by Ed McBain
“I was asked to bring this over,” she said, and placed the envelope on the desk. “You have to sign the Chain of Custody tag.”
“I know, honey,” Ollie said.
“It’s Officer Gomez, Detective,” she said, firmly but politely correcting him.
“Oh my, so it is,” Ollie said, glancing at the name tag pinned above her perky left breast, which read P. GOMEZ in white on black. He signed for the envelope, hefted it on the palm of his hand, and said, “Would you happen to know what’s inside here, Officer Gomez?”
“Yes, sir,” Gomez said. “I was there when it was recovered at the scene.”
“And where would that have been, this scene, Officer Gomez?”
“In the alley outside the auditorium at King Memorial. Down the sewer there, sir.”
“I see, ah yes,” Ollie said, and opened the envelope.
Someone diligent seemed to have retrieved what looked like a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.
• • •
OLLIE WAS JUST LEAVING the squadroom at a quarter to six that evening when the call from Ballistics came. The detective calling had a thick Hispanic accent. Ollie could hardly understand him. He wondered why these people didn’t learn to speak English. He also wondered why every time you called a movie theater to find out what was playing or what time the show went on, the person on the recorded message was somebody who’d learned English in Bulgaria. You had to call the number two, three times to get the message played all over again because you couldn’t figure out if it was Meg Ryan in the damn picture or Tom Cruise. He figured this was some kind of dumb-ass equal-opportunity program. If you had to record a telephone message essential to your business, what you did was choose the person in your company who couldn’t speak English at all. The thing was, Ollie hadn’t realized till now that this practice had spread to the Police Department.
From what he could gather, the .32 Smith & Wesson recovered from a sewer in the alley off the western end of the King Memorial auditorium either was or was not the pistol that had fired the fatal shots into Lester Henderson. From what he could gather further, a pistol bearing the serial numbers of the recovered weapon either was or was not registered to someone in this city.
“Listen,” Ollie said, “is there somebody there speaks English?”
The dope got insulted and hung up.
Ollie dialed back at once.
Another guy who couldn’t speak English answered the phone.
“What is this?” Ollie asked. “Did Castro invade the United States?”
“Quien es?” the guy asked.
“Detective/First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks,” Ollie said. “Give me somebody speaks English down there.”
He heard the phone rattling onto a counter top down there. Probably dangerous weapons all over the place down there, nobody could speak English.
“Detective Hogan,” somebody said.
“Hooray,” Ollie said.
“Who’s this?”
“Weeks, the Eight-Eight. You got an evidence piece we sent down for Comp and ID, I’m tryin’a get a report on it.”
“Didn’t somebody call you?”
“Somebody called me.”
“So?”
“So now I’m callin you. Did you test-fire the piece, and if so did you get a match?”
“Test bullets were positive for the evidence weapon, yes,” Hogan said. “Anything else?”
Ollie figured he was pissed off cause his spic buddies couldn’t speak English too good. “If it’s not too much trouble,” he said sweetly, “can you perhaps tell me if you ran a computer check on the evidence weapon?”
“Serial numbers were obliterated,” Hogan said. “Anything else?”
“Yes. What’s your first name, Hogan?”
“Why?”
“Cause I don’t like your attitude is why. I’m investigating a homicide here, of a councilman no less, and you happen to have in your possession the murder weapon. So if you don’t mind, Mr. Hogan, and if it ain’t too much trouble, what I’d like you to do is restore those numbers for me and then run the piece to see who might own the thing. Do you think you might know how to do that, Mr. Hogan? First you clean the site of the numbers…”
“I know how to do it,” Hogan said. “So do my partners.”
“Well, good, maybe the numbers are written in Spanish. After you bring ’em up, let me know what you find in the system, okay? I’ll be waiting. So will the Mayor’s Office, cause Lester Henderson wasn’t just some punk on the street, you know?” He paused for emphasis. “I wouldn’t be bothering you with all this, Mr. Hogan, cause I know how valuable your time is, but it so happens the only prints on the weapon were smeared, and we got nothing to go on. Which is why your expertise in the matter is so urgently demanded, ah yes,” Ollie said.
“The numbers were filed deep,” Hogan said. “Gonna be tough to bring ’em up.”
“Well now, gee, that’s your job, ain’t it?” Ollie said, and hung up.
6
ANDY PARKER didn’t particularly like being partnered with women, especially any woman who’d been hurt on the job. The way he understood it, Eileen Burke had been slashed while serving as an undercover decoy in a case she’d been working with the Rape Squad. Blue wisdom maintained she’d also been violated at the time, so to speak, but nobody talked about that because Burke had friends with short tempers, among them Bert Kling who Parker knew for a fact had been going steady with her when all this occurred. What went on between them—or even between her legs, for that matter—was none of his business. What happened on the job when you were partnered with someone who’d been cut or shot was another matter. They were never the same again, he knew that for a fact, too.
The man they were talking to this Wednesday night was a person Parker had been working with ever since February. His name was Francisco Palacios, and he owned and operated a cozy little shop that sold medicinal herbs, dream books, religious statues, numbers books, tarot cards, and other related items.
