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

"Drop dead," Virginia told him.

"You got a key for this cuff, Pete?" Murchison said, and shook his head. "Jesus, Pete, why didn't you guys say something? I mean, I was sitting down there all this time. I mean…" He stopped as Byrnes handed him the key. "Hey, is that what you meant by 'Forthwith'?"

Byrnes nodded tiredly. "That is what I meant by 'Forthwith,'" he said.

"Yeah," Murchison said. "I'll be damned." Roughly, he pulled Virginia Dodge from the chair. "Come on, prize package," he said, and he led both women from the squadroom, passing Kling in the corridor.

"Well, we got Miscolo off okay," Kling said. "The rest is in the lap of the gods. We sent Meyer along for the ride. The intern seemed to think that face needed treatment. It's over, huh, Pete?"

"It's over," Byrnes said.

There was noise in the corridor outside. Steve Carella pushed a man through the slatted-rail divider and said, "Sit down, Scott. Over there. Hello, Pete. Cotton. Here's our boy. Strangled his own… Teddy! Honey, I forgot all about you. Have you been waiting lo—"

He shut his mouth because Teddy rushed into his arms with such fervor that she almost knocked him over.

"We've all been sort of waiting for you," Byrnes said.

"Yeah? Well, that's nice. Absence makes the heart grow fonder." He held Teddy at arm's length and said, "I'm sorry I'm late, baby. But all at once the thing began to jell. Let me type my report and away we go. Pete, I'm taking my wife to dinner, and I dare you to say no. We're going to have a baby!"

"Congratulations," Byrnes said wearily.

"Boy, what enthusiasm. Honey, I'm so starved I could eat a horse. Pete, we book this guy for homicide. Where's a typewriter? Anything interesting happen while I was…?"

The phone rang.

"I've got it," Carella said. He lifted the receiver. "Eighty-seventh Squad, Carella."

"Carella, this is Levy down the Bomb Squad."

"Yeah, hi, Levy, how are you?"

"Fine. And you?"

"Fine. What's up?"

"I got a report on that bottle."

"What bottle?"

"We picked up a bottle there."

"Oh, yeah? Well, what about it?"

Carella listened, inserting a few "Uh-huhs" and "Yeses" into the conversation. Then he said, "Okay, Levy, thanks for the dope," and hung up. He pulled up a chair, ripped three D.D. sheets from the desk drawer, inserted carbon between them, and then swung a typewriter into place.

"That was Levy," he said. "The Bomb Squad. Somebody here give him a bottle?"

"Yeah," Hawes said.

"Well, he was calling to report on it."

Hawes rose and walked to Carella. "What did he say?"

"He said it was."

"It was?"

"That's what the man said. They exploded it downtown. Powerful enough to have blown up City Hall."

"It was," Hawes said tonelessly.

"Yeah." Carella inserted the report forms into the typewriter. "Was what ?" he asked absently.

"Nitro," Hawes said, and he sank into a chair near the desk, and he had on his face the stunned expression of a man who's been hit by a diesel locomotive.

"Boy," Carella said, "what a day this was!"

Furiously, he began typing.

Killer's Wedge, 1958

From where the two patrolmen sat in the patrol car parked at the curb, it seemed evident that the priest was winning the fight. They had no desire to get out of the car and break up the fight, not with it being so cold out there, and especially since the priest seemed to be winning. Besides, they were sort of enjoying the way the priest was mopping up the street with his little spic opponent.

Up here in the Eight-Seven, you sometimes couldn’t tell the spics ( Hispanics, you were supposed to say in your reports) from the whites because some of them had high Spanish blood in them and looked the same as your ordinary citizen. For all the patrolmen knew, the priest was a spic, too, but he had a very white complexion, and he was bigger than most of the cockroach-kickers up here. The two patrolmen sat in the heated comfort of the car and guessed aloud that he was maybe six-three, six-four, something like that, maybe weighing in at two hundred and forty pounds or thereabouts. They couldn’t figure which church he belonged to. None of the neighborhood churches had priests who dressed the way this one was dressed, but maybe he was visiting from someplace in California — they dressed that way in California, didn't they, at those missions they had out there in the Napa Valley? The priest was wearing a brown woolen robe, and his head was shaved like a monk's head, its bald crown glistening above the tonsure that encircled it like a wreath. One of the patrolmen in the car asked the other one what you called that brown thing the priest was wearing, that thing like a dress, you know? The other patrolman told him it was called a hassock , stupid, and the first patrolman said, "Oh yeah, right." They were both rookies who had been working out of the Eight-Seven for only the past two weeks, otherwise they'd have known that the priest wasn't a priest at all, even though he was known in the precinct as Brother Anthony.

Clearly, Brother Anthony was in fact beating the man to a pulp. The man was a little Puerto Rican pool shark who'd made the enormous mistake of trying to hustle him. Brother Anthony had dragged the little punk out of the pool hall and first had picked him up and hurled him against the brick wall of the tenement next door, just to stun him, you know, and then had swung a pool cue at his kneecaps, hoping to break them but breaking only the pool cue instead, and now was battering him senseless with his hamlike fists as the two patrolmen watched from the snug comfort of the patrol car. Brother Anthony weighed a lot, but he had lifted weights in prison, and there wasn't an ounce of fat on his body. He sometimes asked people to hit him as hard as they could in the belly, and laughed with pleasure whenever anyone told him how hard and strong he was. All year round, even in the hot summer months, he wore the brown woolen cassock. During the summer months, he wore nothing at all under it. He would lift the hem of the cassock and show his sandals to the neighborhood hookers. "See?" he would say. "That's all I got on under this thing." The hookers would oooh and ahhh and try to lift the cassock higher, making believe they didn't think he was really naked under it. Brother Anthony was very graceful for such a big man; he would laugh and dance away from them, dance away.

In the winter, he wore army combat boots instead of the sandals. He was using those boots now to stomp the little Puerto Rican pool hustler into the icy sidewalk. In the patrol car, the two cops debated whether they should get out and break this thing up before the little spic got his brains squashed all over the sidewalk. They were spared having to make any decision because their radio erupted with a 10–10, and they radioed back that they were rolling on it. They pulled away from the curb just as Brother Anthony leaned over the prostrate and unconscious hustler to take his wallet from his pocket. Only ten dollars of the money in that wallet had been hustled from Brother Anthony, but he figured he might as well take all of it because of all the trouble the little punk had put him to. He was cleaning out the wallet when Emma came around the corner.

Emma was known in the neighborhood as the Fat Lady, and most of the people in the precinct tried to steer very clear of her because she was known to possess a short temper and a straightedge razor. She carried the razor in her shoulder bag, hanging from the left shoulder, so that she could reach in there with her right hand, and whip open the razor in a flash, and lop off any dude's ear, or slash his face or his hands, or sometimes go for the money, open the man's windpipe and his jugular with one and the same stroke. Nobody liked to mess with the Fat Lady, which was perhaps why the crowd began to disperse the moment she came around the corner. On the other hand, the crowd might have dispersed anyway, now that the action had ended; nobody liked to stand around doing nothing on a cold day, especially in this neighborhood, where somehow it always seemed colder than anyplace else in the city. This neighborhood could have been Moscow. The park bordering this neighborhood could have been Gorky Park. Maybe it was. Or vice versa.