Ed McBain_87th Precinct 47 (3 page)

“Rocks?”

“Please. You look beautiful,” he said, not expecting to say what he was thinking, and surprised when he heard the words leaving
his mouth.

She looked surprised, too.

He immediately thought he’d said the wrong thing.

“Thank you,” she said softly, and lowered her eyes and went swiftly to a wall unit that looked like a bookcase with a built-in
television and stereo but that turned out to have a drop-leaf front that revealed a bar behind it. He watched as she poured
the Scotch—Johnnie Red—over ice cubes in two shortish glasses, added a little soda to each, and then carried the glasses,
one in each hand, to where he was standing uncertainly near the sofa.

“Please sit,” she said. “I should have brought you a towel.”

“No, that’s okay,” he said, and immediately touched his wet hair, and then—seemingly embarrassed by the gesture—sat at once.
He waited for her to sit opposite him, in a plum-colored easy chair that complemented her suit, and then raised his glass
to her. She raised her own glass.

“Here’s to golden days,” he said, “and …”

“… and purple nights,” she finished for him.

They both looked surprised.

“How do you happen to know that?” he asked.

“How do you?”

“Someone I used to know.”

“Someone
I
used to know,” she said.

“Good toast,” he said. “Whoever.”

“So here’s to golden days and purple nights,” she said, and grinned.

“Amen,” he said.

Her smile was like sudden moonlight.

They drank.

“Good,” she said. “It’s been a long day.”

“Long
week,”
he said.

“I hope you like Northern Italian,” she said.

“I do.”

“You know, I really wish you hadn’t insisted on coming all the way …”

“First date,” he said.

She looked at him. For a moment, she thought he might be putting her on. But, no, he was serious, she could see that in his
eyes. This was a first date, and on a first date, you went to a girl’s house to pick her up. There was something so old-fashioned
about the notion that it touched her to the core. She suddenly wondered how old he was. All at once, he seemed so very young.

“I also checked movie schedules out here,” she said. “Do you like cop movies? The one about the bank heist is playing near
the restaurant, the last show starts at ten after ten. What time do you have to be in tomorrow?”

“Eight.”

“Me, too.”

“Where?”

“Majesta. Rankin Plaza. That’s where …”

“I know. I’ve been there a lot.”

“What for?”

“Well, once I got shot, and another time I got beat up. You have to check in at Rankin if you’re applying for sick leave.
Well, I guess you know that.”

“Yes.”

“Eight’s early.”

“I’ll be okay if I get six hours sleep.”

“Really. Just six hours?”

“Habit I developed in medical school.”

“Where was that?”

“Georgetown U.”

“Good school.”

“Yes. Who shot you?”

“Oh, one of the bad guys. That was a long time ago.”

“Who beat you up?”

“Some more bad guys.”

“Do you enjoy dealing with bad guys?”

“I enjoy locking them up. That’s why I’m in the job. Do you enjoy being a doctor?”

“I love it.”

“I love being a cop,” he said.

She looked at him again. He had a way of saying things so directly that they seemed somehow artfully designed. Again, she
wondered if he was putting her on. But no, he seemed entirely guileless, a person who simply said whatever was on his mind
whenever it occurred to him. She wasn’t sure she liked that. Or maybe she did. She realized she was studying his eyes. A greenish
brown, she guessed they were, what you might call hazel, she guessed. He caught her steady gaze, looked puzzled for a moment.
Swiftly, she looked down into her glass.

“What time do you leave for work?” he asked.

“I can make it in half an hour,” she said, and looked up again. This time, he was studying her. She almost looked away again.
But she didn’t. Their eyes met, locked, held.

“That’d be seven-thirty,” he said.

“Yes.”

“So if the movie breaks at midnight …”

“It should, don’t you think?”

“Oh, sure. You’ll easily get your six hours.”

“Yes,” she said.

They both fell silent.

He was wondering if she thought he was dumb, staring at her this way.

She was wondering if he thought she was dumb, staring at him this way.

They both kept staring.

At last she said, “We’d better get going.”

