by Ed McBain
He was telling Kling that his wife had threatened to kill him.
He was asking Kling to come back to the apartment with him, to warn his wife - whose name was Imogene - not to say such things to him anymore. And especially not to do such things, if that was what she really planned to do. Which he strongly believed was her plan since she had recently purchased from a street vendor a .22-caliber pistol for sixteen dollars and change.
The man talking to Kling said his name was Dudley Archibald.
He was, Kling supposed, in his early thirties, with a very dark complexion, soulful brown eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore his hair in a modified Afro. He was dressed conservatively in a tan suit that appeared a bit tropical for the frigid temperatures outside. You told somebody in the Caribbean that it was cold up here, he nodded knowingly, figured all he had to do was pack a sweater. Like for when it got a bit chilly at night in the islands. Just like that. Sure. Came up here, immediately froze to death. Tan tropical suit with the temperature outside at twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit and the squadroom windows rimed with ice.
Archibald told Kling he was a postal worker. This was his day off. Saturday. He'd come up here on his day off because he was truly worried that his wife Imogene would take it in her mind to use that pistol one of these days.
'I would appreciate it, sir,' he said, 'if you came home with me and told her that wouldn't be such a good idea, sir.'
'You know,' Kling said, 'people sometimes say things they don't really . . .'
'Yes, sir, but she bought a pistol, sir.'
'Even so.'
'I don't think you would want my murder on your head, sir.'
Kling looked at him.
What the hell was this?
First Herrera, now Archibald. Telling Kling if he didn't take care of them, their murders would be on his head.
'How'd you happen to come to me?' he asked.
He really wanted to say Of all the detectives on this squad, why the fuck did you pick me?
'You did a burglary in the neighborhood,' Archibald said.
Kling realized he wasn't suggesting that Kling had committed a burglary. He was merely saying that Kling had investigated one. Of several hundred, Kling imagined. In this precinct, burglaries were as common as jaywalking.
'Which one?' he asked.
'I forget her name,' Archibald said. 'A fat lady.'
'Uh-huh.'
'She said you were very good.'
'Uh-huh.'
'So I asked the sergeant downstairs for you. Gloria Something?'
'Well,' Kling said, and shrugged.
'Gloria, I think.'
'Well, in any event, Mr Archibald, I don't think it would be appropriate for me to come to your home and to intrude on what doesn't even appear to be a family dispute as yet. I would suggest . . .'
'A pistol is a family dispute,' Archibald said. 'If she has threatened to kill me with it.'
'Did she use those exact words? I'm going to kill you?'
'She said she would shoot me with the pistol. A .22-caliber pistol'
'Was this during an argument?'
'No, it was calmly. Over breakfast.'
'When?'
'Every day this week.'
'Every day.'
'Yes.'
Kling sighed.
'She keeps the pistol in the bread box,' Archibald said.
'I see.'
'In the kitchen.'
'Uh-huh.'
'She probably plans to shoot me while we're eating.'
Kling sighed again.
'I can't come with you . . .'
'Then my murder . . .'
'. . . just now,' Kling said. 'I've got a showdown to run, some women are coming in at one o'clock.' He looked at his watch. 'I should be done around two, two-thirty. I can maybe get over there around three. Will your wife be home then?'
'Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.'
'Where do you live?'
'337 South Eustis. Apartment 44.'
'You make sure your wife's there, okay? I'll come by and talk to her. Does she have a license for that pistol?'
Archibald looked as if he suddenly realized he'd bought more trouble than he'd bargained for.
'No, sir,' he said. 'But I don't want to . . .'
'Gives me a reason to take the gun away from her, right?' Kling said, and smiled.
Archibald did not return the smile.
'Relax, nobody's going to hurt her,' Kling said.
'Thank you, sir,' Archibald said.
'I'll see you at three,' Kling said.
It never occurred to him that in this city certain types of Jamaicans sometimes shot policemen.
* * * *
There were times when the irony of the situation amused Teddy.
She was deaf. She had been born deaf. She had never heard a human voice, an animal's cry, the shriek of machinery, the rustle of a fallen leaf. She had never spoken a word in her life. A woman like Teddy used to be called a 'deaf mute.' A label. Intended to be descriptive and perhaps kind. 'Dummy' would have been the cruel word. Now she was called 'hearing-impaired.' Progress. Another label. She was, after all, merely Teddy Carella.
What sometimes amused her was that this deaf mute, this hearing-impaired person, this dummy was in fact such a good listener.
Eileen Burke apparently understood this.
Perhaps she'd understood it all along, or perhaps she'd only reached her understanding last Friday night, when during dinner she had seized upon Teddy as a sympathetic ear.
