by Ed McBain
Just kept sitting there staring at Karin.
Karin hadn't said anything either.
It was a staring contest.
Eileen looked at her watch.
'Yes?' Karin said.
'Nothing.'
'You can leave whenever you want to,' Karin said. 'This isn't violin lessons.'
'I didn't think it was.'
'What I mean is . . .'
'Yes, I . . .'
'No one's forcing you to do this.'
'I'm here of my own free will, I know.'
'Exactly.'
'But that doesn't…'
Eileen caught herself, shook her head.
'Doesn't what?'
'Doesn't mean I don't know you're sitting there waiting to pounce on whatever I might say.'
'Is that what you think?'
Eileen said nothing.
'That I'm waiting to pounce on you?'
'That's your job, isn't it? To take whatever I say and make a federal case out of it?'
'I never thought of my job as . . .'
'Let's not get into your job, okay? The reason I'm here is I want to quit my job. And so far I haven't had any help in that direction.'
'Well, we've only seen each other . . .'
'So how long does it take to write a resignation letter?'
'Is that what you want me to help you with? A resignation letter?'
'You know what I . . .'
'But I don't know.'
'I want to quit, damn it! And I can't seem to do it.'
'Maybe you don't want to quit.'
'I do.'
'All right.'
'You know I do.'
'Yes, that's what you told me.'
'Yes. And it's true.'
'You want to quit because you killed a man.'
'Yes.'
'And you're afraid if you stay on the job . . .'
'I'll be forced into another situation, yes, where I'll have to use the gun again.'
'Have to fire the gun again.'
'Yes.'
'Kill again.'
'Yes.'
'You're afraid of that.'
'Yes.'
'What else are you afraid of?'
'What do you want me to say?'
'Whatever you're thinking. Whatever you're feeling.'
'I know what you'd like me to say.'
'And what's that?'
'I know exactly what you'd like me to say.'
"Tell me'
'You'd like me to say rape.'
'Uh-huh.'
'You'd like me to say I'm afraid of getting raped again . . .'
'Are you?'
' . . .that I want to quit before some son of a bitch rapes me again.'
'Is that how you feel?'
Eileen did not answer.
For the remaining five minutes of the hour, she sat there staring at Karin.
At last, Karin smiled and said, 'I'm sorry, our time is up. I'll see you on Thursday, okay?'
Eileen nodded, slung her shoulder bag, and went to the door. At the door, she hesitated with her hand on the knob. Then she turned and said, 'I am. Afraid of that, too.'
And turned again and went out.
* * * *
Sammy Pedicini was used to talking to cops. Whenever a burglary went down in this city, the cops paid Sammy a little visit, asked him all kinds of questions. Sammy always told them the same thing. Whatever it was they were investigating, it wasn't Sammy who did it. Sammy had taken a fall ten years ago, and now he was outside again, and he had learned his lesson.
'Whatever this is,' Sammy told Carella now, 'I didn't do it.'
Carella nodded.
'I learned my lesson up at Castleview, I been clean since.'
Meyer nodded, too.
'I play saxophone in a band called Larry Foster's Rhythm Kings,' Sammy said. 'We play for these sixty-year-old farts who were kids back in the Forties. They're very good dancers, those old farts. All the old Glenn Miller stuff, Harry James, Charlie Spivak, Claude Thornhill. We have all the arrangements. We get a lot of jobs, you'd be surprised. I learned how to play the sax in stir.'
'You must be pretty good at it,' Meyer said. 'To earn your living at it.'
'Which, if that's supposed to be sarcastic, happens to be true. I do earn my living playing saxophone.'
'Just what I said,' Meyer said.
'But what you meant is I'm still doing burglaries on the side. Which ain't true.'
'Did I say that?' Meyer asked. He turned to Carella. 'Steve, did I say that?'
'I didn't hear you say that,' Carella said. 'We're looking for Martin Proctor. Do you know where he is?'
'Is he a musician?' Sammy asked. 'What does he play?'
'The E-flat jimmy,' Meyer said.
'He's a burglar,' Carella said. 'Like you.'
'Me, I'm a saxophone player. What Proctor is, I don't know, because I don't know the man.'
'But your girlfriend knows him, doesn't she?'
'What girlfriend?'
'Your girlfriend who's a hooker and who was asking a detective we know why the police were snooping around Proctor's old address.'
'Gee, this is news to me. I'll tell you the truth, I wish my girlfriend was a hooker. Teach me a few tricks, huh?' Sammy said, and laughed. Nervously.
