by Ed McBain
'You know how much pain I got here?' Herrera asked. 'If you'da let them kill me, I wouldn't have no pain now. It's all your fault.'
'My fault?'
'You, you, who you think? I get outta this hospital, they'll kill me the next minute. Only this time I hope you ain't there. This time I hope they finish the job.'
'Nobody's gonna kill you,' Kling said. 'Only one of them's out on bail . . .'
'How many does it take? You don't know these people,' Herrera said. 'You got no idea how they operate.'
'Tell me all about it.'
'Sure. Big fuckin' brave cop, knows everything there is to know. You don't know shit. These people are gonna kill me, you understand that?'
'Why?'
'Go ask them. You're the big hero, go talk to who you busted. They'll tell you.'
'Since I'm here, why don't you just save me the time?' Kling said.
'Go fuck yourself,' Herrera said again.
* * * *
3
The Latent Print Unit reported back on Thursday morning. That very same morning, Meyer and Carella received reports from both the police lab and the Medical Examiner's Office. This had to be some kind of record. The Hat Trick, for sure. Every other detective on the squad was astonished and envious. Cotton Hawes, who was himself working a burglary, asked if he could use the Hodding-Flynn murders as an excuse to get the lab to do some work for him. Hawes looked furiously angry when he asked this question, perhaps because he was a huge man with fiery red hair except for a white streak over his left temple where once he'd been knifed. The streak made him look even more furious, like a vengeful bride of Frankenstein. Unintimidated, Willis told him to go find his own double murder.
The lab reported that the tool marks found on the fire-escape window and sill in the sixth-floor Unger apartment did not match the tool marks found on the fire-escape window and sill in the fourth-floor Hodding apartment.
The lab reported that the cord attached to the mobile discovered on the floor in the baby's bedroom matched a cord fastened to a hook in the ceiling over the baby's crib. This suggested that the mobile had been torn loose from the ceiling. The mobile was made of tubular metal painted red and blue. It emitted a chime-like sound when one section of it struck any other section. There were no fingerprints on any section of the mobile.
The lab reported that the hairs vacuumed from Annie Flynn's body and clothes were foreign pubic hairs.
The Medical Examiner's Office reported finding fresh seminal fluid in Annie Flynn's vaginal contents.
Had she been resisting rape?
They had not, until this moment and despite the girl's torn blouse, considered the possibility that this might be a rape-murder.
But ...
The ME's report went on to note that within a few minutes after female orgasm, spermatozoa normally was spread throughout the somewhat alkaline cavities in the uterus and fallopian tubes. The spermatozoic spread at the time of the Flynn autopsy - begun half an hour after the body reached the morgue - had been well-advanced, indicated not only penetration but orgasm as well. Absent orgasm, as was normal in most rape cases, the spread often took as long as six hours. The ME was not conclusively ruling out rape. He was merely pointing out that the girl had apparently achieved orgasm. The report further noted that semen samples had been sent to the laboratory for identification and group-typing in the event of later comparison with isoagglutination groups in the blood of the accused - God willing, Meyer thought.
The Latent Print Unit reported that Annie Flynn's fingerprints were the only good ones found on the handle of the knife that had killed her. There were foreign prints as well, but these were too smudged to be useful in a search. Regarding the burglary in the Unger apartment, the unit had done what was called a cold search. No suspect's prints against which to compare. No names to check. Nothing but the latents lifted from the Unger window and sill. Find out who had left them there. A cold search on the local level could sometimes take weeks. On the state level, it often took months. Carella had once asked the FBI to do a cold search for him, and they had not come back to him until a year later, after the case had already gone to trial. But on this fifth day of January, the LPU reported that the latents on the Unger window and sill had been left there by a man named Martin Proctor - alias Snake Proctor, alias Mr Sniff, alias Doctor Proctor - who had a record going back to when he was twelve years old and first arrested for breaking into a candy store in Calm's Point. His B-sheet, as supplied by the Identification Section, filled in the rest.
