Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Oh boy, what a week.

Fourteen muggings, three rapes, a knifing on Culver Avenue thirty-six assorted burglaries, and the squadroom was being painted.

Not that the squadroom didn’t
need
painting.

Detective Meyer Meyer would have been the first man to admit that the squadroom definitely needed painting. It merely seemed idiotic for the city to decide to paint it now, at the beginning of March, when everything outside was rotten and cold and miserable and dreary, and when you had to keep the windows shut tight because you never could get enough damn heat up in the radiators, and as a result had the stink of turpentine in your nostrils all day long, not to mention two painters underfoot and overhead, both of whom never would have made it in the Sistine Chapel.

“Excuse me,” one of the painters said, “could you move that thing?”

“What thing?” Meyer said. “That thing.”

“That
thing.” Meyer said, almost blowing his cool, “happens to be our Lousy File.
That
thing happens to contain information on known criminals and troublemakers in the precinct, and
that
thing happens to be invaluable to the hard-working detectives of this squad.”

“Big deal,” the painter said.

“Won’t he move it?” the other painter asked.

“You move it,” Meyer said. “You’re the painters,
you
move it.”

“We’re not supposed to move nothing,” the first painter said.

“We’re only supposed to paint,” the second painter said.

“I’m not supposed to move things, either,” Meyer said. “I’m supposed to detect.”

“Okay, so don’t move it,” the first painter said, “it’ll get all full of green paint.”

“Put a dropcloth on it,” Meyer said.

“We got our dropcloths over there on those desks there,” the second painter said, “that’s all the dropcloths we got.”

“Why is it I always get involved with vaudeville acts?” Meyer asked.

“Huh?” the first painter said.

“He’s being wise,” the second painter said.

“All I know is I don’t plan to move that filing cabinet,” Meyer said. “In fact, I don’t plan to move anything. You’re screwing up the whole damn squadroom, we won’t be able to find anything around here for a week after you’re gone.”

“We do a thorough job,” the first painter said.

“Besides, we didn’t ask to come,” the second painter said. “You think we got nothing better to do than shmear around up here? You think this is an interesting job or something? This is a
boring
job, if you want to know.”

“It is, huh?” Meyer said.

“Yeah, it’s boring,” the second painter said.

“It’s boring, that’s right,” the first painter agreed.

“Everything apple green, you think that’s interesting? The ceiling apple green, the walls apple green, the stairs apple green, that’s some interesting job, all right.”

“We had a job last week at the outdoor markets down on Council Street,
that
was an interesting job.”

“That was the most interesting job we ever had,” the second painter said. “Every stall was a different pastel color, you know those stalls they got? Well, every one of them was a different pastel color,
that
was a
good
job.”

“This
is a
crappy
job,” the first painter said

“It’s boring and it’s crappy,” the second painter agreed.

“I’m still not moving that cabinet,” Meyer said, and the telephone rang. “87th Squad, Detective Meyer,” he said into the receiver.

“Is this Meyer Meyer in person?” the voice on the other end asked.

“Who’s this?” Meyer asked.

“First please tell me if I’m speaking to Meyer Meyer himself?”

“This is Meyer Meyer himself.”

“Oh God, I think I may faint dead away.”

“Listen, who …”

“This is Sam Grossman.”

“Hello, Sam, what’s …”

“I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be talking to such
a
famous person,” Grossman said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, what is it? I don’t get it.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“No, I don’t know. What is it I’m supposed to know?” Meyer asked.

“I’m sure you’ll find out,” Grossman said.

“There’s nothing I hate worse than a mystery,” Meyer said, “so why don’t you just tell me what you’re talking about and save me a lot of trouble?”

“Ah-ha,” Grossman said.

“You I need today,” Meyer said, and sighed.

“Actually, I’m calling about a man’s sports jacket, size thirty-eight, color red-and-blue plaid, label Tom’s Town and Country, analysis of suspect stain on the left front flap requested. Know anything about it?”

“I requested the test,” Meyer said.

“You got a pencil handy?”

“Shoot.”

“Blood negative, semen negative. Seems to be an ordinary kitchen stain, grease or oil. You want us to break it down?”

“No, that won’t be necessary.”

“This belong to a rape suspect?”

“We’ve had three dozen rape suspects in here this week. We also have two painters.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Forget it. Is that all?”

“That’s all. It certainly was a pleasure talking to you, Mr. Meyer Meyer, you have no idea how thrilled I am.”

“Listen, what the hell … ?” Meyer started, but Grossman hung up. Meyer held the receiver in his hand a moment longer, looking at it peculiarly, and then put it back onto the cradle. He noticed that there were several spatters of apple green paint on the black plastic. “Goddamn slobs,” he muttered under his breath, and one of the painters said, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“I thought you said something.”

“Listen, what department are you guys from, anyway?” Meyer asked.

“Public Works,” the first painter said.

“Maintenance and Repair,” the second painter said.

“Whyn’t you come paint this damn place last summer, instead of now when all the windows are closed?”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“It stinks in here, that’s what’s the matter,” Meyer said.