'I've always thought of you as my best friend,' she said now, surprising Teddy. Their relationship had, at best, been a casual one. Dinner out with their respective men, an occasional movie, a football game, a private party, a big police affair. But best friend? Strong words. Teddy was a woman who chose her words carefully. Perhaps because her flying fingers could only accommodate so few of them in a single burst. Best friend? She wondered.
'I wouldn't tell this to anyone else,' Eileen said. 'I've been seeing a shrink, Teddy. I go twice a . . .'
She hesitated.
There was a puzzled expression on Teddy's face.
One of the words had thrown her.
Eileen thought back for a moment, and then said, 'Shrink,' exaggerating the word on her lips. Then, to nail it down, she said, 'Psychologist.'
Teddy nodded.
'I go to her twice a week.'
Without saying a word, merely by slightly raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes a trifle wider, Teddy said - and Eileen understood - a multitude of things.
And?
How's it going?
Tell me more.
'I think she's going to be okay,' Eileen said. 'I mean, I don't know yet. It bothers me that she's younger than I am . . .'
Teddy began signing.
And caught herself.
But she used her hands, anyway, signaling Eileen to go on, to elaborate, to tell her exactly . . .
'Twenty-six or -seven,' Eileen said.
Teddy pulled a face.
'Yeah,' Eileen said, 'that's just it. She seems like a kid to me, too.'
The restaurant was crowded with Saturday shoppers taking a break away from the Hall Avenue department stores. Eileen was wearing jeans, a bulky green sweater, and brown boots. A dark blue car coat was draped over the back of her chair. Her service revolver was in her shoulder bag, on the floor under the table. Teddy had taken the subway in from Riverhead. She, too, was dressed for a casual afternoon in the city. Jeans, a yellow turtleneck with a tan cardigan over it, Adidas jogging shoes. A black ski parka was draped over the back of her chair. Her small handbag was on the table. At a nearby table, two women noticed that she was using her hands a lot, making exaggerated facial expressions. One of them whispered, 'She's deaf and dumb,' another quaint label Teddy would have found offensive had she heard it. She did not hear it because she was too busy talking and listening.
Eileen was telling her that she'd stopped seeing Kling.
'Because I do
n't think he understands what I'm trying to do here.'
Teddy watched her intently.
'Or how much . . . how . . . you know ... I don't think he ... he's a man, Teddy, I don't think any man in the world can really understand what . . . how . . . you know . . . the effect that something like . . . like what happened . . . how traumatic it can be to a woman.'
Teddy was still watching her.
Dark brown eyes luminous in her face.
Listening.
Waiting.
'Rape, I mean,' Eileen said.
Teddy nodded.
'That I was raped.'
Tears suddenly sprang to Eileen's eyes.
Teddy reached across the table, took her hands in her own.
'So ... so you ... I figure if I have to cope with his goddamn feelings while I'm trying to understand my own ... I mean, it's just too much to handle, Teddy.'
Teddy nodded. She squeezed Eileen's hands.
'I mean, I can't worry about his . . . his . . . you know . . . his sensitivity, he's not the one who got raped. Aw, shit, I don't know, maybe I did the wrong thing. But don't I count, Teddy? Isn't it important that I ... aw, shit,' she said again, and reached down into her bag for the package of Kleenex tissues alongside her gun.
'Excuse me,' a man said, 'are you all right?'
He was standing alongside the table. Tall. Brown eyes. Dark hair. Craggy good looks. Perhaps thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old. Wearing a brown overcoat and brown gloves. Obviously just leaving the restaurant Obviously concerned about Eileen's tears.
'I'm fine,' she said to him, turning her head away, drying her eyes.
He leaned over the table. Gloved hands on the table.
'Are you sure?' he said. 'If there's any way I can help . . .'
'No, thank you, that's very nice of you,' Eileen said, 'but I'm okay, really Thank you.'
'As long as you're all right,' he said, and smiled, and turned swiftly the table and began walking toward-
'Hey!' Eileen yelled and shoved back her chair, knocking it over. 'Hey, you!'
She was on her feet and running, shoving past a waitress carrying a trayload of sandwiches, throwing open the front door and racing after the man, who made an immediate right turn on the sidewalk outside. Teddy could not hear Eileen shouting, 'Police, stop!' but she did see the man as he came past the restaurant's plate glass window, and she did see Eileen come up fast behind him, both of them running, and she saw Eileen leap at the man in a headlong tackle that sent something flying out of his gloved hand, and only then did she realize that the something was a woman's handbag, and the handbag was hers.
They went down in a jumble of arms and legs, Eileen and the man, rolling over on the sidewalk, Eileen on top now, her right arm coming up, no gun in her hand, her gun was still in her shoulder bag on the floor under the table. Her right fist was bunched. It came down hard on the side of the man's neck. The man stiffened as if a nerve had been struck. A uniformed cop was suddenly on the scene, trying to break them apart, Eileen screaming she was on the job, which Teddy did not hear but which she guessed the officer understood because all at once his gun was in his hand and he was cuffing the man on the sidewalk and having a nice friendly chat with Eileen who just kept nodding at him impatiently.