At the time of his first arrest, Proctor belonged to a street gang called The Red Onions, comprised of daring young bandits between the ages of eleven and fourteen, all of them with an apparent craving for chocolate. Snake (as Proctor was then known) had been elected to break into the candy store and steal a carton containing a full gross of Hershey bars - with almonds, the president of The Red Onions SAC had specified. The SAC stood for Social and Athletic Club, a euphemism most street gangs affected.
The cop on the beat had caught him coming out of the back of the store. Snake had grinned and said, 'Hi, want a Hershey bar?' The arresting officer had not found this comical. The judge, however, thought Snake's casual remark indicated a good sense of humor, which he felt was the prime requisite for making a worthwhile contribution to society. He let Snake off with a warning.
First mistake.
Six months later, Snake . . .
Me was called Snake, by the way, because there was a python tattooed on his left biceps, beneath which, lettered in blue, were the words LIVE FREE OR DIE, the motto for the state of New Hampshire, though by all indications he had never been there.
Six months later, Snake was arrested for a jewelry store smash-and-grab and this time the judge was a lady who frowned upon such activities even if they netted only a pair of eighteen-karat-gold wedding bands and a digital wristwatch selling for $42.95. Snake, a juvenile offender, was sent to a juvenile detention facility upstate, from which he was released at the age of fourteen. By then, he had learned how to do cocaine, which for a price was readily available at the facility, and had acquired the name 'Mr Sniff,' which was a nickname as opposed to the earlier 'Snake,' which had been a street name. The new name was apparently premised on Mr Sniff's insatiable need for sucking up into his nostrils however much cocaine he could purchase or steal.
Drugs and stealing go together like bagels and lox.
Your white collar drug users may not necessarily be thieves, but down in the streets, baby, your user is a hundred times out of a hundred stealing to support his habit.
Over the years, Proctor managed to avoid imprisonment again until he was nineteen years old and got caught red-handed inside somebody's house in the nighttime. Burglary One, for sure, in that the dwelling was also occupied and Proctor threatened the person with a gun, little knowing the house was wired with a silent alarm, and all of a sudden two cops were on him with guns bigger than his own, so goodbye, Charlie. A Class B felony this time. State penitentiary this time. Big time this time. The DA flatly refused to let Proctor cop a plea - well, why the hell should he? They had the man cold. But the court sentenced him to only half the max, and he'd been paroled from Castleview two years ago, after having served a third of his term.
The name 'Doctor Proctor' had been acquired in prison.
Proctor had a habit as long as the Pacific Coast Highway. Every thief in the world knew that Castleview was as tight as a virgin's asshole. You wanted to cure a dope habit, you got yourself sent to Castleview because, man, there was no way of getting even a shred of grass inside there. Unless you were Doctor Proctor.
No one knew how he did it.
It had to be some kind of miracle.
But if you were hurting, baby, Doctor Proctor could fix you. If you needed what you needed, Doctor Proctor could get it for you. Always ready to help a friend in need, that was Doctor Proctor. A confirmed junkie, and a prison dope dealer. But none of that mattered. He had a title now, which was better tha
n either a nickname or a street name. Doctor Proctor. Who for the past two years had been on the streets again. Apparently doing burglaries again. Or perhaps worse.
His mug shot showed a round clean-shaven face, dark eyes, short blond hair.
The Ungers had described him as thin and blond and growing a mustache.
The date of birth on his records made him twenty-four last October.
The Ungers had said he was eighteen, nineteen.
The last address his parole officer had for him was 1146 Park Street, in Calm's Point. But he had long ago violated parole, probably figuring if he was going to go back to work at his old trade it certainly didn't pay to waste time with parole-officer appointments. If a man was going to break parole by stealing, then why check in with the PO? If he got caught stealing, he'd go back to prison anyway. Besides, he wasn't going to get caught.
No criminal ever thinks he's going to get caught. Only the other guy gets caught. Even criminals who've already been caught and sent to person believe they won't get caught the next time. The reason they got caught the first time was they made a little mistake. The next time, they wouldn't make any mistakes. They would never get caught again. They would never do time again.
