Cop Hater

COP HATER

by Ed McBain

Copyright © 1956 by Ed McBain

A Signet Book

New American Library

First Printing, October 1973

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 10-18-02 [v1.0]

The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routing is based on established investigatory technique.

This is for

Dodie and Ray

Chapter ONE

from the river
bounding the city on the North, you saw only the magnificent skyline. You stared up at it in something like awe, and sometimes you caught your breath because the view was one of majestic splendor. The clear silhouettes of the buildings slashed at the sky, devouring the blue; flat planes and long planes, rough rectangles and needle sharp spires, minarets and peaks, pattern upon pattern laid in geometric unity against the wash of blue and white which was the sky.

And at night, coming down the River Highway, you were caught in a dazzling galaxy of brilliant suns, a web of lights strung out from the river and then South to capture the city in a brilliant display of electrical wizardry. The highway lights glistened close and glistened farther as they skirted the city and reflected in the dark waters of the river. The windows of the buildings climbed in brilliant rectangular luminosity, climbed to the stars and joined the wash of red and green and yellow and orange neon which tinted the sky. The traffic lights blinked their gaudy eyes and along the Stern, the incandescent display tangled in a riot of color and eye-aching splash.

The city lay like a sparkling nest of rare gems, shimmering in layer upon layer of pulsating intensity.

The buildings were a stage set.

They faced the river, and they glowed with man-made brilliance, and you stared up at them in awe, and you caught your breath.

Behind the buildings, behind the lights, were the streets.

There was garbage in the streets.

The alarm sounded at eleven p.m.

He reached out for it, groping in the darkness, finding the lever and pressing it against the back of the clock. The buzzing stopped. The room was very silent. Beside him, he could hear May's even breathing. The windows were wide open, but the room was hot and damp, and he thought again about the air conditioning unit he'd wanted to buy since the Summer began. Reluctantly, he sat up and rubbed hamlike fists into his eyes.

He was a big man, his head topped with straight blond hair that was unruly now. His eyes were normally grey, but they were virtually colorless in the darkness of the room, puffed with sleep. He stood up and stretched. He slept only in pajama pants, and when he raised his arms over his head, the pants slipped down over the flatness of his hard belly. He let out a grunt, pulled up the pants, and then glanced at May again.

The sheet was wadded at the foot of the bed, a soggy lifeless mass. May lay curled into a sprawling C, her gown twisted up over her thigh. He went to the bed and put his hand on her thigh for an instant. She murmured and rolled over. He grinned in the darkness and then went into the bathroom to shave.

He had timed every step of the operation, and so he knew just how long it took to shave, just how long it took to dress, just how long it took to gulp a quick cup of coffee. He took oft his wrist watch before he began shaving, leaving it on the washbasin where he could glance at it occasionally. At eleven-ten, he began dressing. He put on an Aloha shirt his brother had sent him from Hawaii. He put on a pair of tan gabardine slacks, and a light poplin windbreaker. He put a handkerchief in his left hip pocket, and then scooped his wallet and change off the dresser.

He opened the top drawer of the dresser and took the .38 from where it lay next to May's jewelry box. His thumb passed over the hard leather of the holster, and then he shoved the holster and gun into his right hip pocket, beneath the poplin jacket. He lighted a cigarette, went into the kitchen to put up the coffee water, and then went to check on the kids.

Mickey was asleep, his thumb in his mouth as usual. He passed his hand over the boy's head. Christ, he was sweating like a pig. He'd have to talk to May about the air conditioning again. It wasn't fair to the kids, cooped up like this in a sweat box. He walked to Cathy's bed and went through the same ritual. She wasn't as perspired as her brother. Well, she was a girl, girls didn't sweat as much. He heard the kettle in the kitchen whistling loudly. He glanced at his watch, and then grinned.

He went into the kitchen, spooned two teaspoonfuls of instant coffee into a large cup, and then poured the boiling water over the powder. He drank the coffee black, without sugar. He felt himself coming awake at last, and he vowed for the hundredth time that he wouldn't try to catch any sleep before this tour, it was plain stupid. He should sleep when he got home, hell, what did he average this way? A couple of hours? And then it was time to go in. No, it was foolish. He'd have to talk to May about it. He gulped the coffee down, and then went into his bedroom again.

He liked to look at her asleep. He always felt a little sneaky and a little horny when he took advantage of her that way. Sleep was a kind of private thing, and it wasn't right to pry when somebody was completely unaware. But, God, she was beautiful when she was asleep, so what the hell, it wasn't fair. He watched her for several moments, the dark hair spread out over the pillow, the rich sweep of her hip and thigh, the femaleness of the raised gown and the exposed white flesh. He went to the side of the bed, and brushed the hair back from her temple. He kissed her very gently, but she stirred and said, "Mike?"

"Go back to sleep, honey."

"Are you leaving?" she murmured hoarsely.

"Yes."

"Be careful, Mike."

"I will." He grinned. "And you be good."

"Uhm," she said, and then she rolled over into the pillow. He sneaked a last look at her from the doorway, and then went through the living room and out of the house. He glanced at his watch. It was eleven-thirty. Right on schedule, and damn if it wasn't a lot cooler in the street.

At eleven forty-one, when Mike Reardon was three blocks away from his place of business, two bullets entered the back of his skull and ripped away half his face when they left his body. He felt only impact and sudden unbearable pain, and then vaguely heard the shots, and then everything inside him went dark, and he crumpled to the pavement.

