See Them Die

by Ed McBain

  That evening, after he had changed to his street clothes, Parker went for a beer in a neighborhood bar. He had the beer, and he had a shot, and then he had another beer and another shot, and he was feeling like a pretty nice guy by the time he left the bar, and that was the last time in his life he ever felt like a pretty nice guy.

  He was ambushed on his way to the subway by three men who didn't allow him the opportunity to draw his revolver. He was ambushed and beaten within an inch of his life. He lay on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood, and when he regained consciousness he wondered why he'd been beaten or who had done the beating, and he drew what seemed to be the only logical conclusion. He figured that he had been beaten by friends of the shopowner because he'd let the kid get away with the theft of the silk.

  He never did find out who had administered the beating on that lonely autumn night.

  Perhaps it had been friends of the shopowner. Actually, it could have been any one of a hundred people who disliked Parker even in those days of amiability. Actually, it didn't matter who'd beat him up.

  He learned several things.

  The first thing he learned was that it wasn't nice to receive a beating. In the movies, a beating is usually a battle. The person getting the lumps is a fighting devil .who manages to pick off a dozen of his assailants before he is finally subdued. Then he gets up, shakes the dizziness out of his head, wipes a trickle of blood from his lip, dusts off his clothes, and narrows his eyes, leaving the audience to speculate on just what that narrowing of eyes meant. In real life, a beating is very rarely administered with fists. The men who worked over Parker on that night in autumn were all as big as he was, and they were armed with sawed-off broom handles, and they really beat the piss out of him. They kept beating him long after he was unconscious, they beat him within an inch of his life, and the cliche happened to fit the situation well because they damn near beat him to death, and he may have been a lot closer than an inch to leaving the land of the quick. He had not liked that experience at all. So the first thing he learned was that he would never again, ever, as long as he walked the earth, be on the receiving end of a beating. Ever. He learned this the way a young boy learns his catechism. I will never again take a beating. I will never again take a beating.

  And the way to be certain you will never take a beating is to hit first and ask questions later. It's handy to own a policeman's badge at such times. It makes apologies to innocent people easier afterward.

  The second thing that Parker learned was that he was being entirely too easy and naive in his approach to police work. From that day on, Parker would give a summons to anyone who so much as spat on the sidewalk. In fact, and curiously, from that day on Parker brought in more drunks, vagrants and innocuous offenders than any other cop working in the precinct. In his own eyes, Parker had stopped being a nice guy. He was a mean, tough son of a bitch, and he knew it. And if you didn't happen to like him, that was just too bad. Parker had a life to lead, and he knew how to lead it.

  I will never again take a beating, he told himself.

  I will never again take a beating.

  In the luncheonette on the corner, Jeff Talbot held the wet handkerchief to the cut on the side of his face, wiping away the blood. Some of the blood had spilled onto the collar of his jumper, and he was already looking ahead to the scrub job he would have to do on it to get out the stain. Luis, behind the counter, was more concerned with the sailor's condition than with the excitement in the street outside. He watched the sailor anxiously, almost like a father.

  "You all right?" he asked.

  "I'm all right," Jeff replied. "What's that kid supposed to be?"

  "Zip?"

  "Is that his name? Yeah. Him."

  "I don't know."

  "I mean, what the hell, who was giving him any trouble? I was minding my own business."

  "His business is minding other people's business. He'll wind up no good. Like Miranda up there."

  "What I'm trying to get at ... well, what's he looking for trouble for? Is he hotheaded or something?"

  Luis shrugged. "No more than most,"

  "Spanish people are supposed to be hotheaded, ain't they?"

  "Some are, some aren't," Luis said, shrugging again.

  "We ain't got a single Spanish person in all Fletcher, you know that?" Jeff said, a touch of surprise in his voice. "I never even seen a Spanish person until today, how do you like that?"

  "I never saw anybody from Fletcher until today," Luis answered.

  "What I'm trying to figure out..." Jeff paused, studied the blood-smeared handkerchief, and then looked up at Luis. "Well, you seem all right."

  "All right?"

  "I mean ... you ain't like him." Jeff paused. "That Miranda's Spanish too, ain't he?"

  "Si."