His silent partners, however, were named Gaucho Palacios and Cowboy Palacios, and they ran a shop behind the other shop, and this one offered for sale various unrelated and medically approved “marital aids” like dildoes, French ticklers, open-crotch panties, plastic vibrators, leather executioners’ masks, chastity belts, whips with leather thongs, penis extenders, aphrodisiacs, inflatable life-sized female dolls, condoms in every color of the rainbow including vermilion, books on how to hypnotize and otherwise overcome reluctant women, ben wa balls in both plastic and gold plate, and a highly popular mechanical device guaranteed to bring satisfaction and imaginatively called Suc-u-lator.
Francisco, The Gaucho, and The Cowboy were in fact one and the same person, and they were collectively a police informer, a stoolie, a snitch, or in some quarters even a rat. At the back of El Castillo de Palacios, as The Gaucho called his bifurcated shop, he sat with the two detectives and tried to fill them in on what was about to come down next Tuesday night. He found it somewhat difficult to concentrate on business, however, because his eyes kept wandering to the redheaded detective’s crossed legs, and he kept wondering what it would be like to put her in a pair of bragas sin entrepierna and leather anklets studded with chrome.
The Gaucho wondered if she found him good-looking.
He himself thought he was one cool hombre. As tall and as lean as a matinee idol, with dark brown eyes and a mustache he hadn’t sported a year or so ago, he still wore his long black hair in a high pompadour, the way kids used to wear it in the fifties. He did not admit to having four wives because that was against the law—having them, not admitting to having them. But none of them was redheaded. In fact, he had never been to bed with a redheaded woman in his life. He wondered if it was true that they were even more passionate than blondes. None of his wives was blond, either. Not really blond, anyway. He wondered if Eileen Burke here, with her splendidly crossed gambas and the faintest trace of a scar on her left cheek was, in fact, a real redhead. Does the
carpet match the drapes, he wondered, or is she merely Miss Clairol’s cousin?
“What is going to happen next Tuesday at midnight,” he said, “is a very large quantity…”
“When you say Tuesday at midnight,” Parker interrupted, “do you mean Tuesday night when the…”
“Yes,” Palacios said.
“…clock strikes twelve…”
“Yes.”
“Or Monday night when the clock strikes twelve?” Parker asked, cleaving the air with the edge of his hand.
Palacios looked at him.
“What I’m asking is…let’s say it’s eleven fifty-nine P.M., and then it’s midnight, and then the minute hand moves to twelve-ohone…is this Tuesday night we’re talking about, or Monday night?”
“I am talking about Tuesday at midnight,” Palacios said. “It is eleven fifty-nine on Tuesday night, and then it is midnight, and then it is twelve-oh-one on Wednesday morning. The shit will go down on Tuesday night at midnight.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to look at a calendar?” Eileen suggested.
Men, she thought.
There was, in fact, a calendar on the wall of The Gaucho’s shop, and it showed a picture of a dark-haired, spread-legged woman wearing nothing but an open Japanese fan. Palacios put his finger on the square for Wednesday, April 24. “This is today,” he said. He moved his finger down to the next row of dates. “And this is Tuesday, April thirtieth, the last day of the month. That is when the shit will go down. Tuesday night at midnight.”
“Is that clear, Eileen?” Parker asked.
She looked at him.
Palacios caught the glance.
Very nice, he thought, and wondered if she would care to be spanked by him some day.
Parker was thinking, Well, pardon me all to hell, lady, but these are not kindergarten kids we’re playing with here, and I would not like to show up a day late and a dollar short, and lose the whole damn bust, if you don’t mind. What he was afraid of, in fact, was that they’d break down the door next week and go down the basement steps, and Burke here would see a gun or even a box cutter and pick up her skirts and run right into everybody else in her haste to get out of there.
“These people are not amateurs,” he said aloud.
“They are very definitely not amateurs,” Palacios said, smiling at her to let her know he realized her partner here was being condescending merely because she was a ravishingly beautiful redhead he would love to take to bed sometime. “The ones selling the candy, anyway. They’ve been working on this deal for a long time now,” he said. “They are not going to like you going down their basement and messing with them.”
You can hardly see where she was cut, Parker thought. On the face, he understood. Psychologically bad, especially for a woman. Still, they did wonders with cosmetic surgery these days. And yet…
“Where is this basement of theirs?” Eileen asked.
“That’s one of the problems,” Palacios said.
“I didn’t know there were any problems,” Eileen said, and looked at Parker again.
“The problem is it keeps changing,” Palacios said.
“What keeps changing?”
“The basement where the dope is.”
“They keep moving the dope, is that what you mean?”
“So far, yes, it’s been in three different locations.”
“Why is that, do you suppose?”
“They’re being cautious,” Parker said.
“Careful,” Palacios agreed, nodding.
“They’re not amateurs,” Parker reminded her again.
“Or,” Eileen said.
Both men looked at her.
“They’re onto us,” she said.
HOGAN GOT BACK to Ollie at ten that night.
Ollie was enjoying a snack before going to bed. He hated any of his meals being interrupted, and was almost sorry he’d given Hogan his home number.
