Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22 (12 page)

“You missed,” Tino said.

“That’s right, I did.”

“You a hustler?” Tino said.

“Nope.”

“We break hustlers’ arms and throw them down the stairs,” Tino said.

“The arms or the whole hustler?” Meyer asked.

“I got no sense of humor,” Tino said.

“Me, neither. Buzz off, you’re ruining my game.”

“Don’t try to take nobody, mister,” Tino said. “This’s a friendly neighborhood pool hall.”

“Yeah, you sure make it sound very friendly,” Meyer said.

“It’s just we don’t like hustlers.”

“I got your message three times already,” Meyer said.

“Eight ball in the side.” He shot and missed.

“Where’d you learn to shoot pool?” Tino said.

“My father taught me.”

“Was he as lousy as you?”

Meyer didn’t answer.

“What’s that in your belt there?”

“That’s a hook,” Meyer said.

“What’s it for?”

“I use it,” Meyer said.

“You work on the docks?”

“That’s right.”

“Where?”

“On the docks,” Meyer said.

“Yeah,
where
on the docks?”

“Look, friend,” Meyer said, and put down the pool cue and stared at Tino.

“Yeah?”

“What’s it your business where I work?”

“I like to know who comes in here.”

“Why? You own the joint?”

“My brother does.”

“Okay,” Meyer said. “My name’s Stu Levine, I’m working the Leary Street docks right now unloading the S.S.
Agda
out of Sweden. I live downtown on Ridgeway, and I happened to notice there was a pool hall here, so I decided to come in and run off a few racks before heading home. You think that’ll satisfy your brother, or do you want to see my birth certificate?”

“You Jewish?” Tino asked.

“Funny 1 don’t look it, right?”

“No, you
do
look it.”

“So?”

“So nothing. We get some Jewish guys from around the corner in here every now and then.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Is it okay to shoot now?”

“You want company?”

“How do I know
you’re
not a hustler?”

“We’ll pay for time, how’s that?”

“You’ll win,” Meyer said.

“So what? It’s better than playing alone, ain’t it?”

“I came up here to shoot a few balls and enjoy myself,” Meyer said. “Why should I play with somebody better than me? I’ll get stuck with the time, and you’ll be doing all the shooting.”

“You could consider it a lesson.”

“I don’t need lessons.”

“You need lessons, believe me,” Tino said. “The way you shoot pool, it’s a disgrace.”

“If I need lessons, I’ll get Minnesota Fats.”

“There ain’t no real person named Minnesota Fats,” Tino said, “he was just a guy they made up,” which reminded Meyer that someone had named a fictitious character after him, and which further reminded him that he had not yet heard from Rollie Chabrier down at the D.A.’s office.

“Looks like I’ll never get to shoot, anyway,” he said, “if you’re gonna stand here and gab all day.”

“Okay?” Tino said.

“Go ahead, take a cue,” Meyer said, and sighed. He felt he had handled the encounter very well. He had not seemed too anxious to be friendly, and yet he had succeeded in promoting a game with one of the pool hall regulars. When La Bresca walked in, if indeed he ever did, he would find Tino playing with his good old buddy Stu Levine from the Leary Street docks. Very good, Meyer thought, they ought to up me a grade tomorrow morning.

“First off, you hold your cue wrong,” Tino said. “Here’s how you got to hold it if you expect to sink anything.”

“Like this?” Meyer said, trying to imitate the grip.

“You got arthritis or something?” Tino asked, and burst out laughing at his own joke, proving to Meyer’s satisfaction that he really did not have a sense of humor.

Tino was demonstrating the proper English to put on the cue ball in order to have it veer to the left after contact, and Meyer was alternately watching the clock and the door when La Bresca walked in some twenty minutes later. Meyer recognized him at once from the description he’d been given, but turned away immediately, not wanting
to seem at all interested, and listened to Tino’s explanation, and then listened to the meager joke Tino offered, something about the reason it’s called English is because if you hit an Englishman in the balls with a stick, they’ll turn white just like the cue ball on the table, get it? Tino laughed, and Meyer laughed with him, and that was what La Bresca saw as he approached the table, Tino and his good old buddy from the Leary Street docks, laughing it up and shooting a friendly game of pool in the friendly neighborhood pool hall.

