Ed McBain - The Last Brief

I told her I’d pieced the thing together little by little — that was another thing, Liz. A detective isn’t supposed to spend half his working day putting together facts on whether or not his wife is playing around behind his back. That liquor store, for one thing, it’s been held up four times in the past six months, and we still ain’t got a hint who’s doing it. I’m supposed to be working on crimes, and not acting like a private eye looking for proof in a divorce action. Not that I’m talking divorce, Liz, I swear to God I’m not even thinking divorce. If this is true, what they’re saying, then we’ll work it out someway, there’s nothing we haven’t yet been able to work out, we’ll work this out, too.

So she said again, ‘Tell me exactly what they’re saying.’

I told her I’d first got wind of it in the locker room one night. I was changing into my long johns because we had a stakeout later on, and I expected to be outside on a street corner. This wasn’t the liquor store, this was that numbers runner we finally busted; this must’ve been last month sometime, when I first got wind of it. There were these two guys on the squad talking behind the lockers. They were talking about Harris, who’d got a court order to put in a wire downtown, and he was getting some very juicy conversations on that phone, conversations that had nothing to do with narcotics. The reason the wire was in there, I told her, was because the guy was suspected of running a dope factory, cutting and packaging shit for sale on the street. Now you either know all this, Liz, or you don’t, I told her. Because if it’s true what they’re saying, then you’ve got to know the guy is in narcotics. He’s a cheap gangster in narcotics. I don’t know how you could’ve got involved with somebody like that, if it’s true, but that’s not the point, I don’t care about that. If it’s true, then we’ll talk about it, and work it out. The point is that the guy was getting phone calls all day long from this woman, and it didn’t take Harris long to figure out the woman’s husband is a cop. This had nothing to do with Harris’s case; he was just being entertained by all these conversations. Because here’s a guy he’s setting up for a bust if he gets anything good on the wire, and at the same time the guy is getting calls from a woman who’s married to a cop, and who he’s banging regularly when the cop’s working. That was the first I heard of it, Liz. In the locker room there. The two guys talking about it while I changed into my long johns. The only name mentioned was Harris’s, who was sitting the wire. At the time, I didn’t know the narcotics bum was a guy named Anthony Laguna, that’s not his real name, that’s what he goes by on the street, I guess you know his name, if the stories are true. I looked up his B-sheet, Liz, he’s got a record going back to when he was seventeen, including one arrest for rape, which he got off with. Just the idea of your having anything to do with somebody like him, though I can’t imagine how’d you’d ever have met a guy like him, well, just the idea... though I swear to God it never crossed my mind that first time I heard them talking in the locker room. All I knew was it was a cop’s wife involved with this Laguna bum. That’s what I told her.

She put out the cigarette then, and carried the ashtray back to the dresser, and then she unclasped her bra and put it on the chair where the gun was hanging, and then she slipped out of her panties and walked naked to the bed. She fluffed up a pair of pillows against the headboard, and then she got on the bed and leaned back against the pillows and said, ‘What else did you hear?’

I told her the next thing I heard was that the cop with the horns was working out of our precinct. I figured at the time it was a patrolman; a guy with fixed shifts, you know, his wife could easily be playing around while he was on the four-to-midnight, or the graveyard or whatever. I mean, it was a perfect setup for a patrolman’s wife, because while the poor stiff was out there walking his beat, he couldn’t be checking up on her at the same time. So I figured it was a patrolman. There was, in fact, a lot of joking in the squadroom. About the guy being a patrolman, you know. Harris is giving us detailed reports on the juicy conversations Laguna and his broad are having, and by now we all know it’s a cop in the precinct, and we figure it’s a patrolman, it has to be a patrolman. Harris is complaining about he’s not getting anything on the wire but sex talk. He’s supposed to be setting up a narcotics bust, and nobody’s talking about dope, all they’re talking about is screwing. This girl has got to be a nympho, Harris says, she calls the guy every ten minutes, describes in detail what she wants him to do to her next time she sees him. We’re all feeling pretty sorry for the patrolman, whoever he is. But at the same time, we’re making jokes about him. You know the kind of jokes that go on in a squadroom, Liz, it’s like the Army. It’s like when I was in the Army.

Well, this goes on for a week or two, I forget how long, and then I figured either Laguna and the girl broke up, or else all the jokes are going stale because all at once nobody’s talking about it anymore. Not even Jefferson, who used to be with Vice and who’s got nothing but sex on his mind all the time, not even Jefferson is mentioning Harris and that hot wire he’s sitting. Then I hear someplace, I forget where, I think it’s in the John, I’m sitting in there and I hear two guys out at the sinks and one of them is saying the broad’s name is Liz — Laguna’s broad. They’re saying whoever that patrolman is out there, he’s got a wife named Liz who’s putting the horns on him with a cheap thief. I still didn’t, I swear to God, I still didn’t make a connection, I never for a minute thought this was maybe my Liz. This was still some patrolman out there married to a Liz.

‘Yes, some patrolman’s wife,’ she said.

Yes, I told her, that’s what I thought at the time, that’s what I thought when I first heard the name Liz mentioned, but then I put that together with the fact that nobody’s talking about it in the squadroom anymore, leastways not when I’m around. So I singled out Harris one day, I found him there in the swing room, I said Hey there, Charlie, how’s that wire doing? Harris said Oh, it’s coming along, Duke, slow, but it’s coming along. And I said You still getting those hot flashes from Laguna’s broad? And Harris said Oh, you know how it is with these wires, you get all kinds of shit on them except what you’re looking for. So I told him about a wire I was sitting one time, where we had a phone booth on Third Avenue bugged because we knew it was a booth this torch used all the time — we were investigating an arson at the time. But we got all different kinds of people making calls in that booth, people besides the torch. And one time I was sitting the wire, and I heard a guy telling his wife he was calling from the office and he’d be working late that night, this is a call he’s making from a booth on Third Avenue! And his wife says That’s okay, darling, I’ll look for you later, and he hangs up and the next minute places a call to his girlfriend and sets up a date. Harris and I had a good laugh over that one, and then I asked him whether it was true Laguna’s broad was named Liz, and Harris said Yeah, he guessed that was true, and I said Liz what? Harris turned his eyes away and said he hadn’t heard the girl using her last name.

Well, what I did then, I went into Clerical and checked out the records for all the uniformed cops in the precinct, where it lists their home addresses, you know, and the names of spouses and kids and so on. And I found out there are three guys whose wives’ names are Elizabeth. Patrolmen, these guys. None of the detectives on the squad got a wife named Elizabeth. And then I checked the patrolmen’s duty chart, this was last week, I checked the chart and found out which shifts these three patrolmen were working, and I began staking out their houses while they were working, and following around their wives wherever they went. I made excuses to O’Neill, I told him I was clearing up some deadwood in the files, following up on some burglaries, talking to witnesses again, stuff like that. He bought it because we’re so backlogged now, he figured anything I could do to put a case in the open file, anything like that would give us a chance to catch up. So what I did was follow these women around and, well, I guess you know I’m an experienced cop, I told her, and by the end of the week if any of those women were fooling around with a cheap hood, why then they were doing it at the laundromat or the supermarket because that’s the kind of places they went to while their husbands were on the job. Or a movie with a girlfriend, if the guy was working nights. Or one of them went to a Bingo game at the church. They were clean, I told her. So it wasn’t a patrolman’s wife, Liz, it just wasn’t. So it had to be somebody else.