Tricks

by Ed McBain

  Invest it at ten percent, that'd bring them twenty thousand a year, more than enough to live on like a king and queen. A maharajah and maharanee was more like it. Go to the beach every day, have someone doing the cleaning and the cooking, have a man polishing the car and doing the marketing, buy herself a dozen saris, learn how to wrap them, maybe get herself a little diamond for her nose. Even at eight percent, the money would bring in sixteen thousand a year. More than enough.

  And all they'd had to do for it was kill him.

  The train rumbled through the night, lulling her to sleep.

  He approached Eileen almost the moment she sat down at one of the tables.

  "Hi," he said. "Remember me?"

  No eyeglasses, no tattoo, but otherwise their man down to his socks. The eyeglasses he'd worn on his earlier outings could have been windowpane. The tattoo could have been a decal. Her heart was beating wildly. She didn't realize until this moment just how frightened she really was. You're acop , she told herself.Am I? she wondered.

  "I'm sorry," she said, "have we met?"

  "Mind if I sit down?"

  "Please do."

  The prim and proper hooker.

  But crossed her legs anyway, to show him thigh clear to Cincinnati.

  "I'm Linda," she said. "Are you looking for a good time?"

  "That depends," he said.

  "On what?"

  "On what you consider a good time."

  "That's entirely up to you."

  "I noticed you when I was coming in," he said. "You were leaving with a little Puerto Rican."

  "You're very observant," she said.

  "You're a beautiful woman, how could I miss you?"

  "What's your name?" she asked.

  "Howie."

  "Howie what?"

  "Howie gonna keep 'em down on the farm."

  He had them in stitches. Shanahan's words. Kept telling them jokes. A stand-up comic with a knife.

  "So what're you interested in, Howie?"

  "Let's talk," he said.

  "Candy store's open," she said. "You want to know how much the goodies cost?"

  "Not right now."

  "Just say when, Howie."

  He folded his hands on the tabletop. Looked into her eyes.

  "How long have you been hooking, Linda?"

  "First time tonight," she said. "In fact, I'm a virgin."

  Not a smile. Not even thehint of a smile. Some stand-up comic. Just sat there looking into her eyes, big hands folded on the table.

  "How old are you?"

  "You should never ask a woman her age, Howie."

  "Early thirties, in there?"

  "Who knows?" she said, and rolled her eyes.

  "What's your real name?"

  "What's yours?"

  "I told you. Howie."

  "But you didn't tell me Howie what."

  "Howie Cantrell," he said.

  "Eileen Burke," she said.

  The name would mean nothing to him. If he was their man, he'd learn soon enough who Eileen Burke was. If he was looking for action, her name wouldn't mean beans to him.

  "Why are you using Linda?" he asked.

  "I hate the name Eileen," she said. Which wasn't true. She'd always thought the name Eileen was perfect for the person she was. "Linda sounds more glamorous."

  "You're glamorous enough," he said, "you don't need a phony name. May I call you Eileen?"

  "You can call me Lassie if you like."

  Still no smile. Totally devoid of a sense of humor. So where was the comedian? Flat, steel-gray eyes reflecting nothing. But were they the eyes of a triple murderer?

  "So where're you from, Howie?"

  "I'll ask the questions," he said.

  "Now you sound like a cop."

  "I used to be one."

  Bullshit, she thought.

  "Oh?" she said. "Where?"

  "Philadelphia," he said. "Do you see that girl sitting at the bar?"

  "Which one?" Eileen asked.

  "In the black skirt. With the short dark hair."

  He was indicating Annie.

  "What about her?"

  "I think she's a cop," he said.

  Eileen burst out laughing.

  "Jenny?" she said. "You've got to be kidding."

  "You know her?"

  "She's been hooking since she was thirteen. Jenny a cop? Wait'll I tell her!"

  "I already told her."

  "Mister, let me tellyou something about hookers and cops, okay?"

  "I know all about hookers and cops."

  "Right, you're a cop yourself."

  "Usedto be one," he said. "I can always tell a cop."

  "Have it your way," she said. "Jenny's a cop, you're a cop, I'm a cop, when you're in love the whole world's a cop."

  "You don't believe I used to be a cop, do you?"

