Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22 (10 page)

But whereas his eyes were squinted in simulated drunken slumber while alertly he watched the alley mouth and listened for tandem footsteps, his thoughts were on the deaf man. He did not like thinking about the deaf man because he could remember with painful clarity the shotgun blast fired at him eight years ago, the excruciating
pain in his shoulder, the numbness of his arm and hand, and then the repeated smashing of the shotgun’s stock against his face until he fell senseless to the floor. He did not like thinking about how close he had come to death at the hands of the deaf man. Nor did he enjoy thinking of a criminal adversary who was really quite smarter than any of the detectives on the 87th Squad, a schemer, a planner, a brilliant bastard who juggled life and death with the dexterity and emotional sang-froid of a mathematician. The deaf man—somewhere out there—was a machine, and Carella was terrified of things that whirred with computer precision, logical but unreasoning, infallible and aloof, cold and deadly. He dreaded the thought of going up against him once again, and yet he knew this stakeout was small potatoes, two punks itching to get caught, two punks who
would
be caught because they assumed all their intended victims were defenseless and did not realize that one of them could be a detective with his finger curled around the trigger of a deadly weapon. And once they were caught, he would move from the periphery of the deaf man case into the very nucleus of the case itself. And perhaps, once again, come face to face with the tall blond man who wore the hearing aid.

He thought it oddly coincidental and perfectly ironic that the person he loved most in the world was a woman named Teddy Carella, who happened to be his wife, and who also happened to be a deaf mute, whereas the person who frightened him most as a cop and as a man was also deaf, or at least purported to be so, advertised it blatantly—or was this only another subterfuge, a part of the overall scheme? The terrifying thing about the deaf man was his confident assumption that he was dealing with a bunch of nincompoops. Perhaps he was. That was
another
terrifying thing about him. He moved with such certainty that his assumptions took on all the aspects of cold fact. If he said that all flatfoots were fools, then by God that’s exactly what they must be—better pay the man whatever he wants before he kills off every high-ranking official in the city. If he could outrageously outline a murder scheme and then execute it before the startled eyes of the city’s finest, how could he possibly be stopped from committing the
next
murder, or the one after that, or the one after that?

Carella did not enjoy feeling like a fool. There were times when he did not necessarily enjoy police work (like right now, freezing his ass off in an alley)
but there were never times when he lacked respect for what he did. The concept of law enforcement was simple and clear in his mind. The good guys against the bad guys. He was one of the good guys. And whereas the bad guys in this day and age won often enough to make virtue seem terribly unfashionable sometimes, Carella nonetheless felt that killing people (for example) was not a very nice thing. Nor was breaking into someone’s dwelling place in the nighttime overly considerate. Nor was pushing dope quite thoughtful. Nor were mugging, or forging, or kidnaping, or pimping (or spitting on the sidwalk, for that matter) civilized acts designed to uplift the spirit or delight the soul.

He was a cop.

Which meant that he was stuck with all the various images encouraged by countless television shows and motion pictures: the dim-witted public servant being outsmarted by the tough private eyes the overzealous jerk inadvertently blocking the attempts of the intelligent young advertising executive in distress; the insensitive dolt blindly encouraging the young to become adult criminals. Well, what’re you gonna do? You got an image, you got one. (He wondered how many television writers were lying in an alley tonight waiting for two hoods to attack.) The damn thing about the deaf man, though, was that he made all these stereotypes seem true. Once he appeared on the scene, every cop on the squad
did
appear dim-witted and bumbling and inefficient.

And if a man could do that merely by making a few phone calls or sending a few notes, what would happen if—

Carella tensed.

The detective assigned to the surveillance of Anthony La Bresca was Bert Kling, whom he had never seen before. Brown’s call to the squadroom had advised the lieutenant that La Bresca had admitted he was involved in a forthcoming caper, and this was reason enough to put a tail on him. So Kling took to the subzero streets, leaving the warmth and generosity of Cindy’s apartment, and drove out to Riverhead, where he waited across the street from La Bresca’s house, hoping to pick up his man the moment he left to meet Dominick. Brown had informed the lieutenant that the pair had arranged a meeting for ten o’clock that night, and it was now 9:07 by Kling’s luminous
dial, so he figured he had got here good and early, just in time to freeze solid.

