Ed McBain: The Big Bad City

At this hour, there was a sort of languid tranquility to the.squadroom.

Despite the clamor of the nine ballplayers and their arriving attorneys, all armed to the teeth with arguments pertaining to mass and indiscriminate roundups of suspects, all prepared to summon the spectres of the Holocaust and the World War II Japanese-American concentration camps ... Despite the arrival of a paramedic team, all urgency and haste in earnest imitation of the actors on ER, rushing the bleeding body builder onto a stretcher and down the iron-runged steps to the waiting ambulance even though the patient kept protesting he could walk, damn it, wasn't nothin wrong with his legs ... Despite the arrival of a second team of paramedics, no less skilled in TV emulation than the first, who briskly and efficiently lifted the plump little former knifer onto another stretcher, bleeding from forearm and thigh and shouting to his benefactors that the man he'd stabbed had stolen his wife from him, an accusation dismissed by one of the paramedics with the consolation, "Cool it, amigo," though the knifer wasn't Hispanic ... Despite the arrival of two detectives from Internal Affairs who wanted to know what the hell had happened up here, how come a man in custody had been wounded by another man in custody, and how come sidearms had been drawn and fired, and all that bullshit, which Parker and Carella and even Brown, who'd innocently been riding herd on the nine ballplayers--had to address before they could call it a day ... Despite the arrival of a man and his helper from what was euphemistically called the police department's Maintenance and Repair Division, here to fix the building's decrepit air-conditioning system, which of course was malfunctioning on a day with high of ninety-two Fahrenheit, thirty-three Celsius ... Despite what to a disinterested observer might have appeared merely excessive motion and commotion, but which to the detectives coming and going was simply the usual ambience of the place in which they worked, give or take a few warm bodies ...

Despite all this, there was a sort of familiar serenity. As Carella and Parker and Brown reeled off guideline chapter and verse to the two shoo flies eager to earn points with the Mayor's office by exposing yet more use of excessive force by yet another trio of brutal police officers ... As Carella and Brown together typed up their Detective Division report in triplicate on the nine ballplayers still protesting innocence in separate interrogations although almost certainly one of them had been the shooter and Jabez Courtney nonetheless lay stone-cold dead on a stainless-steel table at the St. Mary Boniface Mortuary ... As Parker kept complaining vociferously, first to the shoo flies and next to his fellow detectives, that the goddamn blues in Adam Four should have frisked the fat little bastard before cuffing him and bringing him up here for interrogation ... As Meyer and Kling came in from the field where they'd been interrogating a pawnbroker about a burglar they'd nicknamed The Cookie Boy, real life imitating art once again in that every cheap thief in every crime novel, movie, or television show was colorfully nicknamed by either news persons or cops, fiction copying reality, the fake then feeding the actual in endless cyclical rotation... "Leaves a platter of chocolate chip cookies just inside the front door," Meyer told Brown.

"Yeah?" Brown said, unimpressed.

"Better than shitting in the vie's shoes," Parker said. "Which lots of them do," Kling agreed.

"You missed all the fun up here," Carella said.

"Looks like you're still having fun," Meyer said cheerfully.

As telephones rang, and voices overlapped and intertwined, Carella became aware of the summer sounds of August filtering up through the screened and open windows of the squad room There was a stickball game in progress under the glow of the sidestreet lampposts. On Grover Avenue, he could hear the cropping of horses drawing carriages into the park. Suddenly, there was the liquid trickle of a girl's laughter. He did not know how long ago he'd read the story, nor could he calculate how many times it had been brought to mind on how many separate summer days. But hearing the gift's lilting laughter, he thought again of Irwin Shaw's girls in their flimsy summer frocks, and smiled knowingly.

Yellow. The laughing girl somewhere on the street below would be wearing a yellow dress.

Still smiling, he went to the wooden In-Out board admittedly an old-fashioned way of tracking in this day and age of E-mail and computer technology but still serviceable and accessible at a glance and was about to move his hanging name tag from the In column to the Out column because finally, at ten minutes to nine on a long hot summer's day thirteen hours after he'd moved the tag in the opposite direction he was ready to go home.

The door to Lieutenant Byrnes's office opened. "Steve? Artie?" he called. "Glad I caught you.”

The dead girl lay sprawled in front of a bench in Grover Park, not seven blocks from the station house, on a gravel footpath only yards off Grover Avenue. She was wearing a white blouse and pale blue slacks, white socks and scuffed Reeboks. Flies were already buzzing around her. Not a sign of blood anywhere, but flies were already sipping at her wide-open eyes. Didn't need a medical examiner to tell them she'd been strangled. The bruise marks on her throat corroborated their immediate surmise.

"Touch anything?" Carella asked.

"No, sir!" one of the blues answered, sounding offended.

"This just the way you found her?" Brown asked. He was thinking he didn't see a handbag anywhere around. Carella was thinking the same thing. The two men stood side by side in the dim light cast by a lamppost some five feet from the bench on the winding gravel path. Brown was the color of his name, six feet two inches tall and built like a cargo ship. Carella was a white man standing an even six feet tall and weighing a hundred and eighty-five in a good week. Summertime, with all the junk food, he usually shot up to a hundred-ninety, two hundred at the outside. The men had been working out of the Eight-Seven for a long time, partnered together more often than not. They could almost read each other's minds.

The assistant medical examiner arrived some five minutes later, complaining about summertime traffic, greeting the detectives, whom he'd met before at other crime scenes, and then getting to work while the blues stretched their yellow tapes and kept the forming crowd back.

Nothing the residents of this city liked better than a good sidewalk show, especially in the summertime. Brown asked the blues how they'd come upon the body. The younger of the two uniformed cops said a female pedestrian had flagged their car and told them a woman was lying on the park path here, either sick or dead or something.

"Did you detain her?" Brown asked.

"Sure did, sir. She's standing right over there.”

“Did you talk to her?" Carella.asked. "Few questions, is all.”

“Did she see anyone?”

"No, sir. Just walkin through the park, came upon the vie, sir.”

Carella and Brown glanced over toward where a woman was standing under the light of the lamppost. "What's her name?" Carella asked.

"Susan ... uh ... just a second, it's an Italian name," he said, and took out his notebook. Anything ending in a vowel always threw them.

Carella waited. "Androtti," the officer said. "That's a double t.”

"Thanks," Carella said, and looked over at the woman again. She seemed to be in her late forties or thereabouts, a tall, thin woman with her arms folded across her bosom, hugging herself as if trying to retain body warmth, though the temperature still hovered in the low eighties.

The detectives walked over to her. "Miss Androtti?" Carella said.

"Yes?”

There was a stunned look on her face. It was not a pretty face to begin with, but the shock of having stumbled across a corpse had robbed it of all expression. They had seen this look before. They did not think Susan Androtti would sleep well tonight.