Ten Plus One

by Ed McBain

“Oh?” Mulligan said, his eyebrows raising just a trifle, an only faintly interested expression on his face. “Didn’t my secretary call?”

  “No, Mr. Mulligan, I’m sorry. She didn’t.”

  “Well…” Mulligan said, and he turned a gently anticipatory inquiring look on the flustered proprietress, a look that firmly demanded, “Well, what do you propose to do about this intolerable set of circumstances?”

  The proprietress knew how to read looks, because she’d been dealing with lawyers both here and in the old country, and they were all the same, they all stank.

  “I’ll get you another table, Mr. Mulligan,” she said, “a very nice table in the other room. Come with me, I’ll take care of you.”

  She started to turn, and then stopped in her tracks, and a smile flowered on her face, and she said, “Wait, they’re leaving. Look, they’re just paying their check. See, Mr. Mulligan? It all turned out all right, after all. You can have your own table.”

  “I appreciate that,” Mulligan said. “Sincerely, I do.”

  The two gentlemen sitting at Mulligan’s customary table paid the check, rose, lit their cigars, and left the restaurant. The waiter changed the tablecloth, and held the chair for Mulligan as he sat. Mulligan pulled the chair close to the table and, without looking at the waiter, said, “Dewar’s on the rocks, please,” and then relaxed and looked through the huge plate-glass window at the street outside. He enjoyed sitting in the same spot each day, because it made him easier to identify. He particularly enjoyed this table immediately adjacent to the window because it enabled him to be identified from outside the restaurant as well as inside. A fellow attorney passed the table, said, “Hello, Andy, how are you?” and touched him on the shoulder. Mulligan smiled in response and wondered where the hell his scotch was. The waiter brought it almost instantly.

  “Would you like to order now, Mr. Mulligan?” the waiter asked.

  “I’ll look over the menu,” Mulligan said. The waiter brought the card, and Mulligan picked up his glass of scotch, took a sip of it, and began reading. The menu rarely changed. He almost knew it by heart.

  He was wondering whether he should have the crabmeat au gratin when suddenly the plate-glass window alongside the table shattered.

  Mulligan didn’t have time to react to the falling glass because it had been shattered by a bullet, and the next thing the bullet shattered was the bone just below his right temple.

  If there had been a scale of importance for homicide, ranging from zero for the least important to ten for the most important, Blanche Lettiger would have clocked in at zero, Sal Palumbo would have registered a resounding two, and both Anthony Forrest and Randolph Norden would have fallen somewhere between the three and four mark.

  Andrew Mulligan fell snoot-first into his glass of Dewar’s on the rocks and promptly sent the murder meter soaring to seven-point-eight. There were two leading afternoon newspapers in the city, one big, one small, you paid your money and you took your choice. They both stank. The big one always printed its headline-above-the-headline in red type. The tabloid-sized one always printed its headline-above-the-headline in blue type, because it was a very liberal newspaper and didn’t want people to think it was too liberal, in fact didn’t want even the slightest association with the color red. The big newspaper’s headline that afternoon read SNIPER SLAYS D.A. The headline-above-the-headline was printed in red and it said: MULLIGAN’S TRIUMPHS, p. 5. The tabloid-sized newspaper’s headline that afternoon read MULLIGAN MURDERED, and across the top of the page, in blue, THE FIGHTING D.A., A Study by Agnes Lovely, p. 33. Agnes Lovely’s study had been composed in fifteen minutes by backtracking through the paper’s morgue shortly before press time. The news story, on the other hand, read more like a study, because it was a policy of the blue-headline tabloid to make every item of news sound like a piece of fiction in a popular magazine. If President Kennedy sent a new tax bill to Congress, the blue-headline tabloid started the story something like this: These ancient halls were still with contemplation today. There was a paper to be considered, a decision to be made. The paper had come down to them from above, a document that could change the lives of everyone in the nation, a document that…and so on. Somewhere toward the end of the news story, the reporter usually revealed what the hell he was talking about. Up to that time, he was writing for atmosphere and suspense.

  There were many people in the city who felt that the rifle death of an assistant district attorney contained enough atmosphere and suspense all by itself. These people foolishly felt that all a newspaper was supposed to do in a news story was tell the facts, ma’am. But the blue-headline newspaper, you see, was really running a disguised school for fiction writers, someone having told the city editor that Ernest Hemingway had once been a newspaper correspondent. The city editor also felt that most of the people in the city were illiterate. He would have liked to fill his newspaper with a lot of photographs beneath which would be short, sharp captions, but a morning newspaper in the city had been using that format for a good many years now, and the city editor of the blue-headline tabloid didn’t want to seem like a copycat. So instead, he decided that illiterate people would rather not have their news straight from the shoulder, but would instead prefer reading each story as if it were a chapter of a long novel about life.

  The tall man was drinking scotch. He sat by the restaurant window watching the rush of humanity outside, thinking private thoughts of a crusader who has foolishly and momentarily taken off all his armor. He could have been a Columbus in other times, he could have been an Essex at the side of Elizabeth. He was, instead, a tall and impressive man drinking his scotch. He was soon to be a dead man.

