by McBain, Ed
"Hear, hear," Bucky said.
"Words are only words," Sammy said philosophically, "if they don't come from here. Right here." He tapped his heart.
"Where's this Mason Avenue?" Jim wanted to know.
"Where's all these Spanish chicks?"
"Up the street," Sammy said.
"North.
Don't talk so loud. That's a police station over there."
"I hate cops," Jim said.
"Me, too," Bucky said.
"I never met a cop," Jim said, "who wasn't an out-and-out son-of-a-bitch."
"Me, too," Bucky said.
"I hate aviators," Sammy said.
"I hate aviators, too," Bucky said.
"But I hate cops, too."
"I hate, especially," Sammy said, "jet aviators."
"Oh, especially," Bucky said.
"But cops, too."
"Are you still crocked?" Jim asked.
"I'm still crocked and it's magnificent. Where are all the Spanish girls?"
"Up the street, up the street, don't get impatient."
"What's that?" Bucky said.
"What's what?"
"That blue piece of paper. Over there."
"What?" Sammy turned to look.
"It's a blue piece of paper. What do you think it is?"
"I don't know," Bucky said.
"What do you think it is?" They began waliting again, past the second carbon copy of Meyer's message.
"I think it's a letter from a very sad old fart. She uses blue stationery whenever she writes to her imaginary lover."
"Very good," Bucky said. They continued walking.
"What do you think it is?"
"I think it's a birth announcement from a guy who always wanted a boy. Only he got a girl by accident, but all the announcements were already printed on blue."
"Very good," Sammy said.
"What do you think it is, Jim?"
"I'm crocked," Jim said.
"Yes, but what do you think it is?"
They continued walking, half a block away from the message now.
"I think it's a blue piece of toilet paper," Jim said.
Bucky stopped walking.
"Let's check."
"Huh?"
"Let's see."
"Come on, come on," Jim said, "let's not waste time. The tamales are waiting."
"Only take a minute," Bucky said, and he turned to go back for the sheet of paper.
Jim caught his arm.
"Listen, don't be a nut," Jim said.
"Come on."
"He's right," Sammy said.
"Who care what the damn thing is?"
"I do," Bucky said, and he pulled his arm free, whirled, and ran up the street.
The other boys watched him as he picked up the sheet of paper.
"Crazy nut," Jim said.
"Wasting our time."
"Yeah," Sammy said.
Up the street, Bucky was reading the sheet. Suddenly, he broke into a trot.
"Hey!" he shouted.
"Hey!"
Teddy Carella looked at her wrist watch.
It was 6:45.
She walked to the curb, signaled for a cab, and climbed in the moment it stopped.
"Where to, lady?" the cabbie asked.
Teddy took a slip of paper and a pencil from her purse. Rapidly, she wrote "87th Precinct, Grover Avenue" and handed the slip to the driver.
"Right," he said, and put the taxi in gear.
CHAPTER I5
Alf Miscolo lay in delirium, and in his tortured he cried out, "Mary! Mary!"
His wife's name was Katherine.
He was not a handsome man, Miscolo.
He lay on the floor now with his head propped against Willis' jacket. His forehead was drenched with sweat which rolled down the uneven planes of his face. His nose was massive, and his eyebrows were bushy, and there was a thickness about his neck which created the impression of head sitting directly on shoulders. He was not a handsome man, Mis-cob less handsome now in his pain and his delirium. Blood was seeping through the sulfanilamide bandage, and his life was leaking out of his body drop by precious drop, and he cried out again "Mary!" sharply because he once had been in love.
He had been in love a long while ago, and then only for a few short weeks before his ship left Boston. He had never again gone back to that city, never again sought out the girl who'd presented him with a memory that would last a lifetime. His destroyer had been berthed in the Charlestown yards. He was a bosun at the time, the toughest goddamn bosun in the U.S. fleet. The second World War was still a long way off, and Miscolo had only three things on his mind: how to be the toughest goddamn bosun in the U.S. fleet, how to enjoy himself to the fullest, and how to find an Italian meal whenever he left the ship.
He had possibly eaten in every Italian restaurant in Boston before he found the little dive off Scollay Square. Mary worked as a waitress in that dive. Miscolo was twenty-one years old at the time and, to his eyes, Mary was the loveliest creature that walked the face of the earth He began taking her out. He lived with her for two weeks. In those two weeks, they shared a lifetime together, and then the two weeks were over and the ship pulled out. And Miscolo swam at Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. And he attended a luau on the beach at Kauai, and he ate heikaukau rock crab, and poi and kukui nuts while the hula girls danced. And later, in a Japanese town called Fukuoko-the Japanese were still our friends and no one even dreamt of Pearl Harbor then-Miscolo drank saki with a sloe-eyed girl whose name was Misasan, and he watched her pick up strips of dried fish with chopsticks and later he went to bed with her and learned that Oriental girls do not like to kiss. And on the way back, he hit San Francisco and had a ball there looking down from the hills at the magnificent city spr&ad out in a dazzling array of lights, flushed with his overseas pay, the toughest goddamn bosun in the U.S. fleet.
