Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22 (15 page)

But the commissioner’s cut was deeply felt, first by Byrnes, and then by every man on the squad when he related the news to them. They went their separate ways that Saturday night, some into the streets to work, others home to rest, but each of them felt a corporate sense of failure. Not one of them realized how fortunate he was.

The two detectives from the D.A.’s Squad were experienced men who had handled special assignments before. When the deputy mayor’s personal chauffeur arrived to pick them up that night, they were waiting on the sidewalk outside the Criminal Courts Building, just around the corner from the District Attorney’s office. It was exactly 8:00
P.M
. The deputy mayor’s chauffeur had picked up the Cadillac sedan at the municipal garage a half-hour earlier. He had gone over the upholstery with a whisk broom, passed a dust rag over the hood, wiped the windows with a chamois cloth, and emptied all the ashtrays. He was now ready for action, and he was pleased to note that the detectives were right on time; he could not abide tardy individuals.

They drove up to Smoke Rise, which was where the deputy mayor lived, and one of the detectives got out of the car and walked to the front door, and rang the bell, and was ushered into the huge brick house by a maid in a black uniform. The deputy mayor came down the long white staircase leading to the center hall, shook hands with the detective from the D.A.’s Squad, apologized for taking up his time this way on a Saturday night, made some comment about the “damn foolishness of it all,” and then called up to his wife to tell her the car was waiting. His wife came down the steps, and the deputy mayor introduced her to the detective from the D.A.’s Squad, and then they all went to the front door.

The detective stepped outside first, scanned the bushes lining the driveway, and then led the deputy mayor and his wife to the car. He opened the door and allowed them to precede him into the automobile. The other detective was stationed on the opposite side of the car, and as soon as the deputy mayor and his wife were seated, both detectives got into the automobile and took positions facing them on the jump seats.

The dashboard clock read 8:30
P.M
.

The deputy mayor’s personal chauffeur set the car in motion, and the deputy mayor made a few jokes with the detectives as they drove along the gently winding roads of exclusive Smoke Rise on the edge of the city’s northern river, and then onto the service road leading to the River Highway. It had been announced in the newspapers the week before that the deputy mayor would speak at a meeting of the B’nai Brith in the city’s largest synagogue at nine o’clock that night. The deputy mayor’s home in Smoke Rise was only fifteen minutes away from the synagogue, and so the chauffeur drove slowly and carefully while the two detectives from the D.A.’s Squad eyed the automobiles that moved past on either side of the Cadillac.

The Cadillac exploded when the dashboard clock read 8:45
P.M
.

The bomb was a powerful one.

It erupted from somewhere under the hood, sending flying steel into the car, tearing off the roof like paper, blowing the doors into the highway. The car screeched out of control, lurched across two lanes, rolled onto its side like a ruptured metal beast and was suddenly ablaze.

A passing convertible tried to swerve around the
flaming Cadillac. There was a second explosion. The convertible veered wildly and crashed into the river barrier.

When the police arrived on the scene, the only person alive in either car was a bleeding seventeen-year-old girl who had gone through the windshield of the convertible.

On Sunday morning, the visiting hours at Buena Vista Hospital were from ten to twelve. It was a busy day, busier than Wednesday, for example, because Saturday night encourages broken arms and legs, bloody pates and shattered sternums. There is nothing quite so hectic as the Emergency Room of a big city hospital on a Saturday night. And on Sunday morning it’s only natural for people to visit the friends and relatives who were unfortunate enough to have met with assorted mayhem the night before.

Steve Carella had met with assorted mayhem on Thursday night, and here it was Sunday morning, and he sat propped up in bed expecting Teddy’s arrival and feeling gaunt and pale and unshaven even though he had shaved himself not ten minutes ago. He had lost seven pounds since his admission to the hospital (it being singularly difficult to eat and breathe at the same time when your nose is taped and bandaged) and he still ached everywhere, seemed in fact to discover new bruises every time he moved, which can make a man feel very unshaven.

