But Cronin had a few other things to worry about. By his own admission, he and Martha Livingston had lit a few sticks before hopping into bed together and Section 2010 of the Penal Law quite bluntly stated: “Perpetration of an act of intercourse with a female not one’s wife who is under the influence of narcotics is punishable by an indeterminate sentence of one day to life or a maximum of twenty years.”

  When the gun charge was added to this, and the running of an illegal crap game considered, even if one wished to forget the simple charge of simple adultery—a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in a penitentiary or county jail for not more than six months, or by a fine of not more than $250, or by both—even if one wished to forget this minor infraction, Leonard Cronin was going to be a busier little man than he had ever been.

  As for Martha Livingston, she’d have been better off exploring Africa. Even allowing for her own conviction that all men stank, she had certainly chosen a prize this time. The narcotics, whomever they belonged to, had been found in her pad. The lady who’d fallen in love at first sight was going to have a hell of a tough row to hoe.

  But whatever else lay ahead for the hapless lovers, homicide and butchery would not be included in the charges against them. A check with the clothing store Leonard Cronin named proved that he had indeed purchased his funeral outfit on Thursday. A further check of his rooming-house closet showed that he owned no other black garments. And neither did Mrs. Livingston.

  There must be a God, after all.

  On Sunday morning, Cotton Hawes went to church in the rain before reporting to work.

  When he came out, it was still raining and he felt much the same as he’d felt before the services. He didn’t know why he expected to feel any different; he’d certainly never been washed by any of the great religious fervor that had possessed his minister father. But every Sunday, rain or shine, Cotton Hawes went to church. And every Sunday he sat and listened to the sermon, and he recited the psalms, and he waited. He didn’t kno
w exactly what he was waiting for. He suspected he was waiting for a bolt of lightning and an earsplitting crash of thunder that would suddenly reveal the face of God. He supposed that all he really wanted to see was a glimpse of something that was not quite so real as the things that surrounded him every day of the week.

  For whatever else could be said about police work—and there were countless things to be said, and countless things being said—no one could deny that it presented its practitioners with a view of life that was as real as bread crumbs. Police work dealt with essentials, raw instincts and basic motives, stripped of all the hoop-dee-dah of the sterilized, compressed-in-a-vacuum civilization of the twentieth century. As he walked through the rain, Hawes thought it odd that most of the time consumed by people was spent in sharing the fantasies of another. A thousand escape hatches from reality were available to every man jack in the world—books, the motion pictures, television, magazines, plays, concerts, ballets, anything or everything designed to substitute a pretense of reality, a semblance of real life, a fantasy world for a flesh-and-blood one.

  Now perhaps it was wrong for a cop to be thinking this way, Hawes realized, because a cop was one of the fantasy figures in one of the world’s escapes: the mystery novel. The trouble was, he thought, that only the fantasy cop was the hero while the real cop was just a person. It seemed somehow stupid to him that the most honored people in the world were those who presented the fantasies, the actors, the directors, the writers, all the various performers whose sole reason for being was to entertain. It was as if a very small portion of the world was actually alive, and these people were alive only in so far as they performed in created fantasies. The rest of the people were observing; the rest of the people were spectators. It would not have been half so sad if these people were viewing the spectacle of real life. Instead, they were observing only a representation of life, so that they became twice-removed from life itself.

  Even conversation seemed to concern itself primarily with the fantasy world, and not the real. Did you see Jack Paar last night? Have you read Doctor Zhivago? Wasn’t Dragnet exciting? Did you see the review of Sweet Bird of Youth? Talk, talk, talk, but all of the talk had as its nucleus the world of make-believe. And now the television programs had carried this a step further. More and more channels were featuring people who simply talked about things, so that even the burden of talking about the make-believe world had been removed from the observer’s shoulders—there were now other people who would talk it over for him. Life became thrice-removed.

  And in the midst of this thrice-removed existence, there was reality, and reality for a cop was a hand severed at the wrist.

  Now what the hell would they do with that hand on Naked City?

  He didn’t know. He only knew that every Sunday he went to church and looked for something.

  On this Sunday, he came out feeling the same as when he’d gone in, and he walked along the shining wet sidewalk bordering the park, heading for the station house. The green globes had been turned on in defense against the rain, the numerals “87” glowing feebly against the slanting gray. He looked up at the dripping stone facade, climbed the low flat steps, and entered the muster room. Dave Murchison was sitting behind the desk, reading a movie magazine. The cover showed a picture of Debbie Reynolds, and the headline asked the provocative question What Will Debbie Do Now?

  He followed the pointing arrow of the DETECTIVE DIVISION sign, climbed the metal steps to the second story, and walked down the long, dim corridor. He shoved through the gate in the slatted railing, tossed his hat at the rack in the corner, and went to his desk. The squadroom was oddly silent. He felt almost as if he were in church again. Frankie Hernandez, a Puerto Rican cop who’d been born and raised in the precinct neighborhood, looked up and said, “Hi, Cotton.”

  “Hello, Frankie,” he said. “Steve come in yet?”

  “He called in about ten minutes ago,” Hernandez answered. “Said to tell you he was going straight to the docks to talk to the captain of the Farren.”

  “Okay,” Hawes said. “Anything else?”

  “Got a report from Grossman on the meat cleaver.”

  “What mea—oh yeah, yeah, the Androvich woman.” He paused. “Any luck?”

  “Negative. Not a thing on it but yesterday’s roast.”

  “Where is everybody, anyway?” Hawes asked. “It’s so quiet around here.”