“Right,” he said, and got immediately to his feet.

“Let me get your coat,” she said.

“I’ll put these in the sink,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, and started out of the room.

“Uh … Sharyn?” he said.

“Yes, Bert?”

Turning to him.

God, she was beautiful.

“Where’s the kitchen?” he said.

* * *

Michelle Cassidy was telling her agent all about the dumb lines she had to say in this stupid damn play. Johnny was listening
with great interest. The last really good part he’d got for her was in the touring company of
Annie,
when she was ten years old. She was now twenty-three, which made it a long time between drinks. Johnny had landed her the
leading role in the musical because she had a strong singing voice for a ten-year-old—the producer said she sounded like a
prepubescent Ethel Merman—and also because the natural color of her hair was the same as the little orphan’s, a sort of reddish
orange that matched the adorable darling’s dress with its white bib collar. Johnny knew the natural color of Michelle’s hair
because he’d begun sleeping with her when she was just sixteen.

What happened was Michelle had toured the
Annie
role until she began developing tits at the age of twelve years and eight months, a despairing turn of events for all concerned,
especially Johnny, who at the time represented only two other clients, one of whom was a dog act. Johnny figured that suddenly
blossoming into a dumb curvaceous teenybopper was the end of Michelle’s career as a waif. But the red hair still shone like
a traffic light, and it certainly didn’t hurt that he could tout her as the former star of
Annie,
even though her voice was beginning to sound a bit strident—wasn’t it only
boys
whose voices changed during adolescence? He auditioned her for a dinner theater production of Oliver!, figuring she’d had
experience as an orphan and maybe they could bind her chest, but the director said she looked too much like a girl, no kidding.
So Johnny got her an orange juice commercial on the strength of the fiery red hair, and then a string of other commercials
where she played a variety of bratty budding thirteen-year-olds in training bras and braces. When she was fourteen, he got
her into an L.A. revival of
The King and I
as one of the children, even though by that time she was truly beginning to look a trifle voluptuous in those flimsy Siamese
tops and pantaloons.

Truth was, Michelle’s voice had changed to something that now resembled the bleat of a sacrificial lamb—which she was soon
to become, in a manner of speaking, although as yet unbeknownst to herself. She’d never been a very good actress, even when
she was Tomorrow-ing it all over the stage, but during her television years she had picked up a barrelful of mannerisms that
now made her look hopelessly amateurish. Too old for kiddy roles, too young for bimbo roles although she certainly looked
the part, Johnny figured she would have to mature into her body, so to speak, before he could get her any decent adult roles.
Meanwhile, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, he seduced her when she was sixteen, in a motel room in the town of Altoona, Pennsylvania,
three miles from the dinner theater where she was playing one of the older children in
Sound of Music.

Johnny Milton—his entire name was John Milton Hicks, but he had shortened it to just plain Johnny Milton, which he thought
sounded snappier for an agent—was lying naked in bed beside Michelle on this rainy Sunday night, listening intently to her
plight because he was almost a hundred percent certain that the first starring role he’d landed for her since the orphan gig
was in a play that would be heading south the night after it opened. The theatrical doomsayers here in this city had already
mutated the title from
Romance
to
No Chance,
a certain harbinger of failure. Johnny was worried. He became even more worried as Michelle recited some of the lines she
had to say in the scene where the squadroom detective gets all excited about having seen her on
Law & Order.

“I mean,” Michelle said, “this is supposed to be a precinct in New York’s
theater
district, Midtown North, Midtown South, what
ever
the hell they call it. So why is he wetting his pants over meeting a person had a bit part on
Law
&
Order?
Also, suppose
Law & Order
goes off by the time the play opens?
If
it opens. We make a reference to a TV show isn’t even
on
anymore, it’ll make us look like ancient history. If you want my honest opinion, Johnny, I think this play stinks on ice.
You want to know what this play is? This play is something Freddie should’ve written for television, is what this play is.
A movie of the week is what this play is. A piece of
shit is
what this play is, excuse my French.”

