Ed McBain_87th Precinct 47 (36 page)

“Where were you?”

“A restaurant called Petruccio’s.”

“Italian?”

“Yes.”

“Too much garlic in Italian food,” Rosa Lee said.

“Why’d you pick an Italian place?”

“
He
picked it.”

“Who’s he?”

“Man named Jamie Hudson.”

“I don’t know him. Do I know him?”

“No, Mom.”

“How’d you meet him?”

“At the hospital.”

“He a doctor?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. You staying home tonight?”

“Actually, I’ve got another date.”

“Tomorrow’s a workday, you should stay home tonight, get your rest. How you gonna help sick people, you runnin aroun all the
time?”

“It’ll be an early night,” Sharyn said.

“Where you going?”

“For Chinese food.”

“I like Chinese,” her mother said. “Who with? This doctor again?”

“No, another man.”

“What’s
his
name?”

Sharyn hesitated.

“Bert Kling,” she said.

“Bert
what?“

“Kling.”

“What kind of name is that?” her mother said.

“It’s just a name,” Sharyn said.

“That’s some kind of name, all right. How do you spell that name?”

“With a K.”

“K-L-1-N-G?”

“Yes.”

“That’s some kind of name.”

“Good afternoon, ladies,” the waiter said, materializing suddenly at their table. “May I bring you some menus?”

“Yes, thank you, please,” Rosa Lee said. “I’m so
hungry
all at once, aren’t you, Shaar?”

Shaar.

She had the sudden impulse to tell her mother that Bert Kling was a white man.

She squashed it like a bug.

Thieves knew all about coincidence.

They knew that if they were holding up a mom-and-pop grocery store at the same time a blue-and-white rolled by, that was coincidence
and they were looking at twenty in the slammer.

Cops knew about coincidence, too.

They knew the dictionary definitions of coincidence by heart: “To occupy the same position simultaneously.”

Or: “To happen at the same time or during the same period.”

Cops knew that ninety-four percent of the people who got killed in this fair nation of ours got killed because they
happened
to be occupying the same position simultaneously as a person with a gun or a knife or a baseball bat. To put it yet another
way, they
happened to
be at the same time or during the same period where something terrible was about to occur, like having their brains bashed
out or their livers surgically removed.

Cops believed that every encounter on the face of the earth was coincidental.

Take it or leave it.

Bert Kling happened to be sitting in a booth with two beautiful black women in a restaurant called Pagoda Palace at nine-fifteen
that night, coincidentally alone with them because Arthur Brown had excused himself not a minute earlier to go to the men’s
room.

It was coincidental that two white men were sitting in the booth opposite theirs.

It was further coincidental that two black men walked into the restaurant at that moment in time and began following the headwaiter
to a booth just beyond theirs.

All coincidence.

Then again, Kling wouldn’t have been sitting here with Sharyn Cooke if a hostage cop named Georgia Mowbry hadn’t got shot
in the eye on the twenty-ninth of March, an event that had caused him and Sharyn to meet coincidentally the very next morning.
Georgia getting shot had been a coincidence in itself; she’d just been standing there in the hallway, talking to the assigned
hostage cop, when the door to the apartment opened and the guy inside started shooting.

Cops didn’t want to hear from coincidence.

Cops knew that shit happened.

Nothing happened for a minute or so.

The headwaiter seated the two black men, and asked if they’d care for something to drink, and the two men respectively ordered
a Scotch on the rocks and a Corona and lime, and the headwaiter padded away. The man facing the front door—and coincidentally
the table at which Kling sat across from two black women—glanced in their direction, and then said something to his friend,
and then stood up immediately and walked to where Kling was sitting with his elbows on the table, smiling, in the middle of
a sentence.

What he was saying was that he’d had the feeling all through the Packer Q&A that the actress thought she was playing a role
on television.

“I had the feeling …”

“This dude bothering you?” the man said.

Last Saturday’s race riots were still on everyone’s mind. Lots of people had died in Grover Park last Saturday. Blacks and
whites. The memory of this was part of the equation. The memory was part of this coincidental happening that was about to
evolve at a frighteningly fast pace.

“Everything’s cool, man,” Caroline said.

She’d been married to Arthur Brown for a good long time now, and she was used to his size and his authority, used to feeling
protected when he was around, not only because he was a cop but also because he was a loving, caring husband. But she didn’t
for a moment feel threatened in any way when the black man appeared at their table.
In
fact, she figured the man thought he was being a Good Samaritan, two black women sitting alone here at a table, hankie sits
down across from them, intruding on their space, the brother was making sure everything was all right.

