Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22 (18 page)

“I got a phone call this morning from a man who refused to identify himself. He gave me a very interesting piece of information.” Savage paused. “Know anything about it?”

Meyer’s heart was pounding, but he very calmly said, “I’m not a mind reader, Savage.”

“I thought you might know something about it.”

“Savage, I’ve given you the courtesy of five minutes of valuable time already. Now if you’ve got something to say …”

“Okay, okay. The man I spoke to said the 87th Precinct had received several threatening telephone calls preceding the death of Parks Commissioner Cowper, and three extortion notes preceding the death of Deputy Mayor Scanlon. Know anything about it?”

“Telephone company’d probably be able to help you on any phone calls you want to check, and I guess the Documents Section of the Public Library …”

“Come on, Meyer, don’t stall me.”

“We’re not permitted to give information to reporters,” Meyer said. “You know that.”

“How much?” Savage asked.

“Huh?”

“How much do you want, Meyer?”

“How much can you afford?” Meyer asked.

“How does a hundred bucks sound?”

“Not so good.”

“How about two hundred?”

“I get more than that just for protecting our friendly neighborhood pusher.”

“Three hundred is my top offer,” Savage said.

“Would you mind repeating the offer for the benefit of the tape recorder?” Meyer said. “I want to have evidence when I charge you with attempting to bribe a police officer.”

“I was merely offering you a loan,” Savage said.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” Meyer said, and hung up.

This was not good. This was, in fact, bad. He was about to dial the lieutenant’s home number, hoping to catch him before he left for the office, when the telephone on his desk rang again.

“87th Squad,” he said, “Detective Meyer.”

The caller was from one of the two afternoon papers. He repeated essentially what Meyer had already heard from his two previous callers, and then asked if Meyer knew anything about it. Meyer, loath to lie lest the story eventually broke and tangentially mentioned that there had been a police credibility gap, suggested that the man try the lieutenant later on in the day. When he hung up, he looked at the clock and decided to wait for the next call before trying to contact the lieutenant. Fortunately, there were now only four daily newspapers in the city, the leaders of the various newspaper guilds and unions having decided that the best way to ensure higher wages and lifetime employment was to make demands that would kill off
the newspapers one by one, leaving behind only scattered goose feathers and broken golden egg shells. Meyer did not have to wait long. The representative of the fourth newspaper called within five minutes. He had a bright chirpy voice and an ingratiating style. He got nothing from Meyer, and he finally hung up in cheerful rage.

It was now five minutes to ten, too late to catch Byrnes at home.

While he waited for the lieutenant to arrive, Meyer doodled a picture of a man in a fedora shooting a Colt .45 automatic. The man looked very much like Meyer, except that he possessed a full head of hair. Meyer had once possessed a full head of hair. He tried to remember when. It was probably when he was ten years old. He was smiling painfully over his own joke when Byrnes came into the squadroom. The lieutenant looked dyspeptic this morning. Meyer surmised that he missed the painters. Everyone on the squad missed the painters. They had added humanity to the joint, and richness, a spirit of gregarious joy, a certain
je ne sais quoi
.

“We got trouble,” Meyer said, but before he could relate the trouble to the lieutenant, the phone rang again. Meyer lifted the receiver, identified himself, and then looked at Byrnes.

“It’s the Chief of Detectives,” he said, and Byrnes sighed and went into his office to take the call privately.

Thirty-three telephone calls were exchanged that morning as police and city government officials kept the wires hot between their own offices and Lieutenant Byrnes’, trying to decide what to do about this latest revolting development. The one thing they did not need on this case was publicity that would make them all appear foolish. And yet, if there really
had
been a leak about the extortion attempts, it seemed likely that the full story might come to light at any moment, in which case it might be best to level with the papers
before
they broke the news. At the same time, the anonymous caller might only have been speculating, without any real evidence to back up his claim of extortion, in which case a premature release to the newspapers would only serve to breach a danger that was not truly threatening. What to do, oh, what to do?