  Jeff said nothing. He nodded, and then seemed to fall into silent thought.

  "If you figure that way, sailor, you will be making a big mistake."

  "What way?"

  "You know what way. That's the easy way to figure."

  "This is pretty personal with me, Louise," Jeff said. "I got to know. I ain't doing this just for the fun of it. It's ... it's important to me."

  "Why is it so important to you?"

  "Because, well..." He looked at the clock on the wall, and he wondered if China would keep her date with him. And then he wondered if he still wanted to see her. He frowned and said, "It's just important to me, that's all."

  10

  Everyone seemed ready for whatever might lie ahead.

  The police in the streets and on the rooftops and in the back yard were ready. The people watching the show were ready. Zip and Sixto had obtained a large packing crate from the lot on the corner and had set it up just beyond the barricade; they were ready. And even Lieutenant Byrnes seemed ready now. He apparently had learned that his forces were deployed exactly the way he wanted them. He held a large, battery-powered megaphone, and he stepped out from behind the squad car, put the cumbersome apparatus to his mouth, blew into it several times to test the volume, and then said, "Miranda? Pepe Miranda? Can you hear me?"

  His voice echoed on the silent street. The people waited for Miranda's reply, but none came.

  "Can you hear me?" Byrnes said again, his voice booming out of the speaker. Again, there was silence. In the silence, the crowd seemed to catch its breath together, so that something like a sigh escaped their collective lips. "All right, I know you can hear me, so listen to what I'm saying. We've got this street and the next street blocked. There are policemen with guns in every window and on every rooftop facing that apartment, front and rear. You're trapped, Miranda. You hear that?"

  Zip and Sixto clambered up onto the crate and peered over the heads of the crowd. "This is our box, you dig me?" Zip said. "Only for the Latin Purples. I don't want nobody else climbing on it."

  "How about it, Miranda?" Byrnes said. "You coming out, or do we have to come in after you?"

  "Why don't he answer?" Zip said impatiently. He turned to the first-floor windows, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted, "Answer him, Pepe!"

  "If there's shooting around here," Byrnes said into the megaphone, "some of these people in the street might get hurt. Now how about it, are you coming out?"

  There was another long silence. Byrnes waited.

  "Okay," he started, "if you..." and the voice came suddenly from one of the first-floor windows. There was .no body attached to the voice, no one visible in any of the windows. The voice seemed to materialize from nowhere, a shouted voice which rang into the street, cutting off the lieutenant's words.

  "Who did I shoot?"

  "It's Pepe!" Zip shouted, and the cry spread through the crowd like lava rushing down a mountainside, "It's Pepe, Pepe, it's Pepe, it's Pepe, Pepe, Pepe."

  "You shot one of our patrolmen," Byrnes said.

  "Did I kill him?" Miranda shouted from the apartment, still invisible, his voice floating down into the street.

  'Wo."

 
"You're lying to me. I killed him."

  "You hit him in the shoulder. Are you coming out?"

  "Did I kill him? Is he dead?"

  "Let them come after you, Pepe!" Zip shouted.

  "Miranda, we don't want to play games here. If you 're coming out..."

  A new sound erupted, drowning out the words that came from the megaphone, filling the air with its familiar wail.

  "What's that?" Miranda shouted.

  "It's an ambulance. What do you say, Miranda?"

  "He shouldn't have tried nothing with me," Miranda said. "He could have got killed. I could have killed him."

  "Butyou didn't. So what do you say? Yes or no? You coming out?"

  "No!" Miranda shouted, suddenly and viciously. "You think you got some cheap punk up here? This is Pepe Miranda!" His voice rose. "You hear me? You want me, you come in here and get me!"

  "That's telling them, Pepe!" Zip yelled, and he poked Sixto in the ribs, and suddenly the street was alive with cheers of encouragement.

  "Yea, Pepe!"

  "Bravo, Pepe!"

  "Tell 'em, tell 'em!"

  "Quiet!" Byrnes roared. "Everybody quiet!" Patrolmen moved quickly into the crowd, and the people in the street fell suddenly silent. But the rooftops still rang with cheers for the trapped killer in the apartment. Byrnes waited for the sound to die out. He put the megaphone to his mouth and said, "All right, Miranda. No more talk. We're coming in."