He never went back to Boston. He met Katherine instead when he was discharged, and he began going steady with her, and he got engaged, and then married, so he never went back to Boston to see the girl named Mary who worked in a sleazy Italiant restaurant in Scollay Square.
And now, with his life running red against a Sulfapak, with his body on fire and his head a throbbing black void, he screamed "Mary!"
Bert KIng put the wet cloth on Miscolo's forehead.
He was used to death and dying. He was a young man, but he had been through the Korean "police action," when death and dying had been a matter of course, an everyday occurrence like waking up to brush your teeth. And he had held the heads of closer friends on his lap, men he knew far better than Miscolo. And yet, hearing the word Mary erupt from Miscolo's lips in a hoarse scream, he felt a chill start at the base of his spine, rocketing into his brain where it exploded in cold fury. In that moment, he wanted to rush across the room and strangle Virginia Dodge.
In that moment, he wondered whether the liquld in that bottle was really nitroglycerin.
Angelica (.iomez sat up and snooK her now.
Her skirt was pulled back and over her knees, and she propped her elbows on both knees and shook her head again, and then looked around the room with a puzzled expression on her face, like a person waking in a hoteL And then, of course, she remembered.
She touched the back of her head. A huge knob had risen where Virginia had hit her with the gun. She felt the knob and the area around it, all sensitive to her probing fingers. And as the tentacles of pain spread out from the bruise, she felt with each stab a new rush of outraged anger. She rose from the floor and dusted oft her black skirt, and the look she threw at Virginia Dodge could have slain the entire Russian Army.
And in that moment, she wondered whether the liquid in that bottle was really nitroglycerin.
Cotton Hawes touched his cheek where the gun sight had ripped open a flap of flesh. The cheek was raw to the touch. He dabbed at it with a cold wet handkerchief, a cloth no colder than his fury.
And he wondered for the tenth time whether the liquid in that bottle
was really nitroglycerin.
Steve Carella, she thought.
I will kill Steve Carella. I will shoot the rotten bastard and watch him die, and they won't touch me because they're afraid of what's in this bottle.
I am doing the right thing.
This is the only thing to do.
There is a simple equation here, she thought: a life for a life.
Carella's life for my Frank's life. And that is justice. The concept of justice had never truly entered the thoughts of Virginia Dodge before. She had been born Virginia MacCauley, of an Irish mother and a Scotch father. The family had lived in Calm's Point at the foot of the famous bridge which joined that part of the city with Isola. Even now, she looked upon the bridge with fond remembrance. She had played in its shadow as a little girl, and the bridge to her had been a wondrous day, she had dreamt, she would cross that bridge and it would take her to lands brimming with spices and rubies. One day, she would cross that bridge into the sky, and there would be men in turbans, and camels in caravans, and temples glowing with gold leaf.
She had crossed the bridge into the arms of Frank Dodge.
Frank Dodge, to the police, was a punk.
He'd been arrested at the age of fourteen for mugging an old man in Grover Park.
He'd been considered a juvenile offender by the law, and got off with nothing more serious than a reprimand and a j.d. card.
Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, he'd been pulled in on a series of minor offenses-and always his age, his lawyer, and his innocent baby-blue-eyed looks had saved him from incarceration. At nineteen, he committed his first holdup.
This time he was beyond the maximum age limit for a juvenile offender. This time, his innocent baby-blue-eyed looks had lengthened into the severity of near manhood This time, they dumped him into the clink on Bailey's Island. Virginia met him shortly after his release.
To Virginia, Frank Dodge was not a punk.
He was the man with the turban astride the long-legged camel, he was the gateway to enchanted lands, rubies trickled from his fingertips, he was her man.
His B-card listed a series of offenses as long as Virginia's right arm-but Frank Dodge was her man, and you can't argue with love.
In September of 1953, Frank Dodge held up a gas station. The attendant yelled for help and it happened that a detective named Steve Carella, who was off-duty and driving toward his apartment in Riverhead, heard the calls and drove into the station but not before Dodge had shot the attendant and blinded him. Carella made the collar.
