Ten Plus One

by Ed McBain

  “Yeah, somebody pulled a job.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” Frankie said. “I learned my lesson.”

  “Did you?”

  “Five years was enough for me.” He shook his head. “No more. Never again.”

  “It’s good to hear that, Frankie,” Masterson said.

  “Well, I happen to mean it. I’m making eighty bucks a week now, and I work like a dog for it, but it’s clean, you know. They deduct all the taxes from it, and what’s left is mine, earned honest, no problems. I report once a week to my parole…”

  “Yeah, Frankie, you know a guy named Randolph Norden?”

  “Sure I do. He was my lawyer.”

  “Was?”

  “Yeah. When I had the trouble. Was. Why? What’s the matter?”

  “How do you feel about him, Frankie?”

  “He’s a good lawyer. Why?”

  “A good lawyer? He got you sent up, didn’t he?”

  “That wasn’t his fault. He wanted me to plead not guilty, but this guy I knew, he was a kid in and out of jail since he could walk, he told me I should cop out, that maybe I’d get a suspended sentence. So I argued with Norden, and he kept saying not guilty, not guilty, but I told him I’d decided to cop out. So I copped out, and got ten years. Some jerk I was, huh?”

  “So you liked Norden, huh?”

  “Yeah, he was okay.”

  “Maybe he shoulda argued a little more, don’t you think? Convinced you? Don’t you think that’s what a good lawyer shoulda done?”

  “He tried to, but I wouldn’t listen. I figured all I had on my record so far was juvenile stuff, you know, rumbles, and once when I was carrying a zip gun, the Sullivan Act. But I figured, what it amounted to, the burglary rap was a first offense really, and I figured if I copped out they’d go easy, maybe make it a suspended sentence. Instead, we got a judge he figured I’d learn a lesson behind bars for a little while.” Frankie shrugged. “Maybe he was right.”

  “You’re a pretty nice fellow, ain’t you, Frankie? You forgive Norden for steering you wrong, and now you’re forgiving the judge for sending you away. That’s real nice of you, Frankie.”

  “A judge only has a job to do,” Frankie said, and he shrugged again. “Listen, I don’t understand what this is all about. What’s this go to do with…?”

  “With what, Frankie?”

  “With…well, with whatever. With…with why you dragged me up here. What’s the story?”

  “You read the papers, Frankie?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “When’s the last time?”

  “I don’t know. I go to work early, and I ain’t got time to stop for them. Anyway, I don’t read so good. That’s why I got in all that trouble when I was still in high school. Everybody else was reading…”

  “Yeah, let’s never mind the underprivileged-kid bit, Frankie,” Masterson said. “When’s the last time you read a newspaper?”

  “I don’t know. I just told you…”

  “You listen to the radio?” Brock asked in his even, emotionless voice.

  “Sure I do.”

  “You heard about the guy who’s going around shooting people?”

  “What guy?”

  “The sniper.”

  “Yeah, I think I heard something about it. Yeah, that’s right, he shot some guy up in Riverhead, didn’t he? A fruit man or something. Yeah, I heard that.” Frankie looked up at the detectives, puzzled. “I don’t get it. What…what…?”

  “All right, let’s cut the crap,” Brock said, and the room went silent.

  Frankie looked up at them expectantly, and they looked down at him patiently, waiting. Frankie wasn’t sure what crap he was expected to cut, but he suddenly wanted that door to be unlocked, suddenly wanted that telephone to ring. The two detectives stood over him silently, and he looked up at them silently, each waiting, he not knowing what he was expected to say or do, they seemingly possessed of infinite patience. He wiped his upper lip. He shrugged, the silence lengthened unbearably. He could hear the clock ticking on the wall.

  “Look,” he said at last, “could you tell me what…?” and Brock hit him. He hit him suddenly and effortlessly, his arm coming up swiftly from its position at his side, his hand open, his palm catching Frankie noisily on the cheek. Frankie was more surprised than hurt. He brought his hands up too late, felt the stinging slap, and then looked up at Brock with a puzzled expression.