He was dead before he struck the ground.

He had been a citizen of the city, and now his blood poured from his broken face and spread around him in a sticky red smear.

Another citizen found him at eleven fifty-six, and went to call the police. There was very little difference between the citizen who rushed down the street to a phone booth, and the citizen named Mike Reardon who lay crumpled and lifeless against the concrete.

Except one.

Mike Reardon was a cop.

Chapter TWO

the two homicide cops
looked down at the body on the sidewalk. It was a hot night, and the flies swarmed around the sticky blood on the pavement. The assistant medical examiner was kneeling alongside the body, gravely studying it. A photographer from the Bureau of Identification was busily popping flash bulbs. Cars 23 and 24 were parked across the street, and the patrolmen from those cars were unhappily engaged in keeping back spectators.

The call had gone to one of the two switchboards at Headquarters where a sleepy patrolman had listlessly taken down the information and then shot it via pneumatic tube to the Radio Room. The dispatcher in the Radio Room, after consulting the huge precinct map on the wall behind him, had sent Car 23 to investigate and report on the allegedly bleeding man in the street. When Car 23 had reported back with a homicide, the dispatcher had contacted Car 24 and sent it to the scene. At the same time, the patrolman on the switchboard had called Homicide North and also the 87th Precinct, in which territory the body had been found.

The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theatre. The theatre had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theatre began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign language films. There was a door to the left of the movie house, and the door had once been boarded, too, but the planks had been ripped loose and the staircase inside was littered with cigarette butts, empty pint whiskey bottles, and contraceptives. The marquee above the theatre stretched to the sidewalk, punched with jagged holes, the victim of thrown rocks, tin cans, hunks of pipe, and general debris.

Across the street from the theatre was an empty lot. The lot had once owned an apartment house, and the house had been a good one with high rents. It had not been unusual, in the old days, to see an occasional mink coat drifting from the marbled doorway of that apartment house. But the crawling tendrils of the slum had reached out for the brick, clutching it with tenacious fingers, pulling it into the ever-widening circle it called its own. The old building had succumbed, becoming a part of the slum, so that people rarely remembered it had once been a proud and elegant dwelling. And then it had been condemned, and the building had been razed to the ground, and now the lot was clear and open, except for the scattered brick rubble that still clung to the ground in some places. A City housing project, it was rumored, was going up in the lot. In the meantime, the kids used the lot for various purposes. Most of the purposes were concerned with bodily functions, and so a stench hung on the air over the lot, and the stench was particularly strong on a hot Summer night, and it drifted over toward the theatre, captured beneath the canopy of the overhanging marquee, smothering the sidewalk with its smell of life, mingling with the smell of death on the pavement

One of the Homicide cops moved away from the body and began scouring the sidewalk. The second cop stood with his hands in his back pockets. The assistant m.e. went through the ritual of ascertaining the death of a man who was certainly dead. The first cop came back.

"You see these?" he asked.

"What've you got?"

"Couple of ejected cartridge cases."

"Mm?"

"Remington slugs. .45 calibre."

"Put 'em in an envelope and tag 'em. You about finished, Doc?"

"In a minute."

The flash bulbs kept popping. The photographer worked like the press agent for a hit musical. He circled the star of the show, and he snapped his pictures from different angles, and all the while his face showed no expression, and the sweat streamed down his back, sticking his shirt to his flesh. The assistant m.e. ran his hand across his forehead.

"What the hell's keeping the boys from the 87th?" the first cop asked.

"Big poker game going, probably. We're better off without them." He turned to the assistant m.e. "What do you say, Doc?"

"I'm through." He rose wearily.

"What've you got?"

"Just what it looks like. He was shot twice in the back of the head. Death was probably instantaneous."

"Want to give us a time?"

"On a gunshot wound? Don't kid me."

"I thought you guys worked miracles."

"We do. But not during the Summer."

"Can't you even guess?"

"Sure, guessing's free. No rigor mortis yet, so I'd say he was killed maybe a half-hour ago. With this heat, though . . . hell, he might maintain normal body warmth for hours. You won't get us to go out on a limb with this one. Not even after the autopsy is ..."

"All right, all right. Mind if we find out who he is?"

"Just don't mess it up for the Lab boys. I'm taking off." The assistant m.e. glanced at his watch. "For the benefit of the timekeeper, it's 12:19."

"Short day today," the first Homicide cop said. He jotted the time down on the time table he'd kept since his arrival at the scene.

The second cop was kneeling near the body. He looked up suddenly. "He's heeled," he said.

"Yeah?"

The assistant m.e. walked away, mopping his brow.

"Looks like a .38," the second cop said. He examined the holstered gun more closely. "Yeah. Detective's Special. Want to tag this?"

"Sure." The first cop heard a car brake to a stop across the street. The front doors opened, and two men stepped out and headed for the knot around the body. "Here's the 87th now."

"Just in time for tea," the second cop said drily. "Who'd they send?"

"Looks like Carella and Bush." The first cop took a packet of rubber-banded tags from his right hand jacket pocket. He slipped one of the tags free from the rubber band, and then returned the rest to his pocket. The tag was a three-by-five rectangle of an oatmeal color. A hole was punched in one end of the tag, and a thin wire was threaded through the hole and twisted to form two loose ends. The tag read POLICE DEPARTMENT, and beneath that in bolder type: EVIDENCE.