Frank Dodge went to prison-Castle-eview this time, where nobody played games with thieves. It was discovered during his first week of imprisonment that Frank Dodge was anything but an ideal prisoner. He caused trouble with keepers and fellow prisoners alike. He conStantly flouted the rules-as archaic as they were. His letters to his wife, read by prison authorities before they left the prison, grew more and more bitter.
In the second year of his term, it was discovered that Frank Dodge was suffering from tuberculosis. He was transferred to the prison hospital. It was in the prison hospital that he had died yesterday.
Today, Virginia Dodge sat with a pistol and a bottle, and she waited for the man who had killed him. In her mind, there was no doubt that Steve Carella was the man responsible for her husband's death. If she had not believed this with all her heart, she'd never have had the courage to come up here with such an audacious plan.
The amazing part of it was that the plan was working so far. They were all afraid of her, actually afraid of her. Their fear gave her great satisfaction. She could not have explained the satisfaction if she'd wanted to, could not have explained her retaliation against all society in the person of Steve Carella, her flouting of the law in such a flamboyant manner. Could she not, in all truth, in all fairness, simply have waited for Carella downstairs and put a bullet in his back when he arrived?
Yes.
In all fairness, she could have. There was no need for a melodramatic declaration of what she was about to do, no need to sit in judgment over the law enforcers as they had sat in judgment over her husband, no need to hold life or death in the palms of her hands, no need to play God to the men who had robbed her of everything she loved.
Or was there a very deep need?
She sat now with her private thoughts.
The gun in her hand was steady. The bottle on the table before her caught the slanting rays of the overhead light.
She smiled grimly.
They're wondering, she thought, whether the liquid in this bottle is really nitroglycerin.
"What do you think?" Bucky said.
"I think it's a bunch of crap," Jim said.
"Let's go get the Spanish girls."
"Now, wait a minute," Bucky said.
"Don't just brush this off. Now just wait a minute."
"Look," Jim said, "you want to play cops and robbers, fine. Go ahead. I don't. I want to go find the Spanish girls. I want to find Mason Avenue. I want to curl up on somebody's big fat bosom. For God's sake, I wanna get laid, for God's sake."
"All right, that can wait. Now suppose this is legit?"
"It isn't," Sammy said flatly.
"Damn right," Jim said.
"How do you know?" Bucky asked.
"In the first place," Sammy said, his eyes bright behind his spectacles, "anybody looking at the thing can see it's a phony right off.
"Detective Division Report'! Now what kind of crap is that?"
"Huh?" Bucky said.
"I mean, Bucky, for cris sakes be sensible.
"Detective Division Report'! Now, you know what this is, men?"
"What?" Bucky said.
"This is a thing, you send away the top of a carton of Chesterfields to Jack Webb, and he sends you back a bunch of blue sheets together with a Dragnet gun and a whistle so you can keep everybody in the neighborhood up nights."
"It looks legitimate to me," Bucky said.
"It does, huh? Do you see the name of the city anywhere on it? Huh? Tell me that."
"Well, no, but ..
"When are you going to grow up, Bucky?" Jim said.
"This is the same kind of stuff you get from Buck Rogers. Only his say "Space Division Report," and he sends you a disintegrator and a secret decoder."
"What about the message?" Bucky said.
"What about it?" Sammy wanted to know.
"Look~ at it. A woman with a gun and a bottle of nitroglycerin. Boy!"
"What's the matter with that?" Bucky said.
"Completely implausible," Sammy said.
"And tell me something. If this crazy dame is sitting there with a gun and a bottle of TNT." how in the hell did this Detective Whatever-His-Name-Is manage to type up this note and put it out on the street, nuw."
Implausible, Bucky. Completely implausible."
"Well, it looks legitimate to me," Bucky said doggedly.
"Look..." Jim started. And Sammy interrupted with, "Let me handle this, Jimbo."
"Well, it looks legitimate to me," Bucky said doggedly.
"Is it signed?" Sammy said.
"Do you see a signature?"
"Sure," Bucky said.
"Detective 2nd/Gr ..
"It's typed. But is it signed?"
"So?"
"So what?"
"So, look. You want to stew about this thing all night?"
"No, but ..
"What'd we come up here for?"
"Well ..
"To play space patrol with Buck Rogers?"
"No, but ..
"To waste our time with phony cops and robbers messages typed up by some kid on his brother's typewriter?"
"No, but ..
"I'm gonna ask you a simple question, man," Sammy said.
"Plain and simple. And I want a plain and simple answer, man.
Okay?"
"Sure," Bucky said.
"But it looks legit ..
"Did you come up here to get laid or didn't you?"
"I d
id."
"Well?"
"V,/ell ..