  "Then stop talking and come get me, you yellow bastards!" Miranda shouted, and suddenly the shade on one of the windows snapped up, and there he was, Pepe Miranda the killer, a short, wiry man standing in his undershirt, his lips pulled back into a snarl, a three days' growth of beard on his face, a gun in each hand. He pulled back his head, and then snapped it forward with a short jerking motion, spitting into the street. And then he began firing blindly, both guns blazing as if he were trying to prove he was the marshal of a tough Western town.

  Byrnes waved at the rooftops, and an ear-splitting volley shattered Sunday like a piece of crystal. He scooted for cover behind the squad car while the guns roared down from the rooftops. In the crowd, women were screaming and men were ducking behind each other for cover. Byrnes waved his hand again. The volley stopped, Miranda was no longer at the window.

  He gathered Carella, Parker and Hernandez around him. "Okay," he said, "we're moving in. This time Miranda bit off too big a piece." He paused and looked at the faces of the men around him. "Has Captain Frick arrived yet, Steve?"

  "Yes. I saw him a little while ago."

  "Let's find him. I want this to be right."

  Frederick Block was on his way home when he suddenly found himself in the middle of a traffic jam. Block hated traffic jams, and he especially hated them on weekends. He had gone to his office downtown to pick up a carton of eyelets which a factory in Riverhead needed instantly. He had made the delivery himself — "When you deal with Block Industries, you get service," he had told his client — and had then taken the shortest route he knew from Riverhead to the Calm's Point Bridge, and that route happened to take him through the heart of Isola and the 87th Precinct. And now he was in the middle of a traffic jam, on a Sunday, sweating inside his automobile when he should have been at the beach. Block was a fat man. Not one of those fat men who try to kid themselves by applying euphemistic terms like "stout" or "chubby" to their obesity. He was fat. F-A-T. And being fat, he sweated a great deal. And being a person who sweated — fat men, Block knew, never perspired — he did not appreciate being locked in a parked car in the middle of Isola on a day like today.

  He bore the heat with tolerant malice for as long as he could. Then he got out of the car and tried to find out just what the hell was causing the tie-up. As far as he could see, there had been no accident. It always annoyed the hell out of Block when there was an accident. In the first place, careful drivers didn't get into accidents. And in the second and more important place, even if the wrecked car itself didn't block the road, traffic always slowed down to a snail's pace because every passing motorist wanted to study the extent of the damage.

  Today, there had been no accident. And yet traffic was tied up on the avenue in both directions. Now why? Block wondered. With the instincts of an old bloodhound, he followed the crowd. They all seemed to be heading in the same direction, and he assumed the prime attraction was in that direction. Waddling along, mopping his brow with a big white handkerchief, cursing mildly under his breath, Block made his way up the avenue, and stopped at the luncheonette on the corner. A sailor was sitting at the counter. Block sidled up to him and said, "What's going on, mate?" He had never been in the navy, but he was a born salesman who adapted his speech to fit any and all occasions. "Why can't I get my car through here? What's going on?"

  The sailor did not answer. The sailor kept dabbing at his face with a wadded handkerchief. Block didn't see the blood on the handkerchief, so he assumed the sailor was hot and wiping away sweat. He sympathized with the sailor and turned to the man behind the counter.

  "Can you tell me what's going on?" he asked.

  "The traffic's tied up," Luis said.

  "You're telling me it's tied up?" Block said, and he began chuckling, his layers of fat jiggling. "Say, what kind of answer is that? It's tied up downtown and uptown and probably crosstown, too. What's going on? A parade?"

  "There's a gunman in the apartment up there," the sailor said suddenly.

  "A what?" Block wiped his brow. "A gunman, did you say?"

  "Pepe Miranda," Luis put in, nodding.

  "I never heard of him. What'd he do, rob a bank?" Block said, and he began chuckling, the fat jiggling all over him again. He didn't look at all like Santa Claus.

  "You live in this city?" Luis asked.

  "Sure, I live in this city. Not around here, though. I live in Calm's Point. What is this Miranda, a celebrity?"

  "He's a killer," the sailor said quietly.