  This was the way the reporter on the blue-headline newspaper started his story. But in addition to a city editor who had the notion that everyone was an illiterate except maybe himself, the paper also had a typesetter who thought that people enjoyed working out cryptograms while reading their newspapers. When you were dealing with illiterates, it wasn’t necessary to give the facts in the first place, and in the second place it was always necessary to garble every line of type so that the story became even more mystifying and, in many cases, practically unintelligible.

  The story on page 3 of that afternoon’s edition read like this:

  Thet allman was drinking scotch. He sat by the restaurant window watching the Russian humanity outside, thinking private thoughts of sex at the side of Elizabeth. He was, a crusader who has foolishly and momentarily taken off his arm. Or he could have been a Columbus in other times, he could have been an Es DRINKING HIS SCOTCH. He was soon to be a dead man.

  instead, a tall and impressive man.

  It really didn’t matter what the blue-headline tabloid said, because the assistant district attorney named Andrew Mulligan was inconsiderately turning a little blue on a slab in the morgue, and the district attorney himself, a man named Carter Cole, turned a very deep shade of blue mixed with red and bordering on purple when he found out that a man from his office had been inconveniently knocked off in the middle of a trial while drinking a glass of scotch.

  The DA himself picked up a telephone and put in a call to the Police Commissioner, wanting to know what the hell was happening in this city when a respected and much-needed assistant district attorney couldn’t even go to a restaurant without having his brains blown out while drinking a glass of scotch. The Police Commissioner told him that he was doing everything in his power to get at the facts, after which he hung up and called the Chief of Detectives.

  He asked the Chief of Detectives what the hell was happening in this city when a respected and much-needed assistant district attorney couldn’t even go into a restaurant without having his brains blown out while drinking a glass of scotch. The Chief of Detectives told him that he was doing everything in his power to get at the facts, after which he hung up and called Detective Lieutenant Peter Byrnes of the 87th Squad.

  Detective Lieutenant Peter Byrnes informed the Chief of Detectives that he had calle
d him only this morning in an attempt to solicit some assistance on this case, which was getting a little out of hand, what with people dying like flies, and what with respected and much-needed assistant district attorneys getting their brains blown out and all. The Chief of Detectives told Lieutenant Byrnes that he would certainly see to it that Capello, or whatever his name was, got all the help he needed on this case, because, and here his voice lowered, and he actually said, “Just between you and me, Pete, the DA himself was a little burned up over the situation.”

  Andrew Mulligan, meanwhile, was being sliced up nicely and neatly, and being searched for a stray bullet, which, when it was found, turned out to be a Remington .308, of all things. Being dead, he still had no idea that Carella and Meyer of the 87th Squad were working on a case involving someone who was putting bullets through people’s heads, nor had he any idea how much his own death had helped the investigating cops.

  By midnight that night, Carella had been assigned teams of detectives from every section of the city to assist in running down the sniper. He had, in effect, a small army to work with.

  Now all the army had to do was find the enemy.

  The enemy, like all good enemies everywhere, vanished from sight.

  There were no subsequent killings that week, and it seemed indeed as though detectives from all over the city had been mobilized to combat a ghost. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday passed uneventfully. The cruelest month was gone, taking part of May with it, and the murderer seemed to have disappeared.

  On Sunday, May 6, two detectives from the 12th Precinct, near the Calm’s Point Bridge downtown, decided it would be a good idea to look up Frankie Pierce. Carella had mentioned the name casually to them, as that of an ex-con who had once been a client of Randolph Norden. He had also mentioned that, in view of later developments, it seemed to him Pierce was clean, and not worth picking up. But the two detectives from the 12th were detectives/1st grade, and Carella was only a detective/2nd grade, and they didn’t much like being told how to investigate a homicide by someone whom they outranked, even if the squeal happened to be Carella’s. Besides, the two detectives from the 12th were bulls.

  One was named Masterson, and the other was named Brock. The two had been working together as a pair for a long time, and they had a long series of arrests and convictions to their credit, but they were nonetheless bulls. On that first Sunday in May, with the carnelian cherry blossoms bursting in the park, and a mild breeze blowing in off the River Dix from the south, Masterson and Brock got a little restless in the stuffy-squadroom of the 12th, and decided they could use a little fresh air. And then, since they were simply cruising around the streets in the vicinity of the Calm’s Point Bridge, they decided to look up Frankie Pierce, who lived at 371 Horton in the bridge’s shadow.

  Frankie Pierce had no idea he was about to be visited by detectives, or by detectives who were bulls. He was in constant touch with his parole officer, and he knew he had done nothing to break parole. He was, in fact, working at a garage as a mechanic and he had every intention of going straight, like they say in the movies. His employer was a fair-minded man who knew Frankie was on parole, but who felt that a man deserves a chance at rehabilitation. Frankie was a good worker and a hard worker. His employer was satisfied with him and had given him a raise only the month before.

  But Frankie made a couple of mistakes on that first Sunday in May when the bulls named Masterson and Brock visited him. The first mistake he made was in assuming the two detectives were only detectives and not bulls. The second mistake he made was in believing that people are understanding.

