Ed McBain: Downtown

He threw himself back against the laundry truck, thinking in that split second that Crandall had accidentally stepped on the accelerator, and then realizing in the next split second that Crandall hadn’t made any damn mistake, the car was speeding away, swerving a little as it sought purchase on the wet roadway, and then shooting off as straight as an—

“Hey!” he shouted.

The car kept speeding away into the distance.

“You son of a bitch!” he shouted, and began running after the car.

He ran up the middle of Canal Street, waving his arms and shouting, his coat flapping, horns honking behind him, headlights coming at him from the other side of the road, blinding him. A fearful blast immediately at his back caused him to leap to his right just as the sound of air brakes filled the snow-laden air, and then another blast of the horn, and a voice shouting, “You dumb fuck!” and the rush of the trailer truck as it came by him like a locomotive on the way to Albuquerque, wherever that was, and then the truck was gone as certainly as was Crandall in the rented car.

Sucking in great gulps of air, trying to catch his breath, Michael leaned against a red Cadillac parked at the curb. The window on the driver’s side slid down suddenly and electrically. He jumped away from the car, turned, saw a girl on the passenger side with her blouse wide open and her breasts bulging out of her brassiere, and alongside her, behind the wheel, a teenage Puerto Rican with a scraggly moustache and a lipstick-smeared face.

“You mine not leanin’ on dee wagon?” the boy said.

A sign in Spanish on the wall behind the muster desk advised Michael of his rights. To the right of the sign was the same warning in English — which was considerate, Michael thought. The sergeant sitting behind the desk and before both signs was a very fat man wearing a long-sleeved blue sweater over his blue uniform shirt. He looked up and said, “Help you, sir?”

“I want to report a few crimes,” Michael said.

“Let me hear ’em,” the sergeant said.

“A fake detective stole all my money and my...”

“How do you know he was a fake detective?” the sergeant asked.

“Well, if he robbed me, I have to assume...”

“Oh, yeah, right,” the sergeant said. “What did he get from you?” he asked, and picked up the phone receiver.

“My money, my credit cards, and my driver’s license.”

Into the phone, the sergeant said, “Tony, there’s a man here had his money and his credit cards and his license stolen from him by a fake detective.”

“My car, too,” Michael said.

“His car, too,” the sergeant said. “You want to talk to him?”

“By a different person,” Michael said. “The car.”

“Right, I’ll send him up,” the sergeant said, and hung up. “Sir,” he said, “if you’ll go right up those steps outside there to the second floor and follow the signs that say Detectives, you’ll ask for Detective Anthony Orso, that means ‘bear’ in Italian, he’ll take good care of you.”

“Thank you,” Michael said.

“Don’t mention it,” the sergeant said, and picked up a ringing telephone. “First Precinct, Mulready,” he said.

Michael walked up the iron-runged steps to the second floor, followed the signs with the word DETECTIVES and a pointing arrow on them, and at last came to a blue door with a glass panel. Painted onto the panel was a large facsimile of a gold and blue-enameled shield like the one Cahill had flashed in the bar. Under that was a sign that read:

Michael guessed this was the detective squadroom. He opened the door and stepped into the room and the first thing he saw was a little man sitting on a blue upholstered chair behind one of the desks. He was badly in need of a shave and he looked like a street hoodlum.

“Detective Orso?” Michael asked.

“Tony the Bear, that’s me,” Orso said. “You the one Gallagher ripped off?”

Michael blinked.

“Come in, come in,” Orso said, and got up, and ushered Michael in. The squadroom was small but freshly painted in a blue the same color as the door. Electric IBM typewriters sat on all the desktops. There were five or six desks in the room, but the room did not look crowded. A wanted FOR MURDER poster with twelve photographs was taped to the wall over a small cabinet with fingerprinting equipment on it. A height chart was on the wall alongside the cabinet. Sitting on another blue-upholstered chair beside Orso’s desk was a little man who looked remarkably like Orso’s twin brother, except that his right hand was handcuffed to one of the chair rungs.

“We ain’t got a detention cage,” Orso explained.

“Some dump,” the other man said.

“You shut up!” Orso said, pointing a finger at him.

“I know my rights,” the man said.

“They all know their rights,” Orso said sourly, and held out a chair for Michael. “Please, sir,” he said.

From where Michael sat he could see both Orso and his look-alike in the other chair. The resemblance was uncanny. Michael wondered if Orso realized the man looked like him. And vice versa.

“So,” Orso said. “Tell me what happened.”

Michael told him what had happened. Orso listened. So did his twin brother.

“That’s Gallagher, all right,” Orso said.

“No, his name was Cahill,” Michael said. “Detective Daniel Cahill.”

“Are you sure? Was he working with a redhead calls herself Nikki Cooper, or sometimes Mickey Hooper, or sometimes Dorothy Callahan?”

“That don’t rhyme,” the other man said.

“Who asked you?” Orso said.

“Dorothy Callahan don’t rhyme with the other two, that’s all.”

“I know it don’t rhyme,” Orso said. “Who says it has to rhyme?”

“She picks two names that rhyme, you figure the third one’s gonna rhyme, too. But it don’t.”

“Do all your names rhyme?” Orso said.

“I got three names, too, and they all rhyme,” the other man said, somewhat offended. “Charlie Bonano, Louie Romano, and Nicky Napolitano.”

“What name were you using tonight when you stuck up the liquor store?” Orso asked.

“Charlie Bonano, and I didn’t stick up no liquor store.”

“No? Then who was it holding the gun on the proprietor?” Orso asked. “Musta been one of them two other guys, huh? Romano or Napolitano.”

“Which ain’t the point,” Bonano said. “The point is a person chooses names that rhyme, then the names should rhyme. You don’t go throwing in a Dorothy Calabrese.”

“Callahan.”

“Whatever.”

“Shakespeare we got here in the squadroom,” Orso said. “Worryin’ about his iambic parameter.”

“The point is...”

“The point is shut up. The point is we got this phony cop calls himself Gallagher runnin’ all over the precinct workin’ with a female redhead and rippin’ off honest citizens like this gentlemen here. Also, if you want to know somethin’, Bonano, it’s wops like you give Italians a bad name.”

“Three bad names,” Bonano said.

“And you’re ugly besides,” Orso said.

“So are you,” Bonano said.

“Maybe so, but I ain’t going to jail,” Orso said, and turned back to Michael. “We’ll have to fill out some papers, sir,” he said, “but I can tell you right now we ain’t got a chance in hell of getting back the cash, and we’ll be lucky Gallagher don’t clean out Tiffany’s tomorrow with your credit cards. First thing you better do is advise all the companies that your cards were stolen — do you know the numbers on the cards?”

“Nobody knows the numbers on their cards,” Bonano said. “Who asked you?”