It never occurred to a criminal that a sure way to avoid doing time was to find an honest job. But why should a man take a job paying $3.95 an hour when he could go into a grocery store with a gun and steal four thousand dollars from the cash register! Four fucking thousand dollars! forten minutes' work! Unless he got caught. If he got caught, he'd be sent up for thirty years, and when you divided the four grand by thirty, you got two hundred a year. And when you broke that down to a forty-hourweek for every week in the year, you saw that the man had earned a bit more than six cents an hour for his big holdup.
Terrific.
He marches in there with a big macho gun in his big macho fist, and he scares the shit out of Mom and Pop behind the counter, and he never once thinks, not for a minute, that what he's doing is betting thirty years against that money in the cash register - which, by the way, might turn out to be four dollars instead of four thousand.
Smart.
But who says criminals have to be brilliant?
And, anyway, he's not going to get caught.
But even if he does get caught, even if he does make another teeny-weeny little tiny mistake the second time around, and even if the judge throws the book at him because now he's a habitual criminal, he can do the time standing on his head, right? The Castleview Penitentiary SAC. Lots ofold buddies from the street in there. Hey, Jase! How ya doin', Blood? But a lot of weights in there. Shoot the shit in the Yard. Get some fish in the gym to suck your cock, your buddies standing watch and then taking their turns. Send away for correspondence courses can make you a lawyer or a judge. Shit, man, you can do the time with one hand tied behind your back.
The signs tacked up in every police precinct in this city read:
If you can't do the
TIME -
Don't do the
CRIME!
Criminals laughed at those signs.
Those signs were for amateurs.
Martin Proctor had been to prison and enjoyed it very much, thanks, and he was out again, and had at least burglarized one apartment on New Year's Eve and perhaps done something more serious than that. But the cops had an address for him. And when you had an address, that was where you started. And sometimes you got lucky.
1146 Park was in a section of Calm's Point that had once been middle-class Jewish, had gone from there to middle-class Hispanic, and was now an area of mostly abandoned tenements sparsely populated by junkies of every persuasion and color. Nobody in the building had ever heard of anyone named Proctor - Martin, Snake, Mr Sniff or even Doctor.
Sometimes you got lucky, but not too often.
* * * *
'I should be in Florida right this minute,' Fats Donner said.
He was talking to Hal Willis.
Willis had dealt with him on many a previous occasion. Willis did not like him at all. Neither did any of the cops on the Eight-Seven. That was because Donner had a penchant for young girls. In the ten- or eleven-year-old age bracket; for Donner these days, twelve was a little long in the tooth. Willis was here only because he'd worked with Donner more often than had any other cop on the squad. Donner, being such an expert ear, might have heard something about Proctor's recent whereabouts, no?
'No,' Donner said.
'Think,' Willis said.
'I already thought. I don't know anybody named Martin Proctor.'
Donner was a giant of a man, fat in the plural, fat in the extreme, Fats for sure, an obese hulk who sat in a faded blue bathrobe, his complexion as pale as the January sky outside, his fat hairless legs resting on a hassock, one obscenely plump hand plucking dates from a basket on the end table beside his easy chair, the hand moving to his mouth, his thick lips sucking the meat off the pit. Standing beside him, Willis - who was short by any standards - looked almost tiny.
'Doctor Proctor,' he said.
'No,' Donner said.
'Mr Sniff
'Four hundred people named Mr Sniff in this city, you kidding?'
'Snake.'
'Eight hundred Snakes. Give me something easy like Rambo.'
He smiled. He was making a joke. Rambo was another popular name. A piece of date clung to his front upper teeth, making it look as if one of them was missing. Willis really hated being in his presence.
'It's your burglary,' Carella had told him.
'You've worked with him before,' Meyer had said.
And was working with him again now.
Or trying to.
'You think you can listen around?' he asked.
'No,' Donner said. 'I think I can go to Florida. It's too fucking cold here now.'