  He had a date that afternoon with a girl who was the cashier in a restaurant near the garage. He had told the girl he was an ex-con because he wanted to get things straight with her from the start. The girl had looked him over very carefully and then said, “What do I care what you used to be?” and that was that. He was going to take her over to the park, where they would go rowing for a while, and then have dinner at the outdoor restaurant, and then maybe walk up the Stem and take in a movie later. He was standing before the mirror putting on his tie when the knock sounded on his door.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Police. Open up, Frankie.”

  A puzzled look crossed his face. He looked at himself in the mirror, as though expecting an answer from his own image, then shrugged and walked to the door.

  Masterson and Brock stood in the hallway. They were both well over six feet tall, each weighing about 200 pounds, both wearing slacks and short-sleeved sports shirts that showed the bulge of their chest and arm muscles. Frankie, standing in front of them in the open door, looked very small, even though he was five feet ten inches tall and weighed 165 pounds.

  “Frankie Pierce?” Masterson asked.

  “That’s right,” he answered.

  “Get your hat, Frankie,” Masterson said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “We want to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Get your hat.”

  “I don’t wear a hat. What’s the matter?”

  “We want to ask you a few questions, Frankie.”

  “Well…well, why don’t you ask them then?”

  “You gonna be a wise guy?” Brock asked suddenly. It was the first time he had spoken, and the effect of his words was chilling. He had slate-gray eyes and a thick nose, and a mouth drawn across his face with a draftsman’s pen, tight and hard, and barely moving when he spoke.

  “No, look,” Frankie said. “I don’t mind answering some questions. It’s just I have a date, that’s all.”

  “You want to finish tying your tie, Frankie?” Masterson asked. “Or do you want to come along the way you are?”

  “Well…well, I’d like to tie my tie and…you know, I want to polish my shoes and…” He hesitated. “I told you, I have a date.”

  “Yeah, you told us. Go tie your tie.”

  “Is this gonna take long?”

  “That depends on you, don’t it, Frankie?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tie your tie.”

  He went to the mirror and finished the Windsor knot he had started. He was annoyed when he noticed his hands were trembling. He looked in the mirror at the two detectives who waited for him just inside the door, wondering if they had noticed, too, that his hands were trembling.

  “You want to shake a leg, Frankie?” Masterson said.

  “Sure, be right with you,” Frankie said pleasantly. “I wish you guys would tell me what this is all about.”

  “You’ll find out, Frankie.”

  “I mean, if you think I broke parole or something, you can give my parole officer a call, his name’s McLaughlin, he can tell you…”

  “We don’t have to give nobody a call,” Brock said in that same chilling voice.

  “Well…well, okay, let me just put on my jacket.”

  He put on his jacket, and then walked to the door, and followed the detectives out, and locked the door behind him. There were a lot of people on the front stoop of the building and hanging around the candy store, and he was embarrassed because he knew everybody in the neighborhood could smell a cop from away the hell across the street, and he didn’t want anybody to think he was in trouble again. He kept telling himself all the way crosstown to the station house that he wasn’t in trouble, this was probably some kind of routine pickup, somebody done something, so they were naturally rounding up all the ex-cons in the neighborhood, something like that. It would just be a matter of explaining to them, of making them understand he was going straight, had a good job with a good salary, wasn’t even seeing any of the guys he used to run with before he got busted.

  The two detectives said hello to the desk sergeant on their way into the building, and then Brock said in his chilling voice, “No calls, Mike,” and they walked him to the back of the building where the detective squadroom was, and then into the squadroom itself, and then into a small room with the word INTERROGATION l
ettered on the frosted glass door. Brock closed the door, took a key out of his pocket, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket.

  “Sit down, Frankie,” Masterson said.

  Frankie sat. He had heard what Brock said to the desk sergeant, and he had seen Brock lock the door and put the key in his pocket, and he was beginning to think that maybe something very serious had been done, and he wanted no part of it, whatever the hell it was. At the same time, he knew he was an ex-con, and he knew that it was only natural for them to go looking up a guy with a record if something was done, but once he explained, once they understood he was straight now…

  “How long you been out, Frankie?” Masterson asked.

  “Since November fifteenth.”

  “Castleview?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What were you in for?”

  “Third-degree burglary.”

  “You were a good boy, huh?”

  “Well, yeah, I didn’t give nobody any trouble.”

  “That’s nice, Frankie,” Masterson said.

  “How long you been living down there on Horton?” Brock asked.

  “Since I got out.”

  “You working?”

  “Yeah. I got a job.”

  “Where?”

  “The Esso station near the bridge. Right where the approach…”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’m a mechanic.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I worked in the automobile shop up at Castle—”

  “Doing what? Making license plates?” Masterson said, and Brock laughed. His laugh was a curious thing. It never made a sound. It came into his throat and erupted there only as a series of muscular spasms.

  “No, I learned a trade,” Frankie said. “Listen, I was good enough for the garage to hire me.”

  “That’s nice, Frankie,” Masterson said.

  “What’s this all about?” Frankie asked. “Somebody pull a job?”