“What I did,” Hogan explained, “was first I cleaned the site, filed it down smooth, and polished it with Carborundum till I had it looking like a mirror. Then I kept swabbing it with hydrochloric acid till the numbers came up. Took me three hours altogether.”
Don’t tell me your fuckin troubles while I’m eating, Ollie thought.
“So what’d the computer have to say?” he asked.
“The gun was registered to a guy named Charles McGrath. He used it in a bank holdup five years ago, shot the guard and a lady making a deposit. He still had the piece in his possession when he got busted two months later.”
“Where is he now?”
“Castleview. Doing a max of twenty on a B-felony conviction. He should be coming up for parole in a year or so.”
“Meanwhile he’s behind bars, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s what the computer says.”
“What happened to the gun?”
“What do you mean?”
“After they sent Mr. McGrath to the country.”
“I told you. It was recovered in his possession.”
“Yeah, but how’d it get on the street again?”
“Well now, gee, that’s your job, ain’t it?” Hogan said, and hung up.
SHARYN EVERARD COOKE was the Police Department’s Deputy Chief Surgeon, the first black woman ever to be appointed to the job—though “black” was a misnomer in that her skin was the color of burnt almond. She wore her black hair in a modified Afro, which—together with high cheekbones, a generous mouth, and eyes the color of loam—gave her the look of a proud Masai woman. Five feet, nine inches tall, she considered herself a trifle overweight at a hundred and thirty pounds. Bert Kling thought she looked just right. Bert Kling thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. Bert Kling loved her to death.
The only problem was where to sleep.
Sharyn’s apartment was at the very end of the Calm’s Point subway line, some forty minutes from Kling’s studio apartment across the river and into the trees. From his apartment, it took him twenty minutes to get to work in the morning. From her apartment, it took him an hour and fifteen minutes. Sharyn still had her own private practice, but as a uniformed one-star chief, she still worked fifteen to eighteen hours a week at the Chief Surgeon’s Office, which was located in Rankin Plaza in that part of the city known as Majesta. Majesta happened to be forty-five minutes by subway from Kling’s apartment. So it all got down to where they should sleep on any given night. All couples should have such a problem.
They had planned to spend that Wednesday night in Sharyn’s apartment, but because a cop had got shot downtown, and Sharyn was here in The City, anyway—
No matter where you lived in this city, Isola was still called The City. If you lived in Riverhead or Majesta or Calm’s Point or even Bethtown, and you were taking the subway or a bus downtown, you were going into The City. That was it. Sharyn lived in Calm’s Point, but Kling lived in The City, and since she was in the city anyway that day, they decided to sleep at his place, talk about lengthy exposition.
His place was a studio apartment.
His place wasn’t too very comfortable.
But she loved him, so what could you do?
“Did your mother really work for Gabe Foster?” he asked.
She was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. She was still wearing a half slip and a bra and the sandals she’d worn to work that morning, strappy and buckled, with a medium-sized heel. She had rinsed out her pantyhose, and they were hanging over the shower rod. He liked her things hanging all over the place. He liked anything that reminded him of her.
“My mother worked for everyone in the world,” she said. “How do you think I got through college and med school?”
“Foster said she used to help around the church every now and then. When he was just starting out.”
“That’s possible,” Sharyn said. “I’ll have to ask her.”
She was cold-creaming makeup off her face now. It took her a half-hour every night to get ready for bed. She always came to be
d smelling sweet and clean and fresh and beautiful. He loved the way she smelled. He loved everything about her.
“You ever meet him?” Kling asked.
“Foster? Once. There was a liquor store holdup in Diamondback, and one of the cops who responded was a brother. He got shot twice in the chest. Foster showed up at the hospital to do his thing.”
“What’s his thing?”
“False compassion for anyone who’s black, indignation for any imagined slight to the black man—or woman, he claims, though I understand he favors honkie trim. He’s a rabble rouser who wants to be mayor of this city one day. How’d you happen to talk to him?”
“Ollie Weeks thinks…”
“Bigot.”
“I know. Maybe that’s why he thinks Foster might have had something to do with the councilman’s murder.”
“Are you on that case?”
“Sort of.”
“What does that mean, sort of?”
“We’re sharing the bust with Ollie. If we make one.”
“Is Foster a suspect?”
“Not really. Not yet, anyway. But he had a fist fight with Henderson…”
“Uh-oh.”
“Well, maybe. Be sort of dumb to shoot a guy you just brawled with, though.”
“Not something I would do, that’s for sure.”
“Especially if you’re in the public eye, the way Foster is.”
“So ask him where he was when the shooting took place.”
“We did. He could have been in the neighborhood.”
“Then he is a suspect.”
“Maybe. In police work…”
“Yes, dear, tell me all about police work.”
“In police work, wise guy, everyone’s a suspect until he’s no longer a suspect.”
“Gee,” Sharyn said, and rolled her eyes in mock amazement.
She was standing in the bathroom door now, the light behind her, looking tall and magnificent and lovely and wonderful. She put her hands on her hips. She looked across the room to where he was lying on the bed in his undershorts. The window was open. There was the sound of traffic below, moving toward the Calm’s Point Bridge.