“It stunk in here even before we got here,” the first painter said, which was perhaps true. Meyer sniffed disdainfully, turned his back on the two men, and tried to locate the filing cabinet containing last week’s D.D. reports, which cabinet seemed to have vanished from sight.

If there was one thing (and there were
many
things) Meyer could not abide, it was chaos. The squadroon was in a state of utter, complete, and total chaos. Stepladders, dropcloths, newspapers, closed paint cans, open paint cans, used paint brushes, clean paint brushes, cans of turpentine and cans of thinner, mixing sticks, color samples (all in various lovely shades of apple green), rollers, rolling trays, rolls of masking tape, coveralls, stained rags were strewn, thrown, draped, scattered, leaning against, lying upon, spread over and balanced precariously on desks, cabinets, floors, walls, water coolers, window sills, and anything inanimate. (Yesterday, the painters had almost thrown a dropcloth over the inert form of Detective Andy Parker who was, as usual asleep in the swivel chair behind his desk, his feet propped up on an open drawer.) Meyer stood in the midst of this disorder like the monument to patience he most certainly was, a sturdy man with china blue eyes and a bald head, speckled now (he didn’t even realize it) with apple green paint. There was a pained look on his round face, his shoulders slumped with fatigue, he seemed disoriented and discombobulated, and he didn’t know where the hell anything
was!
Chaos, he thought, and the telephone rang again.

He was standing closest to Carella’s desk, so he groped around under the dropcloth for the ringing telephone, came away with a wide apple green stain on his jacket sleeve, and bounded across the room to the phone on his own desk. Swearing, he lifted the receiver.

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

“Parks Commissioner Cowper will be shot to death tomorrow night unless I receive five thousand dollars before noon,” a man’s voice said. “More later.”

“What?” Meyer said.

The line went dead.

He looked at his watch. It was four-fifteen
P.M
.

At four-thirty that afternoon, when Detective Steve Carella
got to the squadroom, Lieutenant Byrnes asked him to come to his office for a moment. He was sitting behind his desk in the two-windowed room, puffing on a cigar and looking very much like a boss (which he was) in his gray pin-striped suit, a shade darker than his close-cropped hair, a black-and-gold silk rep tie on his white shirt (tiny spatter of apple green on one cuff), college ring with maroon stone on his right ring finger, wedding band on his left. He asked Carella if he wanted a cup of coffee, and Carella said yes and Byrnes buzzed Miscolo in the Clerical Office and asked him to bring in another cup of coffee, and then asked Meyer to fill Carella in on the telephone call. It took Meyer approximately ten seconds to repeat the content of the conversation.

“Is that it?” Carella asked.

“That’s it.”

“Mmm.”

“What do you think, Steve?” Byrnes asked.

Carella was sitting on the edge of Byrnes’ scarred desk, a tall slender man who looked like a vagrant at the moment because as soon as it got dark he would take to the streets, find himself an alley or a doorway and lie there reeking of wine and hoping somebody would set fire to him. Two weeks ago, a
real
vagrant had been set ablaze by some fun-loving youngsters, and last week another bum had supplied fuel for a second bonfire, a fatal one this time. So Carella had been spending his nights lying in assorted doorways simulating drunkenness and wishing for arson. He had not shaved for three days. There was a bristly stubble on his jaw, the same color as his brown hair, but growing in sparsely and patchily and giving his face a somewhat incomplete look, as though it had been hastily sketched by an inexpert artist. His eyes were brown (he liked to think of them as penetrating), but they appeared old and faded now through association with the scraggly beard and the layers of unadulterated dirt he had allowed to collect on his forehead and his cheeks. What appeared to be a healing cut ran across the bridge of his nose, collodion and vegetable dye skillfully applied to resemble congealing blood and pus and corruption. He also looked as if he had lice. He made Byrnes a little itchy. He made everybody in the room a little itchy. He blew his nose before answering the lieutenant’s question, and the handkerchief he took from the back pocket of his greasy pants looked as if it had been fished from a nearby sewer. He blew his nose fluidly (there’s such a thing as carrying
an impersonation
too
far, Meyer thought), replaced the handkerchief in his trouser pocket, and then said, “He ask to talk to anyone in particular?”

“Nope, just began talking the minute I said who I was.”

“Could be a crank,” Carella said.

“Could be.”

“Why
us?”
Byrnes said.

It was a good question. Assuming the man was
not
a crank, and assuming he
did
plan to kill the commissioner of parks unless he got his five thousand dollars by noon tomorrow, why call the Eight-Seven? There were a great many squadrooms in this fair city, none of which (it was safe to assume) were in the midst of being painted that first week in March, all of which contained detectives every bit as hard-working and determined as the stalwart fellows who gathered together now to sip their afternoon beverages and while away the deepening hours, all of whom doubtless knew the commissioner of parks as intimately as did these very minions of the law—so why the Eight-Seven?

A good question. Like most good questions, it was not immediately answered. Miscolo came in with a cup of coffee, asked Carella when he planned to take a bath, and then went back to his clerical duties. Carella picked up the coffee cup in a fifth-encrusted hand, brought it to his cracked and peeling lips, sipped at it, and then said, “We ever having anything to do with Cowper?”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Any special assignments, anything like that?”