But he wasn’t going away.

“It’s cool, really,” she said, and smiled in dismissal.

“Ain’t enough white women in here for you?” the man asked Kling.

“These are friends of mine,” Kling said.

“You hear whut I ast you?” the man said,

“It’s okay, we’re …”

“Hey!”
one of the white men in the booth across from them yelled. “He told you he
knows
them. Fuck off.”

The black man turned. His friend was already coming out of the booth up the aisle. It was starting.

Kling didn’t know who threw the first punch. It didn’t really matter. He knew only that suddenly the two white guys and the
two black guys were tangling, and he saw a gun in somebody’s hand—too damn many
guns
in this city, in this country, in this world—and he shouted “Police! Drop the gun!” and that was when he spotted Brown coming
out of the men’s room at the far end of the restaurant and breaking into a run the moment he realized what was happening.

Sharyn was a cop, and she knew what to do when cops were in a situation where there was a wild gun on the scene,
two
wild guns as she now saw, one in the hand of a black man, the other in the hand of a white man, this was going to be last
Saturday all over again! She scrambled over the low green-lacquered wall that divided their booth from the one adjoining it,
long legs flashing, over and into the other booth where a white couple was digging into a steaming bowl of moo goo gai pan,
“Sorry,” she mumbled, “sorry,” and ran right over them and through them, her high heels digging into the green Naugahyde seat,
and dropped into the aisle on the other side, and sprinted to the front of the restaurant and called in a 10-13 from a phone
hanging on the wall alongside the cigarette machine.

When Brown reached the booth, he saw Caroline standing there with one of her high-heeled shoes in her hand, holding it like
a hammer, ready to hit anyone who came anywhere near her, white
or
black. Brown had drawn his pistol even before he saw the pair of wild guns on the scene, but that was because he’d seen Kling’s
gun already in his hand, and he knew he wouldn’t have unholstered it without first considering the guidelines. Both detectives
were mindful of the fact that the place was packed and that an exchange of gunfire was inadvisable, but the white man and
the black man facing off with guns bigger than they were didn’t have any guidelines to worry about, and they sure as hell
looked as if they were intent on shooting to kill at any moment now. Brown was bigger than Kling or any of the other men,
and he could yell louder than anybody in this city. He shouted at the top of his lungs that he was a police officer and that
if everybody didn’t drop all those goddamn guns in the next ten seconds he was going to break some mighty hard heads here.

It was over as soon as it started.

Everybody had calmed down and everything was under control by the time the six radio cars squealed into the curb outside in
response to Sharyn’s call.

Coincidentally, the white man who’d told the brother to fuck
off was wanted for armed
robbery in the state of Arizona.

In bed that night, he asked her what she’d thought of the evening.

“The food or the floor show?” she asked.

“The company,” he said.

“I’ve always liked Bert,” she said. “And I liked her a lot, too.

“You think it’ll work?” Brown asked.

“I hope so,” Caroline said.

They undressed each other in the dark.

They could have been white and white, or black and black, or anything and anything for that matter, because they could not
see each other in the dark. Kissing in the dark, standing inches apart from each other, they undid buttons and lowered zippers
until at last they were naked in the dark, pressed against each other in the dark, hard against her, soft against him, touching,
feeling, blind in the dark. In the dark, her skin was silken smooth, it felt like polished alabaster. In the dark, his skin
was silken smooth, it felt like polished ebony in the dark.

They moved to the bed at last, and lay side by side in the dark together, kissing, touching, exploring in the dark, lips against
lips, flesh against flesh, their ardor heightened by what had happened earlier tonight, their desire fueled by a desperate
need to demonstrate that it could be otherwise, it did not have to be
that
way, it could he
this
way, hearts beating together in the dark.

He entered her in the dark and felt her enfolding him and enclosing him, murmuring softly against his lips as he thrust more
deeply into her, gently in the dark, withdrawing again and moving into her again, hips rising to meet each thrust, wet and
warm in the dark, his measured steady rhythm drawing from her a measured steady response until together they learned a wilder
heat, found together a greater freedom, discovered together a riff that joined them in the dark, and rushed them thunderously
toward a farther shore where they shattered against each other in the dark and clung to each other like children.

Later,
in
the light, they looked at each other.

He was still white.

She was still black.

“Let’s give it an honest shot,” she said.

“Let’s,” he said.

“E
D
M
C
B
AIN IS A MASTER
. H
E IS A SUPERIOR STYLIST, A SPINNER OF ARTFULLY DESIGNED AND SOMETIMES MACABRE PLOTS
.”

—N
EWSWEEK