The Big Bad City (2 page)
Authors: Ed McBain
THE BIG BAD CITY
T
HE DETECTIVES HADN’T EVEN KNOWN THE TWO MEN WERE ACQUAINTED
. O
NE OF THE MEN WAS IN THE HOLDING
cell because he’d inconsiderately shot a little Korean grocer who’d resisted his attempts to empty the store’s cash register. The other one was just being led into the cell. He’d been caught running from the scene of a liquor store holdup on Culver and Twelfth.
Aside from their occupations, the two men had nothing in common. One was white, the other was black. One was tall, the other was short. One had blue eyes, the other had brown eyes. One had the body of a weight lifter, possibly because he’d spent two years upstate on a prior felony. The one being led into the cell was somewhat plump. Sometimes, the plump ones were the ones to watch.
“Inside, let’s move it,” Andy Parker said and nudged him into the cell. Parker would later tell anyone who’d listen that he’d automatically figured the arresting blues had frisked the perp at the scene. “How was I to know he had a knife tucked into his crack?” he would ask the air.
In this instance, “crack” was not a controlled substance. Detective Parker was referring to the wedge between the man’s ample buttocks, from which hiding place he had drawn a sling-blade knife the instant he spotted the body builder slouching and sulking in the far corner of the cage. What Parker did the minute he saw the plump little magician pull a knife out of his ass
was slam the cell door shut and turn the key. At that very moment, Steve Carella and Artie Brown were together leading nine handcuffed basketball players into the squadroom. Both detectives smelled trouble at once.
The trouble was not that any policeman was in danger from the chubby little knife-wielding man in the cage. But the body builder was in police custody, and presumably under police protection as well, and every cop in that room conjured up visions of monumental lawsuits against the city for allowing a black man—
black
, no less—to be carved up while in a locked cell—
locked
, no less—with a fat white assassin who kept slashing the air with the knife and repeating over and over again, “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”
Carella fired a shot at the ceiling.
“A minute before I was about to,” Parker would later claim.
“You!” Carella yelled, sprinting toward the cage.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Brown warned the nine basketball players, who, although they were not lawyers, were already spouting learned Supreme Court decisions on false arrest and civil rights and such. Just in case one of them decided to drag the rest of his handcuffed buddies after him into the corridor, Brown drew his own gun and stood massively and menacingly between the players and the slatted wooden railing that separated the squadroom from the hallway outside.
“Oh, yeah?” the knifer in the cage said again, and slashed the air. The body builder kept backing away, hands circling the air in front of him. He had seen a few knife-wielders in his time, this dude, and he was
waiting for the next gunshot from outside the cage, hoping the cops would help distract this crazy fat bastard who kept coming at him with the knife and yelling “Oh, yeah?” as if he was supposed to know what it meant. “Oh, yeah?” the corpulent little shit said again and again came at him.
“You hear me?” Carella shouted from just outside the cage now. “Throw that knife down! Now!”
“Juke him, man!” one of the basketball players shouted.
“Oh, yeah?” the fat man yelled, and lunged again, and this time drew blood.
The body builder yanked back his right hand as if a searing line of fire had scorched the palm, which in fact was exactly what the knife slash had felt like. His face went ashen when he turned his palm up and saw the deep cut spurting from pinkie to thumb. By then, the knifer, smelling blood, smelling fear, was closing in for the kill.
Parker, standing outside the cage with his gun in his hand, Carella standing alongside him with his own gun in his hand, had to decide in the next ten seconds whether they would be justified within the guidelines to drop the man in his tracks. They were both certain that a man pulling a knife while in police custody was reason enough for them to have drawn their weapons and shouted a warning. They both shouted warnings again, “Drop the knife!” from Carella, “Freeze!” from Parker, but the fat little man was neither freezing nor dropping the knife.
He simply kept moving closer and closer to the black body builder whose palm was steadily and alarmingly gushing blood, the knife swinging in the air
ahead of him as he advanced, muttering, “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”
“You crazy sumbitch, what’s
wrong
with you?” the black man yelled, but the knifer kept coming on like a tank in the streets, the knife swinging,” Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”
“Steve?” Parker asked.