The telephones rang, and the possibilities multiplied. Heads swam and tempers flared. The mayor, James Martin Vale himself, postponed a walking trip from City Hall to Grover Park and personally called Lieutenant Byrnes to
ask his opinion on “the peril of the situation.” Lieutenant Byrnes passed the buck to the Chief of Detectives who in turn passed it back to Captain Frick of the 87th, who referred JMV’s secretary to the police commissioner, who for reasons unknown said he must first consult with the traffic commissioner, who in turn referred the police commissioner to the Bridge Authority who somehow got on to the city comptroller, who in turn called JMV himself to ask what this was all about.

At the end of two hours of dodging and wrangling, it was decided to take the bull by the horns and release transcripts of the telephone conversations, as well as photocopies of the three notes, to all four city newspapers. The city’s liberal blue-headline newspaper (which was that week running an exposé on the growth of the numbers racket as evidenced by the prevalence of nickel and dime betters in kindergarten classes) was the first paper to break the story, running photos of the three notes side by side on its front page. The city’s other afternoon newspaper, recently renamed the
Pierce-Arrow-Universal-International-Bugle-Chronicle-Clarion
or something, was next to feature the notes on its front page, together with transcripts of the calls in 24-point Cheltenham Bold.

That night, the early editions of the two morning newspapers carried the story as well. This meant that a combined total of four million readers now knew all about the extortion threats.

The next move was anybody’s.

Anthony La Bresca and his pool hall buddy, Peter Vincent Calucci (alias Calooch, Cooch, or Kook) met in a burlesque house on a side street off The Stem at seven o’clock that Monday night.

La Bresca had been tailed from his place of employment, a demolition site in the city’s downtown financial district, by three detectives using the ABC method of surveillance. Mindful of the earlier unsuccessful attempts to keep track of him, nobody was taking chances anymore—the ABC method was surefire and foolproof.

Detective Bob O’Brien was “A,” following La Bresca while Detective Andy Parker, who was “B,” walked behind O’Brien and kept him constantly in view. Detective Carl Kapek was “C,” and he moved parallel with La Bresca, on the opposite side of the street. This meant that if La Bresca suddenly went into a coffee shop or ducked around the corner, Kapek could instantly swap places with O’Brien, taking the lead “A” position while O’Brien caught
up, crossed the street, and maneuvered into the “C” position. It also meant that the men could use camouflaging tactics at their own discretion, changing positions so that the combination became BCA or CBA or CAB or whatever they chose, a scheme that guaranteed La Bresca would not recognize any one man following him over an extended period of time.

Wherever he went, La Bresca was effectively contained. Even in parts of the city where the crowds were unusually thick, there was no danger of losing him. Kapek would merely cross over onto La Bresca’s side of the street and begin walking some fifteen feet
ahead
of him, so that the pattern read C, La Bresca, A, and B. In police jargon, they were “sticking like a dirty shirt,” and they did their job well and unobtrusively, despite the cold weather and despite the fact that La Bresca seemed to be a serendipitous type who led them on a jolly excursion halfway across the city, apparently trying to kill time before his seven-o’clock meeting with Calucci.

The two men took seats in the tenth row of the theater. The show was in progress, two baggy-pants comics relating a traffic accident one of them had had with a car driven by a voluptuous blonde.

“You mean she crashed right into your tail pipe?” one of the comics asked.

“Hit me with her headlights,” the second one said.

“Hit your tail pipe with her headlights?” the first one asked.

“Almost broke it off for me,” the second one said.

Kapek, taking a seat across the aisle from Calucci and La Bresca, was suddenly reminded of the squadroom painters and realized how sorely he missed their presence. O’Brien had moved into the row behind the pair, and was sitting directly back of them now. Andy Parker was in the same row, two seats to the left of Calucci.

“Any trouble getting here?” Calucci whispered.

“No,” La Bresca whispered back.

“What’s with Dom?”

“He wants in.”

“I thought he just wanted a couple of bills.”

“That was last week.”

“What’s he want now?”

“A three-way split.”

“Tell him to go screw,” Calucci said.

“No. He’s hip to the whole thing.”

“How’d he find out?”