She picked up Teddy's handbag from where it lay beside the handcuffed man. The cop wanted the bag. Eileen was telling him no, shaking her head. The conversation seemed to get very heated. Eileen began using her hands, the bag in one hand, both hands waving around in the air. Finally, she turned away from the cop, the bag still in her hand, and skirted back for the restaurant, automatically shooing away the crowd that had gathered outside, a holdover from the days when she herself had been a uniformed cop.
She came back to the table.
'How do you like that guy?' she said, shaking her head in amazement.
Teddy nodded.
She was thinking how strong Eileen had been, how brave and-
But Eileen, noticing everyone looking at her, flushed a red the color of her hair, and said in embarrassment, 'Could we get out of here, please?'
And to Teddy she suddenly seemed like a little girl standing in front of a mirror in her mother's dress and shoes.
* * * *
In Calm's Point, there was a Jamaican neighborhood called Camp Kingston. In Riverhead, the Jamaican section was called Little Kingston. In other parts of the city, there was a Kingston North and even a Kingston Gulch, though how that name had originated was anyone's guess. Here in the Eight-Seven, the Jamaican section ran for several blocks from Culver Avenue to the River Harb, where what was still officially called Beaudoin Bluff was now familiarly called Kingston Heights. In any of these neighborhoods, whenever a cop broke up a street fight and asked the participants where they were from, the proud answer was 'Kingston.' Not a single Jamaican in this city was from Montego Bay or Savannala-Mar or Port Antonio. Every Jamaican in this city came from Kingston. The Capital, man. The same way every Frenchman in the world came from Paris. Mais je suis Parisien, monsieur! The raised eyebrow. The indignant tone. Kingston, mon, where you tink?
Kling had not been in this part of the precinct since it was Puerto Rican. Before that, it had been Italian. And before that, Irish. And if you went back far enough, Dutch and Indian. But there was no sense of history in these streets. There was merely a feeling of a transient population inhabiting a decaying slum. The buildings were uniformly gray here, even though there was red brick beneath the ageless soot. The streets had been only partially cleared of snow; in this neighborhood - as was the case in most of the city's ghettos - garbage collection, snow clearance, pothole repair, and most other municipal services were provided at a rather leisurely pace. The streets here looked dirty at any time of the year, but particularly so during the winter months. Perhaps because of the soiled snow. Or perhaps because it was so goddamn cold. In the summer months, for all its poverty, a slum looked extravagantly alive. During the winter, the deserted streets, the vain bonfires in vacant lots, the wind sweeping through narrow gray canyons, only exaggerated the ghetto's meanness. Here is poverty, the ghetto said. Here is dope. Here is crime. Here is only the thinnest thread of hope.
The mayor seemed not to know that the snow up here hadn't been cleared yet.
Perhaps because he rarely went to dinner in the 87th Precinct.
337 South Eustis Street was in a line of tenements on a street that dropped swiftly toward the river. There was ice out there today. The sky over the high rises in the next state glowered with clouds threatening more snow. Kling walked with his head ducked against the fierce wind that blew in over the choppy gray water. He was thinking that what he'd hated most as a patrolman was a family dispute, and here he was a detective about to march into somebody's house to settle a marital problem. Call used to come in over the radio, 10-64, Family Dispute, a non crime incident, and the dispatcher would almost always tag it with 'See the lady,' because it was usually the wife who'd called 911 to say her husband was batting her around the apartment. Today, he was about to see the man; it was Dudley Archibald who'd made the complaint about his wife Imogene.
He entered the building.
The stench of urine.
He wondered if there was a building in the entire 87th Precinct that did not stink of piss in the entrance hallway.
Broken mailboxes. Jimmied for the welfare, Social Security or Medicare checks.
A naked light bulb overhead. Miraculously unbroken and unscrewed; victimizers normally preferred waiting in the dark.
An inner door with a missing doorknob. Stolen for the brass. You unscrewed enough brass doorknobs, you sold them to the junkman, you picked up the five bucks you needed for your vial of crack.
Kling put his palm flat against the door, a foot and a half above the hole left by the missing doorknob, shoved the door open, came into the ground-floor vestibule, and began climbing.
Cooking smells.
Alien.
Exotic.
Tile floors o
n the landings. Cracked, chipped, faded, worn. But tile nonetheless. From a time when the city's North Side was flourishing and apartments here were at a premium.
Television sets going behind every door. The afternoon soaps. A generation of immigrants learning all about America from its daytime serials.