“Drop him,” Carella said, and fired the first shot, hitting the knifer in the right thigh, collapsing him to his knees. Parker fired an instant later, taking the man in the right forearm, causing him to release his grip on the knife. As it clattered to the cell floor, the black man lunged for it.
“Don’t,” Carella said very softly.
The reason there were only
nine
basketball players in the squadroom—rather than the customary ten, five to a team—was that the forward on one of the teams had been shot while running downcourt for a basket. Presumably, one of the remaining nine players had fired the shot, since this had been a practice game without spectators, on a deserted playground court, on a sizzling Friday evening in August.
The oppressive heat notwithstanding, the pair of blues riding Adam Four knew the sound of a gunshot when they heard one. Two, in fact. In rapid succession. Bang, bang, like in the comics. They rolled up outside the cyclone fence in time to stop nine youths from dispersing fast, as was the usual case in this neighborhood whenever the music of gunfire filled the air.
The kids ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-four, twenty-five, the blues guessed, all of them wearing T-shirts and what one of the Adam Four cops described
as “droopy shorts,” which meant they hung down below the knees. The white team was wearing white T-shirts. The blue team was wearing blue T-shirts. The kid lying on the ground with two bullet holes in his chest was—or had been—a member of the white team, but his T-shirt was now stained a bright red.
The Adam Four cops found a .32 Smith & Wesson revolver in the weeds lining the dilapidated court. None of the nine knew anything at all about the gun or how Jabez Courtney happened to have got himself shot with it. All of them—presumably including the one who’d shot young Jabez—complained that they were being rounded up and herded to the cop shop simply because they were black, the O.J. legacy.
Now, at ten minutes to eight, Carella and Brown started doing their paperwork. In this city, the tempo in August slowed down to what Lieutenant Byrnes had once described as “summertime,” not quite the equivalent of “ragtime,” a slow-motion rhythm that leisurely waltzed the relieving team into the sometimes frantic pace of police work. There were three eight-hour shifts in any working day. First came the day shift, from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon. Next came the night shift, from four to midnight. Lastly, and least desirably, came the morning shift, from midnight to eight
A.M
. Usually, the teams were relieved at a quarter to the hour, but not during the month of August. In August, a good third of the squad was on vacation, and many of the detectives were pulling overtime working double shifts. Which perhaps explained why Carella and Brown, who had both clocked in at a quarter to eight this morning, were still here more than twelve hours later.
At this hour, there was a sort of languid tranquility to the squadroom. Despite the clamor of the nine ballplayers and their arriving attorneys, all armed to the teeth with arguments pertaining to mass and indiscriminate roundups of suspects, all prepared to summon the spectres of the Holocaust and the World War II Japanese-American concentration camps …
Despite the arrival of a paramedic team, all urgency and haste in earnest imitation of the actors on ER, rushing the bleeding body builder onto a stretcher and down the iron-ranged steps to the waiting ambulance even though the patient kept protesting he could
walk
, damn it, wasn’t nothin wrong with his
legs
…
Despite the arrival of a
second
team of paramedics, no less skilled in TV emulation than the first, who briskly and efficiently lifted the plump little former knifer onto another stretcher, bleeding from forearm and thigh and shouting to his benefactors that the man he’d stabbed had stolen his wife from him, an accusation dismissed by one of the paramedics with the consolation, “Cool it,
amigo
,” though the knifer wasn’t Hispanic …
Despite the arrival of two detectives from Internal Affairs who wanted to know what the hell had happened up here, how come a man in custody had been wounded by another man in custody, and how come sidearms had been drawn and fired, and all that bullshit, which Parker and Carella—and even Brown, who’d innocently been riding herd on the nine ballplayers—had to address before they could call it a day …
Despite the arrival of a man and his helper from what was euphemistically called the police department’s Maintenance and Repair Division, here to fix the building’s decrepit air-conditioning system, which
of course was malfunctioning on a day with a high of ninety-two Fahrenheit, thirty-three Celsius …
Despite what to a disinterested observer might have appeared merely excessive motion and commotion, but which to the detectives coming and going was simply the usual ambience of the place in which they worked, give or take a few warm bodies …
Despite all this, there was a sort of familiar serenity.