“Hi, Tino,” La Bresca said.

“Hi, Tony.”

“How’s it going?”

“So-so. This here is Stu Levine.”

“Glad to meet you,” La Bresca said.

“Same here,” Meyer said, and extended his hand.

“This here is Tony La Bresca. He shoots a good game.”

“Nobody shoots as good as you,” La Bresca said.

“Stu here shoots the way Angie used to. You remember Angie who was crippled? That’s the way Stu here shoots.”

“Yeah, I remember Angie,” La Bresca said, and both men burst out laughing. Meyer laughed with them, what the hell.

“Stu’s father taught him,” Tino said.

“Yeah? Who taught his father?” La Bresca said, and both men burst out laughing again.

“I hear you got yourself a job,” Tino said.

“That’s right.”

“You just getting through?”

“Yeah, I thought I’d shoot a game or two before supper. You see Calooch around?”

“Yeah, he’s over there by the windows.”

“Thought maybe I’d shoot a game with him.”

“Why’nt you join us right here?” Tino said.

“Thanks,” La Bresca said, “but I promised Calooch I’d shoot a game with him. Anyway, you’re too much of a shark.”

“A shark, you hear that, Stu?” Tino said. “He thinks I’m a shark.”

“Well, I’ll see you,” La Bresca said, and walked over to the window table. A tall thin man in a striped shirt was bent over the table, angling for a shot. La Bresca waited until he had run off three or four balls, and then they both went up to the front booth. The lights suddenly came on over a table across the hall. La Bresca and the man named
Calooch went to the table, took sticks down, racked up the balls, and began playing.

“Who’s Calooch?” Meyer asked Tino.

“Oh, that’s Pete Calucci,” Tino said.

“Friend of Tony’s?”

“Oh, yeah, they know each other a long time.”

Calooch and La Bresca were doing a lot of talking. They weren’t doing too much playing, but they sure were talking a lot. They talked, and then one of them took a shot, and then they talked some more, and after a while the other one took a shot, and it went like that for almost an hour. At the end of the hour, both men put up their sticks, and shook hands. Calooch went back to the window table, and La Bresca went up front to settle for the time. Meyer looked up at the clock and said, “Wow, look at that, already six o’clock. I better get home, my wife’ll murder me.”

“Well, Stu, I enjoyed playing with you,” Tino said. “Stop in again sometime.”

“Yeah, maybe I will,” Meyer said.

The street outside was caught in the pale gray grasp of dusk, empty, silent except for the keening of the wind, bitterly cold, forbidding. Anthony La Bresca walked with his hands in the pockets of his beige car coat, the collar raised, the green muffler wound about his neck and flapping in the fierce wind. Meyer stayed far behind him, mindful of Kling’s embarrassing encounter the night before and determined not to have the same thing happen to an old experienced workhorse like himself. The cold weather and the resultant empty streets did not help him very much. It was comparatively simple to tail a man on a crowded street, but when there are only two people left alive in the world, the one up front might suddenly turn at the sound of a footfall or a tail-of-the-eye glimpse of something or someone behind him. So Meyer kept his distance and utilized every doorway he could find, ducking in and out of the street, grateful for the frantic activity that helped ward off the cold, convinced he would not be spotted, but mindful of the alternate risk he was running: if La Bresca turned a corner suddenly, or entered a building unexpectedly, Meyer could very well lose him.

The girl was waiting in a Buick.

The car was black, Meyer made the year and make at once, but he could not read the license plate because the car was too far away, parked at the curb some two blocks
up the street. The engine was running. The exhaust threw gray plumes of carbon monoxide into the gray and empty street. La Bresca stopped at the car, and Meyer ducked into the closest doorway, the windowed alcove of a pawnshop. Surrounded by saxophones and typewriters, cameras and tennis rackets, fishing rods and loving cups, Meyer looked diagonally through the joined and angled windows of the shop and squinted his eyes in an attempt to read the license plate of the Buick. He could not make out the numbers. The girl had blond hair, it fell loose to the base of her neck, she leaned over on the front seat to open the door for La Bresca.