  “What’d I do?” he asked plaintively.

  “Randolph Norden is dead, Frankie,” Masterson said.

  Frankie sat still for several moments, looking up at the detectives, sweating freely now, feeling trapped in this small room with its locked door. “What…what do you want from me?”

  Brock hit him again. He hit him very hard this time, drawing back his fist and smashing it full into Frankie’s face. Frankie felt the hard knuckles colliding with his nose, and he said, “What are you doing?” and started to come out of the chair, when Masterson put both meaty hands on his shoulders and slammed him down again, so hard that the shock rumbled up his spine and into his neck. “Hey!” he said, and Brock hit him once more, and this time Frankie felt something break in his nose, heard the terrible crunching sound of his own nose breaking, and then immediately touched his upper lip and felt the blood pouring onto his hand.

  “Why’d you do it, Frankie?” Brock said tightly.

  “I didn’t do nothing. Listen, will you listen…?”

  Brock bunched his fist and raised it over his head as if he were holding a hammer in it, and then brought it down as if the fist itself were the head of the hammer, onto the bridge of Frankie’s nose, and Frankie screamed in pain and fell out of the chair. Masterson kicked him in the ribs, once, sharply.

  “Get up,” Brock said.

  “Look, look, will you please…?”

  “Get up!”

  He struggled to his feet. There was an unbearable pain in his nose, and blood was dripping onto his lip and all over his white shirt and the new tie he had bought for his afternoon date.

  “Listen,” he said, “listen to me. I’ve got a job, I’m working, I’m straight, can’t you understand…?” and Brock hit him. “Listen!” he screamed. “Listen to me! I didn’t do anything! You hear me? Can you understand me?” and Brock hit him again, because Brock did not understand him at all. Brock understood only that Frankie Pierce was a punk who had been cutting up other punks in street rumbles since the time he was twelve. He understood only that the punk named Frankie Pierce had graduated into the cheap thief who was Frankie Pierce, and then into the jailbird, and then into the ex-con, all of which still made him a punk, that was the understanding Brock had. So he kept following him around the room while Frankie backed against the walls trying to explain that he was straight now, he was honest, he was working, kept hitting the broken nose over and over again until it was only a sodden shapeless mass plastered to his face, don’t you understand, hit him as Frankie reached for the phone and tried to pick up the receiver, won’t you please understand, kicked him when he fell to the floor whimpering in pain, please, please, understand, and then stood over him with his fists bunched and ready and yelled, “Why’d you kill him, you little son of a bitch?” and hit him again when he couldn’t answer.

  The girl waited for Frankie in the park for two hours. He never showed up for the date because Brock and Masterson kept him in the locked interrogation room for six hours, alternately rousing him and then beating him senseless again, while asking why he had killed a man he hadn’t seen in five years. At the end of their session, they were convinced he was clean. They wrote out a report stating he had broken parole by assaulting a police officer during a routine interrogation.

  Frankie Pierce was removed to the criminal ward of the hospital on Walker Island in the River Dix, to recuperate before he was shipped back to the penitentiary at Castleview, upstate.

  A sure sign that nothing was happening on this case—oh, yeah, maybe a cheap hood was being beaten up and m
ade to realize you can’t go home again—was the fact that time was passing. It was true that there had been no murders since Andrew Mulligan drank his last drink, but time was nonetheless flitting by, and there was no greater proof of this than the reappearance of Bert Kling at the squadroom, looking tanned and healthy and very blond from the sun after his vacation. Lieutenant Byrnes, who didn’t like to see anyone looking so well-rested, immediately assigned him to the Sniper Case.

  On the afternoon of May 7, while Meyer and Carella were uptown requestioning Mrs. O’Grady, the nice little woman who had been present when Salvatore Palumbo called it quits, Bert Kling was in the office looking over the Sniper file and trying to acquaint himself with what had gone before. When the blonde young lady walked into the squadroom, he barely looked up.