“I don’t know. But he’s hip, that’s for sure.”

There was a blast from the trumpet section of the four-piece band in the pit. The overhead leikos came up purple, and a brilliant follow spot hit the curtain stage left. The reed section followed the heraldic trumpet with a saxophone obbligato designed to evoke memory or desire or both. A gloved hand naked its way around the curtain. “And now,” a voice said over the loudspeaker system while one-half of the rhythm section started a snare drum roll, “and
now
, for the first time in America, direct from Brest, which is where the little lady comes from … exhibiting her titillating terpsichoreal skills for your pleasure, we are happy to present Miss … Freida Panzer!”

A leg appeared from behind the curtain.

It floated disembodied on the air. A black high-heeled pump pointed, wiggled, a calf muscle tightened, the knee bent, and then the toe pointed again. There was more of the leg visible now, the black nylon stocking shimmered in the glow of the lights, ribbed at the top where a vulnerable white thigh lay exposed, black garter biting into the flesh, fetishists all over the theater thrilled to the sight, not to mention a few detectives who weren’t fetishists at all. Freida Panzer undulated onto the stage bathed in the glow of the overhead purple leikos, wearing a long purple gown slit up each leg to the waist, the black stockings and taut black garters revealed each time she took another long-legged step across the stage.

“Look at them legs,” Calucci whispered.

“Yeah,” La Bresca said.

O’Brien sitting behind them, looked at the legs. They were extraordinary legs.

“I hate to cut anybody else in on this,” Calucci whispered.

“Me, neither,” La Bresca said, “but what else can we do? He’ll run screaming to the cops if we don’t play ball.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Not in so many words. He just hinted.”

“Yeah, the son of a bitch.”

“So what do you think?” La Bresca asked.

“Man, there’s big money involved here,” Calucci said.

“You think I don’t know?”

“Why cut him in after we done all the planning?”

“What else can we do?”

“We can wash him,” Calucci whispered.

The girl was taking off her clothes.

The four-piece ensemble in the orchestra pit rose to
heights of musical expression, a heavy bass drum beat accentuating each solid bump as purple clothing fell like aster petals, a triple-tongued trumpet winding up with each pelvic grind, a saxophone wail climbing the girl’s flanks in accompaniment with her sliding hands, a steady piano beat banging out the rhythm of each long-legged stride, each tassel-twirling, fixed-grin, sexy-eyed, contrived, and calculated erotic move. “She’s got some tits,” Calucci whispered, and La Bresca whispered back, “Yeah.”

The men fell silent.

The music rose in earsplitting crescendo. The bass drum beat was more insistent now, the trumpet shrieked higher and higher, a C above high C reached for and missed, the saxophone trilled impatiently, the piano pounded in the upper register, a tinny insistent honkytonk rhythm, cymbals clashed, the trumpet reached for the screech note again, and again missed. The lights were swirling now, the stage was inundated in color and sound. There was the stink of perspiration and lust in the theater as the girl ground out her coded message in a cipher broken long ago on too many similar stages, pounded out her promises of ecstasy and sin. Come and get it, baby, Come and get it, Come and come and come and come.

The stage went black.

In the darkness, Calucci whispered, “What do you think?”

One of the baggy pants comics came on again to do a bit in a doctor’s office accompanied by a pert little blonde with enormous breasts who explained that she thought she was stagnant because she hadn’t fenestrated in two months.

“I hate the idea of knocking somebody off,” La Bresca whispered.

“If it’s necessary, it’s necessary.”

“Still.”

“There’s lots of money involved here, don’t forget it.”

“Yeah, but at the same time, there’s enough to split three ways, ain’t there?” La Bresca said.

“Why should we split it three ways when we can split it down the middle?”

“Because Dom’ll spill the whole works if we don’t cut him in. Look, what’s the sense going over this a hundred times? We
got
to cut him in.”

“I want to think about it.”

“You ain’t got that much time to think about it. We’re set for the fifteenth. Dom wants to know right away.”

“Okay, so tell him he’s in. Then we’ll decide whether he’s in or out. And I mean
really
out, the little son of a bitch.”