'Proctor did a job on New Year's Eve,' Carella said, 'in a building on Grover. Two murders were also done in that same building, the same night.'
Sammy let out a long, low whistle.
'Yeah,' Carella said.
'So where is he?' Meyer asked.
'If I don't know the man, how can I tell you where he is?'
'We're going to bust your girlfriend,' Carella said.
'What for?'
'For prostitution. We're going to get her name from this detective we know, and we're going to haul her ass off the street and ask her about Martin Proctor. And we'll keep busting her until . . .'
'Oh, you mean Martin Proctor. I thought you said Marvin Proctor.'
'Where?' Meyer said.
* * * *
Hamilton followed Kling from the station house on Grover Avenue to the subway station three blocks away, and then boarded the downtown train with him. Stood right at the man's elbow. Bertram A. Kling. Detective/ Third Grade. Isaac had got the information from the court records. Isaac was very good at gathering information. He was, however, somewhat dim when it came to comprehending the complexities of high-level business arrangements. Which was why Hamilton had not told him about the telephone call last month from Carlos Ortega in Miami. Or the necessity of employing a fool like José Herrera, who had turned out to be a fucking crook as well. Isaac would not have understood. But, giving the devil his due, he had done well on the cop. Bertram A. Kling. Who had testified at the arraignments of Herbert Trent, James Marshall, and Andrew Fields. Bertram A. Kling. Who did not know that the man standing next to him hanging on a subway strap was Lewis Randolph Hamilton, who would kill him the moment he could do it conveniently and vanish like smoke.
There were perhaps forty blacks on the subway car.
This was good for Hamilton.
Even if there were recent pictures of him in this city's police files -which he knew there were not - but even if there were, a while cop like Kling wouldn't have recognized him, anyway. Kling - with his blond hair and his peachfuzz appearance - looked like the kind of white cop who thought all black criminals looked alike. Only thing that was different on the mug shots was the numbers. Otherwise, they all looked like gorillas. He had heard too many white cops say this. Actually, it would give him great pleasure to kill Kling.
He liked killing people.
Blowing them away with the big mother Magnum.
He particularly liked killing cops.
He had killed two cops in LA. They were still looking for him out there. Black man with a beard. Gorilla with a beard. He didn't have a beard, anymore, he'd shaved in Houston before the posse took that big shipment coming up via Mexico. Wore his hair Rastafarian dow
n there in Houston.
Hamilton hated cops.
Not even knowing Kling, he hated him. And would have enjoyed killing him even if Herrera hadn't told him a goddamn thing. Which was possible, after all, because how could Herrera have learned anything about the Tsu shipment coming up next Monday? When not even Isaac knew as yet.
Hamilton stood by Kling's side on the subway, a black man invisible among other black men, and smiled when he wondered how many people on this train even imagined that he and the big blond man were both wearing guns.
* * * *
Kling got off the train at Brogan Square, and came up out of the tunnel into a day that was still cold but beginning to turn a bit sunny. He had tailed Karin Lefkowitz first, to make an appointment with her, and now he hurried along High Street to her office in what used to be the Headquarters Building. Linked to the Criminal Courts Building by a third-floor passageway through which prisoners going to court could be moved, the old gray building looked like a Siamese twin to the one beside it. He came up the low flat steps out front, entered through the huge bronze doors, showed his identification to a uniformed cop sitting behind a desk in the marbled ground-floor corridor, and then took the elevator up to the fifth floor. A sign hand-lettered PSAS indicated by way of a pointing arrow that the office was to the right. He followed the corridor, spoiled another sign and yet a third one, and then found a door with a glass paneled top, lettered with the words Psychological Services and Aid Section.
He looked at his watch.
Five minutes to two.
He opened the door and went in.
There was a small waiting room. A closed door opposite the entrance door. Two easy chairs, a lamp, a coat rack with two coats on it, several kick-issues of People magazine. Kling hung up his coat, sat in one of the chairs and picked up a copy with Michael Jackson on the cover. In a few moments, a portly man with the telltale veined and bulbous nose of a heavy drinker came through the inner door, went to the rack, took his coat from it, and left without saying a word to Kling. He looked like a thousand sergeants Kling had known. A moment after that, a woman came through that same door.
'Detective Kling?' she said.
'Yes.'
He got to his feet.
'I'm Karin Lefkowitz. Won't you come in, please?'