  Meyer and Carella were sitting in the living room of a two-story clapboard dwelling in Riverhead while Mrs. O’Grady poured them coffee and tried to recall the incidents preceding the death of Salvatore Palumbo.

  “I think he was weighing out some fruit. Do you take cream and sugar?”

  “Black for me,” Meyer said.

  “Detective Carella?”

  “A little of each.”

  “Should I call you Detective Carella, or Mr. Carella, or just what?”

  “Whichever is most comfortable to you.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll call you Mr. Carella. Because calling you Detective Carella sounds as if you should be calling me Housewife O’Grady. Is that all right?”

  “That’s fine, Mrs. O’Grady. He was weighing out some fruit, you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what? I know we’ve been over all this, but…”

  “Then he just fell onto the stand and slid down to the sidewalk. I guess I began screaming.”

  “Did you hear the shot, Mrs. O’Grady?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Just before the train pulled in.”

  “What train?”

  “The train. Upstairs.”

  “The elevated?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was coming into the platform when Mr. Palumbo got shot?”

  “Well, to tell you the truth,” Mrs. O’Grady said, “I’m not too clear about the sequence. I mean, I heard the shot, but at the time I didn’t think it was a shot, I figured it was a backfire or a blowout—who expects to hear a gun go off while you’re buying fruit from a man? So, although I heard the shot, I didn’t realize Sal…Mr. Palumbo…had been shot. I thought he was suffering a heart attack or something, him falling like that, and the fruit all tumbling off the stand. But then, of course, I saw the blood at the back of his head, and I guess my mind made the connection between the explosion I had heard and the fact that Sal was…well, I didn’t know he was dead…but certainly hurt.”

  “And the train?”

  “Well, what I’m trying to say is that everything happened so fast. The train coming in…I think it was coming in, though it may have been leaving…and the shot, and Sal falling down hurt. It all happened so fast that I’m not sure of the time sequence, the poor man.”

  “You’re not sure, then, whether the train was pulling into the station or leaving it.”

  “That’s right. But it was moving, that’s for sure. It wasn’t just standing still in the station.”

  “Did you see anyone on the station platform, Mrs. O’Grady?”

  “No, I didn’t even look up there. I thought it was a backfire at first, you see, or something like that. It never crossed my mind that somebody was shooting a gun. So I had no reason to look around to see who or what it was. Besides, I was buying fruit, and to tell you the truth, the shot didn’t register on my mind at all, either as a backfire or anything, it just didn’t register until I began thinking about it afterward, after Sal was dead, do you know what I mean? It’s hard to explain, but there are so many noises in the city, and you just don’t listen to them anymore, you just go about your business.”

  “Then, in effect, you really didn’t hear the shot at the time. Or at least, you didn’t react to it.”

  “That’s right. But there was a shot.” Mrs. O’Grady paused. “Why are you asking? Do they make silencers for rifles?”

  “They’re not manufactured, Mrs. O’Grady, no. There are both state and federal regulations against the use of silencers. But any fairly competent machinist could turn one out in his own garage, especially if he had something like murder on his mind.”

  “I always thought silencers were very complicated things. They always look so complicated in the movies.”

  “Well, they’re really very simple in principle. When you put a silencer on a gun or a rifle, you’re closing a series of doors, in effect. You’re muffling the sound.”

  “Doors?” Mrs. O’Grady asked.

  “Try to visualize a piece of tubing, Mrs. O’Grady, perhaps an inch and a half in diameter, and about eight inches long. Inside this tube is a series of separated eight-inch baffling plates, the closed ‘doors’ that absorb the sound. That’s a silencer. A man can fashion one on a home lathe.”

  “Well, I heard a shot,” Mrs. O’Grady said.

  “And yet you didn’t turn, you didn’t look up, you didn’t comment upon it to Mr. Palumbo.”

  “No.”

  “The rifle that fired a .308 caliber bullet would have been a high-powered rifle, Mrs. O’Grady. Powerful enough to have felled a charging lion.”

