Lullaby

by Ed McBain

  In this city, adults did not like teenagers.

  So the adults stopped going to Portside.

  And all the boutiques, and the bookshop, and the florist, and the jewelry stores were replaced by shops selling T-shirts, and earrings, and blue jeans and records and sneakers. The very expensive restaurant closed in six months' time, to be replaced by a disco called Spike. The merely expensive restaurant also closed; it was now a thriving McDonald's. The Steamboat Cafe, the medium-priced restaurant, had managed to survive only because it actually was a transformed steamboat floating there on the river and docked alongside one of the platforms. Teenagers loved novelty.

  According to Colby Strothers, Lorraine Greer worked as a waitress at the Steamboat Cafe.

  The detectives got there at twenty minutes past four.

  The manager told them the girls on the day shift would be leaving as soon as they set the tables, filled the sugar bowls and salt and pepper shakers, made sure there was enough ketchup out, generally got things ready for the next shift. That was part of the job, he explained. Getting everything ready for the next shift. He pointed out a tall young woman standing al the silverware tray.

  'That's Lorraine Greer,' he said.

  Long black hair, pale complexion, bluish-gray eyes that opened wide when the detectives identified themselves.

  'Miss Greer,' Carella said, 'we're trying to locate someone we think you know.'

  'Who's that?' she asked. She was scooping up knives, forks and spoons from the silverware tray. Dropping them into a basket that had a napkin spread inside it. 'Don't make me lose count,' she said. Meyer figured she was multiplying the number of her tables by the place settings for each table, counting out how many of each utensil she would need.

  'Scott Handler,' Carella said.

  'Don't know him,' she said. 'Sorry.'

  She swung the basket off the stand bearing the silverware tray, and began walking across the restaurant. The detectives followed her. The floor - the deck - rolled with the motion of the river. Carella was trying to figure why Strothers might have lied to them. He couldn't think of a single reason.

  'Miss Greer,' he said, 'we feel reasonably certain you know Mr Handler.'

  'Oh? And what gives you that impression?'

  Fork on the folded napkin to the left of the plate. On the right, she placed a knife, a tablespoon, a teaspoon, in that order. Working her way around the table. Six place settings. Eyes on what she was doing.

  'We talked to a young man named Colby Strothers . . .'

  'Don't know him, either. Sorry.'

  River traffic moving past the steamboat's windows. A tugboat. A pleasure craft. A fireboat. Lorraine's eyes sideswiped the entrance door amidships. Both detectives caught the glance.

  'Mr Strothers told us . . .'

  'I'm sorry, but I don't know either of those people.'

  Eyes checking out the door again.

  But this time . . .

  Something flashing in those eyes.

  Both detectives turned immediately.

  The young man standing in the doorway was perhaps six feet two inches tall, with blond hair, broad shoulders, and a narrow waist. He was wearing a red team jacket with ribbed cuffs and waistband, brown leather gloves, brown trousers, brown loafers. He took one look at them standing there with Lorraine, and immediately turned and went out again.

  'Handler!' Carella shouted, and both detectives started for the door. Handler - if that's who he was - had already crossed the gangplank and was on the dock when they came out running. 'Police!' Carella shouted, but that didn't stop him. He almost knocked over a teenybopper eating a hamburger, kept running for the streetside entrance to the area, and reached the sidewalk as Carella and Meyer came pounding up some twenty yards behind him. Handler - if that's who he was - then made a left turn and headed downtown, paralleling the river.

  The streetlights were already on, it was that time of day when the city hovered between dusk and true darkness. A tugboat hooted on the river, an ambulance siren raced through the city somewhere blocks away, and then there was a sudden hush into which Carella again shouted, 'Police!' and the word shattered the brief stillness, the city noises all came back again, the sounds of voices and machines, the sound of Handler's shoes slapping against the pavement ahead - if that's who he was.

  Carella did not like chasing people. Neither did Meyer. That was for the movies. In the movies, they filmed a chase in forty takes that were later edited to look like one unbroken take where the hero cop is running like an Olympics gold-medal track star and the thief is running like the guy who won only the bronze. In real life, you did it all in one take. You went pounding along the sidewalk after a guy who was fifteen to twenty years younger than you were, and in far better physical condition, and you hoped that his red team jacket wasn't for track or basketball. In real life, the calves of your legs began to ache and your chest caught fire as you chased after someone you knew you'd possibly never catch, watching the back of that disappearing red jacket, barely able to make out the white lettering on it, The Prentiss Academy, which in the gloom and with your thirty-something-eyes you couldn't have deciphered at all if you weren't already familiar with it. In real life, you watched the beacon of that red jacket moving further and further-

  'We're losing him!' Carella shouted.