  "Howie, I'll believe anything you tell me. You tell me you used to be a Presbyterian minister, I'll believe you. An astronaut, a spy, a hellip;"

  "I was with the Vice Squad in Philly."

  "So what happened? Didn't you like the work?"

  "It was good work."

  "So how come you ain't doing it no more?"

  "They fired me."

  "Why?"

  "Who knows?" he said, and shrugged.

  "Can't stay away from the job, though, huh?"

  "What does that mean?"

  "Well, here you are, Howie."

  "Just thought I'd drop by."

  "You been here before?"

  First leading question she'd asked him.

  "Couple of times."

  "Guess you like it, huh?"

  "It's okay."

  "Come on, Howie, tell me the truth." Teasing him now. "You really dig the girls here, don't you?"

  "They're okay. Some of them."

  "Which ones?"

  "Some of them. Lots of these girls, you know, they're in this against their will, you know."

  "Oh, sure."

  "I mean, they were forced into it, you know."

  "You sure you were a Vice cop, Howie?"

  "Yes."

  "I mean, you sound almosthuman ."

  "Well, it's true, you know. A lot of these girls would get out of it if they knew how."

  "Tell me the secret. How do I get out of it, Howie?"

  "There are ways."

  A big, wiry, gray-haired guy walked over from the bar. Had to be in his mid-fifties, grizzled look, sailor's swagger. Wearing jeans and white sneakers, blue T-shirt, gold crucifix hanging on a chain outside the shirt, metal-buttoned denim jacket open over it. Right arm in a plaster cast and a sling. Shaggy gray eyebrows, knife scar angling downward through the right brow and partially closing the right eye. Brown eyes. Thick nose broken more than once. Blue watch cap tilted onto the back of his head. Shock of gray hair hanging on his forehead. He pulled out a chair, sat, and said, "Buzz off, Preacher."

  Howie looked at him.

  "Buzz off, I wanna talk to the lady."

  "Hey mister," Eileen said, "we're hellip;"

  "You hear me, Preacher? Move!"

  Howie shoved back his chair. He glared angrily at the guy with the broken arm, and then walked across the bar and out into the street. Annie was already up and after him.

  "Thanks a lot," Eileen said. "You just cost me hellip;"

  "Shanahan," he said.

  She looked at him.

  "Put your hand on my knee, talk nice."

  The midgets came in at a minute before eleven.

  Shotgun Zuckerman was ready to close the store.

  They came in yelling "Trick or treat!"

  Alice opened fire at once.

  ("It was us taking all the risk," she said at the Q A later. "Never mind what Quentin told us. If anybody pegged us for little people, we were finished. It was better to kill them. Easier, too.")

  Zuckerman didn't even have a chance to reach for the shotgun. He went down dead in the first volley.

  Meyer and Carella broke out of the stockroom the
moment they heard the bell over the door sound. By the time they came through the curtain shielding the front of the store from the back, Zuckerman was already dead.

  In the station wagon outside, the blonde began honking the horn.

  "Police!" Meyer shouted, and Alice opened up with a second volley.

  This wasn't a cops-and-robbers movie, this was real life. Neither of the detectives got off a shot.

  Meyer went down with a bullet through his arm and another through his shoulder.

  Carella went down with a bullet in his chest. No tricks. Real blood. Real pain.

  Three of the midgets ran out of the store without even glancing at the cash register. The only reason Alice ran out after them, without first killing the two cops on the floor, was that she thought there might be more cops in the place.

  This came out during the Q A at ten minutes past two on the morning of All Hallows' Day.

  CHAPTER 9

  The more Parker presented himself as afake cop, the more he began feeling like areal cop. Everybody at the party kept telling him he could pass for a detective anywhere in the city. Everybody told him his shield and his gun, a .38 Smith Wesson Detective Special, looked very authentic. One of the women mdash;a sassy brunette dressed as a Las Vegas cigarette girl, in a flared black skirt and a flimsy top, high-heeled black shoes, and seamed silk stockings mdash;wanted to hold the gun but he told her cops didn't allow straights to handle dangerous weapons. He had deliberately used police jargon for "honest citizens." In this city, a straight was anyone victimized by a thief. In some cities, victims were called "civilians." In any city, a thief was anyone who wasn't a cop, a straight, or a civilian. To the cops in this city, most thieves were "cheap" thieves.