'It's cold in Florida, too,' Willis said. 'But it can get hot both places.'
'Oh, look, Maude,' Donner said to the air, 'here comes the rubber hose.'
They both knew that the only reason an informer cooperated with the police was that the police had something on him that they were willing to forget temporarily. In Donner's case, the something wasn't child abuse. No cop in this city was willing to forget child abuse, even temporarily. Dope, yes. Murder, sometimes. But child abuse, never. There was a criminal adage to the effect that the only thing you couldn't fix in this city was a short-eyes rap.
The main thing the police had on Donner was the long-ago murder of a pimp. The way the police looked at it, the city was better off without pimps in general, but this did not mean that they could condone murder. Oh, no. They had the goods on Donner and could have sent him to person for a good long time. Where there were no girls, by the way. Young or otherwise. But the cops chose to work this one six ways from the middle. They didn't give a damn that the city had lost another pimp. And they wouldn't have minded sending Donner up for the crime. But they figured there were other ways to make him pay for what he'd done.
A tacit deal was struck, no handshakes sealing the bargain - you did not shake hands with murderers and especially not with child abusers - not asingle word spoken, but from that day forward Donner knew he was in the vest pocket of any cop who wanted him, and the cops knew that Donner for all his bullshit would deliver or else.
Willis merely looked at him.
'You got a picture of him?' Donner asked.
* * * *
This is the way it worked.
A hearing impaired person like Teddy Carella - who'd been deaf since birth and who had never uttered a single word in her entire life - had finally and reluctantly been convinced by her husband to purchase and have installed one of these newfangled gadgets that had only been on the market for the past God knew how long. The gadget she'd resisted all this time-
Listen, I'm an old-fashioned girl, she'd signed with her hands and mimed with her face.
-was called a Telecommunication Device for the Deaf and was known in the trade as a TDD.
It looked like a ty
pewriter that had married a telephone and given birth to a character display and an adding machine. When the TDD was in use, a telephone rested at the very top of the unit, where two soft, molded cups were shaped to fit the handset. Between these was a roll of paper some two and a quarter inches wide, upon which printed messages appeared in uppercase type. Beneath this, and running horizontally across the face of the unit, was the display line. Twenty-character display. Blue-green vacuum fluorescent illumination. Half-inch character height. Angled so it could be read from above. Just under the display screen was a forty-five key, four-row keyboard with almost the same lettering layout as on a typewriter.
State of the art was not yet able to translate voice to type or vice versa. This would have made things simple indeed for any hearing - or speech-impaired person in the world. But, listen, it was simple enough the way it was. In the Carella house, there was a TDD on the kitchen counter under the wall phone. On Carella's desk at the office, there was an identical TDD alongside his phone. Either of the telephones could be used for normal use, but when Teddy - or any other hearing-impaired person, for that matter - wished to make a call, she first turned the TDD power switch on, placed the handset of her phone onto the acoustic cups, waited for the steady red light that told her she had a dial tone, and then dialed the number she wanted. A slow-flashing red light on the unit told her the phone was ringing. A fast-flashing red light told her the line was busy.
Whenever the phone on Carella's desk rang, he picked up and said 'Eighty-seventh Squad, Carella.' If the call was from a hearing, speaking person, the conversation continued as it normally would. But if this was Teddy calling - as it was at three o'clock that afternoon, while Willis was mildly intimidating Fats Donner - Carella would hear beeping that sounded like a very rapid diddle-ee-dee. This was caused by Teddy repeatedly hitting the space bar on her machine to let the person on the other end know this was a hearing-impaired caller.
If Carella had been calling her, a master ring-signal jacketed to the telephone line and linked to remote receivers throughout the house would flash lamps in several different rooms, letting Teddy know the phone was ringing. A similar device told her when someone was ringing the doorbell. But meanwhile, back at the Eight-Seven Corral, when Carella heard that rapid beeping - as he did now - he immediately knew it was Teddy calling, and he cradled the handset of his phone onto the TDD, and switched on the power, and by golly Moses, what you got was two people talking!