He had had a lot of time to do some thinking since Thursday night, and as soon as he had got over feeling, in sequence, foolish, angry, and murderously vengeful, he had decided that the deaf man was responsible for what had happened to him. That was a good way to feel, he thought, because it took the blame away from two young punks (for Christ’s sake, how could an experienced detective get smeared that way by two young punks?) and put it squarely onto a master criminal instead. Master criminals are very handy scapegoats, Carella reasoned, because they allow you to dismiss your own inadequacies. There was an old Jewish joke Meyer had once told him, about the mother who says to her son,
“Trombenik
, go get a job,” and the son answers, “I can’t, I’m a
trombenik.”
The
situation now was similar, he supposed, with the question being altered to read, “How can you let a master criminal do this to you?” and the logical answer being, “It’s easy, he’s a master criminal.”

Whether or not the deaf man was a master criminal was perhaps a subject for debate. Carella would have to query his colleagues on the possibility of holding a seminar once he got back to the office. This, according to the interns who’d been examining his skull like phrenologists, should be by Thursday, it being their considered opinion that unconsciousness always meant concussion and concussion always carried with it the possibility of internal hemorrhage with at least a week’s period of observation being
de rigueur
in such cases, go argue with doctors.

Perhaps the deaf man wasn’t a master criminal at all. Perhaps he was simply smarter than any of the policemen he was dealing with, which encouraged some pretty frightening conjecture. Given a superior intelligence at work, was it even
possible
for inferior intelligences to second-guess whatever diabolical scheme was afoot? Oh, come on now, Carella thought, diabolical indeed! Well,
yeah
, he thought, diabolical. It
is
diabolical to demand five thousand dollars and then knock off the parks commissioner, and it
is
diabolical to demand fifty thousand dollars and then knock off the deputy mayor, and it is staggering to imagine what the next demand might be, or who the next victim would be. There most certainly would be another demand which, if not met would doubtless lead to yet another victim. Or would it? How can you second-guess a master criminal? You can’t, he’s a master criminal.

No, Carella thought, he’s only a human being, and he’s counting on several human certainties. He’s hoping to establish a pattern of warning and reprisal, he’s hoping we’ll attempt to stop him each time, but only so that we’ll fail, forcing him to carry out his threat. Which means that the two early extortion tries were only preparation for the big caper. And since he seems to be climbing the municipal government ladder, and since he multiplied his first demand by ten, I’m willing to bet his next declared victim will be James Martin Vale, the mayor himself, and that he’ll ask for ten times what he asked for the last time: five hundred thousand dollars. That is a lot of strawberries.

Or am I only second-guessing a master criminal?

Am I
supposed
to be second-guessing him?

Is he really preparing the ground for a big killing, or is
there quite another diabolical (there we go again) plan in his mind?

Teddy Carella walked into the room at that moment.

The only thing Carella had to second-guess was whether he would kiss her first or vice versa. Since his nose was in plaster, he decided to let her choose the target, which she did with practiced ease, causing him to consider some wildly diabolical schemes of his own, which if executed would have resulted in his never again being permitted inside Buena Vista Hospital.

Not even in a private room.

Patrolman Richard Genero was in the same hospital that Sunday morning, but his thoughts were less erotic than they were ambitious.

Despite a rather tight official security lid on the murders, an enterprising newspaperman had only this morning speculated on a possible connection between Genero’s leg wound and the subsequent killing of Scanlon the night before. The police and the city officials had managed to keep all mention of the extortion calls and notes out of the newspapers thus far, but the reporter for the city’s leading metropolitan daily wondered in print whether or not the detectives of “an uptown precinct bordering the park” hadn’t in reality possessed foreknowledge of an attempt to be made on the deputy mayor’s life, hadn’t in fact set up an elaborate trap that very afternoon, “a trap in which a courageous patrolman was destined to suffer a bullet wound in the leg while attempting to capture the suspected killer.” Wherever the reporter had dug up his information, he had neglected to mention that Genero had inflicted the wound upon himself, due to a fear of dogs and criminals, and due to a certain lack of familiarity with shooting at fleeing suspects.

