Ed McBain: Doll

‘That’d be the worst thing that could happen to him.’

‘It’d be the best thing for the squad.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Nobody’s asking your advice,’ Byrnes said flatly.

‘Then why the hell did you call me in here?’

‘You see what I mean?’ Byrnes said. He rose from his desk abruptly and began pacing the floor near the meshed-grill windows. He was a compact man and he moved with an economy that belied the enormous energy in his powerful body. Short for a detective, muscular, with a bullet-shaped head and small blue eyes set in a face seamed with wrinkles, he paced briskly behind his desk and shouted, ‘You see the trouble he’s causing? Even you and I can’t sit down and have a sensible discussion about him without starting to yell. That’s just what I mean, that’s just why I want him out of here.’

‘You don’t throw away a good watch because it’s running a little slow,’ Carella said.

‘Don’t give me any goddamn similes,’ Byrnes said. ‘I’m running a squadroom here, not a clock shop.’

‘Metaphors,’ Carella corrected.

‘What ever , ’ Byrnes said, ‘I’m going to call the Chief tomorrow and ask him to transfer Kling out. That’s it.’

‘Where?’

‘What do you mean where? What do I care where? Out of here, that’s all.’

‘But where? To another squadroom with a bunch of strange guys, so he can get on their nerves even more than he does ours? So he can—’

‘Oh, so you admit it.’

‘That Bert gets on my nerves? Sure, he does.’

‘And the situation isn’t improving, Steve, you know that too. It gets worse every day. Look, what the hell am I wasting my breath for? He goes, and that’s it.’ Byrnes gave a brief emphatic nod, and then sat heavily in his chair again, glaring up at Carella with an almost childish challenge on his face.

Carella sighed. He had been on duty for close to fifty hours now, and he was tired. He had checked in at eight-forty-five Thursday morning, and been out all that day gathering information for the backlog of cases that had been piling up all through the month of March. He had caught six hours’ sleep on a cot in the locker room that night, and then been called out at seven on Friday morning by the fire department, who suspected arson in a three-alarm blaze they’d answered on the South Side. He had come back to the squadroom at noon to find four telephone messages on his desk. By the time he had returned all the calls — one was from an assistant m.e. who took a full hour to explain the toxicological analysis of a poison they had found in the stomach contents of a beagle, the seventh such dog similarly poisoned in the past week — the clock on the wall read one-thirty. Carella sent down for a pastrami on rye, a container of milk, and a side of French fries. Before the order arrived, he had to leave the squadroom to answer a burglary squeal on North Eleventh. He did not come back until five-thirty, at which time he turned the phone over to a complaining Kling and went down to the locker room to try to sleep again. At eleven o’clock Friday night, the entire squad, working in flying wedges of three detectives to a team, culminated a two-month period of surveillance by raiding twenty-six known numbers banks in the area, a sanitation project that was not finished until five on Saturday morning. At eight-thirty a.m., Carella answered the Sachs squeal and questioned a crying little girl. It was now ten-thirty a.m., and he was tired, and he wanted to go home, and he didn’t want to argue in favor of a man who had become everything the lieutenant said he was, he was just too damn weary. But earlier this morning he had looked down at the body of a woman he had not known at all, had seen her ripped and lacerated flesh, and had felt a pain bordering on nausea. Now — weary, bedraggled, unwilling to argue — he could remember the mutilated beauty of Tinka Sachs, and he felt something of what Bert Kling must have known in that Culver Avenue bookshop not four years ago when he’d held the bullet-torn body of Claire Townsend in his arms.

‘Let him work with me,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘On the Sachs case. I’ve been teaming with Meyer lately. Give me Bert instead.’

‘What’s the matter, don’t you like Meyer?’

‘I love Meyer, I’m tired, I want to go home to bed, will you please let me have Bert on this case?’

‘What’ll that accomplish?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t approve of shock therapy,’ Byrnes said. ‘This Sachs woman was brutally murdered. All you’ll do is remind Bert—’

‘Therapy, my ass,’ Carella said. ‘I want to be with him, I want to talk to him, I want to let him know he’s still got some people on this goddamn squad who think he’s a decent human being worth saving. Now, Pete, I really am very very tired and I don’t want to argue this any further, I mean it. If you want to send Bert to another squad, that’s your business, you’re the boss here, I’m not going to argue with you, that’s all. I mean it. Now just make up your mind, okay?’

Take him,’ Byrnes said.

‘Thank you,’ Carella answered. He went to the door. ‘Good night,’ he said, and walked out.

Sometimes a case starts like sevens coming out.

The Sachs case started just that way on Monday morning when Steve Carella and Bert Kling arrived at the apartment building on Stafford Place to question the elevator operator.

The elevator operator was close to seventy years old, but he was still in remarkable good health, standing straight and tall, almost as tall as Carella and of the same general build. He had only one eye, however — he was called Cyclops by the superintendent of the building and by just about everyone else he knew — and it was this single fact that seemed to make him a somewhat less than reliable witness. He had lost his eye, he explained, in World War I. It had been bayoneted out of his head by an advancing German in the Ardennes Forest. Cyclops — who up to that time had been called Ernest — had backed away from the blade before it had a chance to pass completely through his eye and into his brain, and then had carefully and passionlessly shot the German three times in the chest, killing him. He did not realize his eye was gone until he got back to the aid station. Until then, he thought the bayonet had only gashed his brow and caused a flow of blood that made it difficult to see. He was proud of his missing eye, and proud of the nickname Cyclops. Cyclops had been a giant, and although Ernest Messner was only six feet tall, he had lost his eye for democracy, which is as good a cause as any for which to lose an eye. He was also very proud of his remaining eye, which he claimed was capable of twenty/twenty vision. His remaining eye was a clear penetrating blue, as sharp as the mind lurking somewhere behind it. He listened intelligently to everything the two detectives asked him, and then he said, ‘Sure, I took him up myself.’

‘You took a man up to Mrs Sachs’s apartment Friday night?’ Carella asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘What time was this?’

Cyclops thought for a moment. He wore a black patch over his empty socket, and he might have looked a little like an aging Hathaway Shirt man in an elevator uniform, except that he was bald. ‘Must have been nine or nine-thirty, around then.’

‘Did you take the man down, too?’

‘Nope.’

‘What time did you go off?’

‘I didn’t leave the building until eight o’clock in the morning.’

‘You work from when to when, Mr Messner?’

‘We’ve got three shifts in the building,’ Cyclops explained. ‘The morning shift is eight a.m. to four p.m. The afternoon shift is four p.m. to midnight. And the graveyard shift is midnight to eight a.m.’