La Bresca came down the driveway on the right of the stucco house at ten minutes to ten. Kling stepped into the shadows behind his parked car. La Bresca began walking east, toward the elevated train structure two blocks away. Just my luck, Kling thought, he hasn’t got a car. He gave him a lead of half a block, and then began following him. A sharp wind was blowing west off the wide avenue ahead. Kling was forced to lift his face to its direct blast every so often because he didn’t want to lose sight of La Bresca, and he cursed for perhaps the fifty-seventh time that winter the injustice of weather designed to plague a man who worked outdoors. Not that he worked outdoors all of the time. Part of the time, he worked at a desk typing up reports in triplicate or calling victims or witnesses. But
much
of the time (it was fair to say much of the time) he worked outdoors, legging it here and there all over this fair city, asking questions and compiling answers and this was the worst son of a bitch winter he had ever lived through in his life. I hope you’re going someplace nice and warm, La Bresca, he thought. I hope you’re going to meet your friend at a Turkish bath or someplace.

Ahead, La Bresca was climbing the steps to the elevated platform. He glanced back at Kling only once, and Kling immediately ducked his head, and then quickened his pace. He did not want to reach the platform to discover that La Bresca had already boarded a train and disappeared.

He need not have worried. La Bresca was waiting for him near the change booth. “You following me?” he asked. “What?” Kling said.

“I
said
are you following me?” La Bresca asked.

The choices open to Kling in that moment were severely limited. He could say, “What are you out of your mind, why would I be following you, you’re so handsome or something?” Or he could say, “Yes, I’m following you, I’m a police officer, here’s my shield and my I.D. card,” those were the open choices. Either way, the tail was blown.

“You looking for a rap in the mouth?” Kling said. “What?” La Bresca said, startled.

“I said what are you, some kind of paranoid nut?” Kling said, which wasn’t what he had said at all. La Bresca didn’t seem to notice the discrepancy. He stared at
Kling in honest surprise, and then started to mumble something, which Kling cut short with a glowering, menacing, thoroughly frightening look. Mumbling himself, Kling went up the steps to the uptown side of the platform. The station stop was dark and deserted and windswept. He stood on the platform with his coattails flapping about him, and waited until La Bresca came up the steps on the downtown side. La Bresca’s train pulled in not three minutes later, and he boarded it. The train rattled out of the station. Kling went downstairs again and found a telephone booth. When Willis picked up the phone at the squadroom, Kling said, “This is Bert. La Bresca made me a couple of blocks from his house. You’d better get somebody else on him.”

“How long you been a cop?” Willis asked.

“It happens to the best of us,” Kling said. “Where’d Brown say they were meeting?”

“A bar on Crawford.”

“Well, he boarded a downtown train just a few minutes ago, you’ve got time to plant somebody there before he arrives.”

“Yeah, I’ll get O’Brien over there right away.”

“What do you want me to do, come back to the office or what?”

“How the hell did you manage to get spotted?” “Just lucky, I guess,” Kling said.

It was one of those nights.

They came into the alley swiftly, moving directly toward Carella, both of them boys of about seventeen or eighteen, both of them brawny, one of them carrying a large tin can, the label gone from it, the can catching light from the street lamp, glinting in the alleyway as they approached, that’s the can of gasoline, Carella thought.

He started to draw his gun and for the first time ever in the history of his career as a cop, it snagged.