  “So?”

  “It would have made a pretty loud noise.”

  “So?”

  “I’m only suggesting, Mrs. O’Grady, that your reconstruction of what happened may only be a result of your later thoughts about the incident.”

  “I heard a shot,” Mrs. O’Grady insisted.

  “Did you? Or is it only now, now that you know Mr. Palumbo was shot and killed, that you think you remember hearing a shot? In other words, Mrs. O’Grady, is logic interfering with your memory?”

  “Logic?”

  “Yes. If a bullet was fired, and if a man was killed, there must have been a shot. And if there was shot, you must have heard it. And if you heard it, you must have dismissed it as a backfire or a blowout.”

  “I’m sure that’s what happened.”

  “Have you ever heard a blowout, Mrs. O’Grady?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “And what happened? Did you ignore it, or were you momentarily startled?”

  “I suppose I was startled.”

  “Yet when Mr. Palumbo was killed with a high-powered rifle, which would have made a very loud noise, you only later remembered hearing a shot. Does that sound valid?”

  “Well, I think I heard a shot,” Mrs. O’Grady said.

  Carella smiled. “Maybe you did,” he answered. “We’ll check with the man in the change booth on the platform. In any case, Mrs. O’Grady, you’ve been extremely cooperative and most helpful.”

  “He was a nice man,” Mrs. O’Grady said. “Sal. He was really a very nice man.”

  The man in the change booth at the station platform above Palumbo’s store was not a very nice man at all. He was a crotchety old grouch who began giving the detectives trouble the moment they approached the booth.

  “How many?” he asked immediately.

  “How many what?” Meyer asked.

  “Can’t you read the sign? State how many tokens you want.”

  “We don’t want any tokens,” Meyer said.

  “Map of the system is on the wall right there,” the attendant said. “I’m not paid to give out travel information.”

  “Are you paid to cooperate with the police?” Carella asked amiably.

  “The what?”

  “Police,” Meyer said, and he flashed the tin.

  “What’s that say? I’m a little nearsighted.”

  “It says ‘Detective,’ ” Meyer answered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “We want to know the
best way to get to Carruthers Street in Calm’s Point,” Carella said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I never heard of Carruthers Street.”

  “That’s because I just made it up,” Carella said.

  “Listen, what are you, a bunch of wise guys?” the attendant asked.

  “We’re two college kids on a scavenger hunt,” Meyer said. “We’re supposed to bring back a hibernating bear, and you’re the first one we’ve seen all day.”

  “Haha,” the attendant said mirthlessly. “That’s very funny.”

  “What’s your name?” Carella asked.

  “Quentin. You going to give me trouble? I’m a civil-service employee, too, you know. It ain’t nice to give your own kind trouble.”

  “What’s your first name, Mr. Quentin?”

  “Stan.”

  “Stan Quentin?” Meyer asked incredulously.

  “Yeah, what’s the matter with that?” The old man peered into Meyer’s face. “What’s your name?”

  Meyer, whose full name was Meyer Meyer, the legacy of a practical-joking father, hastily said, “Let’s never mind the names, okay, Mr. Quentin? We only want to ask you some questions about what happened downstairs last week, okay?”

  “The wop who was killed, you mean?” Quentin asked.

  “Yeah, the wop who was killed,” Carella said.

  “So what about him? I didn’t even know him.”

  “Then how do you know he was a wop?”

  “I read his name in the papers.” He turned to Meyer again. “What’s wrong with Stan Quentin, would you mind telling me?”

  “Nothing. They almost named a prison after you.”

  “Yeah? Which one?”

  “Alcatraz,” Meyer said.

  The old man stared at him blankly. “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Tell us about the day of the murder.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. The guy downstairs got shot, that’s all.”

  “He got shot from this platform, Mr. Quentin,” Meyer said. “For all we know, you could have done it.”

  “Haha,” Quentin said.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because I can’t even read what your shield says from a distance of three feet. How the hell could I shoot a man who’s all the way down in the street?”