Johnny tended to agree with her.

“I open in this play,” Michelle went on, gathering steam, “I’ll be back doing dinner theater two weeks later. Make it
two days
later. If you can even
book
me ever again. I mean, really, John, who
cares
about the girl in this play, who
cares
if she gets to perform on opening night? Because you want to know something? The
other
play stinks, too, the play
within
the play, whatever the hell Freddie calls it, the play they’re supposed to be rehearsing. It’s even worse than the
real
play. He’ll get
two
Tonys for worst play of the year, the one
he
wrote and the one the playwright in his
play
wrote. How did I manage to get stuck in
two
lousy plays is what I’d like to know?”

Johnny was wondering what they could do to salvage this deplorable situation.

“Also, I think you should know Mark’s been playing a little grab-ass backstage,” Michelle said.

Mark Riganti. The actor playing a character named the Detective, who nearly faints with joy when the character named the Actress
tells him she’s been on
Law & Order.
Mark was not a very good actor. Take a lousy play—
two
lousy plays, as Michelle had pointed out—add a lousy actor and a lousy actress in the leading roles, and what you’ve got
is trouble. Though Johnny couldn’t fault Mark for groping Michelle backstage, which he himself was beginning to do at this
very moment, albeit in bed.

“I’ll ask Morgenstern to talk to him,” he said.

“Lot of good that’ll do,” Michelle said. “He was there first.”

Johnny sighed heavily.

The trouble with Michelle—aside from her being a not very good actress who never could dance and who no longer possessed a
very good singing voice—was that men could not keep their hands off her. Women, too, to hear her tell it. At least in Ohio,
one time. The trouble was her looks were too damn distracting. People, men
and
women, tended to forget that someone who
looked
the way Michelle did could possibly be a good actress, which she wasn’t, anyway. Being so sumptuously endowed would have
been a failing at any time, unless a girl wanted to play bimbos or hookers for the rest of her life, a not insignificant ambition
for many actresses Johnny had known and incidentally slept with. But coming out of your dress in a role that called for the
actress to recite lines like “This is the world’s noblest calling” could he something of an impediment in a play where the
girl’s extraordinary talent is rewarded with stardom due to her courage, dedication and perseverance.

After getting stabbed, that is.

The plot of Freddie’s play revolved around the Actress getting stabbed by some crazy person whose identity is never made entirely
clear because Freddie felt that resolving the mystery would cheapen the play. Freddie had more exalted interests in mind.
Like exploring the concept of giving one’s all for one’s art, for example. The dedication of the Actress in his play was intended
as a sly reference to the play’s title, in that her true
romance
is with the theater, which she loves from “the very depths of her soul,” as she puts it in a memorable soliloquy premised
on the corniest scene in
Chorus Line.
In his play, Freddie loved to ponder the significance of even the tiniest creative act as opposed to the worthlessness of
mundane matters like earning a living or feeding a family. Freddie’s
Romance
was a “play of ideas,” as he was fond of telling Kendall. Contrarily, Kendall felt the play was far
too
“mysterious” and not quite “serious” enough.

Neither of them seemed to understand something Johnny had known from the first time he’d ever read a crime novel: there
ain’t
no way you can turn a murder mystery into a silk purse. That’s because the minute somebody sticks a knife in somebody else,
all attention focuses on the victim, and all you want to know is whodunit.

Which isn’t such a bad idea, he thought.

Focusing attention on the victim.

B
ECAUSE SHE DID A LITTLE DOPE EVERY NOW AND THEN, SHE
was never comfortable around cops anyhow. She knew this had to be done, coming here this afternoon, but just
approaching a
police station made her nervous. Gave her the willies just
seeing
those big green globes with the numerals 87 on them, one hanging on each side of the tall wooden entrance doors, each one
screaming “Cop! Cop!” And sure enough, a real
live
cop in a blue uniform was standing at the top of the steps just to the right of the doors, looking her over as she climbed
the steps, and fumbled with the brass knob, and opened the door. She smiled at him as if she’d just killed her mother with
a hatchet.