La Bresca got into the car and slammed the door behind him.

Meyer came out of the doorway just as the big black Buick gunned away from the curb.

He still could not read the license plate.

Nobody likes to work on Saturday.

There’s something obscene about it, it goes against the human grain. Saturday is the day before the day of rest, a good time to stomp on all those pressures that have been building Monday to Friday. Given a nice blustery rotten March day with the promise of snow in the air and the city standing expectantly monolithic, stoic, and solemn, given such a peach of a Saturday, how nice to be able to start a cannel coal fire in the fireplace of your three-room apartment and smoke yourself out of the joint. Or, lacking a fireplace, what better way to utilize Saturday than by pouring yourself a stiff hooker of bourbon and curling up with a blonde or a book, spending your time with
War and Peace
or
Whore and Piece
, didn’t Shakespeare invent some of his best puns on Saturday, drunk with a wench in his first best bed?

Saturday is a quiet day. It can drive you to distraction with its prospects of leisure time, it can force you to pick at the coverlet wondering what to do with all your sudden freedom, it can send you wandering through the rooms in search of occupation while moodily contemplating the knowledge that the loneliest night of the week is fast approaching.

Nobody likes to work on Saturday because nobody else is working on Saturday. Except cops.

Grind, grind, grind, work, work, work, driven by a sense of public-mindedness and dedication to humanity, law enforcement officers are forever at the ready, alert of mind, swift of body, noble of purpose.

Andy Parker was asleep in the swivel chair behind his desk.

“Where is everybody?” one of the painters said. “What?” Parker said. “Huh?” Parker said, and sat bolt
upright, and glared at the painter and then washed his huge hand over his face and said, “What the hell’s the matter with you, scaring a man that way?”

“We’re leaving,” the first painter said.

“We’re finished,” the second painter said.

“We already got all our gear loaded on the truck, and we wanted to say good-by to everybody.”

“So where is everybody?”

“There’s a meeting in the lieutenant’s office,” Parker said.

“We’ll just pop in and say good-by,” the first painter said.

“I wouldn’t advise that,” Parker said.

“Why not?”

“They’re discussing homicide. It’s not wise to pop in on people when they’re discussing homicide.”

“Not even to say good-by?”

“You can say good-by to
me,”
Parker said.

“It wouldn’t be the same thing,” the first painter said.

“So then hang around and say good-by when they come out. They should be finished before twelve. In fact, they
got
to be finished before twelve.”

“Yeah, but
we’re
finished
now,”
the second painter said.

“Can’t you find a few things you missed?” Parker suggested. “Like, for example, you didn’t paint the typewriters, or the bottle on the water cooler, or our guns. How come you missed our guns? You got green all over everything else in the goddamn place.”

“You should be grateful,” the first painter said. “Some people won’t work on Saturday
at all
, even at time and a half.”

So both painters left in high dudgeon, and Parker went back to sleep in the swivel chair behind his desk.

“I don’t know what kind of a squad I’m running here,” Lieutenant Byrnes said, “when two experienced detectives can blow a surveillance, one by getting made first crack out of the box, and the other by losing his man; that’s a pretty good batting average for two experienced detectives.”

“I was told the suspect didn’t have a car,” Meyer said. “I was told he had taken a train the night before.”

“That’s right, he did,” Kling said.

“I had no way of knowing a woman would be waiting for him in a car,” Meyer said.

“So you lost him,” Byrnes said, “which might have been
all right if the man had gone home last night. But O’Brien was stationed outside the La Bresca house in Riverhead, and the man never showed, which means we don’t know where he is today, now do we? We don’t know where a prime suspect is on the day the deputy mayor is supposed to get killed.”

“No, sir,” Meyer said, “we don’t know where La Bresca is.”

“Because
you
lost him.”

“I guess so, sir.”

“Well, how would you revise that statement, Meyer?”

“I wouldn’t, sir. I lost him.”

“Yes, very good, I’ll put you in for a commendation.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t get flip, Meyer.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“This isn’t a goddamn joke here, I don’t want Scanlon to wind up with two holes in his head the way Cowper did.”

“No, sir, neither do I.”

“Okay, then learn for Christ’s sake how to tail a person, will you?”