Ed McBain - Long Time No See

She wondered how much money she had earned today. It was difficult to play once the cold weather set in. She wore woolen gloves with the fingers cut off at the knuckle joints, and though she tried to keep her fingers moving constantly, they invariably got stiff and she was forced to stop playing and put them into the pockets of her black cloth coat until they were warm again. She wore a long muffler, purple the shopgirl had told her, people were so kind. Here now the garbage cans outside 1142 Pierce, super of the building never took them in till midnight, probably sitting in his basement room drunk as a coot, remembered to take in the cans only when it was almost time to put them out again, stunk up the whole neighborhood.

She wouldn’t mind a little nip herself just now, nothing like a little nip when there was a little nip in the air. Smiling at her own pun, she entered her building and felt along the wall for the third mailbox in the row, which was her box and which she always checked, even though the last time she’d received a letter from anyone but her niece was from the city advising her that she was being called for jury duty. The tailor had read it to her, and she had burst out laughing when he finished. She wrote back on her typewriter, telling the Commissioner of Jurors that she would be delighted to serve since she was as blind as justice, but that unfortunately she had to get out on the street every day to earn a living. The Commissioner of Jurors did not answer her letter, but neither did she report for duty, and nobody ever bothered her again.

She took the small mailbox key from her handbag now, and felt for the keyway on the box, and inserted the key — the lock had been broken and fixed again seventeen times since she lived in this building, and was now, thank God, in a state of good repair — and unlocked the box and felt inside it. Nothing. No surprises any more. She could hardly remember the last time she’d been surprised. Well, yes, she could remember; it had been on her sixtieth birthday when Jerry Epstein across the hall gave her a party. Invited everybody in the building and also the tailor up the street, whose name she learned was Athanasios Parasekvopoulos, but she still referred to him as the tailor because she simply could not pronounce his name, not even in her mind. That had been a marvelous surprise, that party, with plenty of good food and whiskey — she really did need a little nip, she was chilled to the bone. But that was the last surprise she could remember. It was sort of sad, she guessed. She guessed there wasn’t much joy in life if there weren’t any surprises.

She put the mailbox key back into her purse, and the purse back into her handbag, and then she opened the lobby door and walked without needing the cane to where the inside steps began, taking the banister in her left hand, holding the cane in her right, the accordion heavy around her neck. She would be glad to take it off, pour herself a glass of whiskey, sit down to count the money. Someone had put a folded bill into the cup, she didn’t know what denomination it was, she’d have to ask Jerry later tonight, if he was home. Or else ask at the tailor shop in the morning. No, he’d be closed on Sunday. Her hand glided along the banister.

She was crossing the first-floor landing when she heard the inner-lobby door opening and closing below. She listened. The stairs creaked; someone was climbing to the first floor. The banister enclosed the stairwell here, running level for the length of the landing, and then beginning to angle upward again toward the floor above. The footsteps were closer now. She reached the post where the stairs began again, felt the polished wooden ball defining the top of it. Hand on the banister, she was climbing again when someone grabbed her from behind. There was not even time to scream. The last surprise of her life was the blade that viciously sliced across her throat, opening it from ear to ear.

The city for which Carella worked was divided into five separate and distinct sections, but only the island of Isola was referred to as “the city.” If you lived out in Calm’s Point or up in Riverhead, if you lived across the bridge in Majesta or out in the middle of the river on Bethtown, whenever you went into Isola, you were “going to the city.” Once you were in the city, you were either uptown, downtown or midtown. If you were all the way uptown and about to cross one of the bridges into Riverhead, you would never say you were going further uptown; you were, instead, going to Riverhead. If you were in Riverhead and heading downtown, you were going to the city. If you were in the midtown area of the city and heading for the financial area and finally the Old Port, you were still going downtown. And if you were standing in the middle of Van Buren Circle and about to head for the midtown area, you were likewise going downtown.

Crosstown was quite another matter.

For the convenience of out-of-towners, the founding fathers being considerate as well as foresighted, the city was constructed on a simple grid pattern, Hall Avenue skewering it from east to west and dividing Isola into almost equal halves. Bounding the island on the north was the River Harb, the Hamilton Bridge crossing it uptown, Castleview River sitting on its shoreline upstate. The Harb was long and wide and dirty, and nowhere was it wider and dirtier than where the Taslough Straits Bridge was built across it further upstate, a con-tracting-cum-graft coup in the years immediately following the Second World War. The district attorney investigating the scandal was himself later indicted — but that’s another story, kids. On the southern side of Isola was the River Dix, a favorite spot in the thirties for the dumping of corpses wearing cement slippers. Such activity had since been removed to Spindrift Airport out on Sand’s Point, where the bodies of gangsters were all too often found moldering in the locked trunks of late-model automobiles. The streets running parallel to Hall Avenue on either side of it all joined together and turned upon themselves at the Old Port, where you could board a ferry to Bethtown or take a tunnel to Majesta or Calm’s Point, or simply ride back around the island again till you got to the Devil’s Break uptown and crossed over into Riverhead. It was a confusing city, but better than Tokyo. Better even than Biloxi, no offense.

The lady had been killed in the midtown area.

For simplicity’s sake, and having nothing whatever to do with territorial imperative or departmental seniority, the midtown area was divided by the police into two geographical sections called Midtown East and Midtown West, which chopped the island in half across its waist rather than severing it bilaterally from the top of its skull to the tips of its toes. Once upon a time the midtown area used to be divided lengthwise rather than bellybutton-wise, and the police called those two sections Midtown North and Midtown South. But that was when chariots were running in the cobbled streets. The city was confusing, yes, but the Police Department was even more confusing. The British monetary system used to be confusing, too, but all things change for the better eventually.

Things were never going to change for the better as concerned the dead woman lying at the foot of the steps leading up to the second floor. The detective who caught the squeal in Midtown East was a man named Bruno Tauber. When Tauber’s grandparents first came to America, there was an umlaut over the “a.” The name was spelled Tauber then. The umlaut indicated that the “äu” was to be sounded as “oy.” As part of the naturalization process, the umlaut was eventually dropped, the name was spelled Tauber and pronounced to rhyme with “tower.” Not even Tauber himself knew the difference. That’s the way his father pronounced it. That’s the way his mother and brothers pronounced it. And that’s the way he pronounced it. Tauber. To rhyme with tower. Only his grandparents would have known the difference, but they were dead, and maybe they might have agreed that all things changed for the better eventually.