Short brown hair, blue eyes. Wearing a gray dress, with pearls and Reeboks. Twenty-six or -seven, he guessed. Nice smile.
He followed her into her office. Same size as the waiting room. A wooden desk. A chair behind it. A chair in front of it. Several framed degrees on the wall. A framed picture of the police commissioner. Another framed picture of the mayor.
'Please,' she said, and indicated the chair in front of the desk.
Kling sat.
Karin went to the chair behind the desk.
'Your call surprised me,' she said. 'Did you know that Eileen was here this morning?'
'No.'
'I thought she may have . . .'
'No, she doesn't know I called. It was entirely my idea.'
'I see.'
She studied him. She looked like the kind of woman who should be wearing glasses. He wondered if she had contacts on. Her eyes looked so very blue. Sometimes contacts did that.
'What was it you wanted to discuss?' she said.
'Has Eileen told you that we've stopped seeing each other?'
'Yes.'
'And?'
'And what?'
'What do you think about it?'
'Mr Kling, before we go any further . . .'
'Confidentiality, I know. But this is different.'
'How?'
'I'm not asking you to divulge anything Eileen may have told you in confidence. I'm asking your opinion on . . .'
'Ah, I see. My opinion. But a very thin line, wouldn't you say?'
'No, I wouldn't. I want to know whether this . . . well, separation is the only thing I can call it ... whether you think it's a good idea.'
'And what if I told you that whatever is good for Eileen is a good idea?'
'Do you think this separation is good for Eileen?'
Karin smiled.
'Please,' she said.
'I'm not asking you to do anything behind Eileen's . . .'
'Oh? Aren't you?'
'Miss Lefkowitz ... I need your help.'
'Yes?'
'I ... I really want to be with Eileen. While she's going through this. I think that her wanting to ... to ... stay apart isn't natural. What I wish . . .'
'No.'
Kling looked at her.
'No, I will not advise her to resume your relationship unless that is what she herself wishes.'
'Miss Lefkowitz . . .'
'Period,' Karin said.
* * * *
Hamilton saw him coming down the steps of the old Headquarters Building, walking at a rapid clip like a man who was angry about something. Blond hair blowing in the sudden fierce wind. Hamilton hated this city. You never knew from one minute to the next in this city what was going to happen with the weather. The sun was shining very bright now, but the wind was too strong. Newspapers rattling along the curbs, people walking with their heads ducked, coattails flapping. He fell in behind Kling, no chance of a shot at him here in this crowded downtown area, courthouses everywhere around them, cops moving in and out of them like cockroaches, Christ, he was walking fast.
Hamilton hurried to keep up.
Where the hell was he going, anyway?
He'd already passed the entrance to the subway.
So where was he headed?
* * * *
The pocket park was an oasis of solitude and quiet here in the city that normally paid only lip service to such perquisites of civilization. Kling knew the park because on days when he'd had to testify in one case or another, he'd buy himself a sandwich in the deli on Jackson, and then come here on the lunch break. Sit on one of the benches, eat his sandwich in the sunshine, think about anything but a defense attorney wagging his finger and wanting to know if he'd really observed the letter of the law while making his arrest.
'The park was virtually deserted today.
Too windy for idlers, he guessed.
Set between two office buildings on Jackson, the space was a long rectangle with a brick wall at its far end. A thin fall of water cascaded over the top of this wall, washing down over the brick, even in the dead of winter; Kling guessed the water was heated. The park was dotted with trees, a dozen of them in all, with benches under them.
Only one of the benches was occupied as Kling came in off the street.
A woman reading a book.
The sounds of the streetside traffic suddenly vanished, to be replaced by the sound of the water gently running down the brick wall.
Kling took a seat on a bench facing the wall.
His back was to the park entrance.
In a little while, the woman looked at her watch, got up, and left.
* * * *
Hamilton couldn't believe it!
There he was, sitting alone in the park, his back to the entrance, no one in the place but Bertram A. Kling!
This was going to be too simple. He almost regretted the sheer simplicity of it. Walk up behind the man, put a bullet in the back of his head, gangland style. They might even think the Mafia had done it. This was delicious. He could not wait to tell Isaac about it.
He checked the street, eyes swinging right, then left.
And moved swiftly into the park.
The Magnum was in the right-hand pocket of his overcoat.
Patches of snow on the ground.
Water rolling down the brick wall at the far end.
The park silent otherwise.
Ten feet away from him now.
Careful, careful.
The gun came out of his pocket.