Ed McBain: McBain's Ladies Too: More Women of the 87th Precinct

"They keep me warm," Carella said.

"Is it better to be warm or tall?" Meyer asked philosophically, and went back to his typing.

He did not, even under normal circumstances, enjoy typing. Today, because of the very pregnant lady across the room who was shouting Spanish obscenities at the world in general and at Detective Cotton Hawes and an appreciative chorus of early-morning drunks in particular, Meyer found it even more difficult to concentrate on the keyboard in front of him. Patiently, doggedly, he kept typing, while across the room the pregnant lady was loudly questioning Cotton Hawes's legitimacy.

Meyer's patience was an acquired skill, nurtured over the years until it had reached a finely honed edge of perfection. He had certainly not been born patient. He had, however, been born with all the attributes that would later make a life of patience an absolute necessity if he were to survive. Meyer's father had been a very comical man. At the bris , the traditional circumcision ceremony, Meyer's father made his announcement. The announcement concerned the name of his new offspring. The boy was to be called Meyer Meyer. The old man thought this was exceedingly humorous. The moyle didn't think it was so humorous. When he heard the announcement, his hand almost slipped. In that moment, he almost deprived Meyer of something more than a normal name. Fortunately, Meyer Meyer emerged unscathed.

But being an Orthodox Jew in a predominantly gentile neighborhood can be trying even if your name isn't Meyer Meyer. As with all things, something had to give. Meyer Meyer had begun losing his hair when he was still rather young. He was now completely bald, a burly man with china blue eyes, slightly taller than Carella — even when Carella wasn't wearing a turtleneck. He was smoking a cigar as he typed, and wishing he could have a cigarette. He had begun smoking cigars on Father's Day last year when his daughter presented him with an expensive box in an attempt to break his cigarette habit. He still sneaked a cigarette every now and then, but he was determined to quit entirely and irrevocably. On a day like today, with the squadroom erupting so early in the morning, he found his patience a bit strained, his determination somewhat undermined.

Across the room, the pregnant lady — in a mixture of streetwise English and hooker's Spanish — yelled, "So how comes, pendego , you kippin me here when I couldn't make even a blind man happy in my condition?"

Her condition was imminent. Perhaps that was why the four drunks in the detention cage in the corner of the room found her so comical. Or perhaps it was because she was wearing nothing but a half-slip under her black cloth coat. The coat was unbuttoned, and the pregnant lady's belly ballooned over the elastic waistband of the peach-colored slip. Above that, her naked breasts, swollen with the threat of parturition, bobbed indignantly and rather perkily in time to her words, which the drunks found hilarious.

"Tell me, hijo de la gran puta ," she said grandly to Hawes, grinning at the detention cage, pleased with her receptive audience and playing to the house, "would you pay for somebody looks like me?" and here she grabbed both frisky breasts and squeezed them in her hands, the nipples popping between her index and middle fingers. "Would you? Hah?"

"Yes!" one of the drunks in the cage shouted.

"The arresting officer says you propositioned him," Hawes said wearily.

"So where is this arresting officer, hah?" the woman asked.

"Yeah, where is he?" one of the drunks in the cage shouted.

"Down the hall," Hawes said.

The arresting officer was Genero. Genero was a horse's ass. Nobody in his right mind would have arrested a pregnant hooker. Nobody in his right mind would have filled the detention cage with drunks at nine o'clock on a Saturday morning. There would be stale vomit in the cage tonight, when the citizenry began howling and the cage was really needed. Genero had first brought in the drunks, one at a time, and then he had brought in the pregnant hooker. Genero was on a crusade. Genero was a one-man Moral Majority. Which, perhaps, the real Moral Majority was as well.

"Sit down and shut up," Hawes said to the hooker.

"No, keep standin' ," one of the drunks in the cage yelled.

"Turn this way, honey!" another one yelled. "Let's see 'em one more time!"

"Muy linda, verdad?" the hooker said, and showed her breasts to the drunks again.

Hawes shook his head. In a squadroom where fairness was an unspoken credo, it rankled that Genero had dragged in a pregnant hooker. He could be forgiven the cageful of drunks — maybe — but a pregnant hooker? Even Hawes's father would have looked the other way, and Jeremiah Hawes had been an extremely religious person, a man who'd felt that Cotton Mather was the greatest of the Puritan priests, a man who'd named his own son in honor of the colonial God-seeker who'd hunted witches with the worst of them. Hawes's father had chalked off the Salem witch trials as the personal petty revenges of a town feeding on its own ingrown fears, thereby exonerating Cotton Mather and the role the priest had played in bringing the delusion to its fever pitch. Would his father, if he were still alive, have similarly excused Genero for his zeal? Hawes doubted it.

The woman came back to his desk.

"So what you say?" she said.

"About what?"

"You let me walk, okay?"

"I can't," Hawes said.

"I got somethin' in the oven juss now," the woman said, and spread her hands wide on her belly. "But I pay you back later, okay? When this is all finish, okay?" She winked at him. "Come on, let me walk," she said. "You very cute, you know? We have a nice time together later, okay?"

"Cute?" one of the drunks in the cage yelled, insulted. " Jesus , lady!"

"He's very cute, this little muchacho ," the woman said, and chucked Hawes under the chin as though he were a cuddly little ten-year-old dumpling. He was, in fact, six feet two inches tall, and he weighed an even two hundred pounds now that he wasn't watching his diet too closely, and he had somewhat unnervingly clear blue eyes and flaming red hair with a white streak over the left temple — the result of a peculiar accident while he was still working as a Detective/Third out of the 30th Precinct downtown. He had responded to a 10–21, a Burglary Past, and the victim had been a hysterical woman who came screaming out of her apartment to greet him, and the super of the building had come running up with a knife when he spotted Hawes, mistaking Hawes for the burglar, who was already eighteen blocks away, and lunging at him with the knife and putting a big gash on his head. The doctors shaved the hair to get at the cut, and when it grew back, it grew in white — which had been the exact color of Hawes's terror.

The streak in his hair had accounted for a great many different reactions from a great many different women — but none of them had ever thought he was "cute." Looking at the pregnant hooker's naked breasts and appraising eyes, he began to think that maybe he was cute, after all. He also began to think that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to let her walk and to take her up later on her fine proposition. She was a good-looking woman in her mid-thirties, he guessed, who carried her coming infant like a barrage balloon, but who had a good slender body otherwise, with long strong legs and very nice breasts indeed, swollen to bursting now and being flaunted with deliberate coercive intent as she sashayed past Hawes's desk, back and forth, back and forth, black coat open, belly and breasts billowing like the mainsail and jibsail of an oceangoing schooner. The drunks began to applaud.