  But then suddenly, Harold, in this city of miracle and coincidence, a police car came cruising up the street from the opposite direction, and Handler - if that's who he was - spotted the car, and made an immediate hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and began running diagonally across the traffic. Toward them. On the other side of the street. Running for the corner, where he undoubtedly planned to turn north. They anticipated his route, though, and came racing for the same corner, Carella getting there an instant before he did, Meyer getting there an instant later, so that they had him boxed between them. He saw the guns in their hands. He slopped dead. Everyone was out of breath. White puffs of vapor blossomed on the air.

  'Scott Handler?' Carella said.

  That's who he was.

  * * * *

  The two women were white hookers of a better grade than those Hamilton's people placed on the street every day of the week. Hamilton had in fact ordered these two from a lady named Rosalie Purchase, which happened to be her real name. Rosalie was a dame in her sixties whose call-girl operation had survived the inroads of the Mafia, the Chinese, and now the Jamaican and 'other exotic punks,' as she defiantly called them. Rosalie dealt in quality flesh. Which might have accounted for her survival. In a day and age when two buck whores were turning vague tricks for holier-than-thou ministers in cheap roadside motels, it was nice to know that if a real sinner wanted a racehorse, Rosalie Purchase was there to provide one.

  Rosalie wore hats as a trademark.

  On the street, in the house, in restaurants, even in church.

  The cops called her Rosalie the Hat.

  Or alternately Rosalie the Hot, despite the fact that she had never personally performed even the slightest sexual service for any one of her clients. If, in fact, she had any clients. For a lady who'd been openly running a whore house for a good many years now, it was amazing how little the police had on her. For all the police could prove, Rosalie might just as easily have been a milliner. Nobody could understand why she had never been busted. Nobody could understand why a wire had never been installed on her telephone. There were rumors, of course. Hey, listen, there are rumors in any business.

  Some people in the department knew for a fact that Rosalie had grown up in East Riverhead at the same time Michael Fallon was coming along, and that as teenagers they'd been madly in love with each other. It was also true that Rosalie later moved to San Antonio, Texas, after Fallon ditched her to marry a girl named Peggy Shea. The rest, however, was all surmise.

  Was it true, for example, that poor, brokenhearted Rosalie had learned how to run a cathouse out there in the Wild West? Was it true that the reason she'd never been busted in this city was that s
he'd become Fallon's mistress the moment she came back here to make her fortune and buy a lot of hats? Was it true that she was still Fallon's mistress? In which case, this might have explained why she'd never been busted, since Michael Fallon happened to be Chief of Detectives.

  All this was whispered around the water coolers down at Headquarters.

  The two girls were named Cassie and Lane.

  These were not their real names. They were both from West Germany, and their real names were Klara Schildkraut and Lottchen Schmidt, but here in the land of opportunity they were Cassie Cole and Lane Thomas. They were both in their early twenties, both blond, both wearing ankle-strapped spike-heeled slippers and teddies - Cassie's was red and Lane's was black - and both stoned out of their minds on cocaine and champagne. So were Hamilton and Isaac.

  This was a nice little sundown party here in the penthouse Hamilton owned on Grover Park North. This was also a little business meeting here on the twenty-first floor, but there was nothing Hamilton liked better than mixing business with pleasure. The two girls had been trained by Rosalie Purchase to dispense pleasure by the cartload. Isaac was dispensing a little pleasure himself, by way of refilling the girls' glasses and heaping fresh mounds of very good coke onto their mirrors. The girls sniffed with their legs widespread, the better to see you, my dear. In the west, the sun was almost completely gone, its dying stain visible only peripherally through the apartment's south-facing windows.

  The two girls spoke with heavy German accents.

  'This is very good shit here,' Cassie said.

  It sounded like, 'Das ist vehr gut schidt hier.'

  'We have connections,' Hamilton said, and winked at Isaac.

  Both of them were all silked out for the girls. Hamilton was wearing green silk pajamas and a yellow silk robe and black velvet slippers with what looked like the crest of the king of the Belgians on the instep. He looked like Eddie Murphy playing Hugh Hefner. Isaac was wearing a red silk, V-necked, short-sleeved top over what looked like red silk Bermuda shorts. He was barefooted. He was wearing eyeglasses. He looked like a trained monkey with an enormous hard-on.

  'Come do me here, sweetheart,' he said to Lane.

  Lane was busy snorting a mountain of coke. With her free hand, she reached down to unsnap the crotch of her black teddy. Snorting, she began stroking herself. Isaac watched her working her own lips.

  'But why do you feel the cop takes precedence?' he asked.

  'For what Herrera may have told him,' Hamilton said.

  'But what does the little spic know?

  'Naughty, naughty,' Cassie said, at last raising her head from the mirror. Rosalie had taught her that calling Hispanics spics was a no-no in this business where so many of her customers were Colombian dealers up from Miami.