  “There was a burglary last night, grocery store on Culver. Andy and Meyer are out on it. The loot called in to say he’d be late. Wife’s got a fever, and he’s waiting for the doctor.”

  “Isn’t Kling supposed to be in today?”

  Hernandez shook his head. “Swapped with Carella.”

  “Who’s catching, anyway?” Hawes said. “You got a copy of the duty sheet around?”

  “I’m catching,” Hernandez said.

  “Boy, it sure is quiet around here,” Hawes said. “Is Miscolo around? I’d like some tea.”

  “He was here a little while ago. I think he went down to talk to the Captain.”

  “Days like this…,” Hawes started, and then let the sentence trail. After a while, he said, “Frankie, you ever get the feeling that life just isn’t real?”

  Perhaps he’d asked the wrong person. Life, to Frankie Hernandez, was very real indeed. Hernandez, you see, had taken upon himself the almost impossible task of proving to the world at large that Puerto Ricans could be the good guys in life’s little drama. He did not know who’d been handling his people’s press relations before he happened upon the scene, but he did know that someone was handling it all wrong. He had never had the urge to mug anyone, or knife anyone, or even to have a single puff of a marijuana cigarette. He had grown up in the territory of the 87th Precinct, in one of the worst slums in the world, and he had never so much as stolen a postage stamp, or even a sidelong glance at the whores who paraded La Via de Putas. He was a devout Catholic whose father worked hard for a living, and whose mother was concerned solely with the proper upbringing of the four children she had brought into the world. When Hernandez decided to become a cop, his mother and father approved heartily. He became a rookie when he was twenty-two years old, after having served a four-year hitch in the Marines and distinguishing himself in combat during the hell that was Iwo Jima. In his father’s candy store, a picture of Frankie Hernandez in full battle dress was pasted to the mirror behind the counter, alongside the Coca-Cola sign. Frankie’s father never failed to tell any stranger in the store that the picture was of his son Frankie who was now “a detective in the city’s police.”

  It hadn’t been easy for Hernandez to become a detective in the city’s police. To begin with, he’d found a certain amount of prejudice within the department itself, brotherhood edicts notwithstanding. And, coupled with this was a rather peculiar attitude on the part of some of the citizens of the precinct. They felt, he soon discovered, that since he was “one of them” he was expected to look the other way whenever they became involved in police trouble. Well, unfortunately, Frankie Hernandez was incapable of looking the other way. He had sworn the oath, and he was now wearing the uniform, and he had a job to perform.

  And besides, there was The Cause.

  Frankie Hernandez had to prove to the neighborhood, the people of the neighborhood, the police department, the city, and maybe even the world that Puerto Ricans were people. Colleagues the likes of Andy Parker sometimes made The Cause difficult. Before Andy Parker, there had been patrolmen colleagues who’d made The Cause just as difficult. Hernandez imagined that if he ever became chief of detectives or even police commissioner, there would be Andy Parkers surrounding those high offices, too, ever ready to remind him that The Cause was something to be fought constantly, day and night.

  So for Frankie Hernandez, life was always real. Sometimes, in fact, it got too goddamn real.

  “No, I never got that feeling, Cotton,” he said.

  “I guess it’s the rain,” Hawes answered, and he yawned.

  Th
e S.S. Farren had been named after a famous and honorable White Plains gentleman called Jack Farren. But whereas the flesh-and-blood Farren was a kind, amiable, sympathetic, lovable coot who always carried a clean handkerchief, the namesake looked like a ship that was mean, rotten, rusty, dirty, and snot-nosed.

  The captain of the ship looked the same way.

  He was a hulk of a man with a three-days’ beard stubble on his chin. He picked his teeth with a matchbook cover all the while Carella talked to him, sucking air interminably in an attempt to loosen breakfast from his molars. They sat in the captain’s cabin, a coffin of a compartment, the bulkheads of which dripped sweat and rust. The captain sucked at his teeth and prodded with his soggy matchbook cover. The rain slanted outside the single porthole. The compartment stank of living, of food, of human waste.

  “What can you tell me about Karl Androvich?” Carella asked.

  “What do you want to know?” the captain said. His name was Kissovsky. He sounded like a bear. He moved with all the subtle grace of a Panzer division.

  “Has he been sailing with you long?”

  Kissovsky shrugged. “Two, three years. He in trouble? What did he get himself into since he jumped ship?”

  “Nothing that we know of. Is he a good sailor?”

  “Good as most. Sailors ain’t worth a damn today. When I was a young man, sailors was sailors.” He sucked air between his teeth.

  “Ships were made of wood,” Carella said, “and men were made of iron.”

  “What? Oh, yeah.” Kissovsky tried a smile that somehow formed as a leer. “I ain’t that old, buddy,” he said. “But we had sailors when I was a kid, not beatniks looking for banana boats so they can practice that…what do you call it…Zen? And then come back to write about it. We had men! Men!”

  “Then Androvich wasn’t a good sailor?”

  “Good as most until he jumped ship,” Kissovsky said. “The minute he jumped ship, he became a bad sailor. I had to make the run down with a man short in the crew. I had the crew stretched tight as it was. One man short didn’t help the situation any, I can tell you. A ship is like a little city, buddy. There’s guys that sweep the streets, and guys that run the trains, and guys that turn on the lights at night, and guys that run the restaurants, and that’s what makes the city go, you see. Okay. You lose the guy who turns on the lights, so nobody can see. You lose the guy who runs the restaurant, so nobody eats. Either that, or you got to find somebody else to do the job, and that means taking him away from another job, so no matter how you slice it, it screws up the china closet. Androvich screwed up the china closet real fine. Besides, he was a lousy sailor, anyway.”