Genero’s father, who was a civil service employee himself, having worked for the Department of Sanitation for some twenty years now, was not aware that his son had accidentally shot himself in the leg. All he knew was that his son was a hero. As befitted a hero, he had brought a white carton of
cannoli
to the hospital, and now he and his wife and his son sat in the semi-private stillness of a fourth floor room and demolished the pastry while discussing Genero’s almost certain promotion to Detective 3rd/Grade.

The idea of a promotion had not occurred to Genero before this, but as his father outlined the heroic action in
the park the day before, Genero began to visualize himself as the man who had made the capture possible. Without him, without the warning shot he had fired into his own leg, the fleeing Alan Parry might never have stopped. The fact that Parry had turned out to be a wet fuse didn’t matter at all to Genero. It was all well and good to realize a man wasn’t dangerous
after
the fact, but where were all those detectives when Parry was running straight for Genero with a whole lunch pail full of God-knew-what under his arm, where were they
then
, huh? And how could they have known
then
, while Genero was courageously drawing his pistol, that Parry would turn out to be only another innocent dupe, nossir, it had been impossible to tell.

“You were brave,” Genero’s father said, licking pot cheese from his lips. “It was
you
who tried to stop him.”

“That’s true,” Genero said, because it
was
true.

“It was
you
who risked your life.”

“That’s right,” Genero said, because it
was
right.

“They should promote you.”

“They should,” Genero said.

“I will call your boss,” Genero’s mother said.

“No, I don’t think you should, Mama.”

“Perchè no?”

“Perchè
… Mama, please don’t talk Italian, you know I don’t understand Italian so well.”

“Vergogna,”
his mother said, “an Italian doesn’t understand his own tongue. I will call your boss.”

“No, Mama, that isn’t the way it’s done.”

“Then how
is
it done?” his father asked.

“Well, you’ve got to hint around.”

“Hint? To who?”

“Well, to people.”

“Which people?”

“Well, Carella’s upstairs in this same hospital, maybe …”

“Ma chi è questa Carella?”
his mother said.

“Mama, please.”

“Who is this Carella?”

“A detective on the squad.”

“Where you work,
sì?”

“Sì
. Please, Mama.”

“He is your boss?”

“No, he just works up there.”

“He was shot, too?”

“No, he was beat up.”

“By the same man who shot you?”

“No, not by the same man who shot me,” Genero said, which was also the truth.

“So what does he have to do with this?”

“Well, he’s got influence.”

“With the boss?”

“Well, no. You see, Captain Frick runs the entire precinct, he’s actually the boss. But Lieutenant Byrnes is in charge of the detective squad, and Carella is a detective/2nd, and him and the lieutenant are like this, so maybe if I talk to Carella he’ll see how I helped them grab that guy yesterday, and put in a good word for me.”

“Let her call the boss,” Genero’s father said.

“No, it’s better this way,” Genero said.

“How much does a detective make?” Genero’s mother asked.

“A fortune,” Genero said.

Gadgets fascinated Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman, even when they were bombs. Or perhaps especially when they were bombs. There was no question in anyone’s mind (how much question
could
there have been, considering the evidence of the demolished automobile and its five occupants?) that someone had put a bomb in the deputy mayor’s car. Moreover, it was mandatory to assume that someone had set the bomb to go off at a specific time, rather than using the ignition wiring of the car as an immediate triggering device. This aspect of the puzzle pleased Grossman enormously because he considered ignition-trigger bombs to be rather crude devices capable of being wired by any gangland ape.
This
bomb was a time bomb. But it was a very special time bomb. It was a time bomb that had not been wired to the automobile clock.

How did Grossman know this?

Ah-ha, the police laboratory never sleeps, not even on Sunday. And besides, his technicians had found two clock faces in the rubble of the automobile.