  'You finished with that shit?' Hamilton asked,

  'For now,' Cassie said, grinning.

  Oh my, she was stoned. Oh my, these two niggers had glorious shit here.

  'Then come do me,' Hamilton said.

  'Oh, yeah,' she said.

  It sounded like, 'Ach, ja.'

  She went to him, and settled down on the carpet between his knees, making herself comfortable. The strap of the teddy fell off her right shoulder. She was about to put it back when Hamilton said, 'Leave it.'

  'Okay,' she said, and lowered the strap completely, pulling the front of the teddy down over her right breast. Hamilton cupped her breast in his hand. He began kneading it, almost absentmindedly. The nipple actually stiffened, she was that stoned.

  'He likes tits,' she said to Lane.

  Lane was on Isaac's lap now, facing him, straddling him. Both her breasts were in his hands.

  'He does, too,' she said.

  They were talking German now, which Rosalie had warned them against ever doing in the presence of customers. Customers didn't like to think they were being discussed in a foreign language. But in this case it was okay because now Hamilton and Isaac fell into a Jamaican Creole patois neither of the girls could understand. So Cassie and Lane chitchatted back and forth in German like hausfraus gossiping over the back fence except that one had Hamilton in her mouth and the other was riding Isaac hell-bent for leather. Hamilton looked down at Cassie's bobbing blonde head and sipped at his champagne and sang out the riffs of the patois to Isaac who sipped his champagne and then told Lane in perfectly understandable English to turn around the other way, which she did at once, commenting to Cassie in German that if he tried any backdoor stuff all bets were off, this was getting to be a dirty party.

  Dirty in more ways than one.

  Isaac and Hamilton were discussing murder.

  Hamilton was saying that if José Herrera, in gratitude or for whatever reason imaginable, had told the blond cop anything at all about their operation, why then they were both dangerous, the cop more so than Herrera. In which case, the cop had to be dusted very quickly. To silence him if he hadn't yet discussed the posse with anyone else in the department. Or, if he had already shared the information, to dust him as a warning to the others.

  'We have to make a statement, man,' Hamilton said in the patois.

  Let the police know that where millions of dollars were at stake, no one could be allowed to interfere.

  'Especially not with all the money we're paying them,' Isaac said in the patois.

  'Was his name in the newspaper?' Hamilton asked.

  'I'll find it.'

  Lane was standing in front of him, her legs widespread, bent over, hands on her thighs, looking straight at Hamilton while Isaac pumped her from behind. There was a blank expression on her face. Hamilton suddenly desired her fiercely.

  'Come here,' he said.

  'Me?'

  'No, Adolf Hitler,' he said, making a joke.

  Lane was twenty-two years old. She had only vaguely heard of Adolf Hitler. But she knew who the boss was here. She eased Isaac out of her, giving him a promising backward glance, head turned over her shoulder. Smiling, then, she licked her lips the way Rosalie had taught her and walked the way Rosalie had taught her to where Hamilton was on the couch with Cassie.

  Isaac knew better than to complain.

  He poured himself another glass of champagne and watched as the two girls began working Hamilton.

  In the patois, Hamilton said, 'I'll take the cop out myself.'

  'Why?'

  'Because none of them knows what I look like,' Hamilton said, and smiled. In English, he said to the girls, 'Yeah, good, I like that.'

  'He likes it,' Lane said in German.

  'I'll bet he likes it,' Cassie said in German.

  'And then we take out the spic,' Hamilton said in the patois. 'For what he stole from us.'

  'You finish him off,' Lane said in German.

  'Ick,' Cassie said in English.

  * * * *

  Carella talked to Lorraine in the Interrogation Room.

  Meyer talked to Scott in the squadroom.

  Lorraine thought she was playing to a packed house at the London Palladium. A star at last. All this attention focused on her. There were probably a hundred other cops in the next room, behind that fake mirror on the wall. She had seen a lot of movies and she knew all about two-way mirrors. Actually, no one was watching her and Carella through the admittedly two-way mirror, but Lorraine didn't know this, and she was doing a star turn, anyway. Big performance here at the old station house, Give the cops the show of their lives. Cop, as the case actually happened to be.

  On the other hand, Scott thought he was talking to his priest.

  He guessed Meyer was Jewish, but this was a confessional scene anyway.

  All contrite and weepy.

  Waiting for Meyer to dispense penance.

  'I didn't kill her,' Scott said.

  'Did someone accuse you?' Meyer asked.

  He almost said, 'Did someone accuse you, my son?'

  With his bald head, and in Scott's abject presence, he felt like a tonsured monk. He felt like making the sign of the cross on the air and saying '
Dominus vobiscum.'

  Instead, he said, 'Why'd you run?'

  'I was scared.'