  "Yeah?" Block opened his eyes wide in appreciation. "Yeah? A killer?"

  "That's what he is," Jeff said.

  "They going up there to get him?" Block said.

  "That's what it looks like. You better go back to your car, mister. There might be shooting around here."

  "No, no," Block said, very interested now. "I want to watch this. I want to see him die."

  He shoved his way through the crowd, using his huge stomach like a battering ram.

  "Louise," Jeff said, "what time is it?"

  "I don't know. Eleven-thirty, something like that. Why?"

  "I'm ... I'm supposed to meet a girl here. At noon."

  "Sailor, why don't you take your own advice? Get out of here before you run into more trouble. Take a walk over to the park, eh? When the girl comes, I'll tell her you're waiting there for her. What's her name?"

  "China. That's a funny name, ain't it?"

  "Not for a Spanish girl. Only in Spanish, it's pronounced Chee-na." Luis shrugged. "A lot of the girls today, they give it the English sound. Or maybe people do it for them, and then they decide it's easier that way." He paused. "Go. Go to the park. I'll tell her where you are."

  "I thought she was a whore when I first met her, Louise. That's a damn rotten way to start off, isn't it?"

  "Well, I know many men who have married prostitutes," Luis said. "They make good wives."

  "Oh, she ain't!" Jeff said, almost shouting the words in his haste. "I didn't mean to give you that impression. I mean, you can see that, once you know her. She's got this ... this real sweet face, you know?"

  Luis smiled. "Si."

  "Yeah, like a little girl, you know?" He grinned at Luis and then quickly said, "Not that she doesn't look womanly. I mean, she certainly has all the ... the ... things a ... woman has."

  "I have never seen an ironing board among Puerto Rican women," Luis said.

  "Huh?"

  Luis curved his hand through the air, pantomiming a woman with uncommonly pronounced curves.

  "Oh, yes," Jeff said. "Sure. But she doesn't look s
loppy, you understand that, don't you? I mean, she's not one of these..." He used his hands to indicate a woman whose upper portions were mountainous.. Both men nodded in solemn agreement on the proper size of a bosom. "She talks nice, too," Jeff said. "I like a girl with a good voice and ... and eyes that look at you. When she talks, I mean. She looks at you. That's good. It makes you feel like ... like you're important."

  "Si, a man must feel that he is important."

  "That's what I didn't like about Fletcher, Louise. I just felt like anybody else there. It's funny but, well, meeting her I feel like -1 don't know -1 feel like me! That's pretty stupid, ain't it? I mean, like who the hell else would I feel like? And I hardly even know her. I mean, she's just another girl, isn't she?"

  "Sure," Luis agreed, "she's just another girl. You can find girls anywhere."

  "Well, now she's not exactly just another girl," Jeff said hastily. "She's prettier than most, you know."

  "Pretty girls are easy to find, sailor. The world is full of pretty girls. And for every man in the world, there is one girl who is pretty."

  "Sure, sure. But she's, well, I guess you could call her beautiful. I guess you really could, Louise." He paused. "Do you ... do you think she'll come?"

  "I don't know," Luis said. "Perhaps."

  "I hope so. Gee, Louise, I hope so."

  From Zip's vantage place on the packing crate, he saw her at once, working her way through the crowd. He waved to her instantly, and then shouted, "Elena! Hey, Elena, over here!" He poked Sixto and said, "Hey, Sixto, it's Elena."

  Softly, Sixto said, "I thought China wass your girl."

  "Variety, huh?" Zip said, grinning. "Hey, Elena!"

  The girl waved back. She was sixteen years old, an attractive girl with dark hair and dark eyes, wearing a skirt and blouse. The girl with her, slightly shorter than she, was wearing black tapered slacks and a boy's white shirt. "Hello, Zip," Elena called, and then said to her friend, "Juana, it's Zip and the boys."

  Flatly, Juana said, "He's a terrifying creep."

  "He's not so bad," Elena said. "Come on."

  They walked over to the crate. Zip offered his hand to Elena and pulled her up beside him. Papa studied the chivalrous gesture, and then repeated it, offering his hand to Juana who took it with the disdain of a countess accepting aid from a doorman.