As Carella and Parker and Brown reeled off guideline chapter and verse to the two shooflies eager to earn points with the Mayor’s office by exposing yet more use of excessive force by yet another trio of brutal police officers …
As Carella and Brown together typed up their Detective Division report in triplicate on the nine ballplayers still protesting innocence in separate interrogations although almost certainly one of them had been the shooter and Jabez Courtney nonetheless lay stone-cold dead on a stainless-steel table at the St. Mary Boniface Mortuary …
As Parker kept complaining vociferously, first to the shooflies, and next to his fellow detectives, that the goddamn blues in Adam Four should have frisked the fat little bastard before cuffing him and bringing him up here for interrogation …
As Meyer and Kling came in from the field where they’d been interrogating a pawnbroker about a burglar they’d nicknamed The Cookie Boy, real life imitating art once again in that every cheap thief in every crime novel, movie, or television show was colorfully nicknamed by either newspersons or cops, fiction copying reality, the fake then feeding the actual in endless cyclical rotation …
“Leaves a platter of chocolate chip cookies just inside the front door,” Meyer told Brown.
“Yeah?” Brown said, unimpressed.
“Better than shitting in the vic’s shoes,” Parker said.
“Which lots of them do,” Kling agreed.
“You missed all the fun up here,” Carella said.
“Looks like you’re
still
having fun,” Meyer said cheerfully.
As telephones rang, and voices overlapped and intertwined, Carella became aware of the summer sounds of August filtering up through the screened and open windows of the squadroom. There was a stickball game in progress under the glow of the sidestreet lampposts. On Grover Avenue, he could hear the clopping of horses drawing carriages into the park. Suddenly, there was the liquid trickle of a girl’s laughter. He did not know how long ago he’d read the story, nor could he calculate how many times it had been brought to mind on how many separate summer days. But hearing the girl’s lilting laughter, he thought again of Irwin Shaw’s girls in their flimsy summer frocks, and smiled knowingly. Yellow. The laughing girl somewhere on the street below would be wearing a yellow dress.
Still smiling, he went to the wooden In-Out board—admittedly an old-fashioned way of tracking in this day and age of E-mail and computer technology, but still serviceable and accessible at a glance—and was about to move his hanging name tag from the In column to the Out column because finally, at ten minutes to nine on a long hot summer’s day—thirteen hours after he’d moved the tag in the opposite direction—he was ready to go home.
The door to Lieutenant Byrnes’s office opened.
“Steve? Artie?” he called. “Glad I caught you.”
The dead girl lay sprawled in front of a bench in Grover Park, not seven blocks from the station house, on a gravel footpath only yards off Grover Avenue. She was wearing a white blouse and pale blue slacks, white socks and scuffed Reeboks. Flies were already buzzing around her. Not a sign of blood anywhere, but flies were already sipping at her wide-open eyes. Didn’t need a medical examiner to tell them she’d been strangled. The bruise marks on her throat corroborated their immediate surmise.
“Touch anything?” Carella asked.
“No,
sir!
” one of the blues answered, sounding offended.
“This just the way you found her?” Brown asked.
He was thinking he didn’t see a handbag anywhere around. Carella was thinking the same thing. The two men stood side by side in the dim light cast by a lamppost some five feet from the bench on the winding gravel path. Brown was the color of his name, six feet two inches tall and built like a cargo ship. Carella was a white man standing an even six feet tall and weighing a hundred and eighty-five in a good week. Summertime, with all the junk food, he usually shot up to a hundred-ninety, two hundred at the outside. The men had been working out of the Eight-Seven for a long time, partnered together more often than not. They could almost read each other’s minds.