  A homosexual wearing a blonde wig, a long purple gown, and amethyst earrings to match, objected to the use of the word "straight" to describe an honest citizen. The homosexual, who said he was dressed as Marilyn Monroe, told Parker that all thegays he knew were also honest citizens. Parker apologized for his use of police terminology. "But, you see," he said, "I ain't areal cop." And yet he felt like one. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt like a bona fide detective on the world's finest police force.

  It was peculiar.

  Even more peculiar was the fact that he was having such a good time.

  Peaches Muldoon had a lot to do with that.

  She was the life of the party, and some of her exuberance and vitality rubbed off on Parker. She told everyone stories about what it was like growing up as a victim on a sharecropper's farm in Tennessee. She told them incest was a way of life on the farm. Told them her first sexual experience was with her father. Told them herbrother's first sexual experience mdash;other than with the sheep who was his steady girlfriend mdash;had been with his sister Peaches Muldoon one rainy afternoon when they were alone together in the house. She told everyone that she'd enjoyed her brother more than she had her father. Everyone laughed. They all thought she was making up victim stories. Only Parker knew that the stories were true; she'd told him ten years earlier that her priest-killing son was the bastard child of her relationship with her brother.

  The stories Peaches told encouraged Parker to tell some stories of his own. Everyone thought he was making them up, the way Peaches had made up her stories about theTobacco Road dirt farm. He told them the story about the woman who'd cut off her husband's penis with a straight razor. He said, "I substituted the word penis for cock, because I didn't want to offend anybody here who might be a vigilante for the Meese Commission." Everyone laughed at the story and also at his comment about the Meese Commission. Somebody wondered out loud if the Attorney General considered it pornographic that the unauthorized sale of arms to Iran had provided unauthorized funds for Nicaraguan rebels.

  This was straying into intellectual territory beyond Parker's scope.

  He laughed, anyway.

  Pornography was something he dealt with on a daily basis, and he believed straights ought to keep their noses out of it, period. Complicated and illegal arms deals were something else, and he never wondered about them except as they might effect his line of work. When you dealt with cheap thieves day and night, you already knew that they weren't only in the streets but also in the highest reaches of government. He didn't say this to anyone here at the party because he was having too good a time, and he didn't want to get too serious about cause and effect. He didn't even think of it consciously as cause and effect. But he knew, for example, that when a star athlete was exposed as a coke addict, the kids playing pickup ball in the school yard thought, "Hey, I gotta try me some of that shit." He also knew that when somebody high up in government broke the law, then your punk dealing grams of crack in the street could justify his actions by saying, "See?Everybody breaks the law." Cause and effect. It only made Parker's job harder. Which was maybe why he didn't work too hard at the job anymore. Although tonight,playing at the job, he felt as if he was working harder at it than he had in years.

  It was really very peculiar.

  He told everybody that one day he was going to write a book about his experiences.

  "Ah-ha!" somebody said, "you're awriter !"

  "No, no, I'm a cop," he protested.

  "So how come you want to be a writer?" someone else said.

  " 'Cause I ain't got the guts to be a burglar," Parker said, and everyone laughed again.

  He'd never realized he was so witty.

  At a little after eleven, Peaches suggested that they move on to another party.

  Which is how Parker got to meet the wheelman and one of the midgets on the liquor-store holdups.

  There were a lot of things bothering Brown about the Sebastiani case.

  The three most important things were the head and the hands. He kept wondering why they hadn't turned up yet. He kept wondering where Jimmy Brayne had dropped them.

  He also wondered where Brayne was right now.

  The blues from the Two-Three, armed with the BOLO that had gone out all over the city, had located the blue Citation in the parking lot of an A P not far from the River Dix. The techs had crawled over the car like ants, lifting latent prints, collecting stain samples, vacuuming for hairs and fibers. Anything they'd got had already been bagged and sent to the lab for comparison with whatever had been recovered from the Econoline van. Brown had no illusions about the lab getting back to them before sometime Monday. Meanwhile, both cars had been dumped mdash;which left Brayne without wheels. His last location had been in the Twenty-Third, where he'd dropped the Citation, way over on the south side of the city. Was he now holed up somewhere in that precinct? Had he crabbed east, west, or north to a hotel someplace else? Or was he already on an airplane, bus, or train heading for parts unknown?