It snagged somewhere inside his coat. It was supposed to be a gun designed for negligible bulk, it was not supposed to catch on your goddamn clothing, the two-inch barrel was not supposed to snag when you pulled it, here we go, he thought, the Keystone cops, and leaped to his feet. He could not get the damn gun loose, it was tangled in the wool of his slipover sweater, the yarn pulling and unraveling, he knew the can of gasoline would be thrown into his face in the next moment, he knew a match or a lighter would flare into life, this time they’d be able to
smell burning flesh away the hell back at the squadroom. Instinctively, he brought his left hand down as straight and as rigid as a steel pipe, slammed it down onto the forearm of the boy with the can, hitting it hard enough to shatter bone, hearing the scream that erupted from the boy’s mouth as he dropped the can, and then feeling the intense pain that rocketed into his head and almost burst from his own lips as his burned and bandaged hand reacted. This is great, he thought, I have no hands, they’re going to beat the shit out of me, which turned out to be a fairly good prediction because that’s exactly what they did.

There was no danger from the gasoline now, small consolation, at least they couldn’t set fire to him. But his hands were useless, and his gun was snagged somewhere inside there on his sweater—he tried ripping the tangled yarn free, ten seconds, twenty seconds, a millennium—and his attackers realized instantly that they had themselves a pigeon, so they all jumped on him, all forty guys in the alley, and then it was too late. They were very good street fighters, these boys. They had learned all about punching to the Adam’s apple, they had learned all about flanking operations, one circling around to his left and the other coming up behind him to clout him on the back of the head with the neatest rabbit’s punch he had ever taken, oh, they were nice fighters, these boys, he wondered whether the coffin would be metal or wood. While he was wondering this, one of the boys who had learned how to fight in some clean friendly slum, kicked him in the groin, which can hurt. Carella doubled over, and the other clean fighter behind him delivered a second rabbit punch, rabbit punches doubtless being his specialty, while the lad up front connected with a good hard-swinging uppercut that almost tore off his head. So now he was down on the alley floor, the alley covered with refuse and grime and not a little of his own blood, so they decided to stomp him, which is of course what you must necessarily do when your opponent falls down, you kick him in the head and the shoulders and the chest and everywhere you can manage to kick him. If he’s a live one, he’ll squirm around and try to grab your feet, but if you happen to be lucky enough to get a pigeon who was burned only recently, why you can have an absolute field day kicking him at will because his hands are too tender to grab at
anything
, no less feet. That’s why guns were invented, Carella thought, so that if you happen to have second-degree burns on your hands you don’t have to use them too much, all you have to do
is squeeze a trigger, it’s a shame the gun snagged. It’s a shame, too, that Teddy’s going to be collecting a widow’s dole tomorrow morning, he thought, but these guys are going to kill me unless I do something pretty fast. The trouble is I’m a bumbling god-damn cop, the deaf man is right. The kicks landed now with increasing strength and accuracy, nothing encourages a stomper more than an inert and increasingly more vulnerable victim. I’m certainly glad the gasoline, he thought, and a kick exploded against his left eye. He thought at once he would lose the eyes, he saw only a blinding flash of yellow, he rolled away, feeling dizzy and nauseous, a boot collided with his rib, he thought he felt it crack, another kick landed on the kneecap of his left leg, he tried to get up, his hands, “You fucking fuzz,” one of the boys said, Fuzz, he thought, and was suddenly sick, and another kick crashed into the back of his skull and sent him falling face forward into his own vomit.

He lost consciousness.

He might have been dead, for all he knew.

It was one of those nights.

Bob O’Brien got a flat tire on the way to the Erin Bar & Grill on Crawford Avenue, where Tony La Bresca was to meet the man named Dom.

By the time he changed the flat, his hands were numb, his temper was short, the time was 10:32, and the bar was still a ten-minute drive away. On the off-chance that La Bresca and his fair-weather friend would still be there, O’Brien drove downtown, arriving at the bar at ten minutes to eleven. Not only were they both gone already, but the bartender said to O’Brien the moment he bellied up, “Care for something to drink, Officer?”

It was one of those nights.

On Friday morning, March 8, Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman of the Police Laboratory called the squadroom and asked to talk to Cotton Hawes. He was informed that Hawes, together with several other detectives on the squad, had gone to Buena Vista Hospital to visit Steve Carella. The man answering the telephone was Patrolman Genero, who was holding the fort until one of them returned.

“Well, do
you
want this information or what?” Grossman asked.

“Sir, I’m just supposed to record any calls till they get back,” Genero said.